Part One: Summer, May 2001 – September 2001
419 House
Duluth, MN
Part one
Part two
Part three
Part four
This, this is the tricky one, the trickiest. My roommates picked out the 419 house when I was in Virginia. It was a classic Duluth house, two stories with wood everything and a wide, dark staircase meeting the front door. The kitchen was small, green and old, and a tiny dining room jutted out in front of the first-floor bedroom. The rest of the place was open and airy, and brought in the lake breeze when the doors were open in the summer.
We picked bedrooms by lotto, with the caveat that we could trade halfway through the year if we wanted. We never did. Erik, on the phone, before I’d seen the house, told me I’d like the attic bedroom best because it was away from everything else, and I mostly liked being away from everything else. But I drew what was called the Tetris room, an L-shaped affair on the second floor room with two large windows facing the street and a nook for the bed. I loved it. I bought a big blue shag carpet and an old couch at a garage sale and opened the windows wide, drinking tea while watching the kids across the street.
Erik took the room across the hall, which he soon turned into a recording studio, using my bedroom for sleep and clothes. Jason drew the smallest, darkest one, next to Erik’s. Beth took the bedroom blocked by the dining room, the only one with its own bathroom. Matt took the basement room, with a separate entrance and cold floors.
It was just me, Beth, Corina and Jason that first summer. Matt and Erik were in the Cities, working at Valleyfair. We had a sub-leaser named Patrick who soon ducked out on the rent, leaving his expensive art supplies and TV in his room. He sheepishly returned a month later for his stuff, which Beth gave to him (after we’d picked through his CDs).
I visited Erik in the Cities several times, and during my last visit in July, he stopped the car on the way to a restaurant by Lake Calhoun and with lots of dramatic sobbing (his, not mine), broke up with me. It was sudden and weird, and I returned to Duluth wondering what the hell we were supposed to do, having just moved in together, and now this. The night I came back, my roommates had a luau party, and I got very drunk off red vodka punch. It was too hot to sleep upstairs, so we all crowded in the basement next to the kiddie pool we’d stupidly filled with water to complete the Hawaiian theme, and I slept hard.
I worked at the summer season box office at school, and wrote long e-mails to Erik, who never answered them. I became especially close with Beth and her boyfriend at the time, Chris (the same), who drove up to see her every few weeks from his summer place in the Cities. I didn’t spend much time at the lake. I spent most of it in my bedroom, reading, writing, sleeping in the bed Erik’s parents bought for him, wondering what I was going to sleep on when he returned. On my last day of work, the manager bought us a big bottle of wine and the other worker and I drank it during the show, sitting with our shoes kicked off. I walked home that night, feeling sad and independent and ready to move on. Howling at the moon stuff.
But when he came back from his adventure in the Cities – his first foray into a social scene that wasn’t Fargo or college – I was napping on the couch in my room, and he dropped his warm, down comforter over my body and said he was ready to come home and I said okay without protest. So we were back together, and never discussed it again, and I never voiced what was really in my head, the echoes of, you bastard, I was the one who was supposed to leave you. That month was when his empty bedroom was turned into the recording studio, and he moved into my place, the one I’d decorated all summer while he was off discovering himself.
I don’t remember much more about that summer. But we went from the giddy closeness of Goldfine to place where a thin, low current began to buzz in each of us. In the summer, everything was still okay: in my memory, despite Erik, Duluth was bright and breezy and I found a joy in stepping into the courtyard from the box office in the early mornings to listen for the foghorn.
September 2000 – May 2001
Goldfine Apartments
Duluth, MN
Photos
Part one
Part two
Part three
I lived in the on-campus Goldfine Apartments my sophomore year of school with Abbey, Corina and Beth. By this time, my group of friends was steady and close, and the boys (Andrew, Matt, Erik, CJ) lived in an apartment across the hall. The only new person was Beth, who moved to Duluth that semester, and was the randomite thrown in our fourth spot. We speculated for a while – would she fit in? Would should think we were weird? Because of some connections, we found out her Fall schedule, which consisted of classes like Russian and Environmental Science. Mysterious! She turned out fine, in the beginning, being just as bizarre and geeky as all of us.
I shared a room with Abbey. The rooms were cramped, but got good sunshine, especially in the winter when the light reflected off the snow. Erik always kept fresh flowers for me in a vase on my desk. I spent most of my time at the boys’ identical apartment across the hall, however, where the parties and the late-night game nights took place. We had several, crowded shindigs that were sadly busted by the RAs. (One RA even gave us tips: “Don’t put ice in your drink. We can hear it clinking from the hallway.”) At one point, the boys had to attend Alcohol Awareness training and write a three page essay about the dangers of underage drinking.
My favorite part of the apartment was the blow-up Beatles chair, which we’d spent five hours the previous semester trying to win in an outdoor fair put on by the dorms. Matt, Andrew and I played several hundred fair games to win enough tickets to bid on the chair. Erik, being an AV tech, was working an event that day, and when we finally won it, we ran ecstatically to the ballroom where Erik was working, and burst in on him. He was in a dress shirt and tie, setting up microphones and quietly talking with the event planner. I ran to him in my dirty shorts and sunburned face and leapt into his arms, wrapping my legs around his waist. Matt and Andrew were behind me, dragging the chair in to show him. The event planner stood with mouth agape. The chair sat on top of the fridge for after we discovered it wasn’t especially viable as a usable piece of furniture. It moved with us to our next house, but someone accidentally deflated it during a party, and I don’t know where it ended up after that.
Erik and I spent most nights together, either in his room or mine. The beds were twin and tiny, but we managed. One time we all played a truth or dare game in which Dane got handcuffed naked to the kitchen table and an unnamed male-person drank too much, put on one of my skirts (with no underwear), glitter eyeshadow and high heels, and sprinted down the hallway and through the underground tunnels to the other buildings. I had to chase after him, terrified that the RAs would catch him. He was faster in heels than I was in bare feet.
We did Secret Santa for Christmas and Matt and Erik made me a music video at one of those kiosks in the mall, which consisted of them flailing around and lip-syncing, “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”
One April, we had an ice storm that blew out all the power and so we sat in the dark with candles and had a drum jam and the eight of us spent the night together on the floor.
There was always someone around, at any hour. We lived in both apartments effortlessly, and if someone wasn’t there, they were missed, terribly, and parties were thrown in their honor when they returned. I was trying to find my way in the acting progam, and was starting to spend long, late hours in the theater. I was freckled and not-too-wicked, and was brutally aware that all this was too good and wouldn’t last.
My favorite place, time and location, of the list.
This seems like a given, but it’s true: I can only write the navel-gazey stuff once I’m over whatever I’m writing about. The opposite used to be the case – I used to spill it the moment I felt it, and it was messy and gross and caused all sorts of weird problems. I’ve achieved an online stoicness in the last few years.
I couldn’t write about wanting to burn down a school if I wasn’t past the emotions I felt during that time period. When I can look at a memory objectively and autospy without losing my guts, then it’s cool to write about it publicly. I think this can cause a confusion, but it’s the only way I do these things now. I can’t put a disclaimer that says, “Listen, I’m going to tell you a story of how I felt six years ago. I don’t feel this now; it’s past. But I’m going to write it as if I do feel this now for a little realism.” Can you bring in the fourth wall like that? I don’t know.
What I’ve written about the most is the strange splintering I went through five years ago, when my boyfriend and I split and my group of friends scattered. I can piece it out now; I can understand why it became such a defining moment for me and why it haunted me for years afterwards. It still haunts, to a degree, but I can open the box and hold the figures inside and not feel a need to regress.
I’ll probably still write about it because it was just that huge, and threw the course of my life off a cliff, across the sea, into a different planet. It’s interesting to me, how these things happen, how people can still hold hurts and hesitations after so many years. It’s interesting that I got to experience such a shiny, complicated display of human nature on the front-lines.
So it gets written and written and written, and I hope you understand that I’m the entomologist and not the pin holding the beetle. I study and discover and record, but I don’t push myself up against these things anymore. It’s a science, and science is often mistaken for obsession, in the way the details have to be rolled over and over again. I hope you understand this when I roll you over and over again. I’m not trying to love you; I just need to understand.
Spoon rests will always remind me of living in the dorms in 2000, during the election, when my neighbors and I got in a huge debate about the usefulness of the spoon rest. Soon, signs popped up all over the apartments, stating, “NADER IS PRO-SPOON REST!” There was also the same argument with dishwashing, in which my neighbors (and by neighbors, I mean Andrew, Matt, Erik and CJ), formed alternerating “dish teams,” which were highly controversial as if it was your off-night, you could use every dish in the house and not be required to wash it. Soon it was, “VOTE NADER – HE’S ANTI DISH TEAM!”
The dish team problem was eventually solved when Andrew and CJ hid the excess dishes behind the couch.
Anyway, fingers crossed for tonight, yes? Klobuchar and Hatch are Pro-Spoon Rest.
(Also, I’m getting married next month. I know I said I wasn’t going to, but things change, you know? It’s going to be small and warm and in a music store.)