Photographs Of Places I've Lived # 11: 40th Street

(image from Google Maps)

If you had asked me in 1991, when I lived in this house in Hyde Park in Austin, Texas, I would have told you it was the happiest I'd ever been.  A year later I would have told you the exact opposite.

A week or so ago, I mentioned that I had rented a room that I never moved into, & it was because the woman with home I was having something like a relationship (but it was incredibly one-sided) had moved into an apartment on the top floor of this old house.  The door there opens onto a flight of stairs, & there are two apartments upstairs.  My "girlfriend's" was on the west side, or, in the above picture, on the left.  I basically moved into that place with her, although all my stuff was kept elsewhere, as her parents had forbade her to date me, & the place needed to look like she lived there alone.  Her parents liked to visit her.  & they were paying for everything.

The only things to say about the place - I graduated college while I lived here, & it was close enough to campus to walk there & back on days when buses weren't running - which have nothing to do with the disastrous relationship I was in at the time involve the owners of the house.  Their names escape me, although I recall the husband being a little creepy around the woman I was living with - I guess once I finally "moved in," we had to give them more money, which I myself paid - which was cheaper than the room I had been renting - & the wife was a fiery redhead very obviously in charge.  They had a young child while I lived there, & when you walked up the stairs there was one of those vintage Jesus pictures you see everywhere.  I can probably easily find it online:

Yeah, that one (found here).  That kid - who it just occurred to me must be over thirty years old now - once pointed to the painting & said "Gary."  Why in the world would he have confused me with Jesus?  It might be because I looked a little like this when I lived there:

That's from 1992, taken by a woman who actually did love me, although the damage done by the previous relationship pretty much made a healthy relationship impossible for me then.

Anyway, I always thought it was amusing for a toddler to confuse me & Jesus.  I also just remembered not only the child's name, but also the couple's names, but it's not all that important for the story.

It must've been most of 1991 I lived in this place.  Though it seems like much longer.  It was very cold there in the winter & the pitiful wall unit in the bedroom couldn't cool off the rest of the house, so we put sheets up in the bedroom doorway & stayed in there during the miserable summer months.  I don't know if I have any pictures of the place but I remember it like I was just there.  Again, it seemed like I was happy there.  But no, no I was not.