(image from Google Maps)
From the beginning of 2000 to the end of 2002 I lived in the back of this house - technically it was a duplex, although I had the back half & another tenant had the first half. I guess there were a couple of folks who lived in the front half - I was sort-of friends with the first couple, but the last year I lived there, it was three or four guys whom I never really met.
The path to the left went to both of our front doors, but I usually would walk down the gravel driveway & go in through the back door. I had a big covered porch where I would sit outside & smoke, & in the summer, with the porch light on, giant, terrifying insects would gather on my screen door & my cat Buster & I would watch them with similar - but not entirely the same - interest.
To say that my life changed in this unassuming duplex would be an understatement. While I was there:
- my job - the thing I had been doing for years - changed in such a way as I had to move offices, something that meant a giant upheaval;
- though I moved in with my cat Buster, I adopted Beatrice in the summer of 2000 & she would travel with me to so many places for the next eighteen years
- in the summer of 2001 I met the woman who would become my wife
- in October 2002, Self Help Radio premiered on KOOP
- & among other drugs, I did ecstasy a lot in this duplex
Before - & for a while during the first year or so I lived there - I was a miserable person. I was broken-hearted, I was unable to have real relationships with virtually anyone, I felt my time at radio had ended & I no longer had that somewhat creative outlet. & then someone - I think my old KVRX friend Jeff - offered me ecstasy.
Though I had a forty-hour-a-week gig at UT, I took a part-time (Friday nights, Sunday mornings) job at a video store in around 1997. The guys who worked there were great, the bosses didn't mind if we drank at work, & I got to take home a ton of free movies. (One of the cool kids I met at the video store today contributes to segments for Self Help Radio!) Someone told me I should try ecstasy, & I should do it some place I was comfortable, so I did it at the video store - which wasn't a good idea.
My co-worker Kathy asked me as it started to take effect, "What is it like?" I remember saying to her, "I didn't think it would be this intense."
My walk home as I began to roll was harrowing, but I made it back to this place okay. (It was about a quarter-mile away.) I can honestly say as I lay in my bed completely roiled by emotions both sweet & difficult that I had never felt that way before. I later thought that I had never allowed myself to feel that way before. I recognized something that any idiot might have noticed - I surrounded myself with the things I loved - that I had a life full of feeling & creativity & sensation - I was just too wrapped up in ideas of what so-called happiness must look like to realize it. My first ecstasy experience - followed by many more - made me more honest about my feelings. I had seen a therapist in the early 90s but he could never have made me see how extraordinary my life was & could be just with talk. If he had given me e & had somehow been able to guide me through the experience, I might have been better sooner.
Not that I changed over night. But when, in August 2001, I met a very chatty young grad student at a bus stop & made a connection, I had more of a foundation of my life to show to her than I had for virtually every woman I had met previously. The fact that she turned out to be the person it looks like (fingers crossed) I will spend the rest of my life with was not something so obvious. What she met though was a Gary more grounded, more occupied, more understanding of where life had placed him than if she had met him only just a year before.
One last story: she moved in with me in May 2002, & decided soon enough the place wasn't big enough for the two of us, her beautiful hound George, & my two amazing cats. So she started to look for another place for us. As usual, I felt swept along, but wasn't complaining. When the time came to clean the place - I was still a smoker, & I smoked indoors, & the walls were yellow - I felt so sad about leaving yet another home in Austin, I was willing to lose the deposit just to not be overwhelmed by all the memories of that place - including the ones in which I lay on the bed in the middle of an e trip just utterly transfixed by how much I loved my home.
The woman who would become my wife offered to help. I said to her, "If you can clean this place, I'll give you back whatever deposit money they give me." I believe my deposit was my first month's rent or something like that - close to a thousand bucks.
The owners of the property were so impressed that the place was spotless that they refunded nearly all of my deposit - something that had never happened before in my life - & I of course gave it to her, probably around eight hundred dollars.
Honestly, it was worth it. Even now, just looking at these photos of places I haven't been in years, it has somewhat gutted me. Places I'll never see again. It's been rough.
