I lived in the blue room, one of six people in the victorian house at 210 N. Thayer. It was damn near the worst room in the house besides the one of the kitchen which was an add-on and had no heat vents running to it. I was constantly on drugs and wearing polyester dresses or white disco pants and green and yellow aligator shoes. I skipped most all my classes to play hacky-sack and wander down by the railroad tracks where the homeless guys slept under the overpass. Some of them had old, moldy beds down there with cardboard boxes for nightstands and there was garbage everywhere which consisted mostly of paper (homeless people seem to collect reams of flyers and other discarded paper to scatter around their squats for no obvious reason) and empty paint cans as this was one of the few spots in Ann Arbor where you could find decent graffiti. I'd usually find some kid down there repainting the walls of this bums hostel witha rumbling cathedral ceiling and the regularly scheduled Amtrack invasion. But the rent was cheap and I always thought it'd be a nice place to stay for the summer anyway.
The house was constant insanity as someone always had a paper due or a exam to study for and nobody else gave a shit so we'd still all get high and watch Barfly or mix vodka and lemonade in a big mixing bowl and dip our cups in splashing it around and sitting on the porch until late in the night when we all rallied to go down to the Flame which was a seedy gay bar where you could get sick drunk and stumble around while troupes of bare-chested faggots sang showtunes and Petshop Boys songs at you. If we didn't make "out on the town" or at some house party where I spent most of the time trying to get a nitrous balloon then we just kept drinking that wicked lemonade that never got you sick as long as you drank it out of a bowl until somebody (often times me) would spill the bowl all over somebody or get beligerent in some way that offended someone else and whoever had the exam in the morning would come out and bitch until we all went to bed. Either way I woke up in the blue room feeling empty and alone unless someone had spent the night, then I was usually just ready for some breakfast and coffee.
Well one spring day, before the air had warmed at all and the ground was still spongey with melted snow we decided to have a block party mostly because we needed a reason to rent one of those frozen margarita machines. So we talked to the people across the street who had taken a six hour latenight road trip to Sleeping Bear Dunes with us and were generally as reckless as our house and they thought it was a fine idea. We talked to our landylady, Cecile who didn't really know what to say because it probably sounded like a nice idea the way we presented it but she'd already learned not to trust us from the night we all showed up naked and singing with bottles of Crazy Horse on her porch. I think I've got some pictures of that.
The day of the block party was grey and cold. If you weren't racing around putting things together or stone drunk or wrapped up in a blanket you were probably miserable. We had hauled a couch out of our basement and set it on the sidewalk. We were drinking and trying to get things all set up and a few other neighbors were setting up tables or bringing cakes or whatever. Then Traci showed up. I don't know how we met her, but she would swing by now and again. She was in the Public Health school involved in safe sex and AIDS prevention, she was stoned all the time, and she was always trying to practice her safe sex all over somebody- usually somebody she just met. dem bones was there and had set up a big sound system. That was playing loudly and Traci was hitting on my friend Liz. Liz was kind of flattered over the instant lesbian attraction but was a little scared too as Traci is a pretty big girl and was coming on pretty stong so she was sitting with me and about a dozen other people on the couch. We talked and smoked and wondered if it was going to rain for a while but nobody was really showing up for this block party.
That realization must have finally flipped the switch for me. Nobody was showing up and there was really no reason to try to hold myself together any more. I wavered in and out of consciousness for a couple seconds and hit the floor. Somebody carried me up to the blue room and I slept though the thick of the event. I guess a bunch of people showed up eventually and somebody even stole our couch which we found a couple days later in a yard down the street. It was all wet and worn out and broken down like the party had been the last straw and it didn't want to come home anymore, so we left it.

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