Betsy Shebang - Column for 4/9

Chapter 8

By mid-morning Id already lost more money than Id intended to spend that day and the car was having some kinda emphysema problem that kept it from going over 55 mph, so I made a plan to stick to smaller roads and drive only in daylight, hoping the engine thing was happening because of the altitude. I was having too much fun to be scared. For meals I ate cold soup right from the can, like Mad Max. The whole world felt so immediate. Even my car smelled good to me. I felt like I was the only one whod survived the apocolypse, or even knew that it had happened.


I wanted to write. I had to write, actually, and I figured that was a feeling Id better encourage. I knew I wouldnt make it far that day anyway.

I had a roommate named Tony for three months in college, and I was pretty sure he still lived at a big geek house in Northern Oregon. (A geek house, if you dont know, is like a frat house, except theres a Linux server in the basement and dozens of Japanese animation videos on the shelves and the people who live there pretend to be hedonists.) I remember coming by to visit Tony at that house several times after I left Portland. He wasnt actually at home any of the times I came by to see him, but the people who lived there were pretty casual about visitors. I had friends who knew other people there, or used to.

The house was built out of an old school. Its in the middle of the woods and has something like ten rooms, an eight-burner stove in the kitchen and a tennis court behind the house with weeds growing up through cracks in the cement. When I finally found the place, it was late in the afternoon, the sun had gone down and I really wanted a shower. I hadnt even stretched my legs since I chased the car into the ravine that morning.

I knocked a few times, dropped my backpack and stood on the porch for maybe a minute, until a chubby guy in his twenties opened the door. I waved hello and said "Hey - is Tony here?"

The guy said "Tony?" and kept looking at me.

"Yeah, tall guy, black guy? Glasses?"

He pushed the door closed most of the way and mumbled to the people in the room behind him. I kept looking at the door, waiting for Tony to appear. Finally the door opened again and the chubby guy was back.

"He's in Europe."

"Oh, wow...do you know how long he's gonna be there?"

The guy pushed the door closed again and I could hear him talking to more people in the other rooms. I really didn't need to know when Tony was coming back from Europe unless it was later that evening, but I had to say something.

The door opened again and the guy returned.

"Nobody knows."

I started fidgeting tactfully. "Oh, thanks...Uh, I'm an old roommate of his from Seattle - I mean, I'm from Seattle, I lived with him in Portland, in the dorms, at the university - and I always used to crash with him after I moved...any chance I could just find a couch and just pass out for a while? I'm on the road from Seattle to Los Angeles."

He stared blankly at me. His expression hadnt changed since Id arrived. Finally, he said "Sure."


I grabbed my backpack and followed him through the house, towards a distant room that was busy with voices. Most of the lights in the front were turned off. In the back room, one woman and several guys I didn't know sat around a table, drinking beer and playing some kind of war game involving maps and dice and pictures of tanks.

Some of the guys had long hair and beards, like tall dwarves, or short giants. Only one guy, with short hair and no beard, was visibly drunk. He did most of the talking, continuing a story I hadnt yet started listening to. He looked like he belonged somewhere else, which somehow made it seem all the more appropriate that he was here.

Not knowing what to say to a houseful of geeks I didn't know, I grunted and waved hello. The drunk guy waved without interrupting himself, his head and arms swaying diagonally up and down as he spoke. "And this guy kept saying he wanted to kiss me and I said I was straight and he kept saying Youre so homophobic, and I had like four guinesses, so after an hour of this, I finally kissed him. And he wouldnt stop! I figured hed leave me alone after that. So...that's when I knew I was cute." Nobody made a sound to acknowledge the end of his story.

A different voice comes out of me when I address a bunch of young men I dont know. I grunted "Hey, I'm gonna go crash." The guy who first opened the door for me took a seat near the table and said "Yeah, uhkay." He stuck his finger in his ear and looked at the table. I walked further into the back rooms of the house and found the same spare mattress in the upstairs hall Id slept on years before.

"Who's that?" I heard from the crowded game room behind me.

"Friend of Tony's."

"Who's Tony?"


Tony used to have this very fancy stereo in the dorm room we shared. Once he came back after being away for the weekend and the stereo wouldnt work anymore, and thats when he stopped speaking to me. We never did officially start speaking again, actually. Its probably a good thing that hes in Europe.


The house was really filthy, every surface covered with dirty dishes and empty bottles. Nothing had changed since Id last been there, eight years before. Its like theyre always cleaning up after a party. Except...there is no party. And theyre not cleaning up.

Between the upstairs bedrooms was a wide balcony that overlooked the dark living room; and on the balcony, beside a bookshelf and a desklamp, was a mattress on the floor strewn with a sheet and several blankets, like a warm, cozy dog bed. This was the guest room. I recognized Tonys old stereo, the one that broke, stacked against the wall; beside it was a shelf of aging records, stored or abandoned here when he traveled to Europe or finally outgrew his fascination with vinyl. I might have been the only person in the house to know who owned them. Houses like that collect possessions, like old snakeskins shed by the owners who intend to retrieve them someday, when they can use more than one life at a time. Every corner and closet in this huge place was filled with these unnecessary life parts, like the B-list of internal organs they dont bother to put back inside when the surgerys over, all brought here by nobody knows who, now waiting in a slowly mildewing orbit a great distance from anywhere.


I loved this place. Or at least, I found it strangely comforting. I felt like Id escaped from the world and now Id arrived at nowhere, the place I most wanted to be. I would spend the night in the house of the nowhere people, who appropriately treated me like I wasnt there. I had become a ghost and found the refuge I didn't know I was looking for. I was everyone I wanted to be.

I was still soaked with the euphoria Id experienced since leaving Seattle. The old tapes Id been playing in the car sounded like a language Id suddenly learned to understand and I was infatuated with every scrap of sound. Inside the house, the voices from the game room downstairs seemed strangely temporary, as if this one night of gaming in the darkness had already disappeared into the past, along with countless other nights and visitors and housemates come and gone over years and years, and what I was experiencing was the embrace of something larger, and slower, and more lonely, and more welcoming. The voices were only the stray memories of the house itself.

It was then I finally knew what this trip was about. I was driving to Hollywood, but the trip was not about Hollywood. It wasnt about becoming a screenwriter and it wasnt about finding a better job. It wasnt even about me.

This trip was about Eugene.

Copyright 2002 Betsy Shebang