Basement Studio Space

In another part of the forest, I recall the first basement studio I had. Now that I think about it very hard, it was not years later as it seems at first, but just the following spring, because it was in the house we lived in on Brooks Street for only a few months before moving back to the co-ops. I had dropped out of college, soon after beginning my fourth semester. My second-floor room in the co-op would have green walls and wine-dark drapes.

In that basement on Brooks Street, a very normal dirty utilitarian cement basement, I made an enclosure of second-hand drapes, which I got cheap from St Vincent de Paul, and dyed a rich wine-color in the wringer washer. Two of my roommates got very mad about that, because they were in the habit of washing their nursing home uniforms in that washer every night and had them both dyed pink as a result of my project. But they didn’t actually complain to me about it, but to their boyfriend, who talked to mine, and you can see why we only lived there for a few months with that kind of communication going on. Entire volumes of interesting incident occurred during those few months, approximately February to May.

At the other end of the basement was a shelf full of cardboard boxes, that I was told contained chemistry glassware, and one box of lithium: the kind Mr Roberts in tenth-grade chemistry class donned protective goggles and apron to explode in the black chemistry sink, by putting a little bit of it in water. Explosive lithium. In the basement. Right. The people we were living with, or should I say, the person who organized the house we were living in, also from time to time organized a lab for MDA production – what in later years became MDMA. In my Chemistry for Mankind class we had a mimeographed handout diagramming the chemical structure of MDA, a sort of amphetamine with strong hallucinatory effects, which made for good trips because of the speed. The chemist used to come around to the house in the evenings to watch Kung Fu on the television. I saw him years later at a WisCon, coming down the grand lobby stairway, and he had not changed much. The person who organized the house was nicknamed Milo, as in Milo Minderbinder from the novel Catch-22, and he was full of exploits. Years later, again, as a suburban housewife, I saw his name and photo on the evening news when he was convicted of attempting to poison his wife -- one of the roommates. We had danced at their wedding, and ridden in the limo. Another of the roommates now sells insurance, and I ran into her with considerable astonishment at her father’s retirement party. We did not discuss the house on Brooks Street.

The studio was supposed to be a sewing studio. There was a sewing co-op on State Street,The Silver Thread, and it had given me the bright idea of going into business as a seamstress, sewing hand-made clothing, as I had learned to sew on my mother’s machine and made all kinds of things, clothing and patchworks and stuffed toys. I had a second-hand cabinet machine that my boyfriend Peter bought me, there in that basement. I did in fact use it later to construct about half of the Frostline sleeping bag kit that Peter Rabbit ordered so that we could go hiking the Appalachian Trail or some such (although that never occurred), that then lay packed in two cardboard boxes at various locations for thirty years. Now I have a different machine, a Kenmore portable that I bought for $40 from a friend, and mostly use it for mending and alterations. Last year I finally discarded the unfinished project, which mice had got into at some point, and made pillows from all the sealed coded packets of down and sleeping-bag stuffing.