the doorway

Last night our side basement door mysteriously got too big for its frame. We're not talking the swollen effect of humidity, I mean by a quarter inch side-to-side it wouldn't close, when a few hours earlier it had been fine. The frame seemed completely tight and connected even though it had changed size.

I wondered if there had been another earthquake, and Allie worried whether the house had shifted so dramatically in an hour and it meant we shouldn't stay in it. Corrigan suggested this was beyond his physics knowledge, that it indicated a gap in the time-space continuum. We looked at the little foyer structure over the stairs and between 5 of us could not identify which dodgy details had always been there unnoticed until we got suspicious, and what might look different. (This was all after 10:30 at night so the light was against us.)

Then I thought, "Wonder if Andrew Cone's moving crew hauling random furniture in and out of our driveway where he'd "stored" it has anything to do with this?"
I called Ben and asked, did you hit the entryway alcove doorframe with a large piece of furniture, or, say, Andrew's truck?

There was silence.

"Because the door doesn't close anymore," I prodded.

"Um, yeah, there was something," Ben said. "When we couldn't start Andrew's truck, two of us were pushing it out of the driveway, and the drivers' side door was open and it hit the east side of the entryway. But that was only the strength of two people pushing."

And the weight of a truck, Allie pointed out when I relayed the news.

So I decided to take a piece of lumber and hold it against the east side of the door frame, and hit it with a sledgehammer. The frame jumped a bit. Several knocks later - probably much appreciated by sleeping neighbors - the door was able to close.

I was glad to have the seemingly instinctual knowledge to use a piece of lumber to distribute the power of the sledge hammer, and somewhat disconcerted that 1. our entryway can shift on its foundation like that 2. someone ran a car into the house and didn't check for damage. (I made Ben promise to change his policy next time.)

That's Haymarket: The house is out of square; was it an earthquake, or Andrew Cone?

the reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated

Rumor has it that the Cone is alive & trotting triumphantly around HP following a train-hopping trek through the Rockies.

Whether he actually crossed the Rockies or ended up in a Jewel factory yard in Eastern Illinois (again) remains to be verified.

dressing room, revisited

Andrew Cone: a man who once lived in the leaky apartment closet of Texan drug dealers to save cash. (And score hash.)



I should note that Andrew no longer sleeps in a closet. Or rather (there are always "or rathers" when struggling to describe Drew) he does once again now (another story), but for most of the past year he acquired a nice apartment once he moved out of Haymarket.

However... apparently in addition to keeping a stash of clothes in our boiler room to bike over from work and change every morning, he had whittled down an even more efficient routine.

He would come to our house, peel off his underwear, wash it in BLEACH, iron it to dry crispiness, and re-don the jocks. This pair of ironed bleached undies would be worn two days rightside-out and two days inside-out to get the most use out. Like an old frat boy joke.

One night at mealtime this routine was revealed to us; revealed narratively, in the third person, not literally revealed - thank your deity of choice. Depending on how well our diners knew Andrew Cone, this little tale produced a variety of reactions from shock, disgust, to resigned shrugs and doubt about ever letting our clothing touch the community ironing board again.

Corrigan, however, happily celebrated validation:

"I told you!" he shouted. "I told you I saw Andrew Cone ironing his underwear!"

love & absorption

Sophia was in town for a few weeks, which is cool as her presence inevitably inspires crazy, spinning, laughing conversations that are more like a Beat poet's re-mix of the English language than a coherent dialogue. (For her August visit I'll just go ahead and order black berets and turtlenecks for our entire cast, and we'll pick up the Bowers habit of snapping for what we appreciate.)

For the few months prior to Sophia's move to New Orleans, she was dating Andrew. They are still affectionate when she stops back through Chicago.

Standing in the kitchen, Sophia gave Andrew a broad but quick hug this morning and Andrew looked pensive.

"Does anyone else," he asked, "ever get confused all the time when you think someone is attracted to you but really they just need to dry their hands?"

dressing room

So Andrew has been appearing at our house in the mornings. He slips into our basement boiler room, changes into a clean set of the clothes stashed therein, and heads off to the bio lab where he does programming.

"This is what is rumoured," Megan said of the odd closet choice.

"No. He told me this," Beej said.

Andrew's reasoning behind this is that he can't get the fresh clothes back to his apartment after washing them in our machine.

Which begs a certain question, considering the laundry had to arrive AT our house somehow.

the haunting of the wooden mexican

Moving into my room entailed all of a 6-foot trek into what was, prior to my move-in, Andrew's abode. I'd been subletting while Eli spent the summer in France, and with his impending return mid-September I left my room change to the latest date possible to accomodate Andrew's impulsive move-out that hovered according to fluctuating availability of the apartment he'd chosen. (This was a place for which he made the down payment, literally, in cash to some men who drove by an appointed spot in their pick-up truck and had no id on them to prove that they were, in fact, who they claimed.)

Drew planned to move in with two other programmers, Trevor and Mr. Purdy, who had more or less lived on our couches for the past few weeks despite both having addresses where they received mail, owned beds and so forth. The living room was littered with family size jars scraped almost-clean of peanut butter, empty diet pepsi bottles, and hand-rolled cigarettes as they worked round the clock on a program to beat the stock market. ("No, this one is different.") The Mountain Goats played on loop over our stereo, a retro appliance demanding the occasional bitch-slap to calm the buzz when the wires might loosen, and housemates snuck in once or twice to febreeze the orange couch which had begun to adopt an ever-ripening eau d' purdy.

Although these weeks hearkened the return of a girlfriend for Trevor, who headed the project and sketched hyper scratches across the common room blackboard, he found time to move. And Mr. Purdy, whose intense concentration reduced movement to a speed generally requiring stop-motion to record efficiently, also managed to shift his belongings to the new place they'd call home.

But Andrew was having some difficulty extracting more than a box or two of belongings from his room. Considering the modest square footage of the place one would assume that moving out would take one trip. But Andrew planned to move by bike, which meant more trips regardless, and somehow his room proved a clown car of junk. So I began packing his shit into boxes while he spent the last 48 hours before Eli's return and my eviction... well... in the front yard building a bike attachment. This contstruction job took more concentration (not to mention petty theft) than actually moving his stuff would have.

He and Mr. Purdy spread the materials across the front yard. They first stole a cart to use, but deciding that it had too much wiggle to its wheels, elected to hacksaw off the wheels and attach them to a new structure. (My parents were visiting this weekend, and of all moments to connect to someone of my generation, my Dad elected this as his opportunity, donating engineering advice as Drew proceeded to disassemble the purloined trolley and connect it to scraps of wood from our shop to build a cart-like device.)

Mr. Purdy has been described by some as a mathematical genius. Below witness him sawing over his own legs and crotch. (This is a sort of self-selective evolutionary step, right?)


The sum result of the weekend was a cart Andrew called the Wooden Mexican "because it will haul stuff for cheap all day long." (Although it did not pack Drew's belongings, load itself, or clean the mold and dust from his room.) Andrew holds the peculiar and stubborn belief that as an ethnic member of a once-persecuted people, he is granted the right to make politically incorrect comments against the metaphorical "new jews," any marginalized folk, namely, in this case Mexicans.

Most of us rolled our eyes and left Andrew to his politically incorrect business, seeing as despite his racist humour he was the one who washed the laundry for and nursed several of the neighbourhood homeless men, most of whom happen to be black men in this neck of the woods.

No one was treated for shock when the Wooden Mexican was broken/abandoned/disassembled not long into its scandalous lifetime of hauling laundry and a week of groceries.

However one poor woman who was visiting at the time, Ben's girlfriend Lisa, absorbed Andrew's influence a bit more than the rest of us. She had several key circumstances: speaking German as her first language, having the US American half of her family residing in the colour-conscious land of Kentucky, and perhaps not knowing quite how full of shit Andrew can be at times.

Time progressed, Lisa returned to Berlin. But in the winter she returned to stay in the co-op, and this time for a lengthier residence instead of a brief visit. She was folded into the cook cycle, assigned a chore, and quickly assumed a comfortable and beloved role in the co-op as "crazy Lisa." She amused us with wacky plans to make lots of money, observations about people in fridges being super funny, and outlines for musicals about psychedelic cats. And when she referenced using "a wooden mexican" in an email to the house listhost, we figured it was simply wild and crazy Lisa joking around if a little colourfully.

But she wasn't it turns out.

That night at dinner she was very rosy-cheeked, but not of joy. I somehow convinced her to discuss what was on her mind, and it turned out that she had used the term "wooden mexican" thinking that, while it was clearly racist, it was an accepted term in American English, which sweeps so many other bigoted terms under the rug. And how did she learn of her mistake? A helpful email from Ed.

Ed, who is so earnest it hurts -- particularly those of us whose veins run with sarcasm -- had taken it upon himself to send Lisa an email letting her know that she'd used a racist word, unique as the expression might be. This edification was a thoughtful, if stilted, slap on the wrist... but the email also included a list of ethnically booby trapped terms to avoid, such as that hot button term "paddy wagon."

Lisa of course was mortified that she'd made the gaffe, embarassed that she'd been called out on it in such a pedantic way, and likely surprised that only one person had spoken up.

This story is usually mentioned in reference to Ed's complete straight-laced reading of everything around him, his blindness to subtext, subtlety and irony. But really, about whom does it speak the most?