COLLEGIATE EXCURSIONS

Thursday and Friday, Pete and I kicked it with our friends who either presently attend college or have recently graduated. Us being slightly (slightly) older than college-age grad and have either not-attended (myself) or dropped out (Pete) it afforded us the vibe of collegiate extracurricular experience, without the soul-stiultifying loans and/or intellectual edicts. To wit: Friday, we went over to Hanly’s (NYU, ’08) friends’ apartment, to participate in the Fleetwood Mac Power Hour: They play an hour of Fleetwood Mac songs on the TiVO, and every time a new song comes on, you take a shot of beer. We arrived late (we had to finish the Olympics-themed radio show, polish our Beijing banter, and eat dinner) so we only got to hear “Edge of Seventeen” (Stevie counts) and some other Fleetwood song that I didn’t know. When the Power Hour ended, Hanly’s homie who lived there demonstrated how uploading his iPod onto the Tivo resulted in some accidental chopped and screwed effect on certain songs, an effect which only began after he played a defected, desert-slow version of Rihanna’s “S.O.S.” So basically we sat there and listened to a slew of familiar songs as though they were broadcasted from the gates of hell, i.e. the “Whisper Song” sounded like the devil trying to pick you up via dubstep.
That was excellent. Thursday, however, was epic. We journeyed for the first time to Maud’s (Sarah Lawrence, ’09) upper west side apartment, a fully furnished mini-mansion she co-rents with her mother– who subletted from the children of a since-deceased piano teacher who bought the place in, judging from the decor, 1917.
Apartment is really an understatement. It is a house of four floors. The top floor was inaccessible to us because an anonymous elderly woman lives there. It is unclear whether she ever leaves. The third floor houses Maud’s cavernous room, a bathroom, a grand piano, an unoccupied single bed draped with the sort of peach coloured tasseled top-blanket I remember from my grandmother’s own 1917 (1921?) house, and a terrerium on the mantle, housing foliage but utterly absent of amphibians.
The second floor approxmates the same, minus another grand piano, plus a Chinese screen. On the first floor, the staircase drapes out like a wedding veil, cast in red carpet and mirrors all around, and opens to a foyer, another bathroom, two more creepily situated single beds with blankets, a medium sized television, a kitchen, another bathroom and, alas, a third grand piano. It is, note for note, piece by piece, the Haunted Mansion you imagined when you were six, an old gargantuan New York abode with clear yet undisernible history that will reveal its own shadows as you turn every corner.
And yet, after Pete and I got over the architecture (but not before Pete, emerging from the third floor bathroom, squeaked “Don’t leave me!”), we convened upon the dining table for Maud’s home-cooked Jamaican dinner. K and her boyfriend and his friends, two maje stoners from PDX, were fully posted up, eating beans and rice and bragging about the allegedly lax weed regulations of the Pacific Northwest. (I, having been a fan of the “JailBlazers,” don’t buy it.) T, standing against the stove in an Indiana Jones hat, looked on, perhaps disapprovingly. When the not-so-witty mini Oregon Seth Rogans were through with their hydroponic dissertatons, T regaled us with stories of his sugar daddy, an extremely wealthy entrepreneurial fellow he’d met at the old-school diner over on 86th street and who, after taking up a (pre-determinedly) non-sexual May-December friendship, offered to take T to an exorbitantly high priced Bobby McFerrin concert at Carnegie Hall. Black tie. They went. Ever since, T has been enjoying his new status as boy-genius sun-god: openings at MOMA, dinner at Waverly, conversations about contemporary South American novelists that T, ever the mal/well educated prodigy, soon en route to Buenos Aires, could actually understand. Did these unlikely friends speak in Spanish? T did not say. But he did emphasize that their relationship was purely platonic, based on friendship and conversation and intellect. We all celebrated in spite of it, or for it, in spite of or for their non-existant love.
Sensing footsteps, Maud, Pete, T and I, scraped-clean plates at our collective bows, waited for the cat-sitter, a twice-our-age employee of a prominent New York magazine, to come down the stairs. M. offered him a beer; much ado was made internally (among us, via eye contact) whether he would select the Bud Tall Boy (of which there were many) or the slightly fancier Sierra Nevada (of which there was one). He picked Sierra Nevada, of course, and vaulted into his thoughts on Kate Bush’s metaadolescent yearnings. We liked, we said, her voice, the videos, the persona. He did not read our magazine. Nor we, his. It was a conscious decision on our part; his, not so much.. He was wrong. Kate Bush feature TK.
We stomped on the porch of the haunted house and our breath blew out, some of us smoky, up toward the crescent moon. These days, these days, they are excellent.