That fall of 1997 we harvested the garden, then watched the frost kill the garden plants one by one. I was amazed to find out which plants were fragile—tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and basil—and which ones had the chops to hold on into the fall. (The beets, the cabbages, and the sage, that’s what.) The frost stung the Swiss chard three times before it finally capitulated, and only then, after I shuddered my way through my last freezing-cold outdoor shower (the shortest of my young life), we packed it in for the year. I filled boxes with jars of my canning—apple butter, plum tomatoes in sauce, bread-and-butter pickles, fermented dills, pickled green tomatoes—loaded the back of the truck with flats of blushing not-quite-ripe tomatoes, and then we set off in a two-truck caravan to Minneapolis. My dad, whose generosity was judicious but always well-timed, had surprised me with the gift of a vehicle—not just a loaner, but one with an actual title. It came from the unpaved back row of the lot, the part they called “the dirt,” and was what the salesmen colloquially called a “five-dollar car,” a junker they’d try to sell for a few thousand bucks. My GMC Sierra pickup truck had wide orange racing stripes down the sides with the words HEAVY HALF scrolled over the wheel wells and was a 1975, the year of my birth, which I took as a sign. I couldn’t imagine driving a vehicle that better described my new country lifestyle—and it was free! Thank God for Randy, the parts manager, who had had the foresight to install a power-steering mechanism from a local junkyard, because I could barely turn the wheel without it.
We moved into the studio space Aaron shared with Rob in Lighthouse Bay, a nine-story concrete warehouse off the railroad tracks in the Midway, the corridor between Minneapolis and St. Paul. The dimly lit first floor was taken up with Joe the landlord’s spice business. It was a shadowy operation. Open barrels of powdered cumin, coriander seed, cinnamon sticks, and red pepper flakes lined the walls. Slow-moving rivulets of water spread out like a creek bed in the center and rodents bumped along the dark perimeter. The freight elevator rarely worked.
I was glad that Aaron’s space was on the third floor of a possible nine and thankful for the overwhelming sting of cinnamon oil in the air, masking odors that would likely have been much worse. (It also taught me to buy spices only from reputable sources. Stapled-over bulk packs still give me the willies.)
Despite the building’s grunge, we loved our little corner of it. Through the squint of youth, we had the ability to smudge out all the unsavory details and see just the brilliant shine coming off the nugget of the central idea of it—in this case, the enormous space. Our corner unit measured about three thousand square feet, had walls of grimy marble, and was full of light. Aaron and Rob each commandeered a big studio space, Aaron working on his wood carvings in the front room, and Rob welding his tall steel sculptures in the middle. In the back, they partitioned off a small living space, whose walls they painted barn red and covered with their collected paintings and dusty thrift-store finds.
For artists, it was a coveted live/work situation. On par with those, the living part of the equation wasn’t legally sanctioned, although Joe the spice magnate never cared.
In fact, he loved to hang out with his tribe of tenants, often inviting us into his seedy back office to shoot the breeze. Standing on the worn red carpeting and leaning against the front corner of his desk, papers sliding loosely on top, he’d say, “Want some lunch?” If we shook our heads in dissent, he’d look at us incredulously and say, “You sure you don’t want some noodles?” as he sprayed butter from a can onto a paper plate of microwaved pasta and dressed it with a few shakes of canister Parmesan. The nine floors of Lighthouse Bay were filled with artists and street punks and, come evening, homeless guys who wandered in to sleep in their favorite crannies in the dark corners. The backyard was usually occupied by an encampment of hardcore kids, heavily inked-up and metal-punched, who stayed in a bus with the words CIRCUS OF THE RIDICULOUS painted on the side. They traveled the country hopping trains and survived by Dumpster diving for food and materials. Some of them made zines, some of them supported themselves by fire-dancing or riding comically tall bicycles in their circus. Even though I learned to say “No thanks” to their proffered dumpster produce after using a batch of “perfectly good” rotten onions, they were affable and interesting warehouse-mates. When it got cold that fall, a bunch of these kids and their trusty canine sidekicks moved into spaces in the building, some into the studio directly above us, where they set up shop fixing motorcycles and illegally tattooing faces.
Joe seemed to love the madhouse aspect and wielded his power via his henchmen, a band of young Mexican guys. Some of these workmen possessed advanced college degrees earned back in Mexico, in fields like engineering, but they set their gazes out far ahead of them as they hustled around doing Joe’s bidding in exchange for his inflated American cash. “Calling all Mexicans! Calling all Mexicans!” he’d broadcast over the loudspeakers. He was king of the whole shithole kingdom.
The bathrooms were few and far between. There was one on the sixth floor and one on the fourth floor, but the latter was so bad, so terrifically foul, that it had a nickname: Little Bosnia. I will spare you the graphic details, but in short it was at Lighthouse Bay that I cultivated the ability to hover for any length of time over any toilet seat. It made me wonder if warehouses like ours (not free to us in particular, but free to some of us) weren’t called squats for another reason.
Aaron and I spent our time much as we had up north, except that most mornings he went to work as an assistant to a stonemason. He was also working on a number of large pieces for his first real gallery show, so he was fairly solvent and hopeful, but I spent most of my days sitting on the couch, knitting, waiting for a potential employer to call. Easily, this was the nadir of our brokeness. When running errands, I didn’t have enough money to go out to lunch, so I would go home and cook up a batch of white beans with a ham bone, my bangs dragging in my eyes. That I couldn’t afford a haircut or buy a pound of good coffee beans or fill up the truck with gas without feeling a bolt of anxiety never occurred to me to be the reason for my general distress. Broke was so quickly my baseline.
I made dinner in the evenings and afterward Aaron worked on his sculptures while I read books and underlined the passages I liked. When he knocked off work around 11, we’d sit in the cowhide-covered chairs in the glow of the warm light from the floor lamps (with Aaron, the lighting is always good), and our talk would balloon. We’d get excited about our future, the drives we would take, the places we could go, the ways we would improve our place up north…and then we’d sometimes sip straight Jim Beam from little shot glasses to calm ourselves down, sitting among the thrift-store finds that grew more precious to us by the blooming minute. On the weekends we listened to public radio—Bluegrass Saturday Morning—and I made some halfhearted attempts at sewing a patchwork quilt, gently pumping on the small treadle sewing machine Aaron had dragged in for me. In February, we planted our seeds for the next year’s garden, stringing up grow lights suspended just above the sprouts. It was a big space and cold. I piled on thick wool socks and sweaters and timed my phone calls around the heater: when the industrial blower hanging in the corner intermittently came to life, its flames glowed through the grille menacingly, like dragon teeth, and its fan bellowed so loudly that it drowned out all conversation.