The House of Flux?
It was initially dubbed "The Devil Worship House" because of the graffiti in
the attic left by a generation of bored teenage boys: Black Sabbath, Iron
Maiden, Pyromania, Saxxon, and "Come on, feel the noise!" In the bathroom,
the toilet sagged into the floorboards and the stained wallpaper with its
faded illustrations of Victorian water-closets curled away from the walls.
To make it habitable, the entire bathroom was gutted and refurbished with
modern plumbing and fixtures. The claw-foot bathtub remains, but the
wallpaper is now replaced with ceramic tile in a simple geometric design.
Unfortunately, the tile only goes halfway up the wall. Above it, the new
plasterboard is unfinished, patiently awaiting the scrawled graffiti of some
future generation of teenagers.
The overgrown lawn yielded tire irons and volumes of broken glass. Every
trowel thrust into the garden unearthed dog tags, marbles, and plastic
soldiers disfigured by matches and pocket knives. An elderly neighbor
offered apocryphal tales of a previous owner shot dead in an armored car
robbery at the airport; his widow, struggling to raise four children alone,
hurled empty wine bottles out the attic window into neighbors' lawns with
bitter invectives.
Underneath the porch was a jumble of rusted car parts and sheet metal, as
well as a dirty pair of mens' underwear - size fifty from the looks of it.
That might explain the cracked floor joists visible through the cobwebs in
the basement when you looked up. Mostly you looked down at the basement
floor. Obviously, someone had attempted to patch the concrete in places.
Their attempts were futile; a spring of water still flows up through the
cracks after the heaviest rains.
The basement was furnished with a broken refrigerator and a workbench, its
drawers full of rusty nails. The storage cabinets, built from old wooden
shipping crates, reeked of insecticide. Except for a half-empty box of DDT,
the cabinets were empty.
Left for discovery inside the walls were a number of extinct hornets' nests,
a hash pipe, and a cache of small-arms ammunition from The Great War. None
of this was in the fine print of the 30-year mortgage. But you made your
down-payment anyway and watched your investment go up, up, up!
That's my recollection.
Tom G.
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>From: "Roger Stevens" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Re: FLUXLIST: Room Enquiry
>Date: Fri, Aug 3, 2001, 4:56 AM
>
> ... I'm wondering if any other list members who
> have visited the House of Flux
> would they like to describe (in as few words as possible)
> some of the other rooms?
>
>
