Living in Tracy Chapman’s House
It wasn’t exactly a house, or, I suppose, it was less than a house. Specifically, it was one half of a three-story house, split top to bottom, with clapboards, on a corner lot in Somerville. There was a house on the left, where everyone who lived there fought all the time – you could hear them through the wall, the horsehair plaster and the laths – and then there was the house on the right, where we crazy semi-vegetarians lived, I admit, in squalor, two thousand square feet, most of the time smelling of sex and salt and oil and vinegar. One night, everyone stood in the second floor hallway, listening to the screams on the other side of the wall – louder and wilder than the sounds you hear at night in the woods, fox and vixen, courting, mating – trying to decide whether to call the cops. Tracy Chapman, who was huddled in the hallway that night, wrote “Behind the Wall”: Last night I heard the screams. I didn’t live there at the time, but later I heard these screams too.
I think Tracy found the home her first year at Tufts. I was a year behind her. Don’t expect too much. We have never met. I can’t tell you anything about Tracy Chapman, because I don’t know anything about Tracy Chapman, and probably, if I knew anything, I wouldn’t tell you. I didn’t move in until after she left, but people kept calling her on the phone asking for her. Fans, journalists, fans. Did we know where she was? Did we know how to reach her? Can we send him a message? No. Wasn’t she incredible, the best thing that ever existed in this whole big, wonderful, fucked up world? Yes.
This isn’t a story about Tracy Chapman. It’s a house story. There were six rooms, but sometimes eight, nine, ten, even a dozen people lived there, because it was cheaper to share and the place was so messy – what’s one more sweaty body compared to two extra hands to do the chores and another person to split the rent? There was also a dog named Takisha and a cat named Buddha and another cat named Misha that S., who became a soil scientist, had inherited from his grandmother, who gave him the name Mikhail Baryshnikov, because of the height the cat could jump. When S. moved – I think he went to Japan? – he gave Misha to a very nice old lady named Donna, who lived in a yellow house with vinyl walls next door. This cat walked down the street like a lion, king of pride. He once won a fight against a pit bull. Man, that cat could fight.
None of us had Misha’s composure, at least when I lived there. No one was who they wanted to be, not yet, anyway. We were embryos, stem cells, brain stems of our future, wet behind the ears, wet everywhere. We lived in confusing, uncertain, exciting, dizzying chaos, slamming doors, crying into pillows, pondering the possibilities of turnips, menstrual cups, macrobiotics and Audre Lorde. One chapter of our lives had ended, but the next chapter had not begun, and none of us was sure what we wanted, only that we wanted it, wanted it, desperately wanted it. I have been told that it is the job of young adults to learn that they are responsible for their own lives. Easier said than done, but it’s definitely wackier and more fun in a house with a bunch of other misfits, especially if at least one person knows how to make a decent frittata, although it can be a little difficult to know how to take charge of your life if you’re trying to do it in the shadow of Tracy Chapman.
