Welcome To B Street

When I got the keys to the house and the room I was excited to see what kind of shape the place was in. It had been years since the last time I had walked through the front door. The carpets are all dingy and stained from years of beer spillage and knocked over ashtrays. Carpets like this are instant death for vacuum cleaners. In the two livingrooms there is an assortment of broken bar signs, odd artwork, a Nixon/Agnew campaign banner, and tons of other random shit. The livingroom between the front door and the kitchen has one whole wall dedicated to Elvis Presley. They call it the Elvis Shrine. Nobody in the house knows who started it or how long ago it came into existence, but it is impressive. It's a mish-mosh of everything Elvis tacked or taped up on the wall so thick that you can't see the paint behind it. Every inch is covered. Across the room in the back corner is a life sized black and white standup of Marilyn Monroe in her famous white dress from the 50s.

Couches are plentiful here. All of them are entirely moth eaten and mangy but very comfortable. One of the couches is an early 1970s eyesore, it's metallic lime green with a low back and it has two black top tables built in, one on either side. The rest are your garden variety discarded couches that show up at the local thrift store or appear out on the sidewalk with a crudely written sign on it that says "Free". The other livingroom usually has a pool table or a ping pong table set up and ready for anyone who wants to kill some time. Ping pong has been bad for the windows though. Some guests have been a little over enthusiastic about making a slam shot and have put their paddle (and arm) through the glass. The window that got broken the most now has a piece of wood nailed across the window frame to hopefully stop any further ping pong paddle destruction from happening.

The kitchen is barely useable. A puke green refrigerator that lives against the orange wall sort of works. Nobody has defrosted the freezer in years so it's become a solid block of ice. You can still see some packaged food items deep in the ice that no one bothered to retrive. Some of the burners on the stove don't work, and the dumbwaiter has been filled with hundreds of paper grocery bags. We have a dishwasher but ivy has grown through from outside and spread inside the dishwasher itself so it's wrecked. A few ivy branches are poking through the dishwasher door and into the center of the kitchen. I think a couple of the guys here have taken it on as a kind of mascot or house pet.

Out back there's a storage room, stairs to the basement and a door that leads out to where we all park our cars. It's loose gravel and empty beer kegs everywhere you look around by our vehicles. A tree off to the left of the back door has a tiny metal shopping cart someone placed in it's branches 20 years ago. Some of the branches grew through the wire mesh of the cart and forced the metal aside. It's cool. There's a two car garage, if you could call it that. Really it appears to be a chicken coop that now holds two cars. The garage is sagging over on one side and probably will collapse in the near future. Why it hasn't already crumbled to the ground mystifies me.

There once was a front yard here at B Street. Instead of a couple of trees or some lawn and a nice walkway up the front porch we somehow ended up with a portable building that serves the elderly and dingbat housewives as a hair salon. So if we want to use the front door we have to walk a little way down our driveway, make a left just past the portable building, and then walk up improvised stairs to the front porch. The front door to the place is huge. It's solid wood with a one way mirrored window in the center. The address is in gold leaf on the glass. There's a brass Chevy bowtie looking handle in the door right about waist high and that's the door bell. When I say door bell I don't mean some new-fangled electric ding dong sounding contraption either. I'm talking DOOR BELL. This shit is hooked up to a big brass bell and when you pull on the lever I guarantee it will wake up everyone in the whole house. Including the dead.