I lived in campus dorms off and on for my first three years of academic life. I lived in a converted Navy barracks, called Worchester House, which was torn down over ten years ago.
My first non-campus apartment was located above a restaurant. Technically, this was illegal. I guess the slumlord greased the fire safety inspector in some fashion. Ron (good-fellow college chum) and I lived there one summer. When school re-started, we moved to an apartment complex.
We named the apartment "Channel 27". It was our first experience with cable access, and neither of us had a great deal of self-control when it came to tv. The movie channel was locally produced at the time, and they only had a few movies available. I've lost count of the number of times I watched Endless Summer and Gimme Shelter.
That was also the time when I started "dropping" LSD. By this point, the psychedelic was being cut with strychnine, which made the high a very interesting experience. I remember one time when I thought I was going into rigor. Or my muscles were petrifying.
Moved back into the dorms after this. Lived in Boyd House (also torn down). Had a dark year, which bled into the following summer when the future Very Rt Rev Dr. Omed and I rented an duplex from a notorious slum-lord. Dr. Omed worked for a pizza delivery place, and I began my employ at the Infernal Bookstore.
From that duplex, I moved to this apartment, on the NW corner of Sante Fe and Apache. This is where I wrote the first poem in what would become the Saturn Sequence, "I sleep under the sign." Here, my primary drug of choice was alcohol. Primarily beer, but also Windsor Canadian Whiskey (a preference I inherited from Padre).
The white arrow indicates one of my windows. Note there was no air conditioning unit in place when I was living there. I propped the window open with a thick stick. A different twisty branch became a keep-sake on the window sill, and eventually inspired the referenced poem.
From there, I moved to a house several blocks away. I rented the house with Dale, who was a co-worker at the Infernal Bookstore. It was a fair-sized house, with a defunct furnace in the living room. We each had our own bedroom. The living room and dining room were about equal in size.
After we had lived there for some time, a friend related a bit of the house's history. This information was incorporated into the poem The Green House. If you click on the link and scroll to the end of the poem, you'll see a before and after picture of the house. It was torn down within a year after Dale and I moved out. Dale got a year-long scholarship to go to Germany. Rather than seek another roommate, I chose to move again. I moved just across the alley to another old house that had been broken into apartments. The house is on Jenkins Street, just a few yards north of Boyd.
The house faces east. I lived around the back. The fire escape was at my bathroom window; to the left of that is my bedroom window.
This is the house I lived in when Mary and I started dating. She eventually moved into an apartment on the first floor, near the front of the house. With her two teenage boys. A little over a year after she moved in, we got married. Then moved to a house on the south end of Norman, at Chautauqua and Sonia Dr.
We married in 1985. Mary went to Seoul, South Korea, to teach English as a Second Language in 1995. To the best of my knowledge, she is still there. We divorced in 2000.
Which may explain why I did not choose to take a picture of that particular house.
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