A Place to Park

Welcome to the blog tour for Christmas Kitsch, a full length novel featured in Riptide’s Home for the HolidaysChristmas bundle. The story focuses around Rusty Baker, a once spoiled rich kid who finds himself homeless for the holidays, because he fell in love with Oliver Campbell, his best friend from high school.  In honor of their rather rocky beginning in the crappy apartment with the hand-me-down furniture, I went back to my own roots with my beloved Mate.  In the course of the blog tour, I’ll be sharing some highlights (and low-lights) of my first year with Mate–and how I drew on that to write Rusty and Oliver, and hopefully you’ll see why these guys are so very close to my heart.

So, how many of us had a crappy first apartment?  C’mon, everybody raise your hand!

My first apartment was sooo bad…

• Friends had to walk around knife fights in the parking lot on their way to their cars.
• A knot of unsupervised children ran around in the muddy quad, from dawn until dusk on every school day.  They often played with violence.
• Strange diseased cats would just wander in and puke on your carpet when you opened the door, because hey!  Place to sleep!
• The sewage from the apartment above us regularly dumped into our bathtub via a hole in the ceiling whenever somebody flushed a plastic diaper.
• Our own toilet was known to fountain shit so regularly that we kept an extra three bags of cat litter in the hallway for emergency sandbag use.
• When the pissed off woman with a crowbar was wrecking the apartment her husband kept with his mistress, the cops had to wade through a crowd of onlookers in the quad cheering her on for more destruction.  (This happened while the strange diseased cat was puking on our carpet by the way.  I didn’t want to open my door, would you?)
• We knew what the woman upstairs did for a living.  So did her 1 a.m., 3 a.m., and 5 a.m. appointments.

God—the list goes on.

Saying this place was a dump was like saying Corbin Fischer has a few good men.  Our loss of property alone would make up a police report.  In fact, it made up three.

But by the same token?

I remember how big it was, in steps, from the front door to the back door.  I remember how tiny the kitchen was, and the old, ugly pattern of the tile on the counter.  I remember the beige carpeting, and how we counted the beanbag chair as furniture for our first months.  I remember the first time we had friends over, and how for a little while, I was the only one of us with an apartment, and, yes, we all gathered there.  I remember working on papers by the window, where I could look out and see all the apartment grunion flopping around on the muddy quad.

I remember the first time we made love after drinking wine, and how we lived in two sleeping bags all winter because we had no heat, and how Mate bought an oil heater for me (which we couldn’t afford) because I had a head cold and there was no way to get warm.

I’ve never been a great “homemaker”.  One of the reasons I’ve always held such respect for the job is that I’m so hopeless at things like remembering flowers and having tablecloths to match the seasons and swapping out new pictures for older pictures and dusting before there’s an archeological sub-strata layer on top of my tchotchkes.

But I do appreciate the evolution of where we live as we progress through life.

Even if it’s in the same house, the house becomes filled with memories.  There will be more making love with wine and less puking cats and calls from the cops.  More laughter, more understanding, less first fights about “why the hell didn’t you call me I thought you were dead in a ditch!”  The place we live accrues the detritus from lives well lived.  I mean, sometimes you have to purge all of that, but usually, even if the detritus gets tossed, the memories remain.

And part of my history with Mate goes back to that craptastic first apartment.  And now, when we look at our crumbling house (that we own) and see the floor in the bathroom that needs to be repaired or the lawn that is forever in need of mowing or the tile that, after fifteen years, is sort of toast—we know that, just like all of the horrors of that first apartment, these things are not the sum total of who we are.

But it was one of our beginnings, and there was making love with wine, and that should never be forgotten.

Please leave a comment to be included in the Riptide Giveaway!

And don’t forget to collect “Strange diseased puking cat” for the scavenger hunt on Amy’s blog on December 14^th!

Amy Lane has children, pets, consuming hobbies, an amazing spouse, and a very dirty house.  The only time she does housework is Christmas, so that children, pets, spouse, hobbies, and home may exist in peace on hearth for at least once a year.

Feel free to visit Amy in the following places:

Blog: www.writerslane.blogspot.com

Website: www.greenshill.com

Twitter: @amymaclane

FaceBook: Amy Lane

FaceBook Fan Group: Amy Lane Anonymous

Or to contact her at: amylane@greenshill.com

The Scavenger Hunt–

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