Dave pulled off the highway and into the parking lot of 75 Eagle Street or Eagle Square. At this point in time the Olneyville landmark held a small Mexican Restaurant, a Dunkin’ Donuts and the gigantic brick edifice that housed a Flea Market, Fort Thunder and various other lofts and artist spaces. Fort Thunder did not actually fill the entire building: it was one half of one floor. Strictly speaking I shouldn’t have known where I was actually going.
Or rather I wouldn’t have had I not felt the clarion call of my destination like a migratory bird heeding the magnetic pull of its ancestral nesting grounds.
I scrambled up the fire escape cackling in maniacal delight. Another houseguest was sitting outside and reading on an old upholstered recliner. I can’t imagine that I offered nothing in the way of a verbal greeting but I do not remember the specific words that would have comprised this salutation or even if they were actually words at all. I do remember this person regarding me with an expression that conveyed the deepest sense of unease.
It was somewhere in the neighborhood of three in the morning and I was completely out of my mind on many many drugs.
My pharmaceutical regimen had included stimulants, dissociatives and both cough suppressants and antihistamines at high enough doses to function as psychedelics, sedatives and other effects in combination that have most likely not been significantly studied. I had edged down slightly from the plateau that had caused me to view an ordinary highway maintenance vehicle as some sort of extraterrestrial spacecraft but a suite of other visual complications had taken its place.
My perceptions had taken on a visual lag and stutter similar to the effect of playing a 3D rendered game like DOOM on a computer with insufficient RAM and Processor speed. Turning my head would result in a sequence of three to four staggered images instead of a smooth transition. On top of this the edges of physical objects had taken on brightly colored neon squiggles like the animated title sequences of Saved by the Bell and a million other ‘80s era movies and TV shows.
With all of this window dressing accounted for I will attempt to convey my impressions of the wonderland that greeted me after climbing in from the fire escape. The area along the street facing windows was mostly empty with several couches along the wall and countless mattresses piled against the exposed industrial pillars. Looking inward the most conspicuous feature was a sculptural dome about twelve feet high and completely wallpapered in screenprinted patterns in the contrasting green and orange of He-Man’s Battlecat.
I can’t remember if I ever actually saw the interior of Brian Chippendale’s cavelike room but when I try to imagine it I see a nest of thick and scattered furs with a tiny work desk on an elevated loft. On that side of the space the walls were densely covered in toys, posters, hand drawn comic pages and every manner of ephemera as if the space had been occupied for decades instead of a scant five years. I had heard that Chippendale published a mini comic called Maggots but had never managed to acquire any actual issues so I paused in a hallway to appreciate the greatest concentration of his distinctive comic art I had so far encountered in a single setting.
This discovery made poor competition with the prospect of deeper exploration into the warren of labyrinthine rooms and passages so I left the wall comics to be read another day and ventured onward. This hallway opened into a cluttered library with multiple plastic horses leaping from the walls above the towering shelves. This led into a dimly lit passage festooned with individual rooms, lofts and other anonymous spaces giving off the unmistakable energy imprint of unconscious human bodies. I at least had the presence of mind to navigate through this section in relative silence but I think I remember seeing a large wooden skateboard ramp and a section of chain link fence.
The passage looped around to reconnect with the main space through a portal disguised as a refrigerator door set into the wall of the kitchen. Nearby was the only bathroom, the actual front door that could be accessed from inside the building, a large screen printing studio and a cozy television nook. The telephone that I had called might have been attached to one of the pillars, I just remember that it had presence and a station of implied authority as telephones used to do before they became supercomputers in everybody’s pockets.
If my drug addled recollections from over twenty years ago are not definitive enough for you I seem to remember that a publication called Crimethinc had printed an actual detailed floor plan but I can’t quite seem to find it.
While I have given significant space to the visual hallucinations I was experiencing at this time any seasoned psychonaut can tell you that the real fireworks aren’t in what you see but rather in what you think. I had slipped into a profound delusion that Fort Thunder was something like a cross between a space station and Asgard or Mount Olympus. I imagined it’s occupants were something akin to all powerful genies who were watching me from the walls in order to decide whether or not I was worthy of joining their pantheon. In this version of reality showing up in the dead of night while tripping on drugs was some form of preordained initiation ceremony instead of what I now understood it to have been: bad etiquette and a serious lapse in judgement.
Actually believing these things to be true I racked my brain for some form of display that might appease these gods and arrived at an obvious answer: I began to wash the dishes.
This made enough noise to wake somebody up or perhaps (more likely) I had been talking to people in the walls who weren’t there but whichever one it was a bleary eyed Raphael Lyons emerged to talk to me. He said that yes, Jim had mentioned I might be coming but unfortunately Jim wasn’t actually here and they would have to have a house meeting to decide if I would actually be allowed to stay for any significant period of time. He also asked that if I was going to wash the cast iron pans could I please refrain from using any soap so that the pans could retain their seasoning.
I had been introduced to that primordial debate which has been waged through collective housing since the dawn of history and will carry on unabated until the end of time: the cast iron pans and the soap. I remember hearing at the last reunion of a collective house I used to live in called the Blog Cabin that this entire debate arose from a bastardization of a prohibition against using cast iron pans to make soap but at the time I obligingly refrained from it’s use on the remainder of the pans.
At this point my friends who had kindly driven me all the way from Chicago, Illinois to Providence, Rhode Island had conducted somewhat longer conversations with the gentleman on the fire escape and found themselves in the awkward position of asking for permission to crash in a house to which they had just delivered a raving maniac. Raphael agreed that we could all find unoccupied surfaces to sleep on as long as we didn’t go into anybody’s rooms and we could figure all the other details out in the morning.
I tried to convince my friend Meg to come sleep with me on a hidden mattress I had discovered somewhere but seeing as my eyes and voice currently appeared unnatural and creepy as fuck and I was holding my hands in an awkward position like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons she politely demurred. I tried to fall asleep on different couches and mattresses but every time I closed my eyes it seemed like I had X-Ray vision and could see various oversized amoebas and other unicellular organisms inside of whatever it is I was laying on. Eventually I gave up and climbed onto the actual roof where I either fell asleep or waited for all of the other people to wake up.
The next morning it sounded like all of the residents of the house had heard about the unorthodox manner in which I had shown up and were less than thrilled with the prospect of spending time living in close proximity to me, my stunning credentials of having washed some dishes and spoken to Jim Drain on the phone one time notwithstanding. I had probably gotten soap on somebody’s pan. My friends were continuing on to New York and Raphael suggested that I accompany them and return after they had had the opportunity to discuss the matter in a meeting without the pressures exerted by my actual presence.
I climbed back into the car with my friends and we continued onward to New York City.
Next part here:
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 
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