May 16, 2009

• 1975, Anchorage and Chugiak, Alaska

  The lead-in to this memoir episode is here.

  Having a car, Lucy our VW bug, and both of us having regular incomes, and both preferring the quiet green of suburban living over city life, Charley and I started looking for a more pleasant place to live than that dank and gloomy basement apartment a block from Anchorage’s Park Strip.  As the last of the winter’s snow was melting, we found a duplex for rent in Chugiak.  It was a recently built house on a hillside, the last house on that road, with nothing but woods visible from the windows on 2 sides.

  Our half was upstairs with a ground-level entry off the street.  The downstairs neighbors had a ground-level entry downslope and around back.  We had two bedrooms.  The sunny one on the northeast corner of the house was mine, except when I invited Charley in for some fun.  My bed was a pile of foam carpet padding salvaged from an industrial dumpster, very comfortable.  I hung my rattan swinging love seat from an eye-bolt in the ceiling.  A few crates and planks supported by blocks completed the furnishings.  The landlord, a building contractor, had built abundant closets, cabinets, drawers, and counters into the house.

  To furnish the living room, we already had two bean bags.  It was a big room and looked bleak and bare without furniture.  We started looking at serious furniture and temporarily set up a free-standing canvas camping hammock on a tubular metal frame.  The rest of our furnishings consisted of several fluorescent grow-light fixtures and a dozen or so marijuana plants.  Raven vs the State of Alaska had recently decriminalized marijuana, so we were open about our growing and smoking.

  One of our friends had bought some land on the Kenai Peninsula, in an undeveloped subdivision a few miles outside Soldotna.  Michael and Mollie and another friend, and Charley and I went out there for a weekend of fishing and tramping around in the woods looking at real estate.  Michael and Mollie picked a ten-acre lot in a low spot of muskeg near the road despite Charley’s warning that it would be flooded half the time.  I walked to the top of a hill, found a lovely wooded spot where 4 lots met, and talked Charley into buying all 40 acres.

  The down payment was low and we were both making enough money that the monthly payments barely made a dent in our disposible income.  Charley didn’t drink.  He’d sobered up in jail while doing time for some crimes he probably wouldn’t have committed, or at least wouldn’t have been caught at, if he hadn’t been drunk.  He was so outspoken in his opposition to alcohol that it embarrassed and annoyed our friends.  I was happy without alcohol, being more into ups than downs.  We had started getting paid to go to concerts the previous winter, working security for a friend’s concert promotion company once or twice a month on weekend nights.  Paid to party, and without any drug-related expenses, we had lots of money to spare around that time.

  Charley, who had been working for the state-subsidized ex-cons’ business venture, Re-Entry Construction Co., had a little accident.  He was operating a Pettibone forklift, moving a pallet load of building materials around on a mucky jobsite during spring breakup, and the topheavy machine overturned.  Nobody besides Charley was hurt, and his injuries were minor, but expensive damage was done, several days’ work was lost, and a crane had to be hired to right the Pettibone again.  Charley was fired.

  Since hiring for construction on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was being done through unions and he had belonged to the Teamsters when he was driving cab in the ‘sixties, he reinstated his membership in Local 959 and started showing up at the hall every morning for job calls.  There was a great perk for me in his Teamster’s membership:  I got to use the workout and spa facilities at the new Teamster’s Mall.  That building is now Alaska Regional Hospital, and Local 959 isn’t anywhere near as rich and powerful as it was in the Pipeline era.

  Charley went out on a pipeline job, driving a belly dump at Pump Station 8.  He’d fly out to the camp, work a week, and come back for a week off.  I was commuting through Anchorage Monday through Friday to work at the Youth Employment Service in Spenard.  Every afternoon, I’d spend break time reading the bulletin boards in the Job Service office in the same building, watching for a listing in the social service field.  I went on a couple of interviews, but nothing jelled for me.

  One day in August, when Charley had just gotten back from his week out at the construction camp and we were tokin’ up, the landlord showed up on the doorstep with an eviction notice.  He said the neighbors downstairs had been complaining about the marijuana smoke.  Since the ventilation systems for both apartments were connected, he claimed, they were concerned for their children’s health.  At the time, I considered that a thin pretext, a flimsy cover for his own moralism, devised to circumvent landlord-tenant law.  I am currently of the same opinion.

  Finding that duplex apartment had not been easy, and it had taken us a few months of looking before we found it.  Anchorage was overcrowded with pipeline workers and the influx of migrant dreamers who had settled for less-well-paid work or had no work at all.  Now we had thirty days to vacate, and Charley was going to be out on the job for half of it.  I started answering classified ads. 

  We were getting close to the deadline when I found something.  The ad said “mobile home for sale $2,000 cash only.”  I was feeling desperate when I called the owners.  The 8′ x 35′ trailer was about 25 years old and in bad shape, but in that housing market the price couldn’t be beat.  The best thing about it was that it was located in a small trailer park south of Anchorage, overlooking Potter Marsh and Cook Inlet, and the monthly space rental was reasonable.

  The main problem was that I had only about one thousand dollars.  Charley would be back with his paycheck in a few days, but I was afraid the trailer would be sold by then.  Mr. and Mrs. Blackard were reluctant to accept my down payment, but I showed up at their door with $1,000 in cash, held it out, promised that I’d be back within a week with the rest, and reminded them that they could hang onto the trailer’s title and risk nothing but a few days’ delay.  They took pity and caved, and I started packing.

  Everything except a few dishes, toiletries and stuff for daily use was stacked in boxes by the door when Charley’s plane got in.  We stopped at the Blackards’ and completed the transaction on our way out to Chugiak from the airport.  The first load of stuff we hauled into Anchorage, across town, out to Rabbit Creek Road, and up Golden View Drive to our new home, was the easy one.  Then we headed back out to Chugiak for another load, in early dusk of mid-September, as it started to rain.

  Late that night, in pouring rain, we loaded the last 5 marijuana plants in their 5 gallon buckets into the VW bug, made a final sweep of the house to make sure nothing was left behind, gleefully woke the landlord to surrender the key, and headed home, to the first “home” either of us had ever owned.  The land it sat on was rented, but the trailer was ours, which was the opposite of comforting to me.  The risk and responsibility now were mine, not a landlord’s.

  Need I say…?
      …to be continued.

  This entry will have photos added, probably, if and when we replace our broken scanner.
  

  • 3:53 pm
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