The move to 1855 Oak Grove Court occurs in February 2000, a semi-intentional downshift from my previous, much nicer apartment. Going cheaper is all but required for me, as my girlfriend Jill had unexpectedly vacated our place back in November and I wasn’t prepared to pay for it on my own. That’s the intentional part. The coincidence is that the most perfect rental I can find just happens to be around the corner from the Kroger on Morse, which I’d transfered to as a department head right before Jill left. It’s a five minute walk, if so inspired on the nicer days, and but a blink if driving.
People in the know tell me that this part of town used to be among the city’s nicest, but that it started going downhill in the 1980s. I’m not sure about that, but though our snickering Upper Arlington and campus friends refer to this unfamliar region as a ghetto, that’s not quite accurate either. It’s just somewhere squarely in the middle, an area I might term inner city and leave it right there.
Quality debates aside, all the arrows are pointing in the same direction, indicating that this is where I am supposed to be right now. Even down to the fact that my good friend Paul Linville, who had never lived in Columbus before, was contemplating a relocation here just as I was shifting across town. The spare bedroom (the lit window in that picture up top) is unclaimed, and therefore becomes his. Ideal in that while I can afford this apartment alone – which was the whole point – this unexpected roomie splitting bills gives me that much more pocket money. A non-trivial consideration, as this madman will have us out on the town pounding drinks most nights of the week.
He ultimately doesn’t last too long in the big city, but it’s a memorable run while he’s here. His bar of choice is this decrepit wasteland on Morse called the Whiskey Still. Forget researching its history now, too – not only can you find almost no trace that it ever existed, I half suspect it wouldn’t have been in the phone book back then, either. Otherwise, we are not opposed to the Dirty Dungarees, also not far from us on Morse, even though we have a washer and dryer and therefore don’t require the laundry half of their services. The Break-A-Way on Sinclair is also just barely seedy enough for his tastes, and if feeling ever so slightly upscale on a particular evening, as mentioned elsewhere, Eldorado’s is a regular staple in our diet, too.
Among his belongings is a glow in the dark frisbee from the Misfits’ Fiend Club, which we quite naturally hang on our kitchen wall. This gives you some indication as to the lifestyle and decorating touches prevalent around this precinct. We are cranking hard rock and heavy metal jams from his impressive living room stereo around the clock, except on the occasions when doing so in our vehicles. Every now and then, for variety’s sake, we do listen to CD101, most of all on Sunday nights (I think) when they aired their “local stuff” program. One night we’re just chilling in the living room with that program on, when Mercurochrome by Watershed starts playing. Big Paul likes to dispense his tales and with a laugh he starts telling me some story about being given Mercurochrome himself as a kid; I had actually never even heard of it before, much less been given it by anyone, and had no idea what he was talking about. On another occasion, meanwhile, we were driving around in his truck listening to Local Stuff, when the hour ended, but we didn’t know it. Kryptonite by 3 Doors Down starts playing, the first time either of us have ever heard it – we both agree that this song is pretty impressive for a local band. Though soon learning that it was nothing of the sort.
As far as the apartment itself, the interior decor is about what you would expect at this place, at least until (heh heh) some creative decorative flourishes are applied down the road. The walls are white and the carpet dark brown, so this basically matches the outside. And after visiting enough different apartment complexes around town, you begin to recognize that if a bunch of these don’t have the same ownership behind them, then they are at the very least being built by the same crew – I say this because our somewhat otherwise unique, vaguely flower shaped front door handle, it turns up regularly all over town, at numerous random apartments visited.
As one would expect, the odd touches are what we bring to the table, glimpes of which (or maybe more like gigantic billboards advertising such) occasionally turn up in various photographs. A somewhat obvious element which mostly hid in purloined letter status the entire time I lived here is the double TV setup, which a surprisingly large percentage of people wouldn’t notice as odd until someone pointed it out to them. This wasn’t just weirdness for the sake of weirdness, however, but served an actual practical purpose – only one of them had a VCR/DVD hookup, while its counterpart alone could pull in a decent free satellite signal, to give us a handful of stations.
It’s comical and shocking both to realize how swiftly such considerations have been obliterated during this century. At the time, though, I had accidentally stumbled upon a terrific, reliable hack which I shared with any number of equally appreciative friends, and put that to use here: though the intended proper way to pull in the satellite signal was to screw in your coaxial cable, somehow I discovered that it pulled in a much clearer, stronger signal if you positioned the cable so that its round metal screw end merely touched the input on the back of your TV. This admittedly doesn’t seem to make any sense and I’m sure you would find nothing affirming it online today, but it ALWAYS worked, even when I showed it to my similarly desperate friends around town.
II.
So now that we’re checking off this box as an essential, we must now move on to the merely ornamental modifications. In some of the pictures, you may notice some vaguely legible names written upon the living room walls. This is from an amusing if often perplexing occasion where these two strippers Damon somehow met in Mansfield, a few nights earlier, decided to drive down and hang out with us. Or rather he met one of the girls, and she brought her friend along as a sidekick for me.
By this point, Damon has since replaced Big Paul as my roommate. Though he too was ultimately not a huge fan of city living, and would move progressively farther and farther into the boondocks from here, at the time it made sense for him: this would be closer to work, and since we all went out on the town constantly anyway, there was no good reason for him not to give Columbus a second try.
These girls agree to meet us at the somewhat odd choice of the Alumni Club. If I’m not mistaken, this was their pick. Anyway, after a totally normal and borderline dull outing there – the girls are hot, and actually seem kind of sweet, but we just don’t have a ton to talk about – they agree to follow us over to our place. This conveniently involves just a straight shot down Morse, which I don’t even think they knew, although it’s maybe none too surprising that such a simple appearing jaunt must turn into an odyssey. Mostly this is because, right at the Morse/Cleveland intersection, not too far at all from where I had once sweated a similar drive home, and having a police car right on my tail, these girls get pulled over.
As they are following us, we have to turn around and return to wait on them. They and the cop car have pulled into the Shell station at that intersection (which is still a Shell station as of this writing), so we do the same, although sure to keep our distance considering we have no idea what this is even about. If this is some drug bust or what have you, then we don’t exactly want to wave our hands and shout from the rooftops that they are with us. But, as it turns out, though seeming to spend a relative eternity at this gas station, it turns out that they just have an expired license plate. Which can be serious enough if you catch an officer in a foul mood – I think they can cart you downtown for this if they want, and are certainly able to tow your car away – but Damon’s chick, the driver and vehicle owner, gets off with just a ticket.
Back at the house, they ask if they can throw on Nelly’s Country Grammar CD, which they have in their car and is blowing up at the time. So we’re sitting around listening to this, I think with the living rooms lights off but the kitchen overhead on, illuminating this space just enough. The girls haven’t really been big drinkers to this point, and don’t seem messed up on chemicals or anything, so it’s probably only inevitable that they do sort of hint at their primary vice, in asking us in roundabout fashion if Damon and I smoke weed.
“Not consistently,” is my answer. Not because this is true – in reality, neither of us are pot smokers – but because it’s my current favorite saying. I’m a huge fan of the multipurpose stock phrases that can be uttered without a thought and reveal nothing, particularly if I find them hilarious. And this beauty arrived courtesy of my friend Jamie, during a recent night out on the town.
He, Maria, Jen and I had recently ridden over to the Dave and Buster’s in Hilliard. On the way back, as we’re cruising up Riverside (a trip that does coincidentally find Jamie attempting to smoke pot, with the windows down, wind whipping around his head to the extent he…pulls his tee shirt out and over his head to act as some bizarro makeshift, wind-blocking tent, so that he might light it), he is then bellyaching to the girls up front about how his girlfriend is always cheating on him, which is why they constantly fight.
“Wait a second, though,” Jen thinks to ask, “don’t you cheat on her, too?”
“Not consistently,” he says, totally stone faced and serious. As though justified and indicating that he takes the high road when compared to his woman.
Regarding tonight, though, Damon will subsequently tell me he liked the “not consistently” response – even without knowing the provenance or meaning behind it – because it hinted that we might be up for whatever, though not quite saying so. Exactly. That’s why I like it so much.
Anyway, it isn’t as though the girls have any weed, they are just curious. And as such, it’s not exactly surprising that, in conjunction with this lack of common interests to talk about, we are all grasping at conversational/entertainment straws. Which is when, by whatever roundabout means, one of them suggests finger writing on our walls, a la the Manson family or something, except using bleach instead.
“It doesn’t show up in normal lighting, only under a black light,” they explain.
So we bust out a bottle of bleach and they begin writing their “names” (I suspect one or both is a stripper moniker) upon our living room walls. Only much later will we realize that they’re not just full of it, but this whole concept is exactly backwards: it doesn’t show up under a black light at all; however, it DOES appear, readily visible, in pretty much any other circumstance.
III.
Another proud interior decorational touch would be the stop sign I acquire, post and all, during an otherwise tepid night out on the town. This baby pretty much fell in my lap, and is a split second decision that I can’t say I regret in the slightest. Though Damon will confess, when he ventured downstairs the next morning, to leave for work, and saw me curled up on the couch in what he described as a “fetal position,” with the stop sign standing up in the corner behind me, that he assumed this must have been one wild adventure, and couldn’t wait to hear about it.
But the truth is a lot more mundane, even hilariously pedestrian. We had both been out for a couple drinks earlier that night, during a rare phase where neither one of us seems to have much happening on the female front. Attempting then not just to scout out some fresh prospects but to also maybe find a worthwhile new hangout, we bounced around to a couple different places before he tapped out due to sheer boredom.
I subsequently bounce around to a couple other places without him. But maybe there’s a general malaise wafting over the city as a whole tonight, because these establishments are also very reminiscent of a morgue. At the last stop, finishing my drink at a still quite early hour, I’m thinking that what really sounds good right now instead of this nonsense is…a bowl of ice cream. Therefore, my only detour during the journey home is a pit stop at my old Morse Road Kroger store, to acquire such.
And then I’m just cutting through the parking lot, have just passed in front of that big jutting-out building there (currently houses the Franklin County Board of Elections, at 1700 Morse, with the right side empty), where for some reason there was a stop sign ordinarily planted in the sidewalk at that corner. Ordinarily, except right now it’s lying on the ground. Somebody obviously plowed into the thing, because there it rests before me, post and all, ripe for the taking.
Should I feel bad about this? Would it be replanted or simply thrown away? I’m not sure, but with a laugh I jump out of my running car, and risk a quick look around. What few scattered other vehicles exist are nowhere even close, and more importantly I don’t see any cops. From here it’s just a quick hop onto Tamarack, and then a slight jog up the street to my apartment complex. So I pop open the hatch, throw the stop sign inside – though it still sticks out by a couple feet – and lower the hatch once more, before tearing ass out of there.
We have a tendency to think that every wild occurrence, especially if occurring late at night, is attributable to alcohol. However a substantial percentage of these events would happen regardless, as it is with this one. Damon leaves for work the next morning thinking I must have had one wild night without him…but in actuality I’m sitting on the couch with a bowl of ice cream, watching TV, occasionally craning my neck to look at and laugh at this stop sign standing up in the corner. Where it will reside for the remainder of our days here.
IV.
The living room sandbox is something I will have to address at some point, although time and energy considerations prevent me from doing so at present. When the time arrives to leave here, however, near the tail end of 2001 – I have just bought my first ever house, at 1795 Gerrard Avenue – we find ourselves burdened with the not insubstantial though totally half-baked task of cleaning out this mess. Armed with a gigantic plastic barrel, we fill it up with load after load of beach sand, then carry it over into the adjacent field and dump it. The current national emergency concerns these mysterious Anthrax laced letters, and during one point as we’re dumping these out, a helicopter just so happens to be flying overhead.
“It’s probably the cops,” Damon theorizes, “they think we’re dumping out a bunch of Anthrax.”
He’s joking, of course, although it is majorly surprising we don’t run afoul of at least the management crew here, in the wake of our departure. That sand got everywhere, and our cleanup basically consisted of no deeper than what we could scoop with shovels. But while I didn’t get my deposit back, and certainly was not expecting to, otherwise we never heard a peep from them about this catastrophe. To this day I still can’t believe that.
Who knows, maybe they considered us among their better tenants. Apart from one loud music complaint stemming from clear back in the early days, when Big Paul was still living here, they didn’t hassle us in the slightest. My previous, much nicer complex over off of Kenny Road had actually sent far more letters, about a wide range of topics.
We get along with the neighbors just fine, too, especially Tony, this black dude who lives at the end unit a few places further down the row. Even the alleged crime rate over here doesn’t seem all that bad. Personally we experience no problems, and only ever so slightly come into contact with any weirdness (apart from that which we created, of course) on one occasion. Though I was not home this night, it made the papers, and Damon even took some pictures of the incident, whereby someone in a getaway car picked our parking lot at random to ditch the thing. Then set the vehicle on fire before leaving on foot. Luckily for Damon, though the flames were so close that he couldn’t get his truck out, he wound up not suffering any damage to it.
I don’t recall ever seeing these pictures, actually, and must ask him about those the first chance I get. In summary of the 1855 Oak Grove Court experience, though, much like the entirety of living on this side of town, I would have to say that it was ultimately not where I wound up feeling most at home. But man, we sure did have a blast over here, with a whole slew of adventures I haven’t even begun to tackle. Just like the big sandbox party, though, those will have to wait until another time.
