The Live 105 Boys

Day 15's prompt was to write a last letter to someone as if you were trapped in a burning building and would not survive. I find that so horrifying that I could not possibly. Instead I will write about being in a burning building.

My boyfriend (now husband) lived in the first floor apartment in a three unit Victorian building. He referred to his household as “The house of failed New Wave bass players.” There were two other bass players and my husband. I was spending all my time there so that would make it four bass players total. One guy was in the middle of moving out, and his tiny bedroom, which had a window looking out into the air shaft, contained only a few boxes of LPs.

The back yard unit in the building was occupied by the landlord. Nice guy. He was away for the weekend at the BWMT conference (Black and White Men Together) in Chicago.

The top unit was occupied by a group of “bros.” Super disgusting mouth breathing idiots. Go ahead. Accuse me of being judgmental. I am BEING judgmental. We called them the Live 105 Boys, cause they listened to that radio station really loudly all of the time. When they weren’t yelling stupid shit to each other or spitting into the air shaft, they'd watch porn (also loudly). We had to keep the windows to the air shaft closed because they made living our apartment super unpleasant.

Among their other fine habits, one of them liked to park on the sidewalk in front of the front door, pretty much blocking it. They only had one key to their apartment. If someone rolled up and wanted in, they’d yell up “HEY ASSHOLE!!” and someone would throw the keys down to them.

Have I never written this down before? Wow.

These guys had voices like Beavis and Butthead. As if moving their soft palate to make known sounds that convey meaning to other humans would be too much work. Yet they seemed to read, because they stole our morning paper every day. They did not recycle.

One night at the apartment we had a houseguest. A delightful New Zealand Marxist guitar player, employed as an archivist of the Methodist Church in Dunedin. He’d come to visit us on one coast, traveled all around, and was now staying with us as his last stop before returning to NZ with several cases of his newly pressed LP. A bunch of his friends gathered at a local restaurant as a send-off. We had a pitcher of margaritas, and then toddled back to the apartment. My boyfriend had a cold, so I gave him an antihistamine before bed.

Around 5 in the morning I dreamed about a loud blast of shattering glass. I later realized that this was the sound of the fire blowing out the back window of the third floor apartment. But at the time I remember hearing the Live 105 Boys mumble that there was a fire and registered that things had to really be out of control if they were willing to admit there was a problem. I heard them stomp down the back stairs and knock on the back door to let us know. I shot out of bed, and got everybody up. I was naked, but worried about everybody’s safety. I woke up my boyfriend last (margarita plus antihistamines!) and put on a robe and grabbed my wallet. The phone rang. I tried to answer, but nobody was there and I was in a burning building. As we ran out of the apartment we looked into our ex-roommate’s mostly empty room and could see the raging reflection of the fire burning into the air shaft.

For a while, we sat on the doorstep across the street and watched the firemen put out the fire. The Live 105 Boys hadn’t bothered to call 911. Nobody did. One of the firemen had seen the flames himself, from a few streets over, and let his team know there was a fire.

When the sun came up, a neighbor took us in and fed us coffee. The firemen interviewed us about the origins of the fire. Apparently someone had left a candle unattended. All those newspapers…and porn magazines.

Our friend missed his flight. And chose not to run back in and pull his records out of the apartment while he could. He wanted to show solidarity (his word, cute little Marxist) with the rest of us who might lose our stuff. Miraculously, there was some water damage and everyone had to relocate, but the only thing that got seriously trashed was the moving roommate’s Toto record. The sidewalk was littered with porn magazines, their edges singed like the fake treasure maps we’d make in elementary school. A poor iguana panted in his cage in the sun. One of the boys’ rich dads tracked the manager down in Chicago and made him give the kid his deposit back. Asshole. They’d burned all but the floorboards off the third floor.

We went out to dinner again, came back to the apartment, watched the finale of Twin Peaks, and our friend got on a plane with his records the next day. The friends who picked him up at a layover in Aukland said he smelled like a fireplace. So did we. Two weeks after the fire I broke out in crazy symetrical rashes -- things like red half moons on each inner wrist. Not long after, my boyfriend and I found an apartment and moved in together.

No basses were harmed in the recounting of this story.