1976 found me living clearly in the bottom of the top of the barrel in  Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania off City Line Avenue.  This was the Main Line.  Lancaster Avenue.  The upper class.  Established wealth.  Butlers, maids, landscaped manicured lawns, statues of little boys peeing in ponds, mansions and Mercedes.  Immediately west of Philadelphia, railroad barons of yesterday settled here and built some of the biggest mansions along route 30 towards Lancaster and the Pennsylvania Dutch.

We stood out like pimples on an ass.  Litter everywhere, we had cars without wheels up on cinder blocks.  We did cut the grass once a year and did our honest best to keep the place up but we just didn’t have the time.  Hell, we were working class. 

Our house was a Queen Anne Victorian built like a brick, make that a gingerbread shithouse.  Built in 1905 this house was abandoned in the year 1933.  Or so everyone thought.  It was boarded up and left for dead until an enterprising young carpenter rented it, fixed it up and divided it into a four bedroom Hippie Commune forty years later.  John was a good carpenter who’s last name matched his profession.  John took the master bedroom downstairs and transients rented out the three bedrooms upstairs and shared the single bathroom up there.

 The bathroom had a busted window shade and a cracked window pane.  A one hundred-fifty watt bare light bulb would swing back and forth when bumped into casting evil shadows that danced like demons.  The view from outside the house at night was reminiscent of the silent black and white classic The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari.

In 1973 John Carpenter removed the boards over the windows and doors, built a few walls here and there, knocked down one or two, cleaned the place up, got the heater going, planted marijuana out back and discovered the place was infested with termites. 

If termites had a military system these were the Green Berets and  Navy Seals.  The problem was they lived somewhere under the house under the dirt floor and the exterminators said one word “move.”  But by then it was too late.  People had moved in.  We rarely saw these pests because they were so far into the roots of the house.  They left us alone and we left them alone.  Live and let eat wood.  Aside from the balsa wood holding the place up the only evidence we’d see, actually hear was in the spring when the termites would swarm.  The walls literally buzzed in the dining  room so nobody would go in there unless overcome by morbid curiosity.