If These Walls Could Talk (Ghosts of 4418 Pease Street)

Then there were the times of utter absurdity, from which it seemed there was no relief. In the summer of 2003 I found myself signing a year lease for a rather large and decrepit skeleton of a house and invited two friends to take up residence with me as well. While the experience was many things, it was ridiculous for the most part. Under that structurally unsound roof, we (my fluctuating roommates and Sarah see her in a tree here ) spent our days and nights in a state of complete abandon. We were… how can I put this delicately… out of touch with reality. But as we all know I suffer from acute and chronic nostalgia, and in the sunset of dissolution everything is longed for and all absurdities permissible.

Ultimately, when it comes that three ring circus which is geographically labeled as Houston, I am filled with ambivalence. Part of me misses the place like hell and the other part senses that I would have never found happiness there. I digress… Either way, that relic of a house still stands (it defies the laws of physics) while human affairs play themselves out within the walls.



My friend John wrote the following narrative which offers something of a glimpse into the life we once lived. John was my roommate for about the whole year and Bryan, the “fat obnoxious” fellow he so affectionately references moved in with us in October of 2003. It was… again, let me try to put this delicately… the beginning of the end.

Life on Pease Street

When I look back on those few months when all three of us were together, I can’t help but wonder how it is that no one killed anyone.

That’s not to say that somebody didn’t want to. Because they did. Bryan wanted to kill a homeless man for ten dollars.

While rocky at times, all in all, our existence in that musty old house was a peaceful one, if not absurd. First, you have Michael, a well spoken, intellectual man, who loves personal hygiene, working out, and thoughtful conversation. Then there’s Bryan, who is best defined by a fat, obnoxious, mentally unstable slob who’s committed bestiality.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the two was self-confidence. Michael had it in bundles (to the Nth degree!) and Bryan was so impressionable it was almost sad. Well, almost in the sense that it was still funny to us. Watching these two in a room together was like some kind of paradox, you felt as if the world was an alternate universe where people who shouldn’t even be conversing were living together.

As for me, I fell somewhere in between the two. I felt like the missing link, between Michael and the sub-human Bryan. On the whole, I’d like to say I leaned closer towards the civilized side with Michael, and that’s why I was always on his side when we tortured (well, had fun with) Bryan on a seemingly daily basis.

Speaking of which, there was one afternoon, for reasons unknown, we had convinced Bryan to let us pour spaghetti sauce all over him. I’m still not quite sure what the hell any of us were thinking that day, but the madness did not end there. After Michael hoses him down, Bryan then strips off his clothes (while outside on our driveway) and runs inside to clean up. Michael or I then throw his shorts on the roof (I can’t remember which one of us) but not before taking his keys. While he was showering, Michel and I kept throwing things in there on him. First, it was a jar of pickle juice. Second, it was a large bouncing ball that Michael had found outside and made our own. Eventually Bryan got fed up (or excited enough) to jump out and try and flash us his grossly naked body to get back at us. Sadly, this kind of thing had become a pattern at this point. Bryan routinely flashed his fat ass at us whenever he felt he was on the losing side of an argument, or couldn’t think of anything clever to say.

Anyway, the next part of the story becomes even funnier, or pathetic, depending on how you look at it. So I take his car, (a nasty, continually wrecked Explorer that is full of garbage and reeks of maple syrup) and drive it around the block so he can’t see it from our house. As Bryan exits the shower, we tell him that his shorts, and the keys to his car, are up on the roof of the house. Bryan actually decides to climb on up there, but he doesn’t find his keys. We tell him to throw the shorts down, because he’s probably just stupid and can’t find them. As I inspect the shorts, I act as if I pulled the keys out of them, mimicking some horrible magician trick. And of course, Bryan is easily fooled. I’m sure at one time or another, he truly felt as if a quarter was literally pulled out of his ear.

So now onto the part where Bryan discovers his car being “stolen.” He is of course angry, and insists that we did it, and we deny it. He’s getting to the point where he’s about to call someone, so Michael steps in and says he sees Bryan’s SUV. “Where?” Bryan asks.

“Over there, in that big tree, stuck in the branches” Michael asserted.

Bryan says, “nuh-uh” but begins to look furiously. Michael begins to use that silver tongue of his, saying that someone must’ve stolen his car and driven it up into the tree. Bryan insists that he can’t see it up there. I confirm and say that it’s there, and that we can’t understand how he can’t see it. At this point, Bryan is about 60 percent sure that someone put his damn car ON TOP OF A TREE.

But all good things must come to an end, and eventually we had to reveal that his truck was not in a tree.

That is probably my particularly favorite adventure we had in that house, but it is certainly not the most bizarre. There was the time that Bryan was high on ecstacy, and we played with glow sticks and sprayed him with water, and he awed like a baby. Or when Bryan and Michael engaged in various physical fitness challenges against one another to see who would have to take out the garbage (for eternity!) and I doubt you really have to guess at the outcome of that one. There was the time Michael convinced Bryan to run outside only in his underwear, swing on a tree, and run back inside. (And of course Michael locking Bryan outside, in front of school children, no less.) There’s quite a few more as well, but at this time I just can’t remember them. (Maybe I’ve repressed them?)

Perhaps I’ll delve deeper into the rest of these stories at a future date, but not now. At the very least, now you’ll be able to understand how any of us three may have terrible nightmares or be seriously screwed up later in life.

John Gammon III