T

he night spent in the Dart hadn't been especially comfortable. The need to stretch out one's legs is pretty fundamental. That first stretch after I woke up this morning was almost as rapturous as an orgasm. I haven't had many orgasms lately, by the way. But that's nobody's fault but mine.

A

fter a morning spent in Cocke Hall, I went over to the Wertland Mansion, thinking the girls would be up or whatever. You know how it is, I'm homeless more or less and I don't have lots of places to go, none I'm expected to be in, certainly none to call home. But I felt kind of funny when I ran across Jessika and Deya just now getting out of bed a little past noon. I got the impression that maybe I was a problem for them, like they wondered how long I was going to be around. I could be completely wrong about this, but I didn't feel like interacting with them. I went outside and sat on the balcony and stared for a long time into the streets where the residential seas lap against the business district of the Corner.

Down below sat my Dart. It looked to be holding itself at a weird angle, like it had a flat tire. I decided I should investigate. It did have a flat tire. Lucky for me, it was the worst of the tires I drive on. I took the flat tire wheel off and looked at it. I'd driven over a little screw, the kind used to hold appliances together.

Eventually Wacky Jen came over. She'd been having trouble getting her car to pass inspection, and one of her problems had been the baldness of her tires. She'd been driving on one tire fully aware that metal was protruding from the rubber, and she'd been evidently unconcerned about the risk she was taking. But the other day she finally got around to buying a replacement, a used tire for $20. That's the kind of money I like to spend when I buy a tire, so I asked her where she'd gotten it and she said it was a place called Fitzgerald's down in Belmont and that it had been reccommended originally by her older and wiser housemate, Paul.

W

e four sat around together chatting for awhile in the room Deya and Jessika share. None of us had a thing we needed to be doing all day, so Deya suddenly said, "Let's do something!" I had an idea. "Let's go to Belmont and get me a new tire!" I suggested.

That's what we ended up doing, even though it was all based on my singularly selfish needs, a fact which I found mildly embarrassing. But, at least as Deya seemed to view it, "anything to get us out of the house." And Belmont, a quaint little town absorbed wholesale like a dignified Texas or Georgetown into the south side of Charlottesville, has always attracted a strange fascination from most of my friends, particularly Jessika (but also folks as diverse as Joanna Road Rage and Wacky Jen).

The tire took only about a minute to be replaced by the mullet-sporting garageman at Fitzgerald's Wholesale Tire. I got a used tire, which may or may not be such a good idea. The treads were good, and the fact that its basic structure had been tested by use also seemed to be a good thing. The only trouble was the drink machine, which was all too willing to take my money but was reluctant to cough up the promised Mr. Pibb. Both when giving me my tire and when fishing out my Mr. Pibb, the mulletized garagemen handed the items to me saying, "There you be."

The girls had wandered off into "downtown Belmont" where something like six streets come together in a very complicated series of adjacent intersections. We all ended up in a dingy little grocery store looking over the icecream selection. The girls picked out various kinds of frozen sweets that matched their hair colour.

We continued on foot, touring Belmont to look at unoccupied dwellings in the neighborhood. Wacky Jen is always on the lookout for such places and knows where most of them are. One was very close by, a Victorian house at 800 Hinton Street. The corner of the yard was being used as big dog bowel evacuation zone, but other parts of the yard were attractive. Unfortunately there was no way inside the house itself (Wacky Jen had tried all the doors already).

Belmont has a number of undeveloped alleys that run along the backyard boundaries between neighbors on opposite sides of blocks. We walked down these alleys, always on the lookout for houses for rent, and we eventually found one, but the mulberry tree in the front yard produced disappointly flavourless berries.

This was all well and good, but what Jessika really wanted to do was go visit "Jen's House," an abandoned house in a neighborhood to the northwest of Belmont off Elliott Avenue across from a cemetary. It was kind of far away, so we decided to drive.

"J

en's House" was in good condition, and, from outward appearances, nothing seemed to be wrong with it at all. It was in a fairly normal mostly-black middle-income neighborhood of well-kept dwellings with nice porches that, on a day like today, were occupied with people. Jen had been to "her house" several times before, so she was getting to the point where she knew "her neighbors." To give a patina of legitimacy to our explorations today, Jen wrote a note expressing interest in purchasing the house and put it on the door before we entered. She had, of course, snuck in on a previous visit through a basement door and unlocked the front door to expedite future visits, such as today's.

Inside, the house was anything but normal. It looked as if it had been suddenly evacuated as if to escape an oncoming army. Everything, and I mean everything, had been left behind. The oldest paperwork and calendars seemed to indicate it had been occupied until 1995. But a house sitting unguarded for three years is just asking for repeated waves burglarly as well as whatever lesser form of burglary we were committing. Looters had gone through everything, tossing it over and combing through it for anything of value. It looked as if a tornado had picked up the house and given it a good shake and then put it gently back upon its foundation. The chaos and funk that had settled into it all gave a sense of an enormous amount of time having passed, though, as I mentioned, only a few years ago people had lived here for better or for worse.

We fanned out and explored the rooms. I quickly deduced that a fairly religious black family with many financial problems had lived here. Copies of Ebony magazine lay strewn on the floor, while on the walls were all kinds of cheesy religious decorations, including a frayed masonite plaque engraved with the Lord's Prayer. The furniture had mostly been left in place and the contents of most of the drawers were largely undisturbed. As I flipped through the paperwork, I saw lots material surrounding the death of an elderly matriarch and numerous envelopes bearing the ominous words "FINAL NOTICE." It was a little like being privy to the bureaucratic debacle that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs (Paper evidence of a debacle is seldom left in the fossil record!). You're weird, Gus.

I didn't really find anything I wanted among the things that remained un-pillaged. I found a good trash sticker, an old walkie-talkie, a broken 110 camera, and a variety of medication, all of which I put in my pockets to take with me.

Meanwhile the girls were going through the kinds of things they like to get in places such as this: clothes. Jessika particularly was finding many things she wanted, though she was also interested by the themes in the various rooms. One room contained an older religious person collecting a pension, while another room contained a young boy who wore cut-off tee shirts. At least one of the residents had been a proud Aquarius.

Eventually we had to get going because Jen had to go to work. By this point I was sick of the place and was sitting on a plastic chair yawning repeatedly, but I think Jessika would have been pleased to stay there until dark.

Of course, when it comes to this sort of thing, we always go too far and spoil a good thing. We'd stayed way too long. As we were about to leave, we saw a shiny white car park out in front and a middle-aged black man get out and come our way. "Can I help you?" he asked. It was the owner of the house! Good thing we had Wacky Jen along to smooth everything out and explain how interested she was in purchasing the place, and good thing she'd put up a sign expressing such interest before we'd gone in. Otherwise we might have ended up spending the night in jail.

Unfortunately, we had to leave all the loot we'd intended to take with us; we couldn't be witnessed looting a house by its owner, of course. Fortunately for me, everything I wanted fit nicely in my pockets. The others intended to go back later to get the bulkier things they wanted.