1211 North Lovegrove Street

(I'll get back to by dualism post soon.)

North Lovegrove Street isn't really a street. It's an alleyway lined with back entrances to buildings and boxy-looking apartments that put into relief the barred windows and laddered rears of taller, more "stately" buildings. At least that's how it was in the late 90's.

My apartment was the first floor of one of the boxy looking buildings, which was actually a converted carriage house where horses stayed during Baltimore's more glorious industrial period. The inside was boxy too -an open space with fifteen foot ceilings, wooden floors, a tiny kitchenette, a tinier bathroom and a loft bed. I chopped one side of the space in half by hanging a huge, old window from the ceiling to create a fake wall. Although I didn't own any furniture when I moved in, I eventually turned these make-shift rooms into a dining area and living room.  I left the other half open so I could have access to the giant easel that was built into the wall.

Painting was actually a stipulation of my lease. The landlord was the graduate dean of MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art). He generally reserved the space for art students but made an exception because I showed him a series of paintings I did on cardboard. They were abstractions of an Ethiopian girl's face who I met on the 20 hour bus ride from Cincinnati. I  also may have lied, or strongly implied, that I had studied art - at the time I had taken some classes at The New School, none of them art. He was a bit senile and his own work was totally avant-garde, so he took me seriously. Allowing me to move in, he stipulated that I keep painting to create a portfolio for grad school. Um, yea.

My upstairs neighbor had skeletons hanging all around the entrance to her apartment and some of the craziest sounds came from up there. I'm pretty sure she was a heroin addict, or vampire, or both. The odd thing is, I had randomly stayed in her apartment a year earlier. A friend from Long Island knew her and suggested I hang out with her. So I did. I sat in on live drawing classes with her at MICA and helped with her final project for the semester - which was sewing used teabags into a quilt - to pretty cool effect. The only other thing I remember about the visit was how she and her friends sat in the dark listening to punk and drinking Jagermeister. It wasn't really my scene. So I left. ......I think she thought I had stalked her by moving to Baltimore and living in the same building. So I never said a word to her, ever. 


This is how a very strange 9 months of living in Baltimore started.