dredge house

The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 6

Final Edition

Well I’m going to wrap up these here Chronicles, as I think I’ve told most of the good stories that happened in the Dredge House. So to recap, you know it was a party house. Someone was always drunk, having sex (even surprise sex), getting drunk, getting ready to have sex, getting into a fight, or playing nintendo. A lot of our Fry Street Friends would come by after long nights of drinking and having sex on Fry Street and hang out for a while to drink and possibly have sex at my house. Old Guy was somehow always cool with it. He never complained. And our dirt driveway always had plenty of room for more cars.

So one time I brought a girl home with me. She was a lovely little thing, cute and petite. She looked a little young, but that didn’t really catch my attention too much, because I had seen her buy cigarettes. She was at least eighteen. She came over and we turned off all the lights in the living room. I sent Wil to my room because some other couple was sleeping in there, and I was stuck on the couch. TJ’s room was occupied as well. Well this young lady I brought home wanted to hear the Lost Boys soundtrack while we discussed magic and drank popsicle juice. So I put it on. It got through Cry Little Sister and she told me to play it again. So I set the CD player on repeat track, and away we went. Well I won’t bore you with the details of our expedient congregation. But it lasted a while. Seriously. When we got done with all the uh – whatever I called it up above – the index on the CD player said 23. It had played Cry Little Sister, an almost seven-minute song, 23 times. I was pretty sick of it. But I hadn’t wanted to stop long enough to turn off the repeat mode.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 5

Volume Five: Old Guy and The Onion Incident

The Dredge House wasn’t always fun. We did more than just party there. If you want specifics or anything, I’ll have to get back to you on that. But what I’m trying to say is that it wasn’t always fun and games. Sometimes we got serious. Sometimes people almost died.

At the time I was seeing a girl called April pretty regularly. Now I’ve told you what the word relationship meant to me back then. It meant that sure, I’ll call you my girlfriend and we won’t date other people. Just remember that the word ‘dating’ and the word ‘sex’ aren’t synonymous. So anyway, April was my girlfriend, and I loved her quite well. I don’t think I ever needed to see anyone else while I was with her. So it was all good. Regardless, that has nothing to do with the story, so I don’t know why I’m even telling you that except that maybe to establish that I wasn’t a complete asshole. But I was, so that point is moot anyway. So, moving on, I mentioned April because she had two friends with whom she lived a lot. These were Cammie and Cody. They had a pretty slick apartment in Dallas but were almost never there. They were pretty regularly not even in town. They stayed mostly in Houston, and just about every weekend, were loading up to go south. April didn’t though. She mostly stayed with me.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 4

Beth, My Sister, and the Open-Door Policy That Failed Me

While I’m on the subject of my sister, I’ll go ahead and tell you about another incident that occurred involving her. This is a fun one! I had a girlfriend named Beth. She was German. She didn’t speak German, she just was one. In fact, she could have been full-blooded American and I wouldn’t have known because she didn’t have an accent or anything. She just told me she was German and I had no reason to doubt her. So for the purposes of this story, I’ll just ask you to believe she was German, and that’s that.

Beth and I got pretty close pretty quickly, and found our way into some rather embarrassing scenarios more often than I’d probably care to admit. Just by virtue of our being young and wild, I suppose. But she had a lackluster trust for me to begin with, and I can’t tell you why. I think she thought I was still seeing some other girl and couldn’t give her (Beth) my full heart. Uh, yeah. I was too young to be giving anyone my heart. I did, however, give them a different part of me, if you know what I mean. Wink, wink. Anyway, of course I was seeing other girls! That was none of her business though. I treated her like a queen, and gave her roses and all those things women love. She had no reason to doubt that I was for real. I just like to keep a spare account open on the side in case my primary account runs dry all of a sudden. Know what I mean? Anyway enough about her.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 3

Volume Three: Lisa, the Notorious Cereal Thief

Lisa, my sister, likes cereal. I actually used to call her Cereal Killa. No I didn’t. I just made that up. But I should have. Being that she lived right around the corner from me, she would skate up to my house (literally, rollerblades) and visit me in the mornings. However, I knew she wasn’t really there to see me. She was there to eat my Honey Smacks. Can’t say I blame her. That was some good ass cereal. I should place a hyphen there between good and ass. I’m not sure I’m fond of the thought of ‘ass cereal’. I digress.

So she would skate up and eat a couple of bowls of cereal just about every day. And I was finally like, “Why the hell don’t you just buy your own, then you wouldn’t have to skate a quarter mile uphill in your pajamas every day?” And she was like, “Then I wouldn’t get to see you.” Uh huh. At least the quarter mile home was downhill. Well, one day I was feeling particularly generous, so while at the store, I bought two boxes of Honey Smacks. And when she came up the next morning, I gave her one of the boxes. “Here, take this home and you can eat it whenever you want!” So she did take it home. After she had a couple of bowls at my house.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 2

Volume Two: The Great Mate-Swap of 1994

As I’ve told you, the Dredge House was always full of people. Mostly beautiful people, but sometimes people like you and me. Randoms, we call them. It was ridiculous how many times I would come home and see a living room full of strangers watching my television (13″ with no cable), playing my stereo or my guitar, and drinking beer that was undoubtedly from my fridge. Back then we did indeed have a beer fridge. Ask me how I afforded that on such a humble wage. Well, it came with the house. For rent. This is not to say that I had a normal fridge plus a beer fridge. No, we just had different priorities, and thus, called our primary source of food refrigeration the Beer Fridge. There was simply no room for anything in it other than a few ketchup packets and Beer. The Ones were always cold at the Dredge House.

So I’d walk in the door and everyone would look up and I’d scan their faces, looking for someone familiar. Some of them would smile, and an occasional voice would pipe up, “You must be Space.” To which I would reply, “Well if I must, then so be it.” And having not seen any familiar faces, I’d remark, “Where’s X?” And fill in X with a name of someone who lived there with me. Most of the time this was TJ. Stu was really never there. Not when I got home from work. And most of the time, this remark was met with something like, “Oh he left to go to Fry Street.” Oh. So he left to go to Fry Street and left my house full of strangers.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 1

Volume One: Weiland, the Racist Dog

My first story is about Weiland, the racist (and possibly homosexual, as Captain made mention to in my last column) pit bull I had when I lived in the Dredge House. When I first moved in, Blake came over one day with Easy E, his 80-pound pit and said he knew a guy who was getting rid of a brindle pit. Was I interested? Well yeah! Who doesn’t want a tough dog?

So we went to collect him. He was chained to a tree in this guy’s front yard and I actually walked up and took his chain off, put a lead on him and walked him back to my truck. The dog immediately took to me. He was beautiful too. I named him Weiland after the lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots, because they were very relevant in my life at the time.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Prelude

I’ve decided to start putting down on blog some of the stories I have from my days at the Dredge House. So I’ll start by telling you what the Dredge House is. Or was, rather.

Just out of high school, I went straight into college. That didn’t work out too well, so my Pop said, “Son, if you’re not going to do it my way, you’ll have to do it your way.” I told him I had no problem with that. “But your way means your house, your car, your job, your money…” Oh. I see. So I had to move out. He gave me a couple of weeks I think. Well during the last couple of days of my stay at the Spacey Senior residence, my buddy TJ got kicked out of his house too. I invited him to stay with me for the final few days in my parents’ house, and we commenced to searching for new living arrangements.

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The Early Days of Space

I found some more crunk ass pictures reflecting my sordid teenage years. The first one is of me holding my nephew, Alex. This was about four and a half years ago. Well, I guess that means it wasn’t in my teens then. But regardless, he is almost five now. Then we have another, just shortly after the first one, chronologically, that shows him learning to play the guitar. I always knew he would grow up to be like me. That’s my sister – his mom – in the right of that picture.

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