The Wealthy House
By Brendan Moss

Places change you. You realize it after you leave, when you try to go back and everything is different, ruined; the place is unmagical: not at all the way it persists in your imagination. I am convinced you only ever love a place in your memory. Going back, you see that the place you love doesn’t exist (maybe it never did), or if it does exist it has been obscured by so many coats of paint or stripped of all the glorious sentinel trees that preside over your memories of it, making it seem to be all emptiness and waste. The friends that used to be there are all gone, or if they remain then they are depressingly unchanged, and you realize that they’ve outlived their glory days, and so your memories of them, too, are all that you really need from them anymore, all that you really love. The only part of a place you can take with you when you leave is what you have experienced within its borders. You learn that if you don’t really pay attention to a place from the moment you encounter it, for the whole time you live there, then leaving you will have missed the best time that particular place will ever know.
The Wealthy House was a big yellow dream-come-true for those who would come to inhabit it. It was situated three blocks west of the center of the world, Eastown Grand Rapids, Michigan, at 1302 Wealthy Avenue. It had eight bedrooms, two kitchens, three floors and a basement and rented for $675 a month. It had faded hardwood floors, high ceilings with cracking plaster, arched doorways, and warped single-pane windows that distorted the sunlight, refracting it upon the walls at different times of day. The smell of gas still lingered from the winter when we housed the mopeds in the entryway. Dishes piled on every surface in the kitchen were a constant source of guilt for all inhabitants. “You don’t have a job so you do the dishes.” It was the creed that mercifully bestowed a rent-free month or two upon the roommates who were between minimum wage jobs, while allowing the bread winning few to avoid being taken advantage of.
In my memory, the Wealthy House hangs suspended in time. From the inside I always see snow on the ground, and from the outside it is always the last warm night of early fall, when the leaves are changing and time is of the essence. I remember sharing in the nightly ritual consisting of hand-rolled menthols and dollar-out-the-door Deuces on the roof outside the upstairs window with that indifference to danger that only underage kids in the process of discovering themselves can possess, repeating the same tired jokes and interjecting curses when a beer or cigarette would roll off the roof unfinished. We watched the sun go down, gilding every branch and gable; we watched the city lights come on, compensating, comforting; we watched the timid stars come out, peering shyly as they turned beyond the ancient oaks and sugar maples that flanked the sunken cobblestone street. On the porch that wrapped around the side of the house there was an old, weather-beaten piano waiting to be played until, after hours of mingling, I grew tired of all the talking and wanted to go be still and contemplative, swaying back and forth, holding solemn detuned chords and singing softly to myself, “This is all we have…”
In Eastown, the cold wind is checked by the inspired layout of the streets (no two streets intersect at right angles; you cannot travel far in one direction without being blocked by a building or row of bushes). Its short, labored breaths guide the drifting homeless panhandlers like so many fallen leaves and discarded cigarette butts down the streets in gentle eddies from one street corner to the next and back again. Gas streetlamps, long since converted to electricity, but mounted upon the same lampposts and within the same glass housings, keep watch over the streets at night. They shed a comforting but impartial glow upon the bums with their styrofoam cups begging for change or empties (a ten cent deposit makes ten cans equal twenty ounces of beer in Michigan). The streetlamps light the way for partygoers, whooping now and then in that unintelligible language exclusive to inebriation. When it snows (O, bittersweet snow), the swirling yellow cones beneath the streetlamps embrace the routine bar-hoppers as they retrace the familiar steps from Billy’s to Mulligan’s Pub, back across the street to Yesterdog by four AM, and complete the nightly pilgrimage in halting uneven steps. The streetlights graciously comfort them as the forgiving snow fills in their footprints, erasing all the evidence behind them as they disperse among the various upstairs apartments of deteriorating Victorian houses. The flush of the streetlamps was as familiar and dismissive as the faces I saw daily in the restaurants and coffee houses, passing fake IDs in Smitty’s Specialty Beverage and walking by outside our dusty bay windows. The light from these lamps, light from another time, floods the four-block radius extending outward from the intersection of Lake and Wealthy, the beating heart of Eastown, pumping its intoxicated lifeblood down arterial backstreets and alleyways to the extremities, halting at Sigsbee to the south and Michigan Ave to the north. The glow extends as far west as Fulton Avenue, where the asphalt encroaches upon the cobblestone and likewise every modern convenience eclipses its earlier counterpart. Fulton is the front line of the battle against urban renewal.
The Eastown Community Association has warded off this enemy for thirty-two years like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke. The community of Dutch Michiganders and depressed Calvin College students, replenishing itself every four years, but ceaselessly demanding that nothing ever change, insists with the audacity of hope that the Eastown way of life be allowed to stand in defiance of the ocean of modernity that threatens on every side.
To the east, Eastown melts with upper class East Grand Rapids. When I walked down Lake Avenue towards the namesake body of water, watching the houses get bigger and farther apart, I noticed the cars getting nicer, I realized that success seems rather respectable, not at all the broken down, makeshift transience of the Eastown life. All the college kids secretly hope to make their way east, to move gradually from one house to the next until they arrive at the lakefront, where all the nicest, most expensive, rapturous mansions sit: close to heaven, by the water. But for now they’re young and living in grandest squalor, frozen in time, carelessly ignorant of the busy black-and-white world surrounding them.
I must have been in every house on that side of town. Living with my brother, we moved into Calkin’s House, and partied up and down that street, then, after the Wealthy House, I lived on Benjamin and Hope Street, staying on Auburn and on Wealthy again, in a different upstairs apartment where I watched the house next door burn down. Between couch surfing, partying, and delivering pizzas, I met everyone in town. But we were not neighborly. I rarely spoke to people. I allowed my neighbors to live peaceful and guiltless lives, expecting similar courtesy from them. I acknowledged them as they passed by on the street or when we met mutual friends, but we were not neighborly. This was where I lived. It was not my home, but it was a place I lived my life. It was in this place that I cast off my childhood, ached for innocence, and became unashamed of foolishness.
The landmarks in my memory are not of monumental size or proportion. They are the things I most enjoyed, the things that made me most comfortable during my time in Michigan. What draws my mind to Eastown is its extraordinary potential for establishing routine. I often felt as if I could grow old there, but I sometimes worried that I might. The coffee shops, comforting breakfast restaurants, a couple good bars: these things matter; they make all the difference. On a typical day I would wake up late, a recurring consequence of heavy drinking and late nights delivering pizza. In the morning, I would throw on my coat and shoes, still in my clothes from the night before, and make sure my tips were in my pocket. It was not uncommon for everyone else to still be asleep at noon or later, so I would quietly ease the door open and shut to avoid the unsympathetic groans it would emit. I would pass through the living room packed with inevitable guests and out the front door. Down the treacherous icy steps (I would curse, someone peed on these I just know it), I would make a quick right onto the sidewalk, the bright invigorating sunlight overhead beginning to wake me up. One block later, I would make a left, and then my goal would be in sight. Redux Books sat just off Lake Avenue, on a quiet side street in a little brown building from the 1920’s. Wall to wall, it was bulging with shelves and racks of used and rare books. Whenever I walked in, the gust of air from the open door would stir up all the dust and it would dance through beams of light coming in the front window as if it was excited to see me. The owner, a former college professor, ran the bookstore for fun. He didn’t make any money. We would always talk about the books I bought, as they were indicative of whatever philosophical or spiritual phase I was in at the time.
“Oh that’s very existential,” he might say, or “Nihilism this week?”
We would haggle on the price as a joke, and I would always offer to take it off his hands for free, seeing as how I was a student and everything, I would pay him back when my education was paid for.
“You know damn well I’ll be dead by then,” he’d say.
We both knew he wasn’t joking. But he would give me the books for free sometimes anyway. After purchasing whichever Vonnegut or Updike or C.S. Lewis or Albert Camus book I had chosen, I would go immediately next door to the Brandywine Inn. The “inn” was actually a restaurant, and it was in the same old building as the bookstore; I imagine one preserved the other. In the years I lived in Grand Rapids, nothing was as important as The Brandywine. All the parties, the worthless jobs for useless money, college, all of it only made my life complicated and depressing. To be able to take a break from it all, to sit back for the few quiet hours I spent at the Brandywine each day, that privilege meant everything. Gratefulness washed over me whenever I entered through the imposing and heavy outer wooden door into the warm reds, greens, and browns of the dining room that always smelled like coffee, a hint of cigarette smoke, and cinnamon, always radiating light as if the entire room was lit by an enormous candle, to see the same pretty waitress who, expecting me, would immediately set out an earthenware mug of hazelnut coffee and a cinnamon bun, and then stand smiling, waiting for me to take my seat at the bar counter and order. I cannot explain how much it meant, but it felt like I had found a home in the Brandywine, a shelter from the Chaos, Winter, and Loneliness. It was a small place; exposed support beams visually cut the room into sections, giving it the feeling of a tavern or a church. To me it was both. I would tip well, like an offering. After two years of going there I never learned the waitress’s name, but she would ask what book I was reading, lend me her lighter after my half-stack of granola pancakes was gone to light an American Spirit (something is lost in city ordinances that ban smoking in restaurants), and fill my coffee cup whenever it ran dry; she watched my hair grow long, my style change (what little I had), she knew me by my habits and I knew her for her courtesy, and in that way she was a better friend to me than anyone I knew, even if I was paying her.
If I tried to go back now, I would feel out of place in time. I love Eastown, but I don’t miss it. I could not enjoy it anymore because I only love the way it was, I only love it in my mind. It was a good place in a good time, and if I could have been happy there I would have. But then, it wouldn’t mean as much to me if I still walked the same streets, forever in a searching funk, migrating from one party to the next until I died. It’s enough to know that it exists, north of here and in the past.