Walking Out, Down

They called eachother nicknames; they called eachother cuntface. They wore coats and scarves; books held under arms and hair unkept. There were twelve of them when they moved into town, god knows how many now.

In a house in allston, they first started building out, and up. Lean-tos sprouted up like tumors, growing out to the sidewalk. Then the porch on the roof of the squat garage in back, that grew a bridge over to the second floor the next day, and the day after, the bridge got a roof.

Every day you walked down that street, the average neighborhood street, triple deckers closer to the square, and two story houses towards the other end, and you saw them, building, always building, welding, hammering. One owned a pick-up truck, and every morning it was piled high with materials, items scrounged from trash cans, dumpsters, lumber bought at home depot. By mid afternoon the truck would be empty and the house was changing before your very eyes.

In the evenings they'd stop, and you'd see them walk down to the coffee shop in the square. They'd be out of the dirty t's they wore as they remade the house, coats and scarves, books under arms, and they'd talk, and bring spiral bound notebooks, drawings the first draft of what would change by the next evening.

No one knew who granted them the permit, and it took at least the summer before they were shut down. By that time there was a four story open tower on the garage, and off the front porch, a mast rose up to at least twenty feet above the roof, with a crowsnest and a rope ladder. A pirate flag flew up there.

September came and they were gone, and the house was dismantled. I was gone too, moved to another neighborhood.

But I'll walk that way sometimes, and you can see the scars, from when some nameless but named young men moved into a house, and tore it apart and made it more.