Everyone should live in a house or apartment once in their life that, upon later reflection, induces either horror or hysterical laughter. It gives a person perspective. It allows a stay at a bad hotel to be shrugged off with a, “Well, it could have been worse.� It makes for a great story in years to come.

I lived for five years in the Huang House. That wasn’t its actual moniker, but my roommates and I eventually dubbed it that in honor of our landlord, Dr. Huang (but more about him later).

The Huang House, according to those that came before me, was known as the Cactus House. This title was the result of the fact that several members of the Cactus Brothers, a local rock/country outfit had lived there. Our upstairs neighbor, who had dated the drummer, once introduced herself in such a manner to a future ex-girlfriend, “Hi. I’m Felicia. I used to date Dave from the Cactus Brothers.� My girl looked at me quizzically (OK…the television remote produced the same effect with her) and shrugged her shoulders.

I moved into the Huang House as a temporary solution. I had worked with one of the kids that lived there and his roommate was leaving for the summer. My lease was up and the move bought me time to plot a next move. It was the summer of ’93. I wouldn’t leave until the autumn of ’98.

It was a two-story house strategically located on Blair Boulevard or, as one roommate named it, the Dirty Boulevard. There really wasn’t anything dirty about the street. Within a two-minute walk, there was a 24-hour convenience store (clerked by earnest rednecks), a laundromat, a grocery store, a bar, and a pawnshop.

We lived on the bottom floor. We had a porch. There were two bedrooms and, through timing, I snagged the one that was roughly the size of Rhode Island (the other was the size of a broom closet). We had what every visitor referred to as “the coolest bathroom in town.� How could straight males have the “coolest bathroom in town?� Well, it had a black hardwood floor, which is what I believe put us over the top in the informal poll.

The porch, to me, was the trump card. It was your run-of-the-mill porch, but it was large and had a strategic view of the entire Dirty Boulevard…female joggers and the occasional crazed street person. We eventually put a couch out there, which made late afternoon reading and naps simply Nirvana. Hell, we actually moved the telly out there for a weekend and lived on beer and pizza. And, on one memorable night in February, I fell asleep as I lay on the cement, throwing up over the edge, and spent the night out there. How I evaded hypothermia I will never know.

And there was the fireplace. Like the times of the pioneers, life revolved around the fireplace, especially The Mantle. Yes, I meant for that to be capitalized because The Mantle became its own entity. The centerpiece was a large artboard from Tower Records for U2’s album “Zooropa.� Gradually, objects of meaning, or at least perceived meaning, found their way to The Mantle; handcuffs, Canadian money, candles, an actual snapshot of Cindy Crawford, a copy of the fireman’s creed, and a jar of chum. That is just a fraction of items that resided on our hearth of love.

The fireplace was actually a functional thing. The Huang House had NO insulation. Sitting on the couch, facing the front door, you could see a good half-inch gap between doorframe and door. One fine evening during the ice storm of ’94 (when, despite being only twenty blocks from the downtown of the state capital of Tennessee, we were without electricity for nine, fun-filled days), I slept in front of the fireplace wearing two shirts, two sweaters, a Belgian Army coat, running tights, jeans, two pair of rag socks, combat boots and gloves.

We also had a waterfall in the living room, man-made of course. That feature came about when we noticed an ominous bulge in the ceiling above the front door during a rainstorm. My roommate Hoop, a drummer who slept on our couch for over a year, poked a hole in the bulge with a switchblade. The result being a downpour of water every time it rained. Fortunately, Hoop was a painter and we had massive ten-gallon buckets to catch the rain.

Personally, I didn’t fair so well with the waterfall in my bedroom. It had been a miserable day. I had left inventory at Tower (which traditionally begins at 6:00am) to deal with a dental problem that would require a root canal the next day. I walked home from the dentist in a deluge and had grabbed a Tombstone pizza at the grocery store across the street. Cold, tired, hungry, and writhing in orthodontal agony, I walked in the front door and immediately preheated the oven, having lascivious fantasies involving mushrooms and sausage.

As the oven heated, I headed to my room. I opened the door and noticed a familiar, ominous bulge in the ceiling. A massive blister had developed. I had one moment to think to myself, “That doesn’t look good,� and then a four-foot square of the ceiling gave way in a shower of water and plaster. I stood there a defeated man giving thanks that the mess had missed my stereo by mere inches.

Thank God we had Wehbe Plumbing at our beck and call. The only interaction that we ever had with Dr. Huang was in the event of plumbing disasters. Now is the portion of our program where you get to meet Dr. Huang.

Dr. Huang. What can I say? I lived in the Huang House (actually there were five Huang House in a five block radius around ours) for five years and NEVER met the man. He never even knew who the hell was living in his house. He would call and inquire about a roommate that hadn’t lived there for two years.

We never did ascertain what kind of doctor Dr. Huang was. All we really knew was that he often made trips to Korea. You would call for him, only to be informed by his nephew that he was abroad, but the message would be delivered. The house next to ours was a Huang House as well (they were easily distinguishable by their utter state of disrepair relative to our fairly affluent neighbors who despised our drain on their property values). One next-door neighbor, a boy-toy model claimed to have seen the good doctor once. There was even discussion of luring Dr. Huang to the house so that we could catch a glimpse of our landlord.

But the Huang House remains a source of amusement and folklore for me and those that spent any time within its crumbling confines. Most of the lore stems from the copious amount of marijuana and alcohol consumed on the premises. There was the night I consumed a lot of vodka and decided to eat a rose before making many of the books in my room into "snow." There was also the night that one roommate, nicknamed The Cap’n (a drug-induced moniker bestowed courtesy of yours truly) vowed that there would be “Hell to pay,� when he returned home from a bender and found one of the barstools in the bathroom (no, I have no explanation for such an interior-decorating decision) broken.

And a large part of the charm was the neighbors. Above us we had Felicia, better known as “Flea.� Flea was a stamp-her-feet, cross-her-arms type of ditzy sorority-outcast blonde. She would call us at all hours, certain that she had heard someone outside (oblivious to the fact that someone outside would pose more of a threat to us, on the first floor, than her on the second floor). Flea did have an amazing body and, though she couldn’t weigh more than 105 pounds soaking wet, would trod across our ceiling like a 380-pound lineman for the Rams.

It was Flea’s inability to move from one side of her apartment to the other with any audible discretion that led to one of us first-floor dwellers’ traditions, Israel Day. Israel Day came about when, Hoop, irate over her clumsy shufflings above us, began to beat on the ceiling with a five iron. I broke out into hysterical laughter and Hoop, in a stoner’s haze, offered that if she complained about the noise, we would explain that it was Israel Day and we were celebrating.

There was also the Tossing of The Log. During the ice storm of ’94, half of the massive oak in our backyard came crashing onto the house. The inbreds that Dr. Huang sent to reduce it to fireplace fodder left the chainsaw-hacked remnants strewn across our backyard (although Flea would many times “inform� us that it was, in actuality, “her� backyard). One such remnant made it into our living room and would be used as an impromptu table or footstool. Until the night that we decided we could equal her noise by tossing the log. Which we did to tremendous success.

And as neighbors go, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention “UK Trish� and her effeminate husband across the street (for some reason, we got it into our heads that they were running an illegal bed and breakfast). UK Trish earned her nickname because of the vanity plates on her white Duster. Hoop, the painter roommate, drove a Ford Desert Runner pickup truck (known as “The Runner�) with a sock for one windshield wiper. Hoop woke one morning to find The Runner, parked on the street in front of UK Trish’s house, doused in white paint from a bucket in the pickup’s bed.

Now, Trish’s husband didn’t take this activity so close to his homestead sitting down. He informed us that we were not to park in front of his house. He, perhaps correctly, ascertained that we attracted the wrong kind of elements.

Well, revenge was swift. It began with the tossing of food items into their yard. Now, at that time, we were three VERY heterosexual men sharing a house. Food did not always get removed from the fridge in a timely fashion. So, when we did decide to clean things out a bit, these past-due culinary delights would invariably end up in the front yard of UK Trish (personally, my favorite was gallon jugs of milk that would be six to eight weeks past shelf-life).

However, the true act of aggression toward the pair of outlaw innkeepers was biscuits. Yeah, who’d have thought? It happened organically enough. One of us had burned a late-night snack of Pillsbury biscuits. The next thing anyone knew we were standing in the thigh-high grass of our frontyard (we weren’t exactly diligent about mowing) and we were driving the charred biscuits into UK Trish’s yard with golf clubs.

I didn’t realize the extent to which the act had taken root until some weeks later. I came home from a night at our local well fueled. Walking into the living room, I immediately detected the scent of smoke while Hoop and The Cap’n sat calmly watching the telly.

“Is somebody cooking something?�

“Yeah.�

“Well, I think it’s done.�

“Not yet.�

“Sure smells like it.�

“Nah, we’re burning some biscuits to drive into UK Trish’s yard.�

Suddenly, everything was clear as a bell. From that point on it became a periodic event and we must have driven enough flaming biscuits into their yard to give Tiger Woods a run for his money at The Masters.

But we were proud to be hearty enough to endure in the Huang House. Even the threat of the toilet falling through the rotting wood that supported us couldn’t drive us out. It was that toilet of questionable structural integrity that was the first thing mentioned to me when I bumped into an ex-girlfriend. I took no offense at the potential shot to my ego because I understand that a man’s home is his castle and, therefore, casts a long shadow.

No, it was small steps toward maturity that led to us abandoning the Huang House. Hoop, after paying partial rent for a couch for twelve months, finally moved out. The Cap’n, believing that I too would abandon ship, bolted for semi-greener lodgings. Me? I spent was the last one out. I spent the last three months living in the Huang House with an ex-girlfriend before we haphazardly ventured to London to live.

It was a wonderful ride. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I only wish that I could remember more of the events that transpired there (we DID ingest a lot of chemicals and fluids). Where I will end up I have no idea. But, I know that a $30 million-mansion will never be able to produce the memories that one should-have-been-condemned flat did.

* I tweaked the title out of curiousity to see if - to borrow from the movie "A Christmas Story" - people would be drawn to the soft glow of the word sex gleaming there. Alas, there is no mention of sex in this babble, not that there wasn't sex in the Huang House.

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