Everybody pursuing their own destinies

It is Tuesday, June 14, and I am staring at a huge pile of your mail that has been collecting in our house for God knows how long, probably since the last time I sent you your unforwarded mail. Wow. I assume your first year at Harvard has gone really well, since knowing you, you're astounding everyone with your talent and intelligence. As for myself, I graduated last month, hon! I snuck through right under the wire, but I'm finally done and I'm psyched as a motherfucker. In another month I'll be moving out of the Pink House...the end of an era...and in with Jenny, who since late April has been my fiancee! Yay! So I'm engaged now, too. Seems kind of unreal.

Jay Murray will still be here, the only one left from our year together, working to finish his Masters. Then he plans to complete his PhD, but maybe he'll get tired of living with undergrads by that point. Jay also recently cut his hair off - equally big life adjustment. Oh yeah, Scott Bullock is now living with us and will also still be here next year - Jay's friend from Duke who liked to sleep on our couch. He also just graduated.


Firas, N'Gai, Erik, Jay, Pat, Scott, Kyle, Caroline, Michael, and Lydia outside El Rodeo, Spring '93

I haven't talked to Kyle in nearly a year, so tell her I said what's up. Even though Michael now lives around the damn corner from us, I've probably seen him twice all year. I've hung out with Pat several times, though, until he left to tour Tibet a while ago. Lydia is in Australia now, living with her aunt, working, enjoying herself. Her address is... N'Gai Wright is doing some intrepid traveling in Japan, of all places! He was supposedly staying with Dai for a while, the kid who crashed with us for a couple of weeks last spring. But I haven't spoken to him in a month, so I hope he's not buried. Before that N'Gai was working in New York City all this past year.

I still see Michelle Sinott around town, though - her boyfriend got out of the Marines and they're living together now. Remember Lem? He's finishing school next year, but for the past six months has been spending lots of time being a mega party host and DJ at happening Pink House functions and various other locations around town. Do you ever see Erika Gantt in Cambridge? She and Dana are living together in an apartment in downtown Boston for the summer starting June 19 while Dana works at a law firm.

Looks like everybody's pursuing their own destinies, huh. I am currently deciding whether or not to do grass roots fundraising work for SEAC or work for NC-NARAL until I can begin to fundraise for my own voter registration/grassroots media projects. I will be living, working and organizing in North Carolina (and maybe Virginia, to try and stop bastards like Oliver North) for at least the next three years, while Jenny attends law school. I wish you all the best with everything, and maybe we'll see each other in Boston sometime. Take care of yourself, follow your dreams, be free...

- Letter to Caroline Hall

We had such a fun year

How are you doing, this is your devoted pal Erik. Somebody just had a roll of film developed, and there are beautiful pictures of you and me and Penny and Jay and Lydia all over our refrigerator. So how could I help but think about you every time I reach for some bodily nourishment. Besides, I was coming around the corner of North Street today and out of the corner of my eye, who did I spy but Michael. He appeared to be moving into his new house.


Caroline, Erik, Lydia and Jay at 210 Ransom Street, early summer '93

So you see, I really had no choice but to write you this letter today, sitting at my one a.m. desk with John Coltrane in the background, songs from 1962. I just returned to Chapel Hill from Rhode Island. I was there with Jenny for ten days or so, hanging with the folks, visiting my grandma, sharing Northern romantic experiences with my sweetheart.

I heard you were busy with an audition on the day that we were all planning to go to Block Island. Hope it went well, as I hope everything else in your new Boston life is cool, but I really have no doubts that things are going extremely well and positive for my friend the next Shelly Long. When do your classes start? You know, I heard that at Harvard, the best way to gain a professor's respect is to spit in class every once in a while, on the floor or atop a desk or somewhere. It shows you're not intimidated by their Ivy League teaching styles. You should try this sometime.

Anyway, enclosed is some of your mail. By the way, people are constantly stopping me on the street these days, ashen faced because they've realized that you've graduated and are forever gone. I just tell them that you're attending classes at some drunken driving school up in Cambridge.

Caroline, I miss you and hope you'll be in Boston and our schedules will magically coincide sometime this year whenever I get up that way. We had such a fun year. N'Gai is leaving for New York in a few days, and it's got me kind of nostalgic about the last couple years, and everything - and I'm not even done with college yet myself.

One other thing just came full circle, too. Last Wednesday, I got my hair cut. Really short. The last time I did that was two and a half years ago, right before our road trip up North for Spring Break, you, me, Kyle, Dana, and Clint.

Hey, I gotta go. Time to wash the dishes and do battle with ants. Take care of yourself and have a great year, o.k.?

- letter to Caroline Hall

Life is hedonistic and lazy in Chapel Hill

Whassup wit you, homegirl? How's small town Rhode Island treating you? I am writing to you from Chez Pink, upstairs at my desk on a hot, hazy mid-summer Monday afternoon.

Or should I say I'm currently perched in the Tree House, since that's what the Pink House has become this summer. Passengers and fellow travelers heading in and out the doors, coming from all directions, at all times. Two-legged animals everywhere, new and different ones every day.

Jenny and I will be coming up north to Rhode Island for the first ten or so days of August. Jay has mentioned coming up there with Lydia around the same time. It would be fun if we could all get to do two things while we're there – hang out with you and go out to Block Island for a day, and visit Caroline in Boston.

And have you heard about the MTV Beach House that's in Hyannis, on the Cape? It's this big beach house that MTV has rented, and they're filming in it all summer long. Sometimes it's like an outdoor version of The Grind dance show, the one hosted by that obnoxious kid Eric from the first Real World. We want to show up there and crash the scene. As long as you look like a funky beach clubber, they'll let you on the show.

Life is hedonistic and lazy in Chapel Hill. Last night I went to the Power Company in Durham. On Saturdays this summer it has become the mecca for fun loving straight people who are down with the dance scene. I was hanging with friends who are working for ADF this season, and dancers from one of their visiting companies were there at the club with us, mostly beautiful gay men in half-drag. Cute women friends of my friends thought I was just the sexiest straight dance god they'd seen all night.

N'Gai has set about to fill the Tree House with mysterious music at all hours. He's bought a flute, cello, keyboards, and now congas and drums. Other miscreants drop in for sessions with trumpets, guitars, microphones and amps.

Speaking of N'Gai, he may or may not be headed for New York in August. The project he's working on with Tony Deifell (and Ian Williams, who signed on to do some editing) keeps generating job leads in different places. I hope that you'll still be working in Westerly by the time we get up there to Rhode Island, so I can find out where you'll be in the fall.

I've enclosed all your mail that's come to the house so far. In fact, it was the postcard you got about this tropical vacation cruise you've "won" that finally motivated me to sit down and write. Please send us a postcard from Tahiti.

- Letter to Kyle

Goodbye from Caroline Hall

Winter '92 semi-formal

Let me tell you again how psyched I am for you to be back in Chapel Hill and living with us all in...The Pink House! Just this past month we threw a semi-formal party for only our close friends, and it was a big success. There were about seventy-five guests all of us housemates knew really well, and another seventy-five or so who were friends of those friends. We were so scared that word had gotten out about the party and the whole town was going to show up, but they didn't!

The living room was the "cocktail" area, suitable for small talk and assorted deep conversations. The dining room and kitchen were converted into le area de discotheque, complete with flashing strobelights and other essential visual effects, plus booming stereo with lots of authentic techno and disco music for the masses to amuse themselves to. The bedrooms were private hideaways and cool chill-out rooms open only to a few, such as the infamous "Club Caroline," where Ms. C. Rivers Hall played hostess to a steady stream of elite guests. A party within a party, if you will.

Sorry I didn't find much time to write to you this fall while you were in Prague. Did I tell you I was taking this past semester off in order to work on voter registration? Ohmigod, and the last time we talked was probably before the election! Isn't it great that Clinton won? He narrowly lost North Carolina, by about 26,000 votes. But it didn't matter.

...

Today, Chris Pedigo and I were re-admitted to UNC-CH for the spring semester. He eventually returned home last month, after drinking most of his scholarship money over a period of several months, never leaving Paris, and eventually falling sick. He was living in a fucking chateau with all of these rich Parisians who he met somehow, hanging out with Russian poets and princes, formerly exiled types who saw no reason to go home even now that they could. Then he came down with some awful disease that you usually get from drinking feces-contaminated water, and spent the next three weeks in the American Hospital there, in Paris.

He's in Chapel Hill and over at the Pink House right now, in fact. He says he's really sorry he never made it to Prague, and is looking forward to working on our magazine for the sheesy set.

Guess who else will be hanging out for a week or so at the beginning of the semester? Dana Lumsden, the man, the myth, the legend! Did I tell you he was accepted at Columbia Law School? Well, he's still seeing Erika, and is coming down from the 9th til the 19th to see her and also to hang out with me, N'Gai, and other friends.

Speaking of Dana, I'm going to be driving him back to New York from Boston over the holidays, probably on December 26th. This is before we leave to come back to Chapel Hill the first week of January. He's got exams right around New Year's. Then, I'm going to be staying with him and going out clubbing a couple nights, maybe the 26th and 27th. If you'll be around, you have to come out with us!

(Note from 2009 - on one of those nights, we hung with Kyle at various spots around Manhattan, and ended up at Nell's in the early hours, where the ladies were almost as decadent-looking as the ornate, gilded decor and expensive antique furnishings.)

Also, I need to mail our landlord the rent check for January around the 1st of the month, so if you could send me $215.00 I can have it deposited before the rent check clears. Caroline and N'Gai have already paid me for January, but Jay and Lydia are both sending me money over break.

...

Can't wait to see you, chicky baby! Au revoir, and as the froggy disco patrons say, "Que tes chausseurs de "boogie" continue a dancer."

p.s...there was an article in the Times last week about how the seventies craze is over and now the rage is early 80s parties. And it's true, they are...but only among trendy buzzkills who are desperately looking for something new to do. The really hip set are into ultra nineties techno music right now. Just thought you'd like to know!

- Letter to Kyle

Mandated to be Painted Pink

Dearest Kyle, whassup wit you? Super Clint and DJ Erik here, profilin' and stylin', hanging out with a posse of Pink House miscreants. We got your letter months ago, but our general slackness is totally to blame for not having written back to you sooner. Ohmigod, Kyle, you would most definitely have loved going to school with us in Chapel Hill this past year! There's been such a panoply of craziness and coolness that's followed our every move, Clint and me. Yo, check out this latest issue of the DTH, in four color bold type, five column headines, it reads, "Erik and Clint assume titles of Supremely Cool Beings ruling Campus Life in all respects!"

Did you hear about that in Paris? We totally took over the entire town and made it over in our likenesses. Now, everybody's houses and even the campus dorms are mandated to be painted pink, and for fun on Saturday nights, you get to do one of two things in thousand-seat assembly halls we've constructed on Franklin Street - either go register to vote, or attend a poetry reading!

Kyle, you sounded like you were having a great time in your letter. And we read your article that was published in the Raleigh N&O, which was most informative. Our eyes got all misty and our souls grew heartsick, thinking about our little Kyle, all by herself and bravely conquering the land of "the Eiffel Tower, escargot, and Bridgette Bardot."

Seriously, g, are you still down for the cause that involves you and Caroline living with us next year in the Pink House? You guys could split the very spacious room that Clint and I have been sharing all year, with one of you sleeping on a futon, and the other on this beautiful, woodgrained single loft that I will let you use. There's a ten-foot high painting of the Mona Lisa in your room, closet space, high
ceilings, the works.

- Letter to Kyle in Paris

Did 1,900 people show up for a Pink House party?

I don't know how much Caroline told you about our house, but it's assuredly one of the dopest cribs in all of Chapel Hill. Walk two blocks up the street, and you're standing in front of the Chapel Hill post office. Our neighborhood is so peaceful - all these cool, older town residents who give us tomatoes out of their backyard gardens and loan us their power tools. We have not one but two separate, huge backyards. I kid you not. They are the ultimate places to sunbathe or to allow hundreds of excess partygoers to congregate.

Lydia & Raj enjoy the backyard, May '92

Speaking of which, both you and Caroline missed the biggest Pink House party that we've thrown so far this year, in January, right after we got back from winter break. There were 1900 people here!

"A good party would actually take a while to even navigate. I can remember being right around here (outside the back door)...for the entire party. I think I came to two or three Pink House parties before I ever went inside. You could just sit there and occupy yourself with lots of interesting conversations, meet a lot of people, talk about a lot of things. That’s what I remember most about parties here – the great conversations."

- Mike Thomas, sitting on the back stoop, 2009

We had two bands play, three kegs, a swimming pool full of more beer, christmas lights and disco decorations, not to mention hours upon hours of throbbing, mind-dilating techno acid hip hop house music.


Pink House Party Mix, Jan '92

Kyle, think about how much fun you'll have next year as one of the premier entertainment moguls of Chapel Hill!

Kyle at Chez Pink, Winter '93

O.k., here are some more deets. We'll be living with Clint, plus two other people, both of them cool as fuck. One guy, one girl. The girl is Lydia Craft, who lives with us now. She's an art history major and all around artistic type. Totally charming. Oh, and she's half-Australian. The guy is Jay Murray, this Lenny Kravitz-lookalike (sort of, only taller) and brilliant first-year sociology grad student from New York City. He did his undergrad at Boston College, then came here. You'll probably think he's fairly hot.

Jay and Lydia waking up in D.C., Fall '92 roadtrip

- Letter to Kyle in Paris