The house on East Moreland in Memphis was found by Joann and Ann Hicklin. No one seems to be able to pin down the year. Or even get close. I figure it had to be 1970 or 1971 because I spent a little time there in 1972. And someone  was still living there in late 1974 because the house was the site of one of our earliest –and most memorable– Halloween parties. At various times the house was home to Charlie, Jim Bob, RP, Joanne, Ann and a guy named Bobby. Anne Hicklin has fond memories of Bobby.

“Mr. X’s name was Bobby something. He taught me to ride a motorcycle and I bought a 250 Kawasaki dirt bike. I went to dirt bike races with him on week-ends and hauled it on the back of my car when I moved to Florida. I loved that motorcycle and Bobby reminded me of a Mickey Rourke character. A “really bad dude,” but a good person. He kept his motorcycle in the front entry of the house.” — Ann Hicklin, July, 1998

It’s hard to explain why this place and this time needed it’s own page in The Basement Diaries. From a practical standpoint, this was the nearest big city and many of our friends had taken their first grown up jobs here. I think the communal nature of the place held some fascination for me. Here was a bunch of my favorite people, living with a semi-exotic mixture of strangers in this big old house where the only rules were the ones they made for themselves. Sort of a Big Chill meets Road Warrior.

RP In some ways, Memphis was the beginning of the RP legend. When RP discovered someone was drinking his milk, his solution was to mark it with green food coloring. When that didn’t stop the poaching, he built a small, locking cage that sat inside the refrigerator. Then he discovered someone was able to slip their hand into the cage, so he added sharpened nails.

My longest stay at the house on East Moreland was in the spring of 1972. I had just resigned from the U. S. Postal Inspection Service, a milestone I marked by traveling cross-country with Charlie. A story for another page. All the good bedrooms on the second floor were taken so they let me sleep on a mattress in the attic. I believe it was during this stay we made the fateful trip to Voodoo Village.

My memories of this house and this time are fractured at best. Roaches. Thousands of roaches, fleeing from the kitchen light, their little feet tick-ticking on the linoleum. And every wall was RP’s canvas. If you look carefully at some of the photographs here you’ll get a whiff of RP’s… vision. The entire house was one huge collage. Ashtrays glued to the ceiling. A six-foot, yellow moon, spay painted on the living room wall. One of my favorites was a free-hand interpretation of Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the front stairwell. I never asked RP about his inspiration for these works but a lot of them were fueled by 16-ounce cans of Busch.

I believe it was during this period that RP began creating some of his custom furnishings. Five foot speaker cabinets; eighty pound foot-stools; chairs made from wire shopping carts; coffee tables on which a dozen people could stand. And almost every thing RP crafted came with a secret compartment. When time permits, I hope to add a special section dedicated to RP’s furniture. You’ll see his work throughout The Basement Diaries.

The Memphis Period was a wild one for RP. He’d had a couple of encounters with the local law so in a rare demonstration of good judgment, RP elected not to drive when he went out clubbing. Instead he would taxi from one nightspot to the next. Nothing particularly strange about this except his exclusive mode of payment was silver dollars.

I don’t know if it was RP’s influence or not, but one of my most vivid memories of the house on East Moreland is the shower stall RP and I constructed on the roof. There was no shower and the thought of a sit-down bath has always made my skin crawl. So we constructed a sort of Rube Goldberg shower on the roof of the back porch. The shower “stall” was constructed of 2×4’s and we ran a hose out the bathroom window… around the corner of the upstairs hallway…and over to the show. To reach the shower, you had to climb out the hall window and onto the roof. The soapy water ran off the roof to the ground below. An almost certain violation of the building and plumbing code.

I remember scrubbing away while watching the traffic on Union Ave., one block away. I always wondered what the next tenants must have thought of this contraption. I think they tore the house down after we moved out.