Charleston

Charleston, Illinois is full of hippy huts. They are run down rickety old wooden houses with decaying porches and Indian tapestries hanging in the windows. The less ornate hippy huts have bed sheets dangling from the curtain rods. One might see a chia pet or plastic cups from last weekend’s keg party on the porch. I always enjoyed the town in the autumn, when it was overcast and rainy. The gray weather seemed to make the poverty that results in cracked sidewalks, run down houses, and overgrown lawns seem somehow romantic. Of course, this was romantic to the students like me. We were not poor, we were Bohemian. We could still go back.

My fondest memories of Charleston are of the house I lived in during 1998 and 1999 with my boyfriend and three other friends. The carpet in the living room permanently smelled of beer and cigarettes from the parties we would have. Like all college houses, our furniture consisted of items that we were given, bought at the thrift store, or simply found. Our couch was a formerly bright orange, now dingy, piece from the seventies that my boyfriend had rescued from his parent’s attic. The house we rented did have a garage, but the two roommates that had cars just parked in the driveway. We used the garage for recreation.

There was a period of that year when swing music was really popular. It was around the time when that Brian Setzer Orchestra album came out and you could hear “Zoot Suit Riot” by the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies on the radio. Suddenly every bar, even the white trash dive bars in my college town, had a swing dancing and martini night. My housemate, Chris, had bought a bunch of Lounge and Swing CDs. Amidst all of this we christened our garage The Swantkatorium. The last tenants had left two couches, a stand up bar, and carpeting in the The Swankatorium. Then we added our own touches. We hung strings of Christmas lights and brought an old stereo out. The room was for talking, listening to music, playing guitar, drinking, and hanging out with friends. One night a strip poker game took place there. That was the last place I lived in Charleston. I only keep in touch with one of my housemates. She is married, has been to every continent with the exception of Antarctica, and has Masters Degree now. I broke up with my boyfriend, Phil, shortly after I graduated. Seven years later, he is still with the girlfriend he met a few months later. I know that Mike, like myself, moved back to the Chicago area. I saw him once about a year later. We didn’t have much in common anymore. The last I heard about Chris is that he got into some pretty seedy legal trouble and dropped out of school. I don’t want to go into great detail. I really liked him.

The town felt the saddest to me in the summertime. I stayed twice for summer school. There were far less students in the summer and the town felt more impoverished than Bohemian. The summers in Illinois are humid and hot with little rain, often leaving the grass scorched and yellow by July. The second summer I stayed, I subletted a room in a house close to downtown Charleston. When I think of that summer Neil Young is the soundtrack. The smell that comes to mind is the earth skunk aroma of pot. I remember constantly getting flat tires on the bike I used to ride to campus everyday and an overwhelming sense of lonliness. The summertime was when one really felt the hostility the locals had toward all the students living off their parent’s cash, who were just there to go to school for a few years. They were an ever revolving cast of characters in hipper clothes with hipper attitudes. Most of them would go back up north when they were finished, like I did.

I returned to Charleston two times after I graduated. The first time was on the way back to Chicago after a roadtrip to New Orleans. I was with my friend Ana, who I had gone to school with. Neither of us had been back there in years. We walked around campus in the snow and went to the library, which had been completely renovated. There were not many students since it was winter break. We drove to the town square, which seemed to have completely new stores every two years due to the evil big box store on the outskirts of town. One of the businesses that was always there was the pawnshop (good thing Wal-Mart does not have a pawn section). I bought a copy of REM's Out of Time on CD, as the original copy I bought in high school was on cassette tape and needed to be replaced.

The next time I returned was on a spring day a bit over a year later. I had drove down from Chicago to play a show at a coffee house downtown that had not been there when I was a student. I got there a few hours before the show, so I walked around the campus. This time school was in session. Even when I went there it always made me sad how many people stayed in their dorm rooms and watched TV instead of going outside. I went to the garden outside of the Life Sciences building and played guitar for awhile. Once again, I went to the library. As fond as the memories of my Bohemian life in Charleston are, I was reminded that it really is a conservative school. On the bulletin boards there were as many signs for ROTC recruitment and the bible study at the Baptist church as there were for POWER (People Organized For Women's Rights and Equality), or the weekly poetry slam at the coffee house. In retrospect I appreciate that I went to a school where if you were a freak - you really were a freak.

Before the show I went to one of my old bars. I always hung out at the bars in the downtown area. The three bars downtown were filled with townies, professors, and the punk and hippy crowds from the University. The bars closer to campus attracted more of a frat boy crowd. It was early and there were not many people there. The bartender and most of the people there were too old to be students, but too young to be professors. They seemed like the type of people who moved to Charleston to go to school and then never left. I wondered what my life would be like if I had stayed in Charleston.

That night, after the show, the barista who had booked the show let me sleep on the couch in his hippy hut. The was a nice hippy hut - the curtains were Indian tapestries. The bathroom walls were essentially a shrine to the household's hatred of George W. Bush. I wondered what it was like to go to to college during a war time. I realized that I was in a different generation than the inhabitants of this house, despite being only six or seven years older. My formative years had been the nineties.

Part of me will always live in a hippy hut in Charleston, with a chia pet on the front porch, and beer cups from last night's keg party in the yard. Some of it's windows are draped with Indian tapestries, and a few are adorned with old bedsheets. Part of me will always sleep on a futon mattress on the floor. In a world were it gets more and more difficult to feel a sense of place, part of me still lives in this small Central Illinois town, and this part of me curious, haunted, mesmerized, and optimitic about the future.