No Defense by Rangeley Wallace Read Free Book Online

student home for the summer in 1972, I’d organized the
effort to raise the money to purchase and install the memorial.
    The simple but compelling inscription had
been suggested by Leon’s mother: “Leon Johnson (1943-1963) and
Jimmy Turnbow (1944--1963). They had a dream.”

 
    CHAPTER
FOUR

    I was a college junior and Eddie a senior
when we moved in together. In 1971 living together was still
regarded by most of the adult world as “living in sin.” In the
college community, however, it was common, and with our friends
Hildy and John, we moved into one of the furnished apartments owned
by Violet Crawford and her mother, Iris Ann Crawford. Over the next
two years, Hildy and I exerted enormous amounts of energy hiding
the true identity of our roommates from our parents.
    Unlike our parents, Violet and Iris Ann
didn’t give a hoot about marital status. The sole qualification for
moving into one of their five decaying Victorian homes in the
Little Five Points section of Atlanta was a southern birthright.
“Where were you born, dear?” was the first question Violet, a
frail, elegant woman in her fifties, asked each of us when we
answered the newspaper ad about the apartment. A good portion of
the former Confederacy was represented by the four of us, and at
the end of the interview we were invited to join the other college
and grad students who rented their units.
    The Crawfords had subdivided their houses
into apartments with an eye toward minimizing cost and maximizing
rent-generating units. The result was that each of the furnished
apartments was peculiar in one way or another. In carving up the
house we lived in, they’d transformed the dining room by adding a
closet, a dresser, a vanity, a bedroom light fixture, and a double
bed, then advertised the unit as a two bedroom. The front door of
the apartment opened into a living room, which was not unusual. But
all the other rooms-the kitchen, the bath room, the other bedroom,
the truncated hallway-were accessible only through this ersatz
bedroom. Hildy and John and Eddie and I were so happy to find an
apartment we could afford and a landlady who would have us that we
gladly overlooked this design flaw. We drew straws to determine who
got stuck with the walk-through bedroom and who got the bedroom
with privacy. Eddie and I won. Six years later we were still in the
same bedroom.
    Jessie now occupied the walk-through room
that had once been Hildy and John’s. There was no third bedroom for
the twins, who would have to reside in bassinets in the corner of
our bedroom until we figured out something better. Knocking out the
flimsy wall that separated our apartment from the second floor, the
stairs, and the hallway and taking over the entire house was
Eddie’s latest plan for handling our impending space needs. I saw
several flaws in this approach: He hadn’t broached it with the
Crawfords; we didn’t have the money to pay for the extra space; and
the upstairs was home to Adrienne and her six cats.
    Adrienne, the only one of the Crawfords’
present tenants older than we were, was a thirty-year-old flower
child, a veteran of Haight-Ashbury’s Trips Festival and Be-In, who
had arrived here via Sweden and Drop City, Colorado. All Violet and
Iris Ann cared about, though, was that she’d been born in
Charleston and that her mama’s maiden name was Davis. It turned out
that they actually knew Adrienne’s mother’s brother’s wife.
    Adrienne made ends meet answering phones at
Radio Free Georgia a few blocks from the apartment and doing
astrological charts for friends and friends of friends. Not long
after she moved in a year earlier, she did my chart in exchange for
a pair of Grateful Dead tickets a co-worker at the City Paper had
given Eddie. Eddie and I briefly toyed with the idea of going to
the concert, but felt too old, too tired, too married, too
busy.
    So I gave the concert tickets to Adrienne,
who was a Dead Head, and one evening a few weeks later she invited
me