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built a mall with fountains and escalators and shops selling things which no reasonable person could need, but I don’t recall anyone circulating a petition to save the place. The Commercial was one of those oppressively huge hotels which went up all over the country around the turn of the century near major railroad depots. Its fortunes exactly mirrored those of the transportation system it was built to serve, and during its last decade the rooms were used only by prostitutes, winos and other down-and-outs. What kept the place in business was its liquor license. The bar was the biggest and rowdiest in town and they had pretty tight bands on the weekends, but for us the main attraction was the atmosphere of sleaze and failure. It appealed to our sense of living on the edge.
    Maybe that was what held the group together. It’s hard, in retrospect, to see what else we had in common. Even calling it a group is misleading. We were just a bunch of guys who liked to hang out together. The membership was never clearly defined. The basic core—Greg, Sam, Larry, Vince and me—was more or less stable, but it also included a temporary assortment of girlfriends, buddies, hangers-on and anyone who happened to be crashing at our pad at the time.
    We were all young, of course, but so was everyone else back then. Greg, Sam and I were all connected in one way or another with the university, but the links were so tenuous and diverse that this too is a false trail. Greg had been an athlete, a college football star, but had been dropped from the team in his second year following a much-publicized drug bust. Sam had studied English for two years—we’d taken some classes together, which is where we met—before dropping out to complete his studies at the University of Life, while I was in my third year of Comparative Literature.
    As for Larry and Vince, they came from other worlds altogether. Larry worked for a painting contractor, and got home every night covered in specks and streaks of various hues, stoned out of his mind on paint thinner. Vince’s means of support remained a mystery. We suspected that he was subsidized by his parents, but that was not something you could either admit or inquire about in those days. He spent most of the day fiddling with a bank of stereo equipment he had put together from kits and spare parts, which provided a mind-numbing volume of sound that was the envy of our friends and the despair of our neighbors.
    What brought us together originally was the house. It was a pleasantly decrepit wood-framed place with an overgrown yard and a huge maple out front, in a run-down blue-collar neighborhood south of the river. Many lots had been demolished and rebuilt as condos or walk-ups, and the surviving older houses had a provisional, doomed look accentuated by lack of care and upkeep. Respectable renters steered clear of such properties, but the combination of low rent and no hassle was just what we were looking for. The landlord, an old Swede, was waiting for some redevelopment company to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse, and he didn’t much care what we did with, to, or in the house just as long as the rent was there on time every month.
    It’s all part of the general pattern that the guy who originally found the place didn’t go on to become a member of the group at all. He was a dour jock who’d been a wide receiver on the same team as Greg, but had now graduated and was working as a salesman at a Dodge dealership. He and a coworker took the house and invited Greg to share it with them. Greg brought in Sam, who in turn mentioned the place to me. I was living with a girlfriend that year, but I was looking for an excuse to break up so I said I’d give it a try.
    The arrangement was doomed from the start, of course. The two car salesmen may have looked and sounded very much the same as us when we met them over a beer one Saturday night, wearing their weekend tie-dyes and faded Levis, but they had in fact