TALES FROM THE HELL HOUSE #1

     The Hellhouse was the bottom flat of an old Victorian in San Francisco, on Ashbury St, half a block up from Haight.  it was next door to Janis Joplins old flat. I moved into the Hell house after being politely kicked out of my sisters flat upstairs.  My "room" was actually a closet under the stairs. It was slightly larger than a bed, but was cool in it’s own right. My new housemates were Klutch, Dave, and a Hawaiian guy who was never there. This was in the 80's. I was a punk rocker and a bike messenger. Full of energy and bad ideas. The hell house was perfect for me.
    TALES FROM THE HELL HOUSE are some of the things that went on there.

TALES FROM THE HELL HOUSE #1

 We were sitting in the kitchen on a Saturday afternoon drinking beer when I got an idea.
I chugged down the last of my beer, and then went down the hall and out to the front door. Our door bell had never worked, at least not in the time I had lived there. Knocks often went unnoticed, as we spent a lot of time in the kitchen, which was at the back of the flat.
     I decided it was time to fix this problem,  so I carefully pried the little black button out of the door bell housing and looked inside. The contacts were blueish green with corrosion.
I knew just what to do.
 I then slid out the little sign that said "Bell" and changed it to say "Hell",  and tossed the button aside, replacing it with a thumb tack facing point out.
     I then went back into the kitchen and cracked open another beer. When I told my housemates what I had done, and they both asked “why?”

“This way we’ll know when someone is here” I assured them.

“how do you figure?” they asked

Almost on cue, we heard a scream  and then a string of obscenities coming form the vicinity of the front door.

"Someone is here," I said.

I answered the door  to find friend standing on the porch rubbing his thumb. Cradled in his other arm were some fantastic offerings.
Booze, and Lawn Darts.

    Dangerous game for drunks with no lawn. 

    But then again, I think that applied to most everything we did. 

    Croquet seems fairly tame until you played our version, with a golf style swing in the narrow hallway of our flat. Instead of wickets, we set up a ramp and a series of targets. The only real rule was that the players had to be drunk, and the object was to hit the ball down the hall and up the ramp so that it flew through the air and hit one of the targets. If the target hit was the globe, the reward was to drink a tasty cold beer. Sometimes a player would miss the targets, and the hard wooden ball would careen into the kitchen and destroy something in there. If this were to happen, the penalty was to drink a tasty cold beer. It was a good game. 

     Bowling is pretty safe, unless the pins are replaced by a television set, and you are "bowling" from the third floor balcony. 

     This once lead to the idea of "bowling shots" 

It goes like this:  The "bowler" stands on the third floor balcony, and the "pin boy" on the ground below. The "score keeper" fills the three holes with vodka, then the "bowler" rotates the ball, spilling out the vodka, counts to three and releases the ball. The "pin boy" attempts to catch the vodka, but not the ball, in his mouth. 

     Lucky for us, we argued too long about the scoring system, (if you should gain or lose points for being hit with the ball) and by the time we were drunk enough to do it, no one was able to climb the stairs with the ball. 

    We invented another game called "Ceiling fan pool". The idea was to throw an (empty) egg carton up into the air so that it was hit by the fan, and landed somewhere interesting. This would be met by cheers, and toasts, and more beer. One night, as the hours wore on into morning, the game mutated into "Wadded up newspaper pool", then "Empty beer can pool", then "Full beer can pool", and finally "Anything in your grasp pool".
Interesting note: a ceiling fan missing a blade becomes highly unstable, and will eventually rip itself from the ceiling and even catch on fire.
     The funny thing is that the bowling ball, the croquet set, the ceiling fan, these were all gifts.
From People who knew us. 
From people who should have known better!
Maybe they did it for their own amusement.

One housemate was (god only knows why) given a gas powered weed whacker for his birthday.
Later in a drunken frenzy he "cleaned" his room with it.
Aluminum baseball bats, fireworks, bowling balls, Lawn darts, weed whackers...
Dangerous gifts for dangerous games.
For dangerous people.
Gifts from people who should have known better...
Then again, Maybe they did.