Gaslight Village

Iowa City: First Stop on the Road Trip

Stopping by the road - drawing of me, by Fei Fei

We drove for twenty-six hours from Connecticut to Iowa City, six people packed into a custom RV 'yota filled with tapestries, sleeping bags, and art (fun fact: I'd been mishearing "'yota" as "Yoda" this entire time, and have thus named the RV Yoda. It was a colorful arrangement of people: two hippies, their cousin Damon, my friend Fei Fei from China, and my beautiful elf boyfriend. We stopped periodically to stretch, relax, and eat - then finally arrived at 1 am to join Anna's bonfire in the Gaslight Village.

Anna and Erica 

I met Anna and Erica in India the winter of 2014/15 when I studied abroad with a University of Iowa studio art program. Both have blue hair, which made them star attractions to locals all over India. Though we only spent a bit over three weeks together, we bonded over mutual sarcasm and chai. I promised to visit as soon as possible, though I didn't expect to see them only six months after that promise.

Sketchbook entry - outside Anna's house on Brown Street: In Iowa, everything starts to look like poetry - like the signs lining the street that say "No parking on odd days." We laughed. Can you mail back the ticket, arguing that today was a perfectly normal day, a very standard day? We joked about the reasons behind the sign - maybe on odd days you're more likely to get into an accident, we reasoned.

The Gaslight Village

Upon arrival, Anna took me to the side and asked, "You can't play chess here." 

I nodded in an exhausted haze while Anna explained, "The gaslight village has a weird history. It was designed by Henry Black." She pointed out the oddities surrounding us: buildings cobbled together with an alarming randomness. A wall lined with appropriated tombstones. And, she whispered, a basement door with the scratched out remnants of the word "DEAD".

Some years ago, Anna said, two methheads sat playing chess. One grew angry and smashed the other's head in. Later, a third person passed by. Upon seeing the dead body, they wrote the word DEAD onto the door. 

The path to the door was dark and creepy, under construction, and lined with disturbing murals and partial poems. The Gaslight Village is the outdated home to sixty or so tenants, ranging from art students to misguided writing professors. I didn't take any pictures. There was too much to take in, and I was certain I would die down there beneath the ground. I traced the "E" with my finger. It was just barely there, obscured by countless other scraped away leavings.

Day of Gay Pride

It just so happened that we arrived in Iowa City during a weekend of gay pride events, so Anna was immersed in tabling events. On our way to a farmer's market we passed three stunning queens. 

"Can we take your picture?" asked my beautiful elf boyfriend.

"We're late to the parade," one responded, irritated. So we just stood and admired as they passed by.

The city was awash with pride from cross-dressers to drag queens to small children with rainbow-dyed hair. And yet I couldn't stop looking to the ground, where the sidewalk was peppered with poetry and quotes engraved into the concrete. Every few steps, I had to pause to read.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. -Flannery O'Connor

Hamburg Inn

We stopped for a snack at the Hamburg Inn. My beautiful elf boyfriend went to the writer's workshop at the University of Iowa when he was fifteen, and he urgently remembered pie shakes. One picks from an array of pies, then a slice is whirred into an ice cream shake. I learned with few regrets that pie shakes only come in a size large. The pieces of apple pie crust sunk to the bottom were like a reward after a hard day's work. Fei Fei laughed as my eyes glazed over.

Tornado

We were hot and dirty, so we made a quick stop at the lake to swim and relax.

Sketch by me - Coralville Lake

But our visit was cut short by the the heavy roll of thick, dark clouds. A park ranger warned us of high winds and possible hail. We booked it back to Anna's street, folding out the seats into a massive bed to settle in for Cards Against Humanity. But Anna texted me with increasing urgency about forming funnels nearby, high winds, and a tornado watch. We sheltered in her house for a few hours, only returning outside briefly to pick up Mediterranean food from Oasis. We hunkered down to eat lamb, tahini, and falafel. The tornado never formed, but the sky outside turned an eerie yellow. We went outside to stare. "We don't have yellow in Connecticut," I told Anna.

We had planned on checking out a drag show at the Studio 13 bar, but decided to instead drive straight through the night to Chicago. We were taking a roundabout path because the two hippies had tickets in Michigan to see Electric Forest, a music festival. So we were killing time circling around until June 24.

But we had one final stop. The beautiful elf boyfriend recalled a strange sculpture in a graveyard. Us three girls huddled together in a steamy swarm of mosquitos as the boys ran wildly all across the graveyard, searching for a looming angel. We joined them under the two spread wings, the wet ground rising between my toes. I looked at this stranger's grave. She had died so long ago, her husband inevitably dead as well, and yet only his birth date was engraved onto the stone. The death date was left empty. I pictured an immortal man, one who had been married to an angel. Then I poked the ground with my foot, thinking of an empty plot. I imagined myself beneath the ground. June 19, 2015.

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