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Written by Alexis Stewart (Rhododendron Reader)
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March 9, 2007
With a few randomly placed alphabet fridge magnets, Sigma Kappa Alpha, or SKA House, was born.
Of course, the concept of SKA House was formed much earlier. Tracy came home one Friday to find a sink full of last week’s dishes, a floor full of empty booze bottles, and the remaining two members of the house in bathrobes with no real explanation. Horrified, she screamed, “You guys live like a bunch of stinking frat boys!” Instead of being offended, we had found a goal.
Wait, maybe I should backtrack a bit. SKA House was not always the fun-loving, SoCo-drinking, shitty-movie-watching fake fraternity it is today. I mean, the house itself was rumored to be quite the happening whore-I mean, boarding house, in the 1920s, but I digress. A few months prior, SKA House was anything but fun-loving.
I had originally rented it with Calico. She’d gotten dumped at the beginning of that summer but still under a crippling Huntington Slum Lord Lease of Death. Feeling sympathetic (but mostly needing a roommate), I moved into her one-bedroom apartment, paid half the rent, and slept on her couch. When summer ended, we decided that our lives would improve with a change of scenery. I also thought my love life would improve considerably with things like a door or a bed. However, both took a Hindenburg style crash.
At the time, our combined misery along with the misery of the old apartment worked well in a bohemian art flick kind of way, as I’d also had my heart ripped out with a power drill by my wishy-washy trust fund anarchist of a boyfriend. By the time we’d got the new place, though, my ex had arranged a green card marriage to become a Canadian citizen (even though one of the chief factors in our break-up was his aversion to the “Judeo-Christian capitalist concept of monogamous relationships”) and the misery had worn off enough to where Calico and I discovered we were absolutely incompatible.
For starters, nothing I could do would ever suit her Nirvana-like standard of cleanliness. If I would leave a zine layout in the floor for an hour to eat a sandwich, I’d get yelled at. If there was a hint of mildew in a far corner of the floor near the bathtub, I’d get yelled at. Sometimes her parents would come over, and I’d be yelled at in stereo. Everything had to be done her certain way, and I had to be the one to do it. Safe to say I got pretty sick of mopping a floor that I didn’t think was dirty to begin with, let alone the three earlier times that same day when I didn’t “do it right” or “missed a spot.”
So what kept me there? The one word that inspired countless films, songs, and its own million-dollar industry of a holiday: penis.
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(continued on March 23rd >>)
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Alexis Stewart is a thief and a shitkicker living in Huntington, WV. She edits the zine the Rhododendron Reader (a collection of Appalachian culture and weirdness) as well as the occasional one-shot. When she's not wielding a gluestick, she's making movies, working at her college radio station, collecting records, or stalking Ben Folds. Her column explores the weird nuances of the West Virginia underground scene from her command post in a fake fraternity called SKA House. |
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