Excerpt: Resident Aliens

From the studio on Pearson Street we moved into a bare, barnlike place above a store which sold live chickens on the southwest corner of North and Wells. It was pretty primitive: there wasn't even a toilet, so JD found one somewhere and installed it himself; and the smell of chicken shit drifted upstairs through the floor. The floor itself took a rather large dip in the middle of the room, and we didn't dare walk there for fear of its collapsing. But it was huge and open, and the light was good for painting. Of course it was completely illegal for us to be living there, but it was only $35 a month, cheap even for those days, the summer of 1960.

We had not lived there more than a couple of months when JD became friends with a woman named Renée, who had a family consisting of several children of various races who she had accumulated over the years, the oldest being a teenager named Shelagh, and the youngest a pair of four-year old twins. Renée was an ardent communard and a very persuasive talker; she earned her living by taking the little kids around and begging for food or money for them. These children had been given to her by their various mothers, who were usually junkies or hookers, and couldn't or wouldn't raise a child. Shelagh was thirteen and quite a seductive little thing who specialized in shoplifting and scamming men, who all thought she was of age. They were squatting in a rundown house a couple of blocks away.

One morning early in the autumn, we heard fire engines going by on North Avenue with their sirens blaring. The fire must be somewhere close. JD went out to check and came back with Renée, Shelagh, and a couple of their little kids. One of the twins, however, was missing. It turned out that the fire had burned their house and all their possessions, and that one of the babies had died in the fire. We took them in, and then things began to get really weird. Renée was a great talker, and very persuasive, as I said; she would spend hours at the kitchen table talking to JD about starting a commune with us. I was to wean Diana and go out and work, in order to be useful, and Renée would take care of Diana along with all the other children. "You don't really like taking care of children," she told me. I was scared; she seemed to have a hold on JD, and he was just about to agree to this plan, but I didn't want to live in a commune with her and go out and work in order to support everyone. I wasn't ready to wean Diana yet, and I didn't like the influence Renée seemed to have over JD. He was supposed to be stronger than that. I wasn't the one who was supposed to make these decisions, but I wanted a voice.

I was saved by the fire department. Since a child had died in the fire at Renée's house, there was an investigation, and some fire inspectors came to interview her and the kids. They took one look around at our place and told us that it was unsafe, and that we had a five-day notice to move.