Toothbrushes and Tofu |
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| by Kirsten Rudestam, '01 |
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"Yay hyperchocolate hazelnut cake Yay apricot baklava Yay carrot cake and apple crisp Yay periwinkle dining room trim Yay co-ops" - Watermyn house journal, 1986 The co-op is on the corner of Waterman and Governor streets, hunkered there like an old man, into a dilapidated permanence. Two enormous cherry trees occupy the front yard; in the fall their golden leaves are left in peace to coat the lawn until they rot or blow away. A tangled cluster of bicycles clings to a metal sculpture that is perched like an insect under the largest tree. The front garden sprouts renegade tomato plants and Echinacea flowers, long taken over with weeds, and a tin sign hangs feebly from a piece of yellow pipe, its faded letters announcing, "Watermyn Co-op Garden." The newly built front porch smells of wet, cut wood and supports a ratty looking couch, a small mosaiced table, and half a dozen un-opened Wall Street Journals. The Watermyn kitchen never fails to be a stimulating experience. This Sunday night is no exception. Ian and Allison chop vegetables, and the counters swim in piles of mushrooms, carrots, spinach, bowls of crumbled tofu and pans spread with thick pizza dough. Liz Phair plays on the stereo, just loud enough to inhibit a normal decibel of conversation. Old crumpled newspapers litter the two couches beneath the stereo, and rows of red-capped spices, cereal boxes and other assorted dried goods line the racks above the counters. Clippings, sketches and posters plaster the refrigerator and walls. Broken kitchen appliances are stuck above the fridge with black electrical tape and someone has scrawled above them in black marker, "Kitchen appliance graveyard - where all good cooking tools come to die." Ian is tall, with a warm smile and a worn-in look, faded and comfortable like someone's favorite sneakers. He groans as he opens up rotting bags of spinach, "How long has this been in the fridge? I'm not going to use this. Do you think I should use this? No, no one will want to eat this." Allison doesn't offer any suggestions. She smiles unconcernedly and slides an assembled pizza into the oven, holding her long brown hair back with one hand. Dinner is served at 6:30 and in a few minutes co-opers will begin to wander into the kitchen and common rooms, lured by the smell of cooking dough and stir-fried garlic. For Ian and Allison, the preparation of this pizza feast for thirty is part of a weekly routine. They are students at Brown University, but identify just as strongly with their participation in BACH, the Brown Association of Cooperative Housing. According to its newsletter, The Brown Association for Co-operative Housing (BACH) began as a "far-off flickering fluorescent light in the collective eyeball of a fretful/naïve/hyper-omniverous few" back in 1969, when Brown University students formed a Group Independent Study Project (GISP) on the cooperative movement. The first co-op occupied a Brown-owned house during the summer of 1970, and later that fall the newly formed BACH corporation began negotiating with the university over the purchase of five old houses. The administration was less than thrilled with the prospect. Rumor has it that Dean Eckelman said, "There will never be cooperative housing on this campus!" But a deal was born, and BACH ended up with a five-year lease on Carberry and Milhaus, two houses next to the Brown campus, each for a dollar a year. Watermyn was bought and renovated six months later, ending its days as a Bryant College fraternity. In 1995 a new co-op, Finlandia, was initiated into the cooperative movement and in 1997 and 1998 Brown terminated the leases of Carberry and Milhaus, claiming it needed the houses for office space. The co-ops have a healthy collection of stories. In the spring of 1995, the compost pile at Milhaus produced such huge and healthy rats that they chewed through the electrical wiring for the neighborhood and caused the entire block to blackout. A year before Milhaus' official eviction, the fire department crashed a Halloween party and discovered a room filled entirely with foam. Watermyn's annual and infamous Naked Party, where all invited guests are required to leave their clothes at the door, was once held despite the fact that the heating system had broken down. And accompanying the termination of Milhaus was a Wake parade, with musicians, co-opers dressed up like vegetables, and huge, brightly painted floats. These days Watermyn and Finlandia are owned and maintained by the inhabitants, independent of Brown. Any one can live in BACH, but the houses are filled almost exclusively with Brown and RISD students, as the co-opers recruit primarily at Brown, and the houses operate on a student's semester schedule. If one were to enter Watermyn without having any preconceptions of the place, reading the house journal would give a pretty accurate representation of house sentiment. Every semester a new black hard-covered sketchbook appears on the low table that is sandwiched between two sagging couches in the kitchen. Dozens of filled old black bound books from previous years are stacked in a closet on the second floor, providing hours of entertainment and glimpses into the house members of semesters past. Even without the journals, Watermyn gives the impression of a house that has weathered many dramas, much laughter and dancing and impulsive communal creativity. The walls are thick with layers of paint, as new tenants bath their rooms in murals and vivid colors. Graffiti is scrawled on various surfaces, and photographs of previous co-opers cover the walls of the dining room. This semester the first page of the Spring 2001 journal proudly pronounces itself as the "Alternate House Journal...an exercise in post-linear futility! Subversion both trite and meaningless! An endeavor defined entirely in terms of a different endeavor! Yippee!" An added message is blazoned like an advertisement in one corner with an arrow: "Note vaguely oppositional yet formulaic title." The pages are filled with entries that range from ridiculous to endearing, from recipes for vegan baked goods, to political commentaries bemoaning the Bush administration, to facts about dolphins ("Tcisiops truncates Ð size: 6 to 13 feet long"). The journal is the ultimate form of gleeful distraction. For example, there are quotations, labeled as "felony," copied from Brown pre-frosh application essays by a couple of unidentified residents who worked for the admissions office, such as: "I am the princess of Greece. First name: Theodora. Last name: of Greece" or "I know I'm not going to be accepted due to a stellar academic record, because I don't have one, but because my grandfather is a trustee." The house journals date back to the birth of the Watermyn co-op in 1970. This semester's journal for the spring of 2001 has its share of goofiness and inside jokes, but it also includes entries that are remarkably raw and poignant. Compared with books from previous semesters, there appears to be more desperation and more absurdity, perhaps a reflection of the increasingly frustrating and absurd times: an election decided not by popular vote, but by the Supreme Court, vanishing ice caps, an increasingly existential education influenced by a new wave of instantaneous technology. There are elegies in this semester's journal, inspired by depression, frustration and anxiety, written late at night, alone in an empty kitchen. "When I try to imagine what I'd be happier doing I come up with HUGE GAPING VOID...What I've been fantasizing about is joining the CIA. I'll bet they'll reprogram me pretty effectively and take away some of this omnipotent jawgrinding useless constant anger at the project of civilization. I can't even imagine feeling like I'm more part of good things than of evil, alienating, binary-distributing, ecosystem-destroying, unsustainable, entropy accelerating, slavery-promoting, value-homogenizing shitty things." A housemate's jibing response reads: "I'm sitting on the couch and...I feel like I'm filling my HUGE GAPING VOID with vegan food." Every Sunday night, a house meeting takes place over dinner. This week prospective food co-opers have been invited, so there is a certain amount of excitement and flamboyance in the air. The doorbell rings consistently, and newcomers wander around the house or self-consciously study the walls, where there is no lack of entertainment. An elegant banner reads, "Beautify Providence. Kiss Someone." Posters advertise current events and speakers in Providence, and there is an enormous wood-block print of Richard Nixon, framed by plastic flower vines that also drape the banister and doorways. "So how does all this work?" asks one girl, who peers into the kitchen and eyes a precariously balanced pizza with trepidation. "We'll talk about it in detail over dinner," Ian says, but briefly fills her in anyway. The basic principle of a cooperative is that the house is owned and operated by the inhabitants. They cook for each other and share responsibilities of cleaning, shopping and maintenance. Everything is decided by consensus, so the routine tends to remain the same, because any one member has the power to block a decision. The commitment to the house is large, and every semester a few of the food co-opers decide that they can't give the time the co-op requires and quietly disappear. The cooking takes about three hours a week, as does the house job, and the Sunday night meeting can run anywhere from half an hour to three and a half. This is required of all house members, as well as the food co-opers, who pay to eat at Watermyn and are integrated into the house community. They often become indistinguishable from the residents, as they end up watching movies, working on projects, and falling asleep on the couches. Watermyn has a more difficult time than Finlandia recruiting food co-opers because it is a fifteen-minute walk from the Brown campus, which for many students is considered ten minutes too long. This semester's food co-op poster cleverly discloses none of the aforementioned responsibilities and proudly lists the perks of joining the Watermyn household:
Carrie is a second year Brown student from Seattle, with a thick braid of red hair and unsettling sterling hoops that swing through enlarged earlobe holes. Desperate for good, healthy vegetarian food, she discovered Watermyn second semester last year after seeing a recruitment poster. She admits that she would have left Brown if she hadn't stumbled upon Watermyn, and this had little to do with her aversion to Brown dining hall food. She was unhappy at Brown, uninspired socially and academically, and "too miserable to even leave my dorm room." As soon as Carrie entered Watermyn, however, she found that wholesome food was just a fraction of what the house had to offer. She describes it as "a revelation. The moment I walked in I realized at a deep level that this was where I needed to be." For Sara and Ian, who moved to Watermyn from Milhaus after it was shut down, the co-ops are the fundamental reason for their happiness at Brown. The two are dubbed the Mom and Dad of Watermyn, because they have the most cooperative semesters under their belts, and they are from the old guard of long lost Milhaus residents. Both paid double as freshmen to live in Milhaus, because Brown Residential Life wouldn't allow them, in their first year, to live off campus. Ian's sunny yellow room is filled with his banjos and blue-grass records, and he uses his closet to brew beer. In high school he visited a friend's college co-op, and searched for a similar housing situation when he got to Brown. He was disappointed with his first-year housing, but the aspects of Brown that he loves are those that are similar to the co-op, like finding little communities in small classes or political activities; "I didn't find that in the housing I had. I found that here, and it's great to have that, waking up to that and going to bed with that." Sara's parents paid for both housing arrangements because they were willing to do anything at that point, to help alleviate her misery and keep her in school. "Misery is an understatement," she says, and hastily adds, "Which wasn't entirely a product of the dorms." Sara is thoughtful and articulate, has long brown hair that hangs smoothly down her back, and sits with perfect posture and a relaxed confidence. She has been cast in the first play of the semester. It's hard to believe that she struggles with "change of any sort," which was one reason she was initially so unhappy at Brown. "I thrive in small, consistent communities. That's what I love about a rehearsal process...being part of an ensemble that creates." She recognizes that living in Watermyn is a creative process as well; "We create movies and house journals and lawn ornaments, but we also create a culture." There's a language among co-opers: "stuff n'munch" sandwiches, "NGC" food (Not for General Consumption), and house meeting hand signals. "It's a home that way, in a way the dorms weren't." According to Sara, the campus housing isn't conducive to forming this kind of culture. The limited common spaces are not ideal for sitting and visiting with neighbors, and there are no community projects for dorm livers, like getting a house up to fire code standards. There is no sense of ownership or responsibility. "I couldn't leave my toothbrush on the sink!" she complains. People come to Watermyn for different reasons, and many are thrilled to find it politically and creatively engaging. Daniela, a former co-oper who now lives in South Providence and student teaches public school, found the distinction between her on-campus suite and the co-op as "the difference between suburbia and an artists colony." And whether one is looking for it or not, when someone moves into the co-op, he or she acquires a family. Daniela is an only child, who grew up spending a lot of time alone. Perhaps, she says, "the affinity for [living within this community] might be something you missed rather than something you were already acquainted with." Decades of anthropological research describe the human tendency to live within a communal support network. Daniela also says "Once you join this community, it's often a feeling of being embraced. Physically, and emotionally." The insularity of Watermyn may provide warmth and comfort, but can also be frustrating. Not everyone wants to eat lentils a few times a week and drink out of recycled applesauce jars, or end up with a layer of crud on their feet if they walk around the common rooms without shoes on. That the co-op is not very ethnically or racially diverse is also an ongoing concern. This semester fourteen of the eighteen residents are white, and there are only four men, which puzzles the housing coordinators. Outreach efforts are not helped by Watermyn's reputation for housing left wing iconoclasts. There's a tendency of the residents to have an antipathy to consumer culture, and liberal or radical ideologies. "However," Sara explains, "in the co-op you get endless amounts of conversation about all sorts of differences. From the outside you all look like communists, or hippies, or whatever, and this is why the co-op struggles with diversity." At the same time, the house's acceptance of individuality may repel people who are not as comfortable with more liberal platforms, like queer friendliness and socialism. Because they are so at ease with one another, there is a tendency for the housemates to engage in endless teasing and other sibling-like behavior. Verbal sparring could even be a prerequisite for living happily in Watermyn, but it is probably picked up quickly in self-defense. At one house meeting someone asks if the box of clothes in the hall belongs to someone or if it is free for all. Ian smiles, "Well, my philosophy, and clearly Joanna's philosophy, is to wear someone else's clothing until they notice and figure it out." Joanna looks surprised. "My forty-niners shirt?" she says, pulling out her T-shirt from under a couple of other layers. "No, my sweater! And the poly-propylene shirt." "Oh really," she says with wonder, looking at the clothes she somehow acquired and never returned to the owner. "The clothes off my back!" The house is like a family in many respects. There is the love, the teasing, and also like a family, they don't get to choose the members. There is no screening process to live in Watermyn, besides committing to the aforementioned jobs and expectations. If too many people are interested, names are drawn out of a hat. At times this has produced tension and open conflict. Last semester, a squabble erupted because someone cooked bacon in the kitchen, offending a vegan resident. There can also be unexpressed resentment toward a co-oper who doesn't pull his or her weight. The dedication, bordering on devotion, that is required of a co-oper to the house can be challenging. One of the aspects of institutions like Brown is the self-reliance of its students. There is always so much work to be done, so many appointments to keep and organizations to be involved with, that it promotes self-interest. A cooperative challenges this. If someone forgets to make a menu, food is not bought and everyone goes without dinner for a night. Thus, there is tension between the tendency to be a driven student, intent on completing the tasks that one must single-handedly complete, and the co-op resident, whose daily decisions impact the seventeen other house members and a handful of food-co-opers. In the same vein, house members learn how to maintain a house, fixing faucets and unclogging toilets. It doesn't help that the house is quietly falling apart. BACH recently invested in a new roof, a fire alarm system, and rebuilt the porch. These types of renovations are necessary for the capacity of the house to actually be livable, but the more gradual entropy is generally ignored. Justin, a senior at Brown, has friends in the co-ops, has visited them a few times, and has even flirted with the idea of living in one, but says, "Honestly, I think the cleanliness factor really got to me." Some co-opers insist that the lack of sanitation is great for the immune system, but many parents and even friends have refused to sit on the furniture or eat off the plates. The house is so old that it carries with it decades of unscrubbed grime, and spotless common spaces have never been a co-op priority. A hand drawn poster above the telephone reads, "Our house is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy." One Watermyn resident recounts a story of her mother's visit to the house: "We had a nice lunch together and we were washing our dishes when my mom noticed that the plastic mats underneath the drainboard looked pretty gungy, so like a polite guest, she offered to clean them. But, and I don't know what genius did this, they were placed on top of the dishwasher, which was covered by a wooden board. So she pulled the wet mats off the dishwasher and the wooden board turned out to be teeming with maggots." She and another resident ended up prying the board off the dishwasher with a crowbar. The dirtiness is not only an indoor reputation. The owner of an apartment and office building complex next door would love to see BACH evicted from Watermyn. "It's a pigsty!" she says angrily, "They don't keep up their property, the overgrowth in their front yard is horrendous...they bring the rest of the neighborhood down." She resents the furniture on the front porch, the compost in the back, and the music filtering in through the windows of the psychiatry offices. "This is a professional neighborhood!" she protests. Considering that it took five years to clean all of the beer cans out of the chimney after the fraternity moved out, Watermyn can't be considered too filthy. Much of the reputation comes from attempts at living in an environmentally responsible fashion, like the compost and the non-recyclable clutter that no one can bear to throw away. In this sense, the house is, unavoidably, political. The members decide where their money will go; they try their best to purchase local and organic foods, and buy as much bulk as they can afford from a food cooperative in Vermont. More than one house meeting has attempted to identify the greater corporate evil: East Side Market or Stop and Shop. And there is always the banana discussion Ð even buying organic bananas exploits workers in third world countries and rips out rainforests. The community activism in Watermyn is something that drew Carrie to the co-op. According to Carrie, in Watermyn there's a "higher preponderance of generally caring about things. People get preachy sometimes, which is the downside of political consciousness, but we're all doing the best we can." Co-op communities and activist communities overlap, and many co-opers participate in local community activist groups. Daniela found that by her fourth semester living in the co-ops she grew weary of the conversations she had adamantly espoused. The creativity and political activism that was once new and refreshing was no longer exciting, but self-righteous. "I'm not interested in the rhetoric at all anymore," she says, "I'm interested in teaching public school and dealing with my kids and the joys and difficulties of working with other people. But it's not like I'm gung-ho to save or change the world. I'm just interested in individual people and it's much more on a microcosm right now." Despite "the rhetoric," most residents do not regard the house as a hotbed for community activism. Hannah, a tiny woman with a cloud of brown hair, sums it up well; "If you're political, you'd be drawn here, but the house also has its own internal culture." That culture is what makes it unique, a forum for arts and politics, for late night vegan baking and dance parties. In many ways, Watermyn is akin to a neighborhood within the larger Brown community, and its existence is just as rare. Members play pick-up basketball games before dinner is served, help each other sort through ideas, organize BACH dinners and invite university deans. There is also vulnerability inherent in this intimacy. Peoples' moods and sex lives are fairly open books. If Watermyn is regarded as counter-culture, it is through its efforts to create a self-aware community, and in this art, politics and parties organically manifest. It offers an intimate, unconventional community, and particularly for those who anticipated a more creative and accepting university than they found themselves with, it is a refreshing blast of uncensored joyful energy. The BACH-let, their guide to cooperative living, describes the co-ops as "a way of life, not just a corporation." As unique as this way of life is perceived, it is also ancient and intuitive: the formation of a nurturing community living in together, sharing the age-old rituals of stories and dancing and food. |