Things I Learned in the Chaos House
The Chaos House is dead! Long live the Chaos House!
Between August 2020 and July 2021, I lived in a large, shabby, ridiculous, lovable, tumbledown house in Brooklyn with thirteen roommates. Ten of us were musical theatre students. It was loud. It was rambunctious. It was silly. It was the Chaos House.
How and why did we coalesce into such a sitcom-worthy living arrangement at the height of Covid? No vaccine had yet been invented, no restriction lifted. Rapid tests were vanishingly rare. It was a world of bubbles, travel bans and lockdown. The Chaos House arose in defiance. It was part artistic commune, part cri de coeur against an impending year of loneliness. Yes, we were in isolation, but dammit, we’d be in it together.
Two years later, the Chaos has dissipated and order has restored itself. It’s lovely to be back in a world of subways and theatre trips and real-life drinks with real-life people. But there’s a sense of loss too. The Chaos was awesome, magisterial, dynamic, an ancient despot forced to surrender his crown and old-world grandeur. Necessary perhaps, but not without its sadness.
I offer these lessons to any student of anthropology, any devotee of musical theatre, anyone flirting with the idea of group living in New York. But more than that, I offer them in the spirit of Alan Jay Lerner’s lyric:
Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment that was known
As Camelot.
For one brief shining moment there was also the Chaos House. I lived there. Here are some findings that should not be forgot.
Fortune Favours the Bold
The Chaos House was really two houses, or rather two apartments stacked on top of each other, connected via a door in the main hallway. Each of these apartments would naturally accommodate four or five, but had been retrofitted with fake walls to accommodate seven. Bedrooms ranged widely from the half-decent to the minuscule.
These apartments were not on the market. We discovered them through a realtor, who euphemistically described them as “fixer-uppers” in “Greater Williamsburg” (oh-so-suggestive of hipster bars and spin studios). In fact, they were in a roughish part of Bed-Stuy; we would face two break-ins over the next twelve months. To show us round, the aforementioned realtor actually had to break in, jimmying open the upstairs door with a credit card. The fridge was broken. Windows were shattered. No-one had lived there for years. The landlord offered us a deal.
Three weeks and four new roomies-from-Craigslist later, we were in.
A Lick of Paint Can Do Wonders
Our first task was to fix up our fixer-upper.
The Chaos House looked out onto a small jungle which pleased to call itself a garden. We enlisted friends (this was in the brief sweet spot before the second wave), assembled weed-whackers, and for a full day we wrestled with it. We pulled up weeds. We laid down gravel. We built a small fire pit.
The sun was scorching and it was sweaty, thirsty work. A kindly neighbour took an interest and brought us beer. (We grew very fond of him; he lived with his mother and enjoyed sitting outside with nothing but his thoughts and a joint.)
With the garden tamed, the upstairs roomies set about redecorating the upstairs. Soon the walls were painted – not a bland cream, but vivid reds and yellows, with epigraphs and artistic flourishes aplenty. (Two of the Craigslist brigade were architects with an impeccable eye for brushwork.)
Downstairs, we created a games room, filling it with squashy armchairs and stacks of board games. It was attached to The Dungeon. The Dungeon was the shadowy place where we rarely ventured – a dark, dank room in which we technically kept drums and mountains of storage, but which probably housed goblins and God knows what else.
Anyway, soon the Chaos House was a home. More than that, in a city of mass quarantine, it was a private members’ club. There was even an open-air tennis court nearby where we could sneak in at 7am and play a game before breakfast. We loved it.
Chaos Breeds Weirdness
Throw ten musical theatre writers, two architects, a game designer and a videographer together, and you get some strange habits forming.
It started with the shaved heads. Then there was the Self-Deprecation Jar. Then a select few of us started gathering for bedtime stories, where we would slip into character (I was Grandpa Christopherson, or “Grandpapa”) and read ghostly tales to the crackle of artificial fire on Youtube, only occasionally punctuated by ads for Grammarly.
After days of work, we would spend happy evenings getting drunk to the strains of Polish folk music. At Halloween, we acquired a pumpkin and then kept it until it went soft, at which point we used it as a drum. We held councils of war to discuss how to deal with the mice. Before it got too cold, we would roast s’mores outside and play ukulele songs. At the first snowfall, we devised makeshift toboggans.
Politically, we (predictably enough) fell anywhere between centre-left and Marxist. The night of the US Election, we all stayed up, getting gloomier and gloomier, until Trump declared victory and we went despondently to bed. The next morning, we woke up to an unexpectedly bright picture emerging of Nevada, Arizona, Georgia. A few days later, when Biden was announced as the 46th President, we found all Bed-Stuy literally dancing in the streets with joy.
Fourteen Roommates Go Big (Food)
Wednesdays were for Family Dinner, no arguing. We took turns cooking and introduced each other to our home cuisine: Hawaiian, Quebecois, Midwestern, Tex-Mex, British (a weak offering from me). We had a memorable fondue night.
Birthdays were not small affairs. The upstairs roomies had a whiteboard to help keep track. We held many a (bubble-preserving) party, hanging up piñatas and decorating the games room. We exchanged presents and prepared birthday banquets. One weekend saw five different home-made cakes.
We had two or three expert bakers in our ranks. An unexpected perk of living alongside them was being asked to cede the kitchen for an hour or two, then summoned to help with the “taste tests”. You got to wolf down a plateful of buttery pretzel bites and act like you were doing your friends a favour.
Fridge space was admittedly a problem.
Fourteen Roommates Go Big (Games Night)
After Family Dinners, we would often descend to the games room for a night of war by other means. Favourites included Catan, Betrayal at House on the Hill, and a cracking social psychology game called Wavelengths.
We also had a “Decathlon”, in which we split into teams and competed in various events. These included:
A spelling bee. (I tripped up on “camaraderie”. All those As!)
A freehand portrait competition using non-dominant hands.
A timed haiku competition.
Spikeball.
Group Rock-Paper-Scissors. (You conferred with your group, made a collective decision, then faced your opponents and bellowed “ROCK – PAPER – SCISSORS – SHOOT!” before revealing your move and prompting a wave of triumphalism and devastation.)
A smell test, using spices from the kitchen.
Pull-ups.
Timed song-writing.
I wish I could remember the other two.
Fourteen Roommates Go Big (Singing)
Ten of us were musical theatre writers. There was a lot of music.
When infection rates calmed down and my girlfriend was able to visit, she used to count the number of seconds between entering the house and hearing someone’s voice raised in song. It was never more than twenty.
If it all sounds really obnoxious, that’s because it probably was. But to us, it was a little niche of paradise. Different roomies had different (complementary) talents. Among us we counted a classical pianist, a jazz virtuoso, a guitar-player, a violinist, two drummers and a music producer extraordinaire.
So we collaborated on songs, recorded music videos, took online lessons altogether. Sometimes we’d have a karaoke evening or watch a movie musical (The Music Man and Inside were particular highlights). We learned as much from each other as from our professors.
And when, at the end of our grad program, it was finally time to present our finished shows to the whole student body and faculty, the ten of us gathered together to watch them on the large downstairs TV. Later that night, we cracked open several bottles of Prosecco and sang, to the famous Stephen Schwartz melody, “There can be MU-SI-CALS… when you belieeeeeve…!”
So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye
It was a glorious year. It could not last.
At the end of our lease, I left to move in with my girlfriend. Others left too. Some remained. But soon the house was populated with new roommates, and there was less singing.
The Chaos House had arisen as a rebuke against Covid, a refusal to be lonely. As restrictions began to lift, it had less reason to exist. Soon it felt like two apartments again, with little commingling between upstairs and downstairs – just two regular, inexpensive apartments without much in the way of privacy or maintenance.
Now the second year’s lease has ended, and almost all the original roommates have moved on. The downstairs belongs to total strangers. The garden and laundry are off-limits. Order has reasserted itself.
The Chaos House is dead. Long may it live in our hearts.
Care to share some chaotic thoughts of your own? Get in touch!