this artists' life
volume two
The Hart Compound
my life in short stories
by Dana Sitar
Note to the Reader
Many of the characters in this series have been given pseudonyms, and in some cases, distinguishing details about these individuals have been changed. In addition, while I have made a good-faith effort to convey the true essence of every story that I recount, certain events and scenes have been compressed or altered in order to better meet the needs of the story. Finally, as is the case in all memoirs, dialogue is by necessity an approximation and rarely a direct quote.
The Hart Compound
written by Dana Sitar
Cover Art by Stefan Davis
© Dana Sitar 2012. All Rights Reserved.
Published by Dana Sitar at Smashwords
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
To the Madison comedy scene,
for welcoming every misfit with open arms.
THE HART COMPOUND
CONTENTS
Eternal Sunshine of the Drunken Mind
A Year According to the Isthmians
Whether it was good fortune or misfortune has yet to be determined in respects to meeting Dana Sitar.
From my point of view, she hitched her wagon to a star when she crossed paths with one Stefan Davis and me. Regardless, she is a force to be reckoned with. In one night she managed to ruin everything I had been working for: She pissed off my bartender, offended both my writing partner and my campaign manager, then broke the heart of my best friend right before stealing 50 dollars worth of high quality hash from my roommate. To be fair to Ms. Sitar, my bartender, campaign manager, writing partner, best friend, and roommate are all the same person, and his taste in hash is anything but high quality.
But enough of promiscuous housewives and offended broken-hearted assholes who never have decent quality drugs, I'm here to talk about Dana Sitar, the writer! I've been writing nearly my whole life and at least half my life, I've actually written things down on paper making it official. However, Dana writes everything down. She misses nothing! Unless she is puking all over the bar, but then, she will write about that. She has a tenacity towards writing. Dana Sitar approaches writing the way a meth-head approaches a microwave tossed out on to the curb. She's going to approach the story with no fear, kicking it, stomping it, cracking it open to see the components before making off with the silver and copper wiring to finance the next fix.
Let it be known: Dana Sitar is a junkie!
But she's cut from the cloth of the Good Junkie. She is an Experience Junkie out there chasing the junkie experience regardless of the drug in question. For Dana, every story is around the corner or behind some closed door or down an alley that smells like the zoo where water drips into puddles of hope only to wash down the drain of despair. That is LIFE goddamn it! For Dana, writing is life, it is living every moment as though you're writing your own story because deep down, Dana knows no one is going to write it for you, and it sure as hell ain't gonna write itself.
So enjoy Dana Sitar! And if you do not like what she has to offer, the option to go have sexual intercourse with yourself is always on the table, but if you do like it, I taught her everything she knows. Enjoy! Enjoy! Enjoy!
-Nick Hart
How meeting Nick Hart, Stefan Davis, and
the Isthmians of Comedy changed my life.
Writing a New Story
If you want to become Edie Sedgwick, it's all about the eyes. Bold, dark lines framing wide open innocence, layers of lashes that go on forever, hiding the fear buried behind them.
Before I discovered her three weeks earlier I had planned to dress for Halloween as a fairy. A fucking fairy. I had already spent twelve dollars on wings. But when I watched Factory Girl, I fell in love. And, serendipitously, two weeks later, the art museum had an Andy Warhol exhibit, and the University hosted a free screening of Poor Little Rich Girl. I went alone.
She was the heroine I had always wanted to be the star of my stories – fearless, a little bit ridiculous, and absolutely beautiful. I was completely the opposite: shy, a loner, a follower. Always waiting for someone else to decide where to go. But with my marriage on hiatus and most of our friends swept away with my husband, I needed to find a new identity. I needed to write a new story.
I bought fake eyelashes, a cigarette holder, and a giant chandelier earring. I painted on dark eyeliner and tucked my brown hair under a short blonde wig. No one outside of the video store I worked at knew who I was supposed to be.
I went out with no plans that night, except to avoid Freakfest on State Street. I met up with my friend Charlie, who was doing the same thing. We watched a show at High Noon Saloon until I gave in to the only place I wanted to be and convinced Charlie to join me at the Argus.
I had only been there once since I published my interview with Nick and Stefan, the first time that I had ever walked into a bar alone. I was nervous as hell that night, but I fell in love with the scene – this bar that was the home to misfits and night-owls, with comedians every Monday night. I dropped my anchor in the Argus and the comedy scene that first Monday night, not realizing that I would be forced to succumb to its tug most nights after that.
After Halloween, I put away the eyelashes and the blonde wig, but I held onto Edie's beauty. It felt good to feel beautiful. Confident. And a little bit ridiculous. Nobody in this new scene knew who I was supposed to be. I could paint whatever character I wanted them to meet – and I might as well paint on a little extra glamor.
I didn't have anyone to go out with yet, so I just went alone. Edie wouldn't stay in just because her friends weren't talking to her anymore.
I didn't make them try very hard for an opening line when I went out, my journal always open on the bar in front of me.
“What are you writing about?” some guy would ask, slithering into a stool next to me at the bar.
“Just taking notes,” I would answer elusively.
“What's your name? Can I buy you a drink?”
“My name – ” I always hesitated too long, trying to judge them quickly, but I never developed the skill. “My name is Edie. I'm drinking whiskey. Thank you.” And a grateful glance from beneath eyelashes and curls.
“And what do you do, Edie?”
Edie was who I should have been. A writer, a journalism student at the University of Wisconsin. A grad student. She wrote for some publications around town, probably nothing you'd remember. She was a fan of comedy and music and loved to write about artists. She could drink all night on less than ten dollars and never have a conversation longer than three minutes. She'd never go home with you, just thank you kindly for the drink and listen to your story, hoping that you wouldn't notice the anniversary tattooed onto her left ring finger.
Edie carried me through lonely nights. She could be happy without feeling selfish. She could be exuberant without feeling conspicuous. She was confident, independent, creative, and interesting. She was attractive – I had never felt attractive without feeling guilty before.
I wore giant beads, dresses in the middle of the week. I lined my eyes in black and smoked my joints through the cigarette holder. I lost ten pounds, started to do yoga, and touched up my lip gloss before I left work at night.
I went out every night without calling anyone to join me. I just showed up in the Madison comedy scene and convinced them to let me keep watching. I latched onto Nick Hart and Stefan Davis like a lost kitten, and they didn't seem to mind. Maybe I fooled them into thinking they were lucky enough to have met Edie.
They gave me a ride home from Perkins after the bar one night, and I told them about my quest to find the best Bloody Mary in Madison, plus bragged about my own skills at crafting the drink. This prompted cravings, inevitably, and I invited them to my apartment to have some – homemade from scratch, with pickle spears and green olives to garnish. Incidentally, the only food I had left in my refrigerator.
Stefan said, “Right now?” because it was almost five in the morning.
Nick said, “Of course,” because of course Edie wouldn't wait until Sunday morning for Bloody Marys if she were craving one on Wednesday night.
They were the first visitors to my writer's cove of a studio apartment since my husband, and the place was not designed for company. I glanced around the next morning, trying to imagine the impression I must have made on these guys I'd known for less than two weeks.
There was no furniture but a broken futon and a giant wooden table that held my mini laptop and my coffee maker. A bag of rice and a can of beans sat on a shelf next to a stack of full journals and the four books I'd acquired since moving out of my husband's house. Tao Te Ching, Chicago Manual of Style, Artists & Models by Anais Nin, and a copy of The Ginger Man, which I stole from the UW library because Nick Hart told me one night that it was great.
My gaze landed on those stupid fairy wings, standing against the wall beside my mirror. I laughed at myself and finally carried them to the dumpster. I probably wasn't fooling anyone.
Sex, Drugs, Death, Divorce, and Comedy
We had never been the kind of people who could live a normal sort of quiet little marriage. We were fascinating and fiercely independent people, constantly developing the sort of traits that were making us terrible partners for each other but amazing individuals for the world.
Left alone to write through the summer in Madison, I was becoming an asshole and a rockstar, discovering a new adulthood, falling in love with independence, with the life and the people around; creating worries for a husband who sat alone, settling down two hours north, suddenly becoming an adult on his own terms, waiting for me to join him in a new quiet life once I had found myself.
By November, I existed mainly in a world that hardly exists, between the hours of midnight and 8 a.m. I was awake most hours of the day, floating from class to work to comedy to bars to after-bars with comedians, bartenders, artists, and other degenerates. I had wandered into Madison's comedy scene and found in one pair of comedians a story to cover and two drinking buddies who scoffed at the phrase Last call. As I hungrily scribbled notes, I had little time to reflect on everything around me.
When I finally had the courage to look at my journal, I saw the chaos and disorganization of those nights reflected in the pages I don't remember writing. Drunkenness, late nights, exhaustion, and neglect of obligation, as I discovered the barfly and the Gonzo journalist lurking inside of me and saw my husband stray into quiet reality up north.
After a particularly bitter fight with him that had become a nightly routine, I stopped calling and spent four days fretting and figuring out exactly what I wanted to be and do and what I would never be or ever do.
He drove two hours to see me in Madison on Friday night, and we were arguing before we could even leave for dinner.
“Your actions are not the actions of someone who is supposed to be committed to someone she loves,” he said to me.
I was surrounded by men he didn't know. I was faithful, but impulsive, to be sure; and from two hours north in quiet reality, he saw nothing but a threat to his marriage.
“I need this independence. I have found the life I need to live and I'm surrounded by artists that I love. I can't give this up, not even for you,” I replied like an asshole.
“I think you need to just say what you're not saying, then: We need to get a divorce.”
I looked him in the eye for a moment, glanced away in shame, and nodded with a heavy head. Six years, and all it took was this one moment.
After he walked away, I felt only the need to get out. I needed to run away, be in a different place in a different situation. I could leave town. I considered calling friends in Chicago, taking a bus to Milwaukee, hitchhiking to Minneapolis. The prospects exhausted me.
I needed a youthful ear with an artist's sympathies, so I headed downtown Madison. I wanted to snag a friend, get wasted, and confess my failures
I called my friend Dan, who'd been on edge with his girlfriend for months.
“Becca is having a sleepover with her girlfriends, and I was asked to come home as late as possible, if at all,” he complained, and I suggested we grab a drink.
“I am ready to get drunk and drown my sorrows,” I said as I ordered a pitcher of PBR from Stefan at the Argus. He offered a knowing look without knowing my story and served up the pitcher. He added shots of whiskey for the three of us on the house.
Dan and I drank through three pitchers and another round of shots, rolled dice without counting, and shared only a few words about our failing relationships. We worked our way toward a brief moment of blackout drunkenness near bar close.
I don't remember Dan leaving, but I assume it was right around close. I think I said goodbye to him when a crew of comedians showed up. I was drunk now and wanted to be around people who knew me as something other than a Wife.
True to our developing routine, I followed Stefan to the Hart Compound long after bar close. I knocked on Nick's bedroom door to say, “I have weed,” and offered him the bowl as he joined us in the kitchen. The three of us chatted until I faded slowly back towards sobriety with the aid of weed and some water.
Around perhaps five a.m., Stefan drove me home. As I was headed from his car to my front door, he rolled down his window to remind me, “Come by for day beers tomorrow!”
I turned and stepped up to his open window.
“Yes, day beers,” I replied with a sleepy, drunken grin. I sauntered toward the car, cloaked in the feeling of content that drove me to leave the bar with this pair of comedians all these late nights – the feeling that, in the midst of all of my failures, I had found a place that was right and fun and comfortable. “Five o'clock.”
Not wanting to end the night, I continued, “...Are you hungry?”
Over copious amounts of French toast, orange juice, breakfast potatoes, and coffee (and not enough water), we began to bond. We shared stories and secrets full of heartache and inspiration. A friendship that had been built during those fantasy hours after midnight on PBR, whiskey, and late-night munchies slowly began to morph into a deeper understanding. Suddenly, together, we understood art and life, living together on this side of the Gonzo line.
“I feel like an asshole.” I confessed my failed marriage.
“You're an artist,” he replied. “He'll understand, eventually, but he is going to hate you for awhile.”
It was eight a.m. when I finally made it to my front door. Drunkenly, it occurred to me to kiss him goodnight, but I didn't quite feel released from my marriage yet. I settled for a hug, basking in this genuine companionship.
Sunday afternoon movies and day beers led to another evening I couldn't end, a walk downtown for late-night burritos, sharing, philosophizing, and joking. I caught a Monday morning bus home from their house around 6 a.m.
“You,” Stefan said as I left with a hug on the porch, “are a bad influence.”
On my walk to the Argus to watch the comedy open mic on Monday night, I listened to a shaky voicemail from my mom, “Call me as soon as possible. It's, uh, it's important.”
I knew what the news would be before I returned the call, and when I finally got hold of someone in the family, it was confirmed that my grandpa, who had been sick for awhile, had passed away that afternoon. The funeral was planned for the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend, marring the celebration of the holiday but preventing the hassle of finding another day when my siblings could all gather together from around the state. One more blow in the shit show.
I sent a text to my husband to share the news, and asked if he was ready to talk. We hadn't spoken since he had left my apartment on Friday, and I needed closure on our abrupt and confused conversation.
He replied with, “Why?”
I was taken aback, thrust from my belief that we could still work something out somehow, that he just needed a few days to cool down before we could decide to at least be friends. I was reminded of Stefan's words from Saturday night: He is going to hate you for awhile.
“What's to talk about?” he asked. “You want a divorce; I don't think there's much more to say.”
It hit me, then. It was over. It was real.
Death and Divorce had struck, and I had still slept just eight hours in two days. It was Monday; I needed comedy, and I needed whiskey.