Rock Pilgrimage 1: Tulsa, Oklahoma

The first in a very short series. This happened about 10 years ago.

It was at 10 pm on a Saturday night when a sixteen-year-old girl with bleach-blonde hair and a dragging, sugary Midwestern accent loaded us into the backseat of her second-hand Cutlas and took us to see the house.

Our original plan had been to dance at a goth club called Roadkill, which we’d read about online. I had even brought a dress. But she overheard us talking about it in the Mexican restaurant, touched me on the shoulder from the next table, shook her head and said, “Honey, but you do not wanna go there.”

When we expressed dismay and said we had no other plans, she just shrugged.

“Well,” she said. “We can go to the house.”

She knew exactly where it was, where to stop on that winding suburban street with no house numbers, no street lights. She slowed the car to a crawl and killed the headlights as we moved closer. The ranch-style house was small and brown-shingled and profoundly ordinary except that it seemed ridiculous — impossible — that a family with five kids had ever lived there. A single floodlight above the door cut through the darkness in the front yard; a black Range Rover was parked, slightly askew, in the driveway.

We got out of the car — careful not to slam doors, snap twigs — and stood on the damp lawn, the sound of crickets, of early spring wind pressing in. Little yellow signs poked out of the grass along the perimeter where the lawn met the street: This Property is Protected by an Alarm System.

“This is the house with all the doodles on the walls in the basement,” I whispered. “All their little cartoons…”

“Yeah,” said the blond girl with a smile. “And the treehouse. It was there for a long time, but I think some girls wrecked it.” We all knew the same stories.

I bent over and scooped up a handful of pebbles in my palm, rolled them under my thumb. I kept them on my dresser for years afterwards in a paper cup, would rattle them around the bottom for luck.

Corinne had been silent, studying the front door, when she took a gingerly step over one of the signs.

“Corinne!” I hissed. “What are you doing?”

She took another step, then another, the soles of her boots making neat, glistening prints in the wet grass. I imagined sirens screaming, lights flashing, guard dogs unleashed and foaming at the jowl.

“Stop. There’s an alarm…”

She stopped, but not because of my warnings. I watched the dark outline of her back, saw her muscles tense. A noise from the direction house. Low, a little scratch. And then silence, the distant woosh of cars on the interstate. Then we heard it again.

Corinne spun around.

“Let’s go.”

We scrambled into the car, heedless of how much noise we made now. We slammed doors, shuffled across gravel, burned rubber. Racing back across town, past the streaking lights of strip malls and beer signs, drawing a straight line across the wide, flat platter of that city. We giggled madly, hands in front of our faces, awed. Not at humble beginnings or sparkling ends, but at a house that could have been anyone’s. That could have been ours.