Pigeon Spikes in the Household

Dorothy Van Hodgkins was eighty-seven and eighty-eight and ninety and ninety-one and ninety-two years old, while practicing the lifestyle of the live-in installation. But she was not practicing when she was eighty-nine because that's when Dorothy was hospitalized with a severe case of agitated osteoporosis. We'll return to the osteoporosis later.

For the duration of the year prior to the passing of her partner Eileen in 1997, Van Hodgkins, at eighty-eight, lived locked away in a house composed entirely of hostile design. The house was nothing like a house, yet the perfect embodiment of many people's homes around the nation. It was an interactive sculpture that she titled "Stay out of my Home." And after Eileen's death, she was sent into a very public emotional spiral where, along with other statements expressed through her lifestyle and against doctors' recommendations, she continued to live in this uninhabitable house.

During both the first and second portions of her residency at that unergonomic house, she was approached by many reporters. Before her mind was too old to remember to stick to the line, to all of them she said only one same simple thing:

"This is where I live."

I was lucky enough to be one of those reporters. When it would've meant anything to anybody else, I didn't get any special insider's disclosure, or any or other unique treatment. But I did feel quite special as I stood peering in, with my legs apart as to not harrow her garden, when she looked so senile into my eyes, so longingly out of her open lite casement style window on the front of her house, and said that that was where she lived.

It gave me empathy, or perhaps sparked more of it- if one were to argue that you can't be given empathy. My eyes were drenched in her old age, her inhabitance on the Earth, her regrets and loneliness, her imminent danger. Aren't we all headed to that house eventually if we aren't already riding in it to death like some sort of bus? This human body is where we live, after all.

After my first visit in 1999, I came back often to hear her say that, to feel the feeling again and again, and I felt it every time.

The window was plastered open, as if it were part of the wall on the outside of the house. There were no air conditioning or heating units inside. The window's opening was the only way for people to look in and see the exhibit, and to do so they had to avoid prancing all over Dorothy's garden. She had to replant new flowers every couple of days. This system was on artistic purpose of course.

The house also featured the following amenities, to name a few:

• A mailbox, almost out of arms reach from the window, for Dorothy to keep in contact with Eileen from, and a larger compartment below it for the grocery boy.
• A slanted floor made of cattle grid, consisting of fine lacquered cherrywood. Additionally, speed bumps were placed sporadically through out the house. (With time the speed bumps became the most comfortable spots in the house. So naturally Dorothy had to install tinier, angled, speed bumps on the speed bumps.) There were no surfaces that were both flat and level-- nowhere to even trustingly set a bagged mystery bottle down. Dorothy had to hold her own booze.
• One single room. This included everything that a house would have. Bathroom features, bedroom features, kitchen features. It was all there in that one-roomed house.
• A bed, with an arm rest attached laterally across the middle.
• A couch, with pigeon spikes on the cushions.
• A television with one channel (local news), placed on the wall at an impossible angle to view comfortably. No remote.
• A narrow kitchen table with metal skate stoppers screwed onto the edges.
• Various elaborate brutalist and interpretive art sculptures that resembled a place to sit, but were extremely unergonomic.
• One singular chair at the kitchen table. The only normal chair around. Just slightly small.
• A rocking chair with no backing, and a slanted base. There was no place to rock it here anyway.
• A toddler's portable training toilet. A faucet on the wall, a drain on the floor.
• A pile of art supplies.
• A ceiling fan that only worked when powered by a system of belts and a bicycle. There was no seat on the bicycle, and the bicycle was placed out of reach from the ceiling fan's breath. Dorothy still used this feature often in the summertime, for art and exercise.
• A quilt, strung up like curtains on the eastern wall. Dorothy used this to keep warm in the winter. Although it didn't reach her feet, which caused the art council to sometimes have to call a doctor to crawl in through the window and give her Perniosis ointment and new socks.

The house was painted white and was surrounded by rosebushes, with an omission of rosebush for the small garden in front of the window. There were no other doors or windows. There was a chimney on the roof, but no fireplace inside. A front lawn, mowed weekly for free by a fan of Dorothy's movement.

Everything was designed and manufactured by Dorothy herself. It was quite the spectacle.

The point of all this was a demonstration of the modern "war on homelessness." All of these death-trappish features were in fact real world common place installments in the vast majority of publicly owned spaces, put there as an attempt to keep homeless people from dwelling. At parks, at shopping centers, beaches, city plazas, etcetera. In 2001, laws were passed to immediately have all of these fixtures removed and replaced with normal, restful objects. Dorothy's installation was more of a success than she could've ever dreamed. She was the savior of public comfort, and a martyr for the impoverished.

The first year that she lived in this house began on her eighty-seventh birthday. Eileen wanted to join her, but Dorothy denied her residency under the implication that it wouldn't have been painful enough to have an effect if she had company so beloved.

Eileen would stop by the window every day for the beginning of that year. You’d think that Dorothy would appreciate this, but she was too emotionally invested in her work for that. Dorothy would get mad at first, throwing things and saying for her to leave the property because that it would defeat the purpose of the project to become happy in that house, or sometimes that it would feel bad to freshly miss her in between visits every day then have nothing to do.

Eileen stopped coming in May, which was around two months into the whole thing, and around the same time that Dorothy started saying "This is where I live." The way she said it in the early stages differed vastly from her annunciation in her final days at the house, almost like she didn't believe it anymore. To the best of Dorothy's knowledge, Eileen was waiting anxiously, separately and as longingly as she, yet still content, to see her lover and the sociopolitical results of the art project.

In reality, Eileen was in her own torture chamber. She suffered alone in her own regular house in Indiana, developing lung carcinoma. She kept this a secret, just as Dorothy had kept a secret all of her reasons for emotionlessly going off to live away in the uncomfortable art house.

Two weeks before Dorothy's eighty-eighth birthday, she received a letter in the mail, addressed from Eileen. It was a request for visitation. Dorothy had just begun to settle into this new lifestyle, and didn't want to risk creating any aggravated or unnecessary pain from missing Eileen. She was also a fan of delayed gratification, and so close to being able to go back home. Two weeks until her year in the life of being restless was over.

So she declined the request.

Later that week, Eileen showed up anyways. Dorothy didn't even look at her. Witnesses say that as Dorothy sat inside the house straight faced and ignoring Eileen, who looked very frail. Eileen became unruly and had some sort of melt down in the grass and in the sidewalk. She was screaming things like "You live HERE!" while pointing at her heart, "You live HERE!" or while pointing down her throat. All the while she just wanted Dorothy to listen, or to simply look at her. And of course Dorothy wouldn't have known what the throat pointing thing was about. Or most people, because the cancer was kept a secret. Plus also it was a horribly vague gesture. It was about the lung carcinoma, or possibly some metaphor for love's sometimes agony.

Then on her birthday it had made sense because she awoke to some teens burning down her rose bushes and spray painting the house. They were noisy, and so angry. Reporters were there too. Dorothy told them to scram because she lives there, and scrambled to get water into a bucket from the faucet. She tossed as much as she could at the flames around the outside of the window from inside, refusing to exit. She read what the spray paint said, which was in a red typeface. It said "MURDERER!"

Eileen was dead and it was all over the news; Dorothy stammered out an "I live here," to the reporters for continuity, then immediately started screaming and moaning gutturally and crying. Dorothy continued the tantrum on live television (recorded looking through the window from afar, from the cameramen in the street, behind a mess of firefighters and angry locals).

The tantrum was made of anger at herself which involved tearing down her blanket curtain, and throwing things across the room. Most of her useless furniture was broken now. In all her stomping and pacing and jumping and tense standing- she gashed her foot open, snapped her ankle on the cattle grid floor, then laid there for two days, sobbing quietly in the wake.

The funeral was later held across the street, within the window's view. Dorothy had paid to have it there. Her resolve was that she wanted to keep living in that house. It could've been an inspired choice of empowerment, but I think she was making rash decisions from grief or guilt, a punishment of the self. I don't believe that she ever made a single un-rash decision for the rest of her four years of life. Dorothy, on the day of the funeral, stood leaning on crutches and with her foot wrapped up in a cast, watching from the window.

Against medical advice, she soon ripped the pigeon spikes from the couch and glued them to the armpits of her crutches. She spent the rest of that year sitting strange on the ground, rebuilding the furniture with a hammer. All the while, her grass went unmowed at the hands of her supporters, who were on strike. She let it become overgrown and dead. She couldn't bare to look at the location of Eileen's last interaction with her anyways. Few reporters came, and when they did she mostly ignored them.

There was one single day that she left the house, and it was but to paint the outside of the house with new words that said "THE GRASS IS NEVER GREENER IT NEVER IS ALIVE."

This irrelevant prose was one of her less professional artistic decisions.

Then on April fifth of 1998, she could not get up off from the ground. Her pelvis had begun to deteriorate from the osteoporosis. A tourist saw her like that in there, and called the authorities. When the authorities got there, she would not consent to leaving. She was entirely pleased with dying there on the cattle grid. Firefighters had to chop down one of the walls to get her out by way of gurney, then they had to walk through her horrible obstacle course of a house. She was their regular.

Dorothy had her eighty-ninth birthday in a hospital bed. She couldn't sit still in that horrible thing, because she was used to her uncomfortable house. The doctor juiced her up on opiates so she could heal comfortably. They assumed that since Dorothy was so old, complications involving the osteoporosis would probably kill her. They were wrong; and in their chemical attempts to taper her consciousness peacefully into the great beyond, they only gave her a moderate opiate addiction.

Opiates for Dorothy were the first time she acknowledged feeling comfortable in quite possibly her whole life, and now there was no way for her to not continue accepting it from the doctor. Her body wouldn't allow it.

In an interview, the nurse assistant from Dorothy's hospital room tells me that Dorothy told her of a dreamt hallucination; it was a backwards travel in time, into living in a normal house with Eileen. The backwards experience in time plus the chemically physical comfort put her into a direction where she wasn't approaching death anymore.

It seems that she was only getting younger in this reoccurring dream theme, younger and more in love. There was nothing to fear and everything to gain. She was sixty-seven, on a sailing boat through New Zealand standing shade over Eileen's deck sunbathe... then she was fifty, taking knowledge home to Eileen from a cooking class, then she was forty-three then thirty-four, attending politicians' speeches with Eileen and the intent of sabotage, and twenty-eight, making inspired art about nothing in particular, about Eileen's neck and her elbows and her cheekbones in the light of some underground parlor, about the feeling of being next to her and looking up to see the same clouds pass by with only inches of different perspective.

She was kissing Eileen, and not through a window. Eileen was right there, swaying against her body to something on the radio perhaps. This was where she lived, inside of a human moment.

A year and a half of this passed in real time, before she was clear to go back home.

She lived for one day with a caregiver, in the old Indiana house that she shared with Eileen. Dorothy couldn't handle it, and went missing for a few hours. The caregiver somehow found her back in Stay out of my Home (which was for some reason still standing, and the graffiti was somewhat anti-vandalized), dusting the spiderwebs off of the hazard furniture. Everyone let her stay there, because how much longer could she exist there anyways? And the old crow seemed to still be used to its physics, so there wasn't much harm to worry about.

Well she lived there for two more years. During this particular window of time I paid the majority of my visits. With time, she began to use her window to enlighten whoever would listen. She gave speeches of mostly nonsensical rambling, but sometimes it was tangible and the meaning was about loving humans or being present for it. Or to be present in the past with memories, which she was allowed to do as an old person. She talked about honesty. To prove her honesty, she let someone install a regular floor so she could have a wheelchair. They left a square foot of the cattle grid flooring in a corner near the art supplies. The exhibit wasn't exactly strict and simply about anti-homelessness architecture anymore.

Finally she seemed content with being alive. No more stubborn illogical dedication to work, no more emotionless self rationale. It could've been the effect of time, age's wisdom, love and respect for Eileen, trauma, her medications (which were delivered weekly), or just an unreasoned decision. It could have been all of these things and it likely was.

A few of her fans helped her install new grass, which she threw water at from the window with her historical bucket. She let people into the house through the new back door, and even answered reporters' questions to the best of her aged mind's ability.

But there was one question Dorothy could not answer.

I asked her once, towards the end, "Why did it have to be you, Dorothy?"

I guess it was an answer that no longer made sense to the new and improved Dorothy Van Hodgkins, because she went into a bout of dissonant mumbling. The question broke er cognition. I think that the regrets she might've buried worsened her case. I never asked a question like that again.

With time as this cognitive dissonance grew, reporters and tourists stopped coming to see her. I kept visiting, but now partly out of pity and obligation. As more time was spent for Dorothy and I, pity and obligation eventually turned violently into something like friendship.

We became as close as the reporter and the community hermit could be. I even ended up feeding food into her mouth with a spoon sometimes. That feeling felt even more important to me than when she told me that she lived there. I learned a thing or two from her about loving humans during each phase of her life.

Sometimes I would walk around sprinkling her grass with water from the bucket. The grass is green if you make it that way.

I remember when she died. It was I who found her, two weeks before her birthday in 2000. I was headed there somewhat early in the morning, and I was bringing some sandwiches because I knew the history of the day. I remember the walk vividly. A little brisk, but already beginning to warm. And the clouds blended with the atmosphere like a big snow globe. There we were, in it. All the morning humans, all in the snow globe.

She was laying in the grass, where the frost had just changed to dew, all by herself beside her wheelchair, her glassy eyes still looking up at the clouds. Dorothy died happy, and she left behind the content look on her face for all to see.

I called her doctor on my cellular. The ambulance came to pick her up. Responders, knowing her somewhat public background, suspected it was intentional with the aid of opiates. They were wrong. The labs came back with a 0% concentration of any substance at all in her blood, not that that mattered. It could've to her, maybe.

Either way, she knew that it was her time to go, and it was. She just so happened to find her way to joy without her pain medication. Joy was in her last moments; in helplessly getting spoon fed, watching the nurse's children play on the architecture like a jungle gym, knowing accurately that this time, Eileen was waiting to see her (and the results of the project).

Stay out of my Home still stands on the side of the road as a monument for housing rights and public architectural regulations. I visit every spring and eat a sandwich on the (mowed) lawn.

Her words sit comfortably in many hearts now. I've recently replaced the cattle grid in mine.

Dorothy Van Hodgkins lives here.