I came in through the bathroom window

Do memories become any less tangible, any less vivid if there is no physical frame of reference for them? Particularly memories of a place where you’ve lived? I’m about to find out again.

First it was Beaver Lodge, where I lived with six other guys and an unending stream of house guests from the summer of 1978 to the spring of 1979, during my junior year of college in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The place where Johnny’s Goat smashed through the garage door one day. It’s long gone.

Now it’s Hose and Tone’s old house. It’s being torn down to make room for a gas station, convenience store and other stuff. I never lived there, but I certainly lived it up there. We had a lot of fun at that little house on Green Bay’s east side.

My friends Hose and Tone, brothers, lived there in the early ’80s. It was all they — or we — really needed. Couch. Fridge. Small black-and-white TV. Stereo. You came in the back door, through the kitchen and dining room. The front porch was used only to buffer the sound from the four-lane street out front.

We were single guys in our mid-20s. We watched a lot of basketball, listened to a lot of tunes, drank a lot of beer.

One night, I climbed in the bathroom window at Hose and Tone’s house after we’d made the rounds of the neighborhood taverns. There were at least 10 blue-collar bars within five blocks. One of them was Bill and Tess’ (Mostly Tess’).

We didn’t need a designated driver. We walked.

One night, we got the munchies and poured chicken noodle soup over toast on a hot plate. Whether that followed window diving, none of us can remember.

There always was music. Hose and Tone liked Elvis. That’s when and where I started digging Elvis. That also was when MTV and “Night Flight” brought music videos to TV. Where else would we have heard “Ghost in the Machine,” or Flock of Seagulls or our particular faves, Flash and the Pan?

Or this, which might account for the photo above. We dug the song and the video, the latter for obvious reasons.

“Party Train,” the Gap Band, 1983, from “Gap Gold: The Best of the Gap Band,” a 1985 compilation LP. Originally from “Gap Band V: Jammin’,” 1983. Both are apparently out of print, but the song is available digitally.