In The Beginning...

I guess every small college town has one. It was the place for all those people who don’t quite fit. They’re not athletic, not popular, not rich, not accepted by the mainstream. They find each other by some mystical power and form a fraternity of their own. These are the weirdoes, the odd balls, the neo-hippies…, and sometimes just your average Joe. The people your mother didn’t warned you about but should have.

In the small town of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, home of Northeastern State University, was the Commune, an old decaying rental house close to the college campus, shared by four guys. As the name implies, at any point in time it was home to a community of people that held two things in common—music and drugs. I don’t think you could have found a more diverse collection of people anywhere else in the area. Included were a couple of homosexuals, some drama students (who were known to break out in show tunes at the drop of a hat), local musicians, your stereotypical Gen-Xers, underground activists, petty drug dealers, and on and on. You get the picture.

Things were not going well for me at the time. I had dropped out of high school the year before to pursue dreams of playing music professionally, but I was losing interest in the band I was playing with. I had also tried to find a job so I could move out of my mother’s house, but it seemed like I could never get myself motivated enough to get the ball rolling. When it came to things like getting a driver’s license and registering for the Selective Service, I just couldn’t seem to find the time or energy to do those things even though I spent most of my time doing nothing. I would sometimes leave home, not telling anybody where I was going, and just walk with no real destination in mind. With all I needed to be doing, I wasted my days away.

It was late January 1995 when I was wandering around town without purpose and ended up at the Commune. Being around noon, I didn’t expect to find anyone at home, so I wasn’t surprised when no one answered the door after I knocked. Just as I turned to leave, the door swung open and Greg, one of the people who actually lived there, peered at me with bleary eyes. It was obvious I had woken him up. We were good friends so, despite waking him up, he was glad to see me. The other guys who lived there and most of the people who hung out there were all enrolled in the college. Classes were in full swing, so nobody else was home. We heard a car pull up. It was Fred, another one of the guys who lived there and a few other people. Out of the others, I only knew one, Katie, who hung out at the Commune regularly. The other three I hadn’t seen before but later found out their names were Heather, Luke, and Sarah.

I’m not really sure what caught my eye, but as soon as I saw Sarah I knew she was special. I wasn’t sure why. She was pretty but not in a bomb shell way, yet there was something attractive about her besides her looks. She was small, maybe 5’5, with long sandy blond hair covered with a baseball cap. She wore baggy blue jeans and a tee-shirt with a button down flannel shirt over it. It was almost exactly what I was wearing. She was a tom-boy—a beautiful tom-boy. I had never been a believer in love at first sight, but I had felt something that first time I saw her. I liked it.