CityView Magazine

6 | March /April 2019 T M C F A D Y E N ' S M U S I N G S $75 a Month BY BILL MCFADYEN T here is no arguing that it was indeed a very cool condo. Eighth floor, facing west toward Molokai and the sunset, and looking down on a coral reef below the surface a hundred yards off the beach. But then, everything on Maui bordered on beautiful. Still, $900 a month in 1984 was big rent. e only way to mathematically tackle it on the wages made by this busboy/prep cook was through division. Nine hundred dollars divided by four people was much more manageable. As I climbed the restaurant's hierarchical ladder toward waiting tables and tending bar, I was able to divide by three and finally by two. Still, there were permanent stripes le on my shoulders from paying rent. When I returned to Fayetteville in 1985, I was determined to be able to designate a higher percentage of my earnings to things not associated with my leasing commitments. I began the quest for affordable housing in September 1985. In November, I happened upon my old basketball coach, Big Al Prewitt. He had a vacant house on the compound across from the eighth fairway of Cypress Lakes golf course where he kept his horses and where many a high school bonfire had burned on weekends in the '70s. It was the house at the bottom of the hill always known as e Shack. It required only a small percentage of my Davidson education to deduce that anything named "e Shack" was likely to be economical. In what turned out to be one of my life's finest negotiations, I was able to beat Big Al down 25 percent off his initial asking price. I moved in under a handshake month-to-month contract at $75 per month. It so endured for about 24 months. e Shack had everything a young bachelor needed. Electricity, though the fuse box looked like it would broadcast "e Shadow" at night. Indoor plumbing replete with warmish water. A refrigerator made popular in "e Honeymooners." A roof. Two doors. Windows in the main room. ere was a central HVAC system, but it was a Hobo – meaning it worked only occasionally. e window unit was more reliable. e Blackbart wood heater was suitable for winter in the Yukon, thus in a typical North Carolina January, you used the Blackbart and ran the window unit at the same time. e bedroom had no windows, so when you closed the door to sleep, there was darkness like in the bowels of a cave. Clocks required either batteries for which one had to pay or reliable electricity. Having neither, the best way for me to tell if it was morning was to lean out of the bed and look at the back wall three cypress boards over, where there was a slight gap that revealed sunlight once day had dawned. e neighbors were fantastic. My pre-school childhood pal Tom Prewitt (son of the Landlord) lived in the Rankin House up the hill. He roomed with Tom Hollinshed, who had grown up a year before and a block away from me in Vanstory Hills. David Drake, a chum from high school, lived in e Log Cabin on top of the hill. We took hippie baths outside in lounge chairs to take pressure off the septic drain fields. Tom Prewitt had a black lab named Bear that would fetch cold cans out of the refrigerator. We knew the words to every Jimmy Buffet song and proved it almost nightly. We had a pet armadillo for about three days that David imported from Texas via his carry-on luggage. (It did not thrive.) Marlene Floyd, the prettiest

• Cover