The Black Houses of Olympia

If you ever happen to be in Olympia Washington, where I grew up, keep your eyes peeled for black houses. There are at least five black houses, some say upwards of ten or twelve and the number may very well have increased. I've never counted. I haven't even seen all of them but you definitely know one when you see one. They're all black, top to bottom, window sills, doors, any porches or railings, all painted black. Some are matte finish, some glossy. They are fairly simple architecturally--usually two stories, peaked roof, with some kind of porch in front and made of wood. I believe there may be one condo. All of the houses are older and a little run down if not a lot. They're honestly spooky, some more than others, but they do have a way of putting a little hint of doom in your day, enough to make you look over your shoulder and expect a crow just by passing one by.

Dennis owns the black houses. He is a dentist and a satanist. He is a satanic dentist named Dennis. Dennis the Satanic Dentist. You can't make this shit up. He is known to be an asshole and a notorious slumlord. He's younger than you'd think, younger than I always picture, probably around forty. I remember hearing about the Black Houses for the first time and immediately thinking of an orthodontist in town to whom all of my friends were sent when it was time for braces. They all condemned him as an evil, sadist, though they wouldn't have known the word at the time. They described all kinds of oral tortures involving gagging plaster and metal aparatus that I was lucky to miss out on, having teeth "with character" as my mom called them, but no major structural problems. This orthodontist's name was Dr. Grim. When I heard about the satanic dentist I thought, "This must be the same guy! How Perfect!" Unfortunately, they are not one in the same, but their mythological statures as distillations of that lurking "darkness out in these old woods", and their penchants for light sadism still causeme to conflate the two and I like to think that at least they might know each other...through the tooth biz or maybe through a Satanic reading group or something.

I say at least five black houses because it is said that if you plot the positions of each black house on a map of Olympia and connect the dots, the houses spell out a pentagram. I've never done this and I'm not sure anyone ever has but it fits in nicely with the rest of their myth.

According to hearsay, as most of this story is and will be, Dennis bought rundown houses in Olympia, mostly sticking to the East Side of town. Does East have some special significance in Satanism? "The Witches of Eastwick". I just googled "satanism and east direction" and turned up some great stuff about how you can map out pentagrams in Washington D.C. too, how fun.
Anyway, Dennis would buy one of these houses cheap and paint it completely black so that he could then drive down the price of real estate in that neighborhood, buy more houses and paint those houses black. What was the real motivation? To acquire as much Olympia real estate as possible? Or something more sinister...to spread his goth vision, to paint IT black, to mirror the presumed blackness of his soul, to make tangible and plain the otherwise unseen forces of evil ? It's kind of a chicken or the egg thing. Maybe he was just a clever businessman who happened to be really into Satan. Hard to say.

Whether it was part of his grand plan for the soul of humanity/Olympia or not, he then rented the houses to young bohemian types, probably because who else would be interested in living in a completely black house and willing to deal with a literally Satanic landlord? The kids that lived in the Black Houses were usually artists, musicans, activists or a combination of these with well developed DIY punk rock aesthetics. They threw great parties.

I did not live in a black house. My house, The Phoenix House, was a flaky beigy-puce house with a giant blackberry vine perpetually sprouting out of either it or the holly bush next to it. Its owned was an elderly man whose name I can't remember though I wrote rent checks to him each month for two and a half years. We never saw him except when he came down from Puyallup to haul his eighty year old body up a 50 ft. ladder to patch the spot in our roof where rain leaked down into one of the upstairs bedrooms. We would always offer to climb up there ourselves but he always refused us. I assume we did not appear like the types that would know how to patch a roof. I remember feeling slightly superior to the denizens of the calibre punk house that the Black Houses occupied. My roommates were older, we vacuumed, we partied but it never seemed to reach the slurring, mud-smeared tutu, drinking out of giant plastic liquor bottles, blotto level that some houses achieved. I also remember feeling inferior to the kids who lived in these houses. They always seemed to be living at a higher intensity than I could muster. I felt pretty rock n' roll but they totally had me beat. They were way more punk rock than me.

The only Black House that I remember ever being in was "The Track House", named for its position near the train tracks. They threw great parties.

The tracks began in the log yards of the port, ran past the glass piles, through downtown, through the overgrown yard of The Track House, through a tunnel burrowed under Capital Blvd, then along the edge of Capital lake past the old brewery and on into Tumwater. I walked through this tunnel with Clair and Julia one Summer during a bizarre convergence of Lakefair (the annual town fair w/parade, rides, food, and Lakefair princesses populated by a lot of people who didn't spend time in downtown Olympia) and Yo-Yo A Go-Go (an indie rock music festival full of greasy-haired, stripe T-shirt, Black high water pants w/ white belt wearing, sallow-faced artsy types.) We walked our sixteen-year-old bodies in the sunny Lakefair end of the tunnel and out the still sunny end nearer Yo-Yo A Go-Go where a drug deal was taking place. I remember hitting the midpoint of the tunnel, the darkest spot, where no direct light could reach from either end, where we could no longer pick out the glint of bottles and cans along the sides of the tracks. Someone could very easily have been crouching in the musty dark on either side and we wouldn't have been able to distinguish their figures from the tunnel walls. We found out later from our concerned parents, to whom we had for some reason related our adventure, that a man had been bludgeoned to death in the same tunnel a few years previous. Newspaper articles confirm this fact and add to it that he was an Asian man in his 30's and it was a hammer. We should not have been in that tunnel.

Apparently, Dennis lived in his own Black House. Someone had been inside and reported seeing an iron maiden setup in one corner of the gothic styled living room as decoration. Maybe it was Emmett who told me. Emmett was a friend of mine from high school. He was a friend of my friend Ally who I had met in Drivers Ed and who took Clair and I to our first Transgender Film Festival at Evergreen. Emmett gave me my first Bikini Kill CD in the cafeteria at lunch one afternoon and pretty soon I started seeing Ally and Emmett who went to Olympia high school and their friends Gabe, Sam, Mona and Allison who went to the high school across town pretty regularly. Later, when we had moved out of parents houses and into houses with names like "Phoenix House", "ABC House"and "Red House", Emmett lived in one of the Black Houses. He is probably the source of most of my information about them. According to Emmett, Dennis was such a terrible landlord that at one point, the residents of all of the Black Houses banned together and began holding organized meetings to what? I don’t know what they would have discussed. What to DO about Dennis? How to confront him? How to report him to the authorities? I’m not sure what their complaints were, but they must have been significant.

However, it is important to know that this is a very typical and common occurrence in Olympia: the holding of meetings to discuss possible actions against such and such power that be. I detect cynicism in here. I did feel a bit cynical about these kinds of activist gatherings at the time. People of a certain community, to which I loosely belonged (many factions within and not all in agreement) 18-35ish, creative, food co-op shopping, food not bombs patrons and organizers, politically conscious, punk-inspired etc. etc.—that ilk, were big into organizing and often it was awesome and sometimes it was misdirected. When people were on, great things happened: indie record labels, independent film festivals, Yo-Yo A Go-Go, Ladyfest, Homo A Go-Go, letterpress printing, ecstatic life affirming rock shows etc. etc. but also, Olympia was kind of idyllic in a lot of ways in its liberal bubble and small with small town problems and sometimes people wanted to get up-in-arms about something, anything, and we would blow things out of proportion because the proportions of the town were small and events needed to fit to size.

For instance, my ex-boyfriend Keith was once approached by an acquaintance and food co-op employee and told “I could kick you out of here for wearing that,” when he came in to buy his organic carrots and Veggie Bootie wearing a thrift store Harley Davidson T-shirt whose bald eagle was depicted holding an American flag in one claw and a confederate flag in the other. The confederate flag was the issue. Somehow this detail became enough of a political priority for this woman to approach Keith and make him feel like never coming back.

Were the meetings of the black house residents inspired by this same tendency? Maybe. Were they right to be dissatisfied with the care of their landlord and to take action? Certainly. Were the meetings productive, resulting in change? I’m not sure. What I do know is that somehow Dennis found out about the meetings and sent spies.

At this point I have run through of my personal stock of black house lore. Lets now refer to my friend Sam. As I said, I've known Sam since highschool. Sam is poet now, mixing in the same poetic milieu that I often do and I consider him a very reliable source.

Okay first, Sam says his name was Dwayne. Dwayne the Satanic Dentist. I can’t tell which is better: Dennis or Dwayne. Sam also confirms that Dwayne would buy houses and paint them black but adds the detail that he would “paint them at night without warning and often dripped paint all over people’s gardens.”

Weird, granted, but I want to know whether he dripped black paint on people’s gardens on purpose, like painting the roses black, “We’re painting the roses black!” or whether it was just a product of painting at night. Also, whose gardens were these? How cavalier was this guy?

The next piece of information Sam gives us compliments Emmett’s story about the black house resident meetings. According to Sam, Dwayne "sent a pig’s head in a bag to the porches of all his properties in the middle of the night.” Pigs heads.

I want to know how this was done. Did he have them delivered by a service? Did he hire people to deliver them? Does Dwayne have minions? I have so many questions.

That's all I know. That's all I've heard. If anyone is feeling up to it, if anyone has the good old fashioned DIY chutzpah to do it, I would like to recommend that someone take on the task of becoming a Black House historian. I'm thinking oral histories, photography, data collection and investigative journalism. I would help you write the grant.

For more information on The Black Houses of Olympia, I recommend googling “black houses Olympia” or “the dark dentist”. There is a Myspace group for people who have lived in the Black Houses. For my part, I will try to collect more information and pledge to share it with you here.