This Be the Place: The Hobbit Hole

This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place.

The studio apartment, affectionately dubbed The Hobbit Hole, was impossibly small, and I wasn’t sure I could make it work. Space was at such a premium that it had a marine toilet, a setup in which the shower and toilet share the same cramped corner. During the walkthrough, Wayne—the property manager, and a friend of mine—gestured to a sunken patch of earth in the garden and said, “There’s a buried fountain there.”

For starry-eyed me, this felt like a sign. I had been reading Anaïs Nin since I was 15, and in the opening pages of her famous diary, she writes romantically about her home in Louveciennes, a small suburb outside Paris. It was there, while unearthing a buried fountain, that she felt the house—and herself—come alive. I longed for that kind of transformation—for a life steeped in poetry and inspiration.

I turned to Wayne and said, “I’ll take it!”

I had met Wayne years earlier while waiting in line at the Tampa Bay International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. I liked him immediately: a perfect, queer mix of hippie, artist, intellectual, and free thinker. He mentioned he lived in Sulphur Springs, a neighborhood northeast from downtown, and I told him I had just read that Jack Kerouac once lived there in the late ’60s. Wayne’s face lit up. “That’s my building,” he said, launching into stories about literary pilgrims making their way to his doorstep, and how a former tenant claimed Kerouac used to bury bottles in the backyard. 

Wayne’s partner, Tom, had bought Kerouac’s former residence in 1973, while he was in architecture school. Eventually, he also acquired two neighboring properties. The result: a three-unit apartment building with large Florida bungalows on each side, all sharing a sprawling backyard that stretched to the Hillsborough River. Over time, as the neighborhood declined, they surrounded the property with a high fence and dense greenery. It became known simply as The Compound.

The Compound hosted a rotating cast of queers. As the property manager, Wayne earned the nickname Anna Madrigal, after the beloved landlady in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. And like her, he was every bit as wise and magical. Following in her fictional footsteps, he even taped a joint to my front door when I moved in on April 1, 2000. It was the start of National Poetry month, and that felt significant to me.

Life on The Compound was endlessly entertaining. My building mates were Tom and Wayne, who lived in Kerouac’s former apartment above my small studio. Sanford, a long-haired blond with a shaggy, slightly Mark Twainish mustache, also rented a unit in The Compound. At first, he was leery of me. He was a voracious reader but a staunch classicist, which I was not. One evening, though, we discovered a shared love of Quentin Crisp and bonded while swapping our favorite quips.

Another unexpected connection to the literary life came via the elderly, bohemian woman next door. She had once lived in New York, she told me, and in the 1940s, Anaïs Nin hired her to type portions of her diary. She eventually left Anaïs for a higher paycheck.

Then there were Captain Mike and Fruitloops, a handy queer couple who lived in the bungalow. Fruitloops’s double entendre moniker came from his love of the children’s breakfast cereal. Captain Mike got his name after building his own pontoon boat, which he decked out with a screened-in porch and fairy lights. He christened it Priscilla, Queen of the River, painting the name in bold letters along the side. The pair’s “river cruises” were legendary, slow-floating parties up and down the Hillsborough River. Sometimes, the Gaelic band Juniper Trio provided live music; more often, Priscilla simply chugged along, plumes of pot smoke billowing like the stack of a steam engine.

The Hillsborough River was home to manatees—lots of them. From Priscilla's deck, one could watch their slow, hulking bodies drift just beneath the surface. March through September was manatee mating season, Wayne told me, and it happened right at the bend in the river, in our backyard. What he didn’t mention was that manatee mating is neither graceful nor quiet. It’s loud, clumsy, and chaotic—so much so that, on some occasions, I wished them extinct.

The manatees weren’t the only ones having sex at The Compound. One night at a club, I met a cute guy named Allen, with a mohawk. We got to talking, and when I mentioned I lived in Sulphur Springs, he casually said his stepdad used to live there. We made out on the dance floor, then went back to my place. 

My loft bedroom was nothing more than a large platform you had to crawl onto from a ladder. Up there, I managed to fit a queen mattress, a small nightstand, and a bookcase. The mattress sat directly on the floor, and my headboard was just a mirror affixed to the wall with two brackets. Sex partners loved that mirror. Their watching themselves often reminded me of Nin’s erotic story “The Veiled Woman” from Delta of Venus, in which the character’s real self and persona interplay when she looks into the mirror.

After Allen and I had sex in the loft, he showered in my tiny marine bathroom while we talked about the apartment. I told him it used to be called The Hobbit Hole.

Allen froze. “What?”

He stepped out of the shower, still dripping wet, and started pacing around my apartment, looking at it like he was seeing a ghost. Then he said, “My stepdad used to live here.”

The next morning, I asked Tom about it. Allen was right: his stepdad had lived there in the early ’80s. In fact, he was the one who constructed the built-in bookshelves. Tom even remembered young Allen as a kid, running around The Compound.

On the first Sunday of every month, Captain Mike hosted brunch at The Compound. What began as a small gathering—fellowship after an AIDS support group—quickly grew. At first, it was 15 people, then 30, then countless more. Mike cooked for all of them. Over time, the brunch expanded beyond those living with HIV, welcoming their friends, family, and loved ones.

It became an all-day affair, with nearly 300 people passing through the kitchen, dropping off a suggested donation, and spilling out into the backyard. We all pitched in: setting up tables and chairs, cracking eggs in the kitchen, making sure there was enough coffee and conversation to go around. Some Sundays, I’d wake up late, still hazy from partying the night before, stumble out of my apartment, and find hundreds of queer people in my backyard. Wandering into the kitchen, I’d grab a plate and fall into the easy rhythm of the gathering.

Only recently did I learn that the “love offering” didn’t cover the cost of feeding so many. To make up the difference, Tom quietly picked up the tab, ensuring that no one went hungry and that the burgeoning community continued strengthening.

The fountain Wayne had alluded to during our walkthrough, was buried beneath layers of earth and time. I didn’t excavate it right away, but the night before I did, I met a new neighbor, David. He was a couple years older than me—blonde, sexy, straight. He told me he was on parole. After we talked for a bit, I learned he had long been violating his parole by missing hearings, owning a firearm, and using heroin. The morning I was going to work on the fountain, David stopped by, offering to help. I wanted to go about it alone. Unearthing the fountain felt personal, and I didn’t want to do this meaningful task with a straight man. But it was also a daunting task, so I said yes.

We spent a long day sweating in the heat of a humid summer, taking off our shirts, digging, talking. David told me about his time in jail, and every moment of it was erotic—something Anaïs Nin would have written about. We sat outside at the end of the day, drinking beers and admiring our work: a fountain filled with clear water. Inevitably, we ended up in bed. It was his first time, and the start of an affair I told no one about. I was afraid that talking about it would break our connection. Every moment with David made me feel as if I was inside an arthouse movie—one that would be screened at the festival where I first met Wayne.

Months later, David got arrested. I went to his place—the door still unlocked—shortly after to take one of his shirts as a memento. While he was in jail, he’d mail me letters and sketches of the tattoos he was practicing. In one letter, he said he had been having “Romanesque thoughts” about me.

Those years weren’t just filled with joy; they held great loss, too. Residents gathered in the backyard the morning of 9/11, trying to make sense of the unimaginable. Wayne lost his twin brother to cancer. He moved his mother into one of the units, where hospice came in, and we watched her slowly fade. We were all living on the edge: artistically, queerly, and with an extravagance beyond our means. We began spending holidays together, not just out of proximity, but out of preference—as family. We celebrated each other’s big and small wins, marking the milestones of our unconventional lives.

It could have been the idealism and artistic exploration of someone in their early 20s, but I credit The Compound with the energy, enthusiasm, and creativity of that time. It was there, at the age of 25, that I published my first book. When I left The Compound after six years to move to LA, I didn’t just cry—I bawled. I knew, with absolute certainty, that what I had experienced there was something I would never experience again. Maybe this was how some people felt leaving their childhood homes. I never wanted to leave The Compound; I just wanted it to exist somewhere else, in some other city.

In the decades that followed, I came to see my time at The Compound as its own excavation. It was my wild, queer apprenticeship. I had arrived as a poet still finding his voice, a person still becoming. And in that apartment by the river, surrounded by literary history, queers, and dreamers, I found something vital: a life rich with poetry. A chosen family. A way of seeing the world that I would carry forward. We loved fiercely, celebrated loudly, and grieved in the quiet spaces between. At The Compound, I discovered that chosen family is no less real than the one we’re born into, that art and community can stitch together a life. And, most importantly, that once something like that is uncovered, it never disappears.