A house of ill repute is a whorehouse. A house with a whole pile of whores. Kind of like the playboy mansion, except dirtier, grungier, and without Hugh Hefner.
When I was in my mid-twenties I lived in this awesome house with two of my best friends. We’ll call it The Spadina House. We had parties at every major holiday juncture (Christmas, Halloween, birthdays, remembrance day, pasta day, day of the dead, day of awesome) and they’d always involve decorations and dressing up and massive amounts of food. Sometimes our parties revolved around our favourite TV shows, like Six Feet Under and Boston Public and Monty Python. Sometimes they’d be after parties, like after coming home from the bar super loaded and it would be a party just for the three of us and we’d make super sticky Kraft dinner or itchy ban noodles (no soup – just the noodles and the dried packaged seasoning) and we’d listen to Hawksley Workman and burn candles and dream about the future.
We weren’t whores at the time, but we had a lot of fun. And I think a whorehouse is kind of like a fun house. Or a creepy house of mirrors. Like, fun in the sense that you get to have sex with hot hot ladies. Creepy house of mirrors in the sense that you usually see sides of yourself that you aren’t always comfortable facing. So maybe, in that sense, our little university hub of a house was kind of whorey. I think we all went though strange personal emotional transformations. Plus we had a lot of cats. Our landlord hated cats, but he let us have the two that we came with. By the last summer we lived there, we were up to six cats. The two original cats, a pregnant cat we were cat sitting (whom we didn’t know was pregnant and whose owner left the country to teach English overseas and abandoned her pregger cat), the two kittens that cat had, plus another cat that we found outside of the shoppers a few blocks away who ended up having five dead and bloody kittens a few days later and promptly ate them. So it was a bit nutty. Perhaps it was more of a crazy cat lady house. Would that count as a kind of house of ill repute? I think so.
We all grow up in this kind of house and we all do most of our personal growth in situations that are kind of whorey and mildly dysfunction. We’re taught the most about ourselves and humans in general in houses of ill repute. Plus, we have the most fun. Now I live in an apartment. I have only one cat. Sometimes it gets lonely.
1. That’s no regular house. That’s a house of ill repute. A whorehouse. And, like, our basketball is totally stuck in the backyard.
2. I totally grew up in a house of ill repute. You know, Grandma’s homestead.
RELATED TERMS: