I Shall Never Live With a Female Again: Part Two

Wrench not pictured.

The Prozac Jitters
 
I had worked at the same company with S about a year when we decided to live together. She seemed a nice enough person, with a good sense of humor.

     She had been engaged, but the fiance had inexplicably moved out one day and canceled the wedding plans. She was distraught and, paying too much rent for a Brooklyn floor-through, wanted something more economical. I sympathized with her over the disappearance of the boyfriend. 
     "How could he abandon you like that?" I asked, indignant. It seemed capricious and cruel; later, I thought it showed a discerning nature and more than a lick of sense. He had legged it, and fast. When he broke up with her, S had idly threatened to stab him with a kitchen knife. 

     When S left her old apartment, I took the opportunity to let an apartment-hunting couple of mine know about it. They visited, approved, and agreed to take it. After S arrived with bags and boxes to our new apartment, she asked if I would accompany her back to her old place to "pick up a few things,"  such as her bedding, and a few pairs of shoes. Odd that she left them out of the moving truck, I thought, but agreed to help. When we arrived, I received my first harbinger of doom. S waded right into the apartment, through piles of wrinkled clothing, bags of half-eaten potato chips, cat toys, sponges, utensils, and sacks of garbage. I stood there, appalled, as she scooped up a few pairs of shoes. A couple of them spilled out of her arms as she shuffled back toward the door.

     S, you see, was the kind of girl who always appeared impeccably dressed, ironed, and accessorized. I had never had a hint of the chaos under the veneer.

     "Things got out of control while I was packing," she confessed. Very well. I had visited her in the apartment a few months before, but remembered nothing like this. Perhaps it was just an aberration.

     She gathered up whatever she could carry and gave me the garbage bucket and a mop to tote back to the new apartment. They looked suspiciously unused.

     "I guess you're going to come back and clean up this stuff?" I ventured.

     "Not at all." she replied. "The landlord will take care of it."

     A few days later, I received a phone call from my friends who had moved in. The apartment was supposed to have been left "broom clean." They had spent a full day, along with the landlord, toting sacks of discarded possessions and rotten food to the street. The refrigerator was filled with half-eaten bags of stale Cheese Doodles. Not only that, but S had left two big cardboard boxes stuffed full of her personal diaries. My friends were kind enough to hang onto them. (About two years later, when S still had not made a move to reclaim them, my friends cracked a couple and read a couple of tiresome, whiny entries. They were then chucked unceremoniously in the trash.)

     S, however, had brought plenty to our new apartment. Three cats, with all their accessories, moved right in. The place was lousy with cats. Her former fiance, a poet, had abandoned a full library of books in his haste to escape her. About 30 boxes of them sat in our living room. And her clothes collection was astounding. It came in big black garbage bags, on clothing racks, on hangers stuffed into boxes. Everything was impossibly wrinkled and, I soon discovered, would be summarily dry cleaned--at what enormous cost I can't fathom.

     After a couple of weeks in the new apartment, S still had not made a single effort to put away any of her belongings. They filled the common rooms from floor to ceiling, spilled out into the hallways, glutted the exits. The whole place was one goddamn fire trap. Over the piles, the three cats prowled about, yowling and urinating wantonly.

     Enraged, I demanded that S raise herself off the couch and do some work. She would tote a load of clothes up to her lair, then collapse on the sofa and smoke languidly, watching me under half-lidded eyes as I strained with more of the load.  After about 3 months of steady work, all the materials were contained. Her own room was a study in chaos: great, black garbage bags of clothes were piled around her bed like a barricade, and the clothing racks sagged under the weight. S had become so enslaved by fashion that it had literally imprisoned her; she lay in there like some troglodyte harpy, cawing out demands and complaints. She was so doped up on Prozac and other unidentified substances that she never got out of bed before 11 a.m.--especially on work days. Around her bed, an alarming supply of prescription bottles lay opened and half-spilled, presumably so she could snack on them in the night. I also noticed what I thought was a crusty old vibrator lying amongst the detritus, but I won't speak of that.

     Sometime early in our relationship, we acquired a third roommate. G moved in , full of good will. During his first week, one of the wretched cats urinated on his new leather jacket, which he had been unfortunate enough to leave on his floor.

     Despite the enormous number of feline presences in the home, S cleaned their litter box sporadically, at best. The cats rebelled. Occasionally, we would find little cat doody surprises on the kitchen floor. G and I made a pact--we would not clean the things up, no matter how terrible, because it would set a bad precedent. As a result, sometimes the poo would remain on the linoleum until it encrusted into a kind of awful museum piece. When we tactlessly mentioned the "little accidents," S would mutter and growl under her breath.

     S spent most of her evenings sprawled on the couch, a cigarette in her lips, the remote in hand. I seemed destined for weak-willed, pasty roommates with no hope of social life. A nimbus of cigarette ash and food products formed on the carpet--my carpet--under her head; the stain is there still. When I returned home from a night out with friends, S would fix a lazy, lizardlike eye on me from her recumbent position. The effect was downright creepy.

     Pretty soon, we began to notice that a pervasive odor of cat urine was infecting the entire place. The cats seemed to favor a dank, brown rug that had been laid down over the stairs and in the front hall sometime in the 1960s. One afternoon, G. and I tore up the entire carpet, picking out nails with a pair of pliers, and hoisted the sodden mass outdoors. The wood floor that was revealed was in decent shape. During our labors, S returned home, and fell into a foul humor as we had not asked her "permission" before the undertaking.

     Money also became an issue. S and I had initially agreed to share the grocery shopping. This changed after I got wise to her little scheme. At the store, she always seemed to have an empty wallet. I was constantly asking her to reimburse me for food, cleaning supplies, and other household necessities. So jittery with Prozac that she could barely write, S would grudgingly pen a check after some weeks of requests.

     During this time, she was set up by a sympathetic coworker on a blind date. On only their second time out, her purse was stolen. The date, acting as a gentleman, offered her his credit card until she could get her cards replaced. During the next few weeks, S engaged in a maniacal spending frenzy. She returned home with pairs of new shoes to add to her growing pile, and wallets stuffed full of cash-advance money--none of which, I noticed sourly, went to repay me for all her past debts. After at least $1,000 of madcap spending, S went to the bank machine and discovered she had maxed out the poor fellow's card. She explained to us, without a trace of remorse, that as his mother had recently died, he had a number of expenses on the card for the funeral and the gravestone. She seemed slightly put out that her ready cash flow had dried up. By this time, the poor man was so repulsed by her that he insisted she get out of his life--and forget about the money.

     For some time, S had taken to applying her makeup and dressing in my room after I left for work in the mornings. Her room was such a disaster that such actions were impossible. Although I kept my door bolted shut to keep the infernal cats out, S would often forget and leave it open behind her. After a weekend away, I returned home and headed for my room. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. I patted the bed, and realized that it was a sea of cat piss--soaked through right down to the mattress. G returned home to find the sheets, featherbed, and blankets cascading down the stairs, while my tortured screams echoed through the house. To add fuel to my fire, I discovered that S had eaten a large portion of my prescription allergy medication. She must die.

     S, when confronted, suggested that perhaps the cats were angry because I had abandoned them for the weekend. She also recommended that I kept my door locked. With that, she slouched out of the room, forgetting to offer to clean my bedding. I did eventually wrench a check out of her to pay for the exorbitant cost of cleaning the featherbed (no dry cleaner within a 50-mile radius would touch it), but the situation led to the final dissolution of our friendship, as it were. After accusing G and I of a cruel collusion against her and the cats, she elected to move out. I made myself scarce while she packed. Afterward, G and I cleaned every trace of her foul presence from the apartment. I noticed that the little toad had somehow managed to pack all my music notebooks and my entire box of tools--two things which she would never use in her lifetime. She claimed she didn't have them, but I think the real reason is that she never unpacked at her new apartment. I can picture her there now, surrounded by cardboard boxes and piles of faeces.

     After she was gone, we did find one more memento of S: we made an odd discovery of a collection of giant x-rays of her skull and pelvis, stuffed behind the couch. Sadly, there was no silhouette of a metal wrench to be found that might explain the mystery of her troubled nature. Somewhat terrified, we pried up the cheap wooden boards in the dining room wall and hid the x-rays there, where they will no doubt be found by some future archaeologist.  

The Houses Have Eyes

Yesterday, I had cause to visit a neighborhood not far from my own to deliver some wayward mail that occasionally gets misdirected to our address. It was on my way to the grocery store anyway, and I figured I'd do the residents a good turn since all of the three siblings that share the house have a disablity of one kind or another. Indeed, they are quite likeable people. But they are also very strange people.

This is the kind of neighborhood that seems fairly sweet and sleepy upon arrival, but soon certain things pop to the attention. One, there are peculiar mixed-breed dogs either tied up in yards or wandering about, looking like they were drawn by a four-year-old child. Occasionally, there are peculiar humans, also seemingly the work of a young artist with a tendency toward rotund, rather than straight, stick figures. Their heads shoot up as soon as you park your car, and their expressions are not what I would deem friendly. If you were in the South, you would definitely be hearing creepy fiddle music. But, this is Westchester, NY, so the fiddles are stashed away. Then there are the ominous eyes that peer at you from behind curtains that are quickly twitched back into place as soon as you turn around.

I tweren't scared, but the place was unsettling. I got to the house where I needed to deliver my mail and spotted K, tooling around in his driveway in a wheelchair and so hopped up on steroids he could barely stop talking to take a puff from his ever-present cigarette. Then out stepped P, his sister, who invited me inside for the "grand tour." Recently recovered from a bout of "the cancer," P was looking pretty healthy, especially compared to her brother. A third sibling--whose mail I was delivering--was not at home. "That idiot," said P when I asked after him. "He's an idiot." (This brother actually happens to be "slow," so calling him an idiot did seem a bit uncharitable.)

The grand tour of the house made me feel pretty sad. It was dark with the shutters drawn throughout. There was a tiny railroad kitchen, stacked high with detritus; a smoky and stained bedroom for K, another for the "idiot brother," a living room that did not invite laughter and conversation, and a simply awful enclosed "front porch" that was darker than a tomb and about as wide as a cat's hips. "We like to spend lots of time here hanging on the porch!" said P, brightly. But...it's...not a porch. It's dark! There's no...light. "We like our porch, too," I offered. How poor, wheelchair-bound K even maneuvered around this place--filled with old, sticky furniture--was beyond me. P was embarrassed to show me the bathroom because of the color of the tile, but since the entire home was wood-paneled and covered with ugly vinyl-like tiles from stem to stern the bathroom's perky green tiles seemed like a nice break.

A friend was there tearing out K's carpet because K so often lurched about and spilled food on it from his wheelchair. He nodded curtly at me as he carried out a giant sack containing about 1,253 cigarette butts and other detritus.

"Want to see my room? It's pretty cozy," P said. Where could it be? The whole house was no bigger than a breadbox. Ah, the basement! We went down the stairs into a low-ceilinged and yes, wood-paneled area. The bed was piled high with clothes and the place smelled musty and depressing. There was a large pile of Cheez Doodles (the puffed kind) spilling out on her sheets in a strange, orange tableau. "And there's my potty!" said P, pointing to one of those portable toilet seats that the disabled sometimes use, with arm rests--and no plumbing whatsoever. Only a bucket of some kind.

At this point I was about to get mad. When people suffer through a bout of "the cancer," they shouldn't have to use a potty with a bucket under it, for gosh sakes. They should have a proper potty with a flush mechanism! But who is going to pay for P's plumbing, or move her to a bigger house with a nice, sunny front porch where she can sip cool lemonade and watch the world go by, lazy and content, flush with Cheez Doodles?

So we went back upstairs, where she started to fix lunch for K and the friend who was helping to tear out the dreadful old carpet. She cut some nondescript, pinkish-grey meat off a loafy-shaped thing and slapped it on some buns, tearing off the extra fat with her fingernails and leaving it in a little, pink pile on the mustard-colored countertop. The men chomped into those things--yum! yum! I was deeply afraid that she would offer me some, but she didn't. She did offer me a drink, but I said no thanks. I'm afraid some deep-seated nausea kicked in and I didn't even want to drink a can of Dr. Pepper out of that fridge. There were also tons of wild animal figurines from K's room that had been cleaned and left to dry haphazardly all over the kitchen. A falcon in the dish rack. A wild deer and a bear perched on the bread loaf. All with beady, black eyes and wild wings and claws and fangs.

The funny thing is, the reason that I have these people's mail in the first place is that they used to live in our house. For 45 years, the three sibings (plus another) shared the place with their parents and an ancient great-granny who took up one of the only three bedrooms. At one point, the kids were stacked in one of the bedrooms in neat rows, like sardines. There were so many mattresses in the room that the floor was just one, big mattress. Another year, their parents moved into the dining room to accommodate another elderly relative. That must have been the year that they boarded up the beautiful 1905 leaded glass window in that room--for privacy.

They loved this house. When they sold it to us, they cried. Their initials are etched into the basement stairway and they used to jump from the landing on the stairs to the floor, just like my two boys do now. When they lived here, they had the same ugly old furniture but they had a proper front porch, with sun, and big windows, and hardwood floors (that they covered with hideous tile that we had to tear up, but let's not get into that.) Eventually, after the parents died, they had to sell it, partially because K couldn't get up the stairs into the house nor up the stairs to his bedroom anymore. They owned the house outright after all those years, so it makes me wonder:

What have they done with all the money?

And I also wonder at times, mostly in the middle of the night: What's in the water? Sure, I haven't seen the fourth sibling since the closing and I can't remember her at all, but something tells me that she's not the pinnacle of health, either. It's just a guess. I just don't picture her as a veggie-eating marathon runner.

I think about moving a lot, but I know when our For Sale sign does go up K and P will be the first to hear about it. (They knew when we redid the bathroom, planted the sod, and tore up the patio that K put down at age 16. They see it all. The houses here have eyes, too.) They'll be concerned about who is coming, and who is going to take care of the old house.

After my visit to deliver the mail, they asked me to come back, please, anytime, and bring my kids! Like I said, these are the nicest people in the world, so I wouldn't mind paying them a visit or two down the road. I just keep thinking of that little pile of pink meat strips on that old countertop, and the guys sitting there with the dust motes floating in the one, narrow ray of sunlight that's coming in through the window. Then I glance out at my own front porch, and remember that they grew up clattering across it, and clambering up the stairs after school, and watching the snow fall out the big front window.

A Nice Wholesome Glass of Milk

A dear friend has suggested that perhaps I am a wee bit too "excited" about the virtues of wine on my blog. I assured him that yes, I am fond of wine, but I can get just as enthusiastic about a tall glass of cold skim milk! Milk is refreshing, and it goes with just about anything. It's good for your body, too. I choose skim to keep my cholesterol down. Not that I have ever had a cholesterol problem, mind you. The ginormous amounts of greens that I eat crush every stray toxin and fat globule, except for the deadly brain cancer that will soon overtake me.

I love milk. This sounds nasty, but when I was little I used to get a small dish of pimento-stuffed olives and a nice glass of milk and savor the olives, one by one. When they were gone, I would go to refill the dish and the glass of milk. Milk also goes well with Cheez Doodles, cookies, and a steak sandwich. When eating all these items, it is important to have a good book. Much of my library in my youth was soiled with various steak juices and Cheez effluvium. It was the hallmark of a good title to have a few food stains. Books and mealtimes seemed to go well together, even at a nice restaurant. Why talk to one's parents when one can delve into a good read? If I finished my book, I usually went into the women's bathroom and played Harriet the Spy, making excessive notes in a small notebook about suspicious conversations and activities. Sometimes I even carried a tiny dictaphone recorder and recorded all sorts of hot stuff. Then, I would usually finish the evening with a harmless prank, such as sticking the free Maxi-Pads to the wall of the stall or making fake fart noises while crouching atop the potty.

Did I mention how much I like milk? I know my dear friend is worried about me, but I will venture to say that he hasn't had a glass of nice, cold milk since 1978, when he spewed it out, rinsed out the taste with whiskey, and lit a filterless cigarette in its stead. Try some milk, buster! And maybe a piece of fruit or two. Fruit is not simply a weapon meant to be lobbed at unsuspecting passersby. It belongs in your tummy, cozied up to a zucchini and a fava bean or two.

The major food groups are not mini-muffins, oysters in oil, beer, and triscuits. Try drinking milk and you may feel as fit and fulsome as the young, delightful teens featured on the InterWeb. Hoo ha! I know I do.