Honest Conversation Is Overrated
Actual Human Interactions Witnessed Or Overheard
In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century America
In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century America
After a long day of work, I came home to write some e-mails and get to bed. After typing up a few LJ comments, I went to rap my fingers against the desk and got three fingertips coated in my (I assume) roommate's semen. Where is my Lava soap?
Uck. It's not like there isn't a box of Kleenex right next to the desk. At least I didn't bang my head against it.
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Your rooommate is moving out at 10 a.m. on a Monday morning. He tells you he's expecting a call from the person he's driving with. It's very important that your roommate speaks with him ASAP. Do you:
A.) get on the phone and start yelling at your girlfriend, then slam it until it nothing more than a mess of wires and plastic? (it's all good, your roommate will be angry at you for a few seconds, then will realize there's another phone in the house, no harm, no foul, he lets you live) B.) stay off the phone until the call comes through, since you really don't use the phone that much any way (you get a gold star) C.) leave the phone off the hook and laugh to yourself while your roommate becomes increasingly angry and frustrated (what kind of roommate does that? Melissa Plummer, maybe?) D.) begin having noisy phone sex with your Brazilian girlfriend, and ignore incoming calls (slightly bastardish) or E.) begin having noisy phone sex with your Brazilian girlfriend and click over when a new call comes in, realize it's the call your roommate says is very important, then hang up on the guy until after you are done getting off, then fall asleep, then several hours later tell your roommate, "oh yea, that guy you were waiting to hear from called like, a couple of hours ago" If you selected E, congratulations, you're Peter. Now go the fuck away. When I came home from a glorious night of work at Kookaburra Canyon, Wiz and Peter were tanked. Hardcore hammered. The kind of drunk where you get to see a person's true feelings, no bullshit, no pretense of being a good person.
Nothing surprised me about either of them. Wiz was the way he always is when he's drunk, fucking hysterical. He digs on himself, the people in the room, and people who deserve a good ribbing. Nothing evil, nothing uncalled for, but dancing the border of good taste and bad. My kind of humor. Peter does not get funny. He gets truthful. I've known many people who get introspectful and honest when they're drunk. Generally I find this much preferable to the "look at me, I'm drizzunk" drunk, or the "let's go smash the windows of parked cars" drunk, but with Peter, I'm not so sure. First of all, he takes complete credit for fast talking slam style. He, in fact, invented it back when he was out of Chicago Green Mill (never on the team, just a regular slammer) back in the mid-nineties. Saul Williams, apparently, appropriated his mystical poetry from Peter. He was also responsible for Shakespeare's portrayals of love, and e.e. cummings's visual layout. His ego didn't bother me as much as the following incident, though. While he was taking credit for creation of the universe, and inventing the written word, I was reading Savage Love., which contained a letter involving a reader who collects pubic hair from urinals at her place of employment. The whole concept was so ridiculous, I burst into laughter. Peter asked me what I was laughing about, so I read it to him. Wiz's reaction was similar to mine: That's fucked up! I would be completely open to somoene arguing why it's not fucked up. I can always agree to disagree. What I didn't appreciate was Peter asking "Was it a guy or a girl? Cause if it's a girl, it's ok, man, whatever, but if it's a guy I'd beat the fuck out of him." There is a moment of silence here. Wiz points out the asinine nature of Peter's statement. It's either fucked up, or not fucked up. The gender of the person is completely irrelevant. I point out the whole "beat the fuck out of him" statement makes Peter a glaring homophobe. He explains he's not homophobic, he just wouldn't stand for a guy jerking off about him. While he's waaaaay too egotistical and stupid for my taste, I'm willing to bet a guy or two has called out hia name in the privacy of their bedroom before. He's an in-shape, fairly attractive narcissist. That makes him ideal for a number of my gay friends. In fact, had I not had my revelation surrounding Elvis, I may have been attracted to him. Actually, I know I would have been attracted to him about five years or so ago. Ugh. I wish I could say I was surprised about his statement. I'm not. Just overly disappointed. Wiz says he feels karmically attached to Peter, but can't wait for him to leave. He's a very talented painter, but not a very good person to be around, and frankly a terrible poet. I don't say this because he can't write. He can. But he makes a concious effort to bury his poetry in an outdated slammy delivery, so that no one ever knows what his poetry is about. "My poetry is about being raw and inaccessible." he told me yesterday. What a great fucken goal. The first time I met Wiz's father, I commented on the pair of shoes hanging from the telephone wires (I refrained from mentioning the mice). He gazed out the window at them for a moment and asked if I knew what they meant. "From what I've heard, they mean that there's a drug dealer in the neighborhood." "Yes," he said, "those are Oz's shoes." Then he left. I pondered this for the rest of the night. Was Oz a drug dealer? I didn't want to live with another drug dealer. A few hours later, Oz came home, dressed in his CVS pharmacist uniform. He asked me why I was laughing.
What Melissa didn't know was that I never had any intention of calling the police. I didn't have to.
When the college who cut me the check finally mailed me a copy of said check with my forged signature, I'd called a police officer friend of mine from Arizona. He'd advised me that the easiest way to ensure her suffering without having to get my own hands dirty, was to tell the bank that had cashed the check that the signature was forged. Then, the bank would reimburse the college, who would cut me a new check. Melissa would be at the bank's mercy, not mine. But since she didn't know that (I hadn't called the bank yet), I figured I'd try to get a thousand dollars off her anyway because I was a poor bastard and she was a manipulative, lying bitch with a dog that had pissed all over my fucken clothes. I may have been a little bitter. She didn't give me the thousand dollars. I never saw her again. Never had the satisfaction of knowing whether she was arrested or had huge penalties from the bank. I'm not even sure she got any financial comeuppance. What I do know is that she got evicted. Whatever she did with the thousand dollars she essentially stole from me, she didn't use it to pay rent. Also, someone informed her landlord that she had been subleasing part of the apartment to me. She hadn't told him that. He was under the impression that only one person lived there, so he'd given her a great deal on rent. So during the year that I was there, I was paying 75% of the rent and had no idea. Since she was the one who was in contact with the landlord , I just assumed we had been paying the same amount. One anonymous call to the landlord changed that. I met the landlord one night while I was working at Kookaburra Canyon. He didn't know what happened to my bookshelf, my books, my comics, or my computer (and I didn't ask about the porn) but my bedframe and a few of my clothes had shown up in the basement, where (he informed me) all of my stuff had been stored while I was away. No wonder "the storage people" had easy access to the house, they lived in the basement. I've only been back to the house once since the day Becca and I drove my stuff to storage. It's not too far from where I ended up moving to, but the house has some serious bad juju for me. Even though I know that Melissa hasn't lived there in about a year now, I always get really angry when I drive by, or when the subway passes within sight of it. I have the incredible urge to sneak into the driveway and let the air out of all her tires. But her tires aren't there. If she didn't end up doing any jail time (and she probably didn't, I don't think she had any prior problems with the police or with banks), I'm imagining she moved back in with her parents. Why they should be punished for her crimes, I don't know. Then again, it was their terrible breeding and/or parenting techniques that contributed to the bipolar sociopath she became. I've been on a Tery Pratchett binge for the past few days. The other night I read "The Last Hero." and last night I read "The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents." This morning (okay, afternoon)I awoke to your typical non-educated rodents. Brown mice. A fourth one just ran across the floor of the computer room and into Oz's bedroom. They're brazen little things, not at all concerned that there's a big red-headed human wandering around. The fourth one actualy bumped his nose against my sock (brave little bugger) then jetted when I wiggled my toe. #3 is behind me messing around in a Barnes & Nobles bag. These mice have attituedes like big ol' NYC rats, but they're tiny tiny brown mice, the sort I've seen playing around in the T stations.
#5 just arrived. Egads. I do believe it's time to clean this house, and set some have-a-hearts. I've been accused of being a tad cluttered by several ex-roommates, but I've never had to deal with even insect infestation, nevermind little rodents, unless I paid for them and put them in a cage. Oz's computer room is like Disneyland for these things. I'd name them, but I can only tell which is which by what room/bag they're playing in. Once I or they move they all pretty much look the same. Does that make me a speciesist? My first thought was that I could shatter her dog's spine by merely snapping my fingers together. So would end the suffering of Gussy and everyone else who knew her. But I rarely kill ants, there was no way I could kill her dog, even if it meant putting it out of its blissful misery. I debated burning her house down. Gas wasn't as expensive then, but I decided I'd want to wait around and see the flames. That would probably make me a suspect.
In the end, I decided that rather than killing her or having her killed, it would be much more entertaining to see her try and explain herself. I called her and told her I had the money for her (which I did) and that I wanted to meet her the following morning (a Tuesday) to pick up my stuff. She agreed. But on Tuesday morning she was nowhere to be found. On Wednesday she called with some lame ass excuse about a work emergency. She did data entry for a friend of her family's very small business. She spent most of her days playing with her dog in the office. Whatever. I made an appointment to meet her Thursday morning. She said the storage people would be dropping my stuff off at nine. She's meet me at the house then. I got there at seven. Just in case. At eight she came out to walk Gussy and was surprised to see me there. "Oh, sorry." I said, "I thought you said to meet you at eight." She was definitely shaken, not stirred. By nine-thirty, there was no storage truck. "Hold on a second." she said, breaking the tense silence. I assumed that she was going in to call the storage people or some sort of bodyguard. I was unprepared when she walked out of the house with a box of my books. "It looks like the storage people must have come last night after I went to sleep. Your stuff is in the back hallway." The storage people had come in the middle of the night? "The storage people came in the middle of the night?" How did they get in? "Do they have keys?" "I must have left the door unlocked." What-The-Fuck. If I gave her any more of "the eye" it would have been two eyes. I went into my former home, and sure enough there were piles and garbage bags of my stuff in the back hallway. I was too flummoxed to do a complete inventory, but I did notice one thing missing right away. "Where are my bookshelves?" "What bookshelves?" "The bookshelves that held all my books. Two big ones. They were against the wall." "I don't remember them. Maybe the storage people took them." "The storage people stole my bookshelves but returned my TV and CD collection?" She shrugged. "Maybe they misplaced them when they were rummaging around in the dark last night when they dropped off my stuff, huh?" No reply. I called a friend of mine to pick me up in her truck, so I could put my stuff in real storage. "Did you remember the receipt from the storage place?" "Receipt?" "Yea. You said that storage was costing you a bundle, and I said I'd repay you if you gave me the receipt." "No. I'm friends with the guy who owns the storage place. He let me have it for free." "Then why did you tell me it was costing you a bundle?" "You misunderstood." Whatever. I then began counting off the thousand dollars. I made to hand them to her. "Oh. One more thing. Do you remember cashing a check for a thousand dollars the day after I left?" Blank stare. "Because the bank and the people who wrote the check seem to believe that you've already been paid the rent for the three months that I was away." "Oh. The check. I forgot about that. It wasn't the amount I was expecting, so I forgot it." "It was a check for a thousand dollars, right?" "Yea." "I did pay you enough money before I left so that the balance of rent while I was gone was only $900, correct?" "Yea." "So..." Blank stare. "I'm not giving you this money." "But I need it." She threw her hand in the air, "Why do you make things so difficult?" And walked to her car, where Gussy was shivering in the back seat. "If I don't have the money by tomorrow, I'm calling the police." "Here's my phone. Call them now. I'd love to hear you explain to them why you forged my signature on a check, and stole my fucken mail, you psycho." She drove off. Becca and I moved my stuff into storage uneventfully. The storage facility was right next to work, and i had to work in an hour, so I spent that hour doing inventory. Things that were missing: My bookshelves All of my books from authors K-Z My bedframe My DVD/VHS collection My pornography My old comic book collection My two overcoats (one of them my grandfather's cashmere) My computer (which didn't work, anyway) A good chunk of my clothes What was left of my clothes was covered in dried old dog piss. I called and left Melissa a message to call me back. She did not respond. I called about seven times that week. No response. So on the eighth day I left a different kind of message. "Melissa, it's Insafemode. I've been very patient. If I don't hear from you in forty-eight hours, I'm calling the cops. You stole a great deal from me, and forged my signature on a check. If I don't get a thousand dollars in my hands by the end of the week, I'm having you arrested." I then went to take a shower. By the time I was finished she had called my phone seven times but left no message. "I don't live here anymore?" In my head I'm doing the five fingers of death (though Kill Bill 2 has not come out yet, I am intrinsically aware of its future existence).
"You said there'd be a check arriving for me in January. I never received it." "But I called you in January, and February, and March, and you never mentioned it." I'm pulling out her eyeballs with my fingers, and squishing them beneath my shoes. "I assumed you knew." I was just sleep deprived enough to think this whole thing was my fault. I asked her what had happened to all my belongings, and she informed they were in storage. When I could pay her the three months of overdue rent, and the storage fees, she'd return my stuff. It sounded fair. I went to Kookaburra Canyon and explained my predicament. I needed to work as often as possible in order to get my stuff back. Several of my coworkers offered me couches and spare beds until I found a new place to stay. My current debt to Melissa would be roughly thirteen hundred dollars, I expected to have to have about $1800 to put down on a new place. I was fucked in a way that brought me no pleasure. I was also pissed off. I called the institution that was supposed to cut me the check. They "thought" they had sent it out to me in January. It would take a couple of days to track down, but they'd be in touch. I posted angry anti-Melissa comments in my other blog. I called Melissa and asked how much storage was costing her. She said she didn't know, but she'd get back to me. I called her back the next day to ask again, and received no answer. The following day, she called my cell phone asking why I was ignoring her repeated messages. I called my voice mail. I had six messages. None of them from Melissa. The next week was my birthday. I worked eight hours, and then crashed on a coworker's couch. My mom called to ask me if I'd received my birthday money. The following morning, I trekked over to Melissa's in search of my mail. In addition to the birthday mail (one from my mom, one from my dad, two sets of grandparents, and one aunt), I was waiting for a package from a friend in Arizona. "You haven't gotten any mail here in months." Ms. Smiley Melissa Face informed me as she was putting her work cooler in her trunk. "No mail?" "None." "You're telling my five people's birthday cards got lost in the mail?" "I don't know what to tell you." She started to slam down her trunk. "What's that?" I stopped the trunk with my hand. Inside was a package with my name on it. "Oh, that. That arrived yesterday. I forgot." It was my package from Arizona. "Here." "No, mail for me, huh?" While there is no doubt in my mind that she did steal my birthday mail (a federal offense, mind you). I had no proof. She had not been stupid enough to forge my signature on those checks. A few days after the run in by her trunk, though, I got a call from the people who'd written me the $1000 check. They'd written it. They'd mailed it. And on January seventh, the day after I'd left on tour, it had been signed over to and cashed by one Melissa F*n Bitchface. Enter InHulkMode. It's 1:15 on a Sunday morning. After a two-day bus trip at the culmination of a three-month spoken word tour, I had decided to take a trip to my local venue for a surprise appearance. People were surprised. I was happy. I drank. I was tired. I was writing in short, choppy sentences.
My friend, Zuzu, drove me home from the venue. I pulled my bags out of her trunk, walked up to my door, turned the key in the lock and...nothing. Fuck. I rang the doorbell, but I had witnessed Melissa sleeping through me banging on her bedroom door when she had blocked our neighbor's driveway with her car. She probably slept through the sex she had with all The Midnight Men. They were probably just a bunch of crazed necrophiliacs (except the Coke guy, I'm sure he had no crazed fetishes). I realized she had probably changed the locks due to a run in with one of The Midnight Men. Maybe somebody hit her, or maybe she had decided she was going to stick to only one married guy at a time. When she hadn't answered the door to the apartment, and Gussy hadn't even barked at my knocking and doorbell ringing, I went around to the driveway to check for her car. It was there. While I was in the driveway, I realized that I could probably climb in through my window. I didn't remember whether I'd bothered to lock it. But the odds were that I hadn't. I hopped on to the ledge and --- There was no furniture in my room. Bed? Gone. Bookcases? Gone. TV? Gone. Desk? Gone. Pile of films and porn? Gone. The closet was open and there were no clothes in it. I decided that even if the window was unlocked, no good would come from climbing through it. Instead, I walked the couple of miles to Zuzu's house and woke her up, explaining my unpleasant return. She thought I might have just been so tired that I mis-saw. It was true that I didn't do an exhaustive visual search. There were no streetlights, no lights from inside the house. At about five-thirty I walked back to the house where I had lived for the past year. Melissa was coming out of the house as I walked up to the porch. "Hey, Insafemode." she beamed. "How was your trip?" "It was fun. I got to see a part of the country I've never been to, made enough money to live moderately comfortable, met some nice people. But when I got home the damnedest thing happened. My key wouldn't fit into the lock." "Oh, yea. You don't live here anymore." There were enough signs that Melissa was crazy to keep two engravers, four painters and a troupe of municipal workers in business for the rest of their unnatural lives. First off there was the dog, there were the midnight men, there was the dog, there were the letters addressed to various friends (who I never met) and family members filled with phrases like "you're not being conducive to my needs as a human person" and "I think I'm going to need some space from your negative energy for a while", and, of course, the dog.
I first witnessed one of her nuclear meltdowns in June. I am the sort of person who is pretty well known for being a good listener and problem solver (so long as the problems aren't my own) but when someone tells me they don't want to talk about something, that's the end of the discussion. I'm not going to expend effort to hear about someone's problems, unless there's love, money, or fucking involved. I never did find out what Melissa's meltdown was in response to. She started leaving me nasty notes. I'm someone who uses a fair amount of notepaper and writing journals but absolutely deplores the Post-It Note industry. Every Post-It Note I've ever seen involves passive aggressive or just downright aggressive language. When I lived in Burlington, my landlord used to leave me love notes such as "Where's the fucking rent?" and "I hate you. Get out of my house." To be fair to him, I was avoiding him because I couldn't afford rent. I understood his frustrations. Melissa's frustrations were whacky. "I found this pen in the living room. BE MORE CAREFUL!!!!" It was a covered ball-point pen, left in a room that Gussy was forbidden to go into. Another note declared "Gussy did her business in my bedroom while I was gone. In the future PLEASE CLEAN UP when I'm not home." Uhhh...since when is it my business to go into someone else's room and check to see whether or not their spoiled rotten guinea pig impersonator shat on their floor? |
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