Drained
When I moved to Greensboro, North Carolina I was set on course to fulfill the naïve destiny of every fresh graduate, an eager pursuit of the holy triumvirate of “non”s. I had taken a non-paying role at a non-traditional non-profit, and since my income was non-existent I moved in with my best friend Tricia. It was a one bedroom apartment, so I was moving into what was essentially meant to be a luxurious closet. It was a small room accessible through the main bedroom that just barely fit the footprint of a queen size mattress. But I felt like this was more than enough to exceed the qualifications of a bedroom, seeing as it was a room filled only with a bed.
Tricia and I both had a knack for acquiring lots of odds and ends, but when two such collections collide in a small space I’ll admit in certain light it slightly resembles a hoard. Collectively we had so many tables that one night we realized that each table sized almost perfectly down in scale. So rather than either of us getting rid of any useless tables, we stacked them one on top of the other all the way up to the ceiling to form a pyramid we called Table Mountain. To this day when Tricia and I talk about Table Mountain we speak of it with a kind of mystic reverence, like a Stonehenge we kept privately in our apartment. We don’t have any surviving photos of this magical formation, it lives on only in the witnessed testimony of a select few.
Once at a junk store we came across a small figurine, a colorfully dressed turnip-headed man who was posed laying on his stomach holding his turnip chin in his human hands. On his feet he wore what seemed to be wooden clogs which dangled in a somewhat oddly flirtatious manner. We became convinced he was truly either the only or the last of his kind, seeing as we could find no Google image search results to “cute anthropomorphic turnip figurine”. Therefore we had no choice but to take him into our protective custody. We dubbed him Prince Dutch Turnip Clown and he became almost like a mini-deity in our apartment, a motionless infanta. We sometimes would play a game where one of us would hide Prince Dutch Turnip Clown among our hoard, and the seeker would sing a very obvious song with lyrics composed mostly of his name while they searched for his little ceramic body. All that just to say yes, Tricia and I enjoy spending time together in a way that is unique, but recognized it might be a good idea to have others around to balance out our instincts.
One such acquaintance was Jeremy, who lived in the apartment upstairs and studied Orchestral Performance at the nearby college. I can attest to the fact Jeremy has a musical ability that goes beyond natural talent or committed practice. He is an awe inspiring performer - elegant, in control and passionate. Anywhere other than in front of ivory keys however, Jeremy was a shit show. He didn’t really believe in locking doors, did not often remember to turn off burners or ovens and was really into incense, candles or open flames of any kind. More than once someone arrived just in time to nudge pizza boxes away from glowing red stovetops or blow out a candle left burning low. Jeremy was raised in a devoutly strict Christian home in rural North Carolina and had been more or less scorned when he came out as gay. Even though he was younger than us, that estrangement meant he was completely on his own financially. He made money playing piano at an LGBTQA+ friendly church, but when we met he was in the process of finding his own voice as a musician. Sometimes we would listen from the porch as he wrote the most incredible songs about Lucifer jizzing on his face.
Jeremy had found his current roommate about two months prior, through the ever-trusty Craigslist. He was older than any of us, a short man in his early thirties with that general thick-lensed glasses look of a knock off Allen Ginsburg, except that he was so thin he had to shop in the juniors section of Target. His stature was made incredibly more hilarious by the fact his name was Chris Farley. He is by far one of the strangest god damn people I have ever met, and that is saying a lot. He was totally down with Jeremy's maybe-we-burn-down-the house lifestyle mostly because Chris didn't really have anything to lose. I don't say that because he was some kind of nihilist. I say that because he owned close to nothing.
When we first met Chris, his room was completely empty except for a desk, a mysterious case of high end French wine and a shelf. He slept on the bare hardwood floor every night. I am not convinced he was a minimalist so much as he was possibly mentally ill. He made decent money as an operations manager at a catering company but he just didn’t find such luxuries as a bed to be either prudent or necessary. As a futile attempt to try and offset his intense chain smoking habit, Chris also left his second story window wide open regardless of the season. A good way to know if he was home would be to look up and see if there was an enormous wine glass precariously balanced on the sill with six to seven cigarettes stubbed out nearby.
He drove an old boat-sized Buick, and when that car gave out, probably from the sheer build up of cigarette ash in every single crevice, nook and cranny alone, he replaced it with another titanic-scale Buick. One night he asked Tricia and I if we wanted to see something cool and then, produced from within his closet a milk jug full of urine, assumedly his own. Chris is one of the most inscrutable people I have ever met in my life. And between Jeremy’s open door policy and Chris’s open window habit, they were both paying rent only to live two-thirds of the way outdoors most of the time.
Those long summer days were the best of times, the worst of times but mostly they were the drunkest of times. Once, we hosted a small party wherein every attendee got rapidly smashed on tequila and champagne. No one even paused to consider that maybe neither of those substances is an appropriate or safe compliment for the other. So the chamquila had us feeling a unique combination of both wildly adventurous and demonstrably sentimental. This was the perfect time for a slippery concept like “best friend tattoos” to really take root. However, since it was 1 am, and no responsible tattoo artist would allow us so much as in their parking lot given the state of us, this was a job for the internet. About 45 seconds into a DIY tattoo instructable on YouTube we considered ourselves versed enough in the ancient art of body modification to bust out the sewing needles and india ink. I personally tattooed four people that night.
Most of the other tenants in our building kept to themselves, and were therefore in our minds, serial killers. In those days there were two categories of people. There was us and there were serial killers. And while it may seem statistically unreasonable that multiple serial killers would live in the same dumpy house, I guess I just chose to believe in miracles. The evidence was undeniable. Where were they from 9 to 5 on weekdays? Why were they cleaning their cars? Why were their clothes being professionally dry cleaned? So, because we didn't want to get murdered, and because a number of noise complaints had been filed against us, it was time to pick up and move.
Tricia, Jeremy, and I considered it divine providence when we found the holy grail of houses only a few blocks away. It was an old unrenovated three bedroom, three bathroom single story bungalow with a big backyard, and it was within our budget as long as you didn't believe in math. I switched from my non-profit job to working catering gigs, bartending and serving hipster tacos to make ends meet. Chris helped us move, and then in retrospect I’m pretty sure lived with us for a while. Turns out when someone doesn't really own anything, it's really hard to tell whether they are your roommate or not. We couldn't afford to turn on the gas and we did forget to transfer the electric service, but who was keeping track. Not us! We all celebrated the first night at the new house in the sweltering hot pitch black. Cheers to adulthood.
Thus begins our fall from grace. First of all, it became immediately apparent none of our animals got along, meaning we were all instantly caught in the cross hairs of a pissing feud of which admittedly my dog was the main instigator. This meant there was a constant rotating cast of yellow-blotched, baking soda covered mattresses slumped against on the sunny-side of the porch. The key was to put the mattress out during the couple hours that the sun was high and Chris was at work, so the deodorizing effect wouldn’t be offset by the absorption of chain smoking.
A few weeks in the hot water stopped working and it occurred to us that the hot water furnace was probably gas powered. But we still didn't have enough money to pay the deposit, which just goes to show that even if you don't believe in math, it believes in you. So we all just agreed to soldier on for the time being. Most days were so hot, we shared in the lie that the cold water would be refreshing. Good for the skin! But let me tell you, starting and ending every day with a freezing cold shower makes for a very sad, neutered existence. Morale took a sharp downturn. I have one specific memory that serves as one of my standards for personal misery to this day. I had underestimated how long it took to cook a potato in the oven and was running out of time to eat before I had to report for a shift at work. So I ended up taking the semi-raw potato into the cold shower with me, and stood there completely naked, gasping and flinching under the ice cold water, eating around the potato’s still-crunchy core like an apple.
Jeremy was the first to refuse to submit to the passion shriveling showers any longer, and came up with his own solution. He would boil giant pots of water in the kitchen and then transport them in rotation to his tub. Thankfully the process only took about an hour, and only required the use of every cooking pot we had. In order to avoid the Goldilocks conundrum of submerging into either scalding hot or ice cold, the water had to be added in careful proportions and if too much cold was added, more hot was then again required. All of this just meant that sometimes when we had company they might see a mostly naked piano prodigy sprinting through the kitchen.
Next like some kind of choreographed plague, our entire house became engulfed in a cloud of mosquitoes. Nothing we did could deflect or deter them, it was complete bloodsucking anarchy. If you left the door open for even a moment they would flock in to drain you without mercy throughout the day. Which was especially difficult if you lived with someone who had a penchant for not closing doors. Eventually we surrendered the porch and backyard completely, staying inside with our piss-drenched belongings and cold showers.
I don't remember what it was that inspired us to look in the basement. Maybe a sound that sparked the suspicion that maybe the serial killers had followed us. But when we opened the door, what we found was worse. Gazing down, all we could see were the first five steps before the staircase was completely submerged in water. Some time ago, a long time ago I would venture to guess based on the water level, the basement had begun to flood with warm, untouched water. It had drowned out the electric hot water heater months ago and been breeding the militant hordes of mosquitoes and gestating mold ever since. We had been living on top of a putrid swamp for months.
The house we thought was the holy grail had really been more like Lucifer jizzing on our face the whole time. How had it all gotten so bad, so fast? What other things might be lurking behind our unopened doors. I’d been drinking too much, eating too little, pretending the disappointments of the world were funny and ignoring every thought that told me to do otherwise. Multiple sump pumps were brought in to remove the hundreds of gallons of water from the basement. I was exhausted. I broke down and cried for three days. Tricia would beg me to tell her what was wrong, but I couldn’t really explain. It really does all just creep up slowly over time doesn’t it? So my best friend just sat there with me as it finally all drained out.