I waited until Jennifer came in. She went straight to the refrigerator for a Coke. She lit a cigarette. When she walked into the living room, her nose crinkled at the smell and I said, “Oh God, Bear messed on the floor again!”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be sorry,” I said. “Just help me find it. I can’t even find it. I’m gettin’ so SICK of this.”
“Okay, okay,” she said. “I’ll help you look.”
She got down on her hands and knees and started searching. I pretended to look around, too. Suddenly I said, “Here it is.”
“I’ll get a paper towel,” she said.
“Don’t bother,” I replied. I double-checked to make sure it was my little creation, then I popped it into my mouth.
Jennifer dropped her Coke and ran to the bathroom. The sounds she made let me know that my mission had been accomplished.
Bear moved the next day. So did I.
Only in Georgia can you share an apartment with your sister and later get away with an explanation like, “Yeah, but we broke up for the sake of the dog….”
There’s a reason for cliche ´s like, “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.” After my sister and I split up, I moved to Florida and I couldn’t find another place for four months. I had to sleep on the foldout couch of a guy I worked with at IBM. Ralph Hubbard was forty-eight, wore two hearing aids, and let me keep my clothes in a suitcase in the hall. He was actually a great guy, but we couldn’t go on living like that. Then somebody told me that Stanley Cobb had a great place on the beach in Sarasota and wanted a roommate.
If I thought living with Hubbard was odd, Cobb beat it by a mile. He was a bullshit artist deluxe. Every month Stanley would say, “Just write a check to me for the rent and the utilities, and I’ll pay for everything.” Six months later I came home and found an eviction notice on the door. He hadn’t paid the rent for nine months. That was a Friday night. The notice said that we had until Monday morning to be gone, or the marshals would throw us and everything we owned out on the street. I sat on the living room couch and tried to figure out what to do next. That’s when Cobb called. I made things worse when I lost my temper and threatened to beat his ass. Now he wouldn’t even come home. Then all these other people started calling, saying, “Hey, he owes me 800 bucks, that bastard.”
Then it struck me. I said, “Really? Come on over!”
Stanley has a really nice TV, probably valued at close to eight hundred bucks. I’m going to be in the bathroom brushing my hair. The door’s open.”
All weekend long I let people come in and take his stuff.
It was my first and last rummage sale.
I figured my luck could only improve, and I was right.
My next roommate was named Dexter McDougal. Everybody called him Dex. I met Dex when I dated his sister, but he and I ended up hitting it off better than she and I. Pretty soon we moved in together. (Dex’s sister even spent the night from time to time.)
I consider my place with Dex my first singles apartment. Singles apartments are the same all over the country, aren’t they?
Let’s walk through the place room by room and I’ll show you the highlights of fine Southern, twentysomething living.
The apartment had two bedrooms, each with a bathroom. Also, a little hall, a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room.
In the living room we had the telephone wire spool for the coffee table. Saw it sitting off the side of a road, borrowed a pickup truck, and hauled it home. Some people shellac them, others like the natural pitted, tar-smeared look. We painted ours with the only colors we could find in Dex’s dad’s garage: aqua and black. That went really well with the green-gold shag carpet and the orange sofa. The spool top was always cluttered with the remains of a wild Saturday night, usually from three months earlier.
We were lucky to have the sofa. We also found it on the street. I remember cruising by, seeing it balanced on the curb, and thinking, “Heeyyyyy. If that baby’s there after dark, she’ll be in my living room before midnight.” We also had a bean bag chair covered with duct tape to keep the “beans” from falling out and the material from simply disintegrating.
Our place had the same green-gold shag rug that you find in apartments everywhere. I’m certain that there’s one manufacturer who carpets every apartment nationwide, and that it’s part of a government conspiracy, and the real reason for our staggering national debt. This carpet turned up naturally at the corners and smelled like someone had soaked it in spilled milk, Jack Daniels, and cat pee. This was when it was new. When one of Dex’s friends parked his motorcycle on our living room carpet, we got an oil stain as a bonus. Within months, we’d tramped down the rug by the front door so much that we couldn’t even rake it back up. Every time we’d try, we’d kick up a rabbit.
Of course we had the cinder blocks and boards shelving. We finally painted them black to give then a nice look. The stereo was really just an old receiver I’d bought for eight bucks at a garage sale. All the panel lights were burned out so you could never tell which station you were listening to. Our TV was a plastic Ford Philco model. Ford has always been known for making a damn good television, right? The transmission broke in it a couple of times, but what the hell, this was in precable days—we had the aluminum foil antenna—and there wasn’t much to watch anyway. I think it was a color set. Well, kinda color.
I had a deer head on the living room wall. He sported a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a cigarette. He looked like he’d been shot while walking in the parade at Mardi Gras. Something that nice you have to show off.
I don’t think we owned anything framed. Everything was stuck to the walls with tape or thumb tacks. We had posters of different things like cars, women, and rock and roll singers. The important things in life. We also had a lava lamp in the living room, but it didn’t work. The light would go on but it was otherwise impotent. The lava would just sit there and never go up.
Our bedrooms were your basic pigstyes. Dex’s mattress sat on the floor, mine on a box spring without a frame. Clearly, I had the deluxe accommodations. Both were protected by huge piles of clothes, some dirty and some clean. It was always tough to tell the difference, although we did the laundry every month at Dex’s parents’ house.
My bedroom had milk crates for nightstands. Also, my collection of stolen road signs. Dex’s bedroom had an ironing board that he used for bookshelves. One of my brother’s friends said he made it with a girl on that ironing board during a party. We’re still not sure if we believe that. Both rooms also featured the hippest in bedroom decor: blankets for curtains, old pizza boxes, and drinking glasses growing new forms of life.
A small hallway with a mystery stain on the carpet and a Budweiser mirror on the wall connected the bedrooms and there was a balcony off the back. We were on the top floor of a two-story building. Location is, of course, everything, as I’m sure the couple who lived below us soon realized. They were both in their eighties and retired. I’m sure they learned some stuff in their golden years. Occasionally we’d hear them holler things at Dex like, “Don’t let him bring your sister over again!”
The balcony had a rusted-out hibachi grill, and an old towel in the corner that you wouldn’t have touched even with a stick. If you did, you’d have had to register at the Centers for Disease Control. The towel had been rained on and was covered with spider webs. It was also as stiff as petrified wood. I’d always meant to string some yellow police barrier tape around it, but I never found the time. We also had a bike with no chain on the balcony and plants that we moved out there when the leaves finally fell off, leaving only sticks and dirt.
The dining room was empty except for another bicycle and some old bags of trash we never took out.
The kitchen was tiny. The drawers held two forks, two spoons, and a turkey baster. (You figure it out. I can’t.) We used the stove to light cigarettes. The refrigerator had a couple of beers, some junk food, and my olives. We had a can of she-crab so
up in the pantry, though I don’t know why. Neither Dex nor I was ever hungry enough to eat it. When we did eat, we would leave the dishes in the sink until there were none left in the cabinet. Then Dex would talk his mother into coming over and washing them. Somehow he’d also get her to clean up the place.
Both our bathrooms made the local Shell station restrooms look immaculate. We even posted signs reading “For customer use only” but it didn’t help. We had shower curtains no one could approach without a radiation suit. Plus, there was never enough toilet paper. Occasionally I’d steal a roll from IBM. (See, a lot of those Redneck jokes are firsthand.) Dex would let it run out then he’d use the cardboard rolls it came on or duckwalk to the kitchen and get a paper towel before he’d break down and buy a new package of TP. More likely, he’d steal it from some public restroom.
The saddest part of all this is that we actually brought women there!
You might think our living conditions were awful, but it’s all relative, just like fame. We had a friend eating out of a hubcap, so we felt pretty good about ourselves. Still, it’s no wonder why singles apartments are about as close as we all come to being homeless.
The only good thing about a singles apartment is that you never really had to get your roommate’s mother to clean it up. At least not until the day you moved and tried to get the security deposit back. Then you’d argue with the landlord.
“No sir, the back door was missing when we moved in here. The pizzas were always on the ceiling.”
As you get older, if you still live the apartment life, you find you have to tidy up occasionally. Or you have to at least try to make people think you do. We’ve all done that, been home on the weekend, had the phone ring: “Hey, we’re in the neighborhood, thought we’d stop by and see y’all.”
You always say, “Sure, come on, we’d love to have you.” You hang up and do that flight of the bumblebee. Ninety miles an hour, fluff and stuff. You’re sweating when they get there, and the first thing you always say is “Excuse the house, it’s a mess. Y’all come on in.” Why don’t we just tell them the truth? “Y’all, this is the cleanest our place has been in six years! Just don’t open the closet, you’ll kill yourselves.”
This refusal to play by the commonsense rules of hygiene is one reason why single people throw the best parties: They don’t have to worry about their furniture getting messed up. Their friends can destroy everything in the place. They’re out fifteen bucks, so what?
Single people do throw the best parties, don’t you think? There’s always a good chance somebody’s coming out of their clothes before the night’s out. Most of the time it’s the woman who’s dancing by herself way too early in the evening. “It’s only 7:15 and Peggy’s dancing by herself. That shirt’s coming off tonight, I guarantee you.”
Single people don’t consider it a good party unless the cops have been there at least a dozen times. When they arrive it’s the same scenario every time: 400 drunks trying to act like they’re not drunk. One guy is the spokesman for the group. “It’s the cops, turn the stereo down! Put your shirt on, Peggy! Y’all be cool, let me do the talking. Welcome back, Officer Mitchell!!! Don’t shoot!”
Then to the crowd: “I told him don’t shoot!”
Then back to the cops. “I’m glad you’re back, I wanna report a crime. Larry puked in the aquarium. Stinks very much bad in here. Hey listen, if I lie down on the sidewalk will you draw my picture with that little chalk y’all have?”
No one ever went home from those parties. They just slept where they fell. When you’d get up the next day, it’d look like Jonestown: The Morning After. You’d try to wake up people you’d never met before. “Hey man-with-no-pants-and-a-fireman’s-helmet-on, please get up, I’ve got to go to work. All right, lock the door when you leave. I just found a new sofa, and I don’t want anything to happen to it.”
I once went to toga party from which I walked home naked. Thank goodness it was only two blocks from the apartment. I’m still trying to figure out where I had the key. If you know, please don’t tell me.
Throwing parties, like everything in life, adheres to the principle of the Great Circle. I used to be the king of throwing a big blast. Then, the first time I realized I had gotten older was when I worked in Daytona Beach one year during spring break. I found myself at three in the morning standing on my hotel balcony in my boxer shorts, screaming, “Go to bed! Go…to…bed! People are trying to sleep!” Then I walked inside, threw myself back into bed, and realized I had become an old man.
Dex worked the three-to-eleven shift at the Sarasota Hospital, monitoring machines in the intensive care unit. He would often get bored and call home, and I would relay the baseball game to him over the phone.
“Here’s the wind, the stretch. Low and outside, ball three.”
Then Dex would say, “Ah crap, somebody just straightlined.”
“Okay, I’ll let you go.”
“Nah, just one more pitch,” he’d say. That was pretty much Dex’s attitude toward life. And death.
During the summer, Dex got an even better job. He worked in a mental institution and had to show up every morning in the smoking room to light the patients’ cigarettes. For some reason, they wouldn’t allow them to use their own matches.
Dex told me about one guy in the institution named Art. He said when he first met Art he had no idea why Art was in the mental institution. Dex would light Art’s cigarette, then Art would sit there and say, “Hey, did you see that Cubs game last night? Man, that was something else. Cubs score three in the second, they come back, the Reds get four in the fifth.” He said Art was as normal as anybody he’d ever met until his cigarette got down to the last couple of puffs. Then suddenly Art would start shaking like a dog passing a pinecone and would spew the most vile and common curse words. Then he’d reach in his pack, pull out a new cigarette and light it with the burned-down butt, take a drag off it and, as if nothing had happened, go, “So anyway, in the eighth, Sandburg comes back with a two-run homer…”
Dex and I were not only pigs about how we lived. The word sometimes described our personalities, too.
We called our apartment the Penile Palace, “where every night is Ladies Night. Thursday night is Titty Night. Bring one, get the other one in absolutely free!” I’m sure it was this enthusiasm for women, and not grievous errors in our upbringing, that led to Dex and me to stage monthly contests based on our conquests of women.
Isn’t it great what you can get away with when you don’t live at home?
We had a chart in the kitchen, right over the phone, and an honor system. We devised an intricate point system based solely on our womanizing. You could get bonus points if you did it in the bathtub. Even more points if the water got cold. We were extremely competitive, but invariably, at the end of every month we would always be within four or five points of each other.
Sometimes Dex would be so close that he’d say things like, “I know this girl at work. I could beat you this month. I could call up this girl and win.”
But he never could because I had an unbeatable threat. All I had to do was say, “Dex, don’t make me call your sister.”
I think what scared him more than his sister being two quick points—unless I also went for a bonus—was that afterward he would have to hear all the details. That was part of the honor system. We had to identify the woman and describe exactly what had happened. If nothing else, it was an important lesson in telling the truth.
People ask me now if looking back I’m ashamed of this base and degrading behavior. Of course…not.
You have to trust your roommates. But sometimes they take advantage of you just for the heck of it.
I had to be at IBM each morning at eight o’clock, wearing my suit and tie, to fix machines. Dex got home from the hospital each night at eleven-fifteen. Every night he’d say, “C’mon, man, just go with me for one beer. One beer. I’ve been working all night, I just want to go have one beer and unwind.”
I’d say
, “Dex, I gotta get up in the morning.”
But he would always talk me into it. He was either the king of peer pressure or I was an easy mark. Probably both. Then we’d go out and next thing we’d close down some joint at two-thirty in the morning. Every time he’d laugh and say, “I can’t believe you fell for the one-beer line again!” I think he set a record by getting me to go out eleven nights in a row.
I got him back, though.
Every guy has a dream girl, his own little fantasy. From the time he got his first erection, Dex’s dream was his older sister’s best friend. Unfortunately, she never paid much attention to Dex, and one day she got married and moved away. But while Dex and I shared the apartment, she came down to visit Dex’s sister for the weekend. At the same time, Dex’s childhood best friend, Gary, stayed with us.
One night, when Dex had to work the graveyard shift, Gary, Dex’s sister, her friend, and I went out dancing and later ended up back at our place. Sometime in the middle of the night I got up and stumbled into the kitchen for a glass of water. Then a noise made me stop in my tracks. I snuck a peek into the living room and saw Gary and Dex’s sister’s married girlfriend going at it.
Since they didn’t have any idea I was just around the corner, I managed to hide myself and watch. Gary did quite a number. I think there were bonus points being awarded left and right. I saw things that I had never imagined could happen with a coffee table and a sofa. This was rugged.
The next morning the girls left and Gary and I went to pick up Dex and have breakfast. Dex wanted to drive so I sat in the front and Gary in the back. Then Dex said, “So what’d you guys do last night?”
“We went out and had a few drinks,” I said.
No Shirt, No Shoes...No Problem! Page 11