Head-over-heels in hate

At early o'clock in the morning I had to pee, which necessitates walking through Pike's bedroom. He was asleep and snoring, so I should have had no competition for the john, but no — that seat was taken. The bathroom door was mostly closed, as closed as it gets. His girlfriend was in there, so I peed in the kitchen sink, and whoops, forgot to rinse the residue away.

Now I'm typing this instead of going back to sleep, but it's not insomnia keeping me up, it's Pike. He's screaming every few minutes — a mid-volume sound, like dismemberment, not death — and between the screams he moans. At first I thought it was just more sex in the next room (it's amazing how often they go at it), but he's been screaming and moaning for forty minutes, and I don't hear her at all (which is a small blessing), so it's not boinking.

I should open the door and check on the guy? No, I am not his father, but yeah, I did peek through my cracked-open door, and he's asleep, just sleeping poorly. Having nightmares, I guess. Every soul is a tortured soul.

Or it could be the drugs. Pike does drugs, a lot. Pot, of course (doesn't everyone?), and speed and coke fairly regularly, and maybe other drugs I'm unfamiliar with.

Hey, I am not Hunter Thompson. Weed is the only drug I know, and we're only occasional acquaintances.

As I typed that line, there came another scream, followed by another moan. My flatmate is Edgar Allen Poe, or maybe he has appendicitis? If it was just him in there I'd intrude, wake him up, make sure he's going to survive until daybreak, but his loving girlfriend is beside him. She can damned well handle the worries.

"Pike," she just bellowed, "shut the fuck up! I'm trying to sleep!"

♦ ♦ ♦

Now it's a few hours later, and I'm waking again. My morning ritual is to stare at whatever I've recently written, try to make the writing readable, so I was thinking about overnight, and Pike, and Terry, and this apartment with Mierda on the walls, and sometimes in the air.

The three of us have been together for a month or so, and I am head-over-heels in hate with Pike's girlfriend. I hate her laugh, a screech from a bird shop. I hate her sneezes, always a series of dainty extended sniffles at odds with her floozy personality. I hate her nasal voice, her mangled English, her long and boring stories, her forever apologies for forever misunderstanding everything, her irrelevant interruptions whenever anyone else is talking, and I hate even the sound of her footsteps. I hate the expression that's always on her face, a contorted sneer that shouts, Life is a distasteful chore! I hate everything about her. I hate her as if she's my ex-wife. 

When Pike and I talked about moving in together, he never said that his girlfriend would live with us. I'd never met her, never knew she existed, until after I'd moved in. She lives here, though. Maybe not officially — I think she has an apartment of her own — but this is where she sleeps, eats, fucks, showers, pees, poops, talks on the phone, and puts curlers in her hair.

He and She just had an argument, another argument, and despite having my door closed and having no interest, I heard it all. She woke him up by talking at him, started laughing but wouldn't tell him what was so funny, and then they shouted at each other for seven minutes, and then she left and slammed the door behind her, but not before dainty-sneezing twice.

Now he'll try to go back to sleep, and so will I, but the pulsing baseline from the downstairs neighbors' Mexican music has begun for the day, and oompa oompa won't allow much sleeping. We have no claim to complain about the neighbors' loud music every morning, after Pike plays his own loud music every night. None of the music bothers me much, cuz I have earplugs and a loud electric fan to blot out most sounds, unless Pike and Terry are going at it especially loud.  

As for the drugs, he inhales and injects and imbibes so I won't be surprised if he's a corpse one morning, but he hasn't yet stolen my money or food, and he doesn't nose around in my room.

He's late with his half of the rent, but he's still covering the "anything legal" work I can't get to, and nobody's complained about his work, so he has an income, and I don't think he's going to stiff me. This morning he took a stack of my "anything legal" stickers and said he'd post them around the neighborhood, and that was his idea, not mine.

Pike is an annoyance, but everyone is, and he's mostly OK. The girlfriend, though. Jeez, I wish he'd meet someone else, or she would, so they could dump each other and she'd be out of our lives.

♦ ♦ ♦

"Please take one," said the slot at the front of the bus. Twenty years ago, there might have been bus schedules and service bulletins in that slot, but Muni gave up on schedules long ago, so "Please take one" has always been empty until this morning. Someone left copies of a zine in the slot, and that's brilliant.

The Long Answer to How I Broke My Arm is Joel Pomerantz's answer to the question he's sick of hearing, and for 12 pages he describes in detail his ill-fated spelunking and subsequent rescue. It's a smile reading it, a quick glimpse inside someone else's life, and it's enjoyable. I'd certainly recommend it, except it doesn't include an address so how could you get a copy?

♦ ♦ ♦

It was a pleasant day at the shop. Since it's Easter, many of the men walking by wore lovely bonnets. Nothing tasteful, of course, just plenty of vivid colors.

3rd runner-up was a man in a long pink dress, a white rabbit mask, and giant pink bunny ears.

2nd runner up was a man in a tiny thong bikini, with a thousand pimples painted on his buttcheeks.

1st runner-up was a middle-aged man in a violet evening gown, with a fluorescent fuchsia wig a few feet tall, like Marge Simpson. 

Grand prize: I don't remember his dress, just the bonnet. Remember Carmen Miranda in The Gang's All Here, wearing a fruit salad in her hat? This guy had that hat, but it was a vegetable salad — carrots, corn on the cob, cucumbers, oversized pickles, with a few dildos in assorted colors, in case anyone could possibly miss the symbolism. 

Women walked by all day too, but curiously, very few of them seemed particularly dressed up fancy, for our lord and savior's big resurrection.

♦ ♦ ♦

At the apartment, I picked up Pike's cat, and it was only the second time she's allowed that. She purred as I petted her, then scratched my arm jumping down.

"That's how she got her name," Pike explained. "Claudia."

From Pathetic Life #11
Sunday, April 16, 1995

This is an entry retyped from an on-paper zine I wrote many years ago, called Pathetic Life. The opinions stated were my opinions then, but might not be my opinions now. Also, I said and did some disgusting things, so parental guidance is advised.

Pathetic Life
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