1992, and we moved into that house. It was 500.00 a month, with a 500.00 deposit. The rental agent ran away with the deposit, I never saw it again. It was me and her, and 3 dogs. Two of the dogs would fight each other, ripping and tearing, trying to kill each other. We moved them around the house like chess pieces, so they never came in contact. That was a constant job.
Frat boy Sr. was still in the White House, so I was having a hard time landing a job. I did a few temp gigs, a little commercial acting, and a few bucks came in from the comic book I was drawing, but basically I was being supported by a woman that was making six dollars an hour. How we managed to survive, I do not remember. It got hot that summer. Every day was 100 degrees. There was no air conditioner, so I sat in my underwear and sweated. There was no furniture, so I sat on a cinderblock in front of the television and waited to die. Every cartoonist in town came by one night, and asked me to party; there were about 20 of them. I was known as the guy who could draw faster than anyone else. I just sat on that brick and stared at the television until they left. They never came around after that.
I would scrape together loose change and buy unfiltered Pyramid cigarettes from the dollar store. Those things were horrible, like smoking rolled sheets of plastic, but it was all I could get. Emo's had just opened up, and I would see all these beautiful women there, all dressed up in fishnet and leather, mohawks and black lipstick, and I cursed myself for being in a loveless common-law marriage. I would take my pit bull (Melvin) with me. I rescued him from the gas chamber when I worked as a dog-catcher the year before. He only growled at skinheads. He was a good dog.
The woman always accused me of things that never happened. She would tell me that I was going to leave her, that I was going to cheat on her. Every time she cut into me, I'd drink another cheap Malt-liquor, to replace the soul she was sucking out of me. In the end, she left me, but by that time I didn't care. We were too poor to rent a lawn mower, so the grass was about three feet high by October. When we opened the back door, a cloud of mosquitoes rose into the air, and attacked like a single living thing. Vermin, vermin everywhere. I bombed the house weekly, bought glue traps and pyrethrum spray, but the vermin were everywhere. You could see the fleas leaping along the hardwood floor, smell the rancid mouse urine in the air, but the cockroaches were the worst. Giant Texas palmettos like miniature tanks, indestructible, innumerable. I'd stopped sleeping in the same room as the woman, and the roaches would crawl across my face at night, and I'd jump up, yell, and feel the adrenaline pumping through me. I'd check the room before I went to sleep, then put duct tape around the door seals, but they still got in, how, I cannot say. And at 3 am I would laugh to myself, as I wondered what could possibly happen next.
When brother Bill got into the White House, I managed to find a job. I carried boxes of magazines in a warehouse, huge packages that weighed more than I did, yet I never got any bigger, just smaller and harder. I'd work there all day, and come home to the roaches, and the dogs, and the woman. When the woman decided to date other people, I was happy. It took about two months to get up to speed, but when I did, I had some beauties. There was Kristen, and Koshka, and Maria... and Eve. Eve was the craziest of them all, an atomic bomb of a woman. A stripper with a skin-bird haircut and the lack of caution and discretion only found in serious alcoholics with mental problems. I fell in love with her, just like I fell in love with the rest, but in the end I wound up alone, we all do. I suppose I should have been satisfied. I was dating whoever I wanted, drawing my comic books, had a job, was popular at Emo's, yeah, I should have been happy, but for some reason I was sad, and
disgusted.
I'd wasted 5 years in College. I was poor. There's no dignity in being poor, just anger. You're always lashing out at whatever is closest to you. I was full of love that I could not properly express. I had brilliant ideas that would never do the world any good. I had no way to let it out; I'd forgotten how to cry. I was imploding... entropy... death. This depression coated me like filthy oil, as summer turned into the chill of autumn that year. Skeletons, pumpkins, frost-breath, cockroaches, and this thing screaming inside me. There was nothing for me to do but wait for it to be over.
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