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Monday, May 27, 2013

8 Balls and the House on Dana Part 10


Kim and I looked at so many apartments that even the cockroaches wouldn’t have walked into. Filthy, dirty, small and in need of a serious bleaching, was what we saw apartment after apartment. 

That was once we got to meet the Landlords.

Landlords would greet us on the sidewalk 20-30 minutes late, looking like it was an inconvenience just to put their pants on. Old drunken, bloated faces covered in stubble wearing white muscle tees yellowed in the armpits. The smell of chicken soup clung to them.

Kim pinched her nose during a conversation with one of these “Landlords” as we were being given the walk through. Kim pointing to various light fixtures with exposed wiring would ask “Thoooo, yo neeth da deposit, and firth mounth, to mooth ib?” The landlord seemed to have no problem understanding what Kim was asking and rubbed his hands together at the thought of being able to afford another bottle of Jameson.

One apartment we saw was in the only still standing building next to a block of burned out row houses. Two brown rats happily played and chased each other across our feet as we walked up the sidewalk. I glance up at the building to see angry faces peeking out at us from behind slightly parted curtains on the first floor. An old woman looking down on us from another window is seen shaking her head as if to say, “Well, there goes the neighborhood.”

We continued the search the next day.

Kim and I quickly found out that if I called a place and a male would answer, if the apartment was no longer available I would thank them and have Kim call right back. Several times when they heard a female voice calling they would tell Kim “The apartment is available!” Imagine their faces when she showed up and that a male was with her. I imagined a lot of landlords just putting down their killing hammer when they saw me. I started to feel scared for anyone who might have to go through this search without someone by his or her side. 

I saw Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I know what happens when you pick up a Hippie and he wipes the blood from his hand on your van. A lot of people didn’t see it and can’t spot the warnings.

We finally scored a meeting with the landlord of the apartment on Third Street at 3pm. Kim and I asked everyone where Third Street was, after the fiftieth “I dun know” someone sent us on our way.

It was a long walk to Third Street, nothing looked familiar, now one was outside and every now and then, we would see curtains move slightly in a window as if someone was just looking out at us. Finally we turn on third and find the address. We are now standing in front of the sweetest little yellow house. On one side of the house, a slight distance away is another house, on the other is a Snow Blower and Lawn Mower shop. Actually, it’s a big empty lot with a tiny house and a little dirt path leading to their front door. On the lawn are brand new Snow Blowers and Lawn Mowers for sale.

Right at 3pm a large expensive looking car slowed to a stop in front of the house. The driver door opened and out stepped a young version of Arnold Palmer, or what I thought Arnold Palmer should look like. The shock of blond hair, tanned skin, yellow golf shirt with the top button teasingly open, blue sports coat and tan pants. The shine on the shoe was blinding and his glided towards us, hand outstretched.

To be continued……..

Geoffrey Doig-Marx holds all written and electronic rights to his writing "A Day in the Life". It can not be reprinted in part or whole without his written consent.

Monday, May 20, 2013

8 Balls and the House on Dana Part 9


The party was pretty much over once the exterminator found the roach nest. By law, he had to call the city and it was then declared that the house was not fit to live in, in its current condition. The Exterminator went on to explain that the house would need to be completely covered by plastic and that industrial strength poison would be sprayed in. This process would need to be repeated several times, so all living things that would want to continue living, would need to leave the house. 

“I figure it will take at least a month for the house to be inhabitable again,” says the Exterminator grinding his cigarette out in the ashtray in the kitchen. We would also need to take everything that was leaving with us, wrap it in plastic bags and hope that the roaches wouldn’t travel with us.

We had an hour for an emergency group meeting.

Everyone crowded in around the dining room table. Jackie stood and spoke first. “Me and Billy are out tomorrow, the rest of you can do what you want. Ciao, I have to go pack.” With that said Billy also stood, pushed the chair back with his legs, flashed us the piece sign and followed Jackie into the bedroom.

The lease was in Michaels name so he was the only one who could fight the landlord, he was on his own. Everyone had less than a week to move. Kim and I eyeballed each other across the table. The look was clear “Where the fuck are we going to go?” I had no family that I could move in with and I wasn’t going to live with David again. Kim’s family lived to far away. I signaled Kim to meet me in the bedroom.

We started our plan of action. We would go to the Ghetto Chopper, scan the wall of posted fliers and see if anyone had an apartment for rent. Then we would move on to the library and look through newspapers for rentals.  If that failed we would make phone calls to friends and ask to sleep on their floors for a couple of days. Kim and I hit the ground running.

The Ghetto Chopper had fliers of several people with apartments “For immediate rent.” The problem was that most of these apartments were in the worst sections of town. Parts of Albany that you would walk into and people would stop dead in their tracks and watch you walk by. It often reminded me of the old west but what choice did Kim and I have? Standing at the pay phone we called the first number and made an appointment to see it within the hour. The apartment was located behind Clinton Avenue as you headed to the highway. This is where you entered Clinton Hill. If you were driving and you took the exit into Clinton Hill, you locked your doors if you didn’t want to get car jacked or shot.

Kim and I planned the rest of the day as we plunked more quarters into the pay phone, we would not stop until Kim had to go to work later that day, so that gave us 7 hours to find a place. We made appointments to see three other apartments in the Clinton Hill area and we had a lead on a newly refurbished basement apartment on Third Street, wherever the hell that was.

Time was wasting and we needed to find a place to live.

To be continued…….


Geoffrey Doig-Marx holds all written and electronic rights to his writing "A Day in the Life". It can not be reprinted in part or whole without his written consent.

Monday, May 13, 2013

8 Balls and the House on Dana Part 8

Life at the house continued on its frenetic pace of drinking, partying, smoking, working and sleeping. Not in that order and sometimes we were doing a combination of two or more of them at the same time. Our candle was being burned from both ends and from the middle. We were young and we had all the time in the world.


We were living the lives of tortured artists. Kim was a promising musician and someday I wanted to be a choreographer. You don’t get more hard core than that. We smoked lots of cigarettes, listened to Madonna on our walkman and gave the finger to anyone staring at us for too long. We dreaded daily confrontation because we always got it. A trip to The “Ghetto” Chopper two blocks away was a nightmare. You would never go by yourself and usually ask anyone who was home at the house to go with you. It surprised me how angry people got because of the way we dressed. Someone spit on Kim in the parking lot of The Ghetto Chopper just after she was called a freak. She cried, her vanilla ice cream melted by the time she got home.

We loved our freakiness and how we looked; we just couldn’t understand why people cared. Fingerless gloves were now dyed purple and came in opera length. Chemical balloon pants with sleeveless shirts were all the rage and hair had to now be razor sharp and jacked to Jesus. I enjoyed safety pin chains and wore them attached to my ear.

My favorite purchase was a Boy of London coat that looked like a blood spattered straight jacket. I wore it, until I got hit from a passing car with an egg. I was sitting on the front stoop and the words “Punk” and “Fag” were screamed out the window at me as they sped away.

I wanted the world to notice me and ignore me all at the same time.
Kim and I would wake up whenever. Sometimes we would not be in our beds but on the floor in the bathroom and sometimes sleeping on the floor in someone else’s room. It was cool and showed a lack of caring, we were living the life.

After we woke up, we would sit around whatever part of the day was left, watch television and smoke cigarettes. Later we would head into the Half Moon Café to work some random poetry reading or a dinner shift. Kim hated the poetry readings lately. She once had to empty the bucket of an angry feminist poet who peed in it to make a point during a reading of her “A man is keeping me down,” poem. Kim complained about it for a solid month. Even though the poet said it wasn’t real, we knew it was.

All anyone needed in that poetry reading room was a bongo, a beret and a need to snap their fingers at the completion of a poem. It was not my cup of tea and I would get chastised by Tommy, one of the owners for rolling my eyes. “Geoff if you don’t want to hear a poem about babies covered in feces and mucus, stay in the kitchen.” I would happily go and tend to the Keifer culture.

Thanksgiving was now around the corner and the days were getting colder. The cockroaches didn’t seem to know that they weren’t supposed to be hanging out in colder climates; as a matter of fact they seemed to get more intense and bolder. It was so bad that Kim and I spent Thanksgiving at a diner. No one could deal with the cockroaches.

That night when we got home, Ingrid’s oldest was playing on the front porch. I asked him what he was doing up?  Through a perpetual runny nose, he told us that Mommy and Dale had had a fight. Dale was a new man in Ingrid’s as they had recently met and after three weeks he moved in to her house. Dale was appalled at the way Ingrid lived and worked hard to keep things clean.

“How did the fight start?” Kim asked. After wiping his nose of the back of his sleeve he told us “Mommy had felt bad for the cockroaches and placed the remains for the entire Turkey dinner on the floor to feed them. She told him that even cockroaches deserve a holiday dinner.

The next day we call the exterminator and have him come to the house, there in Ingrid’s house he finds a cockroach nest.

To be continued….

Geoffrey Doig-Marx holds all written and electronic rights to his writing "A Day in the Life". It can not be reprinted in part or whole without his written consent.

Monday, May 6, 2013

8 Balls and the House on Dana Part 7


Kim and I spend most of our time cleaning and bathing the kids, wiping down walls, putting garbage in the can and then taking it out to the curb before it can sit around some more. This house is the filthiest place I have ever been in my life, It’s clear to both me and Kim that the cockroaches are breeding somewhere in Ingrid’s house. They have plenty to eat, there are dishes piled in the sink that still have bits of food attached to it. Kim ties a bandana around her nose and mouth and starts to fill the sink with hot water. I can hear Kim scream in disgust as hundreds of roaches run out of the sink.

I go to help Kim in the kitchen, I start by opening the fridge, and hundreds of cockroaches are literally swarming all over the food in there. “Close it!” Kim screams and rushes over knocking the door from my hands.

There is another door in Ingrid’s kitchen that leads to the basement, I wonder what’s down there but Kim quickly stops me by asking “What are you nuts?” she goes back to the dishes and I release the door handle. If this floor of the house is this disgusting the basement must be a house of horrors. For good measure Kim slides a chair under the knob of the basement door, ”Just in case.” I can tell that she is not even joking at this moment.

Kim and I gag our way through the house as we clean. It is a real live version of an episode of Hoarders, except that Ingrid collects garbage, dirty diapers and roaches. Ingrid has very little cleaning supplies so I run back upstairs to get more; I leave Kim to scrub pots and pans.

Jackie and Billy are sitting at the dining room table smoking cigarettes as I burst into the room and hurry past them. I have a sticky film that has coated me and I smell of garbage and baby vomit from being downstairs, as I rush through the room Billy and Jackie gag and pinch their noses closed. “What the fuck?” Billy yells out, Jackie continues making gagging noises as he pulls Billy back towards the bedroom.

“We are downstairs babysitting and cleaning Ingrid’s house.” I yell at them as I root through the walk in pantry for the cleaning supplies. “Do you want to help?” I yell out. “Haven’t had our shots!”Jackie screams back at me before slamming his bedroom door.

When I return downstairs, I start to tackle the kid’s room. The kids are finally clean but their bedding is filthy. Kim finishes the dishes and comes in to help me out; she still refuses to remove the bandana from around her mouth. We strip down their beds only to find that the mattresses are filthy and stained with urine; at this time we don’t know what to do, so we just flip them over and cover the mattresses with clean linen and clean blankets. The kids are used to living in this hell but Kim and I are determined to speak with child services again in the morning. No child should ever have to be raised in a world like this.

The kids climb into bed, the youngest one holds his stuffed bear up for me to kiss. It is missing its head and its fur is sticky. I blow it a kiss instead.

Kim and I sit on the floor in front of the couch, afraid of what lives in the cushions and watch MTV. Two hours later Kim falls asleep on the floor during Video Killed the Radio Star and after a couple of minutes I slap a cockroach out of her hair. Kim jumps up screaming and starts pulling at her hair, tears streaming down her face as she screams “Did it lay eggs?” “Did it lays eggs?” The rest of the night we cling to each other and refuse to go to sleep. It’s tough because the same six videos keep playing.

Ingrid arrives back home at around seven in the morning. She is making such a racket that Kim and I can hear her trying to get her keys in the front door. Instead we hear Ingrid grumbling as she repeatedly drops her keys on the porch floor.  Ingrid is so polluted when she stumbles into the house that she literally falls in the door.  Ingrid doesn’t acknowledge that we are there as she walks through the living room bumping into furniture and swearing.  Finally, she makes it into her bedroom where she slams the door. The path that Ingrid has taken from the door can be followed by seeing where she dropped her pocket book, keys, shoes and shirt on the floor.

Kim and I dump a couple of roaches out of our sneakers before we put them back on and go upstairs. We immediately both call dibs on the shower and I tell Kim that “I just want to burn our clothes and go to sleep.” Kim agrees and pulls herself up the stairs.

The amount of roaches waiting for us in our shower is tame compared to what we just saw.

To be continued…..

Geoffrey Doig-Marx holds all written and electronic rights to his writing "A Day in the Life". It can not be reprinted in part or whole without his written consent.

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