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.
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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