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.