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Monday, September 30, 2013

8 Balls and the House on Dana Part 16



Kim and I take turns calling the electric company, the phone company and the landlord, all from the gas station pay phone. 

Kim calls the Half Moon Café and explains that we can't make it to work because of the flood in our apartment. On the phone Kim is met by the sound of skepticism in Jodi's voice. “Well come in when you can,” Jodi replies flippantly before hanging up. 

A deep guttural sound grows out of Kim as she slams the receiver again and again against the phone. I reach out to her and touch her on the shoulder. Kim quickly turns to me, buries her face in my chest and begins sobbing uncontrollably.

It is a full two days before the landlord even shows up at our apartment. We have already pulled everything apart, cleaned, scrubbed and thrown out almost everything that the water has touched and destroyed. 

Water stains start about three feet from the floor and are on all the walls. The entire apartment stinks of mold and mildew, we are devastated.

“Hello!” chirps the landlord as he lets himself into the front hallway with his key. The carpet he stands on is squishy with water that pools around his feet. 

“Looks like you had quite a problem here,” he says trying not to show in his face, just how bad things really are. “Well,” he says pausing to look around. “The good news is that nobody is dead.” and then snickers. Kim and I look at each other, her eyebrows shoot to the top of her head.

“So this happened because they repaved with little round stones next door?” The landlord runs his finger around what is left of the window frame. “Well it rained before they paved and nothing like this has ever happened" Kim says. The landlord makes a "snort" sound and walks further into the house. Kim grasps her upper thighs with her hands trying to remain calm.

“Well,” says the landlord again as he begins to walk the full length of the apartment looking at all the damage. “I have called the insurance company, but this seems to be flood damage, and we don’t live near anyplace that should flood so…” 

His voice trails off as his eyes land on the kitchen window. 

Quickly recovering he smiles and says “Any who, I will have my men replace this window, I need to speak to the business next door about replacing their driveway with a substance that wont flood your house and insurance should be here within the next couple of days.”

“We lost everything.” Kim mumbles. 

“Well look on the bright side,” says the landlord as he moves towards the front door and pauses to look back. “You now get a chance to start over.”

Two days later the landlord’s men fix the window and within the  the insurance company comes to survey the damage. The guy with the name tag that reads "Bill" fills out a lot of forms.

Three weeks later it rains again.

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, September 23, 2013

8 Balls and the house on Dana Part 15


Kim slides herself through the opening in the door that the water has allowed her. 

The entire living room is a swirling tide pool created by the opening of the front door. Kim becomes as hysterical as I am as she wades into the house. 

Shaking a Marlboro Light from her pack, Kim grabs it and shoves it into the corner of her mouth. Her eyes are as big as saucers as she looks around and shakes her head. Kim’s face grows red as the tears appear just below the surface.

Everything on the floor that the water touched is now floating in a brown dirty muck. “The water came in through the window!” I yell and point into the kitchen. Kim looks at me with wide eyes and says “What the fuck?” Kim screams “Through the window!” I repeat, my hand still pointing towards the kitchen. “That’s Nuts!” Kim yells as she stomps through the water into the kitchen.

Standing in front of the window, Kim sucks on her cigarette like it is a medicine that will calm her down. “What the fuck?” Kim screams again. For the rest of the day everything that Kim finds in the apartment elicits her to scream “What the fuck?”

The good news is that the water has stopped pouring through the windows. The bad news is that everything we own is wet and/or ruined. It’s hours later, the sun has started to set and Kim and I am using everything we have to mop up this water and to get it out of the house. Every bath towel, every roll of paper towels and what used to be dry bedding gets used. Kim remains quiet but I can hear her sniffle and release an almost silent “sob” as she works.

The house phone is dead and now Kim and I take turns walking the two blocks to the gas station to use the pay phone. We have used up all the space on the landlords answering machine and now the line just rings and rings. To add insult to injury the pay phone keeps stealing any change we put into it.

There is no way that we can sleep and we work through the night hauling almost all of our belongings out to the curb for garbage pick-up. The clothes get thrown into a large green garbage bag and taken to the laundry mat. We take turns sleeping as the clothes spin first in the washer and then in the dryer. Kim’s eye makeup is running down her face and she uses the back of her hand to wipe the tears away. For some reason Kim doesn’t like to be seen crying not only in front of me but in front of anyone.

Kim is so exhausted, we had little between us to begin with and now the clothes from our backs are sopping wet and full of brown water. I look over at her and she has fallen asleep on the clothes piled on the folding table.

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, September 16, 2013

8 Balls and the House on Dana Part 14


The water fills the apartment immediately, taking everything that it comes in contact with for a ride. It spills over the kitchen floor and quickly races into every part of the apartment. Stacks of records on the floor, magazines, books and clothes began to quickly sop up the dirty water before they give up all together and float around.

I run into the kitchen grab a roll of paper towels as the water is rising to mid calf. It’s here that I end up facing the side window. The glass pane on the bottom of the window has given way but not before cracking into millions of pieces. Sharp shards of glass weakly cling on before getting swept into the swirl.

I stand there and watch as the water pours and pours into our apartment. I quickly realize, that the paper towels in my hand are not going to help. I need a mop, a sub pump and a prayer.
The cats go running for higher ground as the water carries their bowls towards the bathroom. On its ways to pick up the bowls, the water rushes under the hot water tank and extinguishes the flame.

There I nothing that I can do to stop the water. I run to the phone, pick it up and listen for a dial tone. The phone is still working because of a deal Kim and I worked out with the phone company. We will pay our bill this week, or they will shut it off. Deal done.

I dial the landlord’s number that I find written on a scrap piece of paper. The water rushes and rises towards the electrical outlets. 

The phone in my hand, rings and rings, then an answering machine picks up the call.

The landlord’s sunny voice explains that he has stepped out and will be back soon but I need to be sure that I leave a message. I do, and my message is this…water, flood, glass, hot water tank, quick and help. 

It is all screamed in a hysterical high pitch and then the phone gets slammed down. Half a second later I call his phone again and still I get the goddamned answering machine. This time I scream, help, fucker and what the fuck are we going to do? Then, I slam the receiver down again.

I am at a crazy hysterical pitch as I fall to my knees sobbing. 

Everything that we own, everything that we have is swirling in dirty brown water. The phone cord is stretched so the phone can sit on the top of the bookshelf.

I don’t even think that one end of the phone cord is in the water but realize it the minute I I grab for the receiver. The lack of dial tone tells me that I am fucked, so I drop it in the water, put my hands on my face and continue sobbing hysterically.

The front door suddenly is being pounded on from the outside but the swirling water is helping to hold it closed. The door is suddenly being shoved open as water swirls out into the entryway. Kim manages to get her face in the opening between the jamb and the door. Our eyes meet and she asks me in a high-pitched hysterical voice “What the fuck did you do?”

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, September 9, 2013

8 Balls and the House on Dana Part 13



The apartment was not haunted but clearly had some sort of curse on it. Kim and I began a downward spiral of drugs and booze shortly after moving in. Funny, we no longer had a whole series of roommates to contend with, it was just the two of us with an occasional “special guest star” who would visit, but things got ugly fast.

Kim’s childhood friend Kevin would come to our new apartment and we would stay up late at night watching The PTL Club while we put huge amounts of cocaine up our noses, cigarettes in ashtrays and emptied liquor bottles.  Once you were high on cocaine, we would smoke a joint and wash down everything with whiskey. The booze and weed would help to mellow out three Cocaine Zombied out druggies.

I would often slip off to bed and leave Kim and Kevin to talk about old times. It seems that the two of them had a history, even though Kevin recently came out as gay. Kim put me under strict directions to never mention it in his presence and if I did, he would deny it.

I would spend what seemed like hours trying to drift off. I was usually so high that I ended up tossing and turning while looking at the ceiling. In the morning I would often find Kevin and Kim still on the couch where I had left them the night before. Except now they had all sorts of paranoid theories to share with me.  Theories ranged from our neighbors being able to listen in on their thoughts, to Jim and Tammy Baker giving them secret messages through the PTL Club broadcast.

As weeks go along things get worse and worse between Kim and I. Drugs fuel paranoia and paranoia fuel fights. Kim and I would argue about the tiniest things and that would lead to slapping fights, objects being launched at each other and punches being thrown. Our relationship was becoming unbelievably toxic. We were acting like our hero’s Sid and Nancy and I suspected that Kevin and Kim were smoking a much stronger drug than weed.
It was during this time that we painted the entire bathroom and the changing room, black. It echoed the way we were living our lives and how we were feeling.

One day the shop next door decides to repave their driveway, with these little black stones. For hours we would watch through slightly parted blinds from our basement advantage, as the workers poured wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of the little black stones all over their driveway.

For hours, Kim and I could hear the stones bouncing off the wells that surrounded our windows. Unfortunately, several of the rocks put tiny cracks in the windows before they landed in the wells. Kim would rap on the window and scream at the workers “To be more fucking careful!” Kim would never show her face, just bang and snarl.

Soon, Kim and I started missing work or showed up hours later than the time we were scheduled for. We were in danger of losing our jobs, which also meant losing our apartment if we couldn’t pay the rent.

Thankfully, Jodi’s sister Cindy, who also recently started working at The Half Moon Café, was breaking up with her boyfriend and needed a place to live. It was a Kismet born out of desperation.

Two days before Cindy moves in it rains.

We hadn’t had any rain since the driveway next door had been paved. The storm was moving across the sky quickly as you could feel a drop in pressure and smell a change in the air.

The skies opened up with a fury, quick and fast and they dropped a quick hard summer rain. When the rain hit those round black stones, it rushed over the top of them and headed right for our windows.

Kim was at the store getting a pack of Marlboro lights and I was home alone listening to Amadeus on my tape player when it hit. Within five minutes the force of the water filled the wells, then it smashed against the windows. The widows held back for a moment letting a spray here and there shoot into the kitchen, then they moaned and gave way. The water rushed across the kitchen floor, heading for the living room, the bedrooms and the bathroom. Within moments, I was ankle deep.

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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