affordable housing

It was 10 p.m. on Sunday night when I climbed into bed. Walking team practice starts at 5:50 a.m. If you are late, disciplinary action occurs in the form of fines and suspensions. I was well into the first stages of sleep when loud noises jolted me awake. The Herman Apartments are over 150 years old. They were built in a more genteel time; when I can only speculate public drunkeness was a shameful thing. I imagine that domestic abuse was regarded similiarly. I knew it was the strange couple from upstairs. He had moved in a couple of months ago, alone. He worked at a restaurant. A chef's jacket hung in the window of the back seat of his sad Corsica. The thing was battered and falling apart; wires hung from underneath and poked out of a hole for the side lights. The muffler must've hosted a hole the size of Rhode Island. It had one black door. A curious bumpersticker on the back windshield said, "3 nails plus 1 cross equals forgiven." For the first few weeks, I rarely heard him, except for at night. He would come home from the restaurant, I presume, very late. He turned the volume on his television up high. If I listened closely, I could follow conversations and listen to commercials.
One evening, I heard him arrive with a female companion. This ended days of speculation about his sexual preference. Thomas David Mark, my fabulous gay neighbor and dogfather of Henry, had asked him over for a drink and was rebuffed. Neighbor Dude said he was on a prescription medication which had a strong adverse reaction when combined with alcohol. Soon after, Thomas David Mark noticed Neighbor Dude was being visited by a thin meticulous man. He drove a taxi yellow Jeep Wrangler with a Florida license plate. His clothes were too stylish for Palookaville; suede jackets, layering for form not function, etc. The topper(no pun intended, S&M or millinery wise) was when he showed up in a cowboy hat. From that point on, he was known as "Brokeback." TDM and I delighted in telling each other the comings and goings of "Brokeback and Neighbor Dude."
"Do you ever hear anything?" TDM inhaled his cigarette with a devilish look on his face. TDM was getting bored with his young companion. Jim was a Palookaville native. TDM had lived in London, New York and Chicago. Jim thought Brokeback Mountain was about a couple'a closet cases who got it on for twenty years and one of 'em died. TDM and I teared up when discussing the beauty of young Jack and Ennis. We cursed young Ennis for his stubborness. We quoted the line, "We could have a little cow and calf operation. It could be a real sweet life." TDM showed me his ancient dog-eared copy of the New Yorker in which the short story the movie was based on was first published. Jim sat on the sofa laughing at Scooby-Doo.
"Like...?" and I lowered my chin, puckered my lips and raised one eyebrow.
"Well, ye-es, LIKE...Like hot man-on-man action, what else?" TDM threw his hands and head heavenward and laughed, "..and men don't make that face, sweetheart."
"No, I don't hear anything." I was sorry to disapoint. I would have loved nothing more than to imitate their nasty grunty boofoo-love noises for TDM and cracked up with him while Henry and Cooper wrestled at our feet. TDM had made this medical leave bearable for me. He was from Louisiana, had lived in Manhattan, worked in retail, and ended up at the Herman Apartments in Palookaville. We had the makings of a poor man's Will and Grace, with plenty of Jack and Karen thrown in.
The first weekend the female was upstairs, I was subjected to top forty hits of the 80's for an entire weekend. When not singing along with Madonna's Lucky Star, I got to listen to them fuck.
Wuffah, Wuffah, Wuffah, Wuffah, Wuffah went the bed or couch or futon they were on.
"Oooooohhhhhhhh!" cried the loud lady.

"He's not gay." I told TDM.
"Hmmm, maybe he's bi." offered TDM.
"Given the right circumstances, all men are bi." I wagered.
"True, but he ain't in prison and Brokeback seems awfully light in the loafers. We'll see." TDM wins. Don't argue the finer points of 'mo with The 'Mo Extraordinaire.
"Here's the thing, " I stopped and raised my index finger to show the seriousness of the point I was about to present. When TDM had also stopped, crushed out his cigarette with his sneaker, and gave me his full attention, I continued. "I've seen Neighbor Dude in a wife beater." Pause for effect.
"Ye-es..." TDM was smelling what I was cooking.
"Have you beheld him in all his wife-beater glory?" I asked. I already knew he had. TDM misses nothing. He knows everybody's business in the entire building. All 19 units.
"Oh, yes. I have had the distinct displeasure." TDM widened his eyes and made a shocked and dismayed face.
"He's flabby...He's pasty...He has that beer gut..." Oops, I forgot. TDM maintained ND didn't drink. That was the reason he refused TDM's invitation.
"He says he doesn't drink due to the Plavidillicillizone." TDM was serious.
"Well, it's some kind of gut, and he is missing teeth. My point is...You know he can't put the love down, so what is that woman screamin' about?" I made my most agonized confused face.
TDM cracked up. "Who knows? Have you seen her?"
"No, but I would like to just for the gross-out factor." I was imagining a typical Palookaville barfly 40 something chick.

I looked at the clock. 11:24. The crashing and banging and loud voices had been going on for half an hour. They were not slowing down. I got out of bed and went upstairs. I knocked. The door opened. Staring back at me was a man dressed as a woman. He had dust colored shoulder length man hair. Somebody had attempted to coif it into a 'do resembling a woman's. His face was long and all of his features were pointy. Pointy head, pointy nose, pointy chin. He was very skinny. He was wearing a short woman's coat. The sleeves were too short and one of his big man hands rested on the doorknob. He was wearing inexpensive junior girl's jeans. You know the kind that you see at Target or Wal-Mart in the "teen"area of the big carpeted section housing the clothing. He had no hips. His eyes were bloodshot and slightly buggy. The skin around them was creased and wrinkled in the manner of somebody who has existed on booze, cigarettes, coffee and cocaine. The skin around his mouth was lined and cracked up, his lipstick bleeding into the lines. "Yeah?" He/she croaked.
"Hello, I live downstairs." Pause. Most civilized people would take this social cue and say something like, "Oh, no. Can you hear us? We have been drinking. We are so sorry! Hi, I'm Jane and you are? So nice to meet you. I'm sorry about the circumstances. We will quiet down, I promise. You won't hear a peep!"
I had been living in Chicago for too long. I forgot that in Palookaville, apartments were the lowest rank on the housing chain.
Instead, it said, "Yeah, and?" really nasty-like.
It just so happens that I have a personal policy to give as good as I get. I know responding to the asshole makes you the asshole and all of that, but I was pissed. And immature. And a product of Palookaville.
"Yeah, and you're very loud. I am trying to sleep. You live in a building with o-ther pe-ople. I would appreciate it if you would lower the noise level."
Now what, Julie Newmar? What? What?
It turned it's face away and said into the apartment, "Dwayne, You bettah come handle dis, before I kick somebody's ass!" The crypt keeper voice had a Jersey City accent.
Neighbor Dude had a name. Dwayne. Dwayne is a more redneck version of Wayne. I've heard Wayne is the most common name for serial killers. I tried to verify this via a Google Search, but only came up with John Wayne Gacy and Wayne Williams. Perhaps the other serial killers have Wayne as a middle name.
I used to work with a very elegant man who is credited with helping to bring high end fashion to Chicago, thus creating what we know today as the shopping mecca of Oak Street. He once asked me, "Katherine, is it Katherine with an 'i' or 'y'?"
"It's actually just Kathy. My parents thought it was cool in the seventies to name me an informal nick name. Clever, weren't they?" I lied. My parents were hillbillies. None of that ever occurred to them. I was named after the little girl on "Father Knows Best."
"Actually, I'm just John," he replied. "Are you from a Midwestern 'I' state?"
I nodded, lest anybody was eavesdropping.
"So am I! You can tell so much about parents from the names they give their children." he paused to check a price on a Prada travel bag. "It's Kathy with a 'y', right?"
Nod.
"Oh, it could have been so much worse, it could have been an 'i' with a big round dot!"
So true. Thanks to Ma and Pa Kettle for that much. I could have been D'Kathi.

Dwayne stumbled to the door. "I am sorry," he slurred, " I fell out of my chair."
"Look, I am not trying to be difficult. You are very loud. I am just asking you to keep it down."
From behind the door, the thing said, "Jeez, dese people ah as boring as dah ones in New York!"
I looked at Dwayne and said, "Lovely companion you have there."
Dwayne looked at me in a way that suggested solidarity or embarassment. "Uh, yeah...I know."
From behind the door, "Dwayne, you bettah tell huh ta mind huh own business or I sweah ta God...!"
"When I am being kept awake by your noise, it's my business. You can tell your 'lady'? friend that if she's from New York, she should be accustomed to living among people and having some respect for her neighbors." As I said this, I walked down the stairs.
For the next half hour the tranny-thing stomped on the ceiling, yelled obscenities and insults through the floor, threatened my life and yelled at ND, ""You don't know me, Dwayne...I will fuck huh up!"
I dialed the Palookaville Police Department. One of the older guys came out. Feathered thinning hair, porn 'stache, tinted glasses, the works..."So, uh...tell me what ya got goin' on here."
I explained and he went up the stairs. He knocked four times before Dwayne came to the door. He opened it and announced, "Uh, sorry I couldn't get to the door, I was in the bathroom on the can."
Noteable silence from the officer.
"We got a call about a noise problem and some threats by your guest...?" The officer stopped to let Dwayne speak.
"Uh, I don't know nothin' about that..." Dwayne started.
"You don't know nothin' about that, huh? Well, let me tell you what I know. I know you're so drunk you can barely stand and I can smell you out here. The lady downstairs knows that you have a guest, a female claims to be from New York. Izzat right? Yeah, well, she wouldn't know that unless she heard it from somewhere, right? Riiigghht. Your television set is so loud I could hear it from the first floor. I can issue a ticket to you right now for violating the Palookaville noise ordinance-a hundred and fifty dollars. So, listen up. If you can't get along with your neighbors and like to have loud mouthed guests who threaten people, move. If I come back here tonight, you're gettin' a hundred and fifty dollar ticket. I have better things to do than intervene in a situation that could have been settled between you and your neighbor. Got that?"

This should be the end of that nonsense, don't you think?

I've been a bad bad girl

Siobhan and I were finished with practice and were loitering around the front desk at the Palookaville Athletic Complex.
"Are you girls adding a lap a day?" asked Don, our unofficial coach.
"Yeah, Don." I lied.
Don asked us this every day. In fact, it was the only real coaching repertoire he seemed to possess. I lied to him every day and assured him we had. I wonder if it ever occurred to him that if we really added another lap a day, eventually we would never leave the track. We would just endlessly circle, our home lives left to destruction, eviction notices on our doors, past due utility statements clogging our mailboxes, house pets starving, family members appearing at the side of the track, pleading with us to stop and come home, interventions with Dr. Samson would happen with the entire entourage of friends and family following us round and round...
The surface of the desk was littered with everything from car keys and bananas to tourist guides of El Porto County (featuring pictures of the wife of Eric Snidely, conventionally attractive enough for Palookaville, but with surprisingly pendulous breasts that were featured prominately in a variety of tank top style shirts throughout the guide. She's posed as a faux family with a known gay guy who works for the El Porto County Visitor's Center and her children, who are twin girls and virtual clones of Eric. I was surprised about her breasts which I thought Eric would have had augmented by now, seeing as his best friend, Angelo Pantaglione's fiancee had implants and they seemed to do everything the same, like they are either in competition or just simply like all the same things and prioritize the acquisition of them on the same timetable. I was also surprised [or not, given the discussions Siobhan and I have about Eric's latent homosexual tendencies] by her manly shoulders and the nearly inch and half of dark brown outgrowth of her too-yellow chunky highlights. Wouldn't ya touch that shit up if you were being photographed for a guide that would be seen by everybody in town? That's classic Palookaville/El Porto County for ya; choose a flaming 'mo and a mediocre former stripper desperately in need of a boob lift to represent a typical family.)
Then I saw it. Next to the revised schedule of classes, there was a sign-up sheet. "Foosball Agility Class Ages 8-12." I scanned the names; all of the regulars were signed up, the kids of the SeanPenns, the Snidely's, the Pantagliones, the Popalopogus' and there it was; Trent Charliebrownshoes. Spawn of Charlie Brown Shoes, the first boy that I ever did several nasty things with, God love him. My wheels started turning.
Charlie Brown Shoes started haunting me in the hospital some months prior when my morbidly obese therapist asked me about my patient survey. Upon admittance, patients are given a xeroxed packet of questions and are asked to complete them at their earliest convenience so they could be evaluated by the staff. One of the questions was, "How do you feel about sex?" At the time, I had written, "Somewhat Repulsed." Big Fran had fixed her watery eyes on me. "I see you wrote that you were repulsed by sex on your survey. What's that about?" Big lumbering Fran in her big brightly colored mumu-like tops and her squished lopsided comfortable shoes. She had a quavery, whispery voice and just the very initial jerkiness of Parkinson's.
"The thought of it just repulses me right now." I go through stages like this. Occasionally, the thought of sex is just too gross to consider. Big Fran was desperate to connect it to some kind of unprocessed molestation during my childhood. I wouldn't concede. All of my childhood abuse has been processed quite thoroughly, thanks. Any more processing, and it would be a puree. The repulsion comes from the fact that most of my sexual experiences since CBS have had a predatory aspect to them. The CBS sessions were more pure and innocent. I wasn't drunk and he wasn't pressuring me. We would just make out for hours and things naturally progressed. Those were the frickin' days! No expectations, no disappointments and everything was new. Recently, I was asked if there was a day I could live over, what day would it be. December 26, 1984. The first time I ever made out with a boy-Charlie Brown Shoes.
I noted the time of the agility class as well as the start date. On the same day, at approximately 5 minutes after the start time of the class, I approached the front desk. An older black lady who looked about 50, but was probably 70 given that black people do not age, was behind the desk talking on the phone. "...and she done gone did what? oh, girl...no she didn't....What he said?" Her eyes moved over me as if I were an extension of the counter. "...girl, I gotta call you back in just a minute, I got somebody up here. Aw-ight." She hung up and said, "Yes? You have a question?"
"Yes, I am here for 'Yogilates with Amber' at 6:15, but my little nephew is in the Foosball Agility Class, where is that being held? I'd like to look in on him, if that's ok." Pants on fire.
"Oh, yeah, you gotta little boy in nare? It's down the hall. Go on 'head, look in on 'em. Amber's class 'bout to start, though." She smiled and I saw her gold tooth. Most of the staff wore athletic clothing to work. This woman was wearing a beige turtleneck sweater with metallic gold yarn knitted throughout. Over that, she was wearing a very fitted dark denim vest with a large belt and a collar trimmed with faux leopard fur. Her nails were ghetto long and painted red with gold tips. On every finger she wore a different large ring that resembled those you see on the Home Fashion Shopping Network or those full color glossy flyers that come as inserts in the Sunday paper along with the Wal-Mart and other Big Box Mass retailers' advertisements.
Down the hall, I peeked in the doorway. All manner of little boy moved in synchronized steps across the empty room. Tony Pantaglione stood in the middle of the mirror, monitoring their movements, his titanium elbows bent just oddly enough to make one take notice. Or did I notice because I knew he had fake elbows? Hmmm. Something to ponder for another time. No parents were present. Trent Charliebrownshoes and his dad must come on the other night designated for the class. Charliebrownshoes would never just drop his kid off and leave him. He wouldn't be that kind of parent.
"Did you do your homework?" Charliebrownshoes asked me over the phone. He called every day between 2:30 and 4, after school. I would ask him what he was watching, which was almost always the channel with the cartoons. I would turn my television to the same station so we would be watching the same thing.
"No." I replied.
"Why not?" The Inspector Gadget theme played in my ears from my set and my phone and he hummed along.
"I didn't have any." I was hoping he would say, "Can I come over?" like he sometimes did and we would make out on the living room floor until 10 p.m.
"You should always have homework." he stated, and then made a comment to his cronies about something in the cartoon. Scottie and Steve at CBS's house meant he wouldn't be over. Scottie was a black guy from a crazy ass family who was surprisingly normal. He dressed and talked "white." Steve was the star player of the Palookaville High School's Fighting Chickens football team. He got a scholarship to a Division 1 school even though our football team was one of the worst in the state. He was blond with a receding hairline(steroids, anyone?) and frizzy perm that he used Gheri Curl spray on. He had a beard and mustache and for the first few weeks of ninth grade, I thought he was a teacher.
"How should I always have homework when my teachers didn't assign any?" I asked with my fourteen year old logic. CBS would always make definitive statements with no back-up elaboration. I often felt exasperated while talking with him. When he wasn't stating things that needed explanation and not giving it, he was answering direct questions in an ambiguous manner. "Can't you just say 'yes' or 'no'?" I demanded of him during one phone conversation. "Well, now, that depends..." he began. I rolled my eyes and banged my head against the arm of the sofa in mock despair.
"You could always be studying something." he said piously.
"Uh, yeah, O.K., Dad." I said sarcastically. He had become increasingly paternal in our conversations since a couple of weeks prior while at my house. We were on a rare break from being joined at the tongue. He sat with his back against my sofa. I sat next to him with our legs entwined. "Can I ask you a question?" One of his eyebrows was raised. I nodded and my heart raced with anticipation. What could he be about to ask? I was desperate for the relationship to escalate to a normal boyfriend/girlfriend situation, although I would have sooner died than ever told him. I wanted him to initiate a relationship cue, and I would act like I was going along in my sullen way, "Well, O.K., I guess, If that's what you want..."
"Where is your mother?" he asked. Oh. He just wanted to know if she was coming home so we could move to the next base and he wouldn't have to worry about being walked in on. Maybe he wanted to take off my shirt or something. Oh, my god, did he want to try to have sex with me?
"She won't be home..." I started to tell him that she never gets home from bartending until at least midnight.
"No." He cut me off. "I mean, where is she? She is never here. I am over here alot and I've never seen her."
"She has two jobs. One is bartending and she doesn't get home until late." I was lying. She had maybe half a job. Her time was spent at various bars, but not bartending.
"Don't you get scared being here alone all the time?" He was looking at me and I wanted to finally drop the act and say "Yes, I am scared all the time. Don't leave me. Be with me. Really with me. Be something to me because I have nobody." and fuck him and fall into his arms and cry and beg him to save me from my empty life and hold on to him forever and die all at the same time.
"No." I lied.

I went to the Palookaville Athletic Complex again on the alternate night for the agility class, but no sign of CBS. I had started to shop at the El Porto Grocery because I thought he might be there some time. No CBS. No walking around the corner into the bread aisle where I would come face to face with him, shyly smile, look away...he would initiate some conversation, ask for my number while keeping one eye peeled for his thin but homely wife, with her coarse hair, glasses, potatoe-ish face with the large mole on the side of her nose. I had no idea about his life, where he might be, where I could just run into him after 20 years. I give up. It was a ridiculous childish fantasy anyway. How pathetic. The man is married. It's been 20 years. I am crazy. I am a crazy schizophrenic David Letterman-stalker woman. I leave the PAC and turn onto Sutherland Road. I come to the first stoplight on Highway 241. I look over at the driver next to me. There's something about the profile...he turns his face to me and there's the drowsy eyelids and that bottom lip and his straight Roman nose with just the slightest veer to the right. His hair is greying at the temples. I look away. I have a physical sensation of sinking and being elevated at the same time. I look back. He is still looking at me. He makes a smirky face. I smile at him. the light turns green. I have to turn.