A Start to the Day, At Most

I'm sitting up early this morning and Stanley is ironing a suit right in front of me.  I've filled an apartment with less overwhelming smells from cooking a 10 pound lasagna.  

He just told me he has a job interview, searing his suit against the living room table.

"Oh yeah?" I said.

"I'm going to be one of those New York tours guides on the double decker buses."

Get us off this bus

Then he sat down and shined his shoes with his own socks.

Get us off this bus

Then he grabbed his headshot, which has been collecting dust on top of the record player, and stared at it for a second, his former self winking at him in the eerie morning light like the Ghost of Christmas Never.

Passenger uprising

Then he spritzed the very last of his cologne onto one of his wrists, walked out the door, and was gone, like a stillbirth seagull into the morning.

 

The Fun of It

Stanley just learned tonight why homeless people collect bottles and cans.

Utopia, it HAS to be

Stanley and Blanche traveled up to New York from rural Florida, the first time they've ever been away from their parents. They moved in during Puerto Rican Day in Brooklyn, with their parents carrying all of their boxes. No fire hydrant was unbroken, no roof skimped on raining beer bottles down on the innocent, and no dry patch of grass lacked a burning firework of some sort, struggling to free itself. People danced in the streets, completely unaware of Michael Jackson's impending death. It was a great time for all of us. Stanley asked, "Is it like this everyday?" half hoping for his cartoonish view of the ghetto to be true. True or not, he finally belonged. He had escaped from the hick-infested swamp populated by his best friends in high school, his best friends currently, and his best friends for the rest of his life; those who did not appreciate the finer arts of drama, of acting (like an idiot), of using a Boston accent to portray a New Yorker, of pointing a camera at things he did in his room, that room haunted by his past, of his pre-New York life, and also haunted by an Incubus poster hanging from the wall by one stubborn tack.

You see, Stanley and Blanches' parents are bit religious, and didn't know that they were moving in together. So during the move-in, we were completely silent, as not to incriminate them in their little pre-marital scheme. After the parents left, they exhaled mouthfuls of everglades air, stole a cigarette from me, and asked for the nearest place to get booze. They made it, finally, to New York, the cosmopolitan utopia they had been dreaming of, in that they hadn't, and had actually moved into a shitty apartment complex in Brooklyn that looks like the house from Beetlejuice, after that pill-popping whore of a mom redesigned it.

Nicotine receptors held at bay, booze bile plentiful in their mouth, and parents gone home to cut their wrists over a crucifix made of their grandfather's bones, Stanley and Blanche started to open up. They had escaped a hillbilly hell, what Stanley referred to as "the confederate flag buckle in the bible belt of the south." He was really proud of that phrase, and said it about seven times the first day. From when little Stanley became self-aware at 13 years old, to when he was screaming curses at Jesus into his pillow at 18, he had come up with one creative act, one line that even his single, guilt ridden act of masturbation could not taint, one holy line probably scripted by the God he had become so hateful towards: "Yeah, I come from the confederate flag buckle in the bible belt of the south." Faulkner wept. For other reasons.

But nay, Stanley could not escape his upbringing. When given a comically miniscule amount of alcohol, the beast emerges. A few weeks in, some of us were on the roof with some puerto rican girls we had just met, one of whom we thought was very cute. The conversation was going well, until Stanley launched into a tirade about why he hates immigrants of any kind. They take all the jobs he hasn't bothered looking for. The girls promptly left.

Two nights ago, after a single glass of Old English malt liquor, he flashed his crocodilian teeth, and informed me that black women have different babies by different fathers because of slavery. "They've evolved that way." he said, boldly refuting the controversial notion that black people are the same species, while confirming the theory that black people could evolve within 300 years to resemble something as alien to him as seahorses, or black people.

Sometimes, late at night, he'll smoke cigarettes out the window, contemplating how his girlfriend is slightly more stupid than him. A mute banshee, he thinks, a paper plate punched with five holes for eyes, nostrils, and mouth, framed in permed hair that the cat gets tangled in periodically when it tries to hang itself on a noose of hair to end the misery. As she walks to Whole Foods to buy things she cannot afford, like pints of gourmet lemonade, the cat hangs from her hair and bounces off of her back like a vertebrate pony-tail, making its latest public suicide attempt. This races through his mind as he looks out the window, pretending he's addicted to cigarettes, and he'll ask me, with the eyes of a motherless bear cub, "Are you religious?"

Right when I'm watching the new episode of Megan Wants a Millionaire.

When Mammals Ruled the Earth

I chased the cat around the apartment in my underwear for half an hour tonight, while everyone was asleep. To give you a lurid picture, the cat is grey and black and feeble, and I was wearing yellow briefs and feeble. I propped the door open before we started, to give the the cat the option of escaping this hell entirely. The cat had no idea I was vying for it's best interest, "It's a better world!" I cried, peeing a little in my underwear.

No more floridian sex shows, no more hairspray raining on it's food, no more fruit flies bouncing off it's head, no more wasting its acute hearing on this garbage:

Blanche: How does this look?

Stanley: It makes you look skinny.

Blanche: Thank you!

Stanley: Let's have sex right now.

Blanche: No, baby, I'm sweaty!!

Stanley: I don't care, you look like a little school girl right now.

The door is open!

Omen for Assholes

July 28th

Last night he came home late from his degrading job, holding a huge piece of painted cardboard underneath his arm.  "Hey Andy," he said, "Look at what some homeless dude gave me on the street, isn't it cool?"  He held it up.  It was an oversized tarot card.  The Death Card.

Settling For Less Than Less

July 27th

He and Blanche arrived home in good spirits.  He planted himself on the couch with confidence.  "Guess what?" he said.  The suicide pact is a go, I thought.  But no, it was not to be.  Apparently, he was at a comedy club with Blanche and he had been heckling the performers the entire time with one-liners so delicately crafted he might as well been lobbing a ship-in-a-bottle onto the stage.  Perhaps a fully-rigged 16th century galleon replica in the form of "You're gay!"  The owner pulled him aside afterwards and told him he was the funniest kid in the joint, and decided to give him a slot at the next open mic night.  He invited me to go, and I might, if only for the slight chance that his set turns into the only funny thing it could ever be: a shattering mental breakdown on stage.

It's his big night.  His name is announced by the owner reading from a crumpled piece of paper.  Stanley pops up from his seat, the last weak jello shot sliding down his gullet, and runs up the aisle high-fiving the crowd like a pro-wrestler.  He hops up the stage steps in a single bound, his gelled hair tearing through the thick club air like the like the nose of an F-14.  He slaps the owner on the back and grabs the microphone, pulling it out of the stand and swinging the cord behind his feet like a seasoned veteran.  He pauses, just for a second, nodding to the guy manning the spotlight, and Begins:

"My room smells like cat poop."

And sobs weakly into the microphone until he's pulled off stage.

The Lion Tamer

He barged in the front door the other afternoon with a mangy kitten hanging from his hands, the poor thing's arms sticking straight up into the air as if signaling for me to save it.  

"Can we keep it?"
"No Stanley, I'm allergic."  I said.  

The cat and I exchanged a wink, the only two brainpowers in the room.  

"You know you want a kitten" he said.

The rogue lion tamer cannot be stopped.  He goes out into the urban jungle with nothing but a whip and a tube of Nivea Smooth Indulgence Hand Cream (actually in our medicine cabinet), and he returns riding on the back of the defeated lion.  It is his way.  He cannot heed worldly details such as his lack of money, space, time, or permission for his lifestyle.  Every new stimulating prod on his neurons warrants slowly killing an animal.  Stanley is but a vehicle for a divine quest to annoy, and he must follow it like a naked Ken doll played with by a confused and adolescent God.

I could have tried to talk to him like June Cleaver about "big responsibilities."  But nay, it is not fated.  Cat scratch fever had riddled his defenseless brain.  A few days later he trapped me while I was smoking on the fire escape and he laid out his case:  They would keep the cat in their room so I wouldn't even see it.  And besides, Blanche really wanted the cat because she was lonely.  Who am I to deny her companionship?  The lady of the manor needed a furry eunuch to keep her company and tend to her while her man was on his crusade, the PM shift at the kitchen supply store.  Apparently, her being in a fit of unemployment all day, writhing around on the bed in a slip with a terrible case of the vapors can get a bit lonesome.

"Well," he ended, "We already bought the cat and the food and the litter box anyways."

The cat is terribly skinny, sometimes it's head will eclipse it's whole body.  When they are both gone for 14 hours at time, it remembers it's previous life of abuse as it bakes in their room like a bobble-head trapped on the dashboard of an abandoned car.

The smell of their room is unbearable.  If they even crack their door, a visible frontier of stench can be seen crawling across the apartment.  And you better run when you see it coming.

Stanley and Blanche now have robotic sex among an even stronger stench than their own rotting hearts.  And Bobble-Head watches, dreaming of Africa, or perhaps the living room.

Also, they feed the cat milk.  Because they learned how to care for a pet from Looney Tunes.