PATRICK WALSH: October 2003

(Continued from January 9th, available in the archives)

So I had been in New York about a week and I had already gotten and quit a job. I had no money and no prospects. My roommate Joe mentioned he might be able to get me some temp work, and I told him to see what he could do.

Before we get into that, let me tell you a bit about where I was living. The state of New Jersey has been widely ridiculed as being sort of the armpit of the country. Jersey City, where I was living, is sort of like the crotch of that armpit.

True story: One day while walking to get a little Chinese food with my roommate, we saw a young boy run at an elderly man, push him as hard as he could, and run away laughing as the man fell to the ground. It was that kind of town.

It was very cheap, I'll give it that. I had a very small room in a decent sized apartment. I had space for my twin bed, my CDs and DVDs, and a small area for pushups. I did a lot of pushups, since I essentially became Travis Bickle during this time. I lost my mind.

To refresh your memory, the inhabitants of this apartment were me, a delightful couple named Joe and Paige, and the owner of the place: a 40 year old woman I'll call Julie. Julie was attractive but looked a little "weathered" like a lot of New York women tend to. She had an awful voice. She was a smoker and she was always halfway through a bottle of red wine. Sometimes she would be halfway through her second bottle of red wine. She watched only "Sex and the City" and deemed everything else stupid. She would talk at length about how much her life mirrored that of the "Sex and the City" gals, despite the fact that she did not have sex and she did not live in the city.

She often spoke of her "Mr. Big," the man who "just wouldn't commit." When I finally laid eyes on this man, he was about 5'5 and bald. On the rare night he would sleep over, I would hear a low, gutteral "UGH! UGH! UGH! UGH!" coming from the room next door. This was Laine's voice.

Laine was clearly very horny, and on more than one occasion I thought about closing my eyes and making a move. All guys have "Much Older Woman" on their Sex "To-Do" list, alongside threesomes and Asian girls. Most nights Julie would slip my mail under my door and walk down the hall to her room. But on nights where the wine was flowing a little more freely, she would knock.

"Yes?" I would say.

"I've got your mail," her slurred voice would respond.

"Oh. OK."

"Can I come in?"

And I would always let her and she would usually sit on my bed in a sports bra and shorts and complain about dates and talk about only herself. I should have just climbed aboard and done it. I could have worked out a Kingpin style rent deal. She really wasn't bad looking. Missed opportunities.

As most drunks do, Julie kept a filthy apartment. Filthy. Thick layers of dirt and grime covered nearly every surface of the apartment, the shower was a tangled web of pubes and soap residue, and enormous cockroaches held nightly jamborees in the kitchen sink. But none of that was nearly as bad as the dogs.

The dogs.

Julie kept three poodles penned up in a tiny area in her kitchen. These dogs were covered in so much gunk and crap that they would have had to take a bath in order to become dirty. Julie would often not come home for days at a time, and so piles of shit and pools of urine would coat the kitchen floor. The kitchen was on a slight slant, and their pee would make its way across the floor at night. It was not uncommon to walk into the kitchen and find three rivers of dog urine streaming together to form a yellow lake in the middle of the linoleum. Joe, Paige, and I refused to clean this up, and we hated the dogs, so we just avoided the kitchen as much as possible.

The dogs all looked the same, but differed in one very important way. One dog would bark 24 hours a day. One dog would howl 24 hours a day. And one dog would viciously rape the other two at every opportunity.

This presumably caused the barking and the howling.

You might think dogs having sex with each other is funny. Lord knows I always did. But friends, we're talking about ass hair caked with blood. We're talking about red stains on the floor. It was like a crime scene in there, I swear to God. The dog that got most of the violent ass-raping developed a severe limp and had a condition where what appeared to be mucous would leak from its eyes. I had to look at this miserable bitch every time I wanted a bagel.

These were the good days. Things would soon get worse. A lot worse.

tags: story of my life  new york  

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