a story and conversation repository (est. 2000)

1993 ( 25 Years Old )

I shared a three-bedroom house with two other guys. Of all the houses on the street, we were the only working-age people. We were also the only people who did not mow the lawn on a weekly basis. In fact, we did not even mow the lawn on a monthly basis.

The guy that lived next to us had an old pickup truck with a camper on the back. His truck sat right outside my bedroom window and every saturday morning between 7 and 8 he would start the truck and rev the engine wildly for about 10 minutes or so as some form of apology to the truck for not having enough money to ever take it/him camping.

On a day that was not a saturday a friend came over to pick me up. I let him in and he looked around the dankish living room, visibly sniffed and asked what kind of dog we had. I informed him that we did not have a dog but that I did have a roommate who ingested nothing but garlic cheese bread, beer, cigarettes and a jaundiced version of kraft macaroni and cheese made with iced tea instead of milk as the mixing agent.

There was a weed in the front yard that was growing from beneath the concrete slab that made up our front porch. By the end of the summer the weed was taller than our front door. This door-tall weed was the extent of our landscaping and we all came to like the added charm it brought to our home's facade. One evening the saturday morning truck guy knocked on our door and told my roommate he should cut the weed down in that it was flowering and about to release its door-tall-weed-seed throughout the neighborhood. My roommate denied the request and said that he liked the weed there and was going to leave it. The next day when we got home from work we found the weed felled, forever crippled. Upon further inspection we could see that someone had tried to cut it down but couldn't entirely hewn the trunk, given that it had started growing bark to support its girth. Dan, the weed's main advocate scowled at saturday morning truck guy's house, said some sort of swear and stormed into the garage. He emerged a moment later with part of a broom handle in his clenched fist. He drove this into the ground next to the fallen greenery and resurrected the door-high weed which spent the remainder of it's days leaning against the front of our house and wearing this improvised splint at it's base.

Another time bookpimp traveled 2000 miles to visit his old friend, me. Upon arriving he was very tired from the drive and I set him up on the couch where he slept like a giant sized baby. Upon waking in the morning he had small, red bug bites over the majority of his body from whatever he was sharing the couch with. He refused to stay in the house any longer and set me scrambling to find alternate accommodations for the week he was visiting.

Once after showering I leaned down and peered behind the toilet at something that caught my eye. In the black sludgy mildew that covered the tile floor grew a tall and lean mushroom with a broad white umbrella cap. It is not necessary to reread the prior sentence. You read it correctly. Fungi was growing out of the bathroom floor unassisted in any way. After digesting this vision, I righted myself and stared in the mirror for several minutes and by the time I looked away, I knew I would not share a three bedroom home in the burbs in the middle of a retirement community much longer. And in the end it was not the drunken parties that started at 2am or the cantankerous neighbors or even the pause you had to give at the kitchen entryway as to allow the mice and cockroaches time to scurry or ramble their way off the counter after the light came on, it was this simple if not entirely natural process of a mushroom growing out of the floor in the cool shadows beneath our toilet. This and the fact that whenever the maker of the brown macaroni had to evacuate his digestive tract meant that you had to evacuate the premises lest you fall victim to a rancor so complete it left a palpable sting in the air.