It’s night and I’m inside an impossibly expensive house.  The house is on stilts because it’s on the side of a mountain.  Why I’m inside the house is unclear but there I am anyway and I’m looking for something but I have no idea what.  To clarify:  It’s not that I know I’m there to find something but I don’t know what it is, it’s that I’m there and I have no idea why I’m there, but I’m holding a flashlight and it just sort of feels like the reason I’m there is to discover something.  The flashlight turns out to be a good thing because there doesn’t appear to be any power in the house.  As I go from room to room, there is an increasing sense of dread growing in my mind and I begin to feel certain that I’m there not to find something but to find someone, or at least to make sure no one is in the house.

As I look through the various rooms of the house, I see several pictures showing two women – one black, one white – who appear to be deliriously happy in every picture.  Obnoxiously happy.  Disgustingly happy.  As I look at each new picture of the women it becomes obvious that they’re a couple and that they’re so happy because they’re deeply in love with one another.

I move into the dining room and I see several glass cabinets that are supposed to be housing the silverware and the good china but they’re completely destroyed and anything that was inside them was destroyed at the same time they were.  The dining-room table is upturned and it’s at this point that I know in my heart, with absolute certainty, that the reason I’m there is because I’ve been chosen to discover something horrible.  Something profane.  Almost as though God randomly drew my name from a hat, plucked me out of whatever life I was leading up to that point and put me in this wretched house with no memory of where I’d just been and only a vague idea as to why I was here.

The dining room leads me into the kitchen and I know that the kitchen is the last place on earth I want to be but I have no choice in the matter.  My feet won’t stop carrying me forward, though my mind is screaming at them to just knock it the fuck off.  My flashlight scans the kitchen and the first thing I notice is a small television sitting on a counter at the far end of the room.  The television is on and the screen shows an empty chair in front of a table.  The camera is unmoving, the picture unchanging…it isn’t a program the monitor is displaying, it’s showing another room somewhere, maybe in the house, maybe half a world away.  As I walk further into the room, I look into the sink and am immediately confronted by the appalling sight and smell of rotting meat.  I’m the first person to be in this room in several weeks, if not months.  Then my mind goes black.

There’s someone in the kitchen with me.

I whirl around with the flashlight, casting light in every direction.  I can’t see anyone, but they’re there.  I can feel them behind me but when I turn around there’s no one.  When I reach back behind me, there’s no one.  As I desperately search the room, the television catches my eye again and now there’s someone on the screen.  At first glance he appears to be talking to someone but as soon as I notice him, he stops for just a moment before speaking again.  I step toward the screen to get a closer look and to see if I can turn up the volume to hear what he’s saying, and as I step closer, he begins to gesture wildly and his talking has turned into screaming and it’s obvious, though I can’t hear a word he’s saying that I’m the person he’s been talking to.  And as soon as I realize that, I no longer need to turn the sound up, because I know what he’s trying to tell me.  He’s telling me to run.  He’s telling me to get out of there as fast as my legs will carry me, but it’s too late.  She’s here.

I turn around and just entering the room, where I’d entered moments earlier, is the white woman from all the pictures.  She’s hunched over like an animal, completely naked, and half covered in dirt.  She’s smiling at me just as she is in her pictures, and she takes a step toward me, awkward and stumbling.  As she moves toward me, my eyes go down to her legs, which seem to be bruised and purple.  She snarls at me and takes another step and I notice her complexion lightens toward the top of her body to a pale, almost translucent white.

My mind is now shrieking commands to tear ass out of the room but I can’t.  I want to run but my body refuses to move.  She reaches for me with a noise in her throat that isn’t human and, instead of running, I take a swing and my fist connects with her face and I feel her jaw dislocate on contact, spinning her head around to an obscene degree.  The sound that comes out of her is almost a laugh and she lunges back at me, moving quicker than before.  My hands instinctively go to her throat and as I squeeze I feel it partially collapse, which is when I realize the notion of killing her is absurd because she’s already dead.  This is when I feel a glacially cold hand wrap itself around my neck and send my entire body hurling back into the kitchen wall.

I look up and the black girl from the pictures is leering at me with the same nauseating smile and both women start toward me again with obvious intent.  Still knocked on my ass, I raise my right leg and send my foot into the right knee of the white woman, with a horrible crunch.  This sends her to the floor but the look on her face suggests she hasn’t even noticed.  The black woman reaches down for my throat and I swing my flashlight into her skull as hard as I can, knocking her away and to the side of me.  I get to my feet just as the white woman does, apparently unaffected by her injury.  I grab her hair and send her flying back into her friend, knocking both of them to the ground, and I run from the kitchen back into the dining room and continue through to the living room, where the black woman is waiting for me with that hideous smile on her face.  She throws herself at me with a screech that turns my blood to ice and, remembering being grabbed from behind in the kitchen, I jump to the left, destroying the coffee table on impact, as the two women collide.  For a moment their attentions turn away from me and each instantly begins trying to tear the other apart.

It’s obvious that both women are dead, but as I watch them claw at one another I notice that the injuries I’ve given both of them are gone.  I’m not dealing with zombies, I’m dealing with ghosts.  And with that revelation comes another:  They killed each other.  Something went horribly, horribly wrong and the love they had for each other had turned to hatred and they fought and somehow they killed each other in the process.

Once again, I get back on my feet and the noise I make in doing so brings their hateful attention right back to me and then I have one last revelation: As much as they hate each other, there is only one thing in the world they hate more, and that is me.  My living presence, interrupting their nightly pantomime of double homicide, is the only thing in all of creation more offensive to them than each other and now they’re both turning to me to deal with that.

I reach down and grab a broken leg from the ruined coffee table and use it to cave in the black woman’s skull which, again, goes unnoticed.  We fight for several minutes, but there’s ultimately only one way this is going to end.  The injuries I give them may as well never have happened and if I succeed in throwing one of them off of me, out of the room, they come running back in, completely unhurt and with a renewed strength.  My injuries, meanwhile, aren’t going anywhere and I’m starting to get tired and worse, I’m scared out of my mind.

In a moment of weakness, I stumble backward and the white woman grabs my throat and pulls me in close with her icy hand, her eyes burning holes into mine.  She screams, not like a person, not like an animal, not like any living thing in this world, and I begin to scream too.  I am now terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought and I know there’s only one way out of this house quickly enough to escape these horrible, dead bitches and that’s through the window.

I manage to push the white woman off of me and I grab for the black woman and shove her aside and I take a step toward the nearest window.  I know that jumping out the window means dying but it’s the only way to escape the nightmare of what’s going on inside this house.  Both women shriek their hideous, dead shrieks and I begin to run.

As I plummet to freedom, I see the rotting corpses of two, long-dead women rushing into view, mocking me with their stark, hollow eyes and those hideous smiles.

So I’ve been doing a lot of cooking lately, partially because it’s cheaper to make your own food and partially as an attempt to reduce the amount of dog shit I consume in the course of a week.  I have no desire to turn this into a food blog but sometime last spring I made an amazing dressing / dip with Greek yogurt and a shit ton of garlic and six months later I’ve forgotten how to make it.  So I’ve decided to start posting recipes here as soon as they’re perfected so I don’t forget them and also just to share with whoever wants to give them a try.  Also, I’ve just updated the back end of this site and have installed a few new plugins and I want to use this post to test everything.  Anyway…

Home-made chicken soup.  Goddamn this is good, and it’s a thousand times cheaper than buying chicken soup at the store and about a thousand times healthier (or something like that).  This is nothing new or gourmet, it’s just a simple chicken soup recipe that anyone can make (which, in my opinion, kicks the shit out of gourmet any day).  To make this you’re going to need:

3-4 Pounds Bone-In Chicken Thighs
1-2 Pounds Carrots
1 Celery Stalk
2 Large Onions
1 Bulb Garlic
1.5 Pounds Red Potatoes
2 Bay Leaves
Thyme
Kosher Salt & Black Pepper

How you chop the veggies depends entirely on how chunky you like your soup to be.  Personally, I prefer it not-so-chunky so I tend to dice everything pretty damn small.  Peel and chop the celery, carrots, and onions and throw them in the bottom of a large pan or stock pot.  Dice the hell out of the garlic and throw it in there too.  If peeling garlic is a pain in the ass for you, click this link and watch the video, it’s amazing.  Go on, I’ll wait.

…

Holy shit, right?  Anyway, onto the chicken thighs.  When you buy these things in the store it doesn’t really matter if you buy them with the skin on or not, but you absolutely have to make sure they have their bones still in.  Damn near all of the flavor in the broth we’re going to make comes from those bones so they’re kind of important.  If their skins are still on, hook your thumb under, between the skin and the meat and yank it off.  If you have an inner vegetarian lurking anywhere inside of you, the process of removing the skin will drag it screaming out of you in a fit of disgust.  Don’t be too anal about removing the skin from the thighs, just get whatever you can easily pull off with your fingers.  The skin is mostly fat and fat is flavor so a tiny amount won’t do any harm.  When you’re done, throw them in the pot, on top of the veggies.

Next throw in some thyme.  If you’re using fresh thyme, throw in half a dozen sprigs, if you’re using dried thyme, just…I don’t know, give a light even coat of it over the meat (I’ve used both but I’ve never measured).  Just don’t over-season the meat, you can always add more later.  Throw a couple bay leaves on top of that, and add four or five fairly large pinches of salt (Kosher’s best to cook with but whatever you have is fine) and some ground black pepper (maybe half the amount of the salt).  You can get away with putting in more salt and pepper for sure, but I prefer to season to taste at the end of the cooking process.

Now take the stock pot and add cold water over everything until the water comes to approximately 1.5-2 inches over everything.  If you like thicker soups or stews, then just add enough water to cover the meat and veggies by about an inch or so.  Stock pot on the stove, stove on high heat until everything comes to a boil.  As soon as it comes to a boil, reduce the heat to medium low and let it simmer, uncovered, for 60-90 minutes.

While the soup is simmering, take your potatoes, give them a quick wash, peel them if you have the patience for that sort of thing (I don’t) and cut them to whatever size you feel like putting in your mouth.  Also, during the simmering process, occasionally take a look at your broth.  You’ll notice there’s a small amount of scum gathering at the top of the soup (or a whole fucking lot of it, if you didn’t remove the skin…bleah).  Just skim this off with a spoon or a small strainer or something similar.

After an hour, hour and a half, come back to your pot and take some tongs and remove the thighs from the pot, putting them onto a clean plate.  At this point, the bones have given every bit of flavor they have and are now just gross, so it’s time to remove the meat from them.  You can do this by just shredding the meat off the bones with two forks.  However, I usually let the meat cool down for five minutes or so so that I can do this by hand.  There’s some connective tissue on either end of the bones here and if you’re not careful, it’s way too easy for it to get put back in the soup pot.  This is bad because they have no flavor at all and they’re hard and rubbery and are like chewing on tiny racket balls which, having done it, I can tell you is fucking disgusting and does not make for an enjoyable meal.

When they and the bones are gone, shred the meat and throw it back into the pot, along with the potatoes.  Let everything continue to simmer for another half hour or so, depending on how large or small you cut the potatoes (you’re effectively done when the spuds are fork-tender).  Also, I suppose you could just as easily add pasta at this point, instead of potatoes.  Or even dumplings if you know how to make them…I’ll have to give that a try sometime.

At this point, the whole kitchen is gonna smell amazing (unless you’re a vegetarian, like my wife, who thinks this soup smells like weaponized farts).  All that’s left to do is take a taste of the broth and add salt and pepper to suit your pallet.  Or, if you’re serving this to others, leave it alone and let them season it.  Sometimes I like to add Chinese hot sauce and soy sauce to the soup so it’s important not to go overboard with the salt.  I’m not sure you can go overboard with pepper.

So there you have it, the most verbose chicken soup recipe on record.

It is September 5, 2011, and I’m already sick of the 9/11 anniversary shit going on.  I agree that 9/11 is something that should be remembered but I’m as close to 100% sure as any human can be that it will be incorrectly remembered.  I say that not because I’m a cynical asshole but because of the previous nine years of fictional remembrance I’ve witnessed.  Also, because of it being the tenth anniversary and all, there seems to be this overly-patriotic celebration of how rad-ass America is as well as the (sadly) expected tie-ins to entertainment news, both of which are ugly and obscene and are the reason I’m so fucking grateful that I’ll be out of the country while it’s happening.

I’m leaving town tonight so I don’t have time to develop this into a more fully-thought-out idea but I want to mention it anyway.  A few weeks ago I was watching some dipshit pundit on television ranting against Muslims and citing the attacks on 9/11 as one of the reasons their presence and culture shouldn’t be tolerated in this country.  It occurred to me that these people always focus on the attackers being Muslim and never on them also being assholes.  It always amazes me that assholes never get called out for being assholes and instead get called out for being whatever it is about them that makes them different from the people they’ve angered.  Atheists love to attack nut-bar Christians for murdering abortion doctors.  Nut-bar Christians love to attack Muslim terrorists for bombing innocent civilians.  In both cases no one is getting angry over the fact that the offending group are a bunch of murderous assholes.  Amazing.  And in the case of the television “pundits” I honestly think it’s self-preservation.  If society got it into it’s head that assholes were the cause of our woes, and that they shouldn’t be tolerated, these fuckheads on TV would have about 24 hours to get out of the country alive.

Television pundits are worse than Muslims ten times out of ten.

—

Non-comics nerds can skip this part.  Beginning last week, DC comics relaunched their entire superhero line starting over with all-new first issues.  They’ll be releasing digital comics on the same day as their print-version counterparts and they’ll be charging the same price for both versions ($2.99, I believe).  This is ridiculous for a number of reasons, but I’ll just focus on the economics of the thing.  First off, I haven’t read a monthly comic in years, partially because they’re too fucking expensive.  Asking me to pay three bucks for 22 pages of story and art in a digital format is fucking madness.  That would buy me three different songs.  That’s two dollars shy of buying me an entire album on sale at Amazon.  But mostly it’s madness because anyone with their head halfway pulled out of their ass can download that same comic that same week for absolutely free.  Sure, its illegal but that isn’t gonna stop most people from doing it, just ask anyone who used to work in the music industry.

I realize that DC comics is trying to do right by retailers but they’re going to fail.  Up until recently you couldn’t download digital comics unless someone had gone to the trouble of scanning them and uploading them to the internet first.  The other day I downloaded a torrent that contained the entire 18-year archive of Vertigo Comics, the mature-readers imprint owned by DC* so, yeah, people have been going to the trouble to scan and upload comics for a while now.  But now, by publishing digital copies every week on the same day of release as the print versions, all one needs to do to share them with others is legally purchase the comics and then copy and upload them to the internet as torrents.  So, congratulations, DC, you’ve cut out the most tedious part of the file sharing process by removing the need to scan your copyrighted material.  Well done.  And, assuming their digital downloads are loaded with DRM shit to prevent file sharing…well, just ask anyone in the music industry how that’s worked for them.

DC needs to get with it and realize that the era of the comic specialty shop as we know it is over.  This is sad for those of us who love those stores, but it’s the reality of the situation regardless.  If they don’t start offering a better price for their digital comics they’re never going to recover the people like me, who’ve had to stop purchasing print comics in lieu of paying their mortgage every month.

*I don’t feel bad about doing this since I literally already own more than 75% of it.  And because I fucking hate reading comics on my computer.

Jerome died last week.  There was a point in time when I would have called him my best friend or even my brother.  I’m older now, though, and I don’t have romantic notions of friendship like I used to.  I don’t really believe in such a thing as a best friend but I do believe in such a thing as someone I can’t imagine going through life without, and he was definitely in that category.

Last Tuesday, July 5, he and his mother were supposed to drive from their home in Ontario, to somewhere in Claremont.  Just prior to this happening, Jerome told his mother he needed to run a quick errand and that he’d be back shortly.  As he was driving in the slow lane of the eastbound 10 freeway, he had to suddenly swerve out of the way of some debris on the road.  As he swerved to the left, someone else was merging into that lane and they honked their horn and so he swerved back over to the right and as he did this, he apparently overcompensated, and drove into the back of a tractor trailer that was parked on the shoulder of the freeway.  This is the article that ran in the next day’s paper.

Just a bit of fair warning, this isn’t going to be a starry-eyed eulogy, filled with endless anecdotes about what a great guy he was.  I really don’t think Jerome would approve of me spending a whole lot of time grieving or waxing nostalgic about our friendship…he fucking hated that shit.  To be painfully honest, I think he’d think I was being an idiot to write about him at all.  However, this really isn’t about him.  Like everything else I write here, this is about me.  But if I’m going to disregard his wishes, the least I can do is write about him honestly.  I think he’d respect that, even if he thought it was stupid of me.

I first met Jerome back in 1983-84, when I was still a freshman in high school.  I was a huge comic book nerd and he owned a comic book shop located in The Packing House in Claremont.  The first time I saw Jerome, he was wearing a shitty yellow t-shirt (I think it was a Secret Wars shirt), 501′s, glasses and he was sporting a thick, full beard and long hair that made him look like the hippie he really, really wasn’t.  I vaguely remember asking him about some comic book and then wishing there was a chair I could sit in half an hour later, as he still hadn’t finished answering me.  I wound up talking about comics with him for over an hour that day (the first of literally thousands of similar conversations) and to this day I still judge comic shops by how willingly and how well they carry on a conversation about comics and related pop-culture.

Over the next few years, I’d go to Jerome’s store as often as possible, spending hours in there, going through the back-issue bins and talking about how fucking great Frank Miller’s Daredevil was.  It was because of Jerome that I discovered Nexus, Badger, Matt Wagner’s Grendel, American Flagg!, Love & Rockets, and Tintin.  Once I got my driver’s license, I was at his store as much as I could get away with.  I’d spend weekends hanging out with Jerome, smoking, eating Juanita’s, watching Gidget and The Munsters on his shitty little TV, and talking, talking, talking about everything.  I’d stop by the store on my way home from school and/or work every weekday.  It was through Jerome that I met the first of several lifelong friends I’d meet through him, Chris.  When Jerome wasn’t at the store, Chris and I would hang out and talk.  I remember walking into the store one day to see Jerome, clean-shaven with short hair, and wearing a suit.  I couldn’t get over how completely fucking weird it was to see him that way, which is funny because that’s how he spent all but the last two or three years of his life (the short hair and clean-shaven bit that is, he didn’t really do suits).  Jerome was the first adult (he was seven years older than me) to treat me as an equal and I will never forget him for that.

Sometime in late 1986, Jerome closed his comic store and I was devastated.  There were other comic shops but they were all crap in comparison.  However, shortly after graduating high school, in 1987, I ran into him again, while hanging out at Benji’s in Upland one night.  I said hello and we wound up talking until five or six in the morning.  When you’re young and you hang out in a coffee shop all night and don’t get home until the sun comes up, you’re either going to hate how tired you are the next day and vow to never do that again, or you’re going to accept that you’re going to see a lot less of your family for the next several years and say your goodbyes to the part of the world that requires you to be up and alert prior to noon.  I chose that second one and stuck with it for way, way too long.  By 1988, he and I were inseparable, spending almost every night of the week in one coffee shop or another, talking into the early hours of the morning.

Things started to change back in 2000, when I got my first real job.  Jerome would want to hang out still but he’d want to hang out till two or three in the morning and my job required not only my presence but that I be awake, so there was just no way that was going to happen.  However, we were now living together and we still got to see a lot of each other.  But then, in 2003, in an uncharacteristically smart move, I asked my wife to marry me.  Suddenly I was engaged and almost overnight our friendship changed.  Annette moved in with me for a few months in the summer of 2003 and Jerome instantly moved out.  He didn’t start renting somewhere else, he just started sleeping on the floor of his mother’s house, which was just next door.  Both Annette and I felt completely awkward about the situation and I asked him to please move back in because we felt like we’d kicked him out of his own house.  He wouldn’t hear of it.  We moved into our first place in August and soon after, he took up residence in his house again.  I saw him maybe three times during the course of my engagement.  My bachelor party was clearly something he wasn’t interested in and, while he showed up, he wound up acting like such a dick that he pretty much ruined things for a few of the people there and managed to only dampen the mood for the rest of us.  He was the best man at my wedding and he participated to the best of his ability, but was one of the first people to leave.  Over the next five years, I don’t think I saw him more than twice and only spoke to him on the phone once.  After a while he stopped returning my calls entirely and, after a while, I stopped calling.

This next part I’m going to be intentionally vague about, out of respect for his family.  Out of the blue, in November, 2009, I got a call from him.  He wanted to hang out and he wouldn’t stop talking about what a shitty friend he’d been.  I told him he wasn’t a shitty friend and he said he was but could we meet anyway.  Of course I said yes and I met up with him an hour later at a nearby Starbucks.  When I got there, I damn near didn’t recognize him.  His hair was long and messy, he was emaciated, his face expressionless, and he was staring vacantly into space.  When I got right up next to his table, he looked at me and recognized me and said, “Hey guy.”  I asked him how he was doing and he said, “I’m sorry, I’m just thinking about something, give me just a minute,” and his eyes left me and he went back to staring vacantly at nothing.

So I sat down and we just enjoyed the quiet for about twenty minutes and then he looked at me and said, “So what’s going on?”  I asked what was going on with him and he gave me several different partial answers to that question and he kept repeating that he’d been a shitty friend to me and that he was so sorry.  I kept telling him he wasn’t a shitty friend but he refused to listen to any argument to the contrary.  After a few hours of erratic conversation followed by several periods of extended silence, I told him that he really needed some help.  I told him that he needed help and very likely medication and to not get bent out of shape at me saying that since I’d been in therapy myself for about seven years at that point.  He told me he didn’t want a doctor and he didn’t want medication and that he was fine.  I told him that obviously wasn’t the case and if he wasn’t going to listen to what I had to say why’d he even bother calling me and he snapped back at me, “Because I really needed to be with a friend,” which instantly shamed me for reasons I’ll get into shortly.  We spoke for a bit and then agreed to meet in a few days.  We wound up settling into a regular weekly habit of meeting in Claremont and talking about everything for a few hours.  For the first few weeks of that, he was very down on himself and kept calling himself a shitty friend and saying he was a bad person but that he was trying to improve.  Slowly, however, he started to come out of that negativity and, over the course of about a year, started to be more and more recognizable as his old self (with all the good and bad that that implies), but there was always a hint – and sometimes a little more than a hint – that there was still a fair amount of darkness in the back of his mind.

Jerome was a weird guy.  He was capable of severe cruelty and on more than one occasion, he said things that left me with no choice but to get up and walk away, usually telling him he was an asshole.  There must have been twenty or thirty times I quietly wondered to myself why I didn’t just push him through a wall.  And counting the number of times I wished he’d just shut the fuck up is a job no human is capable of.  I don’t know how many times he’d be droning on about Orwell’s 1984, or the Chinese economy, or whatever the hell, and I’d declare it was time for me to leave and he’d say, “Just let me finish this thought,” and he’d continue droning on as we got the check, paid the check, left the tip, had one last cigarette, had another last cigarette, walked to the car, stood at the car, opened the door to the car, sat down in the car with the door open, sat in the car with the door closed and the window down, sat in the car with the door closed, the window down, and the motor running, and finally, he’d wrap it up as you were slowly backing out of your parking space.

When Jerome said, “Just let me finish this thought,” the next hour and a half of your life was forfeit…most of the time.  There was actually a trick to getting away from him when he said that but most people never figured it out.  I spent several years living with him and I eventually realized that there really isn’t any reason to ever be victimized by sociopaths.  See, if I were to tell most people to fuck off, I’d be concerned with what they might think of me afterward.  But with sociopaths, you really don’t have to worry about it since, most of the time, they aren’t giving you more than two seconds worth of thought.  Strictly speaking, Jerome wasn’t a sociopath but there was definitely a sociopathic streak in there somewhere.  There was a night when he and I were in the living room, having a conversation, and I had to get to bed since I had an important meeting early the next morning.  He said, “Let me just finish this thought.”

And I responded with, “Fuck off, I have to get some sleep.”

A normal person would have had a negative reaction, but Jerome just shrugged his shoulders and said, “We’ll talk more tomorrow then.”  That exact same dynamic probably happened a hundred different times while we lived together, and every single time I felt bad about being rude to him, but sometimes you just gotta get some sleep.

So.  Having said all that, Jerome was capable of amazing kindness and generosity.  Back in the mid 90′s, I was a fucking mess.  I’d been doing my best to keep it a secret, but internally I was a neurotic maelstrom of self-loathing, pain, and anger and I was well on my way to having a complete breakdown.  When that breakdown hit, I was living with Jerome and I found myself unemployed.  I’ve written about this before, so without going into great detail, Jerome let me live in his house while I got my shit together and he let me live there for either incredibly cheap or for free, depending on my financial circumstance.  I can’t think of a single other person who’d have let me do that while I took my sweet time figuring shit out.  It is because of Jerome’s charity and generosity that I found myself in the position to ask the right woman to marry me when she finally came along.  Years after I was out of that breakdown I expressed my gratitude to him and told him I’d never be able to repay him.  He just told me he always knew it would be worth the wait to see me turn into the person he knew was in there and that seeing it happen was payment enough.  And that sentence is the reason that, years later, when he snapped at me that he just wanted to be with a friend, I felt such shame.  He’d done that. For me.  And all those years later, I’d grown impatient with him after only two hours of conversation.  It was then and there that I decided that if he needed me to shut the fuck up and be a friend, that I’d shut the fuck up and be a friend.

I’ve already written a lot and I haven’t even scratched the surface here, but I have one more story to tell and I have to tell it because it’s my favorite memory of him.

Back during The Breakdown Years, most of my friends and I were all hanging out at Nick’s Cafe in the Claremont Village.  There was a girl who was working there at the time who we all pretty much loved to death.  This is maybe 1998, so my memory is a bit fuzzy when it comes to the details, but her father-in-law (or father-in-law to be) was on his way home, when he got hit by a truck and died.  As I recall, he was still young enough that his family really wasn’t prepared to deal with the cost of a funeral and  – I’m just guessing at the numbers here – they needed approximately $1100.  Bella was sitting with Jerome and I (and maybe others as well, I can’t remember) and was telling us this.  Jerome asked her how much had been raised so far and she said something like $150 had been collected.  Jerome then said he’d be right back and he got up and walked out of the cafe.  We all sat there talking and at some point, he came back and found Bella and gave her an envelope with the difference (approximately $950) in it.  When he gave Bella the envelope he told her the only condition was that his name not be mentioned.  He wanted no credit for this – none.  When I heard this, I told him he’d just done a genuinely great thing.  His response was a dismissive, “Yeah, well, the guy needs to be buried and if I’m in a position to help get it done, then let’s get it fucking done.”  If it had been someone else, he might not have helped and it’s not like he was at all close with the girl who lost her father-in-law, but he liked her well enough and he thought she was cool, so he decided to help.

And that was Jerome.

The shower in the front bathroom – the shower I bathe in – is currently blasting water at the hottest temperature possible and no one is in it.  This is happening because:

1. It hasn’t been draining properly for the last week or so and I believe I’ve fixed it but I’d like to make sure.
2. What I pulled out of the drain in no way, shape, or form came from this plane of existence and there is neither water hot enough nor soap strong enough to clean it’s residue off the shower floor.

I could have called a plumber but we’ve done that enough in my opinion and…sorry, the Purell is dry, have to apply another coat.  And we’re back.  Anyway, there comes a point in a man’s life where he has to say fuck it and start taking care of shit himself and dammit, I’m at that point.  Also, I just spent $16,000 on lawyers and their shenanigans last week and I’m really not in the mood to spend another $200 on a plumber.  But I’m not writing this to bitch about not having money again and I’m not writing it to talk about responsibility and the noble pursuit of Doing It Yourself.  No, I’m sitting here at my desk to share with you, the people I love, my horrifying discovery from twenty minutes ago:

Satan jacks off in my shower.

“Oh, Tim,” you’re saying, “you’re just waxing eloquent macabre again.”

No, no I’m fucking not.  It was not…

[Purell Break]

Sorry.  It was not hair that I retrieved from my shower drain, fibrous though it was.  It couldn’t possibly have been hair.  It was black.  Not black like some people’s hair can get.  Jet fucking black.  Like used motor oil only not as clean.

I pulled the drain snake up out of the drain and discovered a sizable bulb at the end of it.  The bulb looked like a smaller version of a bulb like you’d see on a turkey baster.  And it had a tail.  And that tail hit the shower floor and left a trace of jet-black residue behind it.  If I’d wanted to, I could have written my name on the floor of my shower.  I chose not to because, ultimately, there isn’t much question as to whom the shower belongs.

[Purell Break]

Also, I was too busy screaming like a little girl, to write legibly.

There was a small amount of human hair on the snake but mostly it was that nasty bulb of what could only be Old Scratch’s jizz.  I gingerly carried the drain snake outside and turned on the water spigot by the garage.  I held my breath and tucked my testicles up inside my body (or, possibly, they just did that on their own) and held the stygian ovum bulb under the water…and then I put my fingers on it and began trying to remove it.  Oh sure, it felt like hair a bit, but only if it had been soaking in oil for the last century while sitting under a heat lamp.  And I swear to God, it wouldn’t come off.  It…

[Purell Break]

Sorry, it would not fucking come off.  After a few minutes I had to give up and go get some pliers to help me do the job.  It was only with pliers, both hands, and about five minutes of impossibly hard work that I managed to get the snake back to a more-or-less clean state.  It then occurred to me that the fucking thing only cost $17 and I could have just set it on fire and not have spent the better part of ten minutes fondling Lucifer’s spunk.

There’s no reason in the world for me to have shared any of that with you.  But, I’m kind of a dick that way.  And in my defense, I’d like to point out that I didn’t take a picture to show you what I’d retrieved from the entrance to Hell.  And I’m the guy who took a picture of his nasty ass toenail when it fell off (though that was mostly for Melinda because, like all the best people in life, Melinda’s off her nut).

I just checked the shower and it’s draining beautifully again.  Because, goddammit, a happy ending is necessary after all that.

[Purell Break]