The Village Idiots

You people will be happy to find out I go back to work tomorrow.
Then I might have something more interesting to type about than the
idiots I used to live with. Yes, I hear you. "Stop the insanity, Hillbilly
Mom!" OK, I only have one tale left. The tale of The Village Idiots,
subtitled The House of Pigs. It's about the two summers I lived with
an odd couple, a gay construction worker, an archaeologist, an
ROTC gal, a lesbian virgin, and an anal-retentive high school teacher.
The partridge in the pear tree saw us coming, and flew out of town.

This is going to be kind of long, like a James Michener epic, only
not as interesting, and in a much poorer style of writing, and with
no research on details. Read on, if you dare.

I was looking for a place to live in my college town the summer
I graduated. I was taking graduate classes, working, and looking
for a real teaching job. Some acquaintances found a 4-bedroom
house with a yard and an above-ground pool. It sounded good to
me, so I signed on.

From the time of the move-in, I should have know things would not
run smoothly. A half of another lesbian couple brought her two-door
hatchback Chevy Chevette to move my stuff out of my apartment.
We jammed the couch in the back. It stuck out 4 ft. She pulled
out of my apartment parking lot, and slammed on the breaks. "What
are you doing," I asked (foolishly). "Just a minute." I thought she was
going around the back of the car to check on the couch. Then I saw
her sprint into a yard and grab two folding lounge chairs. On the
other trips hauling my stuff, two girls had been laying out, tanning.
They must have gone in the house for something to drink, because
Les Uno snatched up those chairs like a...well, like a lesbian stealing
chairs. She threw them in beside the sticking-out couch, jumped
into the driver's seat, and said, "Let's get out of here!" Good thing
it was our last trip.

The next problem I noticed was the pool. I went out to the yard
to have a look. We peeled back the cover of this oval, 4 foot-deep
pool, and saw black nasty sludge about a foot deep. False
advertising from the landlord. Les Uno devised a plan. She was
good at plans. We would chip in, rent a pump, clear out the sludge,
and scrub that pool. She even called the landlord, who said it was
fine. She hooked up that pump, and had the gunk out in one day.
We put on our grungy clothes, flip-flops (but we called them
"thongs" back in the day), grabbed a mop, rubber gloves, sponges,
some Comet, and dived in. It took about three days to clean that
crap out of the pool.



Here's the bottom, once we
got it to looking good. Almost
done, at this point. Just a little
more scrubbin' and add water.




We all took a turn at cleaning the pool. It was quite a bonding
experience. The archaelogist would sit on the patio, supervising
us, doing her homework. Homework was making arrowheads,
from scratch. She had one kind of rock to be the arrowhead, and
another kind of rock to smack it with. We couldn't see her, what
with squatting down in the pool scrubbing, but we could hear her
chipping away. When she got one done, we would stand up to
admire it. Then someone said, "Hey, did you shave your legs or
something?" The archaeologist wore cut-off jeans, and her legs
had little spots of blood on them. Seems that those chips of rock
gouged her legs each time she chipped them. From then on, she
wore pants. Not so much pants,
as a white nurse's uniform. I
can't remember what the deal
was with this. It's turning into
more Village People scenario
than I first thought. I think
maybe she worked at a nursing
home part-time.

Archaeologist on a stolen chair. Kind of sing it, like Chris Farley
in Tommy Boy, singing, "Fat man in a little coat."

The ROTC gal showed up for scrubbing duty in a red clown nose.
I can't explain that. She was a little bit different. One Halloween,
she had dressed as Frankenstein, complete with green paper mache
forehead, and "forgot" about her ROTC drills the next day. Rumor
had it that she showed up with a green head.


I cropped it. Nobody can take
a picture this bad. If you look
closely, you might see a red
clown nose on one of the two
clowns posing like "American
Gothic." That's on the pool deck. It was such a nice pool.

After the pool was clean, we ran the garden hose in and started
filling it. We had about 18 inches of water in it, and were floating
on rafts, because we couldn't wait. We'd worked hard for our
pool. The water was ice-cold. Then the landlord showed up.
She told us to stop filling the pool. The next day, we returned
home in the afternoon from our classes and jobs to find that the
pool was gone! That mean landlord had come and taken it down,
the supports, the liner, the deck, the ladder, the filter. Everything
was gone. No doubt, she was going to set it up at her own house,
because wouldn't you have torn it down while it was nasty, not
when it was clean? We were pissed!

Little did I know that the pool incident would traumatize the Idiots
so badly that no more cleaning would be done all summer. And
the next summer. More on this later. We may have lost a pool,
but that didn't mean we would have to lose our pool party. We
still sat out on the patio and pretended we had a pool, even though
it was now just a big ol' mud spot in the back yard. Our favorite
drink that summer was a concoction we called "Bullfrogs." The
recipe, which I'm sure you want, was: equal parts rum (cheapest
you could find, though Bacardi would do if you wanted to put on
airs) and frozen limeade, blended in a blender (duh!) with enough
ice to make it slushy. It was quite refreshing to sip in the hot sun,
and it would knock you off your stolen lounge chair if you weren't
careful.

The worst part of the backyard was the dog s***. Lesbian Uno
and her partner, Lesbian Dos, had two cocker spaniels. The
yellow one was named Sandy, and the black-and-white spotted
one was named Stonewall. They were crazy, neurotic, spastic
pooches. I hated them. They ate s***. You'd think with all that
s***-eating, the backyard would be clear, but noooooo! It was
like a minefield. And then those two mutts would try to lick you.
Eeewwww! And they were allowed in the house. This led to an
infestation of fleas by my second summer at Casa Loco, which
was discovered by the Lesbian Virgin, who saw them jumping
out of the carpet as she scratched her ravaged ankles. She and
I set off flea bombs in her room, my room, and the front living
room that was near ours, and put down towels at the bottom
of our doors like potheads smoking weed in a dorm. That ended
my favorite pastime of lying on the floor behind the couch with
headphones, listening to Fleetwood Mac.

I guess by now, if you're still reading, you're starting to get the
picture of this palace I called home. Between summers, I got
a real job, moved to that town, and came back the next summer
to again attend grad school and look for a better teaching job.
By then, the archaeologist and the ROTC gal had moved on
to start real lives, and were replaced by Gay Construction
Worker and the Lesbian Virgin.

We'll start with the LV, because her room was right across from
mine. Poor thing. She had a crush on some bartender that Uno
and Dos knew. LV followed her around like a puppy. She was
all the time buying her lunch, or concert tickets, or a Members
Only jacket. Alas, the bartender only led her on, and used her for
money, and wouldn't even relieve her of her virgindom.

The GCW was made to live in the garage. I don't know why.
There was another bedroom that was vacant, but this poor boy,
the brother of the bartender, was not allowed in it. He didn't
seem to mind. He hung a sheet from the ceiling, tacked up all
four corners over his bed, so that the light shone throught the
colored sheet. He made that garage all artsy-fartsy. It had a little
sink in it, and he made a bar. He spent too much time telling us the
details of his encounters with his boss, the head of the company.
This was a big construction company, with its name on billboards
all over the city, and our boy was doing the boss. We were so
proud. So proud that every time he brought up the subject (which
was every time he opened his mouth), we put our fingers in our
ears and hummed, intermittently shouting "Too much information!"

Now, enter the Anal-Retentive High School Teacher. I'd met
her in the town where I taught. She lived there, but taught in
a town even more podunk than mine. She was not an actual
roommate, but cleaned more than anybody who lived in the
house, so I had to give her honorable mention. She dropped
by every Friday afternoon, on the way to her boyfriend's
house in a town past our city. Her boyfriend with no neck.
I swear, he looked like a torso with legs and a head. I've
never seen a person with a shape like that. It's like if you took
an avocado seed and put toothpicks in it to grow sprouts, and
the toothpicks were his legs, and the seed his torso, and his head
would have been a prune, because it was a huge head, really, for
his proportions. I used to harp on that all the time, fashion model
that I am. She even called him No-Neck sometimes.

Anyhoo, the first time ARHST dropped in, she walked into
the kitchen and said, "Christ! Don't you guys ever clean up?"
It was kind of like Urban Cowboy, where John Travolta's
aunt comes in to fix him food after he's broken his arm, and
says, "Y'all live like pigs, Bud." Kind of like that, except
ARHST didn't make me any individual tuna salads. She
said, "Here, put this peanut butter away." Then, as she picked
it up off the counter and was about to tighten the lid, she
looked in the jar. It was crawling with maggots. She tightened
the lid and tossed it in the trash, then started running the hot
water. If it hadn't been summer, she would have literally rolled
up her sleeves. Next, she canvassed the house. No room was
off limits. Good thing nobody was home. ARHST barged
right into the lesbian boudoir, glared at the guinea pigs in their
smelly cages, and picked up 4 or 5 plastic cups. At one time,
they held tea. Now, they held a slurry of mold. Man. That
takes a while for tea to grow mold. After washing up the
dishes, ARHST cleaned out the fridge. Then she went to
the bathroom.

"What in the h*** is THIS?!" I was afraid to go look. Oh.
It was just the mushroom growing out of the carpet. We'd
been in awe of it. A mushroom, growing out of carpet! ARHST
grabbed a couple squares of toilet paper (stolen from the
college ladies' room), plucked Mr. Mushroom, and flushed
him. Then she said, "Well, let's go get something to eat."
Like it was normal for a visitor to walk into a house for the
first time, and clean it top to bottom. I was shocked that she
didn't get down on her hands and knees and scrub the bathtub.
Not for long, though. She did that the next Friday. The Idiots
were always asking, "Hey, why don't you bring that teacher
friend of yours over here?"

I guess ARHST was a bit obsessive. Her roommate taught
at my school, in the classroom right next door. She invited
me over to dinner one night. The dinner was good, but the
minute ARHST was finished, she started gathering stuff off
the table. You know, like butter and ketchup and salt &
pepper, and her plate, and the other plates of food. I was
kind of surprised. Then my teaching buddy picked up her
plate and took it to the kitchen. I asked, "Do you guys have
to go somewhere?" ARHST was running dishwater. "No.
Why?" I guess that was just her nature. They had a washer
and dryer in their apartment, and let me bring my laundry
over on the weekends. Once, as I was putting in another
load, ARHST took my clothes out of the dryer and started
folding them while she talked to me. Uh. No. Do not touch
my clothes. I must draw the line. I don't care about your
clean obsessions. I will do the folding myself.

And that's about it. The tale of my Village Idiots. Well, except
for that one time, when Les Uno picked up a flashing construction
sawhorse on her way home around 2:00 a.m., and I woke up
and thought an alien spaceship had landed in the living room,
and how the LV and I were scared that the police could see
it flashing through the windows, so we hauled it off the next
night and left it along the road.

I know. You're speechless. I am too, finally.