Living Together

Briefly in my travels, I was living east of Chicago (or perhaps North New York City) or somewhere altogether else. There were six of us total, although seldom at one time.

JIMMY, if one were to be certain of his real name was a longterm smoker with an ash voice and dark cuticles. He was the primary breadwinner who sold unmarked tablets in discrete paper bags for jittery 2am visitors. His main concerns included avoiding police officers, sexually pleasuring his wife Alma, and taking large doses of cocaine that quite easily prevented him from accomplishing terribly much between the hours of 9am and 5pm.

ALMA herself worked down the road at a florist. She loved cheap jewelry, nail glue, and romance novels she'd buy off the rack six at a time, and resell for dubious profit to the used bookstore on the first floor. She would never make more than 60-65% back on the books, but it was more of an odd satisfaction for her to cheat the system... somewhat.

Alma's brother was a large man named JULIAN and despite the fact that he did not share a race, accent, or last name with Alma, was stalwartly Her Brother. At least between the hours of 9am and 5pm. He eventually stopping coming and going and simply stayed. He became a regular customer to Jimmy and soon after stopped talking about the spiders everywhere that only he could see. He retained his job as mail clerk nearly three weeks then but by the time I left, he was more concerned with painting the window panes very, very slowly. Those windows took about a month to dry.

KENSEY was next: a totally clean, straight, thoughtful guy I suspected was writing his disertation on The Human Condition using us all as fodder for his research. Instead he was simply making his rent, sleeping when he could, and heading out to a nursing homewhere he worked as a cook. I saw him for about seven hours total, so I don't know much about him. He eventually published a bookk, "Lfe in These Drug Addled United States" and wrote me a check for 30 dollars.

Finally, there was MARLA, who claimed she was an actress, had zero tolerance for Jimmy and Alma, but appreciated the dense fog that precluded their awareness towards her nonexistent financial contribution to the household. She successfully bobbed and weaved Jimmy and Alma for weeks at a time, convincing them through silence and lack of eye contact that she wasn't even there.

Marla was the reason I eventually left. She managed to somehow convince Jimmy that she was the one who was living in my space, paying my way, and the owner of my luggage. To be perfectly honest, we did share a similar complexion and were using each other's rouge but it was a nonsense approach all the time. It took all my strength to tip my belongings from her meth-friendly hands.

I ducked into a library for my final week in town and found my next benefactor on a Thursday.