Movin' Out

Thinking about moving out of the total rat-pig shithole that I called home was wonderful; a new set of opportunities, no more people collecting my tampons, but I never knew it would be so fucking hard.

Word came down that my roommates and I had to evacuate our dwelling by the first of December because our very gray and very male and very white landlord stupidly bought a building on the crack hub of Chicago. This location prompted my very cracked-out half-brother to announce loudly at a family get together: "That's where Zee (his friend) gets all his rocks!" And he was right. The landlord could not have picked a worse place to start gentrifying. Big mistake.

The landlord let us "artsy WHITE college students" move in, after kicking out the gay black man upstairs, who I guess turned out to be too black and not gay enough. However, he soon learned that we were a bunch of junkies who also worked for the needle exchange, so our whiteness faded ever so fast and our once beautiful apartment soon turned into a crack den where the toilet did not flush and you couldn’t walk two feet without something sticking into your toe.

I lived in a giant pincushion, essentially, except the pins were syringes and they stuck out instead of in. I wonder myself how many times I have been accidentally stuck. When I was on the needle myself, I think I was perhaps cleaner than I am now, off the needle and sucking the methadone tit, due to accidental needle sticks. I still refuse to get an HIV test because I do not want to know the results. Meanwhile my vagina stands as a weapon, infecting each unknowing stranger that I bring home from Nick's Bar with my horrible affliction. I do use protection, or try to, but you never know who is a flea-bitten AIDS bag and who is not.

That aside, after two years, the landlord decided that the gunshots were not going to stop and the crack baggies were not going to go away and the city was not going to fill in the potholes, or even reinstall the streetlight that has been knocked down and which lays hazardously on our corner. A thirty-day notice is what he gave us.

What could go wrong in those thirty days? What did go wrong in those thirty days? How many upright citizens would stand there, their mouths gaping wide open, witnessing my life spiral downward further and further until I swear it cannot get any worse?

That might have been correct until I found my roommate's "secret stash" of my used bloody tampons. This I discovered as I was spending hours and hours straining my arm trying to clean the blood off of the walls so that we are not sued by our very white and very eager to sue landlord. I did what he asked.

And then three days before we moved away, my other roommate almost got his eye removed by a neighborhood maniac. I took him to the hospital. While I was there, every doctor and nurse that entered the curtained room looked first at me as though I were the patient. There was a man next to me with his eye hanging out of his head, and I got repeatedly mistaken for the one who needed help. Maybe these trained professionals are not so mistaken. I would have long since checked myself into a mental hospital or some such place with all of this chaos going on if I had the luxurious privilege of having insurance.

Upon driving my one-eyed pal back to the house after the doctors decided he'd have to get skin grafted from his ass to his face, I found my other roommate (the tampon thief) outside with a destroyed car--the fifth one he's destroyed in two months. He claimed he drove it into a pile of dirt, but the wrecked car with streaks of dark green paint from a Ford Escort down the street told a different story.

The police quizzed him back and forth before they put him in handcuffs and whisked him away. I wished so hard they'd take him to a mental hospital. I was so scared of him I had to lie and say I was living with a Hispanic girl, not my former roommates, because he's threatened to kill himself on several occasions if I ever left that house.

I wanted to leave a million different times, but his threats made it somewhat impossible. I wanted to say fuck off, but how could I to someone who's entire room is a shrine devoted to me. Photos of me adorned his walls, as well as the paintings I'd made for him.

They were the only things on his walls except drug-induced messages written in blood that made no sense. I got news that he was also using our needle-exchange equipment to drain his own blood. Needless to say, that disturbed me a whole bunch. I really don't think there are many more things that can shock me.

Then I found out on not one, but two different occasions that he was collecting my used menstrual blood! The worst thing about this abhorrent behavior was that I had to act like this was absolutely normal, in fear of him going crazy on me.
"Oh, you're collecting napkins containing the bloody scrapings of my fallopian tubes? Yes dear, that would make a lovely art project! Just throw a couple of popsicle sticks in and you could make a whole tampon-ranch type thing!"??So that old living situation is over, and I am now on to bigger and better things. I even bought myself a brand new very white apple computer for the life makeover and then the bomb dropped . . . again. My job laid me off. The job that has supported my need for 18 hours of sleep a day and daily doses of benzos and Church's Chicken laid me off. Now what the fuck do I do?!

I do what every drug-addled retard who does not want to deal with life at all would do: I got on a heavy-duty antidepressant that makes me sleep all the time. That is my solution for a bit, then it gets too boring. How is a girl to cope??? Especially a delicate princess like me.

No home. No job. At least I get sex, but that is a whole different can of worms that I will not open at this point. Lovely is the new year, but I am very scared. There are visions of tampons dancing in my head. . . .