My First House pt. 3: Roaches, Dirty Laundry, and Slit Wrists

After High School, I moved into the now infamous Price Street house. Mom said I could stay at home but I was like, “I’m 18. You don’t have to take care of me anymore.” Then I spent the next ten years calling and begging for money. As any new adult can tell you, getting your first place is a humbling experience. The house had no furniture, towels, shower curtain, or anything. It never occurred to me that I’d have to buy those things. Nobody told me to put in a change of address form for the grocery, laundry, and cleaning fairies so none of them bitches ever showed up.

My partner in crime Jesse and I pooled our money and went to the flea market. That evening we got home with an awesome leather recliner, a VCR, and a rusty sword. When we dropped the recliner on the porch to open the front door cockroaches exploded out of the bottom like a fucking rocket trying to leave the atmosphere by sheer roach power. We picked the chair back up, set it on the side of the road, and went inside to get drunk and eat Ramen noodles made with hot sink water because we didn't have a microwave

I grew up poor as shit with a twin brother and another brother that was 13 months older than me. We didn’t have hand me downs, we had hand me arounds. I hated matching the same three pairs of pants with my five shirts so as soon as I started making money the first thing I did was buy clothes; lots and lots of clothes. It took a month for Jesse, me, and our couch surfers to run out of clean laundry. After listening to me complain about having no clean underwear my girlfriend offered to do my laundry. After I dropped off twelve loads of dirty shit she never offered again. Let me tell you, nothing lets you know you aren’t a gangster like hanging out at the Laundromat asking old ladies what the hell fabric softener is for.

One evening my homie Jody took a dare to punch out a window of an empty house. He succeeded but sliced his wrist open in the process. Instead of going to a doctor he went to my house. I don’t know how long he’d been there when I got home from my bartending job but it was long enough that the bleeding had stopped. The first thing I see when I walk in the door is Jody’s Hellraiser wrist. Every layer of skin is splayed open, with that suicide vein exposed and waiting for him to trip and hit it on the coffee table. It looked fucking crazy. After observing his wrist for two seconds I said, “Go to the fucking hospital you stupid piece of shit!” Then I looked at the twenty or so unconcerned knuckleheads in the room and said, “Why haven’t any of you stupid pieces of shit taken him to the hospital? How fucking long has he been here?”

Someone in the kitchen called me a pussy and the party kept going. Jody flat out refused to seek professional medical help because he was drunk, high, underage, and on probation. Everyone called me grandpa because I drove sensibly and was always telling people to turn that damn music down so I had seniority on all adult matters; that’s why Jody went to my house after he slit his wrist, or maybe it was because we had beer and bitches. Anyway, after I couldn’t get him to go to the hospital I went to the store and bought all the medical supplies an untrained 18 year-old might need to close up a flesh wound. I had to hurry because Jody was wobbling and it was only a matter of time before he hit that coffee table.

I spent every bit of beer money I had on medical supplies but I figured it was a small price to pay to save a friend’s life. I disinfected the wound, closed it up with butterfly strips, and wrapped the shit out of Jody’s wrist. Goddamn, I still get mad thinking about this next part. In the time it took to go to the kitchen to steal one of my room-mate’s beers and come back to the living room Jody had completely removed all of his bandages, drawn a smiley face on his palm with the wound as the mouth, and was wagging his wrist to make the wound tell jokes.

Well, the joke was on this funny motherfucker because after I got done cussing Jody out this skank ho named Blahblah showed up looking for penises and said her mom was a nurse who would stitch his wrist up in the middle of the night. Jody went to Blahblah’s mom’s house, who immediately made him go to the hospital. The doctors didn’t believe his story about punching a window and had him committed for a week under suicide watch.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7