My Time as a Human

“If you see anything, anything with writing on it, a post-it, a toilet paper tube, an old band aid… do not throw it away. It might be a poem.” I held up a wet wad of what looked like snotty kleenex. There were smeared blueish lines disappearing into the folds of paper. “Like this,” I asked, cringing. “Yes, yes. Like that. Save that.”

I got the call in the early afternoon as I struggled to sort my clothes and regain my sanity after last week’s family reunion on the North Carolina coast. I hadn’t even had a chance to blog about the trip before my vibrating cell phone growled like a motorcycle revving and my life popped back into high gear. I didn’t have all of the details, but my friend Zoon was in sudden need of help moving. “Just bring the van to this address,” Winnie told me. As soon as I arrived Zoon pulled me aside to whisper out the true nature of my day’s adventure. “My roommate is insane. We have to get everything out today. I don’t think he’ll try anything with other people watching.”

Apparently the morning had started out as an attempt to move some boxes from a storage shed to a garage where they could be sorted and cleaned out. The roommate had been becoming increasingly aggressive and prone to spontaneous bursts of anger. He had been sneaking into Zoon’s room and tried to force the door open when he found it locked. During one recent discussion about the appropriate time to use the washing machine, he told Zoon, while invoking a variety of inappropriate references to sex acts, that he should leave. When he saw Zoon picking up some of his boxes, he had assumed that he really was leaving, and exploded such that it became clear that the time to go was, in fact, right now.

The three of us walked towards the house and immediately a tall, beefy guy in a white T-shirt pushed open the screen door and strode towards us. I was glad I’d worn sunglasses, and I was hoping they made me look intimidating. I know my sandals and open hawaiian shirt didn’t. I looked more like the dude.

“So you’re taking your stuff. You’re trying to screw me. Is that it? Trying to skip out without paying?” He was tense and looked ready to fight. He didn’t seem drunk, but he didn’t seem altogether rational either. I eyed the collection of weights and workout machines he kept in the back yard and tried to remember what I could from my years of martial arts training.

“Look, we can talk about this later. I’m paid up through the end of the month. Right now, I’m just going to move my things,” said Zoon calmly. Angry Man blocked our way and continued shouting. “I knew I couldn’t trust you. I knew you were sleazy from the start.” We started walking towards the back yard. “I’m going to go to every one of your poetry readings and tell people the truth about you.” Winnie held her cell phone out like a tazer, telling him she was ready to call the police, and we continued around back and into Zoon’s tiny room behind the house.

We began dropping tennis shoes and shampoo bottles into large plastic tubs. After learning that the precious nuclei of poetic masterpieces lurked under every empty tube of toothpaste, I gave up trying to throw anything away and focused on trying to get things packed for the fewest possible trips to the van. I was loading up a stack of CDs when, through the open door to the back yard, I heard a scraping sound. “Oh,” Zoon said turning, “we’d better set up a little blockade to keep him out.” There at the door was a gigantic turtle. A tortoise, actually, who weighed about fifty pounds and was slowly trying to haul himself into the room.

Zoon scrambled over to set up a row of box lids. The tortoise craned his neck to see over them but couldn’t get past. We’d solved the immediate problem, but then I had to get by the prehistoric creature with a drawer load of t-shirts. I tried to encourage him to move but he just pulled his head down into his shell and played dumb. Eventually I was forced to step carefully over him, balancing the drawer and trying not to trip over the lids as I stuck my own head out to look for any signs of Angry Man before going to the front of the house.

Winnie and I are both allergic to cats, and so of course all of the futons, blankets and pillows we were hauling out to the street were covered with cat hair. As I came back around for another load, Winnie was stumbling across the back yard, bent over by loud, explosive sneezes. Behind her I saw the huge tortoise, his muppet-like head extended, chasing her as fast as he could. Like a game of Marko Polo, every time she sneezed he zeroed in on her new location and hurled himself forward on his giant stumpy legs with renewed enthusiasm.

Angry Man returned and began tearing through the yard. “Those grey tubs are mine. Are you taking my gray tubs?!”

At this point Winnie’s current boyfriend showed up with another van. With his tie dye shirt and sandals he looked even less threatening than me, but the sheer number of witnesses must have worked their magic. Angry Man quieted down and went back inside.

To his credit, apparently Angry Man was in the midst of a fierce legal battle for child custody rights. That said, I can’t help but recall the homicidal manic in The Jerk who, after trying to fill Steve Martin with lead from a high powered assault rifle while screaming, “die gas pumper, die!”, arrived later in the film to explain, “it was a difficult time for me. I’d just quit smoking. My wife left me.”

In the end there was no physical violence, and while I didn’t really think it was going to come to that, my already broken toe was thankful. When leaving Zoon told Angry Man, “it is my job to do everything I can to work this out so that we don’t ever need to speak to one another again.” We finished loading up the vans and left him to return to his work illustrating children’s books.

Posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 6:15 pm under Uncategorized.
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