From
Visions of Garleyville
Habitual Living
Look,
I don’t make trouble for anybody. It is
my nature to try and be invisible, that jolly son of a bitch who gets drunk
twice a year, and the rest of the time is a doormat, something people step over
and pay little attention to, welcome written on my face or not.
That
is the thing that is so tragic about the whole mess. It should have worked. I can live with anyone, or so I thought. Maybe I could have seen it sooner before I
put my foot in his door, but I was desperate.
My money was running out, and my landlord was making noises like he
wanted to throw me out.
Sure
moving out of
Which
is why I jumped on the chance to live with hank without thinking too much of
the consequences. While the old place
had a wondrous lake, Hank’s looked out onto the side of the mountain, which was
everything I cared about. Sure he warned
me, saying I have to live in his kitchen.
Though he said it wouldn’t be much the problem. He didn’t use it, except to come and go from
downstairs. His mother cooked most of
his meals. He also said there were
little habits of his which he didn’t want disturbed.
As I
said I can get along with anybody. So I
didn’t see any problem in bending a little.
I had lived with Pauly for 10 years.
I figured that was the worst I’d have to worry about.
But
I was wrong.
The
habits Hank talked about were downright rituals, each and every aspect of his
life organized to a daily routine. Now
I’m not saying he was well-organized and any positive sense. The place was worse than Passaic, more litter
in his bedroom than I ever saw on any street, comic books, tins of potato sticks, old tissues, and newspapers piled
into an artificial archeological dream.
I was sure if you dug deep enough into the mess you to come up with some
insignificant historic rarity and maybe a rare disease or two. No, it was his personal
habits which had become routine to the point of his being a robot. He was the only man on earth who when
watching the Odd Couple on TV sympathized with both main characters, as if he
was some schizophrenic fusion of the two, flipping back and forth between the
tendency for chaos in the absolute need for order, succeeding in neither.
From
the moment his alarm when off in the morning to the time he set himself to
sleep at night, his movements were predictable, and often while lying in the
kitchen I saw his movements
like an actor’s on a stage.
With my eyes closed, and only the sound of these events as clues to his
current location, I tried to envision each action.
And
there were sounds, gargling and coughs, sneezes and burbs, a symphony of bodily
sounds to which his rituals were the dance.
I listened to the pittle of his piss in the toilet at
I
tried to put up with it, honestly, I did.
After all he’d been kind and offering me a room here when few others
would. But each act and sound began to
grate on my nerves, not because they were so offensive in themselves, but
because of their utter predictability.
It was like living inside a clock, with its ticks and tocks, chinks and
chimes, all of its so mechanical I’d stop thinking of my companion as a human
anymore. He was simply a robot I lived with,
dancing out of his life in predictable motions, as if he was simply going
through the motions, waiting for death to relieve him of its boredom.
And
believe me, there came a time when I was almost willing to indulge him,
picturing in the dark as I try to sleep, the ways which I could put an end to
this routine, stop to clock from making its next tick.
It
was when I nearly pressed the point from fantasy to reality that decided to
leave. One night as he gargled before
dressing for bed, I found myself rising from my own bed, my hands clenching an
unclenching with the idea of strangling him.
Look, it is not that
I hate Hank. We still sit and watch TV together. But if I ever had to move in with him again,
there would be murder, absolute unquestionable murder, I guarantee that.