There would be nights when I would lie in bed staring at the ceiling desperately hoping for something terrible to happen. I would imagine a drunk teenager swerving down the street, left and right, left and right, finally losing control, jumping the curb and plowing into the front of my house. My home, destroyed, the teenager, dead at such a young age, but me having emerged from the rubble miraculously unscathed. Of course my cat would also be unharmed, having been nestled quietly under my bed sheets.
I would then finally take stock and begin anew. I would become the lone force for change in my life, and become the independent person I always knew I could be. Then I usually trail off into becoming a superhero through some strange genetic experiment, or perhaps some stray radiation.

The furniture store where I work basically sucks, but it gives me nights free to write. One of these days, I’m going to start writing. Instead of giving me a raise every year, my boss gives me a case of beer, which I gladly accept, because every year I barely expect that. Low standards and expectations make for a more satisfactory life. When I ask for a raise, I get a keg, so I’m known for having the best parties on the block.

Unfortunately that's not saying much, as my neighborhood is awash with young professionals and stay-at-home moms. Kids three and four years younger than me VP-ing corporate offices whose bathrooms I’m not fit to soil. They’re reasonably good people, as long as you don't catch them between 8 am Monday and 5 pm Friday. Sometimes I think they work so hard simply so they can have the best funeral in town.

I live with two guys, Randall and Inferno. Inferno likes to be called inferno because that’s his handle in some Internet hacking group called GOTHIC. He likes to describe himself as some keyboard jockey, but mainly what he does with the banks of humming machinery in his room is pirate video games to be freely downloaded by pimply teenagers around the world. Randall works at a coffee shop.
Our lives here at 123 Buena Vista circle peak at the mundane. That peak is characterized by the long list of toeheads the three of us keep as companions. None of them really has any sort of allegiance to any one of us, and some of them we can’t even remember who assimilated them into the group. There’s the guy with the curly hair that is obsessed with discovering the secret ingredient in coca-cola and blackmailing the company. Then there’s the girl whose entire wardrobe, including bags, hats, shoes, fingernails and pet bird, are aquamarine. Then there’s the wrestler. As one can see, few of them even have names anymore. Except the wrestler, we all call him “bitch-school.”

My mother moved away years ago, and left me the house. I had to take in roommates to afford keeping it. She married a shoe salesman from Bend, Oregon and they moved to Chicago. I think she still feels guilty about leaving, but guilt was a great talent of hers and she has to do what she can to keep in practice. My father lives with his third wife across town and is currently at the tail end of an incredibly nasty mid-life crisis involving a motorcycle and spray-on hair. He calls about once a week trying to entice me over to his house with the prospect of cheap beer and over-cooked meat. Of course I go every time.

Inferno’s parents came to visit once. They drove all the way from Cleveland in an RV that resembled the international space station. Silver air stream, solar panels, and approximately the size of Montana. They were both retired police officers and had decided to road trip around the country till they both were dead, by the looks of them; they had another couple of hundred years. They showed up on our doorstep at eight AM on a Sunday morning. Unfortunately, we had had a particularly nasty party the night before. The police showed up and knocked on the door responding to noise complaints. When there was no answer, the officer opened the door to discover myself, my roommates and many guests dancing the Macarena in the nude.

I awoke to the knocking in my skull only moments before the space station docked in front of the house, effectively blocking out the sun. Swimming through the beer cans I opened the door. They asked for Finbar. Finbar? I asked. Finbar O’Connell, they said. Any relation to Inferno O’Connell? I asked. One and the same, they said, uncomfortably processing “inferno.”

They didn’t stay long. They took us to breakfast and gave Finbar a check. His mother cried. The meal was uncomfortable because not much was said. Randall and I knew he hadn’t seen his parents since he moved away years before. One got the impression that some things had happened that no one was ever going to hear about.

I work four days a week at “Crazy Cal’s Home Furnishings.” I stain things, both intentionally and not so. The name of the store is not a play on his low, low prices, Crazy Cal is really crazy. He was in ‘Nam, deep in the shit. He drinks like Mickey Rourke in barfly, but at times tends to remind me of Dennis Hopper in blue velvet. It’s really creepy when he goes off on warm beer. He’s a much easier fellow to get along with when he’s drunk, I guess that’s what makes him an alcoholic. He’s come to a few of my parties, but he has to get really tanked to get up the nerve to make social calls, so he’s only there for about an hour before he passes out or gets grabby with aquamarine girl. His daughter runs the store, pretty much, but he still outsells the rest of his own sales team. When he gets into that groove, the man’s a wizard.

Tonight, a stray meteor shower demolishes half of my neighborhood, forcing me to take the role of leader and rallying the statewide effort to rebuild and comfort the families of the tragically lost. This, of course, is abandoned when I realize that the only people in the neighborhood whose names I even know are the Jacksons across the street, and the crazy bird lady down the block. And the only reason I know the Jacksons is they are the ones who constantly call the police about our parties. They also filed a civil suit against Randall when he spelled, “FUCK YOU” in their lawn with weed killer. Of course, there was no evidence he was involved because the only witness was too far away to determine whether was spraying the lawn or just pissing. He did allot of that too.

My cat hates it when I daydream, she knows I’m awake and concentrating on something and it’s not her. She is not a loud animal by any means, just spiteful. Nothing is sacred, no shoe, no article of clothing, no piece of electronic equipment spared from the scratches, vomit or urine. This also makes the conquest of writing quite a challenge. I’m currently working on apiece about an alien technology that’s found buried deep within the earth and the mayhem that ensues when the greedy American government tries to harness its awesome power. I told Finn about it and he accused me of plagiarism. I, of course told home he was fucking retarded. He then forced me to watch the first three episodes of “Robot-Tech,” a Japanese cartoon circa nineteen eighty-five. He was right. So I pissed in his hamper.

Since the three of us had moved in, we had been playing pranks on each other. I think it all started when Randall got totally trashed and ran into my bathroom, took my toothbrush from the cup on the sink and proceeded to scrub his right nipple. In retaliation, I pawned his stereo for the rent money he owed me. Things escalated, as they always do, to the point where shit was beginning to appear on shower curtains, and creamed corn in sock drawers.

“It’s fun until someone loses an eye”

The proverbial eye got lost when Randall, destined to begin the escapade, doomed to end it, was arrested attempting to “borrow” a horse from a ranch outside of town. He told me through the bars at county as fin was getting the bail money together that King Leer, the horse, was to be installed into my Volkswagen Rabbit to be discovered by me the following morning. Randall has hence sworn off tequila in all its forms.

I had only heard about Julie for the first year I worked at Cal’s. She only came in on Friday’s to balance the books, make orders, pass out checks, and make up the schedule. I don’w work on Friday’s and frankly was afraid of the kind of child Crazy Cal woyld raise. After Cal had a minor stroke, she quite her job at the Sizzler to come over full time. I often assumed that the only reason we started dating was that I was the only guy there even remotely her age, other than Gill “The Worst One-Armed Salesman in the Universe” Monahan. I also often assumed that the only reason I accepted her offer for a date was that she was the only girl I knew outside of the menagerie of mouth-breathers that shuffled in and out of our house.

We went to the sizzler on our first date. I was totally broke and hadn’t eaten anything all day; I ate so much that night that I got sick during the movie afterwards. I blame her personally because when I got back from the buffet table, my plate piled high with pieces of various animals; she virtually challenged me to eat it all. So I did. And then another. But it was the combination of Foster’s and obscene amounts of soft-serve that did it. We were asked to leave and we didn’t even get a refund. The movie sucked anyway.

Randall’s brother owns a gas station near downtown. He comes over every couple of weeks to get away from his wife. This guy is the poster boy for the unhappy marriage. One day he was ironing a shirt while watching basketball on the television. She came in and asked him why he was using her iron. He said because she had left his at her friend’s house. She asked him not to use her iron. He yanked the cord from the wall, and the plug ripped off. She then took the cake she had made for him and threw it out the window. It was his birthday. He ended up with us that night. Randall wanted to get him a hooker, but we couldn’t get enough money together, and none of us knew where to find one. Aquamarine girl was not interested, not even for one hundred seventeen dollars and eighty-seven cents. And sixty of it was money we stole from the “new TV fund”

The only television in the house was donated to us via the trash dumpster by the family that used to live in the Jackson’s house. Full of vacuum tubes and about the size of a Buick, it seems more effective as a table than a television. Finn actually scaled the roof one day and spliced the neighbor’s cable and hooked us up to their bill. It only took about three weeks for a guy from the cable company to show up. Strangely enough, it was between the hours of ten AM and five PM. I opened the door in a pair of boxers, clutching a gallon of orange juice. I was alone in the house, and that Demi Moore movie “Striptease” was playing in the back. It was during a particularly lurid scene. He was a young kid, maybe twenty -two. I opened the door and saw him staring at the wire running from the neighbors, straight through the doorway, which stood between us. He started laughing. I started laughing, we laughed together.

I know there are no milkmen anymore, and I also understand that his being a milkman has no significance either way, but that’s just how it’s going to be. A deranged and disgruntled milkman, sick to his core with the likes of two percent, whole, skim, and the unholy of chocolate, sprays machine gun fire into the crowded food court at the mall. One hundred plus are wounded, eighteen dead, but myself, quietly munching on food court pad Thai, beyond all odds am uninjured. Oh, hi kitty.

Julie and I went out again, this time I made sure to eat at some point during the day before we went to dinner. I chose the restaurant this time, an oyster bar on the south side of town. She’d never had oysters before, and after one (with perhaps a bit too much horseradish) she threw it up along with the two beers she had previously. Two for two. We did end up sleeping together, though. The precarious architecture of my house makes for interesting sexual encounters. I have the largest bedroom, on the second floor. Finn has the room next to mine, and Randall lives in the room on the first floor, the one that was added to the house when I was eight and my grandmother came to live with us. She died in that bed, Randall doesn’t know, we’re thinking about waiting till his birthday.

The combination of old wood and the toilet paper that was used to insulate the house, the way Finn told me once was, “Dude, when you fart in there I can hear what you had for dinner.” Instead of muffling the sounds coming from a particular room, the structure of the house actually amplifies the noise. Worst of all, Julie turned out to be a screamer. Don’t get me wrong, I like ‘em loud, but it’s just not something you want to have to explain to the police officer who has already been there three times in the last two months, and has seen you naked before.

My high school English teacher, sophomore year, was a squat, fat Canadian that never could speak enough of the virtues of those worksheets included at the end of each chapter in our “English text book.” The book was about eight hundred pages and included excerpts from what it classified as “the great American novels.” A Farewell to Arms, The Awakening, Moby Dick, and the like. I remember somewhere around chapter four, entitled “American Literature of the Forties and Fifties.” which conveniently left out Ginsberg, Kerouac, Boroughs, and even Kafka, included an assignment. Write your own short story. The book said that the essence of good story telling was to write what you know. That one still baffles me, especially as I sit at the computer screen, drooling quietly as it laughs at me. Fear of a white screen. What did Asimov know about robots? What did Roddenberry know about space travel?