April 24th, 2011 4:05pm - Kicked Out

In the past four months I've lived back in Northern California, and my male standards have drastically decreased. While my standards the first twenty-four years of my life (yes, I was checking out strapping young boys as a toddler) have hovered around educated, humorous, intelligent, athletic, and attractive, now anyone slightly above the mental retardation level causes notice.
For lack of male options in Sonoma County, unemployed, illiterate, quasi-gangsters have become beneficiaries of my attentions. I'd been seeing one such man in his early thirties for a month or so, and my respect and esteem for his life plummeted every time I'd see him.
Initially, he was a hot, pseudo-skater/thug. I hadn't experienced this combination before, and I was intrigued. The first time I met him, he mentioned that he wore a uniform. This delighted me. In two seconds, I had envisioned fireman, doctor, police officer, military man, and/or Jesus. However, directly after the word "uniform," I also noticed that I had finished my drink. I screamed, "Bar! Rum!" and sprinted away from him like an alcoholic. The conversation that night never returned to occupation. It instead progressed to intelligent things, like how awesomely strong the drinks were, and how I could beat him at pool.
Over the weeks, it became evident that I would never be able to beat him at pool. He brought his own cue stick to the bars, complete with one white glove. Just one. Like Michael Jackson. He believed that The Glove caused him to excel at pool. The Glove might have been excusable if he was unbeatable. He was not. I couldn't conquer the one-gloved wonder, but many others did.
When I eventually remembered to inquire as to his uniform occupation, he said he was in law enforcement.
"Oh, you're a police officer?" I nodded approvingly. "And you carry a gun?"
"I don't carry a gun," he responded.
"So you're not a police officer. What's your job?"
"I'm security."
"Oh, well, at least you have a badge!" I nodded approvingly again.
"I don't have a badge."
"Oh. Ok, what do you do? Where do you work?"
He worked as night security three times a week at Walmart. He chased kids smoking pot in the parking lot.
He eventually confided that he owned a dog teeth cleaning business as well. I was impressed by this until he proudly divulged that the business brought in about $250 a month. In total sales. He never shared stories about his childhood. He wouldn't tell me where he lived or whom he lived with. He did mention that he'd had 3 DUI's and had been arrested twice. This knowledge did not thrill me.
One night, he was over at my place and kept biting me. Hard. I do not like biters. Gentle nibbling is nice. However, it does not feel good to have my cheek bitten into like a chicken drumstick. I told him to go to KFC. He laughed and chewed my arm.
I grabbed his face in between my hands and screamed, "Please stop biting me, it hurts!"
He chomped onto my shoulder. I sat up.
"If you don't stop biting me right now, I'm going to kick you in the head. Maybe in the trachea. Stop it. I'm going to kick you in the head. I'm not kidding!"
He thought I was kidding. His yellow teeth tore into my stomach. When he moved towards me again, I bunched up both of my legs and kicked out. They connected with his chest, and the 6'3" 260 pounds of muscle shot into the air and crashed onto the floor. It was one of those body blasts you see in action movies. He flew. With his impact, we might as well have been in a two second 7.0 earthquake. The ceiling shook. My legs hadn't kicked anything in awhile, and I had been under the impression that they would feebly connect with his body and then ricochet off like small rocks. Instead, they launched him across the room. I was shocked and working extraordinarily hard at not laughing like a fiend. I snorted and asked him in a strangled voice if he was okay. I apologized. And then I really charmed him by saying that I had warned him.
He lay on the floor in the fetal position until that statement. He then stood up slowly, put his clothes back on, and announced that he was leaving.
"Okay," I said. "Sorry!"
He left. It was four o'clock in the morning and he actually left. He didn't call me. He didn't text me. I fell asleep immediately, smiling over the fact that I literally kicked him out of my bed. I clearly never contacted him.
I ran into him at a bar almost a month later. He had his cue stick and his one white Michael Jackson glove. I ended up going home with him. At nine o'clock the next morning, a woman pounded on his door like a maniac asking if he had any cigarettes left.
"No, leave me alone," the thirty-two-year-old man growled.
It was a woman's voice, his mom's voice. He lived with his mother in a rented apartment. I haven't seen him since. I slightly raised my standards to exclude anyone who wore one glove while playing pool.

April 11th, 2011 10:30am - Breaking in with Children

I´m a Realtor, and I try not to excessively intoxicate myself downtown while it´s still light outside. I monitor this with the breathalyzer that my mom recently bought for me. I don´t want clients or potential clients seeing me in public as a drunken shameless hussy. If it´s dark outside, my logic is that inside the bar people won´t know me. I was fully embracing this theory at Russian River Brewery, downing pints of a beer called Damnation, and arguing with my friends why the concept was superior, regardless of the fact that there are, in fact, lights inside all bars.
¨I don´t care, it´s dark and it´s okay to get drunk,¨I slurred and flung my arm in the general direction of the window. An hour later I blacked out. I awoke the next morning naked and in the process of a booze death recovery. My muscles felt like I´d been in a fight with a mailbox, my mouth tasted like I had consumed a rotting rodent, and I had mascara smeared across my face, which was nicely complemented by drool on my pillow as well as the lower half of my head. My saliva was in my hair. I groaned and glanced at the clock. It was ten-fifty in the morning, and I was supposed to show a house at 11am. I looked up the address, and the house was twenty minutes away. I called the clients and told them I was on my way but running a few minutes late. I threw on a dress, sunglasses to cover my drunk eyes, and perfume to disguise the smell of copious amounts of beer. I got to the car before realizing two things.
1: I didn´t have shoes.
2: I didn´t have my purse.
I ran back inside, doused myself in perfume, grabbed shoes and purse, and drove across town. I realized that I had left the address back at my house, so I called my mom to look it up. She texted me the address, and I didn´t feel like a complete failure as the addresses progressed and I got closer and closer to my destination.
Sonoma Mountain Road was like the goddamn Yellow Brick Road: it just kept going and going and going. I almost drove off the road twice in my haste to not look like a completely late asshole to the clients.
When I got to the end of the street, there was no For Sale sign in sight, and the address my mom had texted me didn´t correspond with any house on the street. It was 11:27am, I was over twenty minutes late, and I couldn´t find the house. I couldn´t call anyone because there was no reception. I couldn´t harass anyone through my window because there was nobody to ask. Every aspect of my life was in pain, demolished by my boozehag self. My eyeballs hurt, and the backs of my knees felt like they´d been attacked by a violent gremlin. I drove back down the street with the distinct impression that I was driving a loonybin. Seven minutes later, I saw a For Sale sign and the clients´monster van. Their youngest child had named the vehicle. They had four children.
I pulled up and jumped out, repeatedly apologizing. I noticed Child #3 lying spread-eagle on the ground crying. Child #2 had a stick in his hand and was playing a game that can only be called ¨Stab the Sibling¨ with Child #1. Child #4 smashed his head against the side of the house in ten second intervals. I ran up the steps to the front door of the house, only to notice that there was a combination lockbox on the front door. Combination lockboxes are almost extinct and technically illegal to use. The Listing Agent hadn´t provided any combination in the description of the house. I called the Agent, with no response. It was 11:38, I was almost forty minutes late, and I couldn´t let them into the house. We walked the perimeter of the property, tried all the doors and windows, and came to the conclusion that we were officially locked out. At this time, I realized that I was going to get violently ill. Within a minute. I handed the dad a bobby pin and a credit card. I said that I was going to continue to look around the house, and he should try to break in. I galloped around the side of the house feeling that the alcohol from the night before had eradicated half of the brain cells from my skull. I looked around, and then projectile vomited over the fence and into the neighbor´s yard. I struggled back to the front of the house to discover that the dad had broken into the house through the garage door.
The house was an absolute cesspool. Carpet had been torn up, walls had been punched in. Doors were missing, as was one of the bedrooms. Electrical outlets and light fixtures had been removed. The roof leaked. One of the kids walked into the bathroom and sprinted out seconds later, screaming. The other three followed suit. When questioned, they were all crying about different things.
Child #1 was in hysterics over the largest shit he´d ever seen, Child #2 over the excessive amounts of vomit. Child #3 had to pee, and Child #4 was crying because everyone else was.
I returned home and got directly in bed. Once there, I thought it prudent to breathalyze myself. I blew a .1. It was twelve-thirty in the afternoon.