PEOPLE FROM CLEVELAND AND OTHER PLACES; PART 2; JERRY

I
It took a special person to accept the living conditions of 128 Beadel St. It was located in what real estate brokers refer to as, “East Williamsburg”, but was more accurately a deserted industrial wasteland. Beadel Street ran through a dense stretch of metal factories and dead ended into a barren field. The field contained yet another factory, a huge tower protruded up from its middle and massive flame burned atop it at all times. We would come to refer to the flame as, “The Eternal Flame of The Jersey Special Olympics”, or simply, “The Sun”. It looked as if the apocalypse came and went with damage leading up to, but ending on, either side of 128 Beadel.
The Street was only four blocks in total length with our half block at its end being the only residential and most remote part. From the front steps of 128, Vandervoort Road was to the left, and a fence that blocked off the field was to the right creating the dead end. Vandervoort Road was so warped from all the truck traffic pounding it down that it was literally hard to cross. The noise level and scale of the ten or so surrounding blocks some might call a neighborhood left the impression we were living amongst mechanized dinosaurs that stomped and screamed all day, but lay totally silent all night. The nearest train was a twenty-minute walk.
Wally owned 128 Beadel and lived on the first floor with his wife Grace who once claimed she was being held captive there by Wally. Grace had taken it upon herself to decorate the entire house including the portion that was available for rent by the general public. I was responsible for discovering 128 and when I first arrived to see it, I must admit, I was shocked. As I entered, an overwhelming stench of cat urine hit my nostrils. Just to my right was a shrine to Maddona. When I tell people this story they always ask, “Like the singer, Madonna, or like, ‘The Madonna’?” The singer Madonna. A floor to ceiling display of photographs, dolls, albums, and books, of, by, and about Madonna all lit by candlelight loomed in the entranceway. The door to the upstairs, what would become our home, was directly in front of my face, another door was one step to my left where Wally and Grace lived.
As we started upstairs I noticed each stair was painted, designed with shapes you might see as a stencil pattern in a home decorating store, but clearly had been hand painted on one at a time. The pattern spread from the stairs to cover the walls and woodwork of the doorframes. The generally open space looked more like an oversized hand crafted wooden jewelry box from Mexico than a stable home for human beings. There were three bedrooms to the left also painted with the repetitive dipsy doodles that were on the stairs. I was somewhat distracted in thinking about the care put into the creation all around me as Wally and I discussed finances.
II
I inevitably took some criticism about the location and general appearance of the house when Max and his girlfriend, Joyce, arrived from Massachusetts to move in. But, the initial shock wore off, and we began to enjoy our little home. There was a huge back porch that overlooked the back yards of the other homes on the block, it also was painted. A sun design covered the entire back wall of the house, our upstairs portion revealed the top half of the sun, the beams reached all the way to the edge of the house. It was summer and with colorful paint on the walls, the windows open, and the screen door to the porch swinging in the wind it felt more like a beach house then a converted duplex in industrial Brooklyn. Wally once told us in his thick Puerto Rican accent not to have too many people on the porch, that it might fall.
We joked that Beadel St. was a little piece of Ohio, where we are from, that we brought with us. The neighbors all had above ground pools. They were mostly second-generation Polish families living some kind of displaced appellation lives. We could sit on the back deck and watch children swim, women hang clothes, and we practically had our own zoo.
The entire block was at odds with Wally, we suspected, because he looked something like a Puerto Rican Shaman, and housed sick and abandoned animals in small 128. In the basement Wally kept four to six dogs, all abused at one point in their lives. One of the dogs once latched on to my forearm with its teeth when I tried to pet it. In the back yard below our porch was a coup for roosters Wally rescued after they fell from a delivery truck on Vandervoort, some of them had lost beaks or feet in the accident. Next to the roosters was an enormous florescent green parrot. It would burst into flapping, shrieking episodes Wally called anxiety attacks that lasted fifteen minutes once a week or so. There were a number of cats and other animals that lived in the back yard as well. Wally had a kindness exceeding that of your average man. He saved animals, and he encouraged us to play our music loud. When we would ask if the noise disturbed he and Grace at night he would reply, “Turn it up man. I can’t even hear it”.
As nice as he was to us, Wally had a particularly vicious feud going with the neighbors directly next door. A few weeks after we moved in Wally came by to show us a video from the eighties of Diane Sawyer interviewing him about a court case he won where he was either awarded 128, or the money to purchase 128, I can’t quite remember how it went. In the video, we saw a much younger Wally defending himself in court against a New York Slum lord. Wally, and a group of tenants, won in a class action suit largely because of his documentation of their beleaguered living conditions. Inspired by his past victory, Wally had been videotaping the borderline violent exchanges he and the neighbor to the left were having in regard to the placement of the very fence keeping them off of one another. He had strategically positioned cameras in the basement facing the fence in anticipation of another court appearance. In his visits he would show us tapes from past fights, and encouraged us to witness the quarreling from our vantage point above.
The neighbor was a drunk, abusive polish man who not only fought with Wally but incessantly with his wife and children. When Wally was gone the neighbors would invite us into their house to share their side of the story, saying it was their land the fence was on. But when they said things like, “and he’s just plain dirty”, about Wally, we could tell they disagreed more with Wally’s ethnicity, and how he maintained his home, then the plastic fence.
We kept a valuable outsiders neutrality perched above the backside of Beadel St. looking out on swimming children, screaming neighbors, and ever burning torches in the six months we were to live there. People have a tendency to not look up when they are searching around for others, hence the sniper’s roost. I guess we just expect each other to be on the ground.
III

Looking for roommate crazy enough to join us. Late nights and loud music. Smokers are okay. If you are the bastard, please contact Nate or Max.
128 Beadel St. Brooklyn, NY 11211
We needed a roommate to take the third bedroom and after several duds stopped by in response to a more proper advertisement; we posted something like the ad above. There was a single response, Jerry Foust. I was not home when Jerry stopped by the first time, but Max quickly informed me he was in fact the one.
Jerry had already been living in New York for twelve years when he moved in with us. He arrived with nothing more then could fit in his small room. A futon, a couple of guitars, an end table, and a lamp with matching zebra print lampshade. He was originally from Texas but claimed to be, “…completely a New Yorker”, after such an extended stay. He was about six foot three. He weighted probably 230 pounds.
We would either drink at home and play music, or go to a favorite place of Jerry’s if his outstanding tab there wasn’t too high. He had spent several years as a bike messenger, and still road his yellow ten-speed everywhere, sometimes getting home late covered in blood after taking a drunken spill along the way.
Jerry was managing a plant shop, The King and I, on Sixth Avenue between twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth streets at the time. He worked for Karen, the owner. She was a surrogate parent type to him, she fronted him money when he needed it, and she yelled at him when he deserved it. Karen was a big woman. Jerry would come home complaining Karen had attacked him and that she was a crazy bitch, but he would always go back to work the next day.
The reason Jerry needed a place to live was an ongoing separation from his long time girlfriend, Emily. When Jerry was extra drunk I could here him in the living room late at night leaving extended messages on Emily’s phone saying things like, “I know we will be together again. I know you still love me”, while giggling to himself. Ultimately, Jerry was just talking to the walls around him, there is no way Emily’s phone had enough memory to record these fifteen minute confessionals. Max and I would try to intercept Jerry’s late night calls telling him it was a bad idea, but he would slip away and call anyways. In the mornings I could hear Jerry going through his ritualistic moaning, coughing, and spitting up of whatever he had collected in his lungs the night before and we would have conversation through the wall separating our bedrooms.
By now Max’s younger brother, Drew, had arrived to live with us, and was sleeping on the couch. I have heard that your first six months in New York are the hardest. Besides Jerry, we were all dealing with the transition in our own way, Drew’s particular method of coping was sleep. He would lay on the couch and drift off in a room full of us screaming drunks, people often sitting on and around him not even noticing he was there. The obvious joke was that he had developed narcolepsy, but more accurate was that he had an actual physical attraction to the couch. He appeared magnetically drawn from any upright standing position as he crashed down on the cushions, not to rise for what seemed like weeks.
As the weather changed and the walks to the train felt longer and longer we openly fantasized about moving somewhere “normal people” lived. It came to my attention that a loft space in a prime location was going to be available starting March 1st, and if we could ride out the rest of winter on Beadel Street, it could be ours. Again, I was put in charge of orchestrating the deal.
IV
When I went to see the loft for the first time there was only a single couch, a kitchen table, and a rug in the middle of the room where a pit bull frantically running around had just taken a shit. The ceiling creaked and cracked twenty two feet over head. A previous tenant had built out and upper deck where a rail less staircase led up to a rail less hallway overlooking the space and leading to three of the four bedrooms. The fourth bedroom was downstairs across from the only tiny bathroom, and a single window in the corner covered almost completely by steel bars served to lock the tenants in as much as to lock unwanted strangers out. No one had the key to the window. If 128 Beadel was a hand crafted jewelry box, the loft was simply the largest cardboard box in the world.
The building was a converted warehouse containing forty units of varying size, # 107, what had become our obsession back at Beadel Street, was the largest. It was located right on the east river across from downtown Manhattan. From the football field sized roof you had an unobstructed panoramic view of Manhattan from Houston Street up to the 59th St Bridge. It was a completely illegal operation and was not zoned for residential living. A group of Hasidic Jews owned and managed the property and most of the rest of the neighborhood. For fifty years this had been a thickly Polish and Jewish neighborhood, but now both groups were relinquishing their homes and collecting checks from young artists and professionals.
The Hasids had a makeshift office a mile south of the building where they conducted their shady dealings. When I went there to sign the lease a buzzer hanging from its wires, and a spray painted address above the door where the only things making it identifiable as inhabited. I walked into what was nothing more than an empty apartment. A single desk in each bedroom and a Xerox machine and coffee pot in the kitchen were the only things inside. The place looked like it could be abandoned and burned in minutes if need be. I nervously sat down and extended my hand to, Dina, the woman handling our “account”. She looked at my hand, and then at me as if I were crazy. Being vaguely familiar with Jewish law, I said in Hebrew, “Shomer Nagilia?”, referring to the Jewish law that forbids unmarried Jewish women from making physical contact with men. The look on her face did not change. I proceeded to agree to what amounted to a series of threats, handed over the outrageous amount of money I had managed to collect from the gang awaiting my return back at Beadel Street and signed the lease before scurrying out hoping to never hear from them again.
When March finally came around we ecstatically packed our things, said a tearful goodbye to Grace and Wally, and headed for our new home.
V
We had big plans for the loft. Max and Andrew come from a family of art dealers and had lots of obscure antiques, paintings, chesterfield couches, and a six hundred pound cement table. They were supposed to decorate the place. I was going to build out a small room off a pillar that came down through the loft as a recording studio. And Jerry was going to build a floor to ceiling water fall and bring in full size palm trees from his shop. He claimed to have a museum quality toy collection he was going to mount on one of the bare walls. He told us he also had several other collections of records, instruments, and snow boards at Emily’s mother house in Rockland county, all of which we “needed” for the loft. Jerry had succeeded in some way with his late calls to Emily, they were talking again and had restored their own kind of civility to the relationship.
One night, Jerry borrowed the van from Karen at The King and I, and me, Jerry, and Emily headed up to Rockland. Jerry was driving, Emily was in the front seat, and I was rattling around in the open back without seats. On the way Emily and Jerry were discussing whose stuff is who’s and who is owed what. They had been together for four years and had allowed their lives to sufficiently meld together making this process difficult but necessary. Somehow Jerry came to the conclusion that Emily’s mom owed him six hundred dollars.
We got to Emily’s mother’s house around ten pm. It felt strange to be out of the city. I hadn’t seen the bouncing headlights reflect off a house for long enough that I noticed ours as we turned into the driveway. No one was home when we opened the side door of the house. Three cats scrambled as we entered. We went upstairs where Jerry started unplugging televisions and video game systems while sorting through CDs. We brought the first load out to the van. We re-entered the same side door and turned immediately into the garage to the left were Jerry’s record collection and toys were. Jerry was saying most of his good records were missing and he and Emily screamed back and forth about it as we carried crates of records out, Jerry accusing Emily’s mother of hand selecting his finest vinyl, and selling them.
We went into the living room when we re entered the house the third time. Jerry was very pleased when he saw the couch he had described to me on the ride up. “It’s this huge orange wrap around couch from the seventies. Vintage”, he had said. He was right, it was huge, it was orange, and it was vintage. He smiled at Emily as he told her we would be taking the couch in exchange for money owed and missing records. We carefully carried the couch out the front door one section at a time until the van was full and the house was empty. Emily must have had some issues with her mother because she not only let us take the couch, but she helped, and laughed the whole time. I had somewhere to sit now in the back of the van as we headed for the city in hysterics.
VI
The couch fit perfectly in the corner of the loft that had the window, and it took all four of us to slide the cement table over, a good fit. We had started storing the things we were not sure what to do with in the corner opposite the couch and table as there were no closets in the loft. Joyce would come over and say, “That fucking pile is going to stay like that for six months.” Offended, we reassured her not only would the pile be sorted through, but the waterfalls would be up and running within two weeks.
Six months later the pile was a twelve foot stack of furniture, bags of clothes, garbage, sports equipment, amps, jackets, and boxes of junk none of us dared identify as our own. Our lifestyle had taken priority. There were beer cans everywhere, overflowing ashtrays, shoes, magazines, and records spread out over the shrinking space.
The loft was tough to keep clean because of a few unique characteristics. First, the flooring was just plywood meant to be covered by had wood floors that never got installed. Because there was only one window, it was always dark even during the day and no air circulated through, and we had only a few antique lamps to light the place. A constant sprinkle fell from the rafters above and would settle as a layer of dust over everything. The place was earning a distinct smell. The dingy nature of the loft attracted certain types as a place were they could come smoke their cigarettes and maybe get a free beer and some weed, sit around cracking jokes and play video games.
Two very different, very important characters stepped on the scene at the six month mark that would drastically change the course of history in the loft. Lyon Porter, one of our friends from Cleveland arrived in June to begin an internship at a big real-estate firm and live with us for the summer. Lyon was a college hockey player. When he arrived, needless to say, he was in a different mind frame then the rest of us. He had no intention of living in such filth and insisted we shape up and, “get rid of that fucking pile of shit.” At first we took offense to this outsider taking charge, but soon realized he was right. We dragged our asses up from the couch and started cleaning. At almost the same time, we noticed a complete stranger had started sleeping on one of the couches.
People slept over a lot. Sometimes there would be four or five bodies around when I would come out of my room in the morning. Once after a party, I stood at the top of the stairs and counted 24 people sleeping around, beside, and on top of one another. We had eight couches and an open door policy, but this stranger had been around for almost a week, it was clear he was living with us. We thought we might try to speak to him.
His name was Jared. Jerry claimed to have known him from some time he spent in Colorado, but we all thought they just met out at a bar and Jerry invited him to live with us out of pure goodness and stupidity. Jared was about the same age as Jerry, 33, and told us he had an ex-wife and child back in Colorado. His charm was contrived but apparent. He slept every night on the vintage couch we had so smoothly heisted, and didn’t usually rise until about 2 p.m. He and Jerry were on a rampage of sorts, going out every night and bringing back strange women in the early morning. This was not uncommon for Jerry. We had a few experiences back at Beadel with Jerry’s loose taste in women, or, taste in loose women more accurately. Once, on Beadel, one of Jerry’s girls was dancing around the living room entertaining us all, kneeling on a chair facing her and rocking back and forth he ripped the leather cover of the chair straight off out of excitement. As I said, Jerry was a big man, but he had lost a lot of weight now in a short time while hanging out with Jared. He called Karen with excuses as to why he couldn’t make it to work several times a week. He looked like shit, a bit of a skeleton of himself. We speculated it was coke, but we never saw them actually doing any in the house.
Jared and Jerry started several new bands and would have various members dropping by to jam. One of my favorites was John. John was so drunk when he came over that he would reintroduce himself every time he arrived at the door. But he had a great disposition and could absolutely shred on a guitar. He acted like Jimmy Hendrix from old interviews I have seen with him. He never actually said anything, just mumbled.
One day Jerry told us Karen fired him. It sounded official this time as he said he would not go back to ask forgiveness yet again. As he spoke there was a hint of shame in his voice but also disregard and distance. Jerry and Jared continued on there various missions around the city. Jared didn’t have a bike so he took it upon himself to borrow Lyons expensive mountain bike that hung suspended from the ceiling by the entrance to the loft when it wasn’t in use. When Lyon found out about this he about pounded Jared into that couch he slept on. Being held back, Lyon told Jared he was a freeloading addict piece of shit, and warned the rest of us to, “look out for this asshole”.
Around the same time I was receiving phone calls from our not so friendly landlords letting me know that each month one of the four roommates was not paying rent. Mine was the only name on the lease, and though they knew I had others living in there, they couldn’t have imagined what exactly we had going on. To them the roommates were just names on checks and in their records only initials were written down.
When I got the call back from Dina, the missing rent was from J. F. I wasn’t really sure how Jerry was supporting himself since he had lost his job. He certainly wasn’t looking for a new one. He was just always drinking, always smoking, losing weight steadily, and working on several different projects around the loft. One of the things we had acquired in our trip up to Rockland was a life sized manikin Jerry started some years before made completely of computer parts. With his new found free time, he decided to finish. The manikin stood six feet tall. It was a woman according to Jerry. Most of the body up to the torso was already covered with microchips and wires. Jerry would apply the oozing glue and then simply stick pieces of the insides of a computer on, fitting them together like a mosaic. For supplies Jerry would scower the streets of our neighborhood looking for computer monitors. His supplies were taking up much of the available space of the loft as he neared completion.
The arms and legs were done when Jerry found a pair of knee high leather woman’s boots for her feet. All he needed was a head. Jerry told us he had brokered a deal with some bar downtown that was going to show this woman thing along with several other of Jerry’s pieces when he finished. He thought appropriate finishing touch would be a huge horn coming out of the neck that was to hold a small flashlight meant to then shine down into a martini glass she was holding that would refract the light around the room. Ambitious. As jerry started constructing the horn out of duct tape the weight became so great that every time he let go of his creation she would fall forward and crash to the ground. Construction halted.
VII
It was Joyce’s birthday. Joyce had pretty much stopped coming to the loft all together, but came by the day Jerry and Jared decided to give her for her birthday, a brand new Gucci hand bag. Sound a bit odd to you? Well, it did to us. When I got home later Max said, “Did you see what Jerry got Joyce for her birthday?” with a confused look on his face. It was a possibility in our minds that this was just a nice gesture by Jerry, but then Joyce found a license in an inner pocket of the bag.
Joyce called the woman whose license it was and told her how it had come about that she now had her license and Gucci hand bag. The woman on the other line didn’t know how to react at first, but soon went into a story about how she was robbed two days earlier. The two made plans to meet for dinner so Joyce could return the purse and the woman could thank her and explain the story in full. She told Joyce a man on a bike had rode past her and yanked he purse right of her shoulder while another man rode just behind him.
That was it for Jerry. He was pretty much out of control; out of work, robbing old women, dismantling computer monitors, and he hadn’t paid rent in two months. I was the only one not totally disgusted with Jerry. In my mind he could do no wrong. He was just a little fucked up. He had earned my unconditional friendship and I knew it was Jared who had actually done the purse snatching anyways. I don’t know if Max was actually pissed at Jerry or if he just had to act like he was for Joyce. Drew agreed that Jerry should go. Jerry knew it was coming, and I could tell it made him sad to leave. In some ways we were the best thing for him, and leaving us was just another step in the wrong direction. Jared and Jerry both moved out, but not before Jared could steal my hair clippers…asshole.
VIII
Darren moved in.
We had started throwing parties and actually were making money doing it. By the simple fact that we hadn’t returned to Cleveland with our tales between our legs as some might have expected, we had earned a reputation there. I don’t know if it was our perceived success in New York or if our friends had a genuine desire to live here, but they started arriving in droves. After Darren, our friend Bradford arrived after traveling Europe and was temporarily living with us. Gregg moved down from Massachusetts as soon as he finished school and got and apartment right down the street. Verne tried living in Hawaii, but his girlfriend was driving him crazy so he broke it off and was now staying with us too.
Casper arrived. A unit in our building opened up on the third floor, four of the Clevelanders moved up there. Another unit on the top floor became available, and four more took it. We now had three lofts in the building and had essentially reconstructed our childhood and high-school gang, but now in Brooklyn, some kind of post graduate psychedelic dormitory living. Also now in New York; Nora (who stayed with us for two months), Sarah (actually was here before us), Ray, Andrew, and Kelly lived together in Astoria, Aaron and a different Sarah lived in Park Slope, and there are more I am forgetting. All together there were about thirty of us. Having all of your childhood friends reunited in adulthood is both amazing and completely hindering. It is comfortable and satisfying, but I pretty much don’t talk to anyone else and have no desire to spark new friendships.
Most of the migrants waited tables here or there, but were really living to come home to the crew and have fun. Our loft was home base. Every time I walked through the door I could expect at least five people hanging out on the couches drinking, smoking, and laughing usually while both the radio and TV played. The walls of the loft were paper thin. I was convinced the noise from downstairs was actually magnified as it carried through my closed bedroom door. The mess and the fun persisted.
IX
I would periodically run into Jerry around the East Village. We were genuinely happy to see one another. He told me he was living in an art commune on St. Marks and that he didn’t talk to Jared anymore. I continued to have coincidental run-ins with Jerry every few weeks. I even saw crazy John a few times, though he didn’t remember me. But then a period of about four months passed when I didn’t see Jerry. One day Max came bursting into the loft with a copy of the New York Post, he handed it to me and told me to read.
A huge one page photograph of Jerry was on the fifth page. He was grinning wide wearing a straw hat and a dress with a bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand. The Headline covering part of the photo read, “Art Guru says, ‘We’re taking SoHo back’”. The caption credited Jerry with starting an art collective on Greene Street and quotes him as saying they were taking the neighborhood back from the capitalists. Art guru, Jerry? The same Jerry that sat around with us playing his bass sloppily. The same Jerry I had never seen pick up a paint brush.
The next day I went to Greene Street to check it out for myself. Jerry was ecstatic about the article. He had gained some weight back, and besides the fact that he now wore women’s clothes, he seemed well. The space was pretty unbelievable. It was even larger then our loft and completely covered in art. Huge paintings went floor to ceiling. There was a small stage and sound system, and a huge machine gun sat in the middle of the room.
Jerry told me he has befriended the elderly woman who owned the building and she let him move in under the condition that he would fix it up. The old woman lived on the sixth floor and hadn’t come down in years. He had told the reporter from the post she was his mom.
The place did need fixing, but Jerry seemed less concerned with that as he climbed a ladder to finish his towering canvas. As he climbed someone leaned over to me and said, “Isn’t he an amazing artist.” I couldn’t help but laugh, Jerry had reinvented himself as some genius artist, little did these fools know, it was probably the first painting he had ever done. But, I gave Jerry credit. It was an exciting atmosphere and I liked the prospect of being “in” there.
Jerry was living in his gallery/studio/dump, and was permitting several of his cronies to crash there too, paint, and get high all day. One of them was this African man whose name I can’t remember. Come to think of it, I never knew his name. He was building a shrine to the aliens that were coming, some already lived amongst us according to him, and as I showed he and Jerry photographs of paintings I completed he added them to the shrine and told me they would help our cause. I pride myself on my ability to consider all things possible and was actually engaging in conversation with this man as Jerry told me from the background that he was a prophet.
I visited Jerry’s colony as often as I could, they had a lot of good shows there, and it was always interesting. One day when I arrived a wild bunch were sitting around the makeshift living room drawing and reshaping rabbit ears for a clearer signal to outer space. Jerry insisted that I paint something and shuffled me over to the other end of the gallery and set me up with a brush and paint. As I worked, I saw fumbling and unfolding from the corner were everyone was, and concluded they were getting high, really high. I certainly didn’t care and was more offended I wasn’t invited to join than anything. I finished my painting and left.
X
Back at the loft, things were pretty much out of control. Being the responsible one was taking its toll especially considering it was the first time in my life I was assigned the role. I would pay bills and spend the remainder of the month asking for the money in my passive aggressive way. I was getting phone calls from the management company about unpaid rent with threats of fines and worse. I had pretty much put myself in a spot where I accepted all risks, and it was getting old. I said I was out come March just before we got an eviction notice. It is hard to get evicted from an illegally rented warehouse but we had managed to do it. The fact shocked us considering we constantly heard neighbors and people who used to live in the building say they went months without paying and often never settled old debts when they moved out without as much as a phone call from the managers. But we had clearly earned the eviction. Between the parties attracting Brooklyn’s finest vandals and the rotating list of names on rent checks they knew we were up to no good. We moved out March first. I should say, I moved out March 1st, everyone else stayed, Drew moved upstairs and Max and Darren held strong, staying in the loft and hoping no one would arrive with a truck full of things ready to move in. They survived a month like that then left. When I did return to offer the new residents my key to the front door, they looked at me like I was a total ass. We had left the place a bit of a mess, and as I spoke with the girl at the door I could see her friends standing behind her, eyeing me with mops and paint brushes in there hands. It appeared they too had big plans for the loft. I wished them luck and left not feeling too bad, it certainly was a nice gesture by me.
I was still going to Jerry’s every couple weeks to check on their progress there. The exhibits (if that’s what you want to call them) changed constantly. Where the machine gun had been now stood an enormous pink vagina you could walk into. I was wanting to do a show of my own work and had been sort of harassing Jerry about the possibility. I stopped by a lot over the course of one month, but Jerry was increasingly difficult to locate. He didn’t have a cell phone and I was constantly leaving messages with people I knew were not going to relay them. I would say, ”Tell Jerry, FISH, stopped by”, trying to emphasize my name in an effort to show that he would care.
One evening I stopped in and announced myself as usual to a bunch of blank but friendly stares. Jerry’s girlfriend came out from the little bedroom they had constructed. I had met her before. Jerry always had a knack for landing beautiful women despite his shortcomings; she was possibly his most beautiful. She was wasted on dope (the type that starts with an “h”). She shook my hand and told me, “Jerry isn’t feeling well”. My insides told me to just burst into the bedroom and jump on the bed with Jerry. I didn’t care if he wasn’t feeling well and I didn’t care if he was wasted. Our friendship was deeper then that. But I didn’t. He had obviously told her he didn’t want to see me. I had become a nuisance, an unwanted presence in his life. He chose drugs. Me and the girl came to an agreement we would meet back there the next day at seven to talk, but in my heart I knew I would not return…ever.
THE END