Things went downhill for Buddy quickly after that, though it was hard to notice because he spent so much time locked away in his room and I spent so much time trying to avoid him. The only signs that something was wrong were fairly indirect: He stopped making his daily pilgrimage to the living room to do cocaine, a bottle of vodka I’d been keeping in the freezer somehow froze solid, I went to the bathroom and walked in on Caroline crying in front of the mirror, and one afternoon I crossed paths with Buddy while doing my laundry and he said something to me that came out as guttural nonsense, like a string of words a Neanderthal might have said before the dawn of sophisticated language.
And then there were the roaches. This final clue that something was wrong would have probably been the most disturbing if it hadn’t also been the most indirect. At the time I never even considered that they could be related to Buddy or his drug abuse. From the day I moved in I had been seeing the little fuckers, “german” roaches they called them, a quarter the size of a cockroach, that would show up in the kitchen or the bathroom then dart behind some surface as soon as you noticed them. I would see a handful of them every day, but they tended to hang out near the kitchen, and the sink was always so dirty it seemed obvious that they were just living off whatever scraps we left out for them. Their numbers gradually and almost imperceptibly increased over those first few weeks that I lived there, but I didn’t mind them any more than my other roommates until their population suddenly exploded in that last week of June.
Overnight they had taken over the kitchen completely, so many of them that I’d see at least five any given time I went to the fridge or walked through to take a piss. Any time I opened a cabinet or drawer there would be three or four of them scattering like I’d caught them smoking grass in an alley. Soon they had conquered not only the kitchen but the bathroom and the laundry room too, and even though they had plenty to live off of with the sink and the dishes and a floor smattered with tomato sauce, they had no intentions of ending their empire there, and by the right of their manifest destiny they sought to overspread and possess the whole continent that providence had offered them.
They started coming in beneath that locked door which led to the laundry room, threading their way through the interstices of my luggage and then spreading out into the disarray of my floor like post-apocalyptic scavengers entering a ruined city. There were towers of books all over the place in little stacks, the humming AC unit, clothes in haphazard piles, bags that still hadn’t been unpacked or put away, a variety of art supplies strewn beneath a window, and even a few cobweb-covered shutters that Shelby had left in the corner because she hated to throw things away. The roaches seemed to like the books the most, and soon I couldn’t pick up anything to read without a roach or two scurrying out. On the covers of all the books I started finding thick speckles of brown, like tree sap, that could have been insect vomit or insect piss but was regardless some form of insect bodily fluid that would stick to my fingers. To make matters worse, the roaches were the exact shade of brown as the wood floor, so even when I made an attempt at organizing and cleaning up I could still never be sure how many were around me at any given time, and after I started finding them in bed with me, crawling over me as I slept, I entered a constant state of paranoia. I’d see them everywhere, even in the places they weren’t. My eyes started to detect tiny, flitting movements that would sometimes be roaches and sometimes be hallucinations, and even in my car or in my friends’ houses I’d find myself flinching at the sight of imaginary insects.
Of course, I was all the while doing everything I could to kill the little bastards, and as they started to encroach upon the third floor the other roommates also joined the resistance. We set up poison traps all over the place and bought cans of Raid. The Raid seemed like a particularly unpleasant way for them to die— in my mind they were like little people I was hitting with mustard gas, and they’d run around frantically until they fell over twitching like crazy— so I made sure to use the Raid as often as possible, and I started leaving roach corpses in conspicuous places in order to strike fear into their comrades. Over a few days I perpetrated a small holocaust, but no matter how many I killed they kept coming back, more of them each time, the borders of their empire now encompassing the whole house, even Shelby’s apartment downstairs.
I had become so preoccupied with thinking about the roaches that I all but forgot about Buddy until one day there was a quiet knock at the front door, and when I got there and opened it I found a squat, fifty-something year old lady with a bowl cut looking up at me with a nervous smile.
“Hi,” she said. “Is Buddy home? I’m his mother.”
“Oh, hello!” I cried with a false enthusiasm, masking my surprise and alarm as I tried to block her line of sight into the living room which was littered with roach-filled beer cans, discarded plates, and the brown guts of cigars that had been turned into blunt wraps by Joe and Marv. “Let me go see if I can find him,” I said, then I closed the door on her as politely as I could.
When I got to the end of the hall and passed through the kitchen I saw that the door to Buddy’s room was wide open. I had never seen the inside of his room before, but all I could see now was Buddy’s bed just in front of the doorway. On top of it was Buddy sprawled face down over the covers, completely naked. My immediate impression was that he was dead, overdosed, and now I would have to tell his mom that her son was dead, but when I hissed BUDDY at him he started to shift around, and when I did it again he turned his head toward me and grumbled “What?” with apparent irritation.
I said, “Buddy, your mom’s outside looking for you. She knows you’re here. You need to get dressed and come out front.”
He made a noise like “Mraaghhh” then muttered, “I’ll be dere in a minute.”
I went back up front and informed his mother the he would be there in a minute. It occurred to me then that I didn’t know what to call her— Mrs…?— because I didn’t know Buddy’s last name. He was just Buddy. I said one more time that he’d be there in just a minute, then I made a half-smile and closed the door again.
Ten minutes later Buddy still hadn’t gone to the door, and his mother started knocking again, louder, and calling, “Buddy? Buddy are you okay?”
I went back to Buddy’s room and found him in the exact same position I had left him ten minutes earlier. I said, “Buddy, get the fuck up! Your mom’s waiting on you! She’s been out there for ten minutes!”
“Aight fine!” he yelled back, then he rolled from the bed with a moan, completely indifferent to the fact that I had a direct line of sight to his junk; though, for my part, I was more disturbed by the seamless transition between his afro-like pubic hair into his curly belly and chest hair, which now just seemed like an extension of the pubes. I didn’t want to be standing there any longer, and I was now confident that he wouldn’t fall back asleep, so I scurried down the hallway again and opened the door to his teary-eyed mother who was in the middle of dialing someone on the cellphone.
“Is he okay?” she asked, softly, looking like she was on the verge of sobbing.
I said, “Yes, yes, of course he is! He’ll be here in just a minute. I’ll go hurry him up.”
And thankfully, just as I was about to close the door on her a third time, Buddy emerged from the hallway with clothes on, and I said, “Ah! Here he is now! I’ll leave you two to it!”
I hoped that that the visit from his mother would be a wake up call for Buddy. She clearly knew that something was wrong with him, and she’d driven over an hour to come and check on him in person. The best thing would have been to drive him straight to a rehab center, but in their short meeting he must have told her he’d shape up, maybe yelled at her for intruding in his life, because an hour later he was walking back through that front door with a pissed off look on his face. He didn’t say anything to me or Marv— we were playing bumper pool but stopped to watch him— and he just continued right through the room, down the hallway, through the kitchen, then we heard his bedroom door slam closed behind him.
TO BE CONTINUED
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter10
Chapter 11
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Why I'm Writing/ Recap of first 11 chapters
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Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
