Author: Eric Fritzius
December 30, 1998
It is, at last, the end of the Year of our Lord 1998 and is thus the traditional time to reflect back on what the year has brought us and taught us. I’ve gained quite a lot in 1998. Despite a few setbacks, it has been one of the best years of my life. It also taught me quite a bit. This year I learned that the Tombigbee Electric Power Ass. seemed perfectly willing to continue supplying me with power, regardless of whether or not they believed in my existence. I learned that major radiator repair is best left to the major radiator repair professionals. I learned that having a girlfriend is good, but having one whom lives 600 miles away is a steaming fresh pile of suck. And I learned that regardless of what I might previously have thought, I owe most of the happiness I experienced this year to dope fiends.
Allow me to explain.
Despite the 600-mile distance, on occasion my sweety, Ashley, has seen her way clear to drive from her home in North Carolina to visit me in my festering hellhole of an apartment in Tupelo. She doesn’t mind its festering nature so much since, before moving to North Carolina, she used to live in a similar festering hellhole, namely the apartment directly below mine. This is kind of how we met in the first place.
Back then Ashley was attending to school by studying to become a medical technologist at the North Mississippi Medical Center. One of her fellow medical technology students was a young woman named Ramona Underwood. Ramona Underwood is the wife of John Robert Underwood. And John Robert Underwood… Well, hell, you know who he is. He’s been one of my best friends since the age of five. In fact, back when I was looking to move to Tupelo, he and Ramona tried to help me find a place to live. One day in class, Ramona happened to mention this to Ashley who in turn mentioned that there was an empty festering hellhole above her apartment due to the fact that the eloping teenage couple who had rented it had recently been hauled off by their parents. This was of great relief to Ashley, as the floors there are hardly sound-proof and the eloping teenage couple had been doing “the nasty” at full volume, non-stop, from the day they moved in.
Long story short, I moved in, met Ashley, months passed, she moved 600 miles away, then we started dating. Besides that whole not being able to see her every waking moment situation, I think I have coped fairly well with it. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s pretty unbearable! But the point is, I’m happy, dammit! Happy and infinitely grateful to John Underwood for having the good sense to marry Ramona in the first place, thus kicking off this whole adventure.
When Ashley comes to visit me, I usually do still have to go to work during the day leaving her stranded in the festering hell-hole for hours at a time. She often passes the hours by devising ways to make my festering hellhole a bit more manageable and considerably less festering and hellacious. Her ways are not always readily apparent and can manifest themselves mysteriously, sometimes months after they were originally set in motion. For instance, after I came home from work one day, my honey baby said, “I bought you something, today.”
“What is it?” I said.
“It’s something you needed.”
“Gimme a hint?”
“Nope. You have to find it on your own.”
I thought, at first, this was a mystery that I was actually meant to solve, but upon a once-over inspection of the festering hellhole I found nothing obviously new.
“You won’t find it by looking around,” she hinted. “You probably won’t even find it until after I’ve gone home. It isn’t all that exciting, really.”
“Oh. Well. Let’s go eat,” I said. After all, if this was going to be a time-consuming search I’d rather do it later, preferably after eating a good meal. I didn’t find the gift after the meal and I didn’t find it over the course of the next few days. I didn’t even worry about the mystery gift much, but I didn’t actually forget about it. Occasionally, when I thought I wasn’t being observed, I would look for it.
“It’s not in the cabinet,” Ashley would say upon catching me as I inspected the cleaning products under the sink. I would grit my teeth and go about my merry way, vowing to continue my search when prying eyes weren’t about.
Like Ashley had predicted, I was unable to find the mystery gift before she left for home. Over the next several weeks, I continued my search for the mysteriously useful gift quite unsuccessfully and was beginning to wonder if I should give up altogether when I suddenly hit pay dirt. One day, whilst in “the can”, I noticed an unfamiliar object behind my toilet. It was a small, vaguely cylindrical object apparently made of black plastic and which was wrapped in shiny tan tape. At one end of it there was a rusted metal ring sticking from beneath the tape. I had never noticed the object before, and I had even looked behind the toilet recently when I was forced to mop there after it overflowed following my attempt to flush an apple core. It hadn’t been there then, but suddenly it was there now. Sounded like a mystery present to me. But what the hell was it? A couple of possibilities came to mind. My first thought was that it was some sort of “bathroom device” designed to freshen the air, or kill bugs, or destroy toilet germs or some such. I mostly based this theory on a vague half-recollection of maybe having seen a similar device behind a toilet in a McDonald’s during my childhood. But for a new “bathroom device” it didn’t look very new. Besides the rusted ring at one end, the tan tape wrapped around it was clearly wrinkled. In fact, it looked like it had probably spent a good deal of time on the floor of a McDonald’s restroom. This being the case, I wasn’t about to touch it. My sweety may have put it there, but she also examined stool samples for a living as a med-tech and was much braver than me when it came to touching mooky stinks. Sure, I could have just called her up and asked her what it was, but that would be admitting that I didn’t know and would prove myself to be a goober bachelor, as she already suspected. Instead I just chalked it up as a terribly useful device that only girls who grew up in Alaska know the purpose of and which would no doubt enrich my life.
More weeks passed and soon it was time for another visit from my woman. The day before she was to arrive, I tried to alleviate her fears of my goober-bachelorhood by assuring her that I had done my laundry so the house wouldn’t smell like socks and ass.
“You didn’t wash your sheets, did you?” she asked.
“Uhh. No.”
“I knew you didn’t wash your sheets,” she said with gleeful accusation. Now granted, it was a pretty good bet that I hadn’t washed my sheets in the first place. If I’m going to wash anything, chances are my sheets aren’t going to be a huge priority until they become noticeably rank. I thought her assumption was girlfriend’s intuition or perhaps she was a linen psychic.
“No, I’m not psychic,” she added.
I preferred to let the subject pass in favor of more pleasant topics of conversation since I was in no mental state to deal with linen psychics.
Ashley arrived the following afternoon and was hardly through the door when she again said, “I knew you hadn’t washed your sheets!” I gave in.
“How? How did you know I hadn’t washed my sheets? HOW??!!”
“Go lift them up.”
I sighed, went over to the bed and lifted up the fitted sheet that covered it. Beneath it I found a big white padded mattress cover, the very kind I had never bothered to buy.
“Oh,” I said.
“See. That’s the useful thing I bought for you,” she said.
“Oh,” I said again. “I thought you got me that thing behind the toilet.”
“What thing behind the toilet?”
We went into the bathroom of the festering hellhole and I pointed at the plastic, taped thing behind the toilet. Being, as I believe I mentioned, a brave soul, Ashley reached for it.
“Oh, great! You’ve touched it. Now we’re all gonna die,” I said. “What is it?”
The plastic object was, upon closer inspection, wrapped in tan packing tape, and the ring at the end of it, held down by the tape, was a key ring. To my horror, Ashley began to unwrap the tape. “Don’t do that!” I yelped, imagining the explosion that was likely to be unleashed. For all I knew, this was some long lost package from the Unabomber that had found its way behind my toilet. She kept unwrapping it, though, and within a few seconds the tape had been removed revealing a black plastic key-chain, with a tiny clasp beneath the actual key-ring. It opened to reveal a hollowed out interior compartment that held… well, I didn’t know what it held, but it looked organic and was kind of grayish brown. Great, I thought, now we were going to die from Anthrax poisoning.
“They’re pot seeds,” Ashley said, spilling most of them on the floor.
“Pot seeds? How can you tell?”
“I grew up with hippie parents in Alaska. Believe me, I know.”
“Then how’d they get behind my Tidy-Bowl?”
It was then that it hit us. The horny teenagers who used to live here had been dope fiends! These were people who were out sick on the day they showed “Reefer Madness” in the 8th Grade. They’d missed that important life lesson and had been lead down a path of pot-smoking, pot growing, pot-seed hiding, munchy munching, elopement, and, of course, doing “the nasty.” But in their own little way, these dope fiends had done me the greatest favor they could ever have imagined in their sex-addled, paranoid, Mary-Jane clouded minds. Had they not managed to piss off their parents so much that their folks came and dragged them bodily from this hell-hole apartment, I would never have met my sweet honey-baby and would have missed out on knowing one of the most beautiful souls on the planet.
So screw John and Ramona! This year, I owe my happiness to dope-fiends.
Dope fiends, I thank you.
Copyright © 1998 Eric Fritzius
