Poor Damian

Remember those 7000 words?



I haven't written them yet.



I was going to--honest. But first I had to clean the house. And...Well, let's just say that the truck being in the shop means LJ's home a lot more; and that the start of the basketball season means that when LJ's home, EVERYBODY is here. (We got League Pass--every single everlovin' game, all season long. If it keeps my man in the house, I'll put up with all the basketball in the world....)



Anyway, it was mostly the truck being in the shop that led to my novel not getting written today.



I was upstairs cleaning the bathroom...Okay, first of all I suppose I should explain that "cleaning the bathroom" in this case didn't mean "throwing some bleach into the toilet and some Comet into the tub"--this was more along the lines of a remedial fix-it project.



See, Bob the Plumber's doofus son had, in preparation for levelling my floor, screwed 2X4s at sixteen-inch intervals across the width of the room, then crosshatched them with shorter pieces along the length. And this was all admirable and industrious of him, but there was a flaw in his logic, namely: If you have a surface that isn't level, and you raise both ends an equal amount, you still have a non-level surface. I attempted to explain this to him, but he wasn't inclined to listen and I think the theoretical basis was beyond him. So for five months or so, we have been stepping over 2x4s every time we need to pee.



Well, now that the underlying cause of the floor problem has been remedied (oh, wait--you don't know about that because it happened while I was maintaining blog-silence owing to my enormous workload....They fixed my joists!! I found a reputable contractor, Mom provided the financials, and on Monday morning three big Ukrainian guys came in, took a look at things, then marched off to Home Depot. When they returned, they ripped the righteous hell out of my kitchen--everything is STILL gritty with all the construction dust--and by 7 PM on Monday, I had two new joists and two reinforced ones. And I can tell it did some good, because I can see about three places in the upstairs walls where the drywall is now buckled from the lift provided by the joists.) Anyway, now that the underlying cause of the floor problem has been remedied, I'm ready to fix the situation myself. The way I see it, I need to shim the floor at different heights along the length and the width of the room. I figure if I grid the room off into 8-inch squares, and measure the difference at each point, I can cut shims in two dimensions and then lay sheets of plywood over the whole mess. It'll take me a few weekends to do it, of course, but I'm willing to take it on if it means I can put my bathroom back together.



However, to start with, I had to get up all those 2x4s. So this afternoon, I took the drill upstairs and got started.



I hadn't done more than one or two boards when I heard someone come up the stairs. I assumed it was LJ--I knew he and Marcus were downstairs playing NBA Live 2005--but it was Damian. I hadn't even heard anyone come in.



"Hey...got you upstairs fixin', I see..." he said. So I was explaining my project, a little--along with an extremely-abbreviated version of my problems with this house--and when I was finished he said "My girl's downstairs..."



"Cool," I said, and headed down with him.



She was indeed; she was sitting on the beat-up chair, petting White Cat; her name was Lisa. I chatted with her for a few minutes, then went out to the kitchen to straighten up a little bit. I ran upstairs for something and they called me back down to ask if I had a corkscrew, or a pair of pliers to open the brandy...I managed to come up with a corkscrew, though the pliers would have been easier.



We were sitting there drinking and smoking, and the guys were playing NBA Live, when the phone rang. I grabbed the phone and ran upstairs--it was Mom, of course--and when I came back down, Lisa wasn't there and Damian was on his cell phone, trying to make her see reason.



"Lisa. You can't just sit out there in the car. This is not the neighborhood where a white girl can just sit in a car on the street without drawing attention. No...no, you can't! No, I'm not ready to go right now, so c'mon back in..."



He hung up and looked at me, standing on the steps. "How you gonna sit in the car on the street in a neighborhood where they sell crack cocaine and you a white girl?" he asked me. "I mean, not to be racist or anything, but..."



"Well," I said, "I mean, I wouldn't do it, personally...."



"AND I got a quarter pound of weed in the trunk??" he continued. "Aw, HELL no."



"I kinda had a feeling you were gonna get some shit once they started playing," I told him, and he just shook his head.



I went down to the basement to put the laundry in the dryer, and when I came up she was back in the house. But that didn't last too long; about ten minutes later he asked her something I couldn't hear and she said "I don't enjoy watching video games for hours on end!" and then a few minutes later, she got up, went to the car, came back, and said "How about I just come back and pick you up tomorrow?"



He sighed, told us he'd see us in about a week, collected his brandy, gave White Cat a pat on the head and referred to Foof as "Skeletor", and I let them out. "Nice to meet you," I said.



I walked back into the living room and told LJ "You know, I don't normally talk about people, but if I ever change your personality THAT much, just by being around me--man, you better let me go."



"Oh, I will," he said.



From the conversation that followed, it's pretty clear that none of his friends are too fond of Lisa. "I don't fuck with her," he said. "Dude can come by any time, and he knows that, but leave her the hell back home. And I made that clear," he added.



The thing that struck me, though, was how totally different Damian's personality was between Tuesday and today. Tuesday night he was talking, laughing, bragging, plotting--today he was quiet and placating, just kinda morose and resigned. I felt bad for him. Nobody should be that henpecked. It kinda made me think of Bernadette, JP's old girlfriend, the one before me--the mean one. Poor kid....



Anyway, the truck comes out of the shop on Monday and the natural order of things will doubtless reassert itself. And maybe now I'll quit trying to get LJ to spend more time at home--because honestly, I'm not at all used to having him around the house so much, and it sorta messes with my routine.



I was also driven to one of those revelatory moments regarding the nature of my current condition, thanks to Marcus...we were watching some rap documentary on cable, and they were talking about Tupac and Biggie. I said that when Pac had been killed, one of my students came to class really sad and low about it, and since I'd been through the same thing with Kurt Cobain....



"Wait. Who the hell is Kurt Cobain?" said Marcus.



I'm sure my eyes were the size of dinnerplates. I couldn't believe it. "Nirvana? Lead singer?"



"Nope."



I think there were two potentially-proper responses here--one would have been to LJ, namely: "What kind of rabble are you tryin' to expose me to, 'who is Kurt Cobain?'" (the other response would have been to the ghost of JP, to wit: "Man, how the hell did I get HERE???") Instead I informed Marcus that he HAD to know who Kurt Cobain was, since Kanye West namechecked him in an interview a couple of weeks back, to which Marcus replied "Kanye?? FUCK Kanye," and we let the matter drop. Instead I hooked him up to Slap the Candidate, thus undermining his video-gaming for the rest of the afternoon. My revenge is petty, but mine own.