Relocation 5: South Temple (from 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)

At some point my friend Amir talked me into moving in with him and another roommate in their house on South Temple. "You can't live with your parents forever," he told me.
"Well of course not," I agreed. "Eventually, I will die."
Amir took me to see the house even though I remember that I'd already decided, or I should say my girlfriend at the time had already decided, that I would move in with them.

It was one of those classy old style pioneer type houses with an ornate wooden railing on the stairs and a very convenient toilet in the laundry room. An indescribable smell permeated the house, a kind of grand old house moldy-wood type smell mixed with spilled beer mixed with garbage. It reminded me of places I'd visited as a child that I'd been glad that I didn't live in. The smell did, not the house. Well, the house did too, but since I was never able to experience the house without the smell, except on the very last day after we'd cleaned it for the first time, it's difficult to judge fairly, except to try and imagine how the house looked in my mind while standing in an open field far away from it.

I don't remember much about visiting the house with Amir when he was trying to talk me into moving in even though I was already going to, except that we went upstairs and took a look at the bedroom where I would be moving in and I met the guy who was moving out. I don't remember him at all, but I remember he had all these comic book style illustrations on the walls that I thought were really cool - mostly elfin people with swords - they were copied from Japanese comics. For some reason those illustrations and the guy's furniture made me view the room as hip and an adventurous place to live.
But he took all his illustrations and hip drawing tables and I moved in and filled the room with my banker boxes of books and papers and junk and baskets of clothes. And the bunk bed, the only furniture left in the room when I moved in because it belonged to the landlord, and the previous tenant had told me it was cool to sleep in it because his girlfriend liked to sleep in the top bunk. I thought he was referring to some kind of hip sexy stuff but I didn't get it.

I hated sleeping in the bunk bed because I didn't want to sleep on top because I am afraid of heights and I didn't want to sleep on the bottom because I couldn't see the top and I produced several horror movies in my mind that featured demonic little ghost kids lowering their evil little heads over the side of the top bunk and grinning at me like the little kid my brother and I met when I was young and church-going and my brother dragged me to do his home-teaching with him and the family we visited was a prominent family in the ward and they had three sons and the youngest would jabber to us in a satanic tongue and run around the room in a pcp-related state of agitation and he swatted his older brother's head with a ruler and the older brother glared at him for half the lesson before he took an entire fisher price parking garage and brought it down on his little brother's head and my brother and I were speechless with shock and also with half expectation half dread for some kind of supernaturally evil reaction from that little brother but he only screamed and cried and the father looked sadly at the older brother as if he'd said something mildly out of line.

Another anxiety was the window of my bedroom which they told me not to open but I did because I like the fresh air and I suffered an invasion of box elder bugs from the tree that grew against the house, and I shut the window and breathed the rancid stale air of the house but during their mating season they kept coming in through the cracks between the molecules of the window and they kept coming and dying on the window sill and then the floor around the window and I bought raid and I sprayed the window and the floor and the room stunk and I thought maybe I would sustain brain damage from the fumes and I took to sleeping on the couch which smelled like beer but the dining room at the end of the couch had a giant painting by the landlady of two frogs kissing over a fiery red background which I did not sleep well under. So I went back upstairs to sleep.

The kitchen gave me anxiety because it stunk and I could not eat from my roommates' plates because I suspected them of being bad dishwashers and leaving their plates crawling with germs, and when I discovered in the course of my first week that the kitchen had no microwave but had a nice stove (which Kevin [name changed] demonstrated for me by lighting the pilot light and at the moment he crouched down with the match in his teeth I knew I would never be using the stove) and then also I knew that 75% of all the meals I liked to prepare for myself I would not be able to prepare because they required food irradiated by microwaves. So I ate mostly peanut butter sandwiches and beer, which helped with my anxiety quite a lot.

And at another point Amir achieved a girlfriend, an amazing coup for a man who'd come to this country from Malaysia to study engineering and ended up sleeping mostly under his desk in the engineering building at the U or on the couch at the band house, an incredibly filthy house lived in by the members of two local rock bands and the least particular of their girlfriends whom I happened to know because one of their girlfriends who was too particular to live there also happened to be dating myself at the time along with several other people, which is how I met Amir.
Who in any case finally met a girlfriend of his own, who moved in with him/us and ignored Kevin (name changed - no actually that might have been his name after all) and I until Amir went on a trip for a couple weeks and she began wearing exciting clothes and talking to us more and two-timing Amir with a creepy guy in a cowboy hat. She told me about Detroit and her brother who would only sleep with virgins, which mathematically tended to keep his relationships to a short overall average duration. She told me that Detroit was segregated and her family lived in the white part but she wasn't like that because of Amir, who her perverted brother didn't like and spoke of with racial epithets.
She eventually broke up with Amir and he eventually gave up looking for jobs in America because his student visa expired after he'd made friends and slept on couches and under desks and received a Master's in Engineering and given up his religion for booze and loose women, and after all that he cursed America and moved back to Kuala Lumpur to live the good life.

But this is all getting ahead of myself, because the landlady who refused to put in a sprinkler system and watered her lawn the "natural way" with a hose in one hand and a cigarette in her other hand and who enraged her South Temple neighbors with their BMWs and million dollar houses by never fixing up her house and renting it out to loser college guys finally decided that enough was enough and she gave us until the end of the month to move out, which coincided with Amir getting on the plane for Malaysia - almost. Actually he wouldn't be getting on the plane until a week after we were kicked out. So he planned to go stay with his ex-girlfriend for a week, in Detroit, and then take the plane back to Salt Lake in order to take the plane to Malaysia.
"Will you have time to hang out in Salt Lake before you get on the plane to Malaysia?" I asked him.
"Why would I do that?" he asked me, honestly puzzled.
So we had a party on the last night before we cleaned the house and moved out the next day, and Kevin (I guess that was his name) and Amir and I bought tequila, and we discovered that the liquor store sold margarita mixes that were 17% alcohol, because the tequila was already mixed in, which we purchased to mix with more tequila. We also bought juice and fruit and vodka and other cheap liquors and mixed jungle juice, which I'd never tasted but an hour or so before the party started and at least two hours before any guests arrived, I tried some of the jungle juice and was surprised at how delicious it was, so I poured myself a tall glass of it, and Kevin and Amir also poured themselves a tall glass. It was like punch.

We had a few more tall glasses, and then eventually guests started arriving, and about 15 minutes into the party I was drunker than I'd ever been in my life, and about 30 minutes into the party I made offensive remarks to a woman at the party that I'd worked with at the time, and about 45 minutes into the party I felt sick enough to stagger upstairs and try to take a nap. And by about an hour after the party had begun I'd crawled out of my room and barricaded myself in the upstairs bathroom, where I spent the next six or seven hours hyperventilating over the toilet in a desperate effort not to throw up, and ignoring the repeated pounding on the bathroom door from party-goers who'd not been able to find the laundry room, or didn't know the laundry room had a toilet, or who'd tried to get into the laundry room and found someone else using it. Eventually the pounding grew more faint, as people began to give up on the upstairs bathroom or began to leave the party.
Amir got so drunk and sick that he began to pack for his trip in the middle of the party, dragging luggage from his bedroom downstairs, through the mass of people and out to Kevin's car. I later heard, from Kevin, that he'd been sick the first time in the middle of the dancing, then on the stairs, then in the laundry room, then his garbage can, and all over his sheets. He'd slept on a bare mattress that night. Thinking about my time in the upstairs bathroom, and reflecting on the number of people who must have been going through the laundry room, I couldn't help but feel a little guilty as Kevin told me this story, all the while he staggered around the house helping me clean the next morning, still terribly pale.
"I'd take Amir to the airport, if his stuff would fit in my car," I told him.
He told me he'd already taken Amir in. Amir had wanted to leave an hour early, and they hadn't been able to wake me up even though they'd knocked on my bedroom door. "You must have been passed out," Kevin said.
"Oh yeah," I said, or something like that, remembering how weak I'd felt that morning and how it hadn't been too difficult to keep my eyes closed and ignore the knocking, even when Amir had opened the door a crack and said my name. But it was difficult to meet Kevin's glassy, bloodshot eyes, and I was relieved when he turned away to lift his side of the couch.