At the encouragement of my friend OMWF...I offer to you a personal story of love, loss, and sleeping with rodents. This is a story usually told after lots of drinks to a bunch of strangers, egged on by a friend who has heard it before.
It was a typical weekday my Junior year in college. I was dating The Porn Star (after 3 months of dating he bought me a FLIPPING VIBRATOR for my birthday - red flag number 5). He was one of 4 white boys who attended FAMU, on an athletic scholarship. He and his identical twin - the one Hillary dated who I claimed we had tag teamed as I gave my wedding toast - were runners. They shared a house with another FAMU student in the ghetto. I am not even kidding you. It was not uncommon to hear about the neighbor's crack habit on the news, or the 2dolla hoe down the street. The house was old and full of crap. The boys were big dealers. They were self proclaimed Renaissance men...artists, photographers, salesmen, and lovers. They made a living buying other peoples abandoned and repo'ed shit, and then selling it to make a dollar. Their living room looked like the set of Let's Make a Deal'. They only shopped at Costco, so making dinner had to involve a supersize jar of peanut butter and/or frozen chicken strips. Are you feeling me?
Some nights I stayed at his place, others he stayed at mine. I hated staying at his place. It was dirty, dank, RANK, littered with porn, and in the ghetto. Hard to sleep with gun shots and police sirens going off at night. This particular night we were at his place.
Ok. There are some things you need to know about his bedroom. God I wish I had a picture. DISCO BALL, you heard me, hanging from the ceiling. Multi-colored strobe light in the corner with various rotating themes. A blacklight, and A CLAPPER to orchestrate all the lighting effects. One clap turned the normal bedroom lights on and off. Two claps turned the black light on. Three claps got the disco ball rotating and 4 claps for the strobe. Red flags 1, 2, 3, and 4. I could never get it all straight. I mean, he had to impress all the women he brought back to his lair somehow... The room was about 10 X 10 with a California King size waterbed pushed up in one corner. A 13inch TV stacked ontop a bunch of crates in one corner. And priceless 'artwork' and photographs of me half naked on the walls. When your boyfriend asks to take a picture of you wearing a cowboy hat and sitting on a blow up Oscar Meyer Wiener dog - it's NOT - CUTE. It's NOT - LOVE. And its NOT - SMART.
So there we are sleeping. He on the side up against the wall. I am awoken by a scratching sound. Not sure if I am really hearing it, or dreaming it...I ignore it. Moments later the sound is louder and more definite. I sit up and look over to Porn Star who is deep in slumber. I notice something dark and MOVING behind his white pillow. Surely I am on crack. Surely there is nothing ALIVE under his pillow. I am thinking to myself...if there is a rodent under his pillow and I turn the actual lights on, I am going to shit a gold brick. So I decided to turn the black light on...to lighten the blow of potential rodent activity. I clapped. The strobe light came on. Fucking hell. I clapped again, thinking how many fucking claps to get the damn black light on???!!!! Now the black light AND the strobe are shining on The Porn Star with a moving pillow under his head. OMG. I am seriously about to have heart failure.
I wake him up and we get out of bed. He goes and wakes up his twin who is sleeping in the other room with Hillary. They search the house frantically for weapons. They find baseball bats and return to the bedroom with the moving pillow. The lights are on, the pillow is moving, we have confirmation that there is in fact SOMETHING alive that was sleeping in that bed with us. Fucker.
I am in the adjacent kitchen STANDING on the counter top in my undies peering around the corner into the room, YELLING AND SCREAMING....pissed off as all hell and crying. They determine a plan to uncover the 'thing', and off comes the pillow yielding a large toothed, pissed off, UGLY ASS, 20lb (ok so maybe it wasn't quite that big...but it wasn't no baby - it was definitely baby's mama)...
POSSUM.
Ya heard me.
A flippin possum. Chillin. In our waterbed. It had crawled up from the crawlspace under the house to get warm. In bed.
**I have disturbed a few folks with my violent imagery, and therefore edited all the gory details, because this story was not supposed to be about a rodent massacre, it is supposed to be about how stupid I was for dating a Porn Star** The possum was removed.
Anyway, the point is it was all his fault. Because he had to live in the ghetto. Because in my perfect, pretty little slice of Tallahassee, where 19 year old girls live in town-homes with alarms and have screens on the windows, I didn't have to check my god damned pillows for possums. And you better believe that every night for the next 6 months, I was checking my pillows in my own home - and I was pissed.
And there you have, flag number 9.
Moral of the story? Be leary of a white boy who lives in the ghetto, sells used furniture out of his home, has a disco ball operated by a CLAPPER in his bedroom, subscribes to various pornographic mail order catalogs, and asks to take pictures of you naked. With a blow up hot dog.
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