I Loved That Yellow Couch

I think I may have gotten the couch from my brother Brian.  It was a little larger than a settee but not quite a big as the contemporary couch.  It was yellow brocade that had a shiny thread running through it.  The high light was certainly the fabric.  I was so excited about it.  My couch for my first real apartment.  I was moving out of my boyfriend's family house and had found a large apartment with two bedrooms and a huge kitchen for $325 a month.  I think it was 2001 and I had finally turned 18 so I could actually rent a place.

I wasn't renting by myself there is no way I could afford rent by myself and my boyfriend at the time was college bound and not wanting to move in with me.  I found the next best person.  My old co-worker Brian from the Jack In The Box.  I still did not know at this time that he was obsessed with me seeing how I had a boyfriend the entire time of our friendship.

Crazy town began gradually.  I started finding entire bottles of Southern Comfort emptied around the apartment, but mostly in the living room were my beloved couch lived. They were on the window sills and fallen over under the glass top coffee table.  Several bottles.... Then the pee began.  I would get home after working and going to school and visiting my friends to find pee all over the bathroom seat and dark brown urine in the toilet along with cigarette butts and ashes in the shower.  The pee looked like syrup.  The man must have never drank water in his life. 

I knew this was an act of resentment for having been gone to long or maybe from a lack of attention.  We had lived together for about a month before the first episode began so I knew this was not regular behavior.  I was too young at the time to confront the issue head on and honestly I may not have the courage now to face such a crazy--who knows what the hell he was thinking.  Behaving like a neglected pet that pisses on your pillow while you are gone.  Some true animal instincts were on the horizon.

My poor couch.  He had a bedroom and a bed and entertainment in the room and a door for privacy.  The bedrooms were large and separated by the before mentioned huge kitchen.  We had lots of privacy in our own little boxes.  Despite the room division and adequate space Brian chose to sleep on my couch.  He would be asleep on this small couch with his pants undone and hermaphrodite porn in the TV's VCR.  I found out the porn thing by  turning on the TV one day and it was set to play automatically. That was the last time I touched that television set or that couch.  Shit was getting nasty.

I never talked to him about the incidents and tried my hardest to avoid him and find other places to stay as I was beginning to fear interactions with my old friend.  I had a lock on the inside of my bedroom door which I found very useful.

By the time it was move out time my beautiful yellow couch had been worn down into a greasy mess.  The fibers were pulled apart on the arms and the center sank low from having been slept on for months.  Oh and it smelled of a thousand cigarettes and had spills of old booze and who knows what else from the porno thing.

I found out later that Brian thought I was leading him on and toying with his mind---I of course had no idea...The mind is crazy sometimes.   

Alongside a Burger /A Crew

In good company with Carl as a shift leader were 4 others.  The Crew:

A tall thin poet man nicknamed Papa(because he liked young girls).  Papa whom I called Brian worked the 2pm till 10pm shift and he mostly existed in the late night hours at coffee shops.  Brian was a good friend and we hung out quite a bit before he became obsessed with me.  I was young...

There was Becky that had a skinny abusive greasy husband and a couple of adult children that milked her for everything.  She lost her house one summer and was bathing in the back prep sink for a while.  Nice lady she even helped me with some English papers for school.  She turned out to be a great proof reader.

Susie should have been a militant lesbian but messed up one time and ended p with a little girl.  I went over to house one time to help her daughter write a book report and ended up getting pulled over by a real asshole police officer.  I had worked 16hrs then went to help a 3rd grader with a book report...what a turd.

Karma was a very large woman with a little girls voice and a strange husband that told her all the time that he thought he was gay.  She crushed the frame of a bike one day and I gave her rides to work for a while.  We got a bomb threat one night and Karma freaked out hard and we all got to go home early.  She really liked the bacon potato wedges.

The General manager was a real class act she always knew the right things to say at the right times--she was also very funny.  She had some children a long time ago. I think Barb was in her 50's and had hired 4 of the Kraft family Keith, Shiela, Brian and myself.  She knew we were work slaves.
It came out later that she was a lesbian because one of the the gay male dancers that worked at Jack-n-the-box spotted her at the gay bar.  She passed a way about 10 years ago from enfazema she smoked a ton of Misty's.

Jack in the Box

Well, Carl had a kid and a wife name Lola.  He liked the band Rat and would listen to the cock-rock station into the late hours of the night.  The grease in the air and the denial of shakes were my humble surroundings during my midnight stints at the Jack in the box.  Carl was a good guy?  He did have a slight rat tail which I thought was a beautiful feature that completed his look.  The beer flowed from the back ice chest on those long summer nights.  Always the Bud for beer, Carl was an American.  He would drink until he was angry and could no longer stand the idea of cooking a burger or dropping some fries into the fryer.  He refused to serve shakes at night; I could never figure out why after all I would be the one making them.
Things were simple: arrive at 10pm make about 150 tacos and overstock the shit out of some buttermilk house ranch.  I was the food disperser for the overly drunk and coked-up folks of the town.  They would share their vises and guidance with me.  I was good at the drive through.  My efficiency mixed with my fine attention to detail amazed and mystified the alcoholics which I believed were used to having a less than perfect drive through experience. I would hand out ranch dressing like it was candy on Halloween.  I managed to satisfy the customers and clean the entire closed dining room area and do all the prep work for the following day.  I was a multitasking machine always strapped up to the speaker machine that would beep in my ear as a car pulled up to the glowing sign of burger delight.

Carl had a wife and then he didn't after fornicating with a young short haired teenager in the walk-in cooler. That girl had a kid too..  oh Carl was a double dad.  I think back now and wonder how he wasn't fired after said incident.  I guess he had already lost his wife and he was a damn good midnight manager.  Poor guy worked two full time jobs and carried around a picture of his kid that he would look at while he smoked cigarettes in the break room.  Carl used to tell me about the music shows he had gone and seen and all the fun he had as a youngster.  I knew a that moment in his life he had no free time and regretted marrying Lola who was a past Jack in the Box sweet heart.