Fifteen Years of Hamster Guilt

Walking down Yale Avenue North at 7:30 pm and a Juggalo is pissing at birds. He spins around, waves.

“How are you?” He asks. He is smiling.

“I just really want you to put your pants on,” I say.

He does. I continue forward.

“Hey, what are you doing tonight?” The man is shuffling with his belt buckle.

“I have plans,” I say, adjusting the gallon of grapefruit juice under my arm.

“You should come to the show with us!” he says, and points to a tattoo parlor on the other side of an empty parking lot. I say nothing.

The man walks to a nearby car, where he tells his friend in the passenger seat that he thinks I should go to the show with them.

“Hey,” shouts the friend, his head out the window. “Where are you going?”

“Home,” I say.

“Wait, do you like hip hop?” he asks.

“I do like hip hop,” I say and keep walking.

There are conversations you and I aren’t having.

For example: your riding your bike to work and having a tan unjustly misleads new acquaintances into believing you’re an active outdoor enthusiast rather than someone who often wheels his bike the three miles home after having too much to drink.

For example: the hole in the elbow of your blue button-down shirt, which occurred sometime after you were kicked out of the Mariners game but before you somehow wound up outside Lindsey’s house where she and I were shotgunning pumpkin beer in the back yard. It is fairly noticeable, and you probably shouldn’t still be wearing it to work.

For example: our relationship, while sober.

I walk in the front door of my parents’ house and immediately learn that nobody expected me to come to the baby shower despite the RSVP text I sent my mother. Sandy, my brother’s wife and the guest of honor, hugs me. “I can’t believe you came!” I set my gift on the table. Also in the room are my two grandmothers, Sandy’s other two children, her mother, her grandmother, the wives of her two brothers, their four children, her best friend and her best friend’s baby. I am late, and the games are about to begin. I go to the kitchen to pour myself a cup of coffee, hesitating only briefly before selecting the “I’m a mom!” mug from the cupboard. I take my coffee and sit down.

Charlotte, the best friend, holds up a tray full of pink items.

“What you need to do,” she tells us, “is try to memorize all of the items on this tray. You have 30 seconds to do so. Next, write as many items as you can remember on the sheet of paper in front of you.”

We all gather around the tray, and the women pick up various items and declare them to be something I wish I could’ve found in Omaha and a lifesaver when I had Braden. I pick a couple of things up and put them down, nodding my head and trying to appear as though I know what they are used for.

When the 30 seconds are up, I use my piece of paper to draw pictures of chairs.

Later that night, a photo of me drinking coffee will be posted to Facebook and everyone I know will think I’m pregnant.

Your apartment, in the basement of a building that houses a pawn shop and a fish tank supply store, was dark the first time I woke up there, and I didn’t realize I wasn’t in my own. What woke me up was an alarm, and I fumbled with my own phone trying to shut it off before realizing the alarm was not mine. I slowly sat up - another person was in my apartment.

My eyes adjusted to the dark. I was sitting on an air mattress. Next to me, under a threadbare Atlanta Falcons blanket, was you. Somewhere was your phone, the alarm still going off. I rubbed your shoulder until you woke up. While you went to the restroom I looked around to take stock of my surroundings. On the wall across from the bed was an underground window, not allowing in much light but offering the possibility of escape in the event of a fire. Behind the bed a wall heater, always on, with a stone gargoyle you later said you stole from somebody’s yard placed between the heater and the plastic mattress for safety. On top of a large dog kennel filled with cigarette ash was a television.

You came back to bed with a growler of beer. It was 6 am.

You took a long sip from the growler and offered it to me. I took it. I can do this, I remember thinking. I can sit here in the dark, drinking morning beer on a pool toy.

Across the hall, the drunk neighbor’s cat is lost again.

“Must have snuck out behind me Saturday when I took out the trash,” the man says, distraught, as he tapes a sign in the elevator—but I myself have come home to find his door wide open with the keys in the lock, the sound of snoring audible from down the hall.

And I myself have come home to find this man passed out in the hallway, once just after I moved in, unsure if he lived in the building or was just a man who had stumbled in from the streets.

“Really nice guy,” the building manager had said the next day after I showed him a photo. “Terrible about the drinking. Said to me once, ‘why bother? I’m 45 years old, haven’t been laid in ten years and my voice is shot so now I’m working at the laundro-mat.’”

Not knowing all that at the time, though, I had gingerly stepped over him, willing my keys not to rattle as I hurried into my apartment, my heart pounding well into that sleepless night.

There was that time, over the summer, when you had one of your migraines and decided to take the day off. When we went to Ruth’s Tavern for a bloody mary before I had to go to work.

“You can go hang out at my place and watch mine,” I had offered after you lamented your lack of valid Netflix credentials.

“I could maybe do that,” you responded. “That way I could walk your dog, too, before you get home.”

“It would be nice to have somebody there with him during the day, for a change,” I had said.

And so we had settled it—I would give you my keys and go to work, you would stay at my place watching TV with the dog, and I’d meet you when I was off work to have a drink and get my keys back.

And I guess those things did happen, after finding you drunk at Ruth’s at 11 pm, having not answered my calls or texts. Being in my apartment, alone with my keys and my dog, had made things feel “too real” to you. You’d gone back to the bar after twenty minutes.

There are reasons this apartment isn’t ideal for parties, although I have Candyland and a deck of cards and so I do try. One is the four of everything: glasses, forks, spoons, hooks on the coat rack, as if I’ve prepared this space for the acquisition of three additional humans. And before there were the four armchairs collected from various yard sales and thrift stores, we all sat on the floor and threw bottle caps at the bucket of sunglasses and bottle caps.

But now there are these four armchairs, and a dining chair next to the door that holds an old brass lamp and my keys or sometimes a person if the situation calls for it, and these developments have changed where we sit but little else. Even now, as Greg and Sean and Shannon and I sit with our legs over the arms, the favorite party game is still several toy soldiers on a Roomba.

Sometimes I do get sad, like right now, and I know it can take a few days or even weeks to get out of it. During these times, I make to-do lists. I spend a few minutes each morning deciding on a reasonable number of tasks that will keep me going through the motions, make me feel good each day about what I’ve done, and also get me closer to somewhere I want to be. In the six weeks immediately after splitting with Nathan, I’d finished nine paintings and taken 45 seconds off my mile before realizing I wasn’t as sad.

And now that I’ve rededicated my life to this metal box of lists I feel much better about drinking almost every night, assuming I’ve done everything I meant to do.

By crossing off “make my bed” minutes after getting up, I feel like I’m off to a good start. It inspires me to complete other tasks. It also inspires me to never unmake my bed, and instead to spend each night shivering under a throw blanket on top of the covers.

You pissed your jeans on the kitchen floor. We were sitting on the tile, facing each other. I don’t know why we were on the floor. We’d both fallen asleep against the cabinets, and then you had woken up. Your waking startled me awake. You stood up, looked horrified, and your jeans were wet.

“Don’t worry about it,” I’d said. I’d heard the stories about Jeremy pissing into a VCR, about Liz pissing herself outside her door while trying to get her key to turn in her lock. It just didn’t seem like that big of a deal.

You took off your clothes in the bathroom and put on my bathrobe, which gaped open at the chest and hit halfway down your thigh. You put your clothes in the washing machine and sat in the green armchair. I got up and sat across from you.

When I think about that night now, so many weeks ago, I think about what it would have been like if I hadn’t woken up when you did. If I’d woken up an hour later, propped against the kitchen cabinet, with you sitting in the green armchair wearing my bathrobe.

But who am I kidding—if I hadn’t woken up, you would have quietly closed the door behind you and walked home in your pissed jeans and I would have woken up alone on the kitchen floor.

At work we have a fish guy. He cleans our three large saltwater tanks. He keeps the shrimp, krill and algae stocked in the freezer for us to thaw with tank water and feed them each day. He brings new fish and disposes of the dead when needed.

He will be gone for two weeks, so he has tossed a few dozen small snails into the tanks to keep the glass clean in his absence. One man, two weeks, thirty six snails.

When I was in high school I bought two hamsters. One died within a day. The other made my room smell like a feed store and bit at my fingers whenever I tried to refill its water and after three days I set it free in the front yard.

So that’s what I’ve been dealing with all this time—fifteen years of hamster guilt.

The rooftop of this building, occupied largely by shut-ins and the elderly, is usually empty, but a few other neighbors have gathered to watch the sunset on this rare warm night.

“Those clouds over there,” says a man I’ve seen by the mailboxes, “mean it’s going to rain tomorrow.” He continues to talk about the clouds. I’m not listening but I do notice when we’re interrupted by shouting from the direction of the halfway house next door.

“You fucking perverts!” someone yells from a window.

I pour more wine into my glass. Discussion ensues between residents on the sexuality of our building manager who, I am told, tried to hold hostage the security deposit of a girl who was trying to move out, demanding a date before she saw her money again.

“He dates women?” I ask, surprised.

“Closeted,” says Riley, a woman from the third floor.

“You fucking perverts!” the man screams again.

“Sometimes,” I tell the others, “I feel like this building is the waiting list for that building.”

“That drunk on the first floor,” says a man I recognize from my hall. “I’ve seen passed out, having wet himself, in the middle of the hallway. More than once.”

“You fucking perverts!” screams the man again, and we all finally look around to locate the source. Finally we see him in the window, naked, aggressively masturbating at us.

A man on a skateboard has decided he’s had enough of the sidewalk and wants to see what the street is all about, and now we've all fallen to the floor of the bus. The man on the skateboard seemed to know we’d be fine. He glanced back over his shoulder but continued on down the road. The bus driver, however, flipped on the hazards, jumped out of her seat and rushed to our aid.

And it’s fine, we’re all fine. I’m on my knees, my chest against a now-empty seat. My coffee is upright and in my hand. And the man who was standing behind me, one arm casually draped around the pole as he read from a book in the other hand, has landed directly behind me, his book somewhere, his arms on either side of me, clutching the same seat I am.

He is all apologies. I don’t tell him I don’t want us to get up yet.