.prEtEnd yOU dOn'T cArE.

Phone Calls - A Short Story by Me

Mary Lou stayed up most nights talking on the phone until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. She talked about what had happened to her during the day, about sermons her pastor gave, and she reminisced about her dead mother. She had a loud, shrill voice that carried through her apartment walls as if they were then cotton sheets. The neighbors that shared walls with Mary Lou were used to being woken up late at night when she was arguing with someone or cackling at something she found funny. I once overheard a conversation she had with one of the other neighbors in the building.

Janice was a young single hipster girl who worked in the accounts payable department at an independent record label. She always had someone in her apartment laughing or playing Nintendo Wii. The smell of marijuana seeped daily out of her front door and into the common hallway. Mary Lou knocked on Janice’s door wearing a white knitted sweater splattered with food stains, faded pink sweatpants, and black sneakers with Velcro straps instead of laces. Janice opened the door with skeptical eyes.

“Hello.” Mary Lou screeched. “I’m Mary Lou, your neighbor.” Mary Lou had the habit of elongating the first syllable of a word and shortening the last. Neighbor became naaaaaaaybr. Her vowels were thin and they rattled around in her nasal passages before finally finding their way out of her mouth. 
“Yeah I know. What’s up?” Janice responded.
Mary Lou shifted her weight back and forth between her feet and fiddled with a yellow post it as she made her request.
“Well, my garbage disposal is broooooken, and the phone at my house isn’t working. Would you let me use your phone to call the landlord?”
Janice had two guys over. They snickered in the background.
“You don’t have a cell phone?”
“No.” Mary Lou answered. “My mother said cell phones give you caaaaaancer.”
Janice sighed deeply.
“Here.” She thrust her Blackberry at Mary Lou. “Don’t use all my minutes.”
Mary Lou stood in the hall as she dialed the number that was scrawled in pen on the note she was holding. She left a message for the landlord describing in painful detail how the garbage disposal broke down. That night at 2:00 AM Mary Lou was on the phone in her apartment repeating the entire incident to a friend. Somehow an event that took place over three minutes was enough material for a thirty minute story.

When Mary Lou died she was fifty nine years old. In the weeks after her death, her neighbors gossiped about her in the hallways of the apartment building, the parking garage, and the laundry room. She had been in the same one bedroom apartment since she born. She had lived there with her mother, who had passed away only three years before her. The two women had shared a full size bed since Mary Lou was big enough to not sleep in a crib. She never got married, never had kids.
A week after she died there was a technician for the phone company outside Mary Lou’s apartment. Our eyes met, and I tried to make a joke.
“You guys lost one of your best customers.”
“Sorry?” He was confused.
“The woman who lived here. She talked on the phone every night for hours. Her bills must have been huge.”
“Not in this apartment, buddy.” He shot back. “There hasn’t been phone service in this unit for almost three years. They sent me out to check all the wiring, make sure it still works.”

He hefted a large spool of cable onto his shoulder and walked away. The door to the now vacant apartment was open. On the floor among stacks of boxes and piles of old clothes was a small rag doll. It lay on its back surrounded by once treasured possessions. The doll’s red yarn hair fell haphazardly on the worn blue carpet. Its button eyes, long ago picked off by young hands, stared without emotion at the ceiling.

Screw You MTA Bus Driver!!

I’m really excited about my bike right now so pardon the self indulgent post that nobody is going to care about (not that anyone cares about any of my posts). I just got my bike out of the shop where they replaced the brakes, changed all the cables and housings, switched the old suspension fork for a rigid one, trued the wheels, and gave ‘er a tuneup. All in it cost me $195. That’s almost twice what I paid for it last May when I bought it off some pot head’s angry girlfriend in Eagle Rock. The bike now runs great and hopefully I’ll be able to get many more years out of it.

So I commute 9 miles each way to work 2 or 3 times a week. I’d like to do it more but I’m often prevented by laziness or a sore taint. Here’s my route, as if I could make this post any less interesting (the start location is approximated so as to not give away my home address. I love you Citlalli :-).

Anyways, as you can see the last bit of the trip is on Ventura Blvd. At the time I’m coming in there are anti-gridlock laws in effect so there is no street parking on the Blvd. This turns Ventura into a 3-lane almost-highway with stop lights. It’s terrible for biking, but I don’t see an alternative. If you come up with a good one I’ll give you a box of Girl Scout Thin Mints. So this morning I was cruising along in the far right lane as close to the sidewalk as I could without hitting my pedal on the curve when a Metro Bus 750 approached me from behind. Usually the buses just pass me, but this driver got right behind me and started honking. There isn’t much I can do in this situation so I just kept on pedaling. The driver kept honking, then when traffic to his left allowed he swerved around me. I caught up with the bus when it stopped at Sepulveda and I pulled alongside the driver’s window. Our conversation went something like this:

ME: Were you honking at me?
BUS DRIVER: Yes, you were going to slow.
ME: Too slow? I’m on a bike. What do you want me to do?
BUS DRIVER: You should go on the sidewalk.
ME: It’s illegal to ride a bike on the sidewalk. I’d get a ticket.
BUS DRIVER: Well, you should use the sidewalk. You’re going to slow.
ME: No, YOU should share the road. We gotta share the road brother!

At this point I pounded my chest with my closed fist twice then gave him a peace sign, and rode away. I’m not quite sure what motivated this ghettofied gesture. I think I was momentarily overcome by a “fight the power” sentiment, and I believed I was representing a noble cause in the name of suppressed cyclists everywhere. Suddenly I remembered all those annoying soap-box blogs I’ve read run by self-important cycling activists and I was disappointed in myself for acting like them. I put my headphones back in and finished my commute in shame.

Urban Dictionary: Social Notworking

Urban Dictionary: Social Notworking