50
by jimmy two hands_Archive
I stayed in a room for my last year of college in a house with a trust fund junkie, a russian cab driver, and an insane line cook/trumpet player. The rooms were all rented separately. The junkie was probably the most normal one except she was strung out all the time. The line cook on his first night in the house woke me up at three in the morning playing his trumpet in the kitchen. I walked out to tell him to shut up and found him playing trumpet in his underwear and t-shirt spattered with blood. He tells me he was chopping up a steak (which was sitting on the counter in a mangled mess) listening to Miles Davis and "when I hear Miles man I really flip out and can't contain myself so I gotta play along man".The Russian cab driver drove a cab for a living but didn't ever seem to leave the house. Later he said he quit his cab driving job and was giving chess lessons for a living, and four lessons per month covered all of his expenses. One night after a long bout of drinking together he told me that it's difficult making a living as a Russian in America if you're not working for the CIA or the Russian mob. He would get into loud dish-breaking arguments with his girlfriend in the middle of the night with angry russian words filling the entire house. I would go down to tell them to shut up and to make sure he wasn't hitting his girlfriend, and they would both tell me to "please to fuck off, we are fighting." They had an endless supply of dishes. Eventually they tried to appease the house by going outside to fight in the middle of the street late at night. When the cops showed up to shut them up he was carrying his girlfriend over his shoulder up a hill and she was beating him over the head with her shoe. The cops wanted to arrest him for domestic violence but his girlfriend told them "please to fuck off, we are fighting outside so not to disturbing our housemates. Leave us to fighting in peace."