I live and work in a semi-major southern city. My office and apartment are literally around the corner from one another. This lifestyle is fantastic. My car is safely tucked away in a parking deck and on average I see it about once a week. In minutes, I can walk to the main bar district in the city and should I be unable to walk back afterwards, it’s five bucks to take a cab home. Metropolitan living really has its advantages and I am surprised more young professionals in my area have yet to embrace it. You see, the city is what they call transitional. This means that 40 years ago it was a thriving urban center but throughout the 70s and 80s businesses and residents fled to the suburbs leaving empty office space and abandoned warehouses and buildings. During the last ten years businesses have been returning and investors have dumped huge sums of money into converting the empty buildings into luxury apartments and condos to attract people not unlike myself. The thing the city is having difficulty shedding is the reputation it gained during its lesser years as a cesspool of gang violence and murder. The truth is, it is very safe now but the myth is perpetuated when sheltered suburbanites venture downtown and encounter the homeless. One such vagrant fills his days in the alley outside of my apartment building. We have come to refer to him as Crazy Man.

Crazy Man: The first Encounter

I first met crazy man before I moved downtown. There is a Mexican restaurant that my coworkers and I frequent and Crazy Man spends a good deal of his time in the alley outside of the restaurant. One day on the way to lunch at the restaurant, Crazy Man was standing on the corner and as I walked by him, he looked at me and said “I want to go to the crack house, that’s right, the crack house”. My coworkers and I continued into the restaurant barely able to contain our laughter.

Crazy Man: The next Encounter

About a week after we met crazy man, we were back at the same restaurant (they have a special I particularly like on Thursdays, so I go there just about every week). While sitting in the restaurant eating, I noticed Crazy Man was outside. He was holding a cup and looking in through the massive windows that make up the front of the restaurant. After about five minutes, he walked in repeating “It’s a crazy man, a crazy man”. (This was when he got his name). Crazy Man walked through the restaurant to the self service soda dispenser. Instead of filling his cup like a normal patron, he lifted the metal grate where the spilled ice and overflowed soda fall and filled his cup with the leftover ice and soda mixture that reside down there before melting and going down the drain. He then replaced the grate and left the restaurant.

Move-in day: Getting to know Crazy Man’s real Personality

In late August my roommate (who happens to also work in the same office as me) and I decided we wanted to move back downtown. We chose an apartment around the corner from our office in a newly converted former commercial building. This building is located next to the Mexican restaurant previously mentioned.

Putting it politely, my roommate’s mom is a worrier. She is one of the sheltered suburbanites mentioned previously and is definitely convinced that the two of us are going to get killed living downtown. On move-in day she was lending a hand with the process. Mostly she held the door while the two of us carted things to the elevator and then into our apartment. On one such trip while my roommate and I were upstairs, Crazy Man emerged from the alley. A car had just parked at the curb and its occupants had exited the vehicle and were standing next to it on the sidewalk. Crazy man walked into one of members of the group. This made Crazy Man very angry. He started shouting “you motherfucker, god damn motherfuckers, shit, god damn shit motherfuckers.” The trouble was, he was walking away from the person he had bumped. We’re not sure what was going on inside his head but we’re reasonably certain whatever it was, it was only loosely based on reality.

Some notes on Crazy Man

I have lived downtown for five months now. During that time, I have learned a great deal about Crazy Man. Turns out, his name isn’t Crazy Man, it is Rodney. Rodney spends his days in the alley between my apartment building and the Mexican place. Mostly he sits and stares at the wall. Sometimes he sweeps the alley with scraps of cardboard, other times he rearranges the contents of the alley. Frequently, Rodney likes to sing. He usually wears jeans with the legs rolled up just above his ankles and has a rotation of faded t-shirts. He has long scraggly hair that is washed out from years in the sun. He wears a bandana around his forehead most days to keep his hair out of his face. The odd thing about Rodney’s appearance is that somehow, he always has clean socks. His socks are bright white every day. They were doing some construction on the building that the Mexican place is in which provided a great deal of entertainment for me as Rodney interacted with the construction workers. Occasionally, when he is out there by himself, especially on weekends, Rodney gets mad. I’m not sure what sets him off, but he will throw things and yell and then eventually storm off to who knows where. There are some videos of this odd behavior. I suppose this is a good time to mention that Rodney does not live in the alley. We are not sure where he lives, though we did follow him one evening when he left. We lost him about eight blocks away in an area that contains a half way house for crazy people. It is possible he lives there. We will follow him again one day and try to confirm it. Rodney keeps a pretty regular schedule though, he shows up in the mornings around 6 AM (singing and yelling which generally wakes me up) and he leaves just before it gets dark in the evening. It’s almost like hanging out in that alley is his job. He is rarely there on the weekends but occasionally, I guess when he has extra work to catch up on, he’ll show up on a Saturday or Sunday.

One final note, if it was not evident from what I have written, it is clear that Rodney is a schizophrenic. He clearly sees things that the rest of us cannot. You will understand this when you watch the videos. The videos were taken from the window in my living room. Because we are many floors above, Rodney cannot hear us open the window and so is not yet aware that we watch (and video tape) him from above.

Check out the video and enjoy.

Ice Man

The Beach and the Hooker

What is it about Myrtle Beach that is just so trashy? There are some nice places to go, a few delicious restaurants, definitely some good golfing, but there’s something about it that is just a little off. If you’ve lived North of Florida or South of New Jersey, then you’ve been there. No matter how you got down there, you had an interesting experience while you were there. I was no different.

It was early in my college career, and like many other college students, I was broke. Spring break had come around and I just didn’t have enough cash to go on a trip to Florida or going skiing out west somewhere. So I just decided to take the days off from school and pick up some hours at the sandwich shop I was working at. About half of the break was over and I was pretty down about the idea that I wasn’t going to be doing anything exciting, when my friend (I’ll call him Ben) came to the rescue and told me to come crash with all of his buddies down in Myrtle Beach. None of us had a lot of money, but you can always find money for gas and booze.

So as fast as he had sprung the idea on me, I was on my way to the beach and imagining what the trip had in store. It’s not a very long drive from my little college town, so before I knew it I was already smelling the salt of the ocean breeze blowing in through my car windows. This state of euphoria was interrupted when my buddy Ben called me on my cell phone. Ben told me I should hurry, because a friend of ours had decided to purchase a hooker for the night. Now our friend was a pretty good looking guy, he had no trouble getting women, but for some reason he decided to go the risky route and listen to the cab driver’s sales pitch for the evening. For one hundred dollars the cab driver could have a woman at our hotel room within an hour. That strikes me as a little bit cheap for what I would imagine the going rate for hookers are these days.

I hurried to the hotel, not having a clue of what was in store, and opened the door to a room full of guys with the strangest looks on their faces. I guess they thought I might be the prostitute when I opened the door, but when they saw me it was a combination of both relief and disappointment. I walked into the room and said hi to all the guys, but the fact of me getting there was almost an afterthought. It was kind of like waking up on Christmas morning and having to wait to open your presents.

We all sat there on the hotel beds and chatted while we awaited the arrival of our “Pretty Woman.” Let me tell you, that once the knock at the door came, it was not Julia Roberts on the other end. If you can imagine the skinniest version of a trailer park girl, then that was her. Well at this moment, I had absolutely no idea of what was about to happen. We all just sat around and kind of looked at each other waiting for the other to make a move. Then that’s when the financier of the evening decided to kick us all of the room so that he could have fun with his lady of the night.

Imagine all of our disappointment when we realize that we’re not even going to get to laugh about what all he is going to. So the rest of us all grab a few beers and go chat on the porch. After finishing our beers and getting a good buzz on, we decide we want to go to a pancake house and get some late night food. We all go back into the room to find our friend just finishing up with…well whatever he was doing. And he says that he’d like to come with us to get some food. Now here’s the awkward part. The hooker doesn’t see where she fits in all of this and decides to invite herself to the pancake house with us. Now that’s kind of intimidating. How could you tell the hooker no?

Well the pancake house was full of funny moments of us trying to embarrass the trailer queen, but that’s not the moral of the story. Once we finally arrive back to the hotel it’s time for the prostitute to settle up the bill and get her ride home. She pulls out her cell phone, that she must have stolen from Zach Morris, and calls her mother to pick her up. You can imagine the field day I had with this poor girl. Let’s just say we didn’t take the time to “build her up.” Our friend, who’s idea this all was in the first place, senses the tension of the moment and decides to take her into the bathroom for round two.

This time, we’re actually in the room while all of this is going on. I must have giggled like fourth grade school girl for 15 minutes. Once we could hear that things were wrapping up in the bathroom, all of us guys thought that we’d pretend to be asleep so that we could distance ourselves from the awkwardness of the evening. Once they came out it was time to settle up the bill. She asked our friend for the 100 dollars, but there was a problem. He only had 40 dollars on him. What happens next, I’ll never really understand how it happened. This doesn’t upset the girl; she simply just pleads for 10 more dollars so she can pay her “manager” his portion. So our friend starts to ask us all for the ten more dollars, but we’re all pretending to be asleep. He gets louder and louder and starts yelling at us to help when in a collective motion we all start busting out laughing. Someone in our group felt bad and pitched in four more dollars.

The girl ended up leaving the room giving up double the goods and fifty-six dollars in the hole. At least she got a free breakfast out of it. Needless to say, we’ve never let this guy live the events of that night down.

-Costanza

So first a little background:

At my university, every year at Homecoming each fraternity teams up with a sorority to make floats for a parade. Seems pretty normal. Well basically everyone in the parade is hammered every year and it turns into a huge shit show. My house got teamed up with Chi-O for the parade (defiantly not our first choice, or even second choice for that matter… they would have been about fourth or lower on the list). The girl who was in charge of making the float for from Chi-O is being a huge bitch to all of our pledges that are making the float (no actives are involved). Also, I should mention that this girl has very large breasts, but this is most likely due to the fact that they match her sizable gut. Before the parade, the girl is drinking heavily as would be expected and during the course of the parade falls off the float and gets partially run over by the trailer. Hence her name for the rest of eternity, “Curb Check”. (She didn’t get hurt though for all of you that care)

On to the interesting part of the story…

We are having a work session at the House which that particular evening consisted of alternating between the pledges getting worked and then cleaning. During the time they were being worked, the actives would fuck up the house in any way that we could think of, thus creating more work for the pledges during their cleaning break. Well somehow, Curb Check is able to get in the front door of the house during a clean. She walks in and is a huge mess, drunk as hell and only wearing jeans, shoes and a zip-jacket done up about ¼ to ½ of the way with no shirt on underneath. So Curb Check walks up to my friend and tries to kiss him and is telling about how much she likes him. He proceeds to grab her arm and remove her from the building. She comes back in a few minutes later, (we didn’t have a workable lock on the door) and tries to go after another friend with similar advances. She keeps saying how she knows what is going on in here (the pledges) and she doesn’t care. After she is removed a second time, this time with ever more force, I am picked to be in charge if she does happen to come back in. As someone who is not particularly a good hazer, I don’t mind this. Hey some of us are built to fuck with and tweak out on kids, others aren’t. When I see here trying to get back in I go outside and walk her down to another sorority house down the street. She is crying at this point and the girls from the other house seem me with her and assume that I have done something wrong. I explain what is going on and Curb Check demands to see her friend in the house we are now at.

After about 20-30 minutes of waiting with her, (I can’t take the chance of her coming back to our house) her friend finally comes out and they talk for a little bit. They decide that I should walk her home, which I agree to do. On the way home she is blabbing about this and that and all I can think about is how to get this drunk, topless, ugly-ass girl home without anyone I know seeing me. Oh yeah, she made me feel her boobs more times that I care to count or remember. One thing I thought she said that was particularly funny was that her grandmother always taught her that men should walk on the outside of women (the side closer to the street) when walking down the side walk. She made me do this for about a block and then abruptly made me switch sides. Kinda odd, but she was hammered and ugly, so I didn’t want to take this time to ask many questions. We see a few deer on the way back to her house and I know at this point that I am going to have to deal with this girl for longer that just dropping her off. She tries to kiss me several times and from there I know it’s over.

We get back to her house and she takes me inside and we make out for maybe 20 minutes (hey I hadn’t gotten any in a while, give me a break). Another of her sorority sisters is also making out with a guy in the living room pretty much right next to us.

She then leads me downstairs because it is against Chi-O rules for guys to go upstairs. (I think this has to do with Ted Bundy and his killings at the University of Florida Chi-O house). She sits me down on a couch and then proceeds to give me a very drunken and almost painful blowjob. As soon as I am finished, I stand up and she sits on the couch. I think that she was assuming that I would reciprocate. There was noooooo way in hell that this was going to happen. I walked back upstairs to be greeted by the girl who had been downstairs earlier. She said in a somewhat accusing, but also jokingly manner, “Did you go upstairs at Chi-O?” With the quickest response that I think I have ever given, I said “no” and hauled ass for the door and home.

So I think that I have gotten away with it, and I do, for a while. But because girls talk like they do, everyone finds out that I was the one that took down the Curb Check.