Strawberry and Christina trashed my house

June 07, 2005 - 2:27 p.m.

Weed and curry is in the air so you know my girl Strawberry is in town again. She’s out visiting the Midwest from Olympia for 15 days and she’s been up in my crib smoking weed, cooking, redecorating, and stealing bouquets of flowers out of my neighbor’s yards. I came home from work last Thursday and walked into what felt like someone else’s home: Delta Blues blaring, candles burning, furniture moved to different rooms. In the front room, my favorite room, I found a semi-naked child sitting in the midst of every kitchen cooking container and utensil that I own, with construction paper thrown all over the room like confetti and some unidentifiable garbage, wet and fibrous-looking on the floor.

I walked by the bathroom and saw that the floor was covered with mud and hair, like someone had groomed a fucking horse in there, and what the…? Green? There also seems to be Crayola Crayon drawings on the white ceramic tiles.

My nose led me to the kitchen, where I found Strawberry sitting at the table with a Puerto Rican with a bad haircut, and of course, the small child’s mother, Christina. Twelve empty bottles of Corona sat on the counter top, next to a sink piled three feet high with dishes, balancing perfectly in the shape of a pyramid.

Me = Home from work at 11pm, bitchy and tired.

“Hey guys…what’s up?”

*partying continues*

Me = Standing there ugly and dirty with the personality of a wet blanket.

Strawberry says, “Hey lookit! I walked down the whole boulevard and stole flowers out of everyone’s yards! Smell this, it’s mint!”

I cocked my head in confusion, eyeing the large stem with purple flowers. Me, leaning in for a sniff: “Uh, I don’t think that’s mint. It’s lilac.”

“Excuse me?? I’m an ORGANIC BAKER, I think I know the difference between lilac and MINT!”

“And I think I know the difference between a giant purple bush and a tiny green leaf!”

We’re still disagreeing on the matter, even though my home has been filled to the brim with Lilac stink for five days now.

A few minutes later I was washing my face in the bathroom when the small child appeared and asked, “So what are you doing tonight?”

“Tonight? What do you mean, ‘what am I doing’?”

Child: “You know, like later. What are you doing?”

“Later? It’s midnight. I’m going to bed. Why are you asking?”

“I was just wondering if we could play, like a game, or play with the stamps, or play Memory, so I was wondering what you were doing tonight.”

“Sorry, Ms. Five-Year-Old, but I’ve got PLANS tonight, with my pillows and blankets. But you’re more than welcome to crash at my place if you’re up partying all night.”

“OK…”

Strawberry was supposed to head down to the hippie-fest BONAROO in Tennessee for 6 days but I begged her to stay in Chicago, arguing that the only thing she can get out of the event is sun burn and an STD, or any other dirty-person insect disease, like scabies, lice, and crabs. I’m not kidding when I say this, and she agrees, as 5 years on the road with the Grateful Dead had given her more than her fair share of things that itch and burn.

She acknowledged that Dave Matthews and Widespread Panic will never replace Jerry and Mickey and she tossed that $180 ticket to the wind and will be spending next weekend with me and the Chicago Blues Fest. Much joy and triumph is sure to ensue.

I gave Strawberry a set of keys to my house so she could come and go as she pleased, and when I got home from work Friday night, I found this on my kitchen table:

Flowers (lilacs not visible in this photo), homemade pot-smoking device fashioned from an MGD can, THE BIBLE (New Testament; from grandpa), ashtray, lighter, rotten banana, discarded pack of Kools, that no doubt belong to Christina, who is the only white person on the planet that smokes them.

Christina, blond-haired and blue-eyed, stopped into a gas station for cigarettes one night, and the Indian guy at the register blurted out, “Let me guess – Marlboro Lights?”

And she said, “No - a pack of Kools, please.”

And he replied, “What are you, a NIGGER?”

A month after that I walked to the liquor store with her to buy some beer, and every other car came screeching to a halt to holler or whistle at us (her). She causes car accidents everywhere she goes. We got our beer and paid for our own separately and the Indian cashier (a different one) was friendly and flirty with her when she handed him her ID. I handed him my license and he studied it and said sarcastically, “Thanks, GRANDMA.”

“Did you just call me Grandma?”

He said in stone-cold seriousness, “Yes. Your license tells me that you are one year older than me. That’s why I call you Grandma.”

Me and Christina exchanged looks, jaws adrop, deciding who should respond to this.

I said, “Really? Because your THINNING HAIR and MISSING TEETH tells me that you are aging poorly, and you look TWENTY YEARS older than me.”

I verbally abuse lonely, coal-toothed, age-d men who work in liquor stores without any bullet proof glass or life insurance.

My Life. It’s riveting.

(Still no postcards, 0/40, 39 days and counting. DEATH TO ARAB STAMP THIEFS!)

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