After taking his first swig, he makes a brief and barely understandable reference to being a Vietnam War veteran. It speaks volumes. Then he tries to engage me in a conversation about his girlfriend Debbie, whose husband is a real prick and he really wants to do the right thing by her so he is going to support the baby if it’s his and he told this to the husband himself, yeah he did, but he’s a prick and he wouldn’t listen and he just tried to pick a fight, so what can he do and the husband’s the one with the money so it wouldn’t be any good for her to leave him because where would they get the money for that cruise they were planning?
“Exactly,” I say, wondering if I have enough money to hire a security guard to stand outside my bedroom door while I’m sleeping.
For some reason, I am very hesitant to ask Ron any questions. Maybe it’s because I don’t see him offering any answer that can be understood by someone who hasn’t been drinking highballs for the past two and a half weeks.
My curiosity gets the better of me, though, and almost without realizing it, I ask him, “So why are you here?”
“To get away from Mom,” he replies without hesitation.
He’s joking, right? This is a joke. I’m being punk’d. OK, guys, I get it, where’s the camera? Come on, OK, you got me, ha ha, very funny, didn’t see it coming. Ashton, get your ass out here, you nut! You are awful, but I
“And her retarded fucking husband.”
I decide then and there that this Ron gentleman is the most fucked-up person I have ever met. Sure, I had some problems before coming here. I was a pothead. I was directionless. I was bored and uninspired. I was a part-time waiter. But this guy? He is like an amalgam of horror movie villains. Does his mother live in his attic? What’s wrong with her husband? Where does Debbie fit into this melodrama? A feeling of helpless dread takes me over. It’s fight-or-flight time, and since I’m a little fairy at heart, I decide to flee, back over to Julia’s, to unload my worries about being beaten to death with a prosthetic leg in my sleep-and to take solace in her well-stocked cabinets of English biscuits.
“It turns out,” I tell her as I make myself a cup of tea and arrange some McVities Digestives on a small plate, “that you were not far off with that fugitive comment. And it’s also possible, Ruth, that he’s a necromancer.”
Julia doesn’t blink. “Did you happen to see if he has any tattoos, like maybe a series of numbers or a gang symbol?”
I tell her that no, I hadn’t seen any tattoos, but that was probably because I’d been preoccupied with the prosthetic leg on the floor, the containers of booze that kept appearing from nowhere, and the fact that he only has one earlobe.
By the time I return a few hours later, Ron is well into his fourth or fifth tall beer and has downed about half of his bottle of Jack. He has somehow managed to pry Ewan away from the cocoon of his bedroom and is talking to him about his girlfriend and his mother and the prick and the baby, and Ewan looks as if he is questioning his very concept of reality. I retire to my room to read and try to get some sleep.
I fall asleep enumerating the various ways one might lose an earlobe. I wake up about an hour later to the sound of Mr. Faust banging around the apartment, cursing, throwing things around, and generally grumbling like Grendel. I get up and peek out my bedroom door. All I can see is his shadow moving along the hallway floor and the shadows of the things he is throwing (the TV remote, a magazine, some Tupperware).
I fall back asleep and awake later to an eerie silence. I get up and clamber out the door and down the hall to the kitchen. It’s strewn with beer cans, dirty dishes, cigarette butts, crumpled-up pieces of paper, and small puddles of Jack Daniels.
Among all the crap on the table I find a small letter that he’s scribbled to an unfortunate soul by the name of Debbie. It is written in the penmanship of a three-year-old, but I am able to make out its contents. He talks about his new roommates, saying about us that we’re “good guys, but I won’t be surprised if one of them has to kiss the sidewalk soon.” Cue maniacal laughter.
Hmm. Evil’s afoot. What is Ron Faust’s plan? Is he concocting a plot to get rid of us? Perhaps he’s considering making our rooms into fitness/meditation rooms. Ewan’s would work better for that, I think.
Since I’m now wide awake, I decide to sit down, have a piece of damn toast, and read the
“Um…,” I mumble, not sure how to answer, “I just read it; I don’t touch myself or anything.”
He doesn’t really appreciate the joke.
“Well, I always read the articles in
Gross.
Then he starts talking about this woman who’d bought his car a few weeks before he’d made the big move to Japan.
“She had a great stack, though not much of a face, I’ll tell you. It wouldn’t stop a clock, let’s put it that way.”
It’s very interesting to hear a man who is about as sexually appealing as a toilet seat talk about someone else’s lack of physical attractiveness. Kind of like hearing Tony Danza say that he’d broken up with a girl because she sounds stupid.
Ron starts warming up to me once he gets his tenth or eleventh drink in him. He asks if I want to share a Valium with him. He says we’re kindred spirits. I beg to differ and decline the offer, though I am
In bed I wonder what Ron’s mother looks like. I wonder if their relationship has ever crossed any moral boundaries, and as I’m drifting off to sleep with the word “Debbie” dancing in my head, I jump awake, having had an epiphany that won’t be silenced. His mother and Debbie are the same person! And the husband is his stepfather! And he’d left the country because something terrible had happened that he’d needed to escape from! He got his mom pregnant! I have it! It all makes sense now!
Having had such a monumental breakthrough, I have trouble falling back asleep. I toss and turn for several hours, listening to Ron curse and burp and piss and yell throughout the apartment. The sun rises and I hear him cursing to himself at the front door right outside my room. He opens the door, and I can hear him throwing things out and over the balcony into the garden below.
It is then that the screw turns, and, the sleep deprivation allowing my polite Southern facade to crack, I bolt out of bed, throw open the door, and shriek, “What the fuck are you doing?!!”
I look down at the area where our shoes had once lain just inside the door. They’re all gone, except for one of my sneakers that he still has in his hand, poised to toss. Taken off guard, he turns to me and starts fumbling for an explanation, but since in the past five hours he has ingested innumerable beers, a whole bottle of Jack Daniels, a Valium, and an ocean of vodka, an answer isn’t forthcoming.
I storm out the door onto the balcony and look over the railing. There, four stories down, is a wonderland of footwear tossed away like so much rubbish.
I turn back and look at Ron, my nostrils flaring, my eyes surely bulging. “Don’t you ever touch my fucking stuff, do you understand me? Don’t you fucking ever fucking touch my fucking stuff!”
I run down the stairs, stumble into the garden, and start picking up all the shoes and carrying them up to the apartment. It takes me two trips, which gives me a good chunk of time to get even angrier. When I’ve retrieved all the shoes and brought them back up, I stand at the threshold of the front door and glare at Ron, leaning against the wall in the hallway looking confused. I am ready to use the “F” word some more.
“You fucking drunk insane fucking idiot, what’s your fucking problem?!!”
Meanwhile, Ewan has finally come out of his room and started being my yes-man, punctuating my railings (“You need to fucking dry out! Fucking shit fuck!”) with the occasional sober “exactly” or “that’s absolutely right.”
It turns out that Ron, in his profound delirium, thought Ewan and I were playing a cruel joke on him. He couldn’t find his leg on the floor and naturally jumped to the conclusion that we’d thrown it over the balcony.
I ask him why the fuck he fucking thought that fucked-up shit, and he says, “Because of the argument.”
