DEAR LANDLORD [PART ONE OF THREE]

[1] BARNHOUSE LOVE
It's a great thing not to have to pay rent. Perhaps there are greater things to want in life, but somehow I was always very satisfied with just having that as a main ambition.
For a while there I managed to live off a man named Jesus, who was always saving up for things like coffee tables, little bathroom rugs with special patterns, lamps that would turn on if you clapped and anything else useless enough to spend months saving up for. Jesus. I didn't know that people still walked around with that name. I thought they all died on crosses a long time ago, but apparently they're still around and I ran right into one of them my first day after having graduated from high school. I dropped a milk bottle on his foot at the supermarket and, before we knew it, we stood in a puddle of milk and were deeply in love.
I had just finished school, but I was so ignorant it was painful to listen to me talk. I don't know if it was just me or if it was the school, but that's how they sent me out looking for life-- dumb, lazy and low-lifed. That thing about finding love in the milk puddle was, of course, a joke, by the way. I didn't even know how to be minimally interested in a billboard, let alone experience anything loosely related to that momentous freak of all feelings-- love. I didn't respect anything. I didn't like anything. I didn't enjoy anything. I was as emotionally empty as my bank account and, I guess there's no use beating around the bush, I was what they call evil. Maybe I still am, it's hard to tell.
My parents had discreetly vanished a week earlier, having sold the house to travel the world and left me with a ten dollar bill at my grandmother's apartment. So I had my reasons for substituting greed with love. When I dropped that milk bottle on Jesus' foot and our eyes met in shock, I called it romance, with malice aforethought.
I packed a suitcase and stumbled into my new boyfriend's house on a Monday night. Jesus had a TV that was about the size of a stamp. Plus it only had about four channels and they were all green. I considered seriously moving back in with my grandma. Very seriously-- grandma had about 300 channels, and in my early days I was very gung-ho about frying my brain on a TV screen. It was a necessity that I never even felt the need to justify. Therefore, when confronted with the somewhat limited TV possibilities of my new future, I sustained a severe, mental trauma. I just stood there for a while on that first day, and studied the little black box with the crooked antenna and the cable running through the whole house to some socket in Australia.
"Hey, honey," I said, "Is that a TV?"
"Yeah."
I took a closer look at it. "Is that the only one you have?"
"Yeah. I hardly ever watch TV. I think the recent rise in serial killers is due to television."
I nodded with big eyes. "Oh, yeah. I think so, too."
That night I crawled into the bathroom to cry and throw the toilet paper out the window, but by morning I had made up my mind to stay with Jesus and rough it. Why go looking for the engine driver when you're on a free ride? Well, I did try to convince him to buy a new TV after we were used to one another and had abolished all pretense of manners, but it was no use-- he was saving up for a glow-in-the-dark espresso machine.
"Oh, honey!" I cried, "I can't believe you. You're so goddamn addicted to coffee. It's embarrassing."
"Everyone is addicted to coffee."
"Look, the point is--"
"Don't try to make a point, please. It's too painful."
"Well, fine then!"
I put my leg up on the table and we both stared at it for a while.
"You've got an addictive personality, Jesus," I began freshly. "Trust me. Soon it'll be the Internet and then drugs."
"I'm not buying a TV. I'm getting an espresso machine."
"This is not about a TV, Jesus! Don't you understand? I just don't want you to become some kind of a-- coffee freak."
"I don't even know what a coffee freak is."
"Anyway," I said. Then I fell silent. You see, besides being evil, I was also somewhat slow. I would frequently start a train of thought only to realize that I'm speeding through Siberia, a long way from where I'm supposed to be going. Then I'd have to stop, change trains and start all over again.
"Well, baby," I said, having boarded that other train, "you're going to have to decide what's more important to you: your little espresso machine or me. It's that simple."
He laughed. "You can always move out if you have a problem with my kitchen appliances, honeybunch."
I squinted at him for a while. If I were a normal woman, I would have probably thrown a heavy object at him-- preferably one that would shatter into little bits and so express my emotions more accurately, but this had nothing to do with emotions anyway. Jesus didn't mean much more to me than my tweezers. I never had a problem with spitting in someone's face, but I also never had a problem crawling up anyone's ass.
"Oh, Jesus. I just want you to be happy, you know that. That's all that matters."
We stared at each other for a while with unimpressed looks on our faces.
"That's all that matters to me, too," he said. "So where's the problem?"
Anyway, I made do without a TV.
Life with Jesus was good, if you closed one eye and looked at it so that everything was blurry. Pretty good. We treated each other like shit of course, but we always called each other "honey" and "baby" and "sugar-lumps". It was simple and straight-forward. There wasn't any pretense involved and that's what made it great. We let nothing get in the way of taking complete and utter advantage of each other in any way we could.
I spent my days corrupting the nights and sleeping into the afternoons and doing no good whatsoever. I ransacked his fridge and never lifted a finger. Sometimes, when I was feeling good and forgiving, I'd make the bed or unclog the garbage disposal, and it's true what they say about a good deed-- it makes you feel all warm inside. But it wasn't anything I did on a regular basis.
After a number of months, I got so bored that I actually started reading Jesus' cheap Penguin classics library, thus becoming a strange mixture between an accidental intellectual and a complete imbecile. I still craved a car commercial every now and then, or a hospital scene in a soap opera where little machines beep in the background as handsome doctors glance critically at clipboards. Whenever this craving crept into my nerves, I'd walk down the street and watch a silent weather report through a shop window.
A year or so later I switched over dramatically from the fungus on a damp couch to a chain-smoking, intellectual, jazz-listening skeptic on an ego trip. I was losing my simple-minded stare and bland brain, becoming refined, and learning the joys of sarcasm. I realized there was a whole dangerous toolbox in the English language, and you could use it like the devil if you had the skills. Oh, and I would.
Soon I'd be able to look down at the world and play God. Soon I would be up to the standards of Jesus and then I'd be able to spit at him the same way he spat at me and everything would be even greater than it already was. Life actually had the potential of being sublime during those last days.
But my plans were cut short unexpectedly. One day, Jesus came home and stood looking at me from the doorway long and hard. I was sprawled on his new sofa, eating, dropping crumbs everywhere and reading a book called The Social Contract by a guy named Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I understood only half of what I read, but I had my eyebrows raised in awe and was darn impressed at times.
“All powers come from God, I admit; but every...”
I looked up from my page and waited for Jesus to say something. Nothing came. His eyes were empty and it looked like he had never had a thought in his life.
So I dropped my eyes back to The Social Contract.
“All powers come from God, I admit; but every...”
"Hi, honey," he said.
"Hi."
“All powers come from God, I admit; but every...”
"You know," he began, "I realized today that I can't stand the sight of you anymore. I mean, I get sick just thinking about you. Physically sick, you know?"
He sighed. "I'm going to have to ask you to be out of here by eight tonight."
“All powers come from God, I admit; but every disease comes from him too; does it follow that we are prohibited from calling in a physician?”
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