Last night, the brickwife and I were talking about a dog we once had. Wait, let me go back one step. Last night, we were just sitting around and the brickwife looked at a book lying under the coffee table. It was a handsome hardback, boxed edition of the complete works of Shakespeare that I bought for her years ago. What can I say, I’m a thoughtful guy. Anyway, one side of the box opening is completely chewed up. She noticed this and we had the following exchange:
Her: Remember when we had a dog?
Me: Yeah, June was really cute.
Her: Remember how she chewed up my Shakespeare book?
Me: Yeah, she was a good dog.
Her: Remember how she used to chew everything up?
Me: Yeah.
Her: Remember how she used to sleep on our bed but eventually learned that her place to sleep was on the pile of stuff at the bottom of the bed?
Me: Hmm, yeah I do remember that.
Her: We were pretty white-trashy that summer weren’t we?
Me: Indubitably.
So here’s the lesson. We may look all sophisticated with our euro-style shoes and our name brand clothes from outlet stores and our DC condo and our Volkswagen, but really, we’re just a couple years from living in true white trash squalor. It was the summer of 2001 and this is what our house was like….
1) We definitely had the rusting out (not all the way yet) car sitting in the driveway/lawn. It was a 70’s Corvette, so that makes it a little cooler.
2) The house we were living in was still full of dead guy stuff when we moved in, so we had a yard sale and sold a bunch of dead guy stuff to random people for money that we so desperately needed.
3) The dead guy stuff that didn’t sell we left sitting in the yard (which was overgrown with weeds) for several weeks before finally having St. Vincent’s come pick it up.
4) Our dog was a mangy, scrawny, deaf Australian Shepherd that the bricksister-in-law (who was living with us) found on the street. We named her June.
5) Our doggie door was home-made. We kicked out the bottom panel of the back door so she could come in and out.
6) When we moved in, the refrigerator was utterly disgusting. It reeked. So we threw it in the back yard.
7) We never did anything with the dead guy’s huge box of porn. We just left it sitting there by the back door. Do people collect 20 year old Playboy’s? Maybe we could have made some money.
8) We never unpacked our boxes, we just used them as furniture.
9) We had a little mirror-art thingy in the kitchen advertising Tijuana Gold with a picture of a guy smoking a blunt. It wasn’t ours, but we left it up.
10) When I would play fetch with June it was usually at night, out front on the rickety wooden wheelchair ramp (the dead guy was in a wheel chair). I would throw an empty milk jug down the ramp and she would freak out and bat it back up the ramp. I usually just left the jug out front over night.
11) We didn’t have a garbage man, so we just took our trash to work with us and threw it in the dumpster.
12) Our car was a beat up 93 Ford Escort. Okay, that one is not that bad, we were just in college.
13) We did our grocery shopping at the Canned Food Warehouse. It’s like a grocery outlet. Wait, no. It is EXACTLY a grocery outlet.
14) We often ate dinner at the taco bus next door. It was awesome.
15) We did our laundry in a Laundromat. This seemed perfectly normal at the time, as did the other patrons of said Laundromat, but after a recent conversation we had with some friends, we learned that those people that used the Laundromat are actually poor souls and we should feel sorry for them. I apologize to you other Laundromat users who were there with us. I apologize for not having the correct pitying demeanor and condescension towards you. I hope you’re not mad. Oh, wait. You probably don’t have internet access, so never mind.
Well, that’s all I can think of right now, but I’m sure there’s more. Ask us about it sometime. It was quite the summer, though I think the brickwife enjoyed it more than I did. She tells me that going back there to get all our stuff and move it into our cool new loft apartment in Seattle made me physically ill. I don’t remember that, but I’m sure she is right.
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5 comments:
It's really hard to picture the two of you as white trash. But, I bet it was fun while it lasted ;-)
What does it say about me that that doesn't sound so bad? Heh.
Yep, you missed your chance with the porn. Probably could've fetched big bucks... But you probably wouldn't have wanted to touch it.
*shudder*
Yes, Zach, I did forget the stray kittens. Consider this mention of the fact that we were to lazy to feed our dog so we just left an open bag of dog food out for her which also happened to attract a lot of cats. In our defense, June had been abandoned (probably for being deaf) and was rail thin when we found her. She needed all the food she could get.
Also, I feel that I haven't really gotten across how trashy the house was. It was literally falling apart. The shower barely worked (and required copious amounts of cleaning to make it usable). Our friends were afraid to come over because it was in a bad neighborhood. The walls were stained yellow/brown from years of cigarett smoke. When we moved out, we had to wash all our clothes twice to make them wearable.
Ewww. Okay. I rescind my earlier comment (but not the part about the porn).
I would e-mail this to twentysomethingwhiteguy, but I can't find his e-mail address.
So, White Guy, whatup? Are you taking an unadvertised break? Your pledge to amuse and inform us is being broken, I'll have you know.
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