Papa November

Footnotes

I slept on a mattress on Josh’s floor for a while. When the manager came i would throw it on top of his bed. They must have thought he really liked a soft bed.

Two of our roomates were Doctors from China. You would not know this by the ammount of crazy food left to thaw in it’s own juices on the counter all day. They actually had their own fridge. This allowed them to store the enormous volume of squid and other raw meat they always had on hand and not stink up their roomates food supplies.

Sidenote. Corey had a vegan microwave.

Th cockroach was an affectionate name for our other roomate. We saw him about four times in as many months. When we came home he would scurry down to his basement lair and padlock himself in. He really did blast that same Bush song over and over.

One day Corey noticed some fish flopping in the grass of our Brazilian neighbor’s lawn. Next thing we new we were part of a rescue mission that terminated with the fish’s release back into the wilds of the BYU Botany Pond.

At one point, Corey, Spencer, Josh, and I were all dating girls from the house across the alley. In fact. the cockroach even dated a girl over there! I married Michelle, Josh married Adrienne, and Spencer married Emily.

I sublet a portion of my room to Spencer who practiced the same stacking of the mattress technique explained above. Spencer ate only tuna and rice and ran 315 miles every day.

Josh would like me to point out that I broke the bulb on his leg, not his head. I would like to point out that he dented the wall with my head. A good time was had by all.

No one ever did the dishes. I can promise you that. At one point it was all just too much so we threw them away. Corey kept a secret set in his closet that he let Josh and me use.

Our landlord did live in Chile. This somehow meant that no repairs could be done but rent could still be raised and we could still be evicted if we got too out of control.

Some girls forked our lawn. It stayed forked. It may still have forks in it.

Our days usually started with a quick shower and neighborhood meet and greet. Our bathroom had no curtains on it and we apparently were helpless to change that situation. There was a parking lot outside of our window and several homes with clear views to ours, so there was always someone to wave to as you showered. In the interest of decency (the little that we could muster), we strategically placed various shampoo bottles on the sill. We were a very tall group of roomates, so only the doctors and the cockroach were in compliance with public decency laws in there.

We didn’t call home. I was about to say that I didn’t think we even had a phone, but Frank Black did call for Corey now and again. As diehard Pixies fans it was hard to act cool as you told “Charles” that you would let Corey know that he called. I’m not sure how long we went without calling, but long enough to deserve some serious guilt thrown our way. Luckily, our paren’t just trusted that we were alive and let it go at that.

The movie we watched over and over was Bottlerocket. I’m not sure if this lead to the police car incident or was only a happy coincedence. One afternoon we were launching dozens of very large bottlerockets off of our front porch, as we were want to do. Just as we had tossed one into the air a police car rounded the corner and drove onto our lawn. As the officer stepped out of his vehicle the rocket descended directly over him. We were watching it fall, screaming, “no, no, no. We don’t want to go to jail! Please bottlerocket, don’t put out the cops eye! Please, oh please don’t blind the officer! We will be good, we will put a curtain up in the bathroom, we will pull the forks from the lawn and donate them to orphans! Please, if the cop does die, let it be ruled of natural causes!” as we tried to guide the rocket away from his head with our waving arms and prayers. The rocket exploded inches from his head. Michelle ran in and hid the large bag of rockets on the coffee table while we apologized and assured him that we were all out and we were very sorry. He left and did not shoot any of us.

We actually met the girls in the house next door while fleeing from cops in an earlier bottlerocket incident. The girls let us hide in their house. One time a cop showed up at our back door with his gun drawn. I do not think it was unrelated.