...or, More Crazy Hoes I used to Know....
I recently ran into a former...roommate? Partner in Crime? Fag Hag? All these words, and many more could describe who she was to me, but let's just call her Biddy. We first met back in the Fall of 1992, right after I'd graduated from High School. We met at the 1st university I attended (yes, the one where I got a 0.5 cuz I was out drinking and playing cards all the time); she was the manager of the radio station where I volunteered, a senior about to graduate with a BA in theatre. We became friends, she was about 7 years older than I was but we had a lot in common, at least musically. OK we both loved Sinead O'Connor & often stayed up late on the phone doing Sinead sing-a-longs. She moved to NOLA right after the University placed me on Academic Suspension & my parents and I were fussing all the time & I ended up staying with her for a while. I was going thru a pretty self-destructive phase & I pushed her (and alot of other people I cared about) away.
Things got really crucial for me for awhile, and I had to spend some time in rehab. When I got out, I moved back in with my family & stayed sober but the problems we had weren't resolved & it was still just as much fussing, I was just sober the whole time. Not to mention unemployed & slung up in Hahnville with no car. Which sucked.
One day, she & I were on the phone & she heard how my Dad was talking to me & she just said, grrl enough is enough. Pack what you need to take with you. You can stay with me. We will work it out.
She had just graduated from UNO with an MA in Film Direction & I thought she was going places. What I did not realize was that despite her education, she didn't really have much in the way of Ambition, and the best thing she could come up with to make ends meet was selling handmade jewelry at the French Market, and that wasn't cutting it. I was sleeping on her couch, and grateful that she let me stay there, so when someone she knew offered to let her sell pot for them, I was all on board about it. Neither one of us had jobs & we both knew lots of people that smoked so it just seemed like a good idea. (It just sounds so stupid now) At first, she was getting daily phone calls from Sallie Mae, Discover Card, Mastercard, Entergy, you name it, people wanted their money. So I helped her out, the only way I knew how. On top of the bizz I was helping her with, I also got two jobs (Catering & working at a local magazine) while she mostly just sat on the couch, bitching, freaking out about money, and not taking her psych meds.
She let me drive her car around to do "errands" and she would let me have $20 per day "walking around money" as she called it. I would have to pay for parking, get cigarettes & food & keep gas in the car on this amount of money, despite all the hundreds of dollars at a time that I was bringing her. Anyway, I moved in around Halloween & by Christmas, Sallie Mae & all them other hoes had stopped calling & we were doing well enough that we moved into another, two-bedroom place down the street.
I thought things would be different, like now that we were in "our house" & not "hers" things would be split more 50-50. But no. She still wanted to take all the money, pay our joint bills and her personal ones (and my fines for getting busted with her stuff) and give me a $20 per diem, all the time ready to flip on me if I brought her the wrong fast food, or God Forbid, that the food should be cold.
She was so lazy that she couldn't even be bothered to go out & do sales. She had all sorts of ppl in & out of that place & our landlord lived like 2 blocks away. He got wind of what was going on up in there, and in June of 1999, right after I turned 25, he came by the place & basically told us he knew what we were up to & that he wasn't calling the police, but that he wanted us to leave. I was grateful he wasn't calling the cops but Miss Biddy was OUTRAGED. Instead of just admitting fault, she blew up on him. He never did call the police on us, even when she withheld the last month's rent & told him to keep the deposit to cover it.
During that last month, she was even more mean & unreasonable than I remembered. I was just as sick in this Nightmare of Co-depency that I had gotten myself entangled with, like one night I was driving back from getting her some fast food thru City Park, in the really cruisy part & this hot man pulled up alongside me in his car, flashing his piece at me. Well damn if I didn't end up poking this man in the woods. Naturally when I got home, Biddy's food was cold & she completely blew a gasket. She also threw her sandwich and fries at my head when I told her why I was late. She made me go back out & get her more fast food. This time, I went thru the park first & spent like 40 minutes fooling around with various dudes BEFORE I went and got her Number 11 from Burger King. Talk about passive-aggressive.
Anyway, we were both looking for a new place together but it was getting harder & harder for me to take her yelling at me for spending money or not letting her use my money to pay for drugs or whatever it was that day. She went camping with some friends of hers & left me the car & the night she got back, she paged me (lord, who remembers pagers any more?) and I stopped at the store to pick up some cigarettes for both of us on the way home. My backpack was in the front seat of her car & I must have forgotten to lock the car properly, because by the time I got home, I realized that my smiley-face backpack was gone. Snatched. With all my ID plus $$$ & pot. Miss Biddy carried on yelling at me about how she couldn't afford my fuckups for a solid 2 hours. Eventually she tired her self out & I just sat in the living room, crying in silent devastation.
.I thought about it. Prayed about it. & then I made my choice. I went to the stash box & took half the money & product, packed enough clothes for a few days, & headed over to stay with my friend Swervella, leaving a note that basically said, "This is all over between us. I can't take this any more. You are mean and greedy and I'm tired of paying for everything and it never being good enough. I'm taking half of what was in the box & I don't expect to hear from you again."
Swervella let me stay there, and of course old girl showed up on his front porch the following morning, at the crack of 11, crying and begging me to talk to her, to not abandon her, to keep being her roommate, etc etc etc. I went to the house with her and I explained how I felt. How I had been paying bills that weren't mine to pay and constantly being demeaned & yelled at (often in front of our friends) and she tried to justify this or that and I think she must have realized that she wasn't going to get what she wanted & she finally just said, "Sam, I need you to tell me that it's over, that I'm just too much of a nightmare to live with."
The fact is that not only was she a nightmare, she was giving me nightmares, I often woke up screaming at her to stop yelling at me already, so I told her what she asked me to say.
Within a month, I had legally earned enough $$ with a little help from Swervella to get my own place and I tried to be civil with Miss Biddy, at least civil enough to get her to front me one last bit of pot & then tell her that I wasn't paying later on because I had paid more than enough of her bills. She was living on someone else's couch & really didn't appreciate what I had to say about the situation, but there you have it. This would have been in the late summer/early fall of 1999. Last I heard, she had moved back to Larose or Cutoff or some place like that with this guy who liked fat girls around early 2000.
Well, you'll never guess who showed up working at the drinks booth at the Freret Market last month. Yep, Big Bad Biddy, looking bad. All haggard in the face & fat in the waist & I wasn't sure it was her at first, but I called her name as she passed by my stall, she stopped, we talked...civilly. There was no hugging. Just a sort of mutual "How've you been" "Good" sort of a thing. She asked if my scarves were knit or crochet. I told her knit, and gave her one of my Witty Knitter business cards. She never came into my booth. She said, "well, I wish you luck with it." I said, "Likewise." and that was all we had to say to each other.
A part of me rejoiced at how bad she looks. I admit it. To say Miss Biddy is in her mid-40s now, she looks closer to her late 50s-early 60s. Bad highlights on her already stringy hair. But I don't know, the joy has kind of gone out of it. It's just sad. She was never going to be Angelina Jolie or some other sex symbol but Wow. It makes me even gladder that I didn't follow her down that twisted path she was guiding me on.
I learned a lot of things from living with her & every day since I got my MA, I try to do things to avoid the Biddy-ness. Like I feel it creep up on me if I'm inactive for too long, I'm very wary of days when I just wanna sit around on the couch and bitch, or if I start to feel like I'm the victim of circumstances and not a participant in my own life. It's not easy though. Sometimes it just seems so much easier just to sit around and wish for better things and justify bad behavior but really it's not. Really it just leads to regrets and recriminations and who has the energy for all that?
I have been thinking a lot about this lately, as I find myself at (yet another) crossroads. Since this thing at IHSNO doesn't seem to be working out, I made some phone calls yesterday & found out that I am able to go back to working at the med skool as a Standardized Patient and that the restaurant where I have been doing my guest-star stuff is looking for actual staff, so that is how I will spend this semester, and probably the summer. I have also decided to apply to Tulane's PhD in French program for the Fall. Hopefully I will be able to do some tutoring to make a little extra $$ as well. I am trying not to look at this as doing more of the same, but rather as doing things I don't neccessarily want to do now so I can do what I want to do later.
Wish me Luck!!
