City People

 

CONVERSATION FIVE – MISTAKEN IDENTITY 

                   “I don’t know why you can’t be more careful, that’s all,” God says.

              “Roomie, it was an honest mistake. It could’ve happened to anyone,” I tell him.

   God and I have been sparring like this all afternoon. I can’t get anything done with his constant interruptions. I wish he’d just stop pacing here in my studio! No harm’s been done — Roomie’s fossil rock is back on my window sill. You’d think he could just let bygones be bygones — or however the saying goes.

              “But just imagine the fossil rock in the wrong hands!” he says.

              “Can’t you just let it go, God? The rock’s been returned. All’s right with the world.”

   This messy situation began as innocently as anything can. My neighbor was having a yard sale and I had boxes of junk that I’d been stuck with for years: eight track tapes from the seventies, meditation quartzes from the eighties and every kind of gadget missing a part or battery you can think of. ‘Why not make a few dollars,’ my friend had said to me. ‘Bring your stuff to my yard sale’.

              “I just don’t get how you could let it happen that’s all,” Roomie goes on.

              “You act like it was my fault, God. Honestly, I don’t know how it happened.” 

  You’ve probably guessed that my roommate’s dwelling place — yea, his rock, was buried in one of those boxes. I honestly have no idea how his rock got mixed up with the crystal specimens and astrology books.

  So here’s what happened. I’m at the yard sale and this man parks his truck and walks up to me. 

             “Five bucks for the whole box?” he asks.  

             “Yea, for the whole box,” I say.

             “You’ve got a deal,” he says.

   As soon as he walks away with the box I get this feeling that something’s very wrong. Just like any good Hollywood director will tell you, everything went into slow motion. I’m charging down the driveway on this perilously hot day, running through a sticky substance that can be nothing less than the fabled molasses we hear about. I’m charging after the truck yelling, ‘Stop —stop!’ Thank God the guy stopped! I gave the man his five dollars back and let him take the box away, too — minus God’s fossil rock of course. It was a close call but the way I see it, I saved the day. But my Roommate here just won’t let it go. 

              “You sold me out!” he cries. His face is stern and I must say that look takes me aback. I’ve never seen God like this!                         

             “Geez”, I say, “That look is scary — is this what the ancient Hebrews meant by ‘The Wrath of God’?”  

   I hear a snort and then I see God’s doubling laughing, choking up and desperately trying to speak. That paralytic laughter, you know?

             “Humph! Huh, ho, ho— Oh, ho, ho…. Oh, my stomach! Oh no, oh, my stomach! ‘Wrath of God’! My heavens, that’s funny!”

   Apparently my innocent comment has found God’s funny bone. Something’s really tickling him. I have to say it’s nice to see him loose control once and a while. I’m enjoying this moment so I decide to keep it going.

              “Wrath of God!” he peals. Tears are running down God’s —ah, face. Yes, I decide to take full advantage of this moment. 

              “Well Roomie, your rock in the box was a close call but let’s face it… (here it comes) “The Junk Man giveth and the junk man taketh away.”

              “The Junk Man taketh…. Oh, no —ho, ho, ho! Oh my, that’s a good one, too! ‘The junk man giveth — oh no, oh Jeez! Tell it — tell it,” he says between wheezing laughs. “Tell it—tell your City People story.” he sighs.

* * * * *

CITY PEOPLE  

   Birthday cards stick out from under the lid shining in the sun. 

          “Wow, this one really smells,” I say. “We can be pretty sure maggots or something like that are in here, so we won’t even take the lid off this one,”   

   My sister listens. She can be a very serious little girl sometimes. She’s a strong little one with honest hazel eyes. She’s sturdy and can out run any ten year old even though she’s only six. 

              “This one?” she asks.

              “Sure, go ahead.”

   My little sis is sad because her favorite playmate went away for the whole weekend. They didn’t tell her they were going, either. They just left. So I told her, ‘come on, come on with me’.

   This is my sister’s first time out on a special trip with me. I know she’s old enough for the mystery part, which is a whole lot of fun. I just hope she’s old enough for the danger part. The danger is in getting caught, of course.  And what’s fun about the mystery? Well, I think it’s fun seeing parts of people’s lives under the lid of a can. Here’s another birthday card lying on the ground. It doesn’t take much to guess that someone in the maggot house just had a birthday.

   My sister’s watching everything I do. I lift the lid carefully. I love this wait and see moment.

              “See? See how it’s done— nice and easy,” I say.

              “Nice and easy,” she says and pushes ‘extra’ hair away from her face. We pull some cardboard and birthday wrap out.

              “Hmmm…here’s an old poster. It says, ‘Charity Dance’. I like the picture on it but—“

             “Me, too.”

             “–ugh, there’s coffee grounds all over it. We don’t want that.”

              “What does ‘charity’ mean?” my sister asks.

  I’m thinking. There’s my Mom who’s likes to be as charitable as she can towards people.  She tells us to be nice to everybody no matter who they are.

              “I think charity means acting like you’re nice to people,” I tell my sister.

              “Like being friendly,” she says.

              “Something like that. It gets confusing to me sometimes too.”  

   My Mom’s especially kind to ‘City People’ because they’re not as good as we are. Grandma’s family started the whole city people thing a long time ago. When Grandma grew up, her family didn’t like to hang around with people ‘from the city’ and they began calling them ‘City People’. The confusing part is that we don’t live in a nice, Long Island suburb like Grandma did. We live in a small city.  

              “You know, I think charity means sharing things with people who could use some sharing,” I say. “Okay, let’s try the next yard”.

              “I’m kind to my friend Diana,” she says.

              “You’re a good friend, Sis. Don’t worry, she’ll come back,” I tell her. “Hey, let’s try the next yard.” 

   My sister’s playmate, Diana is what I call a good friend. Diana is okay with the fact that my sister doesn’t care for Barbie dolls. Diana loads all her dolls into my sister’s big metal jeep and they drive them around. Last week all the Barbies married my sister’s J.I. Joe dolls and then they went for a long jeep ride.

   We squeeze through a wire fence and we’re in the next skinny apartment backyard. Junky trees that won’t grow anywhere else make some shade here. There’s even some grass growing and a big pot with petunias. Someone’s laundry is hanging.

              “Okay,” I say, “you do it all.”

              “Really?”

               “Yea, go ahead. You do the whole thing yourself.”

   My sister waits like she’s not sure what to do next. The lid’s a little stuck so she pulls on it just a little too hard. It lifts off quickly and she drops it. The noise is like thunder on a trampoline when the lid bounces off other cans. She’ll learn. Meanwhile I’m sweating, so I remind her that noise like that can get us caught. We look inside and see a treasure chest down in the can.

              “Wow, look at this! A lobster claw.” I say, and pull it out. The lobster claw is the most wonderful thing: pearly and pink; red and bumpy in parts. Like a sea shell. I’ve never known anyone who eats lobster before. Now I do.

              My sister laughs. “Hey look, there’s some crayons here. Look, this one’s whole!” she says.

              “See, I told you this can be fun!” We dig deeper and find a cloth covered address book. It has gold edges.

             “Oh,” she says when she sees it, “a little book with some empty pages!” My sister loves to draw.

              “You found it; it’s yours,” I say. “But remember, no more banging lids, okay?” It’s important to teach my sister the right way to do this.      

     My Mom says there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things. Grandma says it all the time, too and everyone knows Grandma has a lot of class. I guess that knowing the right way can be pretty important.

   We’re pushing the book and crayons into a little pocket on my sister when I hear something I don’t want to hear:

              “What’s going on out here?” a man with a crinkly face yells from a window. His hair is like the chipping yellow paint on the window sill.

              “So who is it?” a lady’s voice says.

              “Oh, lookee Carmella,” he says, “its Aunt Louisa and Cousin June!”   

      Louisa and June? Who’s that? Not us! But the man’s pointing at us. This is not a good time for mysteries. He’s on his way down the fire escape and I think I’d better grab my sister and run. She’s still fumbling with the address book. Before we know it, we hear the lady’s voice behind us.

              “You must be Aunt Louisa,” she says to my sister. Her voice is like the lady in the Leggs commercial on TV. We turn around and see that the man’s down here, too.

              “We see you back here digging in the trash now and then Cousin June,” he says, “But this little one, now, she’s new —“

              “Aunt Louisa does seem to fit,” the lady says to the man.

              “It does now, doesn’t it, honey?”

   I’m praying my sister doesn’t say or do anything. I can handle this. We can run.

              “This is my first time with my sister and I’m having a lot of fun with her today,” she says.     

   Oh thanks. Thanks a lot.

             “Yes we’re going to talk about that,” the lady says and tries to frown. She and her sort-of frown take my sister by the hand and start up the fire escape.

              “I’ll bring Cousin June, Mommie,” the man says. “Come on, you, too, big sister,” he says to me. I look up the fire escape for my sister and she’s gone. She’s disappeared.      

   I know what this means; police records, that’s what this means. We’ll be arrested, just like the freaks I see on the evening news. I hear about freaks all the time on the news now. The freaks are getting themselves arrested for marching and sitting in front of buildings all day. I see them getting beat with clubs for being where they’re not supposed to be. The cops on the news don’t seem to like the freaks — that’s for sure.

   My parents don’t like the freaks either. ‘Send them back to Woodstock where they belong!’ my Dad yells. Sometimes he gets his words mixed up and calls them carnival freaks. I usually know he means, ‘you god damned city people’, though.

   While we wait for the cops to come I look around a tiny kitchen that’s all white. My sister seems to be all right. She sits and scratches a mosquito bite on her knee. I stare at the table cloth in front of me. It’s red and blue and yellow—the only colors in a room full of white porcelain. Cowboys are on horses dancing in circles chasing themselves. Campfires are in the middle of every cowboy-chasing circle.

              “Care for some fried jelly beans?” the man says.            

             “Fried jelly beans?” we say. My little sister giggles.

              “Yes, fried. We like to think they’re fried,” the lady says.

             “That’s right, that’s because we don’t like raw food”. 

             “No we don’t,” she says.

   My sister stares at the tile floor. It has these wonderful little rectangle and triangle tiles. She takes a jelly bean, grins and looks down again quickly.  I’m not grinning or eating jelly beans but for a minute I forget about the cops.

   I don’t know why but the best day in my entire life comes to my mind. I can almost see it; the time I walked in on my very own surprise party. I see the party favors, confetti and my friends from school shouting, ‘Surprise! Happy Birthday!’     

   I suppose maybe we won’t be arrested like the freaks on TV. I bump my sister with my foot under the table and hope she’ll look at me. I want to let her know that maybe things will be okay. She looks at me and I think she knows. She has hazel eyes, a lot like mine, even if they’re not the same color.

              “I’m Hack and this is mi senora hermosa, Carmella”. The man puts his hand across the table to shake mine.

              “I’m, I’m —,” I don’t know what to say. “This is my sister — Aunt Louisa and I’m— I’m Cousin June”, I say and laugh. It feels good to laugh.

              “Glad to know you, Cousin June. Glad to know you, Aunt Louisa,” Hack says.

              “I’m happy to meet you Aunt Louisa and Cousin June,” Carmella says. “We do have something serious to talk about though, okay?” She moves the jelly bean bowl closer to us.

   Hack folds up his shirtsleeves. It’s a blue work shirt a lot like my father’s grey ones.

              “Yes we do,” Hack says. “Aunt Louisa, Cousin June, pretend for just a minute I’m your daddy. We have something important to talk about. After that, we can laugh some more, okay?”

              “Okay.”

              “It’s germs,” he says.

              “Germs,” Carmella rolls her eyes. “We see you out there so many times. Your hands in all that junk,” she says to me.

              “I never thought of that before,” I tell them. But the truth is, I have thought about it before and I’m thinking about it now.

   Just after Christmas my father brought home a store carton of chocolate-nut candy. He found it behind a restaurant or something. I guess Dad likes getting something for nothing as much as Mom does. Waiting was almost painful but Mom insisted on checking the candy before we could eat it. I’m glad she did. The candy was full of worms.

   Hack’s talking.

              “Think about it: Bacteria, disease, sickness lives in those cans. Promise me you won’t do that anymore,” he says. “No more digging in other people’s trash?” We nod.

              “Imagine if you got sick and died and we had no more Aunt Louisa; no more Cousin June!” Carmella pretends she’s crying.

             “We promise.”

              “And you’ll think about germs and disease before you do that again?” Hack asks.

   It was full of worms—I’ll never breathe a word of that to anyone so I just answer, ‘uh-huh’. My sister nods, ‘uh-huh’, too.

               “Oh, and when you come back to visit,” Carmella points to a tiny living room window, “just ring our bell out there in front.”

   We keep our promise to stay out of trash cans and I find ways to turn things around. My Mom thinks we’re picking through trash cans when we’re really visiting our new friends. And when I find some old thing somewhere, like a half filled bottle of nail polish —even if it’s from my own bottom dresser drawer, I save it for my Mom. She smiles when I come home and say, ‘Look what I found!’  

   And I have another new trick. I pretend everyone I meet is Carmella and Hack. I seem to like people a whole lot more when I do that. One of the things I like best about Carmella and Hack is their stupid jokes. Here’s one of my favorites. It goes something like this: 

              Hack: “Carmella, this package of wheat puffs says it expires 8/30/63.”

             Carmella: “So?”

             Hack: “… at 11:45 p.m.”

              Carmella: “Hack, you’re crazy, that’s impossible.”

              Hack: “No, look right here.” And of course Carmella—and the two of us, have to take a look. But before we can look, Hack laughs. “Gotcha”, he says. He’s always saying, ‘Gotcha’.

   When I’m a wife I’m going to say, ‘gotcha’, instead of arguing. I told Aunt Louisa and she likes that idea. She tells me that the G.I. Joe’s and Barbies never argue and I’m glad to hear that.          I’m proud of her for keeping our Carmella and Hack secret, a secret all this time, too. That’s pretty amazing for a six year old. You never know what she’ll come out with, though.

   My sister tells Hack that he reminds her of one of her favorite foods. I’m hoping she won’t embarrass me. I mean, she is the ‘new improved’ Aunt Louisa, but all the same you never know.

              “Okay, little one. It best not be rutabaga.” he says.

              “No— it’s not rube— whatever that is; you make me think of corn chips,” she giggles and pulls a strand of hair from her mouth.

              “Mmm”, Carmella says crispy, crunchy and golden!”

              “And what about my lady?” Hack asks. “What about Carmella?”

              “Oh, she’s one of my favorites, too.” Aunt Louisa is blushing.  “Maple syrup,” she says.

              “Oh, boy, I like that!” Hack starts laughing. “Dark, mellow … rich and —”

              “Syrupy?” Carmella asks.

              “Yea, syrupy!”

             “What about us?” I ask.

              “That’s easy.” Hack says. “Aunt Louisa here, she’s cotton candy.”

              “Pink cotton candy,” Carmella says. Then Hack starts sizing me up.

             “What will it be?” he says. “Roast turkey…no. Kumquats?”

             “No, Hack, no,” Carmella interrupts, “stop being silly. I’ve got Cousin June, I’ve got her perfectly!”

             “What?” all three of us wait.

             “Midway fries!”

             “Of course!” says Hack.

             “What’s midway fries?”

             “You don’t know midway fries?” he says. “Carmella, they don’t know midway fries!”

             “Oh, they are sinful— so good!” Carmella ties her black hair into a huge pony tail.

             “They’re the thickest, most melt in your mouth deep fried potatoes you’ll ever taste,” Hack says. “Dusted with sea salt. A sprinkle of vinegar. They’re the best.”

   We bring presents to Hack and Carmella— not junky old things we found; we bring drawings we made. Mine is a tree with branches that go out all over the drawing. In my sister’s drawing, she’s playing on a rainbow rug with Diana. Barbies and G.I. Joe’s are dancing. My sister starts to cry. Carmella sits on the floor with her.

              “This is your friend you’re sad about”? Carmella asks.

              “Diana’s missing,” my sister says. Her face is smeared with tears.

              “Sometimes people have to go away. Sometimes they have to move quickly, Aunt Louisa,” Hack says.

              “She went away and she never came back. She’s missing.”

              “It happens to us sometimes, too,” Hack tells her. “With our jobs— sometimes we have to pull up and go, just like that. Maybe your little friend has a special job to do, too.”

              “Sometimes, no warning for us, too,” Carmella says. “But let me tell you something, Aunt Louisa. And you, too, Cousin June; good things don’t have to be right in your face to still be there.”

             “How?”

             “Good friends become a little part of you,” Hack says to my sister. “I see a bit of Diana in front of me right now.”   

             “You do?” She grins. “Not the Barbie-part, I hope!”  

  Carmella and Hack are part of Girardi Brothers Carnivals. They get to travel all over the country with their carnival friends. That’s got to be fun! Hack runs the Dart a Duck Booth. That’s where you get three darts for a quarter. You have to break balloons to win a fuzzy alligator to take home.

              “It’s really depressing,” Carmella laughs. “Just think about what it costs you to knock three balloons out. That’s a lot of quarters for one gnaty alligator on your dresser!”     

             “That’s commerce, Mommie,” Hack says, it’s the American way.” She pinches him.

              “Girls, ask Hack why it’s called ‘Dart a Duck’,” Carmella laughs. “Think about it, Cousin June, where are the ducks? Just alligators!”

              “Hmm, no ducks,” I say.  I’m thinking really hard but I can’t guess why it’s called, ‘Dart a Duck’. I’m hoping this is another gotcha moment. It feels good to forget about loosing friends for a while. Hack’s trying to talk but Carmella won’t let him.

              “The game used to be called, ‘Dick’s Darts’”, she starts out but Hack breaks in.

              “Someone messed with the sign the next season,” he says.

              “My turn,” Carmella says. “So, so when the sign goes up, — when it goes up, it says: ‘Dart a Dick’.”

              “The only thing Dick could do was to paint over the letter i and change the sign to say, ‘Dart a Duck’,” Hack says in a reasonable way.” And it’s been Dart a Duck ever since.”

              “No ducks?”

              “No ducks”.

      Carmella has a job even better than darts and fuzzy alligators. She wears a mysterious costume and tells fortunes. She looks at our palms and tells our fortunes.

              “You will always be a good friend,” she tells my hazel-eyed sister.

              “You will always be a good friend,” she tells me.           

   Mom says city people never stay put. She says city people are like gypsies and that’s the problem with them. I don’t see people moving around a lot. Mostly, I see people stuck in one place. My Mom’s going through a box of things the church doesn’t want after their rummage sale.

             “This lamp will look nice in our dining room,” Mom says, “I can’t believe someone didn’t want this!”

   I keep walking because I’m looking for my sister. We have somewhere to go.

            “Are you ready, Aunt Louisa?” I ask. She’s trying to fit a leather jacket left behind by the Barbie’s on her G.I.Joe doll.

             “He doesn’t have to button it,” she says, and we leave.

   Hack and Carmella’s apartment building is absolutely huge. It was built a long time ago and it was built to say: ‘aren’t I grand — aren’t I just the biggest, finest, grandest building you’ve ever seen? Myrtle with blue star-like flowers grow everywhere here in front. The myrtle has the nicest moist and musty smell whenever we pass it. This may be a tired old building now but each time, I’m walking up to something grand.

             “You know what I like about Carmella and Hack the most?” Aunt Louisa asks. “Their eyes wear smiley faces, that’s what I like,” Aunt Louisa says.

             “What if they were teachers? Wouldn’t that be something,” I say.

  Big old lions with chipped away stone faces guard the front doors of this building. The bricks are my favorite part because I love their ancient colors. You can say, oh well, they’re just bricks. Sure, but I’m doing a neat trick with my eyes and I do it all the time. I can make anything beautiful with my eyes; it’s the way I like to use them. My sister has those eyes, too. 

   We’re in the lobby. A million mailboxes and doorbells surround us. 

              “Cousin June, why aren’t they answering?” Aunt Louisa asks.

              “Let’s try around back,” I answer.

   Racing up their black fire escape has been fun in the past. Today I do it slowly. Sometimes you know something’s going to happen. Or not going to happen.

   Once there was a huge family reunion by the lake with hot dogs, hamburgers, watermelon and even marshmallows. The day before it I could feel myself getting sick. You can’t mistake a sore throat. At first I felt so bad about missing the water games and prizes, my cousins and hot dogs. But I talked myself into believing I was getting better. Even though I knew that wasn’t happening.

              “Take it easy,” I call up to my sister up above me. “You sound like an elephant!”

              “Hurry, get up here!” she yells back.

   I see a little stone lion statue at the door up on the fire escape. It’s my sister. The door is open from the wind. The wind blows me inside.

   An empty apartment is the ugliest thing you can imagine. We look into a tiny dark hole that is not Hack and Carmella’s apartment — not anymore. Nothing white is white anymore. Nothing big is big anymore. Spots on the walls show places where pictures were hung. My sister looks wild-eyed. She’s so small.

  It’s like I’ve just come from the dentist’s office. I don’t know where my mouth is — or where my body is. I’m looking into emptiness. We grab and hold each other and we cry. We say nothing to each other for a while. My sister has her wild eyes on her wet face. I have my numbness that could be wild-eyed, too. We walk into the little parlor that has the front window.

   When we speak we say at the same time: 

             “Look what they left for us.”

   It’s in the dust and puffed wheats on the hard wood floor. Two finger drawings of big hearts with the letters, C and H inside. 

             “Oh, I wish we could take these hearts home with us!” I say. 

   My sister’s just a little one. I’m the one who’s growing up. Yet she surprises me sometimes with her Aunt Louisa ways.    

             “Good things don’t have to be right in your face to still be there,” she says to me.

             “That’s what Carmella said.”

             “Yea, that’s what she said.”

   This thing, growing up. It’s not an easy thing, not for either of us. But we do have our fortunes, the ones Carmella gave us.  ‘You will always be a good friend’, that’s what our fortunes said. Our very first fortunes from the best fortune teller ever and for now, I  guess that’s enough. 

              “Come on, Aunt Louisa, let’s go,” I say softly.

              “Okay, Aunt June,” she says even softer.

                                                                    * * * * * *

               “Good story. My favorite so far. As always, you’ve managed to come as close to the truth as possible —

              “Thank you

              “— without being arrested by the literary license-taking police,” he says.

              “Shaking in my boots, God. Bye the way, I’ve got a question….”

              “‘All ears’, isn’t that what you guys say?”

              “Yea, yea. Earlier, what did you mean when you said, ‘in the wrong hands,’?”   I ask.

              “Oh, that.”

              “Yea, when you were ranting about selling you out, do you remember?”

              “The garage sale thing.”

              “Right, you said: “… imagine the fossil rock in the wrong hands.” Remember that?”

             “Yea…”

             “Well, what I’m wondering is, if God is ‘everywhere’, then ‘Everything’ is good, right? So how can a simple object like a rock be, ‘in the wrong hands’?”

              “You philosophers make me tired sometimes.” My roommate takes a deep breath. “It’s just that some objects have more attractive power than others, that’s all.”

              “Like some people, huh?”

              “You could say that.” Hmm, that’s the broadest smile I’ve seen in days.

    I love when he does that.

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Note: Chapter order runs backwards! The nature of this blog format is such that what has been entered first appears last. Chapter three, for example, appears above chapter two, and so on. I hope you’ll consider going to the end  of Conversations with my Roommate, of which these stories are a part and reading from beginning to end if you haven’t already done this.

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Conversations with my Roomate – Introduction

Copywrite 2009, 2010; Christina Kreiser

   My roomate’s pretty pissed with me today. Guess I left a peach pit on the window sill in my studio yesterday and it kind of cooked and got funky in the sun all day. My roomate’s rock, which is his living space, was right beside the funky, stinky peach pit.

   I see I’d better back up and explain. You were probably okay with my narrative until I got to, “his living space”, right? It’s simple really. My rock holds divinity — not just, ‘A divinity’, but THE DIVINITY. You’ve got it right; you are reading what you think you’re reading.  God lives in this one particular fossil rock which sits among a number of fossil rocks displayed on my studio room window sill. The stinky peach pit is no longer there. I threw it out. The smell is everywhere, and God, well, as you know, is always there. God, as so many people are fond of saying, is everywhere, too.

   Usually God has a great sense of humor about everything. Like right now, He’s humming, ‘Hail to the Chief’, as I write this. God has perfect pitch which probably doesn’t surprise you.  Since he’s humming I’m guessing he’s over being pissed. Oh, and the pronoun, ‘he’— is that alright with you? I considered using, ‘she’ but that’s nearly as silly as, ‘he’, so I decided to stick with the silliest.

   I’ve been hunting for fossils for years and I have a collection of all types of fossil rocks that I’m pretty proud of. Well not all are rocks; I’ve got some other fossilized objects that I’m —-what?

‘Forget about the rocks Chris, tell us about this God-roomate business and this rock that God lives in on your window sill!!!!!!’.

   OH. OKAY. You’re family and I suppose there are some friends here, too. No one’s going to bombard my dopamine receptors with gallons of Haldol in the name of treatment, right? And you know I’m not a danger to myself or to others? We’re all friends here, right? Okay, here goes.  

   When I’m finished this’ll all make perfect sense. I promise you.