Another Reason I Hate the Homeless
Flipping through my old photo album, I was reminded of a very shitty story. And by “shitty,” I mean involving feces – the feces of an insane, homeless man.
It was the summer after my senior year at Texas, and I was living in a giant, yellow house with eight of my friends. Several of the residents at the Yellow House, however, were new. You see, during the school year, I lived with seven of my frat brothers and my best friend from home. Most of these idiots graduated; I, however, decided to take an extra year to write my thesis and take fun classes like Roman History and Elvish (yes, I’m a big ole nerd).
Anyway, a lot of the guys left Austin shortly after graduation and, since our lease went through August, sublet their rooms. Two of the rooms were sublet to old friends of mine from El Paso, people I had known since elementary school, who I’ll call “Yel” and “Gerbil.” Yel is a peace, love, and flower power hippie; Gerbil is a Marxist, blame-everything-on-colonialism-and-hegemony, leftist. Despite our totally opposite politics, I’ve known them forever, so it was a good time. After the LSAT was over and done, I had nothing to do that summer but sit on the front porch, sip bourbon, smoke hookah, and read Kierkegaard. So I did precisely that.
Now, the Yellow House is located in the middle of West Campus, which is the big student residential area to the immediate west of the UT campus. It’s full of fraternity and sorority houses, run-down apartment complexes, and Bosnian war-zone style houses rented at Manhattan prices. It’s a wonderful drunken, college playground. Unfortunately, it has something of a bum problem. And they weren’t just any old bums – they were fucking nuts. I mean that literally – full-blown, unmedicated, delusional schizophrenics.
Usually, we’d just ignore the bums – we’d leave them to their dumpster-diving, and maybe shoo them away with a broom if they got too close to our house. Gerbil, who also spent a great deal of the summer sitting on the front porch, would occasionally give one of the bums a glass of bourbon. I objected because, as I predicted, he kept coming back for more booze. It’s the reason you don’t feed wild animals. But, despite my objections, Gerbil, not wanting to be “classist,” kept giving him booze.
Anyway, the crazy homeless guy began to take greater liberty with our house. For example, we would come home to find him sitting on our porch, uninvited. As if this wasn’t bad enough, one morning I caught him pissing on the side of our house.
Enough was enough.
I thought I could put an end to this unpleasantness by going outside and waving my sword at him. No, not the one in my pants – a katana that I picked up a while back. When I confronted him, the bum claimed that he had been given permission to pee there. I asked him who had given him permission and he told me that “the Visitors” said he could. Of course! The Visitors – why didn’t I realize that straight off the bat? However, when I asked him why the Visitors had not painted him green to show that he had permission to urinate on my property, he began to get suspicious, asking whether George Bush sent me. I told him that, yes, George Bush sent me to chop off his willy with my katana if he didn’t get the hell off my property.
Needless to say, he left. One of my housemates, Blackbelt, who was watching the spectacle from the kitchen thought that it would be funny to shoot him with one of his many BB guns as he left. I disagreed; I thought it would be hilarious. So Blackbelt, with sharpshooter-like aim, proceeded to nail this insane old bum several times in the butt as he ran down the street.
Anyway, that was the last of the bum I saw until a party we threw several weeks later. Now my house could throw some serious parties – our end of year bash, for example, went through several thousand jello shots within the first two hours and even had a moonbounce in the backyard. This party, however, was the first party we had thrown with my old friends from El Paso. The party dynamic was odd – Yel’s hippies invaded the house, passing around doobies like…well…doobies. Frat boys bonged beer outside and tried to hook up with sorority girls. As a host, I floated between these two very different worlds, both united by a common desire to get really fucked up.
Around midnight, I was outside talking to a hot little blonde girl, when Gerbil interrupted me. The goddamn hippies let the crazy old bum into our house, so I had to go kick him out. Great.
Kicking the dirty old bum out of the house was easy – and when I returned, I saw several people carrying a recliner out of the house. “What the fuck?!?!” I thought. When I inquired as to what the hell these people thought they were doing, I understood completely.
The bum had shat in the chair.
That’s right - this dirty, drunk, delusional, smelly transient had taken a dump in the armchair of my living room. Now do you understand why I harbor so much animosity towards the homeless?
POSTSCRIPT: We took the chair to the dumpster catty-corner from the house. The bum continued to live in the chair that he soiled. On July 4th, Blackbelt came home with a big ole bag of fireworks, so we decided to blow the chair up. God bless America.
