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getting my brother to wash dishes
Monday, February 10 2025
location: the bed in Nathan's furnished basement apartment, Little High Street, Charlottesville, VA
After loading all my stuff back into the Forester and making the furnished apartment look exactly the way I'd found it (actually a little better, as I cleaned up some prexisting crumbs in the kitchen), I went over to the non-apartment part of the house and joined Janine and then Nathan for coffee. Nathan had to begin work at 9:00am, though, so our caffeine-facilitated banter (which, let's be honest, between Nathan and me could go on all day) had a hard cutoff. This might've been the morning when he told me about how his tastes changed over the course of a few months after arriving for his Peace Corps gig in Gambia back in the early 1990s. He said that he gradually lost all interest in conventional American food like pizza and burgers and came to crave ground nut stew and other African staples, particularly the poverty food that most Africans consider gauche to serve to guests (they'd prefer to serve roast goat or at least chicken). Nathan also said that his sexual interests changed and he soon found white American women undesirable, completely replaced in his thoughts by the African women he was surrounded by. This plasticity of desire reminded me of how easy it was for me to maintain my veganism once I'd been forced by circumstances to be vegan continuously for only two weeks, back in January of 2010.
At that point I climbed in the Forester and started driving back towards Staunton. Again, though, my memory of Charlottesville let me down and for some reason I'd thought I could get on I-64 by heading south on Avon Street, but that street does not feature an interchange and I didn't know about a shortcut over to 5th Street via a shopping center that includes a Wegmans (that supermarket chain from Rochester). So I drove all the way back to Monticello Avenue and then over.
Back at my childhood home, I resumed poking around among the ruins for useful artifacts, which I kept unearthing. I kept finding good tools (particularly C-clamps) that I can never have enough of. But I was also finding rare treasures like an ancient Singer electic sewing machine my mother had inherited from her mother in 1985 and then (as far as I know) never even managed to open. There was also a Perkins Brailler (a typewriter where one embosses braille onto cardstock by pressing chords on a six-key keyboard) that I was pretty sure my mother was supposed to return to the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind when she quit working there circa 1990.
I didn't want everything I found, though some things that I didn't want I still wanted to preserve. (Anything not removed by me was, I believed, likely to get crushed eventually beneath a bulldozer.) This included a large framed pen & ink drawing of an anteater that my parents had bought in Chicago before I was born (and that had been a fixture of the decor in every place we'd lived since). There was also a three-foot-tall plaster statue of a nude woman that my mother had made for an art class in the 1970s that was now languishing on the front porch of my ruined childhood home. I brought those two things over to Creekside to be placed in the trailer there with my brother Don. While I was in there dealing with those things, I noticed that the air no longer had that unpleasant sour fragrance. Indeed, conditions there were almost good enough for me to want to hang out in. Don claimed that the problem had been a dead mouse caught in a trap that had begun to decompose.
Now that Creekside was suddenly a reasonable space to hang out in, I could look around a bit more to see how Don was living his life there. He has no motiviation to clean up after himself, partly because that was never modeled for him at any point in his life. But this is not to say he isn't proactive about things from his very odd (and, let's admit, impaired) worldview. For eample, I found a massive (but somewhat orderly) pile on one of the kitchen countertops of unused toothpaste tubes and toothbrushes. Initially I'd assumed this was part of the largesse that our friend Josh heaps upon Don, especially when Josh manages to secure some particular thing for free. But no, it turned out that Don had bought every one of those toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste using his own meagre funds. Something was causing him to hoard them. I asked Don how often he replaces his toothbrush and he said "about once a week," and he insisted that doing so was a good idea because "bacteria build up" in an old toothbrush. I have no idea how this idea got into Don's brain, but it must've taken advantage of his neuroses about dental hygiene. It's possible this was all caused by an advertiser for some toothbrush manufacturer, which he might have internalized uncritically (since his ability to determine the bias of statements, even from advertisers, is exremely weak). In any case, now that he was hoarding toothbrushes and toothpaste, he was probably never going to stop. And it might be that at some point the accumulation of all those dental hygiene supplies will lead to real problems, much as the clutter in my childhood home made it so the house can never again be liveable. Already those toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste are taking up space in a place which would much better be used for other things.
At some point Don asked if I could please take him in town to toy store he wanted to go to. I don't know why he thought I would want to do him such favors, so I said I would, but only if he washed the dishes in the Creekside sink first. (Don thinks nothing of letting messes languish indefinitely, and I'd like to somehow get him into the habit of regularly doing cleaning tasks.) Don groaned a the demand but then set to work; there are few things for him as motivating as a trip into town considering that otherwise he has to walk all the way there and all the way back, a round trip of at least twelve miles. Once I was satisfied that he'd done the dishes, I was clear for takeoff.
The store Don wanted to go to was somewhere on Beverley Street in downtown Staunton. At some point as I was looking for a parking space, he just jumped out of the car and headed off, saying he'd stay in touch via phone. Without anything else to do, I walked around looking for a restaurant selling the kind of food I might eat. There was no suitable place on Beverley Street, and the Indian restaurant down on the other side of Johnson Street was closed. So I used my phone to find Chinese food near me. At around that time, my mother's old lawyer, a man I'd been trying to get in touch with, finally called me back in response to messages left by both me and Gretchen on his machine. He told me he wouldn't be free for a meeting with me until tomorrow afternoon at 2:00pm, which I already knew would be coninciding with a severe winter storm that had been predicted. But what choice did I have? So I told him I'd see him them.
Shortly thereafter, Don called me. He'd bought a $30 kit of a race car "with a real gear box" built with plastic parts similar to those of Lego, but he wasn't done buying things yet. Now he wanted to go to that Know Knew bookstore he likes on US-250 and he also wanted to go to Walmart to buy a plastic box to protect more of his books from dust. I suppose he felt entitled to these additional destinations because of the demand I'd extracted from him. And, also, it didn't hurt to ask. But even before we got off Bevereley Street he ducked into a store selling model trains and scale models of all sorts of boats, planes, and vehicles. Don asked the price on a 1:6 scale military Jeep and when the guy said "$300," I said, "That's a little outside your budget." Don lives in poverty, but he loves blowing what money he can on plastic toys and books.
On the way out to Know Knew and Walmart, I stopped at the Great Wall Chinese restaurant in Statler Plaza and ordered three dishes, one for Don and two for me. They were all vegan, of course. But Don likes bean curd. Then I drove him to Walmart, where I told him not to dilly-dally. He was so committed to getting in and out fast that he had the balls to ask people in line in front of him if he could skip past them (they said sure). Things went more slowly at the Know Knew bookstore, where someone had bought the tree book Don was interested and he had to find another book to blow the money he insisted on blowing to today on. Then, after I'd picked up the Chinese food, Don wanted to go to the Dollar Tree, which is where (for better or worse) he buys his groceries. I figured if he needed groceries, it was good for him to get them before the arrival of a huge snowstorm.
When we returned ot Creekside, I saw Dimita, the neighbor across the street, sitting in her pickup truck. Decades ago, Dimitra had been one of the several neighbors my family had feuded with, but time had mellowed those feelings, and in recent years Dimitra had been friendly with my increasingly-addled mother. When she saw us, she came over and said, "You must be Gus!" (as she hadn't seen me since I was a young adult or perhaps even a teenager). She then gave me and Don hugs to note the death of our mother. Dimitra is small olive-skinned Greek woman with an accent that is unexpected in Redneckistan. The husband who gave her three daughters left her in the lurch well before the arrival of the 1980s, and since the daughters grew up, she's lived alone. She has bought some additional land, though, particularly a garden plot on the banks of Folly Mills Creek a little north of her twelve or sixteen acre farm. She's a nosy woman and wanted to know what was happening with the land and the stuff in all the houses. I told her the land would be sold to a land trust to be conserved but that the stuff in the buildings would likely all be bulldozed. I said I'd picked through it multiple times but that there are probably still a few treasures in there. She told me that it was essential that I go through it thoroughly to find everything valuable so that I could get what I could for it.
After hanging out for awhile in the Shaque eating Chinese food, doing some writing on my laptop, and listening to tunes (MP3s from early Genesis albums, actually), I got in contact with my old high school buddy Eric P. The plan was to meet him somewhere for drinks so we could shoot the shit and catch up. (Last time we did this, he got me very fucked up on cannabis, and I barely made it back into my AirBnB, but then I woke up the next morning feeling fine.) Not having any better ideas, Eric decided we should meet again at Ciders From Mars, the cider place near the Wharf in Staunton. So I drove to Staunton and parked in a parking lot a little ways west of downtownish things on Middlebrook Road so that, should I be a little tipsy at the end of the evening, I would be leaving with a bit of a headstart back out into the country.
Ciders from Mars was closed, so Eric and I ended up at a nearby place called Redbeard Brewing Company, which wasn't too busy when we arrived. They also had an interesting mural depicting hop vines covering a tree with various robotic birds and insects climbing or flying around. We got our beers and sat and talked about things. I told of how my mother died and how well, by contrast, Nathan's mother is doing. Eric used to be great friends with Nathan but he's fallen a bit out of touch and wasn't aware, for example, that Nathan's father had died years ago. Eric told me about his recent employment, that he's been working for the past two years for Amazon at a non-robot warehouse in Fishersville. He says he'd been fired from an earlier job at a place that handles airplane parts for having THC in his urine, but Amazon, which it makes him take a piss-test, doesn't care about THC. Eric said that he's been having to work extra hard of late because his wife had a flare-up of her multiple sclerosis and has yet to recover. This means that Eric has to do all the goat-related chores back at home after a full day of work at Amazon.
Eric has a good memory of things that happened when we were kids, and interspersed among the things we discussed from today, he would remind me of things we'd done in high school. He particularly remembered me gradually disassembling an entire filing cabinet in Spanish class and flinging the parts from a window. He also reminded me of a lie I'd told him, that my birthday was on February 29th. But he'd rememembered as the truth.
We also talked about the current political situation and how absurd it has become. Like me, Eric says he is paying less attention the news. But somehow he finds out anyway.
Eventually Redbeard hosted a musical bingo event that I didn't want to participate in. So we walked over to Byers Street Bistro. There, we sat upstairs drinking cocktails (mine was "very girlie" and his was a margarita) and eating appetizers (fried pickle chips for me, waffle fries for him). I'd eaten a lot of Chinese food earlier so I didn't have much of an appetite.
Because I'd been sick recently and needed to drive myself home, we ended things after two drinks. I chatted with Gretchen via the voice calling feature of Facebook Messenger on the drive home. Once back at the Shaque, I finally got around to trying a hotspot app for my non-rooted Android phone so I could get on the internet with my laptop. The last time I'd tried this, I hadn't been able to get it to work. But this time I succeeded using an app that made me paste a cURL string into a command window on my laptop. That app was the key to using my laptop the way I usually do, instead of just as a text editor/MP3 player, and the internet quality via the cell network was surprising solid there near the bottom of Stingy Hollow.
Don in Creekside today. Click to enlarge.
The way my childhood home now looks from Stingy Hollow Road. Click to enlarge.
The level of vegetation growth around my childhood home is insane. Click to enlarge.
Under the bunk in the Shaque. The decorations remain unchanged from when I lived there, though the clutter my mother left covers evert surface. Click to enlarge.
The south (interior) wall of the loft space has this on the other side facing the main space. I've taken some of the skulls and such but this remains. Click to enlarge.
A newspaper clip from April 22, 1986, showing me with some classmates, including Eric P. Yes, Kirk S. was exactly the person he presents as in this photo. Click to enlarge.
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