Freque Factory - Post High School, Part 2

Freque Factory

Post High School, Part 2

      By the time the holiday season was over that first year I knew I needed to make some changes in my life.  Living with my mom was impossible.  Living with my dad meant I had to deal with his floozy, and that was unacceptable.   The answer was pretty clear-I needed to move out.

   When I started college I didn't know a lot of people.  That changed. Mostly because I rode the bus. By Christmas I had worked my way into two different groups of people.  One person I met, HJ  needed a new roommate after the first of the year.  I liked her.  The location and the price was right.  Best of all, she had a trundle bed and was willing to let me use one of them.  My parents were ok with letting me take my chest of drawers and night stand, but not the bed, so it worked.  For the first time in my life I was not living with my parents.

   Despite my new friends and roommate, I was still spending time with Monique and her husband.  Brian was back in County Jail.  With him gone Monique felt free to introduce her new husband to Fast Freddie.  I have no idea why.  Freddie still had the hots for Monique, so he put up with Blonde, but Freddie never did make him part of any of his plans.

   So instead, Blonde started trying to make some drug deals with Bad Penny.  Yeah, Bad Penny was back in the picture.  He was living in a small apartment in Hollywood.  One night Monique, Blonde, and I were over there (waiting for Bad Penny and Blonde to finalize a drug deal) and Monique grabs me to take me to BP's bathroom.  Instead she shows me his closet, which has a lot of fancy women's clothes.  He didn't have a girlfriend.  Monique and I were really confused.

   The drug deal fell through, as was often the case.  Instead we sat around while they got stoned.  Eventually Monique asked about the dresses.  It turns out that Bad Penny was wearing the dresses himself.  He was going out at as a female hooker on the streets of Hollywood.  When he had a drunken client he would "roll them", i.e. he would rob them and take off.  He hadn't been caught because what man is going to report being robbed by a female hooker that turned out to be a man?  I can't make this stuff up!

  I think that was the night I ended up driving home Monique's car.  It was a stick shift-first time I had ever driven one.  Luckily it was really late, so not much traffic.  I didn't wreck the car or strip the gears.  I considered it a win.

   Caught up on news from Freddie's family.  Too Cool had married his model girlfriend.  They had a really cute daughter.  He wasn't using cocaine anymore.  He couldn't.  He had used so much he had destroyed the inside of his nose.  So he was drinking instead.  Freddie's sister (the one who was married to the jockey) had committed suicide.  Another sister had done the same before I knew the family.  A history of depression.

   One of the reasons why Blonde was trying to get involved with drug deals was that he was underemployed.  They just didn't have enough money.  And he was getting pressure from his family back in Minnesota.  They wanted Blonde back home. And by summer they had packed up and moved there.

   Since I didn't have a car I had to be creative with my transportation.  I rode the bus a lot, walked, got rides from my new friends, and I started using my old childhood bike.  I got some of the most outlandish paint colors I could and made that bike something that no one would want to steal-and that no one would forget.  It worked.  I put a lot of miles on that thing and it was never stolen.

   As I've written in another blog, I only lived with just HJ for about 2 months before I found myself living with two other people in a 2 bedroom apartment in Montebello.  Closer to school.  Much further from work.  However, about that time I injured my back at work.  Workman's Comp. gave me several weeks paid leave.  The pain did eventually go away, but it was the start of some chronic back pain I still deal with, especially when stressed.  I decided to leave my job.  For one thing, it really was too far to commute from my new place.  And I was about to go visit my brother in Alabama for about a month.  I'd been frugal with my money, so I had enough to pay my bills through September, at least.  I'd get another job then.

   We called our apartment the United Nations and it was possibly the best transition to adulthood I could have had.

  Now Monique was not having it so easy in Minnesota.  They arrived and promptly moved in Blonde's parents.  The dad was rather nondescript.   but Monique's mother-n-law!  The woman' name was Gert.  She was overbearing, opinionated, and clearly in charge of the house and everyone in it.  Monique would tell me stories about living in Gert's house and I sometimes didn't believe her.  I mean, what woman has light salmon colored rugs in her halls and insists that no one wear shoes on them or have dirty feet?  Much later I visited Monique in Minnesota and briefly met Gert.  The salmon colored rugs were real, and I think Monique didn't tell me half the stories she could have.  My goodness!  That woman could have kept a therapist in clients for years.

   Monique was miserable.  After several months, with both of them working, she and Blonde were able to afford a cheap, basement apartment in St. Paul.  To Monique it seemed like heaven.  Monique was trying to get pregnant, but not having any luck.  She was also noticing that her husband was not acting the same way he had in CA.  More and more he was becoming a weaselly mamma's boy.  This did not bode well or her marriage.