2007 started normally enough. While the last two months or so of 2006 were a "staging area" for the major life changes I'd undertake over the next several years, 2007 was the year all of those changes would go into effect.
Alley returned to school in mid-January; I did indeed go with her. However, as I had not yet found an apartment or a job, this time we went to the hotel first -- this time, taking a good chunk of (but not all) of my belongings with me. The Budget Inn had weekly rates, which at the time were about $170 for the week. I set up two weeks with them and would use the hotel as my "base of operations," so to speak. Alley, in turn, was able to reclaim her old dorm room, but most nights she spent with me. She would get up in the mornings, go to school, then return to the hotel to pick me up and we'd have dinner at the school dining hall (occasionally springing for something different, like CiCi's Pizza or Wendy's or something like that), return to her dorm room where I would use the internet and apply for jobs, and then return to the hotel for the night. If she had a large amount of homework to do, or if she had an early class or exam, we'd work around those things to get as much time with one another as possible.
The winter of early 2007 was brutally cold in St. Joseph. When I'd get a callback for a job interview or we went to go look at prospective apartments, we often were forced to brave the cold, ice, snow, and/or any other weather that the midwest wanted to throw at us. For example, the local Kmart (remember Kmart?) called me back and wanted to bring me in for a 7:30 PM interview one night, as that's when the hiring manager was in. I'd applied for a stocking/cashier job there. So, I got all dressed up in my interview uniform of the dress pants, shirt, tie, and gelled-back-and-tied hair, and we got an ice storm as we were driving that made us almost wreck the car not once, but several times. I got in there and let them know I was there for my interview, and they sent me back to the manager's office.
"Well, I see here that you're listed for this interview tonight, at this time," the manager said, "but I don't know why they called you in, because I don't have anything at all for you right now."
You've gotta be shitting me, right?
That experience summed up my job search experience in a nutshell, for the most part. I would have Alley pick up copies of the newspaper every day (they were free on campus) so that I could go through the classifieds like an old man in the 1900s -- I'd make a list of things to call about or apply for, only to find for half of them they were either filled/no longer available or they weren't at all what they said they would be.
Our apartment search didn't fare much better. We'd looked at probably five or six places, all with glaring flaws or that ended up being too expensive, or wouldn't accept our housing application because I didn't have a job yet and Alley was a full-time student (despite the fact that I had over $5,000 in the bank and could show them that). We applied for foodstamps and housing assistance and were shot down on that as well, even once I did have a job (I'm getting there) because I made $200 a month too much to qualify.
I was getting depressed more and more by the day as I began spiraling down further. I had uprooted my entire life and had made countless sacrifices to be with Alley, and everything I'd tried to accomplish was failing miserably. Because of that, we were fighting a lot more than we ever had up to that point. We were both miserable. Nothing was happening the way it was supposed to. I debated internally about just giving up, moving back down to Kansas City and packing everything back up, and finding a way back home to West Virginia -- I couldn't keep doing this bleeding money with nothing to show for it thing.
By late February, by which time I'd been living in the hotel for about seven weeks -- effectively homeless -- on a whim I put in an application at the grocery store across the street from the hotel and tacked on a copy of my resume. It wasn't a great grocery store; in fact, it looked and felt rather low-rent whenever I'd been inside it, but I had grocery experience and nobody else had wanted to hire me -- and while I didn't want to work grocery retail again, I needed a job that would allow me to slowly replenish my bank account and I desperately needed to say, on apartment applications and the like, that I was gainfully employed in what appeared to be a stable job.
I got a callback within two days asking when I could come in for a sit-down interview.
"Right now if you'd like," I told the store manager on the phone. "I live literally across the street and can be ready and over there in half an hour at most."
They'd called my references in the interim -- both my boss in the lab as well as the ladies at the grocery store back home, who both told the store something along the lines of "yes, hire this man immediately." Once I got there, I had a brief chat with the manager, who hired me on the spot and gave me my list of shifts I'd be working.
It was that job, and my experiences in it, that would inspire me to start this very blog (in its original form, the 1.0) six months later -- in order to document the weird shit that happened while I worked there. But that's neither here nor there. Let's continue.
So, I had a job. That job would allow me to, shall we say, begin treading water with my finances. While I was still in the hotel, the weekly paychecks the grocery store gave me covered my weekly rates of staying there. Aside from food and cigarettes and the like, I was mostly breaking even -- I wasn't replenishing my lost funds, but I wasn't continually draining them, either. With some careful planning here and there, I could stop the money-bleeding.
Of course, the job at the grocery store wasn't glamorous, but it was indeed gainful employment and I was grateful to have it. It was a 24-hour grocery store at the time; I started there working some day and afternoon shifts. My schedule was pretty wide open, as I lived in the hotel across the street, so I could basically come and go as necessary and made the scheduling folks aware of that. So, some days I'd work 10-7 or 11-9, some days I'd work 2-11, some days I'd work 3-12, some days I'd work 7-4, etc. In the beginning there was no rhyme or reason to the actual working schedule, it was just whenever they expected they'd need the most help on the registers.
By the end of my second day, having worked register before, I was running it by myself with no further training necessary and only the occasional question I'd have to ask regarding a particular type of transaction or item. The management was stunned, but apparently they were easily impressed, as it was not a hard job to perform. At the time, most cash register systems were pretty self-explanatory across the board, and if you'd used one of them, you'd pretty much used them all. Sure, there were codes for different things that you'd have to memorize, but when you serviced 500 customers a day on the busy days, you had no choice but to pick them up fast. I was a quick study. I soon became the fastest, most reliable checker they had, with my tills accurate to the cent every day. As stupid as it sounds looking back on it now, I took great pride in my work.
At the grocery store back home in West Virginia, I had slowly become a sort of de facto shift manager by the end of my tenure there. I didn't have the title, the pay, or the power, but the ladies there knew I was trustworthy and knew that they could leave me in charge when necessary and that nothing would explode -- and if it did, I could handle it. This wasn't something that could happen at this new store, as it was much larger and had many different departments, all with their own department managers and sub-managers. I "reported to" the store manager and the assistant store manager, both ladies in their late forties at the time, as well as the office manager who ran the locked office, the cash room, the safe, etc. The store probably had a pool of about twenty-five checkers -- ahem, cash register jockeys (there's a reference for all of you old-school readers) for day and evening shifts, and 1-3 they'd have on the night shift, who stocked the aisles as well as ran register. This does not count the close to ten support staff in management positions over various departments. Not a huge number by any means, but much more than the store back home, which generally had five to seven people on shift at any given time. Total.
During this time as well, I discovered that -- adding insult to the injury of already being functionally homeless as well as working grocery retail again -- I had become a victim of identity theft, and someone had racked up numerous charges on my debit card from, I believe, Singapore. They used the money to purchase online gold for some online game, and I had to file five separate disputes with my bank in West Virginia for them to investigate, determine that the charges were indeed fraudulent, get the money refunded to me, and have them mail me a new debit card. This process took the better part of a month, simply because it was much harder to do back in 2007 than it is now. It also basically locked me away from any access to my money for awhile, since at the time I did not have credit cards and I only carried cash when I had to. I had my checkbook, and that was about it.
Because I was working weird shifts -- some mornings, some afternoons, some evenings, etc -- I only got to sleep and see Alley when I wasn't at work and/or when she wasn't in class. It sometimes felt like we were ships passing one another in the night. When we did see one another it was generally for meals, for shopping (as necessary) and for looking at apartments. By the end of March, this was getting tiresome and I was really needing some downtime, preferably in a place of my own that wasn't a one-room, one-bed hotel room. We knew students in town would be pulling out of their apartments soon once the semester ended, and kept scanning the listings for anything affordable.
It was around this time where we got a callback for a place on the outskirts of the downtown area: $300 a month, utilities covered, a 3rd floor studio with a decent sized kitchen and living area, and a tub shower. We went to see it.
"It's not the greatest place in the world," the building manager -- who lived on the bottom floor -- told us when we arrived. "We do have the occasional mouse, we do have roaches, but if you take care of your place and you take out your trash every day so they don't have anywhere to go, then you probably won't have to worry about them."
Note: this was a lie.
"$300 a month, $300 deposit, move in anytime," he continued. "Rent gets paid to us, on a month-to-month basis with 30 days' notice when you want to move out, we'll give you receipts for it and the like, pets are fine, you can repaint or recarpet or whatever you'd like -- the place is yours to do what you want with."
We should've known this deal was too good to be true (at least partially, anyway), but I needed a place, and it was less than half what I was paying per month to live in the hotel, so we took him up on the deal and began moving in within a day or two.
The apartment was the top floor of an old run-down house that had been converted into six units; we were unit #5. Across the hall from us was a long-haul trucker motorcycle enthusiast who was in #6, a small family was in #3, #4 had a single girl who was rarely ever home (but when she was, there were screaming fights for which the cops were called more than once), #2 was a middle-aged lady with some sort of personality disorder (we never knew what it was, but she was super-weird), and #1 was the building manager and his wife, with their five cats. The building had no air conditioning whatsoever -- we eventually bought a window unit as we got into the hot summer months, as we were on the top floor and heat rises; it became broiling hot in that apartment without it and without fans. The building was also a good distance away from my job and even farther away from Alley's campus, so the location wasn't exactly convenient, but it was a place to live. At the time, it was a good idea. At the time, it would allow us some breathing space. However, the distance from my grocery store necessitated that I needed a set schedule of some sort for work, as I couldn't work erratic shifts anymore -- without my own car, I'd need to rely on Alley for transportation to and from work, and that transportation was only possible if she wasn't in class. The other option was the bus, which made me take at least two transfers every time I rode it to or from work, and if I missed the transfer or couldn't catch the bus on time, well, I was boned.
My store manager offered me a stocking position on the overnight crew at the store; 9-6 or 10-7, depending on the night, three or four nights a week, sometimes in a row, sometimes not. Some weekends, some holidays as necessary, with the occasional 3-12 or 2-11 thrown/tacked on as an extra shift depending on anticipated need for the week (such as if a holiday or a big sale was planned). It always varied slightly by the week and would change based on the available help -- the grocery store, it seemed, was a revolving door for employment. We'd hire two or three new folks, and of those folks maybe one of them would stick around for a few weeks or months before they quit. However, the overnight crew was fairly stable: two managers (one each for different nights of the week, and then a night they'd overlap), and 2-3 stockers/checkers since the store was 24/7.
Anyway, I figured that was convenient enough for the moment, so I took the overnight position. It was my first overnight job anywhere, and I started it a week or so after I moved into the apartment.
Nights in that place was a completely different animal than days; the crazies in St. Joseph -- never seen during the day in that little shithole of a town -- came out to play. And they weren't wearing kid gloves, either. I can't tell you how many people our overnight shift lead chased down and tackled because they were stealing bottles of alcohol or other things from that store. I can't tell you how many meth-heads I had to sell copper scrubbers to because they used them as filters to smoke meth or crack (or something like that, I really haven't a clue as I'm not a drug user). We dealt with robbery attempts not once but twice while I was on shift, one of my regular customers was mugged in the parking lot on Easter morning and I got to identify the perp and provide a deposition to the court for it (that was fun), our assistant manager would pin shoplifters to the floor with their arms behind their backs and sit on them to hold them in place until the police arrived, etc. The people who shopped in that place after dark were the dregs of society, man. And that town was a veritable cesspool full of people like that.
We did have the good customers though, the regulars who came in on nights -- Greg and Sandy, Craig and Alan, and a few others -- who made working in that store tolerable and worth doing. Overnight shift was almost never busy when it came to customer flow, but they were the ones we liked and who liked our team. I kept in contact with a few of them for a while long after I moved out of St. Joseph, because in the time I worked in that store they became friends. And in Missouri, I really didn't have many friends. I didn't get along incredibly well with most of Alley's friends, even the small number of them she'd made in college, and I was rather okay with that -- Alley and I lived our own lives together on the outskirts of most normal social interaction and were happy with that.
By the end of spring and moving into the summer, we'd sort of gotten accustomed to our own groove of things. The store was the store, and it was a job. The apartment was an apartment, and it was somewhere to live. Alley's schooling was just that -- normal college. People treated us like an old married couple because we acted like one. The team at the store referred to Alley as my wife because they thought we'd been married for some time based on the interactions they'd seen between us. On my days off we'd go run errands or see movies or venture down to visit her family or what-have-you, it was the most "into a groove" we would ever be for our entire relationship, probably.
I will take a second here to pause and step back from the story for a moment to describe our relationship, because it was unique -- Alley did not want to get married, at least not anytime soon, and she 100% did not want to have children. Ever. She'd gotten on birth control many months before I moved out to the midwest, and while we'd talked about marriage as an eventuality, her thoughts were along the lines of "maybe, like ten years from now" sort of reasoning. Meanwhile, all I'd wanted in my adult life out of a stable relationship was to get married and have children -- start that nuclear family, be a father, do the whole Mad Men-style life of have a nice house, two cars, two kids, and a job that I worked early in the morning until nightfall and came home to a freshly cooked dinner, etc. Perhaps it was naive or old-fashioned (and/or somewhat sexist, based on societal norms and social pressure to do so in the media and otherwise) but that was what I'd always wanted.
Alley wasn't opposed to the housewife lifestyle, but she didn't want the kids and she didn't want the marriage. I had to accept that rather quickly and after some discussion well before I decided to move to the midwest to be with her, and I'd made peace with it. It was what it was; neither of us expected our relationship to last forever, I don't think, but we had committed to one another for the long haul, however long that haul would end up being. And, at the time, we were happy. At least, we seemed to be, most of the time. We were both fairly laid back and even keel, if nothing else.
So, when Alley decided she wanted to look into getting a cat, I wasn't necessarily opposed to it off the bat. I wasn't a cat person, per se, but I could be open to the idea. I'd had a cat when I was a child, and my parents had adopted their first stray who was an indoor/outdoor cat by the time I'd moved out of the house, so it's not like I wasn't used to having cats around -- but I was primarily a dog person, I'd had a few of them over the years, and Alley's parents had three (one of which was actually Alley's dog). But, a cat was a commitment, it was a lifetime commitment for the lifetime of the animal, and while not as much responsibility as a dog, a cat was still indeed responsibility, especially if we were to get a kitten.
Our building managers downstairs had a cross-eyed Himalayan they'd picked up from someone at some point, and she didn't get along well with the other cats they had. Her name was Lily, and she was probably three of four years old at the time. The building managers offered her to us, as a trial thing, to see if she would fit in better with us. So, we decided to try it out.
Lily was sweet, but dumb. She got along well with me; she was a lap kitty to her core, and she loved attention and just being around people who cared without having to constantly worry about being under attack from other cats. She and Alley did not get along at all, and when she bit Alley in the face on day two, that was the end of our tenure with Lily. We returned her to the building managers, who soon found her another home someplace else.
I thought that would be the end of the cat discussion -- and it was, for a while.
A few weeks later, they stopped Alley on the way in from school, and told her to call me downstairs because they had some news to share. When I came down, they relayed to us that the quiet lady in the apartment below us -- who had only moved in a month or two before -- abruptly told them she was moving out and leaving the state, with no notice and little warning, and was already gone. She'd left the apartment a mess but with a lot of furniture and small appliances, canned goods and decor/knick-knacks that was up for the taking before the building's owner would clean it out and ready it for a new tenant, and had left behind one other very important thing that they thought we'd be interested in -- a very, very young black kitten, named Petey.
"He knows his name, but he's sort of shy," they said. "And he's really tiny; he was taken away from his mother too soon, probably. But go on, go ahead and call him."
We did, and a softball-sized ball of black fur bounded down the hallway, jumped up onto the arm of the chair I was sitting in, and stared into my face with two bright little blue-green eyes. I could hold my palm upright and he could fit his entire body onto it, staring at us, wanting attention. He maybe weighed two pounds, if that. He was a very cute little thing.
"This lady just left this little guy behind?" I asked. I couldn't believe it.
"Yep. Just up and left, locked him in the apartment. Didn't say anything about it."
"We'll take him," I said, my eyes never leaving Petey's gaze.
Of course, the job at the grocery store wasn't glamorous, but it was indeed gainful employment and I was grateful to have it. It was a 24-hour grocery store at the time; I started there working some day and afternoon shifts. My schedule was pretty wide open, as I lived in the hotel across the street, so I could basically come and go as necessary and made the scheduling folks aware of that. So, some days I'd work 10-7 or 11-9, some days I'd work 2-11, some days I'd work 3-12, some days I'd work 7-4, etc. In the beginning there was no rhyme or reason to the actual working schedule, it was just whenever they expected they'd need the most help on the registers.
By the end of my second day, having worked register before, I was running it by myself with no further training necessary and only the occasional question I'd have to ask regarding a particular type of transaction or item. The management was stunned, but apparently they were easily impressed, as it was not a hard job to perform. At the time, most cash register systems were pretty self-explanatory across the board, and if you'd used one of them, you'd pretty much used them all. Sure, there were codes for different things that you'd have to memorize, but when you serviced 500 customers a day on the busy days, you had no choice but to pick them up fast. I was a quick study. I soon became the fastest, most reliable checker they had, with my tills accurate to the cent every day. As stupid as it sounds looking back on it now, I took great pride in my work.
At the grocery store back home in West Virginia, I had slowly become a sort of de facto shift manager by the end of my tenure there. I didn't have the title, the pay, or the power, but the ladies there knew I was trustworthy and knew that they could leave me in charge when necessary and that nothing would explode -- and if it did, I could handle it. This wasn't something that could happen at this new store, as it was much larger and had many different departments, all with their own department managers and sub-managers. I "reported to" the store manager and the assistant store manager, both ladies in their late forties at the time, as well as the office manager who ran the locked office, the cash room, the safe, etc. The store probably had a pool of about twenty-five checkers -- ahem, cash register jockeys (there's a reference for all of you old-school readers) for day and evening shifts, and 1-3 they'd have on the night shift, who stocked the aisles as well as ran register. This does not count the close to ten support staff in management positions over various departments. Not a huge number by any means, but much more than the store back home, which generally had five to seven people on shift at any given time. Total.
During this time as well, I discovered that -- adding insult to the injury of already being functionally homeless as well as working grocery retail again -- I had become a victim of identity theft, and someone had racked up numerous charges on my debit card from, I believe, Singapore. They used the money to purchase online gold for some online game, and I had to file five separate disputes with my bank in West Virginia for them to investigate, determine that the charges were indeed fraudulent, get the money refunded to me, and have them mail me a new debit card. This process took the better part of a month, simply because it was much harder to do back in 2007 than it is now. It also basically locked me away from any access to my money for awhile, since at the time I did not have credit cards and I only carried cash when I had to. I had my checkbook, and that was about it.
Because I was working weird shifts -- some mornings, some afternoons, some evenings, etc -- I only got to sleep and see Alley when I wasn't at work and/or when she wasn't in class. It sometimes felt like we were ships passing one another in the night. When we did see one another it was generally for meals, for shopping (as necessary) and for looking at apartments. By the end of March, this was getting tiresome and I was really needing some downtime, preferably in a place of my own that wasn't a one-room, one-bed hotel room. We knew students in town would be pulling out of their apartments soon once the semester ended, and kept scanning the listings for anything affordable.
It was around this time where we got a callback for a place on the outskirts of the downtown area: $300 a month, utilities covered, a 3rd floor studio with a decent sized kitchen and living area, and a tub shower. We went to see it.
"It's not the greatest place in the world," the building manager -- who lived on the bottom floor -- told us when we arrived. "We do have the occasional mouse, we do have roaches, but if you take care of your place and you take out your trash every day so they don't have anywhere to go, then you probably won't have to worry about them."
Note: this was a lie.
"$300 a month, $300 deposit, move in anytime," he continued. "Rent gets paid to us, on a month-to-month basis with 30 days' notice when you want to move out, we'll give you receipts for it and the like, pets are fine, you can repaint or recarpet or whatever you'd like -- the place is yours to do what you want with."
We should've known this deal was too good to be true (at least partially, anyway), but I needed a place, and it was less than half what I was paying per month to live in the hotel, so we took him up on the deal and began moving in within a day or two.
The apartment was the top floor of an old run-down house that had been converted into six units; we were unit #5. Across the hall from us was a long-haul trucker motorcycle enthusiast who was in #6, a small family was in #3, #4 had a single girl who was rarely ever home (but when she was, there were screaming fights for which the cops were called more than once), #2 was a middle-aged lady with some sort of personality disorder (we never knew what it was, but she was super-weird), and #1 was the building manager and his wife, with their five cats. The building had no air conditioning whatsoever -- we eventually bought a window unit as we got into the hot summer months, as we were on the top floor and heat rises; it became broiling hot in that apartment without it and without fans. The building was also a good distance away from my job and even farther away from Alley's campus, so the location wasn't exactly convenient, but it was a place to live. At the time, it was a good idea. At the time, it would allow us some breathing space. However, the distance from my grocery store necessitated that I needed a set schedule of some sort for work, as I couldn't work erratic shifts anymore -- without my own car, I'd need to rely on Alley for transportation to and from work, and that transportation was only possible if she wasn't in class. The other option was the bus, which made me take at least two transfers every time I rode it to or from work, and if I missed the transfer or couldn't catch the bus on time, well, I was boned.
My store manager offered me a stocking position on the overnight crew at the store; 9-6 or 10-7, depending on the night, three or four nights a week, sometimes in a row, sometimes not. Some weekends, some holidays as necessary, with the occasional 3-12 or 2-11 thrown/tacked on as an extra shift depending on anticipated need for the week (such as if a holiday or a big sale was planned). It always varied slightly by the week and would change based on the available help -- the grocery store, it seemed, was a revolving door for employment. We'd hire two or three new folks, and of those folks maybe one of them would stick around for a few weeks or months before they quit. However, the overnight crew was fairly stable: two managers (one each for different nights of the week, and then a night they'd overlap), and 2-3 stockers/checkers since the store was 24/7.
Anyway, I figured that was convenient enough for the moment, so I took the overnight position. It was my first overnight job anywhere, and I started it a week or so after I moved into the apartment.
Nights in that place was a completely different animal than days; the crazies in St. Joseph -- never seen during the day in that little shithole of a town -- came out to play. And they weren't wearing kid gloves, either. I can't tell you how many people our overnight shift lead chased down and tackled because they were stealing bottles of alcohol or other things from that store. I can't tell you how many meth-heads I had to sell copper scrubbers to because they used them as filters to smoke meth or crack (or something like that, I really haven't a clue as I'm not a drug user). We dealt with robbery attempts not once but twice while I was on shift, one of my regular customers was mugged in the parking lot on Easter morning and I got to identify the perp and provide a deposition to the court for it (that was fun), our assistant manager would pin shoplifters to the floor with their arms behind their backs and sit on them to hold them in place until the police arrived, etc. The people who shopped in that place after dark were the dregs of society, man. And that town was a veritable cesspool full of people like that.
We did have the good customers though, the regulars who came in on nights -- Greg and Sandy, Craig and Alan, and a few others -- who made working in that store tolerable and worth doing. Overnight shift was almost never busy when it came to customer flow, but they were the ones we liked and who liked our team. I kept in contact with a few of them for a while long after I moved out of St. Joseph, because in the time I worked in that store they became friends. And in Missouri, I really didn't have many friends. I didn't get along incredibly well with most of Alley's friends, even the small number of them she'd made in college, and I was rather okay with that -- Alley and I lived our own lives together on the outskirts of most normal social interaction and were happy with that.
By the end of spring and moving into the summer, we'd sort of gotten accustomed to our own groove of things. The store was the store, and it was a job. The apartment was an apartment, and it was somewhere to live. Alley's schooling was just that -- normal college. People treated us like an old married couple because we acted like one. The team at the store referred to Alley as my wife because they thought we'd been married for some time based on the interactions they'd seen between us. On my days off we'd go run errands or see movies or venture down to visit her family or what-have-you, it was the most "into a groove" we would ever be for our entire relationship, probably.
I will take a second here to pause and step back from the story for a moment to describe our relationship, because it was unique -- Alley did not want to get married, at least not anytime soon, and she 100% did not want to have children. Ever. She'd gotten on birth control many months before I moved out to the midwest, and while we'd talked about marriage as an eventuality, her thoughts were along the lines of "maybe, like ten years from now" sort of reasoning. Meanwhile, all I'd wanted in my adult life out of a stable relationship was to get married and have children -- start that nuclear family, be a father, do the whole Mad Men-style life of have a nice house, two cars, two kids, and a job that I worked early in the morning until nightfall and came home to a freshly cooked dinner, etc. Perhaps it was naive or old-fashioned (and/or somewhat sexist, based on societal norms and social pressure to do so in the media and otherwise) but that was what I'd always wanted.
Alley wasn't opposed to the housewife lifestyle, but she didn't want the kids and she didn't want the marriage. I had to accept that rather quickly and after some discussion well before I decided to move to the midwest to be with her, and I'd made peace with it. It was what it was; neither of us expected our relationship to last forever, I don't think, but we had committed to one another for the long haul, however long that haul would end up being. And, at the time, we were happy. At least, we seemed to be, most of the time. We were both fairly laid back and even keel, if nothing else.
So, when Alley decided she wanted to look into getting a cat, I wasn't necessarily opposed to it off the bat. I wasn't a cat person, per se, but I could be open to the idea. I'd had a cat when I was a child, and my parents had adopted their first stray who was an indoor/outdoor cat by the time I'd moved out of the house, so it's not like I wasn't used to having cats around -- but I was primarily a dog person, I'd had a few of them over the years, and Alley's parents had three (one of which was actually Alley's dog). But, a cat was a commitment, it was a lifetime commitment for the lifetime of the animal, and while not as much responsibility as a dog, a cat was still indeed responsibility, especially if we were to get a kitten.
Our building managers downstairs had a cross-eyed Himalayan they'd picked up from someone at some point, and she didn't get along well with the other cats they had. Her name was Lily, and she was probably three of four years old at the time. The building managers offered her to us, as a trial thing, to see if she would fit in better with us. So, we decided to try it out.
Lily was sweet, but dumb. She got along well with me; she was a lap kitty to her core, and she loved attention and just being around people who cared without having to constantly worry about being under attack from other cats. She and Alley did not get along at all, and when she bit Alley in the face on day two, that was the end of our tenure with Lily. We returned her to the building managers, who soon found her another home someplace else.
I thought that would be the end of the cat discussion -- and it was, for a while.
A few weeks later, they stopped Alley on the way in from school, and told her to call me downstairs because they had some news to share. When I came down, they relayed to us that the quiet lady in the apartment below us -- who had only moved in a month or two before -- abruptly told them she was moving out and leaving the state, with no notice and little warning, and was already gone. She'd left the apartment a mess but with a lot of furniture and small appliances, canned goods and decor/knick-knacks that was up for the taking before the building's owner would clean it out and ready it for a new tenant, and had left behind one other very important thing that they thought we'd be interested in -- a very, very young black kitten, named Petey.
"He knows his name, but he's sort of shy," they said. "And he's really tiny; he was taken away from his mother too soon, probably. But go on, go ahead and call him."
We did, and a softball-sized ball of black fur bounded down the hallway, jumped up onto the arm of the chair I was sitting in, and stared into my face with two bright little blue-green eyes. I could hold my palm upright and he could fit his entire body onto it, staring at us, wanting attention. He maybe weighed two pounds, if that. He was a very cute little thing.
"This lady just left this little guy behind?" I asked. I couldn't believe it.
"Yep. Just up and left, locked him in the apartment. Didn't say anything about it."
"We'll take him," I said, my eyes never leaving Petey's gaze.
June 1, 2007 -- a few days after we took him under our care.
Over time, as he got older, we dropped the Y from his name, and he became "Pete," and if we wanted to be formal about it or call him by his full name, we called him "Peter." Which was accurate, because he could be and frequently was a dick.
Keep in mind that I was working overnights at the time, and there was a rather reliable schedule that could be followed when it came to caring for an animal. On my working days, I'd sleep from about 9am to around 4 or 5pm, getting up usually before Alley got home from class/work (she worked in a computer lab on campus as a work-study sort of thing). I'd go to work about 9 or 10, Alley would spend the night at home doing homework or studying or watching TV or what-have-you, and I'd return the next morning no later than about 7:30 or so, 8 or 8:30 if it was a morning I had to take the bus. On my days off, as well as Alley's days off, our sleeping schedules varied, but I was usually up and awake during the daytime hours for most of the day, during which I would do the household chores, listen to podcasts or music, watch a DVD, etc. It wasn't completely ideal but we made it work; we got what time together we could get and when we couldn't, we each remained fairly independent of one another.
In adopting Pete, however, a lot of this changed. Suddenly we weren't just caring for ourselves anymore, we had a legit little rugrat to worry about. And Pete demanded care and attention, as he was a little black furball filled with boundless kitten energy and curiosity. He would spend the overnight hours running back and forth through the apartment, so said Alley, running up walls, getting on tables and on top of cabinets only to leap off dramatically, climbing the curtains, attacking your feet and legs when you walked by, and generally being a little shit. In the mornings, when I'd get home from work (after he'd slept a few hours in the night), he'd try to repeat the process. He was super-active, he wanted to tear ass around the house, he wanted to play constantly, and he hated when you were asleep and couldn't give him the attention he wanted.
I slept during the day and desperately needed to -- some nights at work, especially truck nights (when I'd stock three aisles or more) were quite tiring and draining, even when I was in my mid-twenties and had far more energy than I do now as I enter my late thirties this year. So, I found a very efficient and effective way of training Pete so he would know that when I/we were sleeping, it was time for him to calm the fuck down and sleep too -- I'd catch him and play with him for a bit in the morning, and when it was time for me to go to sleep, I'd hold him like a teddy bear in bed with me. He hated it, he'd struggle and whine and try to get away, but I'd hold him tight and would keep telling him it was time to go to sleep. After about half an hour, he'd slowly calm down and relax in my arms, and he would stop trying to get away -- and he would sleep as my teddy bear for a good chunk of the day. It only took a few weeks of doing this with him every day (or almost every day) before he was conditioned to know that when I went to bed, he needed to come join me and be my teddy bear. Soon, I didn't have to carry him to bed with me, all I had to do was call him and he'd come running to sleep in my arms. Not long after, he'd get accustomed to my sleeping timeframes and would act like something was wrong if I wasn't going to bed by a certain time every day, and would sometimes go to bed by himself if I didn't do it "on time."
Almost thirteen years later, and he is still conditioned to do this -- when I go to bed every morning after working my overnight shift now, he always follows me upstairs and curls up with me as my teddy bear, even if he changes positions or leaves the bed later. He will always do it if he's awake and knows I'm going to bed, regardless of time of day or night. And, sometimes, if I go to bed later than usual (or fall asleep downstairs on the couch or in the chair in my office) he'll put himself to bed, even now, taking his usual spot. He does it with Daisy too, on occasion -- but nowhere near as much as he does it with me.
Back in 2007, this created problems with Alley, as Pete was now conditioned to sleep during the daytime hours with me -- meaning all night he was a wide-awake little terror. On nights I was home, he was calmer, but he still had so much energy that watching over him and making sure he wasn't getting into things was running us ragged. For months I had bite and claw marks all over my hands and arms, because kitten teeth and claws are sharp and they use them to play.
By mid-summer, Alley's mother let it slip to her that she worked with someone who had a farm, and on that farm they had some kittens (e-i-e-i-o); said kittens would be going to the shelter if they couldn't find a home for them. They were barn cats, wild, didn't like people much, but their mother was a full blooded Russian Blue, a very-sought-after breed of cat, and the kittens carried many of those genetic markers as well. And Pete needed someone to play with and interact with in hopes that it would calm him down and even him out when we needed to sleep, work, or otherwise be out of the house. Alley agreed to go check out the kittens and maybe bring one home if she thought it would mesh well with Pete. I was okay with this plan, I guess. I mean, for the little hellion he was, Pete was relatively easy to take care of -- he wasn't picky with cat food, he was already litter box trained when we got him and had never had an accident, and having another cat to socialize with wouldn't be a bad thing. I wasn't opposed to having a two-cat household; even with how relatively small our apartment was, we had enough room.
"Sure," I said. "Go get another one if there's one you like."
When I got up the next afternoon, after Alley had returned home (I slept through it), there was a large refrigerator box in the middle of our living room, mostly open-top.
"So I guess you found a cat," I said.
"Go look," she said. "But be quiet and don't scare them."
"Them?"
I went to look. Inside the box were two little kittens, both of them barely larger than Pete was when we got him. One was white with grey markings, and the other was fully blue-grey -- carrying that Russian Blue gene to the hilt. Both of them looked scared as fuck.
"Maggie and Sadie," Alley said, proudly.
Maggie and Sadie were almost exactly a month younger than Pete, but we didn't know their exact dates of birth. We didn't know Pete's either, so we approximated based on how old Pete was when we got him. Ever since, we've celebrated Pete's birthday on April 25 and the girls' birthday on May 25. To this day, I'm not sure how accurate that is, but it works as a close enough approximation and gives us days to mark on the calendar.
The girls were indeed wild barn cats -- they didn't seem to like people much, they didn't like loud noises, they didn't like fast movement (or really any movement at all) and for the first day or two we had them, they did not leave their large refrigerator box. They had food and water on one side of the box, and had a small litter pan on the other side. We'd put a pillow and a small blanket or two in there as well so that they had somewhere soft to lay and sleep, and figured they'd warm up to us in time, when they were ready. They'd let us pick them up and make over them a bit, but they didn't necessarily like it, and they were too small to get out of the box themselves, or so we thought.
Pete was fascinated but also scared shitless as well. When we introduced him to them, they hissed and went after him, and he ran up the side of the box, up my shirt, and curled up around my shoulder as if he was asking me to be his protector. His intense curiosity, however, would not allow him to leave them alone, and after a few rather hairy encounters, they eventually allowed him to get into the box with them and socialize a little bit. He also made it very clear as quickly as he could that he alone was the alpha of the cat household, and that the girls needed to fall in line.
It took a week or so, but eventually all three cats ended up functioning as a familial unit and we were able to get rid of the box. The girls also warmed up to us rather quickly once they realized that we were the food-bringers and we were their protectors. Maggie ended up being Alley's cat more than mine; she bonded with her and didn't seem to want much to do with me. Sadie, on the other hand, became my shadow, and would follow me everywhere and spend every waking moment she could with me -- up to and including climbing up inside my bathrobe at night when I was on the computer or watching TV so that she could curl up and sleep inside it against my hip.
Summer 2007.
Today, Sadie is still very much my shadow and gets separation anxiety sometimes when I'm not around, but all three of them spend time with me and Daisy pretty equally.
So, stepping back again for a moment, for a while things were going pretty well. We had a stable household, stable jobs, three cats, a good, working car, and a strong relationship. It deeply troubles me that when things tend to be going well, however, something has to happen to fuck it all up. In this case, it was many somethings, all one after another.
Shortly after we'd gotten the girls, Alley had a fight with the building manager's wife about something stupid (I can't remember what it was, honestly) and went off on her. They had a few screaming matches, which I'm sure wasn't helped by the manager's wife's mental state from her ovarian cancer treatments -- she was old, and the drugs made her a little weak and loopy -- but she was always a little nutty anyhow. The treatments just exacerbated things. Anyway, this caused the two of them to have a falling-out and caused the building manager to accuse Alley of being strung out on some sort of drugs -- the one thing that the apartment building had a hardline policy against.
I found this laughable -- Alley was never the druggie type, and never would be. She was too smart for that, and we were (obviously) too poor for it. We were just people in our twenties trying to work, go to school, and survive. So I had to set the apartment manager straight on that and let him know that I wasn't a fan of those accusations, regardless of what had transpired between his wife and my girlfriend, and it needed to stop. We lived in the building the same as they did, and the only interaction any of us needed with one another was to see them once a month to hand them a rent check, or if there was a maintenance concern that needed to be handled.
Well, very soon, there was a maintenance concern that needed to be handled.
Over the spring and early summer of 2007, there had been a lot of rain and nasty storms with hail that had hit the region -- and, if you're from the area, you may recall the Greensburg tornado, that wiped that town off the map that year. While Greensburg was relatively far from St. Joseph, the area had seen no shortage of awful storms like that throughout the course of several months, and they had all taken a toll on the roof of our apartment building -- punching holes in it, apparently. Holes that nobody knew about. Holes that let in water and squirrels. Holes that let in water and squirrels directly above our apartment's ceiling, which (as you may recall) was the top floor of the building.
One night, I got a call at work from Alley, who declared there was water pouring through our ceiling in the middle of our living room, and that there was a large crack rapidly forming in the drywall the ceiling was made from. The next morning, a four-foot chunk of the ceiling fell in on us, exposing the insulation and rafters above it. Water continued to pour down through the roof directly into our apartment. The building manager tacked up plastic sheeting onto the studs in the rafters, and water continued to drip onto it, creating what looked like a big brown bubble filled with a puddle of dirty roof/attic water.
The next day, during continued rain, the ceiling of our closet collapsed. All that was in the closet was a few boxes of housewares and a few coats, which we quickly removed. Squirrels got into the closet and destroyed a number of small items before we'd had the chance to remove them, but had vacated it once they heard our presence in the apartment.
By this time we were well on the path to finding another place to live; we didn't have much choice. Thankfully, it was summer, so it's not like Alley had classes to worry about. To her credit, she busted her ass for a few days until she found us a company willing to show us an apartment in our price range, and got us an appointment with them. We went to the appointment and toured the apartment -- a studio that was just a little bit smaller than the place we were in at the time, but way better taken-care-of -- in another renovated Victorian house. They wanted $100 more per month, and we had to pay for our own electricity, but other than that, it was perfect. It was also a mile and a half in a straight line from point A to point B to the store, and about three miles closer to Alley's campus.
"Wonderful," I told the landlord as I handed our completed application to him. "When will we know if we are approved and get it?"
"You've already got it," he replied. "Rent is pro-rated for the end of the month, so I'll need $125 today, and $200 for the pet deposit."
We gladly paid, and went back to our old place to pack up our stuff and get the hell out. I told the building manager that we'd be leaving within two or three days, once we had everything packed, and he tried to fight with us about the deposit and 30 days' notice. I was prepared for this, and cited the Missouri Landlord-Tenant Law to him, which stated that if we could prove that the place had become unlivable due to negligence or structural issues, we could not only get all deposits and rents refunded in full, but could raise charges or other legal action against the building's management and/or owning company.
The owner of the building was one of the provosts at the university (and I'm sure didn't want any negative attention or press getting out that he was a fucking slumlord), and very hastily approved giving us two months' rent back to us as well as our full deposit, getting us a cashier's check within 24 hours. We got Alley's dad and his truck to move the big stuff, and just like that, we were out of that shithole, collapsing-in-on-us apartment, and into our new place.
As an addendum to this story, a few months later, the building manager came into the store and purchased some groceries, and he came through my register. He relayed to me that his wife had died of the cancer she'd been fighting off for several years, and that the building had been closed and condemned, with the remaining tenants forced to find somewhere else to live. He was living across town in a smaller place at that point, and had moved out before the building had been condemned. I offered my condolences for the loss of his wife, and wished him well; I had no real ill will towards him, and he went on his way. I never saw him again after that.
Most of the rest of 2007 passed without any major incidents or problems, but there were a few bumps in the road. We got the cats all fixed, so that they wouldn't start marking or having kittens of their own. Alley's Taurus finally died on her, and her parents helped her purchase a used Grand Am...that needed a new engine dropped into it after she'd had it for less than two months. I was finally settled into a good grove at work and had a pretty regular schedule. I discovered Amazon, and suddenly I could get so many things delivered right to my door. My computer blew its power supply, and I had to get an old Gateway from Alley's mother to use while I got a replacement. I got cable internet for the first time. I sold a bunch of my DVDs and CDs to Hastings, and got myself a portable DVD player, on which I could not only watch movies but listen to music/podcasts on data CDs. Alley went back to school in the fall to start her junior year. In August, to chronicle the events I experienced at the grocery store, I started this blog.
However, the end of the year would prove very difficult, and it was due to circumstances outside our control.
In early December, it had been a bit warmer than usual. We were hoping that we'd have a warm Christmas, because I was (personally) sick of the nut-numbing cold, and I was looking forward to enjoying a few days off in Kansas City over the holidays. On days that Alley had to be to class early, it was really hard for her to wake up before 6 to come get me at work, and even though our new place was only about a mile and a half from the store, the last thing I wanted to do in mid-winter, after working all night on my feet, was to walk that distance home in sometimes zero-degree temperatures with well-below-zero wind chills. I could take the bus, and sometimes I did, but if it was too cold to do so or I couldn't get a quick ride home from work from someone, either I was forced to walk or she was forced to get up to come get me, and there wasn't a lot I could do about that -- we weren't well-off enough for me to get a car, and I didn't have a Missouri license, so I couldn't take hers.
The end of the first week or so of December, we began getting a mix of sleet and snow, but it had started out as a cold rain. I hate cold rain; it soaks into everything and makes you colder than you would be if it were just straight snow. This rain very quickly turned to ice, and turned to heavy ice -- a particularly nasty ice storm that lasted for two days. Our power went out. In our apartment, while we had a gas stove, our water heater and actual heating was all electric. We were thrown into the dark ages. Once the power was out, without heat, the temperature in our apartment slowly began dropping. It reached 45 degrees inside and there was nothing we could do to raise the temperature any, we just had to stay warm huddled under blankets and wearing layers. The cats were so cold that they all slept on top of us. Power crews worked day and night to try to get stuff back online.
I called the store. The store had power (it was one of the only places around that did) and all employees were expected to come in and work their normal shifts. When I told the manager that I hadn't had power or hot water in two days and didn't even know whether the roads were clear enough for me to be able to make it in (since I had no way to check without power), I was informed that if I couldn't make it in, not to come back.
The store didn't have sick days or paid time off for anyone but management; if you didn't go in, you missed about $85 in pay for the day, and they'd factor in your absenteeism (ha!) when creating your schedule for the next week. There were no "excused absences" for personal hardship or situations like this; you were expendable, and someone else could always very easily be hired to take your place.
So, because I needed that job, we got in the car (unshowered, freezing cold, and half dead to the world) and Alley brought me in...where we had exactly three customers all night and I was the only checker/stocker from overnights to show up.
This is part of the reason that today, as I am management in my current job, I think one of my strongest management traits is compassion, empathy, and understanding for my employees, with a fair amount of leniency thrown in.
It took almost a full week to restore power. It took another four days after that for the cable company to send out a technician to resplice the lines that had been ripped off the side of the house to bring my internet back up -- and I had to call them to tell them "I literally see the cable hanging off the side of the house, torn off of the box -- all we need is for someone to come back out and put it all back together."
After that fiasco, I was done with winter. It sucked, I hated it, and I never looked forward to snow or ice with any sort of real excitement ever again. Every time since when the power has gone out when related to a winter storm, it has given me extreme anxiety, because I now have a fear of how long it will take to come back on.
I was not scheduled to work over Christmas, thankfully, but I was scheduled to work the overnight of the 26th. So, Alley and I packed our stuff into the car and drove down to Kansas City to spend Christmas with the family, with plans to return on the afternoon of the 26th so I could return to work as scheduled. We had a normal Christmas Eve dinner, and in the middle of the night (since Alley and I were up late watching a bunch of movies her father had rented) I made a turkey sandwich as a snack and went to bed.
When I woke up the next morning, I felt really strange, like something wasn't quite right. I barely made it to the bathroom before I vomited up the entire contents of my stomach....and then came the rumbling of the bowels. I...had food poisoning.
I spent the majority of the next eighteen hours on the toilet with my face in a plastic bucket, puking and shitting violently at the same time. Constantly. Unrelentingly. After each bout, I'd feel okay for twenty minutes or so, almost normal, before it would well back up again and I'd repeat the process. I had to keep myself well-hydrated with water and Gatorade, not only to give me something to throw up when I had to but because I needed to flush the demons out of my body, and to do that I needed liquids to wash them out.
I was so sick. I'd never been so sick before and have never been that sick since. I completely missed Christmas. I completely missed anything even vaguely pertaining to or involving Christmas. Words cannot adequately describe the terror, pain, nausea, and other related feelings I felt during this sickness. I truly wanted to die just so it could be over, and nothing was making it stop.
By the overnight hours of Christmas night, I had finally stopped vomiting. However, I hadn't eaten anything aside from water and Gatorade, and the diarrhea/cramps was not stopping. I just didn't have to vomit anymore while I was experiencing it. This was a somewhat moderate improvement. I felt so weak and so frail that I could barely move, and my legs wobbled when I walked. With the help of some Pepto Bismol, I was able to quiet (read: solidify) my gut enough to get some sleep.
Throughout this whole process, Alley -- to her credit -- took care of me the best she could. There wasn't a whole lot she could do, really, but check on me frequently and give me fluids. I felt like such a fuck-up. Here I was, in her family home, ruining Christmas. Given that the previous Christmas in St. Louis didn't exactly completely ingratiate me to the extended family, this made two in a row where I was sort of a problem or otherwise in the way. This time, at least, I was in the basement and could shuffle freely back and forth between the bathroom and the bedroom, so I didn't have to worry about disturbing people with my sickness.
I don't even remember what I got for Christmas that year. I truly don't.
By the morning of the 26th I was mostly okay, though I couldn't go far from the bathroom because of the continued diarrhea, which came back after the Pepto Bismol wore off. I could maybe go 20-35 minutes without needing to run to the toilet, but that was the maximum. Our home in St. Joseph was a little over an hour away. And when it needed to happen, there was no holding it in possible. At all. I had maybe 30 seconds to get to the bathroom before an explosion, so to speak. I had to work that night. Me and one other guy were the only two people scheduled for coverage. I didn't know if I could make it back up to St. Joseph without shitting my pants and shitting up the car first, something that I (obviously) did not want to do. I was helpless, I couldn't control it, and I could not stop it if it was coming. I considered just sitting with my pants around my ankles on top of an empty wash basin in the car for the drive home, and if it happened, it happened. We waited until the afternoon to see if I would get any better, but there wasn't much improvement. I couldn't miss work; we had to go.
I emptied my bowels one last time, and then ran to the car. We were on a biological timer and needed to peel rubber.
We did, in fact, make it back to our apartment in time, but with very little time to spare. It was quite difficult.
"This isn't getting any better, really," I told Alley, after I began vomiting again. "I need to go see a doctor, I have to see if I can get something to make this stop."
Alley had been a trooper throughout all of this, but she was severely sleep-deprived and was as sick of my being sick at this point as I was. I just wanted to get it all out of me, I wanted it to end. It now seemed as if the sickness was getting a second wind, and I began feeling as sick as I'd felt at the beginning. I had four hours before I had to be at work, and the clock was ticking.
We ended up driving up the street to the local urgent care as a last ditch option -- someone there had to be able to give me something that would stop this.
"It just has to run its course," the clearly overworked doctor there said.
"Okay," I said, "it's run its course for three days now. I need something to make it stop. I need to be able to stop shitting my guts out because I have to be at work in three hours or I lose my goddamn job."
"Fine," he said, exasperated. "I'll give you these two prescriptions; one is an anti-nausea and the other is an anti-diarrheal. Only take the anti-diarrheal when you absolutely need it or it can back you up for a long time."
"Thank you," I said, and went to the pharmacy next door to get the prescriptions filled. I took one of each immediately, and while the anti-nausea didn't do much aside from stop me from constantly vomiting, once the anti-diarrheal kicked in, the poop stopped. Finally.
I was, however, still a mess. I forced myself to take a hardcore, scrubdown shower at home, and I got ready for work. I was very pale, I had coldsweats that matted my hair to my head, and I was wobbly, but I was no longer shitting or vomiting everything out of me at every opportunity.
"Are you okay, man?" my coworker asked me when I arrived at work. "You look like you're strung out on heroin or something."
He was right, I did look like that.
"I'll live," I said. "I have horrific food poisoning. The drugs I'm on for it are keeping me from losing complete control of my bodily functions. I'm here because I'll get fired by [bosslady] if I don't show up. Let's do this."
The symptoms would come and go over the course of the next few days, but gradually waned as we approached the new year. Even by New Year's Day the sick wasn't completely gone. We'd tracked the culprit to, and you may have guessed this, the turkey sandwich I'd eaten on Christmas Eve -- the deli turkey I'd eaten on it had expired well over a month beforehand. It didn't taste any different, but it was the only thing I'd eaten that the rest of the family had not. Worse than that, on the afternoon we were going back home so I could get back to work, I made another sandwich with it because I was feeling at least a little better and needed to put something on my stomach -- which is what prompted the second wave.
I couldn't even look at deli turkey like that in the store again for well over a year because the mere thought of it made me instantly nauseated.
So there you have it, folks -- 2007. Easily one of the most eventful years of my life, and far from one of the best. But everything in it can be chalked up to learning experiences, I suppose.
I will be making one final post in this series to wrap up 2008 through the present, and then we'll close out this long-winded chronicle of my life.
