Melissaphobia (Part 7: Inconclusion)

What Melissa didn't know was that I never had any intention of calling the police. I didn't have to.

When the college who cut me the check finally mailed me a copy of said check with my forged signature, I'd called a police officer friend of mine from Arizona. He'd advised me that the easiest way to ensure her suffering without having to get my own hands dirty, was to tell the bank that had cashed the check that the signature was forged. Then, the bank would reimburse the college, who would cut me a new check. Melissa would be at the bank's mercy, not mine.

But since she didn't know that (I hadn't called the bank yet), I figured I'd try to get a thousand dollars off her anyway because I was a poor bastard and she was a manipulative, lying bitch with a dog that had pissed all over my fucken clothes. I may have been a little bitter.

She didn't give me the thousand dollars. I never saw her again. Never had the satisfaction of knowing whether she was arrested or had huge penalties from the bank. I'm not even sure she got any financial comeuppance.

What I do know is that she got evicted. Whatever she did with the thousand dollars she essentially stole from me, she didn't use it to pay rent. Also, someone informed her landlord that she had been subleasing part of the apartment to me. She hadn't told him that. He was under the impression that only one person lived there, so he'd given her a great deal on rent. So during the year that I was there, I was paying 75% of the rent and had no idea. Since she was the one who was in contact with the landlord (I've been landlordphobic ever since I moved out of Hippieville), I just assumed we had been paying the same amount. One anonymous call to the landlord changed that.

I met the landlord one night while I was working at The Corporate Restaurant. He didn't know what happened to my bookshelf, my books, my comics, or my computer (and I didn't ask about the porn) but my bedframe and a few of my clothes had shown up in the basement, where (he informed me) all of my stuff had been stored while I was away. No wonder "the storage people" had easy access to the house, they lived in the basement.

I've only been back to the house once since the day Becca and I drove my stuff to storage. It's not too far from where I ended up moving to, but the house has some serious bad juju for me. Even though I know that Melissa hasn't lived there in about a year now, I always get really angry when I drive by, or when the subway passes within sight of it. I have the incredible urge to sneak into the driveway and let the air out of all her tires. But her tires aren't there.

If she didn't end up doing any jail time (and she probably didn't, I don't think she had any prior problems with the police or with banks), I'm imagining she moved back in with her parents. Why they should be punished for her crimes, I don't know. Then again, it was their terrible breeding and/or parenting techniques that contributed to the bipolar sociopath she became.

Melissaphobia (Part 6: InHulkMode)

My first thought was that I could shatter her dog's spine by merely snapping my fingers together. So would end the suffering of Gussy and everyone else who knew her. But I rarely kill ants, there was no way I could kill her dog, even if it meant putting it out of its blissful misery. I debated burning her house down. Gas wasn't as expensive then, but I decided I'd want to wait around and see the flames. That would probably make me a suspect.

In the end, I decided that rather than killing her or having her killed, it would be much more entertaining to see her try and explain herself. I called her and told her I had the money for her (which I did) and that I wanted to meet her the following morning (a Tuesday) to pick up my stuff. She agreed. But on Tuesday morning she was nowhere to be found. On Wednesday she called with some lame ass excuse about a work emergency. She did data entry for a friend of her family's very small business. She spent most of her days playing with her dog in the office. Whatever. I made an appointment to meet her Thursday morning. She said the storage people would be dropping my stuff off at nine. She's meet me at the house then.

I got there at seven. Just in case. At eight she came out to walk Gussy and was surprised to see me there. "Oh, sorry." I said, "I thought you said to meet you at eight." She was definitely shaken, not stirred.

By nine-thirty, there was no storage truck.

"Hold on a second." she said, breaking the tense silence.

I assumed that she was going in to call the storage people or some sort of bodyguard. I was unprepared when she walked out of the house with a box of my books. "It looks like the storage people must have come last night after I went to sleep. Your stuff is in the back hallway."

The storage people had come in the middle of the night? "The storage people came in the middle of the night?" How did they get in? "Do they have keys?"

"I must have left the door unlocked." What-The-Fuck.

If I gave her any more of "the eye" it would have been two eyes. I went into my former home, and sure enough there were piles and garbage bags of my stuff in the back hallway. I was too flummoxed to do a complete inventory, but I did notice one thing missing right away. "Where are my bookshelves?"

"What bookshelves?"

"The bookshelves that held all my books. Two big ones. They were against the wall."

"I don't remember them. Maybe the storage people took them."

"The storage people stole my bookshelves but returned my TV and CD collection?" She shrugged. "Maybe they misplaced them when they were rummaging around in the dark last night when they dropped off my stuff, huh?"

No reply.

I called a friend of mine to pick me up in her truck, so I could put my stuff in real storage.

"Did you remember the receipt from the storage place?"

"Receipt?"

"Yea. You said that storage was costing you a bundle, and I said I'd repay you if you gave me the receipt."

"No. I'm friends with the guy who owns the storage place. He let me have it for free."

"Then why did you tell me it was costing you a bundle?"

"You misunderstood."

Whatever. I then began counting off the thousand dollars. I made to hand them to her. "Oh. One more thing. Do you remember cashing a check for a thousand dollars the day after I left?"

Blank stare.

"Because the bank and the people who wrote the check seem to believe that you've already been paid the rent for the three months that I was away."

"Oh. The check. I forgot about that. It wasn't the amount I was expecting, so I forgot it."

"It was a check for a thousand dollars, right?"

"Yea."

"I did pay you enough money before I left so that the balance of rent while I was gone was only $900, correct?"

"Yea."

"So..."

Blank stare.

"I'm not giving you this money."

"But I need it." She threw her hand in the air, "Why do you make things so difficult?" And walked to her car, where Gussy was shivering in the back seat. "If I don't have the money by tomorrow, I'm calling the police."

"Here's my phone. Call them now. I'd love to hear you explain to them why you forged my signature on a check, and stole my fucken mail, you psycho."

She drove off.

Becca and I moved my stuff into storage uneventfully. The storage facility was right next to work, and i had to work in an hour, so I spent that hour doing inventory.

Things that were missing:

My bookshelves
All of my books from authors K-Z
My bedframe
My DVD/VHS collection
My pornography
My old comic book collection
My two overcoats (one of them my grandfather's cashmere)
My computer (which didn't work, anyway)
A good chunk of my clothes

What was left of my clothes was covered in dried old dog piss. I called and left Melissa a message to call me back. She did not respond. I called about seven times that week. No response. So on the eighth day I left a different kind of message.

"Melissa, it's Insafemode. I've been very patient. If I don't hear from you in forty-eight hours, I'm calling the cops. You stole a great deal from me, and forged my signature on a check. If I don't get a thousand dollars in my hands by the end of the week, I'm having you arrested."

I then went to take a shower. By the time I was finished she had called my phone seven times but left no message.

original posts: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/30121.html, http://insafemode.livejournal.com/30689.html

Melissaphobia (Part 5: Checks And Unbalances)

"I don't live here anymore?" In my head I'm doing the five fingers of death (though Kill Bill 2 has not come out yet, I am intrinsically aware of its future existence).

"You said there'd be a check arriving for me in January. I never received it."

"But I called you in January, and February, and March, and you never mentioned it." I'm pulling out her eyeballs with my fingers, and squishing them beneath my shoes.

"I assumed you knew."

I was just sleep deprived enough to think this whole thing was my fault. I asked her what had happened to all my belongings, and she informed they were in storage. When I could pay her the three months of overdue rent, and the storage fees, she'd return my stuff.

It sounded fair.

I went to Corporate Restaurant and explained my predicament. I needed to work as often as possible in order to get my stuff back. Several of my coworkers offered me couches and spare beds until I found a new place to stay. My current debt to Melissa would be roughly thirteen hundred dollars, I expected to have to have about $1800 to put down on a new place. I was fucked in a way that brought me no pleasure. I was also pissed off.

I called the institution that was supposed to cut me the check. They "thought" they had sent it out to me in January. It would take a couple of days to track down, but they'd be in touch. I posted angry anti-Melissa comments in my other LJ. A certain former landlord's girlfriend (I think, I have no proof of who the anonymous fuckwad was) said of my homelessness and misfortune, "That's awesome. You deserve what you get."

I tried not to turn into InHulkMode.

I called Melissa and asked how much storage was costing her. She said she didn't know, but she'd get back to me. I called her back the next day to ask again, and received no answer. The following day, she called my cell phone asking why I was ignoring her repeated messages. I called my voice mail. I had six messages. None of them from Melissa.

The next week was my birthday. I worked eight hours, and then crashed on a coworker's couch. My mom called to ask me if I'd received my birthday money.

The following morning, I trekked over to Melissa's in search of my mail. In addition to the birthday mail (one from my mom, one from my dad, two sets of grandparents, and one aunt), I was waiting for a package from a friend in Pieceofshitdeserttown.

"You haven't gotten any mail here in months." Ms. Smiley Melissa Face informed me as she was putting her work cooler in her trunk.

"No mail?"

"None."

"You're telling my five people's birthday cards got lost in the mail?"

"I don't know what to tell you." She started to slam down her trunk.

"What's that?" I stopped the trunk with my hand. Inside was a package with my name on it.

"Oh, that. That arrived yesterday. I forgot." It was my package from Pieceofshitdeserttown. "Here."

"No, mail for me, huh?"

While there is no doubt in my mind that she did steal my birthday mail (a federal offense, mind you). I had no proof. She had not been stupid enough to forge my signature on those checks. A few days after the run in by her trunk, though, I got a call from the people who'd written me the $1000 check. They'd written it. They'd mailed it. And on January seventh, the day after I'd left on tour it had been signed over to and cashed by one Melissa F*n Bitchface.

Enter InHulkMode.

Melissaphobia (Part 4: Welcome Home)

It's 1:15 on a Sunday morning. After a two-day bus trip at the culmination of a three-month spoken word tour, I had decided to take a trip to my local venue for a surprise appearance. People were surprised. I was happy. I drank. I was tired. I was writing in short, choppy sentences.

My friend Joycee drove me home from the venue. I pulled my bags out of her trunk, walked up to my door, turned the key in the lock and...nothing. Fuck.

I rang the doorbell, but I had witnessed Melisa sleeping through me banging on her bedroom door when she had blocked our neighbor's driveway with her car. She probably slept through the sex she had with all The Midnight Men. They were probably just a bunch of crazed necrophiliacs (except the Coke guy, I'm sure he had no crazed fetishes).

I realized she had probably changed the locks due to a run in with one of The Midnight Men. Maybe somebody hit her, or maybe she had decided she was going to stick to only one married guy at a time.

When she hadn't answered the door to the apartment, and Gussy hadn't even barked at my knocking and doorbell ringing, I went around to the driveway to check for her car. It was there. While I was in the driveway, I realized that I could probably climb in through my window. I didn't remember whether I'd bothered to lock it. But the odds were that I hadn't. I hopped on to the ledge and ---

There was no furniture in my room. Bed? Gone. Bookcases? Gone. TV? Gone. Desk? Gone. Pile of films and porn? Gone. The closet was open and there were no clothes in it.

I decided that even if the window was unlocked, no good would come from climbing through it. Instead, I walked the couple of miles to Su's house and woke her up, explaining my unpleasant return. She thought I might have just been so tired that I mis-saw.

It was true that I didn't do an exhaustive visual search. There were no streetlights, no lights from inside the house.

At about five-thirty I walked back to the house where I had lived for the past year. Melissa was comingo ut of the house as I walked up to the porch.

"Hey, Insafemode." she beamed. "How was your trip?"

"It was fun. I got to see a part of the country I've never been to, amde enough money to live moderately comfortable, met some nice people. But when I got home the damnedest thing happened. My key wouldn't fit into the lock."

"Oh, yea. You don't live here anymore."

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/28964.html

Melissaphobia (Part 3: Signs and Post-Its)

There were enough signs that Melissa was crazy to keep two engravers, four painters and a troupe of municipal workers in business for the rest of their unnatural lives. First off there was the dog, there were the midnight men, there was the dog, there were the letters addressed to various friends (who I never met) and family members filled with phrases like "you're not being conducive to my needs as a human person" and "I think I'm going to need some space from your negative energy for a while", and, of course, the dog.

I first witnessed one of her nuclear meltdowns in June. I am the sort of person who is pretty well known for being a good listener and problem solver (so long as the problems aren't my own) but when someone tells me they don't want to talk about something, that's the end of the discussion. I'm not going to expend effort to hear about someone's problems, unless there's love, money, or fucking involved. I never did find out what Melissa's meltdown was in response to.

She started leaving me nasty notes. I'm someone who uses a fair amount of notepaper and writing journals but absolutely deplores the Post-It Note industry. Every Post-It Note I've ever seen involves passive aggressive or just downright aggressive language. When I lived in Burlington, my landlord used to leave me love notes such as "Where's the fucking rent?" and "I hate you. Get out of my house." To be fair to him, I was avoiding him because I couldn't afford rent. I understood his frustrations.

Melissa's frustrations were whacky. "I found this pen in the living room. BE MORE CAREFUL!!!!" It was a covered ball-point pen, left in a room that Gussy was forbidden to go into. Another note declared "Gussy did her business in my bedroom while I was gone. In the future PLEASE CLEAN UP when I'm not home." Uhhh...since when is it my business to go into someone else's room and check to see whether or not their spoiled rotten guinea pig impersonator shat on their floor?

In mid-July she announced that she was leaving for Florida for a while. This made me very happy. When she returned home, there were Midnight Men coming at all hours of the day. Fortunately, I was rarely home at all hours of the day. The one great thing about us being roommates was that (after we both quit Crapplebees) she worked days, and I worked nights. We rarely ever saw each other or had to have conversations. Which was good, as I rarely had anything nice to say to her.

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/28834.html

Melissaphobia (Part 2: The Midnight Men)

I don't sleep at night (have you noticed most of my posts are at 4 fricken AM?). My job requires me to be at work promptly at four in the afternoon, sometimes as late as six. I'm done at midnightish, and completely wired when I get home. My life has been like this for the majority of the last three years.

When I first moved in with Melissa, I had yet to buy my bed (best purchase ever), so I was sleeping on the living room couch. I'd invited my friend and coworker Quentin over to play cards. Nothing sleazy, just cards. This was before the madness that is spectator poker. This was merely Cribbage, a game I was once damn good at.

Around 12:15 I heard a key turning in the lock. Melissa was already home. I was already home. There were only two of us. Had Gussy gone outside on her own? If so, why?

A man in his early forties in desperate need of a shave and a shower walked in, blinked curiously at Quentin and I and continued on his way down the hall to Melissa's room. I was puzzled until I heard the sounds of someone trying to quietly fuck. Ahhhh, the boyfriend.

This happened several times through the course of the year that Melissa and I lived together. But it was never the same guy twice. I wondered whether she gave her one spare key out to people she met at bars or whether she always set the key in a plastic Easter egg, and hid the egg in a different location, perhaps putting out ads in magazines or The Internet with directions to where the egg was located. The ad would read: "Want to fuck a moderately attractive girl with dependency issues while being watched and barked at by a miniature dachshund? Go to Pope Hill Park, find the easter egg under the monkey bars in the playground, and follow the directions inside. Bring condoms and rawhide bones."

The only Midnight Man who ever caught my attention was The Coke guy.

I love me some Cherry Coke. One night at around three I went into the kitchen, surprised to find a moderately attractive man in boxers drinking the last of my Cherry Coke.

"This yours?" he asked.

"Yea."

"Sorry, I was really thirsty. I'll replace it tomorrow."

He didn't know what I knew. There was no tomorrow in our house for Midnight Men. Melissa was burying herself under a pile of anonymous men in a pathetic attempt to disguise the fact that nobody loved her enough to commit to her. Maybe we had more in common than I thought.

There was no Cherry Coke in the fridge the next day, but he had blocked up the toilet.

About a week later, I was in the middle of writing when the doorbell rang. There was a Coke truck outside. On the doorstep was Midnight Man with ten cases of Cherry Coke.

"Sorry bout the delay. I'm a little mad at Melissa, but I felt bad about taking the last of your Coke. She tells me you pretty much live off the stuff. Hope you enjoy this. Oh, and don't tell Melissa I said Hi."

I wanted to fuck him right there on the doorstep. Instead I said thank you and began stocking the refrigerator and the pantry.

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/28575.html

Melissaphobia (Part 1: Hell Hound)

A couple of years before I met her, Melissa got dumped hardcore by a boyfriend who must have woken up one morning and gone "Woah, I'm dating a total dependent bitch with no personality of her own, and she's not even that good looking."

She didn't take that well. She apparently spent months crying in bed, leaving only for work and the occasional Ben & Jerry's run (the one aspect of her personality I respected). To get her out of her slump, her grandfather bought her a new puppy: Gussy. Gussy was named after Melissa's dead grandmother. This was my first clue that she was somewhat unbalanced.

The first three months that Gussy was in Melissa's possession, the two did everything together, including sleeping in the same bed. Those of you who know anything about dogs know that sleeping with the dog on a regular basis is a big nono. You must establish that you are the alpha, or you run the risk of having your new companion turn into Frankenpuppy.

Even obedience school couldn't save Gussy from being a horrid little shitstain. Maybe it's because, as a miniature dachsund, she had a Napoleonic complex (sometimes known as a Devito complex). I imagine that it had more to do with Melissa's intimacy issues.

The first day I moved in, Melissa and I were talking in the hallway when Gussy wandered in from the kitchen and took a shit next to Melissa's foot. Melissa's response: "Gussy, I can't believe you're doing this right in front of me." Then, to me: "She usually waits until I'm in the other room before she does her business on the floor."

Ummm...she usually shits on the floor?

"I take her out for walks all the time" (this was true) "but for some reason she likes to do her business in the house." She did. Every night. Every day. Whenever Melissa was home, Gussy was pissing and shitting on the floor. I locked my bedroom door and always watched my feet when I walked around the house.

Melissa was forever stepping in piss puddles (which she referred to as widdle water) and saying "Gussy, bad dog." Then she would give her a treat.

The true victims of the frequent floods of widdle water were the Midnight Men. None of whom ever learned from previous experience to watch their feet when they entered the house. Unless of course none of the Midnight Men were repeat customers. I couldn't tell any of them apart. And when even a gay whore can't keep track of all the random dick that comes into the house to fuck his roommate, you know there's a problem.

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/27816.html