Christmas Tree for Indie Bands and Drunks

hen my Attorney and I first met, we quickly moved in together in a run down flea bitten apartment in Orlando that was in the process of being condemned. It was a long apartment, open all the way through, with a Murphy bed in the living room wall and a row of derelict garage apartments across the back lot.

It was surrounded by palm trees and rhododendrons and the garage apartments were populated by drunks and the semi-homeless. The neighborhood was surprisingly Bohemian and our street ran along Lake Eola to dead-end against an office building a block north of the Library. A passel of raccoons lived under our apartment and we were plagued by fleas. We had the oldest refrigerator in the world, a waterbed, and a couple of middle aged queens for neighbors in the adjoining apartment. We shared a common porch, festooned with wildly healthy plants on their side and a growing pile of newspapers on ours. Didn't matter. We were in love.

So around Christmas we decide to have a party. My Attorney didn't know a soul in town except her brother but I knew everybody and I invited them over for a party.

My Attorney hails from a semi-privileged existence in Chicago and has not always been privy to the ways and weirdnesses of poverty stricken musicians and writers which comprised 100 percent of my peer group and found herself a bit startled when, instead of eating the carefully arranged snack try, they began to surreptitiously throw tomato slices and salami cuts around the room when she wasn't looking. Worse, she had gotten a whole box of Andy's Mints from the office. Now, in the 50s, in Florida, light green was a very popular color, eclipsed only by Avocado 20 years later and our walls happened to have not been painted since 1953 and were the exact color of the green side of and Andy's Mint. As soon as the drunken artists discovered this, they began to lick the chocolate side and stick them to the walls. We couldn't see them and continued to find them, about once a week, until we were evicted (by the health department) a month or so later. These same apartments are now high priced condos going for something like 400 grand.

There was a huge tube of cookie dough on the counter because my Attorney was going to make cookies and got distracted and someone grabbed it and was passing it around until someone else discovered her cache of rubber gloves (my Attorney was then My Scientist). They immediately filled a glove with dough, shaped it like it was giving the bird, and stuck it in the freezer.

Around this time, a group of girls from my office and the acting girlfriends of my friend's band abducted my Attorney to go away from the stupid people at the party and buy booze. So for a while, my Attorney's guiding presence was not available and I lost control.

Losing control seemed to be a personality trait that came with the apartment for any worthy renter. I recall one night returning to our tropical abode in my super cool 66 Chevy Impala ragtop, to find a man lying face up in the middle of the drive. Now these garage apartments I mentioned had balconies facing the rear of our place and directly over this barely conscious man was the fixed quantity, always there in the evening when I was off to the newspaper, always screaming drunk, always with different homeless people, and always bellowing about something. This night, he had lost control par usuum and was reeling in his apartment, just the top of his head visible through the battered balcony doors, a hand with a bottle if Maddog occasionally popping into view, screaming, "Where's Reuben? I gave him my G*****M Army money to buy some likker ain't come back! REEUUUUUBEN!" Every time he'd yell Reuben, the guy on the ground would groan. I told Colleen to run in and call 911 but the guy managed to croak 'no cops'. I called the Fire Department instead.

Fixed Quantity's son came by for a week. There was a winner. He screamed even louder and evidently drank far more than his father and scared the crap out of us, pounding up onto our porch and screaming about the "queers" and the "lovebirds" and calling us all out. I had my hand firmly gripped on a claw hammer next to the waterbed just in case he decided to come in for a visit.

This was the delicious and colorful world my Attorney was weathering up until the Christmas party whereupon, I believe, she made the firm decision to vacate post haste and relodge us in more appropriate digs. Some place with a pool, less drunks, and cable.

My buddy Sab (Mark Sabatino--where are you?) who is by far one of the most generous and gracious humans I have ever had the pleasure of knowing, was also one of the funniest people I ever met and decided that since our party was happening sop close to Christmas, needed a tree. So he took a chair from our assemblage of bad chairs, drug it out into the lawn, stole some Christmas lights from the neighbors, and wrapped the chair in them. Somehow, this caught on and there was a clamoring rush to find things to "decorate" the tree with, ending up with a dead houseplant and our cake. My attorney happened to pull up with her abductors about the time Sab ignited the handful of Black Cats he'd stuck in the cake and she witnessed with growing horror the redecoration of our small yard with cake residue and plant matter. The Christmas lights and chair were unharmed.

She came into the house to find me sunk into a chair, a bug satisfied smile on my face, a bottle of wine in either hand, and a screaming mob of people dancing in the living room, throwing Andy's Mints and sandwich meat onto our ceiling. To my Attorney's great credit, she cracked up and dropped into my lap. I don't remember what else happened that night, except that I managed to slur "mehrchrim muss" into her ear before everything went black.