The Rock Bottom Quarantine Blog: The Beginning

Before all this craziness started, I had a rather unique job. I was a ghost tour guide in the French Quarter of New Orleans, which meant I got paid to talk to groups of strangers about ghosts (duh). 

That’s gone now. Which is sad. It was actually a pretty great job, better than I even knew at the time, in fact. I’ve always had love for my job but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that there would be many times over the years where I found myself wondering, “OK, when will my writing start selling so I can begin my real life?” Now that it’s gone, I miss it like crazy. Being able to perform for strangers and tell outrageous stories for tips in the French Quarter (and maybe afterwards flirt with some girls who are dazzled by your storytelling ability…). What a fucking life! 

But everything’s changed now. 

Except my bedroom of course… 

No joke, my bedroom is the one aspect of my normal everyday life that is completely the same as before. My bathroom is now a crumbling, leaky mess with no showerhead, and outside my room the house I rent is one with no roommates, and no furniture. So most nights are spent on my bed, drinking alone (let’s all just soak that image in and get real depressed for a sec… ok good!). 

Anyway, back when I was a ghost tour guide, the most common question I got from these strangers was whether I really believed in ghosts myself, which I always answered with nervous laughter and a snarky response (“I believe in tips, I can tell you that!”). So it’s kinda ironic how things worked out, where I’m not allowed to talk to strangers anymore, especially groups of them, because now I’m seeing ghosts everywhere these days. Ghosts of my ex-girlfriends, old bitter roommates, and disapproving family members. They live in this empty house with me, you see. They started appearing around the first days of the shutdown. In the beginning, I questioned their existence, but I stopped doing that a long time ago. Now I hold court with them, carry conversations with them over who was right, who was wrong, and who has always been an asshole. No matter what though, we always end up laughing at the end, because the way things worked out is undeniably comical, in a lonely and depressing kind of way. But still, a good story is a good story, and this storyteller needs to tell it to someone living (I promise, I won’t flirt with you afterwards). So while I lay in bed at 3 am with a beer in my hand, enjoying the ominous solitude of this skeletal husk of house, allow me to explain how this all came to be. 

I guess I better start way back at the beginning, a couple months before the whole lockdown thing started, back when COVID19 was simply known as the corona virus and not many people here knew anything about it except that it was “someone else’s problem” in “some other country”. 

That’s when I got my heart broken. And this was the worst kind of heartbreak. Not because the relationship ended in bad terms, but just the opposite. And it turns out a relationship ending on great terms is way worse than it ending on bad terms. Because if it ends on great terms it means it wasn’t due to a drying up of love or some horrible betrayal, but rather, circumstances outside your control. In this case, that meant a big opportunity in New York City for my SO. I cared for her deeply, but she knew from day one that I had no intention of moving up to the island of skyscrapers. I need my swamp and my cheap, magical, alcohol-induced, way of living… 

So that was that.

She moved up north for a big career, and I stayed down here and tried to pretend I was okay. We even kept in touch, texting and talking throughout the days like nothing had changed except the miles between us.

 And then time went on and she found someone else. And that’s when the real pain came. That’s when I kinda lost it. Like really lost it. Like my-heart-shattered-repeatedly-every-day-and -every-night kind of losing it. 

 How stupid is that, right? I knew it was bound to happen yet I still let it rip me up inside. 

Stupid, stupid, stupid. 

Anyway, going through this made me learn something about myself. And that’s that shockingly enough, I’m not really good at getting my heart broken. In fact, you could say I’m really, really bad at it. Just no skill at all. Now I’m not sure if there is any kind of person who is good at getting their heartbroken, but if I had to guess it would be scientists and genetic engineers (wait, isn’t that a type of scientist?), I just think that anyone who has a fondness for molecules would be undeterred by love pain. But that’s just a guess. 

Now as I see it there are three stages to heartbreak. The first is sheer misery. It’s during this time that I played a game I like to call “don’t be pathetic” where I tried to see how long I can go without being pathetic. I didn’t do well in this game, breaking down about once a week by acting… pathetic. For instance, at this one wedding I attended I caught the garter from the groom and then later texted my ex, telling her maybe this was a sign that we made a mistake…(yeah, I know). 

And then I completely and utterly failed the game when I found out a certain thing that happened that really tore me up. It isn’t what you’re thinking, no cheating or anything like that. It was just kind of this thing that really hurt but wasn’t exactly her fault either. What you might call a gray area. Anyway, this thing gnawed at me and drove me crazy. I mean honestly, it really twisted my mind up, and I couldn’t shake the belief that she did this thing just to hurt me even though I knew she wasn’t that kind of person at all. So at one point I had this habit of telling her that I think what happened was really uncool, and she would talk me down and explain she didn’t mean to hurt me, and I would accept that, until my mind got twisted again and I would reach out again and tell her how messed up that she did was, as if she hadn’t already explained herself. And this fun, healthy, cycle came to a disastrous end when I sent an ill-advised email on a certain Friday afternoon that started with the most pathetic opening of all time: 

“How could you…”

 Aaaaand, the best (and certainly, classiest) part of all of this was that the certain Friday I sent it happened to be Valentine’s Day… (yeah I know, I know…I know.).   

 So anyway, my ex and I completely stopped talking after that, and I languished for the rest of stage one all alone, being a miserable hermit for days on end, until I finally managed to crawl my way to stage two of heartbreak: riding it out. That’s when you do whatever you can to either improve yourself, distract yourself, or just let yourself wallow in misery for short periods of time until you feel ready for stage three. So I improved myself by buying some free weights and working on my biceps, jogging three miles a day, and changing to a healthier diet. No more heavy beers- only shitty, light, domestic beers- no microwave food, no red meat, only properly cooked white meat and vegetables. I distracted myself by taking long walks at three in the morning in a depressed haze, freaking out some of my neighbors, and occasionally wallowing in my depression with two day benders of boozing. I guess I should note that this is not a proud time of my life, but still very much improved from where I was in stage one. 

Now stage 3 is the best stage. For it is the moving on stage. Going on romantic dates, or terrible online dates, flirting shamelessly with ladies on your tour groups, and just generally getting your life back to normal. I tell ya, I was so very fucking close to this stage, so close!  Like maybe a day or two away at most. Maybe I was actually there! 

And then the fucking pandemic hits, and I feel myself sliiiiiiiiiiide way way back.

But wait, let’s back up a bit. Because I still have to explain what happened to my duplex and why it became a ghost town.   

About two weeks before the global pandemic, I woke up one morning to one ferocious hangover and two surprises. Surprise number one: I found my phone, an ancient galaxy which was the bane of my existence, with its devolved one hour battery life and its inability to function, soaking in a puddle of spilt beer on the floor of my room. When I first purchased the phone years ago the salesman bragged that it could survive being submerged in ten feet of water for five hours, but apparently half an inch of cheap domestic beer was a different beast altogether because my phone was now toast. To this day I have no idea if this electronic drowning had been accidental or a deliberate drunken act by me to destroy the last documentations of my failed relationship. In any case, a year’s worth of texting and pictures had vanished during the night, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. A mixture of sadness and relief, I suppose. 

The other surprise was not nearly as ambivalent for me, it was just plain bad news. You see, I belonged to a very prestigious facebook group chat that is known as… my roommate facebook group chat. This was a group chat dedicated to me and my roommates so we could message each other instead of actually talking. It was delightful. Usually. But not on this morning. For on this morning I got a message from my roommate F that looked something like this:

          Hello everyone. You should all know, last night around midnight, J and I 

Came home from the bar to find T (the upstairs neighbor) moving his 

Stuff out of his apartment and into a moving truck. We asked him what 

Was going on, and he told us that he had found out that M, (the landlady)

Had put the house on the market in secret, and T made an offer to buy.

When she turned him down, T decided to move out in secret, so come 

April 1st she’ll be out half of the rent. Bottom line, with the house on the market 

this means we all better start looking for places to live. 

Motherfucker, I thought to myself, I have to find a place to move now?! In the best of times they say that moving is the most stressful thing a person can do (although, honestly, I find that hard to believe, there are surely things more stressful, like… I don’t know… A GLOBAL FUCKING PANDEMIC) but to go through all that while dealing with my emotional bullshit, fuck that. Surely there was a path I could find that would allow me to stick solely to my daily dose of moping, drinking, and jogging. You know, the big three. 

 So I began to do some research and discovered that just because a house is put on the market doesn’t really mean anything. It could take time to sell the place, and considering M was asking for way too much, there was a good chance that the house won’t sell for months if not a year plus. At the roommate meeting that night, I shared this with everyone and we all agreed to hold off on moving for at least the time being. 

Great, I thought, catastrophe avoided, before returning to my regular schedule program of getting fit during the day and getting drunk at night. 

But then, three motherfucking days later, as I shuffled out of bed into the kitchen with a new hangover, ready to make a sad batch of scrambled eggs, F called out to me from the living room.

“Randy?” She said. “Have you been looking for a place to live?”

“No… “ I told her, confused, “I thought we all agreed to wait because of… everything I said about how long it will take for the house to sell.”

“Yeah right, but here’s the thing, we actually found a place, and we are all moving in together next week, without you. So you might want to really think about finding a place.” 

God. Fucking. Dammit. 

(if you’re wondering why I was not asked to join them to their new place, there are a number of good reasons for that, cough roommate war cough, but that’s a story for a different post down the line). 

Words could not express how much this recent development irritated me. I had found the perfect way to wiggle my way out of responsibility, and they had to ruin it.  

There is just no justice in this world. 

But being an adult means knowing that just because you don’t want to go through something doesn’t mean you don’t have to do it. And so I decided to look for a new place to live… after first ignoring the problem until the last possible minute. There were still a couple of weeks of March left, after all, I figured, plenty of time to do nothing before things get real serious.  

And then a few days passed and THE WHOLE WORLD CHANGES. Now I know we all went through that whole initial mindfuck of a disaster together, so I don’t have to pour over all that now, but as I watched the world on my laptop seem to devolve into chaos and fear, I just remember thinking: what the fuck am I going to do now?

In a matter of a single day, the craigslist offers for housing changed completely. Suddenly 99% of all the posts advertising rooms for rent disappeared, like people were now worried about strangers moving in with them, like they could catch some disease or something. 

Weird.

Even worse though, and creepier, were these new posts that popped up at damn near the same time that basically read:  

Room for rent. Should be $500/month but I’m a nice guy so I’m asking for nothing. Females only.

Yikes. We were barely out of stage one of the apocalypse and already men were trying to be as Mad Max pervy as possible (and as unhelpful as possible to a guy like me, who is not a woman). What the fuck am I going to do?? 

But in the middle of all this, a silver lining appeared. The mayor announced that all evictions would be paused for at least a month. As I read this, I felt the ends of a grinch-esque smile crawl up both sides of my cheeks, as I realized Mayor LaToya had just become my personal little Cindy Loo Who. 

This was the answer to all my problems! I could stay in this house alone, no one could bother me, I could be as miserable as I want, rowdy as I want, and no one could do a damn thing about it, not even my nasty landlady! 

It would be a bold move, but it felt like the right one. 

“You’re gonna do what?!” F responded when I told her my plans. “You can’t just stay here alone, can you afford to pay the whole rent?”

Hell no I can’t, I told her, but I can still pay my part. And what can the landlady do? No evictions anymore. A new day had risen!

Oh yes, my crisis had turned into an open rebellion against archaic ideals… like paying 100 percent of the rent. Perfect.

It was clear that my roommates thought my plan was rather odd, but they also knew I’m rather odd so they just kinda accepted it and continued with all the packing and moving that I had narrowly avoided. I guess this is the time of the lockdown that I’ll call the “patting myself on the back” part. 

But this was short lived.  

That night I laid in bed wondering if I could really get away with it. Would I really be able to live in this whole house (well the downstairs part of the duplex) alone and just pay my share of the rent? Considering that the upstairs unit was empty too, that meant M would be getting one sixth of the rent she was expecting for this month, and she didn’t even know it yet. Granted one sixth was better than nothing, which was what she’d be getting if I moved out, but still, could I really do this? Sure, the law might be on my side, but M could get pretty nasty, I’d seen it before (again, a story for another post). What if I entered quarantine alone in this house and never came out, never seen again. What if some Kenner redneck hired hand vanished me forever in some murky swamp…

I didn’t sleep well that night. 

Fast forward a few more days. It was evening and the whole world was filled with that great initial fear/excitement that can only come when a deadly virus has made its way to every corner of the globe. I had just returned from giving a haunted pub crawl- the last haunted pub crawl ever, at least for now, which will also be a story in another post-  and the grocery store, where I fought through the scared masses to get enough whiskey and canned food to survive whatever fate awaited us all. 

So when I arrived home after all that, all I wanted to do was take a hot shower and forget my troubles. I still hadn’t told M what my plan was, and that was filling me with incredible anxiety. Of course my plan was to wait til the last moment so she had little to no recourse but accept my paltry rent check.

(What can I say, I’m a classy guy).

Anyway, I went to turn on the shower in my small private bathroom, and the shower head started making this strange rattling noise and I noticed the head itself shaking. That shouldn’t be happening, I thought, before reaching a hand out to grab the head only to have it immediately fall to the floor. And when I say it came apart, I mean the far end of the thing, the part of it that retreats into the wall, just tore off. 

I don’t use this word much, but I tell you I was flabbergasted. Once the initial shock wore off, I inspected the decapitated shower head to find that the section where the head goes into the wall was literally corroded to a comical degree. Plus, now there was a horse piss-like stream pouring out of the hole.

Not knowing what else to do, I called my plumber, who was actually M’s go-to plumber as well as her cousin. He’s an interesting guy. Gave me weed sometimes, for free. And sometimes he just arrived really stoned and did a piss poor job fixing my toilet. Bit of a wild card, that one. He’s also a bit of a backstabber, but (again!) that’s a story for a different post. Anyway, Interesting guy.

So I called and begged him to come fix my shower before quarantine officially hits, and he told me he’s sick in bed with what he thinks is the virus and he probably can’t return to work for a very long time. He also told me he’s not surprised the shower head broke off because the pipes were really old in there and stuff like that was gonna happen all the time now. Then he coughed a rather dry sounding cough and hung up. 

 I stared back at the horse piss pour coming out the hole and tried to get a handle of the situation. I picked up the now detached shower head and walked out to the living room to show my roommates what just happened, thinking if nothing else I’d get some laughs from this. But I went out there only to find that no one’s home. Not only that but all the furniture’s gone too. That’s when I remembered they told me tonight was their last night of packing. They were officially gone for good. It happened. I was officially all alone. 

My Rebellion had begun…

(Now you might be wondering why none of the furniture was mine. Fair question. It’s another long story but the gist is that roommate J’s family had a great deal of nice furniture to share. Also just know this was also a major source of contention between me and my roommate J whenever we would squabble (which was often). He would love to throw in that jab of “you don’t even contribute anything to this place!” in the middle of an argument. I always took that as a cheap shot, but standing there now, seeing how empty the place was without my roommate’s stuff, I could see his point. It felt like I almost didn’t exist.)

As reality settled in, a dark cold went through me. The lights were off in the main area and moonlight squeaked in through the blinds, creating a shadowy shelter of foreboding. I noticed the gallon of jack daniels on the mantel, I had put it there myself just that morning as a joke after F had packed up the original mantel piece. But now, in all seriousness, I grabbed the gallon with a shaky hand. Now I was holding the decapitated showerhead in one hand and the gallon of whiskey in another, staring at the long shadows decorating this empty house, wondering what the fuck I had signed on for. I felt alone in every sense of the word.  

I looked out one of the windows to my desolate neighborhood. I felt as if I can almost see the fucking virus running up and down the night streets. 

That’s when I swore I could hear the voice of my ex calling out for me in long drawn out whispers from the bedroom, telling me she wanted me to text her. I knew this was not true, but dammit, it seemed so real. I screwed off the top of the whisky and began to drink. As I did I try to fully take in my current situation for what feels like the first time. 

I’m now living alone, in an empty house, with no furniture, no people, no showerhead, and the ghost of my ex seemed to be haunting me. The pain in my heart had returned eight fold. I have slid back, I realized. Not just back to stage two or stage one of heartbreak, but waaaaaay back into some unknown dimension of pandemics, ghosts and booze. 

Jesus, I realized. I’ve hit rock bottom. I’ve slid all the way back to hard granite, where there’s nothing but invisible germs haunting the outside. The spirits of my insecurities haunting the inside.

Fantastic.

 And I had at least six weeks left of this, at least…

My phone buzzed in my pocket causing me to drop the showerhead to the floor. It smacked against the worn hardwood below and the sound echoed against the bare walls. I took out my phone to find a new message from a dear friend. 

This shit is crazy! They are shutting everything down in the city! This is living history!

History, I thought ruefully, drinking again from the bottle. No, this is a bad idea, that’s what this is, and it will probably take me to bad places. I drink again from the bottle. Fuck it, I decided, no use being miserable right now, might as well try to enjoy my first night in this new bizarre life. I put on my earbuds and jam out to some of The Who’s best tracks, followed by Tupac’s , dancing my troubles away in the dark while one thought repeated in the back of my mind. 

Six more weeks of this, at least… six more weeks of this, at least…six more weeks of this..at least…

Oh, this would be an adventure alright. One hell of a rebellion, at rock bottom. 

Up Next: What happens when my landlady finds out she’s been bamboozled by the sneakiest ginger in midcity, come back in a few days to find out!