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2/27/2023 11:43 pm  #161


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom

PEPSI

Some girl is upstairs. In a hot shower for forty minutes. Long enough to blow up our water heater. Flood our basement. 

My girlfriend is letting her stay here a few days. Told me her bad life story. How she’s deep into some hard times. Living on an Indian reserve. Pooping in a bucket. Getting attacked by dogs.  

For a bit she sat on the floor and told us a story about how her father had driven around with a decapitated head in the trunk of his car.  

Then she went upstairs. Could hear her in the shower, but also on her phone. Talking and talking and maybe sitting on the toilet. Maybe not even in the shower. Just letting the water run and run. Until it got hot enough to explode our house. 

 

 

3/02/2023 1:19 am  #162


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom

THE BUS WE DESERVE 

It was supposed to be the right bus. Looked like the right bus. But I guess its number changed after I got on it. Became the wrong number. A very bad number that went somewhere I didn’t know. 

Suddenly on a narrow road. Overhung with tree branches. No leaves. Not sure where it was going. Just wanted to be home. 

Had only just been thinking how happy I was that I didn't have to walk the whole way there. Thankfully, still buses running. Couldn’t bear another moment standing in these awful socks. A whole day of them slipping down my ankles, under my feet. Having to dig my fingers into my shoes over and over. Finding them bunched up at the bottom and always pulling them back up. 

Kept pulling the chord but the bus wouldn’t stop. It kept driving further and further away from my home and left me outside a hospital. Could hear howling inside of it.  

Nothing to do but start walking. Too late for any more buses. Getting angrier and angrier. Got half way across a road and kicked off my shoes. Saw them fly in the air, then heard them drop into the gutter.  

Pulled off my socks. Threw them on the ground. Started swearing, barefoot. 

“You stupid fuck. You stupid fucking fuck. That stupid fucking stupid fuck of a bus. Sure, just get on that stupid fucking bus you stupid fuck” 

Someone was watching me. Could see them sitting in a car on the side of the road.  

I stopped screaming. 

Picked my socks back up and put them in my jacket pocket.  

Started looking for my shoes. Kept walking.

I would be closer to my home than I thought. 

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3/05/2023 2:25 pm  #163


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom

BRO GAMES 



At first, he’d be in the same room as them. Having to be looked around. My brother, always standing directly in front of whatever his parents wanted to see. Yelled at until he stepped sideways out of the way. Stepped right in front of whatever they were going to want to look at next. Getting shouted at again. Shouting his name over and over until he had shuffled right out of the room. Out into the hallway, where he would now awkwardly stand in the way of anyone who might eventually need to run to the bathroom. Stand in a doorway that someone wanted to close. Stand in his bedroom until someone yelled at him that it was time for bed and to turn out his light. 

The more they said his name, the smaller he got.  

He’d come with my mother when she picked me up for a weekend visit. In the backseat by himself. No one hearing whatever he was saying back there. My mother playing the radio so loud. Would never stop singing along, not even as he stuck his head up front and tried to ask her something. Maybe to turn it down a little. 

Before we left, my grandmother would talk to my mother on the porch for a bit. Me and my brother wouldn’t say anything. He would just look at the house like he’d never seen anything so big. Sometimes ask if he could go inside. Proud he didn’t have to ask where the bathrooms were anymore. Knew one was downstairs, and another one upstairs. But also that there was a third one he had never been able to find. Seemed to understand he never would. That it was in a part of my home he would never get to see. 

His eyes were very sad. Even as a child. 

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3/05/2023 3:15 pm  #164


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom



Because I was visiting, my mother bought me lunch. And because my sister was little more than a baby, she bought her lunch too. And since my mother was also hungry, she made sure to get herself something.  

But she said my brother was old enough to buy his own. I remember him standing there holding two quarters he found in his pocket. Not sure what that could get him. Not sure what he should tell the cashier who kept looking down at this eight-year-old kid, trying to do math in his head. 

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3/05/2023 4:32 pm  #165


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom

3 

Head squashed and made toothless by bar bouncers. Getting drunk and calling black ones names that would get him hit. Melting down crack and shooting it into his veins. Getting paranoid and thinking the bouncers had followed him home. Kept whispering on the phone that he kept hearing the sound of a shotgun being cocked outside. Not even sure who he was talking to. Injecting beer when he ran out of crack. Getting his gear clogged with cough syrup when he ran out of beer. 

He looked so much older than me now. Still only had fifty cents in his pockets. Sometimes would say that when he was a kid, he kept waiting for my grandmother to take him too. That it seemed like a better place to be. Wouldn’t understand until years later that because he had the wrong father this was never going to happen. Assumed my grandmother just didn’t want him like she had wanted me. 

“I only got to go inside if I had to piss. Then right back into mom’s car and back to my shitty house” 

He said he never saw my bedroom. Or my kitchen. Or even my father, who was always in there somewhere, but would have been hiding. Maybe ducked behind a couch. Trying not to be seen by anyone who could report back to my mother that he was inside. 

All my brother ever saw of my life were those two bathrooms. Said he remembered how our toilets were always really clean. That he’d wash his hands before he left since it seemed like we probably did that sort of thing here. That maybe this would make him good enough to be allowed to stay, like me.  

“You didn’t have a hope, kid”, I told this man, who still seemed as if he was holding onto some hope that something might eventually change.  

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3/07/2023 5:06 pm  #166


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom

4 

The condition of my mother ever doing anything with us was she would have to nap first. Nothing before a nap. And the condition of her napping, was to accept she might not get back up.  

Sometimes it would be as soon as we got to her home. Barely got in from the car. Barely sat on the couch. Sometimes before I could even ask her if we were going to do anything that day, she had to go lie down somewhere. 

She could sleep in a square of sunlight on the floor like a cat. Or in the corner of a room with a blanket over her head. Or in a chair with her eyes open. Or in her bedroom with the door closed and all of us knowing not to ever open it. Or in the backyard burning under the sun. Or on a dirty mattress in a basement, next to a towering pyramid of cat shit. 

You could shake her and she’d just wobble back and forth. Plug her nose and cover her mouth. Pick at her eyelids. Yell in her ears. Start kicking everything around her in hopes all that cat shit would tumble over onto its side and bury her.  

But she would just keep sleeping. Her lifeless presence accumulating in the house like a kind of heavy dust. Something that made it hard to do anything but sit around and wait for her to hopefully wake up. 

This only had to be every second weekend for me. I’d be back home soon enough with my grandmother. Would ask my brother what he did when I wasn’t here. Did anything ever happen? 

“I don't know? Usually just this” 

We were sitting on a carpet. In a room in the middle of the afternoon. Somehow dark, even though the curtains were drawn wide open and there were lamps on.  

I can still remember the feeling of her rug on my knees. Looking for something maybe under the couch to do. The sound of dust in the gears of the clock on the wall. How there wasn’t a pen or pencil in the whole house. Couldn’t draw or write or keep track of lost time. Nothing at all to do while she slept.  

When she finally got up, often too late to do anything else but fall back to sleep, I’d tell her there’d been ghosts all over the place while she’d slept. That it had been terribly exciting. Couldn’t even explain it properly. You had to be there to fully understand. 

She’d be angry that we’d let her miss such a thing. Me and my brother still on the same carpet. The one we’d been waiting on all day. A hole slowly burning through another one of his teeth. Me already thinking of going home tomorrow. My brother already asking me how long I was going to stay, never seeming to understand how short a weekend was.  

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3/07/2023 6:51 pm  #167


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom

5 

He would be waiting for me. Always waiting and already so bored when I got there. Weeks of boredom, crawled up into his shirt with him. An itchy thing he couldn’t escape. Skin gone grey from it. A slight smell of how bored he was filling the room. Leaving particles in the carpet. Waiting for me and my no ideas of how to conquer it. Asking me what we could do as soon as I got there, quickly wrapping his arms around himself like he was suddenly cold if I told him I didn’t know. Letting out a howl, like a dog forgotten inside of a house. 

“Ouwwoowooo” 

Usually, I’d think of something to do if it got bad enough. If he kept howling and holding himself like that. Would start building things from the cardboard boxes I found flattened on the floor. Make up games that had no rules that we could play for hours. Sometimes would bring him music or paint skulls on the back of his jacket. 

He was always happy with whatever I thought of. At least until he got older, and I slept more and more and he became fond of his hammer. Smashing everything that was around him. The bedposts of my mothers bed. Her engagement ring. All of the things I had given him over the years. Cassette tapes full of songs. Even a framed picture of me and him sitting in a department store, laughing and dressed terribly. 

He smashed the picture glass and left it in his carpet for me to roll onto months later. Severing something in my ankle. Spraying blood all over his bedroom.  

At least he wasn’t bored that weekend. 

I told him not to worry about it as he stood in the doorway of the bathroom chewing his finger. My mother on her knees trying to stop the bleeding.  

Never had blood been so black and it was all over the floor. 

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3/13/2023 1:17 pm  #168


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom

FAT LUCY 

1


 It was never as good as the last time she was here. Even in places she’d never been before. She’d taste it and make the face that would get me and my brother sinking into our chairs. Hoping the waitress wouldn’t come near us while she kept looking down at her plate for what was wrong. This one-time eater of spooled toilet paper and uncooked potatoes, now believing she’d detected something was off. Not up to her standards. Checking her lips over and over in hopes of finding the offending taste she hoped would let her eat for free. 

But my mother was no Fat Lucy.  

She didn’t have those yellow eyes that could stare down waitresses who dared point out she’d scraped her plate clean. That it couldn’t have been that inedible after all. 

She didn’t have that mouth to keep finding different ways of explaining why she shouldn’t have to pay for anything. Not even her coffee, which maybe she admitted to liking. 

She didn’t have such slow and stubby legs that somehow never got caught by the managers yelling at her to come back. Always moving that immense body of hers out the door of the restaurant, swaying slowly back and forth, never leaving a penny behind but still complaining anyways. 

My mother wasn’t Fat Lucy, and so never got anything for free. Never got banned anywhere. Would eventually have to take out her purse. Take out her wallet. Lay her money on the table and then sulk all the way home because she didn’t have that kind of magic.  

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3/13/2023 2:36 pm  #169


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom

2 

My mother was always introducing me to best friends. Said she had known them since she was a kid but I’d never seen them before. Would only meet them once. Then next time I’d meet a different one. Maybe this one down in a basement. Or in an apartment above an arcade. Sometimes sitting in the front seat of my mothers car while she was driving them somewhere. Me in the backseat until they got out.  

Fat Lucy was the only one that stuck around. Always sitting next to swimming pools and sweating. Met her enough times that she gave me a little bottle of cologne when she heard I was turning 13. Watched her over the years get banned from every restaurant in the city. 

Only the Bingo Hall would have her anymore. So that was where my mother would take her. Where she would eat my mothers potato chips and smoke her cigarettes. Swipe any troll dolls she expected were luckier than hers. Stuff them into that big purse that was full of sunglasses and jewelry and sandwiches. None of which were likely hers.  

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3/13/2023 3:38 pm  #170


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom

“Crazy” “Fat” Lucy


I am not above abusing mod powers for my own amusement.
 

3/13/2023 5:20 pm  #171


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom

Her hunger makes her crazy.

Some lyrics from my ill-fated and now unreleasable hip-hop happy rap track, "Bitch, 'Cause You Fat":

I can't extract
The fact of your fat
From your tenth Big Mac
To your heart attack
 


 

3/14/2023 6:14 pm  #172


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom

Are dine and dashers an oppressed group now?

I should probably check to see what the preferred nomenclature is for them before continuing any further.

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3/14/2023 6:30 pm  #173


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom

Brendan Fraser should play Lucy. Oscar, please.


I am not above abusing mod powers for my own amusement.
 

3/16/2023 2:21 pm  #174


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom

3 

Years of Lucy but mostly days of Randy. My stepfather now the one to come pick me up. The one to drive me home. The one to sit watching horseracing in a chair in front of me. Randy days and Randy nights. Neither of us talking for a decade. Almost soundless. His nose sometimes squeaking like a cheese curd. Occasionally a lone fart. But nothing I’d dare reply to. Not even moving anymore. Waiting for my mother to return from her fun with Fat Lucy. Smoking cigarette after cigarette until their eyes went red at the Bingo Hall. Waiting for her to come home, take a nap, then borrow more money from my seven-year-old sister and run out the door again. 

“But you said....”, I'd start as I reached out and she kept going. Moved through doors faster than anyone. Closed them quietly so not to be heard by everyone.

At night, horseracing was over. Now time for hockey and a few more squeaks from Randy's nose. One more fart from inside his blue pants with the white stripe. But otherwise, a silence that never stopped growing.  

I’d at least be home by Sunday. Driven back by Randy. Ask my mother to take me instead but she wouldn’t say anything. Might shake her head and eat a sunflower seed. One Randy day after another. No one to save me from them. Sitting in the backseat not saying anything until he got me home. Silent for so long he began to dread these car rides as much as me. A silence so big it affected the radio. 

“He doesn’t say anything”, he’d tell her upon returning home. Me no longer there. My brother somewhere. My sister somewhere. “Not even a thank you” 

But my mother was already asleep. Or not even there. Out somewhere with Lucy, not paying for something. And Randy stuck talking to a hump of empty blankets until he noticed.  
 

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3/16/2023 3:14 pm  #175


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom

crumbsroom wrote:

Randy days and Randy nights.




 

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3/21/2023 4:35 pm  #176


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom

4 

Rumbling behind houses in my train. Sneaking past whole neighborhoods. Backyards all the way there. Like staring up skirts just looking out the window. At what could only be seen by those on board. Underwear hanging in the wind on clotheslines the train could follow all the way to my mother. Moving from one secret lawn to the next. Toys on the grass and piles of bricks flashing past and sprinklers turned off and rust in the eavestroughs. The ugliest trees, sick from pool water. Children in mud when it was raining.  

Looking out the window at the backsides of homes passing by. Old enough now I could ride the train by myself. All this way, rushing past an entire country of backyards, right into the kitchen of Old Bob. 

This was where my mother could now be found when I visited. Always in the apartment of Old Bob since Lucy died. Thoughts of her enormous skeleton beneath the earth on my mind whenever I heard her name. Stolen trolls buried with her, fallen into her ribcage and no longer lucky. No more bingo for either of them ever again.  

Nothing left for my mother to do but sweep Old Bob’s floors. Wash his dishes. Feed his cat Chinese food on the floor until it got so fat I couldn’t even see its legs as it came running into the kitchen. The kitchen where me and Bob would sit, watching my mother clean and continue to be unlucky with friends. 

Old Bob was just a man at a kitchen table. Don’t know where she could have found him. Always sitting there with a deck of cards he could do impossible things with. Could maybe read minds too, telling me all the things I was thinking when I ran out of things to say and stopped talking. 

“Do you know how lonely your mother is?” he asked me once. Shuffling his cards. Making me wonder if that was what I had been wondering about as I stared out of his kitchen window. 

“I think so”, I told him, and he changed the subject.  

I never once saw him move from his chair, but that didn’t mean he didn’t ever do it. His hands didn’t look like they moved much either but no matter how long I kept watching them, they kept pulling cards out of the air. Dealing himself all the aces. Doing things I couldn’t see them do they moved so fast.  

“Bob’s the best friend I’ve ever had”, my mother told me once. I remember a cassette of Bob singing Country Western songs was playing in her car as we drove from his apartment. My brother covering his ears in the backseat and my mother singing along to what Old Bob had recorded from a Karaoke machine in his living room. Something he would sell for ten bucks to strangers but gave to my mother for five.  

I had begun to realize it was the only thing she listened to anymore. No more radio. His voice haunting us wherever we drove.

“He said he put me in his will. Says he loves me like his daughter. Can you believe it?” 

For the whole year after Lucy died, my mother kept disappearing to clean Old Bob’s apartment and talking about how she wished he could have been her real father. Would already be at his place when I came to visit. Had been there all day. Randy left to pick me up from the train station and bring me back with him to watch television in silence. 

My brother would be waiting there, sitting next to me on the couch, looking terribly bored. And I’d just sit there wondering how clean my mother could possibly make Bob’s apartment. Randy wondering the same thing, I’m sure. Neither of us understanding what she got out of it. Neither of us knowing how long it would take her to clean it that particular night. 

When Old Bob eventually died, my mother never told me what happened. That he was gone. Had to figure it out for myself when I saw that his cat was now at her place. Sitting by itself on her floor. Already skinnier. It’s hair falling out. No one knowing its name. 

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3/24/2023 5:12 pm  #177


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom

5 

My brother wasn’t always wielding a hammer. Wasn’t always standing rigid with one in his fist. A big one with a claw. Sometimes he was just holding a leash without a dog. Or a spoon for pudding. Or money he stole from my sister. But not always a hammer.  

I don’t want it to be misunderstood. Would never go so far to call him a hammer maniac. That wouldn’t be fair. Was just as much a dogless boy, or an eater of pudding, or a thief. His hammer only a small part of him. I know this and I need to try and remember. 

But I still sometimes have a hard time imagining him without one. At least at that age.  

I don’t ever remember one at the restaurant with Fat Lucy. Not even under the table to hit her knees with.  

Maybe one was nearby when me and my mother would return home late from Old Bob’s. Maybe on the floor or on the end table next to him. But always fast asleep and no longer holding it. 

But he had one when he brought my mothers wedding ring into her bedroom and smashed it into the carpet. Smashed the glass in family portraits until entire faces fell out. Had it while I was sitting on the couch and blasted a cassette full of songs to pieces. Something I had just given him. Thinking he needed the company. Aware how I wasn’t coming down so much anymore and seeing the look in his eye when he smashed it. 

Things getting broken into pieces all the time. After Lucy died. After Bob died. Those years when my mother was finally completely friendless, with no one but me to leave the house with. Taking me with her to where she wanted to go and my brother always at the door asking what time we’d be back. Holding his hammer, as if the question might also be a threat 

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3/25/2023 12:43 pm  #178


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom



He wanted to know when we would be doing something. Didn’t get we were already doing it. Everyone on couches. Nothing happening on the floor. The sound on the TV turned down. Looked around to see if he had missed something. If all the fun was behind him. Turning to find nothing to do back there too. 

He kept asking if all we were going to do was sit there and talk. Wouldn’t accept the answer he kept getting. That I'd forgotten how to do anything else than this. No time to make up games to play. I’d just come here to sit and talk and nap. To never leave the couch. Unless my mother took me somewhere. To some other place we’d just sit and talk in too. 

“Do you never do anything”, he asked.  

I shook my head.  

A look came into his eyes. A desperate look I had only seen once before. That time he was on the floor and asking me how old I would be when he was my age. How old I’d be when he was thirty. How old I’d be when he was fifty. Kept asking and asking until we both got so old I told him I’d probably be dead by then. And he would be soon too. 

It was a look that made me feel like I had said something very bad. That I shouldn't have let him ever know all of us eventually die and that there is no escape. Or that we sometimes stop caring long before that. Just give up and do nothing but talk and sit around and wait for it all to be over. 

“Can I at least turn the TV back up”, was all he said. Me and my mother back to talking about people he’d never heard of. Both of us already looking half asleep, eyes drooping and wrapped in blankets. 

We didn’t answer him, so he turned it up anyways and I shook my head again. Not because I would stop him from making the television louder. But because he didn’t understand anything yet and was somehow still sad anyways. Making the television so loud it almost stopped me and my mother from talking. Got us yelling at him until he left the room. 

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3/25/2023 1:32 pm  #179


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom



My mother told me he was gone. A few days now. Her dog having convulsions on the floor and making her realize maybe he was some place bad. That maybe she should look for him. Her dog full of chocolate and dying and guiding her to the phone to call me and tell me my brother was missing. 

“Someone saw him on a bridge”, she told me.  

She didn’t know anything else. Kept crying. Telling me the dog was starting to convulse again. That this was a bad sign. 

Went downstairs to tell my grandmother what had happened and that I had to look for him. That I might know what city he was in. That I’d arranged for someone to drive me there. 

“Why is it your problem”, she kept asking. Trying to get me to sit down. Wait for dinner and stop talking about this like I could do anything about it. 

“He’s my brother”, I told her.

“What does that even mean” 

She kept stirring her pot of spaghetti.  

I kept standing in the kitchen telling her I wasn’t hungry. Asking how many bridges there were to jump off in Belleville. 

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3/27/2023 3:24 pm  #180


Re: LOVE, crumbsroom

8

When my brother returned from Bellville, he had photographs of a life without furniture. Rooms full of kids his age and nowhere to sit. Nothing on the walls but dicks and swastikas. Everyone either smiling or sitting on a toilet. 

He left his shirts there. Never found another one. Barechested ever since Belleville. Had less words too. Was harder to understand. 

In the winter, his jail tattoos would turn purple from the cold. Sleeping between newspaper boxes when no one answered the door for him. Pulling them closer together for warmth. Sometimes wishing he hadn’t left all his shirts behind in that city he was never going back to. 

But sometimes my brother would get excited. One time said he understood now why I just liked sitting around and talking. Asked if I remembered how much he used to hate doing that. Now that was all he wanted to do. 

“Everything I want to do, I can do sitting right here”, he said, gently putting his hands on the couch my stepfather had dragged into the basement for him. “I got nowhere to go” 

There were no lights down here. You couldn’t even see where the pyramid of cat shit was. How close we were sitting next to it. Barely had any smell at all, it was now so old. Those cats long dead. 

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