THE WORST HOUSEGUEST ON EARTH

Ex-Files Installment #1.

I first met “Bluto” (not his real name, obv.) while doing a temporary catering gig for one of the lesser Macauley Culkin movies, moving metal tubs of a horrible salad made for the extras with grated carrots and raisins.  He was a big weird slob of a quiet guy with awful homemade tattoos and a front tooth missing, who drove trucks for the catering company  — in short, someone I would naturally get along with famously. 

Bluto had been a fairly well-known punk singer in Seattle, where he lived — he had known Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love.   His band was somewhat famous for licking batteries and shocking themselves during their performances. We had a brief but torrid affair during the movie job.  It was a tremendous advantage hanging around with someone so large and scary looking.  Once we were in a jazz bar and saw the Artistic Director of a theater that had been fucking me over by withholding grant money from me. Bluto followed the Director into the men’s room and gave him an insane, jailhouse mad-dog stare, and I got the money the next week. 

Bluto went back to Seattle, but we stayed in touch.  He had a terribly interesting history — he was adopted, and told me that he had been the product of a rape committed by one of the most powerful men in his home town.  His birth mother never divulged who the man was, for fear that Bluto would become hell-bent on revenge — this was probably wise. 

Bluto wasn’t a total animal — he was the owner and proprietor of a very cool, trendy tapas restaurant, at one point. 

The first time he visited New York, I stayed with my then fiancé and let him stay in my tiny West Village apartment — a 500 square foot, 5th floor walkup, which did have the advantage of having a wonderfully deep bathtub.  

Bluto was unable to figure out the antiquated plugging and unplugging mechanism — a chrome handle to the right of the tub — so, when he was unable to drain it, he filled the tub with some hydrochloric acid I had to unclog ancient plumbing, and left it to sit in the tub for the weekend.   The acid ate through the porcelain, leaving my bathtub looking like the porous surface of the moon and needing to be reglazed. 

“Why didn’t you just call me and ask me how to drain the tub?” I asked.  He shrugged.  It was just a bad decision. 

After my divorce, I visited another friend in Seattle for book-related reasons and our romance somewhat rekindled.  We were driving back to his house after a date one night, and his phone started ringing.  He turned ashen when he saw the number.  “Oh fuck,” he said.  “She’s calling from inside my house.  On my land line.”  This was the first I’d heard that he had a girlfriend.  She was apparently a blacksmith, and her red-haired Irish strength seemed to make him terrified of confronting her, so he drove me back to the friend’s house I had been staying in….and our romance was quickly over.   But we remained friends. 

When I was married, I owned an incredible Brooklyn brownstone in Park Slope — back in the days when banks would give you a mortgage without proof of income.  My husband and I lived on the top three floors and rented out the bottom unit.  After the divorce, I was living for a while in 3500 square feet of fairly empty, beautiful, largely useless rooms, so I enjoyed having houseguests whenever possible. I told Bluto I would be delighted to host him again, platonically, as long as he avoided my bathtubs. 

I am not sure what to say about it, other than Bluto came to New York to do some whitewater intense, filthy living.  He was like hosting a snowballing trash fire of alcohol and drugs. 

 Bluto moved into the top floor of the house for the week of his visit.  

What became quickly apparent — something I’d never noticed before — was that his feet were as raw, pervasive and intensely powerful to the nose as if they had been fermented in cans of rotting Swedish fish and then shat on by troll corpses.  

In order to use another room on the third floor for a shamanic drum ceremony, my friend and I had to mop Bluto’s area, dump baking soda on the carpets, and light enough incense and scented candles to choke a Hindu cab driver.  Tears were streaming down our faces.  

One morning I came downstairs.  The front door was wide open (a no-no in any neighborhood).  Bluto was leaning back on two legs of one of my kitchen chairs, in the middle of the room with his head thrown all the way back, snoring wildly with his mouth open.  

This was quite a sight to behold, because of the precarious balance of it.  He didn’t notice as I went about my day, in the kitchen.  He slept that way for hours. 

I asked him to please make sure, in the future, to please shut the front door behind him at night. 

The next morning was the real treat:  not only was the front door wide open again, but there was a filthy little punk rocker with a mohawk sleeping on my red velvet couch, upright, fully clothed. 

“Hey!”  I yelled. 

“Oh, er, hi…….” He said, all hangover fevers and sweaty dehydration.

“I guess I should go,”  he stammered, collecting his bus-grime covered belongings. 

“Yeah, I guess you should,”  I said, not offering him seltzer water or a bathroom.  He shuffled off my stoop and I locked the door. 

I steamed until a reasonable hour — noonish — and resolved to give Bluto a stern talking to.  This was no flophouse!  I had some interesting shit to steal!  Who was I supposed to be hosting, The Clash? 

Was this some kind of test to see how bourgeoise I’d become?  Was this the way the motherfucker really acted all the time, or was he alienating me special? 

I finally stomped up the stairs to the third floor.  “Bluto?”  I said. 

I heard grunting, and then “Yeah?” And I walked up a few more steps. 

What I was not at all prepared to see was Bluto, naked, entwined in a muscular embrace with his half-brother, also naked.  

“Sorry, honey,” I said. “I really don’t care what you’re doing, but you really can’t do it here,” I said. 

Bluto nodded. 

I reeled back downstairs, wondering what the fuck I had just seen.  Brotherly incest? Just a special night of family huggy wuggs? I didn’t want to know.  

His half-brother, a boxer had met him before, raced downstairs fully dressed and joined me in the kitchen.     

“Do you know what you are?”  He asked me. 

“No, what am I?”  I asked. 

“Look at this house — you’re like Miss Havisham,” he said, comparing me to the Dickensian character who ghosted around her mansion in a soiled wedding dress, alone. 

I thought that was a pretty solid burn, so I didn’t respond like I might have and called him a brotherfucker.  I didn’t want to seem judgmental.

Bluto and I glossed over the whole thing.  It was never spoken of.  When he left New York, we weren’t friends anymore. 

He was, however, quite a memorable specimen. 

CINTRAW@GMAIL

Artwork: “Japanonoir,” oil on masonite — sometime around 2000.