Dead America, part II

II.  FROM ONE FRIEND’S COUCH TO THE NEXT,
AS ONE’S FATHER GROWS WEARY AND ANOTHER
OPENS HIS ARMS ONLY BECAUSE OF THE SON,
WHO’S DADDY DRIVES A BEAMER AND HAS POCKETS
THAT JUST DON’T QUIT AS MY TIME IN FLORIDA
BEGINS IN EARNEST.

It comes to the point at which I have stayed with my friend Louis (one of the two who came to Georgia to pick me up) for a month and we’re trying to figure out what to do.  His apartment complex doesn’t look too kindly on people staying for over a month, but truth be told, he just wanted me out.  Brad, the other one that came down to Georgia, lived a few minutes away in another apartment complex, and it was decided that I was to move in with him.  He had just lost a roommate, so I was free to take his bed.  Come to find out, the roommate hadn’t been paying his rent and Brad’s father was the one to kick him out.
We spent the next couple of weeks hanging out at the apartment, playing an X-box that we had rented from a rental store down the street, and surfing the web by piggy backing off a signal coming from somewhere downstairs via a household network.  I had been able to convince my dad to send me some clothes and belongings from home, which arrived a few days before we had received word from Brad’s father that he was moving him to an apartment in Tampa.  Luckily, I had been able to convince him to allow me to move with him.
After packing up our belongings in a U-haul, we made the 2 hour trip to the new apartment.
Whereas the one we had just come from had been a two floor double room, this was a double room single floor plan.  We spent the first few weeks breaking in the place and getting to know the area.  Not having a vehicle meant having to take a taxi to places that were inaccessible by simple walking to them.  Even going to the grocery store was somewhat of a hassle as it was a good 30-45 minute walk from the apartment, and even longer back as we usually brought back at the least 5 full bags of groceries.  Not having jobs didn’t necessarily mean not having anything to eat.  When I had first moved in with Brad, he had already honed the art of stealing our food.  He would simply walk in with a few empty bags from the store, walk around, fill them up, and walk out.  Nobody ever stopped or questioned him.  In fact, the only thing we payed for for the first month I was living with him was cigarettes, and only cigarettes because they were behind a counter, inaccessible and impossible to include into his five finger shopping skills.
Within the first few weeks we spent breaking in the new apartment, we had it wired up pretty good.  Phone line, cable, internet access.  For dinner, we became well known to the local Dominos and ordered from the online form, which saved us the trouble of having to actually phone it in.
Every other day, he would talk to his dad and they would argue about the job situation until it finally came down to both of us getting a job or losing the apartment.
This was about 4 months into our stay at the new apartment.  We went from store to store, filling out applications and waiting for calls.  I never succeeded in gaining employment.  He wound up getting a job at Ross, a discount clothing store, where he met and befriended a married 40-something and wound up having sex with her in the bathroom at work.  She wound up leaving her husband for him, but I had convinced him not to keep seeing her as she was clearly both psychotic and dependant, based on the phone calls he received and the e-mails she sent him.  This wasn’t the first woman he had trouble with, and definitely not the first older woman he had trouble with.  Of course, for legal reasons (as well as the fact that I was not present during his time at the ill fated youth academy that was shut down for child welfare endangerment crimes) I can’t really relate such troubles.  Suffice it to say, it wasn’t the first older woman he had trouble with.
It was about this time that the hurricanes began rolling in.  People started getting scared, pulling up stakes, and leaving town.  Not having a car, we had no choice but to stay in our apartment and ride them out.  So here was the situation we now found ourselves in: a record number of hurricanes were slamming their way across Florida and against the Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg area not seen since the 50’s or so and with each hurricane, the power would go out for 4 or 5 days at a time.  This meant that having any groceries that needed refrigeration was next to impossible.  It also meant that entertaining ourselves in a conventional sense (i.e. surfing the web, watching tv, and or listening to music) was completely out of the door except for a single portable cd player that I had.  During this time, we didn’t have money as he had lost his job at Ross and mail wasn’t running whenever the hurricane was ripping its way through the city.  As it were, none of the stores were open either as they had boarded up their windows to prepare for the hurricanes which were now ripping through town.  We barely had any food in the apartment, and we had nothing more than a few books and a few batteries to run the cd player with to keep ourselves entertained for up to 106 hours at a time, taking away 8 hours that we spent a night sleeping.  On top of that, no power meant no lights.  We had no flashlights, and the only source of light was either from Brad’s cell phone or our lighters.  We had to conserve his cell phone for in case of emergency purposes, so it was usually our lighters that gave us light through the apartment at night, which came on at about 7 pm or so.  This would have been fine if it had only happened once.  Within a month, this happened 4 to 5 times.  By the second time, we were down to eating uncooked spaggeti in butter.  By the third, we were down to eating bread.  By the fourth, we had at least gotten smart enough to start keeping more food around the apartment.
Hurricane season came and went, and by this time Heather was in the middle of getting ready to move to Florida.  It was also about this time that Brad’s ex-girlfriend from New York began calling him and preparing to come down as well.  She arrived before Heather.
If you’ve ever lived with a friend and then lived with a friend when his girlfriend came down to live with you, you’ll know what I mean when I say that this was the worst situation I had ever been put in.  Not only was she a bitch, she had that attitutde about her that made her think that everything she had to talk about was so much better than whatever anybody had been talking about previously.  And since it happened to her, she could neither shut up about it nor could she stop emphisizing everything in her stories.  And I guess the fact that they had very loud sex every hour didn’t help matters out much, either.
Eventually Heather showed up.  It was about this time that Brad’s dad had grown tired of our situation, and had begun to tell Brad he had to get rid of me.  He was going to move Brad and his girlfriend to a new apartment, and if I went anywhere near it, he would have me arrested.  I thought he was over reacting just a bit, but I was also growing tired of Brad and his girlfriend, whom Heather and I both agreed looked like a man in the right light.  It was then decided that we were going to have to find a new place.
I had been talking to Louis for a few weeks before all of this, and we made arrangements to move to San Antonio.  After finding somebody on Rent.com, we booked tickets to San Antonio and bid farewell to Tampa.  My year in Florida had finally, and thankfully, come to an end.