Roommates with Uncle Steve and the Story of the Observational Curse

 

I dreamed Uncle Steve and I were sharing a house, and apparently, that wasn't all we were sharing. One day, I came home to find that all his possessions were in my room. He was away on vacation and had decided to let me use all of his stuff while he was away. I was looking around at his wall of stereo and video equipment, trying to make sense of the hodgepodge of cables and components, when a knock came at the door.

I opened the door, and two naked black girls came in and made themselves comfortable, one on the bed and one in my arms. The one in my arms wasted no time and jumped up, saddling my face with her shaved genitalia. "Well, hello to you, too," I thought, breathlessly busying myself with this most pressing matter in front of me. The one on the bed produced a DVD and asked me to put it on. 

I unhitched myself from the limbs of the social climber, and attempted to find the correct player in which to insert the disc. There were stacks of tape decks, CD and VHS players on the dresser, but I was having difficulty finding the DVD player. Some porn was playing on a small tube-type black and white TV monitor. 

I finally found the DVD player, but I couldn't for the life of me get the disc to go in. It kept falling out, and it finally wound up slipping behind the dresser, irretrievably lost in the crack between the wall and dresser with its Doc Brown stack of audio video devices. 

"I'm sorry," I apologized, "but I'll have to move this dresser to get your disc."

The ladies seemed unconcerned, and amused themselves with each other on the bed while I hoisted one end of the heavily laden dresser and reached behind it to retrieve the DVD. Naturally, there was a lot of clutter going on back there, and I had to sift through a bunch of old magazines and pieces of paper before I finally found their disc. I gave the disc back to them, and they left me alone in the room with the magazines and notes.

I rifled through the notes and found one that was handwritten to me by my uncle. It read:

"Drew, take care of my stuff while I'm away. Feel free to use whatever. Back soon."

I opened one of the magazines and saw pictures of myself in several of the full-page spreads in the middle. The shots were grainy, candid artsy looking photographs of me in my youth, taken by my uncle. Some were blurry, as if the camera or subject was in motion, but all were relatively flattering. Apparently, I made a good subject for one of his school projects, as these photos had made their way into more than one of the magazines in his collection.

I left the room and went into what was supposed to be Steve's room. Since he was away, and he'd made an unrecognizable mess of my room, I decided to lay down on his bed, which was decidedly less cluttered. I was drawing the blanket up to my chin when I noticed a pair of teal colored bikini briefs down at the foot of the bed. Somehow, I just knew they belonged to my uncle. Cheeky monkey, I thought to myself and tossed them on the floor.

At this point, Steve walked in, back from vacationing in God knows where. He greeted me cordially, and we discussed the "friends" that he'd arranged to keep me company while he was away. I thanked him for his thoughtfulness, and told him about the magazines and notes that I'd found. He had stories to tell from his vacation, but I can't recall any of them. I was too busy looking at a strange rash on my chest that had developed into some red bulbous growths that looked like they were filled with strawberry jam. 

I woke up soon thereafter. I do have a rash on my chest, but not quite as bad as all that. I think I will get it looked at by a dermatologist, nonetheless, as it has been there for more than a month. Denise pointed it out to me on her last visit. When someone points something out to me of which I am unaware, I always think to myself, "They have cursed me," because of a couple of incidents in which my uncle pointed out defects about my house or property that turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg.

On one of my first visits to the new property on Stonehedge, while my uncle and I were walking around, he noticed a few suspicious stems sticking up out of the ground. 

"I wonder if you guys have any poison oak on this place?" he mused.

It later turned out that the place was rife with poison oak. I battled it for years, spraying gallons of glyphosate into the environment, causing untold collateral damage. I get rashes to this day from sticks that have lain dead for years, which I end up burning with the fallen tree limbs and vegetative debris each winter. 

Another time, Steve was in my living room and he spotted a small crack in one of the floor tiles. Leave it him to point out the fly in the ointment. 

"Do you think your house may be settling unevenly?" he asked, pointing to an adjacent tile with a similar hairline crack down the center. Sure enough, over the years that crack has extended all the way across the living room and into the dining room. Uncle Stinky strikes again. 

When we first moved here, on one of Steve's visits, he posed a question to us while were riding down in the car:

"I was thinking of maybe selling my house and parking my RV here when I'm not vacationing in Mexico or Arizona. I'd pay you a small amount, say, $100 a month or so. How 'bout it?"

Sharon and I both cringed inwardly. We didn't waste any time quashing the idea. 

"I don't think that's going to work for us," I said. "We are pretty private people, and we like our space. Nothing personal, you understand, but we just need our space."

He looked hurt. The rest of the car ride was uncomfortably quiet. My uncle had been going through a bout of depression after having a series of mini-strokes, and he'd even had to take anti-depressants to combat feelings of hopelessness. Always the lone wolf, he'd whittled his circle of friends down to Sharon and I and one other couple that he'd known for years. The rest of his friends and acquaintances he had dismissed over the years because they didn't measure up to his qualitative standards. 

I'm sure our rejection of his self-invitation to stay with us was another of the million little things that contributed to his later suicide. Sure, he'd kicked me out of the house in the early 90s after grandpa died, and I could have felt some vengeful karmic justification now that the shoe was on the other foot, but that didn't factor in to our decision not to allow him to stay with us. The truth was, we just didn't want Uncle Stinky and his foul-smelling, cheap hand-rolled cigarettes stinking up the joint. 

Plus, after living butt to nut with our Paradise neighbors for many years, we just wanted to enjoy the newfound privacy of living alone on 5 acres. Tired of smelling our neighbor's laundry detergent or hearing the infrequent blaring of the TV, used to cover up the sounds of their late night lovemaking, or the incessant yelling from our other neighbor at her obnoxious teenage son, we'd just had enough of people. We wanted the freedom to be our own loud, obnoxious selves and have no one around to annoy or be annoyed by. 

And we did. We yelled and screamed at one another and nobody called the cops. We blasted our music at full volume and made all manner of amorous noises during our own lovemaking rituals, the sounds dampened by distance and the competing sounds of crickets and frogs during the summer and blocked by closed, double-pane windows in the winter. 

But you know how the rest of the story went, and our serene solitude had the obverse effect. Our heaven was a big hell. One by one, our beloved pets passed away, and then finally, Sharon, taken by MS at 44. Now, it's just me and my middle aged cats and my itchy chest rash, an unwitting observational curse cast upon me by Denise through the innocent act of pointing it out. 

Soon enough, mathematical logic dictates that I, too, will self-terminate, if a sudden fatal event doesn't befall me before that. I'm not being dramatic when I say this. It's more of an actuarial prediction, based on statistics. Time and tide. Who'll stop the rain? And all that cliche gibber-jabber. I'm rambling. Now's the time, the time is now to ramble on, on my way. <soundtrack slowly fades out> <long fade to black> <roll credits>