crazy jerry (part one)

Bonne never fails to have favorable first impressions of people, and with our landlord it was no different.

“I don’t know why, but he reminds me of Santa Claus!” She said as she escorted my mother and I over to meet him for the first time.

His office was halfway between our apartment and campus, in a building that had always piqued my curiosity. It looked like some dilapidated beachfront motel, with Christmas tree lights strung out front, pink flamingoes, and a faded green canopy jutting over the porch. The sidewalks were lined with furniture that looked to have been dragged out of low-income neighborhoods in the 50’s, and left to gather dust ever since. As we climbed the steps and waited for a response to our knock, I took in the various reading material lying about the porch. “Conspiracies and Cover-ups: What the Government Isn’t Telling You,” “Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness,” “The Supernatural, Paranormal, and the Unexplained.”

This, I thought, was going to be interesting.

The person who answered the door did not, for me, remotely resemble Santa Claus. He was small, thin, and wiry, leathery tan, in cut off jean shorts, sunglasses and t-shirt. He introduced himself as Jerry, but he will hereby be known as “Crazy Jerry” since to call him anything else would be to diminish his personality. As we signed the various hand-scribbled forms and photocopies he thrust at us, he told us all about his budding enterprise; to buy out the entire block of one-level houses, and sublet them as vacation bungalows for visiting friends and family of students.

“Wanna see?” He said. With no choice but to say yes, we followed him through the rest of the building, which he had partitioned into four sections and into each squeezed a bed, a fan, and a mini-fridge. Two had a microwave balanced on top of the fridge, the other two, a television.

Clearly enamored with my mother, Crazy Jerry proposed a discounted rate on one of his dwellings for the week. The one he was offering came furnished with peeling yellow wallpaper and leopard print bedcovers. My mother shuddered.

“I think I’ll keep my hotel reservation,” she said.

Taking us outside, Jerry tried to auction off some of his hideous furniture. The objects that lined the streets were only the tip of the iceberg; chairs, couches, desks, and lamp skeletons filled the nearby alleyways, and he gestured to them proudly as he entreated, “Take anything you’d like!”

Not wanting to offend him, we settled on a chipped corner table and a floor lamp. I also agreed to have him drop off one or two of his extra mattresses for me to sleep on, although Bonne and my mother both wrinkled their noses at the thought.

“What else am I going to do?!” I countered. We had literally nothing by way of furniture and appliances, and Bonne already had dibs on our friend Cat’s extra springbox. I didn’t want my room looking like a prison cell any longer.

crazy jerry (part two)

In the next couple of weeks, Jerry came with his Mexican helper Roberto to drop off the mattresses, fix the upstairs plumbing, etcetera. These episodes were all by day, and involved a lot of him ordering around Roberto like a nit-picky mother hen.

“Don’t turn it that way, Roberto. To the left. Izquierda!” To which Roberto would give me a sheepish smile and change direction.

But my first true Jerry encounter came when I was alone one night fixing dinner. Bonne had apparently called him about our bipolar heating system without telling me, because I was entirely unprepared for the sudden screech of a motorcycle halting outside our building and Jerry ambling into our apartment, still with his helmet on, a few seconds later.

“Can I help you?” I felt it was appropriate to ask.

“You girls called about your heat. I’m going to fix it up for you. Don’t want you girls to get COLD.” He added further emphasis to the last word with a suggestive wink.

I was already getting disconcerted, and this was before I smelled the whisky.

“Ah…. are you sure? I don’t remember calling.”

“Oh, you called.” He said.

“Well,” I said. “Maybe I did. I can’t remember. Maybe I’m just losing brain cells at a rapid rate.”

He peered up at me owlishly from under the helmet.

“Rapid?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re talking about time, then.”

“Yes….?”

“Well, what do you know about time?”

I pursed my lips together as I pondered my response, while Jerry, wobbling slightly under the weight of his helmet, put a hand out to steady himself on the stair railing.

“Have you ever read,” he asked, “about the space time continuum?”

I was beginning to doubt he had any intention of making repairs.

“No,” I said. “Does it involve quarks?”

“The Space. Time. Continuum,” He went on, ignoring me, “maintains that time is only a fourth dimension, and therefore its passing is but a construct of the mind, and so time cannot be rapid, it can only be now.”

“Fascinating,” I said, not wanting to encourage him any further. “Are you going to fix the heat?”

Grinning, he shuffled over to the thermostat, the heavy smell of liquor trailing in his wake. He punched a few numbers, popped open the vent below, and rose up as quickly as he had squatted.

“Don’t have my tools,” he said, shuffling past me again, “I’ll have to come back tomorrow when I’ve got ‘em.”

“Listen,” he leaned back in the doorway as I prepared to deadbolt the lock, “Have I ever told you about the time I went to find Osama bin Laden?””

I pleaded for somebody, anybody, to return home to the apartment complex at that moment.

“No,” I said, “You sure haven’t.”

“Well, the first time, I looked in every crevice of the desert, and I didn’t find him. But the second time…. well….. I won’t tell you about the second time,” he said, giving me a parting leer as he tightened his helmet strap.

“I wouldn’t want to scare ya,” he said.

And that was my first encounter with Crazy Jerry.

He never came back with his tools, and eventually the heat seemed to work itself out on its own, so I didn’t see him again until about a month later, when our sink was clogged. This time, he proceeded to tell me about all of the children he had fathered.

“I got a few around your age,” he said as he fiddled with the drainpipe.

“You know, you never finished telling me about the space-time continuum,” I said, perched on the kitchen table. I’d had a couple glasses of wine and I was in the mood for entertainment.

“Did I say I was going to tell you about the space time continuum?” He furrowed his brow.

“Yup,” I said. “And Osama bin Laden.”

“Huh,” he said, wrenching something into place. “I must have been wasted.”

“I’m pretty sure you were,” I said.

And so it went.

crazy jerry (part three)

The other members of the Vortex were scared, or just plain baffled by Jerry. The boys next door had fallen from grace after breaking their living room window for the third time (they were known for holding boisterous beer pong tournaments), and the girls down the hall avoided dealing with him on the basis that he was too creepy.

It got to the point where every time something was broken, or we heard the far off rev of a motorcycle, it would be me who was sent out to delegate.

“You’re the only one who knows how to talk to him!” Barbara said as she prodded me out onto the steps before running to hide in her bedroom.

It was true that the landlord and I had a certain affinity; there was something about his rampant eccentricity that was familiar, even comforting. He was like a cross between my father and Hunter S. Thompson.

So when Bonne and I walked into our apartment at the end of the year to find the power out, we knew just who to call. Well, first we called the electric company, who told us that there hadn’t been a bill paid for #3 Menlo in over a year.

“But we didn’t ever GET a bill!” I moaned to the disgruntled operator, who transferred me to a specialist.

“But we just moved in three DAYS ago!” I told the specialist, hoping no one was recording the call.

She didn’t sound convinced. “Well then bring a copy of your lease over to our office and we’ll get things sorted out.”

Bonne had been outside at our mailbox while I was on the phone. She returned with a handful of envelopes.

“So THAT’s who Tim Reynolds, Jr. is,” she said.

“That deadbeat,” I said. We opened up the envelopes and surveyed the bills. The latest one was bright pink.

“Bonne!” Bonne yelped, looking at the bottom numbers. “Look! There’s no way we could pay even a quarter of that!”

I peeked over her shoulder and shuddered.

“What are we going to DO?!” She said.

I looked around. “I guess we could manage without power for the next week or so… couldn’t we? We’ll just have to sleep over with other people and do everything by day…”

She bit her lip anxiously. “I don’t know, Bonne. I have to go to work. But call Jerry.” She paused in the doorway a moment before leaving, then turned back. “Jerry will know what to do,” she said.

I took a deep breath and crossed my fingers as I dialed the number. I could only hope she was right. I waited just one ring and then,

“They turned off our electricity, Jerry! We never knew we were supposed to pay it, and somebody else was getting the bill, and nobody ever told us and now they’re charging us a million dollars and we’re only even going to be here another week, and….”

“You mean you never got the electricity turned on in your name?” Jerry shouted.

“No,” I whimpered.

“And now they want you to pay for all that you’ve been using for the past five months?”

“Yes,” I moaned.

“Those bastards,” He said. “I’ll be right over. Don’t talk to anyone else until I get there.”

I had barely hung up the phone before I heard the squeal of tires, and the motorcycle came roaring around the corner.

Kicking the stand down to meet the sidewalk, he swung off the seat and headed straight for the back of the building.

“You ever jimmy-rigged a fuse box before?” He called over his shoulder.

“Whaty’d a what? What?” I ran to catch up with him.

“You haven’t. Here,” he handed me a wrench as we treaded over the weeds to stand next to the large tin fuse box.

“Now,” he said, looking at me judiciously with one hand on the box. “Now what you’re asking me to do is illegal, you realize.”

“Ask you… I didn’t…”

“You ever been involved in criminal activity before?”

“Uhh….”

“Good,” he threw open the box. “Me, I already got a criminal record. So if those Public Utility bastards come poking around here and see what’s been set up, I had nothing to do with it, see? You get me?” He waggled a wrench my way.

I took a moment to consider the consequences. I shrugged.

“Sure,” I said. And within ten minutes we were wired up to the girls next door.

Before leaving, Jerry sent me over to make sure I had their legal and binding permission to steal their electricity. The only one home was Katie, and she was rushing around getting ready for a date.

“Yeah, sure, whatever… “ She said, drawing a crimson gloss across her lips and puckering them several times. “Tell me, do you think my hair is big enough?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

Then I ran into our apartment. The lights were ablaze and the upstairs shower roaring.

“Thank you, Jerry!!!” I called out the window, him holding up the peace fingers as he revved off into the distance.

in my college creative writing class....

we spent a good deal of time talking about crack. I learned more about crack than I ever cared to know. In fact, the two main facts that stick in my memory from junior spring at USC are that bonobos are the “make love not war” ape (they enjoy frequent bouts of g-g rubbing), and that, in the 80’s, Barbara Bush used to ride around on something called the battle ram, an actual army tank used to break into and flatten houses where suspected drug dealers were living.

“Just imagine,” our professor would say in that gleeful tone of voice he always took on when approaching his favorite topic of conversation, “You’re a nice big Italian family, sitting down to spaghetti dinner, when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the walls bust open and…..”

“Wait! Did this really…” I squealed incredulously.

“BATTLE-RAM! BATTLE-RAM!” He yelled.