Hello~! My name is Scarlet Andromeda and I am a 30 something year old female automotive technician specializing in transmission repairs. I am also a professional artist, gamer and sometimes I mistake myself for a comedian! I have been in the ReddX community for a little over 4 years now, as one of ReddX’s discord mods, probably half of that. I've been in automotive for a little under 4 years. I was trained under my dad at the same company, and learned some of the most highly demanded units for Chevrolets. What I will explain is my entire automotive journey up to this past week in as much necessary detail as possible, from my time at the used car lot, to the past month.  Any automotive jargon I’ll do my best to explain in layman's terms. Also sorry if I ramble, I just needed to get all this off my chest. I basically copied/pasted this from google docs, so hopefully the formatting doesn't get screwed up in the process.
 
I had been wanting to move in with my gf Ynnep-Chan for a very long time. I have lived with my folks pretty much all my life. You’d think as an automotive tech I would’ve been able to save up and rent a house or an apartment to at least get out of my parents house, right? Yeah, that didn’t fucking happen. Not in this small town. The new management for the used car lot I worked at promised me a raise (keep in mind most techs earn at least $20+ an hour and I was under that) with the stipulation that I produce the hours I worked. Makes sense, right?  If it were any other normally run transmission shop that would be no problem, but with this shop it was impossible. The units we would build would often sit on the shelf for weeks, sometimes MONTHS before we could get them put into a vehicle. So when the shelf space was all taken up, there really wasn’t any point to doing another build until some space was cleared. I lost time due to waiting for something to do, and my weekly report looked like dogshit. The way they had our hours tracked was time we clocked in vs the hours we output on cars. Each rebuild equaled anywhere from 7.5 hours to 9.8 hours depending on the model. We would get these hours when the parts and labor are invoiced. So If i’m putting only three transmissions out a week and clocking in 44 hours, it doesn’t look good because I’m not at 100% efficiency. And that's if we have three to put out.
  We had 2 R&R(remove and replace) guys, responsible for removing and replacing the transmission and always stayed busy, a part time builder (who barely showed even on days he was supposed to), a full time builder/ and office manager (Me) and the shop foreman, which was my dad. He was always busy diagnosing many of the vehicles; working on rewiring, scan testing, test driving to see how the car shifts, etc. The size of the shop was our biggest problem. The build room, tear-down tables and washers(which also constantly broke down on us) were all spread out throughout the length of the shop and there were always transmissions on the floor to trip over and get in the way. We did not have enough space for the amount of units we had to produce for our hours. We kept our rebuilds on shelves that were not enough to meet the upper management’s demand. You may be wondering, well if your shop was so gosh darn busy why were there ANY units sitting on the shelf at all?! Well,  remember what I said before? We only build popular Chevy transmissions and rarely a couple of Fords, and most of the time we were sent imported customer cars with transmission issues, like Hyundai, Honda, Toyota, etc. Management did not want us building for imports  because it was way cheaper to order used ones from the salvaging yard. Think a few hundred dollaroos from a salvaging yard vs 1k+ for a rebuild. Only being allowed to order used units for these cars caused a bunch of problems in itself, when the used units did not work (which was just about every single fucking one) and we would have to wait a few business days up to a week on a replacement. Management was convinced this was the best and most cost efficient way of handling these cars. As you would imagine, it often leads to customers getting frustrated with the timeframe and getting traded out into a different car, leaving us with now a PDI(Pre-Delivery Inspection)  car we were previously rushing to get out and now is just sitting there.  
Even though I did everything from keeping the paperwork sorted, to ordering parts, organizing the build room and keeping track of what cars left and what cars arrived ... .oh, and building when I had time…. They refused to give me a hefty raise for all of my hard work. They would praise me during managerial meetings, but not on my check where it mattered. They praised the office workers more than the technicians, the ones who have the skill and knowledge to do the actual repairs. Make that make sense. I had to climb to the wage I ended up at, from when I started $13 an hour to $18, when I was a fully trained technician putting out units everyday (when there’s room). 
We asked for extra hands on deck so many times I lost count. Mainly for R&R, so we can knock out the cars faster. We also asked for an expansion of the shop, so we would have more workspace. Their response was to knock out the office in the shop  and relocate it to the break room that was our sanctuary during lunch. Our breakroom size was essentially halved, leaving little room for all our staff to eat if we wanted to eat there. They also had our couch removed , which the guys were disappointed in because they would usually take short naps there (I didn’t mind, that thing was disgusting). We also got two additional lifts in the remodel, but nobody to man them. One of many brilliant decisions from this management that has no idea how a functional shop runs. Ugh. 
Eventually, we DID get a new hire, a girl they brought on to take over the office for me (everything was on me to run the shop). They started her at $18 an hour, where I had to PAINSTAKINGLY  CLIMB for 4 years to get to. This girl was as dumb as a box of rocks. Even though she came from a dealership, she knew little to absolutely nothing about automotive or ordering parts. The only reason she was hired was because the current manager knew her upper ranking dad in the military. Whoopie, nepotism at its finest. Even though I was also hired because of someone in my family also working there, I earned my goddamn spot. My dad knew I was capable of whatever he threw at me, and that's why he pushed to have me hired. This girl had no merit whatsoever. She was over organized, and overcomplicated the paperwork to the point she got herself confused on what went where. She would make several copies of the same ticket and couldn’t figure out what stage it was in. I had to take over for when she would call in sick because she had a headache, and I was confused. Her system was bullshit and to this very day I strongly believe it's gotten her deeper into the shit. She also unfortunately had the company’s amazon account and ordered a bunch of dumb, useless shit for her office, and fragrance bombed her office to the point nobody could stand to be in there. She also was persistent on keeping the light off because it gave her migraines. She kept a blanket on her and always had a heater going in the office even if it was 90F outside. What the fuck. Another thing that irked me was when I was looking for the air conditioner remote for the build room, and she had it on 76 in the office. We only had one remote for the two ac units we had in the build room and office, we lost the other one. One day she straight up turned my AC off when I was there working. Fuckin bitch.
 Don’t get me wrong, the first few months were okay. Getting settled into a new job you’re liable to ask the same questions a few times until you get it, at least twice or thrice.

NAH. 

This girl was so dumb she asked the same questions six months later, when she was supposed to already have known how to look up parts. She always HER works on other people, including my mother in PDI with ordering simple parts anybody could google and figure out on their own. My mother is an older woman with back issues and this bish wanted her to bring us over several cases of water all at once. My mom ran parts to other departments in the lot so she always stayed busy. Yeah, a few members of my family worked with me at this company along with one of my sisters. It got so bad my mom stopped answering her phone when she called. The last day I was there, I had a transmission to finish building and she called me into the office to ask me to do inventory counts for parts. Let me tell you it was PAGES as thick as an average book of bs she could’ve figured out on her own, but she felt the need to make me do it. I straight up told her “No, I’m busy.” And this dumbass looks at me and tells me “You need  to find time”. BISH WHAT?! We needed more of this specific transmission on the shelf before I left the company, because the shop foreman (my dad) was not going to have time to build with all of the diagnostics he had to do. We always had a backlog of cars filling our lot and even more at the service lot. This man’s phone stayed ringing all day. 

Needless to say I reached my limit for more reasons than I listed here and desperately reached out to the admin of a Facebook transmission group, who owned his own shop in Texas to ask if he knew anyone in my gf’s area that needed help. 

One did.

This is not the sweatshop I worked at but a fairly decent gig I wish lasted longer than it did. I was given a weekly salary, a fair one to start out with, people my age that I can meld together easily. Everyone understood brainrot and cringe, and had a lot of the same interests as I did. Even better, they had a SHOP DOG!! A beautiful Doberman that I got to pet every day. I miss her so much. I got to tear down the bigger units I never got to see at the used car lot, learned some tricks by the owner/main builder of this shop, all was good. I couldn’t ask for a better job, though the 40 minute drive was a bit taxing on me.

 I was let go two months in. 

We had a Chevy truck come in with a 4L60E transmission, one I was excited to work on because I know these units so well. I got everything ready, swapping o-rings and pistons and all that good shit. I stopped at this one drum, which had a gash in the shaft where the teflon seal is supposed to go. I tried to clean it up so I could finish putting the seal on it, but it was no good. We were already waiting for a part for this assembly, and it was already late in the day so I just shrugged and marked it with a paint marker so my boss could see it and I could show him in the morning. The next morning came, and I was in the middle of the routine of getting the work day started when Boss came in early that day. As soon as he showed up, his wife (my other boss) called me into the office and the boss sat me down.

“I’m sorry, I’m gonna have to let you go.” He said that and I just started staring wildly at him.

“What?” I said in disbelief, because there’s no fucking way this man is letting me go this soon. I moved cross country and spent thousands of dollars to get here FOR THIS JOB. 

“Yeah, I saw the gash on the input shaft yesterday before I left late last night. I wasn’t even gonna look at that unit but I noticed it and I was pissed. You should have brought this up to me as soon as you caught it.”

What the fuck.

I just remember sitting there, speechless and in shock. What the hell am I supposed to do now? This was one of the better shops in the city and now that opportunity is gone. 

I went home that day, mind buzzing with panic and hands shaking. I ended up laying down and napping (because that’s what I do when I am stressed). Ynnep got me up, obviously confused as to why I was still home. It took me a moment, but I looked at her and said,

“I got let go.” 

“...WHAT?!” 

I explained to her what happened and we both were in disbelief. Things had gone so well, I thought I had a solid relationship with everyone there. I kept recounting everything that went on that day, and it couldn’t have just been that, could it? It was such a small thing. How could that simple mistake send me home unemployed?

Apparently job security isn’t a thing, even for technicians. I kept looking and reached out to a shop close to me. A shop, mind you that my last boss said he would help get me a job at. He didn't do SHIT, btw. I talked to one of the guys that my freshly former boss recommended I go to. The guy I contacted told me their shop was full, but that he knew someone who needed more help. He gave me his number, and like 5-10 minutes later he asked the recruiter why I haven't called yet. Red Flag number 1. I spoke to the man and arranged for me to drive out and do an interview with him in the morning. JUST an interview. Red flag number 2, his shop was isolated out in the woods with little to no other businesses or roads near it. I showed up wearing my old shop’s shirt, long shorts that went just above my knee and my work boots. He waved to me into the office to conduct said interview, and immediately remarked

“It’s not a good idea to wear another shop’s shirt here” As he pointed at me and then hurried to the office where I quickly followed behind. I mean, sure I get that but what else do I wear? Formal wear to this kind of interview seemed like not a good idea. Later on I was told to wear pants instead because they didn’t want customers seeing me ‘like that’ and think bad things about me. Yeah, I wasn’t allowed to wear shorts, which like i described before were just above my knee and were definitely not booty shorts. Because of my medication, I am prone to heat stroke and letting my legs breathe helps keep me cool in a hot humid environment like an automotive shop. Red flag #3. 
The actual interview consisted of him telling me that he’s a no nonsense, America-loving christian  conservative that treats everyone equally, and there’s no feminism here. Told me he doesn’t want any female drama and I wouldn't be treated differently because I’m a female. Fair enough, though I wasn’t asking for special treatment. I just wanna clock in and work dude. He asked me a few questions about what transmissions I'm familiar with, which are the 4T65E, 4L60E, and the 6L80 which are all Chevrolet. What? You didn’t ask? Oh, my bad. 

He then showed me around the shop, where all the magic happened. From R&R (Remove and Replace) to Tear down, cleaning and reassembly. All of the technicians that were there were so nice and were clearly hard working people. Their set up was nice, everything I would need was right there at the ready and I wouldn’t have to go far for much. He and one of the techs grabbed a transmission from the floor and threw it on the table, looked at me and said “Get to work” and scurried off. 
I was swarming with thoughts, excited because I got to work on my favorite transmissions, confused because I thought this was just an interview and there were no followup questions, no paperwork, I wasn’t asked for identification or to sign anything. Oh, and I didn’t have my toolbox. 
I looked around in a cloud of confusion when one of the guys came up to me and asked

 “Are you taking the job?Where’s your toolbox? ”

Even more confused, I told him I would have to go get it and return, to which I stupidly did. Yes, I rented a trailer and got my toolbox from my previous shop, racing headfirst into something I did not stop and think about. I spent just under 5 hours rebuilding that transmission, which is a time I am very proud of. On the way home, the adrenaline started to fade and I remember thinking to myself “there’s no way in hell I’m doing this six days straight”
Yes. He wanted me to work 12 hour days for six days straight, and the drive is about an hour an a half. So about 3 hours of just driving, 12 hours of working.
I called my gf and talked to her about it. I was trying to convince myself to stick it out for at least the rest of the week but everything in my body was screaming DONT DO IT!!!. Funnily enough, just the night before I remember thinking to myself ‘Why do I feel like I’m about to be trafficked’, cue that “haha, i’m in danger” simpsons meme.

After my one and only shift at that place, I thought about everything I would be putting myself through if I stuck around. How much gas i would burn through in just a week, lack of time to spend with my gf, and just how fucking exhausted I would be and never  catch a break. 

Heeell no. 

When I got home I talked to my gf and my parents to see what they thought. Right away my mom and gf said it feels like a sweat shop and to gtfo. My dad, however, went on about how nice their setup must be, how I should stay for a couple of weeks and see how much I can do, how he’d love to do nothing but work on transmission work with that schedule. Why don’t you move here and do it then? Lastly, he went on about how much money I would be making. I was promised a huge chunk of dough every week that would’ve been way worth it if I didn't feel like something sketchy was going on. 

With all of the suggestions from both my folks and my gf, I ended up sending the boss a message about possibly tweaking my work schedule to accommodate the hours I would lose getting to work every day.  

Big mistake.

He blew up my phone, saying ALL his guys drive hours away, that I needed to move closer, that it wouldn’t be fair to his guys if I get my own schedule, that I was trying to stir up drama when really I was just trying to get out of this whole situation and used the scheduling as an excuse. He called and berated me on the phone, trying to intimidate and threaten me that no other shop will take me in, that his shop is gonna take over Texas and be the only shop people go to, that he’s sucking the air out of the market or some insane shit like that. Gf was with me when he called, and asked to repeat what he said. 

“WHO ELSE IS ON THE LINE?!” he barked. I looked incredulously at the phone and said matter of factly, 

“My girlfriend.” 

“Yes, sir I’m her girlfriend, I’m just making dinner in the other room.” She gave him an excuse, while we both sat on the bed, in absolute disbelief. 

It seemed like he thought he could isolate me and guilt me into coming back and working his demanding hours. He threw every psychological tactic in the book at me. I just kept saying “yup” “I understand” and “Yep, I shot myself in the foot”
And he kept getting more and more mad. He finally let me have a final choice, screw up my career entirely because I wouldn’t comply with his demands (eyeroll) Because he was gonna “have a monopoly on the entire market” and I would do nothing but work at shitty shops and wont grow. I told him AGAIN that I'm gonna have to say no. We hung up and he sent a text demanding I pick my toolbox the very next day. No fucking issue for me, the last thing i wanted was that asshole to take my toolbox hostage and dangle my money over my head.
I spent that night having a mental breakdown and crying over what I almost put myself through, and panicking over what to do next. I am not a crier. This isn’t me trying to be macho or whatever but I just don’t get upset like this. Anger is usually my go to emotion, but this experience just sent me over the edge. I did NOT want to go back there by myself. I was legitimately scared for my life. Ynnep and our friend Astro agreed to go with me just in case any shady shenanigans were to happen. I am forever thankful for these two angels, Ynnep risked being late to work and Astro full on called out to support me and help get my stuff. 
We had to rent a trailer and as soon as I knew we were on the road, I messaged him just that, and gave him an eta when I would be there. and all he said was “Perfect. Come by the office and we will ordain it. Whatever that means. Red flag number…5 i guess?
  When we came by with the trailer, the wife came out and told me we would have to wait because they were pulling a transmission out at that moment. For reference, there were two bay doors and two lifts on the side where my toolbox was. The shop’s setup was compacted in a way where I would have to wait for them to clear out so I could get it. We went out to a clearing in the back of the property and waited. I messaged him, asking what the ETA was. He played dumb, texting me 

“ETA  for what? I don’t understand” 

“On…your tech dropping the transmission so I can get my toolbox?”

“Yes,   I just find out. Will have to wait, as soon is done we can call you”

They had us sitting for about 20-25 minutes before I got a message that I could come and get it. Astro drove my car, due to the lack of sleep on my part. I have a history of nodding off at the wheel and we really didn’t want to risk it. This poor soul struggled to back the trailer into the bay where they had my toolbox. I got out to direct him, and we ended up just disconnecting the trailer to manually back it to the bay and reattach it that way. Hey, I can’t do much better so props to him for trying. 
After loading my toolbox up, he went on yet ANOTHER rant about how I'm making a huge mistake and that it was a once in a lifetime chance to work at a class A shop. I just nodded, placated him  so I could gtfo of there. He paid me for the full day, we shook hands, I apologized again for not being able to make this arrangement work (barf) and then I was out of there.

And then that's the end of the story, right? NOPE.

My friend Astro, ever the honest guy, got prompted on his phone to leave a review, and so he did. An honest criticism of how He and I were treated while we were there. Being unnecessarily rude, the unbelievable hours he wanted me to work, how he talked down to us and that he wouldn’t recommend anyone get work done here.

The psycho wasn’t having it. While we pulled up to the rental place to drop off my toolbox for a storage unit and return the trailer itself, I got a call from the dude. Well, I got my money and my box back so I ain’t gotta talk to him, so I ignored the call. It was only then, I got a message from the guy who recommended me to this shop that that review was unfair and  not at all accurate, that he was just trying to help me find a job and he’s sorry that I don't like how they work. 

What review…?  I thought to myself. Then it came crashing in on me. Astro had mentioned he left a one star on their site, little did i know he wrote a whole review and I was now getting harassed for it. 

For Fred Fuchs sake.

I sighed, looked over to him as we were pulling up to my house and said
“Please, Astro for the sake of my own sanity can you please take that review down? Not that I’m not with you, I am, But i just need these fucks to leave me alone.” 

He realized the implications, and quickly took it down, apologizing profusely. He genuinely felt so bad about it, even though I kept telling him that it wasn’t his fault, these guys are just asshole internet bullies that desperately try to keep their flawless five star rating. Yeah, no business with a web page has a perfect five star rating, even if they are the best. People forget Karens and Kevins exist to ruin a good business’s reputation, however, this one is not one of those.
And then after that, I took a shower and napped the rest of the day, leaving my Whataburger sandwich in the fridge for my gf to eat because at that point I was way too stressed to have an appetite. 

And that is the end of this hectic and horrific story. I hope it was interesting to read/ possibly listen to by the charismatic ReddX. I can't wait to hear what everyone thinks. It started as a short story, then I kept adding as I went and now we’re here lol. I’m currently still unemployed, but I have high hopes for a couple of positions coming up that I applied for. For the meantime I do art commissions, and am about to start streaming again. I’ve done a few works for Redd in the past and created a few of the emojis/stickers in the discord. Hmu up, dog. Peace 

CARTBEARD pt 2: I tried to get the trash pile by his car hauled away and it turns out the pile is not trash, it is a scrapbook

so a lot happened. i know exactly what half of you are going to say, you're going to say call the health department, and i'm getting to it, and it's not the layup you think it is, i have to build to it or none of it will land.

quick recap for anyone who wandered in: last Kmart on earth, six employees, cart guy named Cartbeard, six months on the job, pees in the sink, keeps a chicken in his vest, took a dump in the parking lot into a bag he stole off my register. that's pt one. that's where we are.

ok

but first, because this week had a LOT of him in it, a new one for the file. the ovens.

I told you the Little Caesars in the vestibule closed years back and the ovens still run and Cartbeard uses them. what I did not know about, was the SCALE. I went into the vestibule for a genuinely unrelated reason and the dead Little Caesars was warm. the whole booth. warm like a body. and there's a hot pocket in the conveyor oven going around, and around, and around, on the belt, and it is clearly not the first lap, this hot pocket has been through some things, and taped to the front of the oven, in his handwriting, which looks like a man wrote it during an earthquake, is an index card that says DO NOT TAKE MY GUYS.

my guys.

there were four of them in there. three hot pockets and a macaroni kid cuisine, riding the belt in a restaurant that has been closed for a decade, and he has NAMED THEM COLLECTIVELY, and posted GUARD SIGNAGE, against a threat that does not exist, in a store nobody enters, to protect a snack rotation from a public that is never coming.

I am telling you this so that when I get to the pile you understand it is not an isolated behavior. it is Cartbeard's worldview.

anyway. yeah. the pile.

so here is a thing I said in part one and then just sailed right past like a coward: the days he isn't scheduled.

the midden by his car grows on days he is not working. I did the math and it did not math. so this week I actually pulled the schedule.

Cartbeard works tuesday, wednesday, thursday, and saturday.

his car was in the lot monday. it was in the lot friday. it was in the lot SUNDAY.

I want to be normal about this and I kinda can't anymore. the man comes to work on days there is no work. he pushes carts nobody used into a store nobody entered. for free. he is the only person in the history of this location who has ever wanted to be here and he expresses that by treating the parking lot as a bathroom.

anyway I decided to start with the pile because the pile felt winnable. clean it up, one problem gone, morale victory. that was my thinking. I had a plan and a coffee and everything.

god

the plan

the plan was simple. figure out whose job it is to haul it, and make them haul it. one problem, gone.

step one was just going out to actually look at the thing in daylight, up close, so I could describe it to whoever I ended up calling. i had been avoiding looking at it up close for about a week, which in hindsight was the healthiest week of my life.

so I go out to the far lot at like 8:40, before he's on, and

his car is always there

it's tuesday, so fine, he's scheduled, but he's not ON till nine, and there's no Cartbeard, just the old silver Buick, waxed, gleaming like a tooth, and next to it the pile doing pile things, mostly decomposing. and I think great, I have twenty minutes, I'll get a good look and go.

I get maybe four seconds in.

"OH you're gonna wanna stand upwind of her"

I have never in my life come off the ground the way I came off the ground. he was RIGHT THERE. he had been there the entire time. I still don't know where he comes from. I've decided he doesn't arrive anywhere, he's just already at every location, retroactively, like weather. or a schlubby ninja.

Cartbeard seems THRILLED. because I'm looking at the pile. 'finally a witness!' he thinks.

"you wanna see it?" he says. "like actually see it?"

of course I did not want to actually fucking see it. but I have a case to build and I am, may it be noted, a trained observer of decomposing biological systems, so I said, fine. show me the pile.

and his whole face made what i think is a glad look. though he might have been about to cry. or poop.

and he goes, "her name's the archive."

neat. so, the tour...

The car is the thing that broke me first.

It's spotless. I said this in part one but I don't think I sold it enough. it is not clean-for-a-work-car. it is clean like a museum. the tires have that wet-look shine. there's a little chamois folded on the dash. he calls the car Deborah. not the sweater lady, a different Deborah, and when I asked if they were connected he looked at me like I was slow and said "why would they be connected," which, fair, but also YOU named a Buick after a woman, sir, the burden of the weird is not on me here.

so we've got Deborah. immaculate. loved. detailed weekly by hand.

and eighteen inches away, sharing her exact patch of asphalt, is a refuse mound the size of a chest freezer that has the strength to grab your uvula and tug it up through your nose.

the pile does not touch Deborah, of course. there is a clean line. a border. Cartbeard maintains a PERIMETER. a DMZ, demilitarized zone. the man has standards, a whole entire code, with that caveat that none of his standards are ones any normal person would pick.

"I'd never let any of that get on her," he said, offended I'd even glanced between them. "that's disgusting."

that's disgusting. he said that. standing there. wiping his chicken hands on his vest again.

the refuse coffin is made largely of boxes.

I thought "the archive" was a bit. it is not. he walked me through it all and at some point my brain gave up on horror and switched into the only other mode I have, which is field mode, which is the mode where I stop being a person and absorb the whole experience. for science.

the pile is chronological. newest on top. he knows roughly where any given week is by depth, the way you'd read tree rings, the way I told you in part one you can read a midden, except I was being clever and he was being SINCERE, he actually does this.

he crouched down at the top and started pointing.

"that's this week. wings tuesday, wings wednesday, I did the thai place thursday which was a mistake." i was gonna ask what was wrong with the thai place, but i opened my mouth and he just glared hard enough to make me reconsider.

then he goes deeper. physically deeper. he's excavating now, gently, like an archaeologist, moving the top layers aside with tenderness and organization, and I'm standing there in the cold with my phone out having genuinely forgotten I came to destroy this monument to his meal choices.

"now THIS." he pulls out a flattened box, grey, structural, been in the system a while. holds it up like a trophy fish. "this is from the day the lottery hit forty million and I thought about it. this box was there for that. so i'm gonna keep it as a record."

I said Cartbeard that's a arby's box

"it was there FOR IT," he said. offended again.

it wasn't gross to HIM. I mean it was gross, objectively. a seagull was doing laps overhead like it owned the airspace, but he wasn't showing me garbage. he was showing me a YEAR. he was showing me his six months on earth, laid down in layers, wings and thai mistakes and the day he almost got rich, and he was proud, and he wanted me to see it, and for one horrible second, standing in a dead parking lot next to a museum-grade Buick and a mound of his own composting lunches, I understood him completely and I have never felt worse.

then the seagull landed on the arby's box and he said "hey Scooter" and I left.

the seagull has a name. it's Scooter. moving on.

we need the health department.... so about the health department

right. so. here's where you say it. call the county health department, textbook biohazard on commercial property, they'll make it go away. I said it to myself in a reasonable person voice.

so I looked into it. I am not an idiot, I just work somewhere idiotic.

here's the problem that i found. the pile is next to his car. his car is parked in the FAR lot, the outer band, past the light poles. and I looked up where our property line actually runs, and it turns out the far lot, where car-Deborah lives, is not clearly Kmart's.

it's a right-of-way. it's this weird dead easement from back when they thought they'd widen the road and never did. the store's parcel ends at the light poles. past that it's a jurisdiction nobody wants, half county, half state DOT, functionally nobody's, a little strip of legal nowhere.

and Cartbeard parks in it.

on purpose? I asked him. later. if he knew.

and he got the one-second almost-caught look, and then it passed and he said "I like the space" and would not say anything else, and I want to be so clear about what I think happened there, which is that this man, who cannot spell egregious, who eats kid cuisines out of a dead Little Caesars, has somehow located the one square of earth in this entire county where the rules don't reach, and he PARKED HIS TRASH CHRONOLOGY THERE... I cannot prove he did it on purpose but I will go to my grave certain that he did.

I called the county anyway. Worth a shot, right?

the county said it sounded like a state DOT matter. the state DOT has a webform. the webform has a dropdown. the dropdown does not have an option for "a man is composting rotisserie chickens in a disputed easement behind the last Kmart on earth." I picked "other." "other" has a 500 character limit. I have never in my life had less room to say this much.

I have not heard back. it's been a week. I looked it up and the average response time is measured in a unit I'd describe as "seasonal."

the manager, still a yogurt

I told Yogurt about the easement thing because I thought, finally, a real fact, a legal fact, surely this moves him.

he was eating yogurt. big surprise.

I laid it all out, the schedule, the sunday car, the archive, Scooter, the easement, the webform, all of it, gesturing, building, really cooking, and when I finished he was quiet for a second and I thought oh my god I got him, I finally got him, and he set the spoon down and he said,

"you looked up the property line? on your own time?"

and I said yes

and he said "that's a lot of work, kid" and he did not mean it as a compliment or an insult, he meant it as a diagnosis. he look slightly disgusted that i'd exert myself in such a way, and then he picked the spoon back up.

for the record I asked about the boat he's gonna buy again. progress: he is now between two boats and wouldnt tell me which two. he said "you'll jinx it." he has three months left and he is protecting the honor of two hypothetical boats from the evil eye of his own assistant manager. Yogurt is one weird dude.

the part I wasn't going to tell you has been weighing on me, so i guess ill tell it anyways.

Content films him. I've mentioned Content, electronics, never puts the phone down. what I did not fully cop to in part one is the phone is not for her. it's for him. she films him, constantly, and she's weird and protective about that phone, and I have decided very hard that I do not want to know what she does with it. I used to think it was a private bit. it is not a private bit. that's all I've got and I'm leaving it there.

and word gets around anyway, apparently, because a customer, a real one, came in from a couple towns over, walked past me, the manager, and asked Tupperware "is this where the chicken guy is."

the chicken guy.

he has a fanbase. a word-of-mouth, drive-in-from-the-next-county fanbase. I'm out here filling out WEBFORMS and this man, without trying, without knowing, without so much as a last name that anyone uses, is more beloved by the general public than I have ever been by a single human being, and he heard about the customer and you know what he did?

he signed her receipt.

he can barely write dude. it took a while. she probably framed it. it says "stay sneaky" and then a shape that I think is supposed to be a chicken and it is kind of a good chicken tbh.

4:15

Brandy came on. the sweater lady came in, wolf sweater today, a real howler, and she bought it. I thought about asking and I didn't. she's got a story for sure, but i cant invest all that much.

The Fixture, in his chair, hadn't moved since open. and as I passed he said his one thing for the day, and his one thing was:

"Scooter's a good name for it."

and I stopped and I said you know about Scooter?

and he said "everybody knows about Scooter"

and that was it, that was his whole allotment, and he went back to being furniture, and I stood there realizing that there is an entire layer of knowledge in this building that everyone has and no one will hand me, they just release it one sentence a day like a hostage video, and I am the assistant MANAGER, I am supposedly in CHARGE, and I am the least informed person in a building of six.

TL;DR: tried to get the trash pile hauled off as a biohazard. it's a chronological ARCHIVE that exists in the netherzone. Cartbeard has forbidden knowledge.

the health department is a webform and the webform picked "other."

I'm still going to try and get him.

CARTBEARD pt 1: my new cart guy pees in the breakroom sink and I can't fire him because he's the last man alive who will push a cart

on mobile. sorry about the formatting

I have a bachelors degree in marine biology.

putting that first because in a minute I'm going to describe a man washing an apple, and you should know I did not get here the normal way. four years. senior thesis. I once counted barnacles on a piling in the rain for an entire summer and it was the happiest I have ever been.

anyway. I'm the assistant manager of what im pretty sure is the last Kmart on planet earth.

not saying what state. not saying the town. there are six of us, so if you find the store you've found me.

94,000 square feet. six employees. the parking lot has painted lines for four hundred cars and most days there's four cars in it and three of them belong to the employees.

somebody painted those lines by hand 2 or 3 decades ago. he went home that night and told somebody he did a good day's work.

I think about that guy.

I don't know why I think about that guy.

whatever

I've been here ten years now. came back to help my mom move, it was supposed to be six months. it might be funnier if it weren't a hell of my own making. OH WELL!

So, the neckbeard... Cartbeard has been here six months.

that's the whole post. I've been in that building a decade and he showed up in the spring and it's his building now. I can watch it happening. I know exactly what he is and I can't make him stop.

he's an invasive species. not an insult, a classification. you drop an organism into a system with no predator for it and no competitor in its niche and it doesn't win by being strong, it wins because nobody knows what to do about it. zebra mussels. lionfish. Cartbeard.

the niche was open. nobody had ever thought to defile this store because everybody who works here is dying, tired, or nineteen.

took him one season.

before I get to today, here is a partial list of things I have personally watched this man do since spring, so you understand the baseline:

he keeps a rotisserie chicken in his vest. not in a bag. in the vest. the vest has a chicken pocket now.

the little caesars in the vestibule closed in 2016 but the ovens still work, nobody knows why, and he has figured this out, and he uses them to cook hot pockets and kid cuisines. he eats like a literal toddler.

he clips his nails at the service desk and calls it "doing my books."

he refers to a specific dumpster as "the good dumpster" in a tone that suggests there is bad blood with a second dumpster. i'm not sure if a love dumpster will make an appearance, or if the good or bad one used to be the love dumpster at some point?

Cartbeard once handed a customer her receipt with a hand that had, four seconds earlier, been fully inside a chicken.

that's the version of him I had made my peace with. the BASELINE.

another shitty monday 9:38am or something

I badge in eight minutes late. nobody notices. noticing is a form of caring and we don't bother with that anymore.

The Fixture is in his chair by the door. 78. greeter. brought the chair from home in 2004. says one thing a day. saves it. does not spend it on me.

I go to the back, phone out, coffee in hand, already talking because I need such and such fixed by somebody with a pulse

and the person I wanted, who we'll call Yogurt isn't in the breakroom

Cartbeard's in the breakroom instead

At the breakroom sink with his back to me... and he is peeing into it

I've had a day to think about this so I'm going to be precise.

he wasn't near the sink. no aiming situation. i presume he just like... flopped it in... he was SQUARED UP. hips set, head tipped back like a man enjoying weather. one hand on the counter.

the other hand was holding a bag of shredded cheese.

the radio was playing steely dan. I can't hear the opening of Peg anymore. that's a real thing that's true about me now.

the sink is essentially a steel bowl. it's a drum. I stood in the doorway and got played a liquid solo. the echoes of the damned haunt me less than the sound of this neckbeard's ropey dehydrated piss in the breakroom sink.

he hears the door. does not stop. looks back, sees me, lifts the cheese. like a cheese salute.

"morning boss"

then he finishes. shudders head to foot like a labrador coming out of a lake.

that's not the worst part of course.

he takes the pull out sprayer, the one we use on the coffee pot, and hoses the basin down. circular. thorough. a considerate man tidying up his waste.

he wipes his hands on his vest.

takes an apple out of his vest pocket.

I said 'no'. out loud. in a gasp. like a woman in a haunted house.

Cartbeard holds it under the tap. turns it twice. buffs it on his sleeve. bites in, juice dribbling down his chin, and this motherfucker goes:

"you want half?" ...half of your piss-apple?

so i go seek the manager, who is a yogurt

I find Yogurt and give him the whole thing while gesticulating wildly with my hands. sink, sprayer, apple, offer. pee. pee pee. lots of pee with winky in sinky.

Yogurt is 61 with 3 months to his pension. he has the stillness of a man who negotiated with the universe and lost badly. his office is a supply closet with a window onto sporting goods, which is basically just four bikes and a kayak at this point.

(the kayak's on clearance. been on clearance ten years. drops four dollars a year. it's free in 2061. maths.)

Yogurt eats yogurt through the entire reenactment. slow. like a man with somewhere to be in about twelve years.

he says, "when's the last time that sink seemed right to you?"

i opened my mouth and let out a croak.

"I remember the sink being fine." i managed. and i guess that's my problem. I'm the only one left who remembers BEFORE. everybody else already adapted.

soap bar hasn't shrunk since june.

Content stopped filling her water bottle in that room in april. never said why. I never asked. lizard brain knew not to open that door.

and Tupperware. 19, on register, kindest person in the building, getting out of this town if I have to mail her in a crate. since march she carries her lunch container two hundred feet to wash it in the CUSTOMER bathroom. every day. for months.

I never asked because I already knew. everybody already knew. it got folded up small and put somewhere dark, like you do. i can only imagine how bad it'd be if we were british lol

Yogurt said "nobody else does."

then he tells me The Fixture clocked it in Cartbeard week one.

I said THE FIXTURE TALKS

he said "he talks when it's worth it"

so I said fine, then we write him up.

Yogurt put the spoon down. folded his hands. looked at me with the gentleness of a vet about to say slip a needle into me and said, "if you write it up, then it happened."

I said it DID happen. I WATCHED it. he waved at me WITH CHEESE.

"but it isn't documented. a thing that isn't documented is a thing corporate can't ask me about. i got 3 months. don't do it."

then he goes, "tomorrow he'll do it again, I still won't care to know about it or document it, and then in the spring I'm buying me a boat."

I asked what kind of boat.

he hasn't decided. he's had thirty years. life do be like that.

anyway

the pile

I went out to the lot. I'm an idiot with a degree, which is the worst possible thing to be.

he's in the far lot, the outer band past the light poles where the asphalt gives up. that's where staff park, out of some retail instinct that the good spots are for CUSTOMERS. there are no customers. you could hold a wedding on the good spots.

forty carts, pushing them across nine acres alone, humming.

his car's at the far edge. 97 buick, silver, WAXED, cleanest object within twenty miles and I have looked at every object within twenty miles.

next to it is the pile.

I'd been driving past it since may and filing it under "garbage." up close it's not garbage. garbage is anonymous.

it's SORTED.

it's a midden. using that term correctly. a refuse heap built up in one spot through repeated deposition by a single population, and archaeologists love them because they tell you everything, what they ate, what they valued, how long they stayed, you can date one, you can read it in layers like a...

ok you probably don't care, sorry, I get like this.

the midden is about the size of a chest freezer. collected in six months. I did the math in the car. four containers a day, every day, including the days he isn't scheduled.

somebody explain the days he isn't scheduled. nobody can. not yet.

clamshells with clamshells. pizza boxes stacked flat and SQUARE, which I've thought about it more than the sink pee. and at the bottom, a layer that stopped being containers and started being SOIL. there's a sheen. I looked one second too long and something in me died forever.

a smell like this reaches the back of your throat before it hits your nose. sweet. warm. personal. like breath.

there was a seagull standing on the trash. we are not near an ocean. it looked at me and did not leave. it had the body language of a bird that considers me the intruder.

fair enough

the conversation

he sees me and lights up. that's the thing I can't digest about him, he is ALWAYS glad to see you, no memory of the last conversation, and I had walked out there to end his career.

"HEY BOSS"

lets go of the cart train. it keeps rolling. neither of us acknowledges it.

I said: the breakroom. this morning. you were urinating in the sink.

"yeah." the way you'd confirm the time.

then he waited. companionably. because he's a generous guy, and he had nowhere to be, and he's been here six months and owns nine acres, and I've been here ten years and own nothing.

I said do you understand why that's a problem.

"no."

I said you don't understand why urinating in the sink where we wash the coffee pot is a problem.

his face got EXCITED.

"okay now SEE, I'm GLAD you asked me that. most people don't ask, they just get all" and he does a fluttering thing next to his head, indicating the general concept of other people having thoughts, "and go away mad. but you ASKED. so. two things."

"one, it's a sink." he said it gently. he was breaking it to me nice and slow. "it's a bowl that goes to the sewer. toilet's a bowl that goes to the sewer. same sewer. you're upset about the SHAPE really."

"two." voice drops, goes warm, goes PATERNAL. "that toilet's three and a half gallons a flush. I'm out here six, seven times a shift. you run that over a career, boss, that's real money. this company's money. down a hole. to move something that was ALREADY LIQUID."

over a career?? bro's been here six months and he's doing projections. we'll be lucky to last two years.

behind us forty unattended carts rolled into a light pole.

and then, and I want to be clear this happened while I was standing there deciding whether to cry, he reached into the vest, into the CHICKEN POCKET (which is the right pocket, I'll note. the apple came from his left pocket. who cares?), he pulled out a leg, and held it out to me. across the whole conversation. a peace offering. a drumstick that had been riding around a parking lot at body temperature inside a safety vest.

"you didn't take the apple," he said. like that had been bothering him. like he'd been keeping score and I was down a snack.

I said no thank you. pocket chicken is only marginally better than piss apple.

he said "suit yourself, boss" and ate it himself in about four seconds and wiped his hand on the cart meant for the customers. salmonella? maybe. i told him to wipe the handles down.

then I said "why don't you just use the bathroom?"

and for one second something moved behind his face that was almost like getting caught. he was embarassed for just a flash.

"bathroom's inside."

yes. i said.

"I'm outside."

the store is forty feet away.

he looked out across nine acres of parking lot that took him one season to annex for himself.

"sure. but then I gotta come back."

the drawer

I wrote him up. BEAUTIFULLY. it took forty minutes to find the right form but it was worth it...

sanitation. food contact surface. repeated and acknowledged. I typed "egregious," deleted it out of professionalism, then put it back out of spite.

I set it on Yogurt's desk with a pen on top.

he looks at it. looks at me. and picks up a different pen. HIS pen, out of a drawer, with the smooth practiced motion of a man who does this a lot.

signs it. "there."

I said thank you, that's all I wanted, process, it goes to corporate, it's documented, it's REAL now, something can happen.

I picked it up and turned it over.

the signature was silver.

silver metallic gel pen. the kind you buy at a craft store to write on dark cardstock at christmas.

doesn't scan. doesn't photocopy. doesn't fax. a form signed in silver gel bounces out of corporate's system in 11 to 14 days with an automated ILLEGIBLE, RESUBMIT.

I said how many of these have you signed.

Yogurt reached down, no hurry, and opened the bottom drawer.

there's a file. it's THICK. same name on every page, silver on every page, and I went to the bottom and the last one is dated his second day.

forty one write ups in six months. Yogurt never tried. he clocked it on day two and went and bought the pen.

I said what happened to the guy before him.

"fella named Ostrowski. lasted nine days. cried in the lot."

about what?

"the carts."

I sat on the floor of the supply closet holding a disciplinary form from a man's second day and I said WHY.

"because there's nobody else, kid." and he said it KINDLY, which was the worst part, because a cruel man I could work with.

"OP. nobody's applied in ages. you fire him, that's your right, I'll back your play. and monday morning the carts are in the road. they DO get in the road. somebody's camry takes a nine hundred dollar dent and calls the county."

spoonful of yogurt.

"and then it's you and me out there in the rain in our little vests, and one of us turns to the other and goes, so who's covering grocery."

i left it at that.

at 4:15 the PA plays Brandy (You're A Fine Girl). every day. only that song. nobody knows how, nobody knows why.

the sweater lady came in. she comes every week and buys one sweater. usually with a cat or a wolf on it.

and The Fixture, who had not moved or blinked since 9:38 when i walked in, says from his chair without turning his head:

"he didn't wash his hands."

what.

"cartbeard. this morning. after. he didn't wash his hands."

I said he was AT THE SINK. he was STANDING AT THE SINK. he USED THE WATER. HE USED THE WATER ON THE APPLE.

"yep."

that was his one thing for the day. he spent it on that.

I looked out the front window.

past lawn and garden, past the light poles, at the far end of nine acres he annexed in a season, Cartbeard walked between a ford f150 and a chevy suburban and glanced back over his shoulder. not furtive. not careful. a theatrical performance of the CONCEPT of privacy, staged for nobody, performed badly, by a man who has never needed any.

he had a kmart bag in his hand.

he had, at some point that day, walked up to one of my registers and helped himself to a COURTESY BAG and folded it into his vest and carried it out to the far lot.

for this.

he goes down behind the truck. only the top of his head shows.

and over the store radio, clipped to my belt, broadcast to all six of us, in a voice of enormous untroubled contentment:

"sneaky break. cartbeards out there taking a stoop poop. behind the f150."

click

behind me, Content's phone made the sound a phone makes when it starts recording.

Tupperware put down a sweater and walked fast toward the bathroom.

The Fixture said nothing, having spent it.

Yogurt, behind me, said "three months."

and on the ceiling, Brandy was a fine girl, and what a good wife she would be.

TL;DR: new cart guy, six months in, pees in the breakroom sink, rinses it with the dish sprayer, washes an apple in it, eats the apple in front of me, offers me half, then takes a dump in the parking lot behind a ford f150 into a courtesy bag he stole off my own register. can't fire him because nobody in this state will push a cart for eleven an hour, and my manager's been signing his write ups in craft gel pen since day two so they won't scan.

I've been in that building ten years. he's been there six months and it's his building now.

But I'm going to try and get him.

Good day, goodly folken. Faring well? I hope so. Ole' Papa Paqa here has been kicking back while the world burns contemplating all of life's little adventures.

On this subreddit, we see a lot of weird characters both of beardy bravado and nice guy nincompoopery, but we are also blursed with the occasional Kevin or Kevina. For most, these Kevins/as are passing acquaintances. Though, for a few, there is a genetic line. A tainted protein somewhere deep in the twisted fibers of our genetic code. Maybe it is recessive, where you are only but a carrier of the gene. Maybe it is dominant and you are cursed with a choice to pass on the Kevin gene, though I suspect most don't know they are afflicted, coasting through life on a raft of dumb luck and hope. If you're lucky, the family Kevin is just that weird cousin. For me, that Kevin is dear ol' Dad.

My father's time in my life is sporadic and intentionally so (on my part), so I don't have a linear line of perpetual Kevents but I do have an assortment of tales.

Like Shrek, these people have layers and giving them a full backstory will do them no justice.

So, gather round niblings, siblings, and Gubbin-folk, Papa Paqa will tell you the motley crew of princes and fools.

Father - The Kevin of the tale, as stated before. Navy Vet, but more like if Gomer Pyle enlisted in the Navy sans the whimsy. 29 at the telling of this tale and still active. At this time he looked like a Freddy Mercury impersonator you would hire for a kid's birthday party but like, not a good one.

Pops - My grandfather. World War II vet from New York City but retired in the country. This dude is a G. Unintentionally hilarious, Good heart but gruff. Best visual I can give is Grandpa Munster. Dude looked like that from 81-2011. Not relevant to the story, but he was so scared of flying he once made his buddy mollywop him into unconsciousness so he could board a plane to Colorado.

Mom - Uh, my mom. Got caught in the Kevin trap between rails of coke and poor 80s related decisions.

Baby Paqa - 3 yr old me. I have few memories, none too vivid. I am just a wee lad discovering the world, these are my pre-amputation days so I cherish memories when I had all my limbs, be them few. I don't play much of a role here, I was still shitting my pants, I am guessing. This is one of those few memories that will always be in my head. Added for context to why the proceeding decisions were bad.

With that, settle in, light up a pipe, and put on some sea shanties, we are about to sail on the seas on time. Mind you, these tales were told to me by my reddit illiterate (reddiliterate? Redd, trademark that, please. kthx.)

It was the late 80s, my father just got promoted to E-3 (somehow) and this called for a celebration. My mother phoned all the relatives to come to a bbq on the base. My aunts and uncles from Long Island would stampede with piles of cannolis, gabagool (capicola for non-Italians), and drama. Preparations were made, food was had, good times were had by all (I'm guessing, there are pictures of me stacking beer cans for my relatives. The 80s were different).

As a gift, my grandfather surprised my dad with a new station wagon. My mom was expecting the future neckbeard that was my brother, so he felt a station wagon was more appropriate for our growing family rather than our 2-door coupe. Now, goodly folk, my grandfather was a tightfisted miser, unless it was for his family and if we really needed it. This man refused the GI Bill after the war because he wanted to prove he could make it on his own merit, unlike his father who drank whatever assistance he got. So when my grandfather spent a large sum of money on ANYBODY that wasn't in his house, it was was a big deal. The man couldn't tell you he loved you, but he would let you know.

Anyway, according to my Ma, this was a huge deal as their current car's muffler kept falling off and my dad not exactly being good at holding onto money. The car worked well, time passed, and my father came home from work one day, acting rather sheepish but excited. According to my mother, the following conversation went along the lines of thus:

My dad, awkwardly walking into the house: Uh, hey. So, I made an amazing deal today! And came out on top!

Mom, all too use to these Gil-like machinations: Oh God, what did you do? *notices a car in our driveway, one that definitely isn't her car* What the fuck is that piece of shit in the driveway??

Friends, where my mother once saw a beautiful white station wagon with wood panels, she saw a puke green rusted out Pinto.

Dad: That's our new car! She's not much to look at but she's got a reliable engine! It's 15 years old and still runs like a champ. All that damage is just cosmetic!

Mom: *breathes deeply* and where is *our* car!?

Dad: That is the amazing part, babe! I ran into a guy at the gas station who was with his son in a wheelchair. He asked how much the car was because he needed something for his son's wheelchair because all he was driving was that Pinto, so I offered to trade him! We were blessed with the car and they needed it more than we did!

Mom *blinking, holding back rage*: We only were "blessed" with that car because you got our last car repoed! That car was supposed to be transporting the kids! Have you considered how we will tell your father this!?

Dad: Oh, well, yeah...

Mom: How????

Dad: Well, I was kind of hoping YOU would tell him...he likes you!

My mother, being an ex-hippy from the Bay Area, who powered through the 70s on coke, spite, and three husbands absolutely refused to call my grandfather and tell him. She made it clear that either he would call now and try to get the car back, or she was moving back to California. Again reminding him that if they did have their previous car repoed because he wanted to party with his Navy buddies rather than pay his bills, Pops wouldn't have had to buy him a car. Charity or not, they couldn't just replace another car let alone fix up whatever garbage pile my dad brought home. As such, my dad calls.

Again, pulling from the memory of Mom, after my dad made awkward small talk he professed to Pops his wonderful deed. He waited with a smug smile, anticipating his father to laude him for being the model son, a pillar to his community, and the picture of what our family represented. What he got, however, was a very loud, very angry, very Italian man spitting a slew of curse words (in English and Italian) and very stern words. Apparently, Dad didn't have much to say after my grandfather said his piece. Not because he wasn't without anything to say, its because everytime he would begin to speak, Pops would begin with a new tirade.

Dad hung up the phone and told my mom that Pops was driving down to help get the car back, hopefully. Pops had a way with words, though a bit unscrupulous he may be. Ya can't bullshit the bullshitter, in other words.

Hours later, Pops arrived. He had a good few hours of driving to stew, he wasn't big on small talk when he got there. It was getting late, so they agreed to go in the morning. Pops wasn't outwardly angry, though. He would just take small jabs here and there (i.e. "Should we take my car, or should we pedal that piece of shit like the got-damn Flintsteins!?" Yeah, Pops couldn't be convinced it was "Flintstones").

The next morning, Pops made Dad ride with him and my mom take the kids and drive the pinto. Remember, kids, this was the 80s, and Pops was an old man who survived Normandy, the Depression, and my grandmother. Car safety was but to laugh at.

This is where the core memory comes in. It only lasts about 5 seconds, but all these years later, I still get a pit in my stomach in irrational fear. I remember being in my older sister's lap, watching the road go by, but not out of the window....out of the gaping hole in the foot well across the backseat. OF course, my mother took no notice of this at first, but quickly did when my sister brought it up. Unfortunately, Pops and Dad already began to pull away and leaving us unable to flag them down. No phone to call because, again, 80s. So, yeah, we had to drive Jesus' Pinto (because it was holy, you see) to an unknown spot except to the intrepid Kevin-dad who was navigating at the head of the convoy.

My mother recalls seeing from her point of view my grandfather in the truck ahead, waggling his fat Italian finger, occasionally whacking Dad in the back of the head.

The next details are rocky, and I am not sure how they came up with this address; I am guessing something to do when the cars were signed over or something, don't ask me, I am just a chicken farmer, not a Time Lord.

Apparently, they arrived and had a conversation with someone, someone else came to the door, an argument ensued, threats were made, doors were slammed in faces. We left in the pinto...

It turns out, my dad got scammed. Two people flim-flamed my naive dad out of his car by using the wheelchair story. My father, never one to question anything or anyone and always rose to the occasion to be the hero in his own story, took it as face value. Not sure how they got that out of them or whatever, but Pops, when asked later on about it told me to, "Don't worry about it." in his deep, New York accent. Ask again, I never did, but I am guessing it was carny level fleecing. I respect the hustle, honestly. I'd never trade my prize rooster for a grocery store rotisserie chicken, but if I somehow got swindled to do so, that's my own damn fault.

Well, friends and such, thus ends a tale of my father the Kevin. Maybe the next tale I will tell will be about the time he got knocked down by a rabbi who was a good foot shorter than him or one of his destination-less road trips. Maybe I will go another way by regaling you with how Pops managed to hoodwink a Cupcake Outlet or the time he took me on an Amish farm tour by just pulling into Amish farms and walking around like they were public attractions.

If you've gotten this farm, don't forget to give Jefe ReddX the 1st a like and subscribe, he's got many gubbinses to feed, do it for the Gubbinses! PLEASE THINK OF THE GUBBINSES!

Until then, be awesome and be well. Remember to feed your chickens, don't wash your eggs until their ready to eat, and support your local farmers.

This is the last one. I'm going to tell you how it ended, which is messier and slower and better than the tidy version anybody would script. I find myself wishing for the script recently. It did not finish that night with me walking out of that apartment holding Wesley's hand while Elliot wept into a laptop. What actually happened took months.

Let me get the night itself out of the way first.

I did not leave that apartment with Wesley. That's the part people always expect and it's not how it went. After Elliot said the word "loved" and heard it land, after the "oh," Wesley stood up, and he looked at me, and the thing on his face was not relief and it was not love. It was the specific blankness of a man whose entire house had just been picked up and turned upside down while he was still standing in it. Shellshock, maybe. And he said, quiet, "I think I need everyone to leave. I need everyone to just... Please leave."

So I left. I wanted to stay so badly my bones hurt. I wanted to fold him up and take him home and fix it all. And Marissa, who I called from the car, said the single most important thing anyone said to me in this entire story. She said, "Danny. Don't you dare become the next guy, who tells him what to think about Elliot. He just found out his whole life got arranged for him. If you swoop in and arrange the next part for him in distinct benefit to yourself, then you're just a nicer-smelling version of the same disease. Let him get himself back. If he's any good, he'll come find you when he's ready. If he's ready."

I hated that. It was completely right. It is very annoying to love someone who is perpetually that correct.

So I did the hardest thing I have ever done in any of these stories, and again, I want it on the record because it doesn't come naturally to a man who once drove a stranger's ferment home rather than throw it away immediately. I did nothing... I did not text him paragraphs. I did not show up. I sent exactly one message, the night after, that said "I'm here if you want me, I'm gone if you want that too, no pressure either way, take all the time you need." And then I put the phone down and let a good thing go. And I waited to find out if it would come back.

Here's what happened while I waited, as I pieced it together later.

Wesley moved out. Not in a fury, not that first week. It took him a while, because when you have never once paid for your own life, leaving is not a feeling, it's a logistics problem. The apartment was in both their names but the lifestyle inside it was Elliot's, entirely. Wesley added it up one night, actually sat down and added it up, and realized he did not know how to afford himself. The Aspen guy, the good-seats guy, the guy on the boat neither of them owned. None of it was his. He'd been a passenger in his own life for six years and mistaken the view for freedom or independence or whatever else.

So Wesley got a smaller place. A real one, a sad one, the kind with a hotplate and an upstairs neighbor who bowls indoors until you bang on the ceiling with a broomstick so he gives you a 5 minute break from the endless racket. Wesley also gave the watch back. I know that because he told me, months later, that handing Elliot the watch was the moment it became real, watching Elliot hold it and understand that the arrangement was over, that the thing he'd bought six years of proximity with was being returned. Wesley said Elliot didn't yell. He just got small, and quiet, and said "you don't have to do this," and Wesley said "I know. That's kind of the point."

I want to talk about Elliot for a second, because I don't hate him. I know that's a strange thing to type after four parts of watching him try to erase me. But Marcus was right, and Marcus earned the right to say it because Marcus paid more than I did. Elliot is not a villain in the way the tonsil stone guy or the ferment guy were villains. Nobody was ever in physical danger. He never broke a law that I know of. He was a man who answered a lonely question in the worst possible way and then spent six years defending the only answer he could ever conceive of for himself. Elliot wanted to be loved, he got told no by the one person he decided counted, and instead of grieving it and leaving like the rest of us have to, he built a whole shadow-marriage out of laundry and Aspen and dinners on the counter and called it friendship, and he needed it so badly he was willing to burn strangers to keep it lit. That's not evil. That's a person who was never taught what actual love is.

I hope he got help. I don't know if he did. He had the money for it. I heard through the grapevine that his dad manages a hedge-fund or something like that. Doesn't matter. He's not in my life and he's not in Wesley's. I think about him more than I want to. I think a version of me that got a few things different in my twenties could have ended up building a shadow-marriage of my own. I just got a Marissa instead. I am lucky to have her though. Not everybody gets a Marissa.

Okay. The good part. You've been patient.

Wesley came back after about two months. Not with a grand speech. He texted me, out of nowhere, on an afternoon I wasn't expecting anything, and the text just said "can I take you to dinner. I'll pay. it's my own money, it's not much, but it's mine." And I read it about nine times and then I sat down on my bedroom floor, because floors are apparently where I end up processing everything now, and I cried, in the good way, for the first time in months.

We went to dinner. He paid, with his own not-much money, at a place way cheaper than anywhere Elliot ever took him, and it was the best meal I have ever eaten. He told me he'd read everything. All of it. Upperdeckerbeard, the ferment, all the bar stories, the whole ugly catalog. He'd watched the ReddX videos too, which is a deeply surreal thing, to have the man you love watch a stranger narrate your worst months back to you for an audience of thousands. And I braced for it, the thing Elliot promised him, the "he'll turn you into content, he'll make fun of you."

And Wesley said, "so, when you write the one about Elliot. About all this." And I froze. And he said, "make me the oblivious idiot. Because I was. I read those and the whole time I kept thinking, this guy notices everything, and I noticed nothing, for six years, because noticing was going to cost me a nice life. So if it's going in a story, tell it straight. I earned the oblivious part."

Reader, I have never been so relieved and so seen in my entire life. He didn't ask me to stop writing. He didn't ask me to leave him out. He asked me to be honest about him, which is the exact opposite of everything Elliot swore I'd do, and it's how I knew, all the way down, that this one was actually different. The willfully oblivious paramedic went and made himself a man who wanted the truth even when the truth was that he'd been a fool. You cannot manufacture that. Elliot spent six years and a fortune trying to and never got close.

So yes, Wesley, if you're reading this, and you are, because you read the drafts now, the way Marissa does: I made you the oblivious idiot. You asked. Thank you for accepting me.

I'll close where I always seem to end up. Behind my bar.

If you read the Lonely Hearts post, you already know my saddest night, the widower and the wheat beer, me pouring a full glass down the drain because I had nobody to order a second one for and I'd started to believe I never would. It was the most naked thing I ever put up here and I almost deleted it four times. I had to pay ReddX $20 to read it. But I wanted it heard, because this year has been a fucking rollercoaster. And it all ties into this series of events.

A few weeks ago Wesley came into the brewery at the end of a shift, his shift, the fourteen-hour meat-grinder kind, and he sat down at my bar, and I didn't ask him what he wanted. I already knew. I put a water down first, because he always needs the water first, and then I poured him the porter he likes, the one I know by heart now, the way you're supposed to know somebody. "A meal in itself" he calls it. And I poured myself one too. Two beers on the bar, both of them for someone, both of them going to get drunk by people who wanted them.

I have a person whose order I know by heart. It only took twenty-eight years and a documented parade of disasters and one genuinely good man who had to burn his whole life down to get free enough to sit at my bar and let me pour him the second beer.

It was worth it. All of it, even the parts that weren't at a glance. Now I have my person. We are going strong, and I don't want to change that for a moment.

So... That's the end. Thank you for reading these, all of them, for years. I'm going to go home now. Somebody's waiting, and he already knows how I take my coffee.

Danny out. For real this time.

TL;DR: I did not get Wesley that night. He made everyone leave. He moved out. Two months later Wesley took me to dinner on his own money. He comes into my bar now and I know his order by heart. The second beer finally has somebody to belong to.

Marcus wrote back at 6:40 in the morning. I know the exact time because I never slept, I just lay there watching the little "seen" like it owed me money, and when the three dots finally came back my whole body came up off the mattress.

His first message was short. "I've been waiting like two years for someone to send me this exact message. I almost didn't answer it. Give me a minute, this is going to be long."

It was long. I'll only repeat the parts that matter, because the whole thing is four years of a man's life and it isn't all mine to hand out.

Marcus dated Wesley for about a year, ending a little over two years ago. And everything, everything, that had happened to me had happened to him first, in the same order, in nearly the same words. Elliot got closer as the relationship got more real. Elliot was always there, always warm, always paying. Marcus started hearing himself come back through Wesley's mouth, bent. Controlling. Intense. "Drama follows him." And then one day Elliot sat Wesley down, gently, so worried, and told him that Marcus was bad news, and Wesley believed the man he'd trusted for four years over the man he'd been dating for one, and that was that.

But Marcus got further than I had. Marcus figured out the why.

"I'm going to tell you the part I had to work out on my own," he wrote, "Elliot is in love with him. Not a crush. Not a phase. He built his entire life around being the person closest to Wesley and he will burn down anyone who threatens that spot. I found out he put the roommate ad up specifically looking for a gay guy. He told me that himself, one night, drunk, like it was romantic. He kissed Wesley right after they moved in, got shot down, and instead of moving out or at least just moving on like a normal wounded person, he just... stayed. Six years. He decided if he couldn't have him he'd at least be the one who never leaves. And every guy Wesley brings home is a countdown for him. He's not trying to date Wesley anymore. He gave that up. He just needs to make sure nobody else gets to either."

And then the part I've read maybe forty times.

"The worst part is I don't even fully hate him. By the end I felt sorry for him, which he used against me too. He's not a monster, he's a guy who's been starving at the table for six years and decided one person was the only thing on earth he was allowed to want. That's sad. It's also going to cost you the person you love, because Wesley will never see it. He refuses to, so... Loosen ties now. Seeing it means admitting his whole adult life was built by a man who's in love with him, and no one wants to know that. I tried to tell him. Elliot got there first. I lost. I hope you don't. I really do. But I got out because I couldn't win a war against a guy Wesley had already decided was the good one."

I sat on my kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets and read that until the sun was actually up and cooking.

Because now I finally had it. Not a feeling. Not a vibe. An actual person, a witness, someone who had stood exactly where I was standing and been walked out the same door, telling me I was right about all of it. And it did not make me feel powerful. It made me feel sick. Because being right meant I now had to walk into my boyfriend's life and detonate the single longest relationship he had ever had, and there was a very real chance he would look at the wreckage, and then look at me holding the match, and he could very well choose the wreckage.

I decided to tell him carefully. Slowly. Pick a soft moment, lay it out gentle, let Marcus's words do the work mine couldn't. I had a whole plan.

I did not get to use the plan. Because Elliot moved first.

Two days later Wesley texted me. "hey can you come by tonight? we should talk." No emoji. Wesley always uses an emoji. That "we should talk" with nothing after it landed in my stomach like rock, and I knew, the way you know, that somewhere across town a hand had already been on the dial.

I drove over already holding the proof, Marcus's messages screenshotted in my phone, walking in like a man carrying a fire extinguisher into a building he didn't yet know was already burning.

Elliot answered the door.

He was so calm. He said "hey, Danny, come in," soft and sad, like a man receiving me at a wake, and he stepped back, and there was Wesley on the couch, not Elliot's spot, the other end, sitting forward with his elbows on his knees and his phone in his hands, and he would not look at me.

On the coffee table, laid out like evidence, was a laptop. And on the laptop was a page I recognized instantly, because I have looked at it more than any healthy person should. It was a ReddX video. In another window was my Reddit account. Upperdeckerbeard, The Fermented, all of it, scrolled and open.

"Danny," Wesley said, and his voice was doing something I'd never heard it do. "Is this you?"

I looked at Elliot. Elliot looked back at me with the saddest, gentlest, most devastated expression, a man who had done a terrible necessary thing for someone he loved. "I wasn't going to say anything," he said quietly, to Wesley, not to me. "But I couldn't watch you get in deeper. You deserve to know who you're actually with."

And then he delivered it, the line he'd clearly built the whole night around, warm and grave and perfect: "He turns people into stories, Wes. That's what he does. Every person who gets close to him ends up as a post. I just didn't want that unfunny demon guy reading about you and making fun of you someday."

And I won't pretend around this part, because I promised the record would be the true record. It landed. It landed because it's true. I am, right now, this second, turning Wesley into a story. You are reading it. Elliot picked the one weapon I could not knock out of his hand, because to deny it I'd have to lie, and I don't lie in these, that's the deal I made.

So I didn't deny it.

"Yeah," I said. "That's me. I write about the stuff that happens to me. I've never used a real name, I've never used yours, and I wasn't going to. But yeah. It's mine."

Wesley flinched like I'd confirmed something worse than I had. And Elliot, from the doorway, let the silence do its work, because he thought he'd won. He thought the posts were the killing blow.

The posts were the mistake.

Because standing in that room, watching Elliot run his play in the open for the first time instead of through Wesley's mouth, I finally understood I had exactly one move, and it was the one I'd been too scared to make. I stopped defending myself. I took out my phone. And I said, "Wes, before you decide anything, I need you to read something. Not about me. About Marcus."

Elliot's face did not move. That's how I knew.

"Marcus was unstable," Elliot said, immediately, smooth. "Danny, come on, this is exactly what I've been saying about..."

"I found him," I said, over the top of him. "I messaged him. He didn't know who I was. And he told me, before I told him a single thing, the entire story of what happened to him in this apartment, and it is word for word what's been happening to me. The concerns. The 'drama follows him.' You sitting Wesley down. All of it." I was shaking. I held the phone out to Wesley. "Read it yourself. I didn't write it. He did."

Wesley took the phone. And Elliot, for the first time in six years, made a mistake in front of the only person who mattered. He reached for it. He actually reached across the coffee table for the phone in Wesley's hands, fast, not calm anymore, and said, "don't, that guy is poison, he's been trying to get to me for two years, he'll say anything, he's..."

And Wesley pulled the phone back and looked up at him. And it was the first time all night he'd really looked at anybody. "How do you know he's been trying to get to you," Wesley said slowly, "if he moved away two years ago and never speaks to me."

The room went very still.

I watched it happen. I watched six years land on Wesley all at once. He read the phone. He read the part about the ad. He read the part about the kiss, the kiss he'd told me was a fun drunk nothing, sitting there in Marcus's account as the beginning of everything. And then he looked up at Elliot, his best friend, the man who did his laundry and knew his coffee and bought him a watch he wore every day, and he asked the question in a voice gone completely flat.

"Is it true. Did you kiss me because you wanted me. Do you... is that what this is?"

And this is the slip. This is the moment the part is named for.

Because Elliot, cornered, losing, watching six years of careful work come apart in real time, did not do the smooth thing. He didn't laugh it off. He didn't say "what? no, Wes, come on." The calm mask he had worn through every dinner and every hospital blanket and every gentle worried little comment finally cracked straight down the middle, and what came out from underneath it was loud, and raw, and true, and pointed straight at Wesley.

"Do you have any idea what I have DONE for you? Six years. SIX YEARS. I built your whole life. Who do you think paid for it? Who's here every single night, who cooks, who remembers, who actually shows up, while these guys float through and take what they want from you and just leave? I have NEVER left. And now you're going to sit there and take some stranger's word, and HIS," he threw a hand at me, and his voice broke on it, "over the person who has loved you since the day you walked into that apartment?"

And then he heard himself. You could see the realization on his face. The word "loved" hung in the air of that living room like smoke and would not clear, and Elliot's face went from fury to horror to something small and grey, because the one thing he had protected for six years, the secret that all of it existed to keep hidden, he had just set down on the coffee table in front of the man himself.

Nobody said anything for a long time. Wesley sat very still, holding my phone, staring at the friend he had somehow never once looked at directly in six years, finally seeing the whole of him.

"Oh," Wesley said. Just that. "Oh."

I would love to tell you this felt like winning. It did not feel like winning. I stood in that doorway and watched the man I loved lose his oldest friend, his home, and his entire understanding of his own life inside of about ninety seconds, and there was no part of it that felt good. I was right. It was still the worst thing that happened to any of us that night.

Part 5 is the after. What happened to Wesley, what happened to Elliot, what happened to me and Wesley, and whether a man who just found out his whole life was built by someone else can still choose something real, with a guy who, let's be honest, was always going to write about it lol

It's the last one. I'll get it out soon.

Danny out. For now.

TL;DR: Marcus wrote back and confirmed everything. Elliot has been in love with Wesley for six year. Elliot ambushed me by showing him my posts to paint me as a guy who turns people into content, which is true and which I couldn't deny. So I showed Wesley what Marcus wrote. Elliot panicked, slipped, and screamed the truth out loud in front of Wesley without meaning to. Wesley finally saw it. It did not feel good.

Let me tell you how Wesley and Elliot met, because I found out in the middle of all this and it rearranged my whole face, possibly permanently. It definitely left some indelible scars on my brain.

They met on Craigslist. Six years ago. A roommate ad. And when Wesley told me this, cheerful, chopping peppers at my counter like it was the most ordinary origin story a person could have, he tacked on the detail I have not been able to put down since. "Yeah, his ad said he was looking for a gay roommate specifically, which I thought was kind of cool, like a safe-space thing. We just clicked."

I stood there holding a pepper.

"His ad said that," I said.

"Yeah, progressive, right?" And he went back to dicing, beaming, a man who had just narrated the literal foundation of a six-year situationship and heard, inside it, absolutely nothing.

That is Wesley. And before Elliot came for me, I got a long, clear look at the thing Wesley could not see, and it is the single most impressive act of not-noticing I have ever watched a licensed adult perform. I'm putting it up front because Part 4 runs pretty short on things to laugh at.

Start with the money. Wesley cannot afford Wesley's life. I say that with love. He is a paramedic, he makes paramedic money, and this man goes to Aspen. He goes to concerts in the seats where you can actually see faces. There is a framed photo in that apartment of the two of them on a boat that I am fairly certain neither of them owns. So one night I asked him, light as anything, how he manages all that on an EMT salary, and Wesley speared a piece of chicken and said, "oh, Elliot usually covers it, he likes having someone to do stuff with, and I'm his guy, so." I'm his guy. So. Yikes. Yeah. He said the words "I'm his guy, so" about the man who has been financing his entire recreational existence since 2019, and then asked if I was going to finish my spring roll.

Once it was unveiled, I could not stop seeing it. Elliot does Wesley's laundry. "He likes things folded a certain way, it's honestly easier to just let him." Elliot knows Wesley's coffee order, his allergies, and exactly which nights his shift pattern turns into a meat grinder, and there is food ready on those nights, hot, no text required. "He's thoughtful like that." Elliot bought him a watch for his birthday that costs more than my car is currently worth, and when my face did something, Wesley said "yeah, he goes overboard, I keep telling him to relax," and then glanced down to check the time on it. On his wrist. Where he wears it every day.

This is a brilliant man, by the way. Wesley can look at a stranger folded into a wrecked car and tell you in four seconds precisely how scared to be. He simply will not aim one single degree of that at the person doing his laundry, buying him watches, and calling him "my guy." Every light in the house is on. That one specific room is just... very empty.

And then, one night, he handed me the whole thing tied with a ribbon. Casual as you please.

We were trading first-kiss stories, bad-kiss stories, the normal getting-to-know-you stuff, and Wesley laughed and said, "oh, here's a funny one. Elliot kissed me once. Years ago, right after we moved in together. We were hammered, he kind of went for it, I went whoa, no, buddy, and we laughed it off. Never came up again. He was totally cool about it." And he drank his beer, delighted, a man producing a charming little anecdote off the shelf.

I put my beer down. Because he had just handed me the seed the entire six-year garden grew out of and called it a silly party story. The ad for a gay roommate. The kiss, right after move-in. The no... And then six years of laundry and Aspen and watches and dinners waiting on the counter, and every single boyfriend since somehow turning out to be "bad news, honestly kind of scary." He was totally fine about it. My sweet, brilliant, oblivious paramedic.

I took all of it to Marissa's couch that weekend. The ad, the money, the watch, and then the kiss, and I watched her put the pieces down in a row. When the ad and the kiss touched each other I heard the low, flat, four-second ohhhh... It was the sound of a woman watching a piece drop into a slot she had been staring at all night.

"Danny," she said. "That's not a fun fact. You uncovered something here..."

Then she set her glass down and asked the ugly obvious question. "Okay. I'm going to ask the gross one and then we bury it forever. Are they just... together? Is Elliot the actual boyfriend and you're, like, the side piece?"

And I thought about it. I genuinley thought about it, because in a lot of ways it would have been a mercy. If they were a couple I could bow out clean and go be furniture again and nobody would get hurt. But no. Wesley is with me. In the daylight, in front of people, in his phone, in his bed. I have never once seen him lean the wrong way toward Elliot, and he goes loose and happy in the exact rooms Elliot is not in, which told me more than any conversation could. They are not a secret couple. One of them has wanted it for six years, and the other one does not know at all. Or decided to not know. I'm unsure.

"So he's just in love with him," Marissa said slowly. "And Wesley thinks it's a bromance."

"Wesley thinks it's a safe-space thing," I said.

For a few weeks I got to hold all of that as a comedy. A weird, sad, kind of sweet comedy about a man who could not see the obvious. Then Elliot stopped working on Wesley's calendar and started working on Wesley's head, and specifically, on what was in it about me, and it stopped being funny at all.

That is what this part actually is. Elliot spent the first two parts fencing off Wesley's time and Wesley's home. In Part 3 he came for the only thing I actually gave a damn about, which was what Wesley thought of me. And he did it the way he does everything. Sideways, gloved, never once leaving a print.

I started hearing myself in Wesley's mouth, except bent. Wrong.

The cabin boundary, the "this one's ours," came back to me a couple of weeks later as Wesley asking, careful and a little wounded, "you're not trying to, like... keep me from my friends, are you?" And it stopped my heart for a second, because that is not a Wesley sentence. Wesley does not have the word "isolate" anywhere in his body. But it was in the room now, sitting between us, and I knew exactly whose mouth it had lived in before it found its way into his.

That is the trick, and it is genuinley a good one, I have to give the man that. The guy building the wall down the middle of us went to Wesley and worried, gently, that I was the one building a wall. He took the exact thing I was afraid of and handed it to Wesley pointed the other direction.

It kept coming. All of it soft, all of it "just worried about you, man." That I was "intense." That I "moved kind of fast." Wesley relayed these to me like weather, not even as accusations, just things that were apparently now in the air. Elliot had "noticed" I seemed like I had "a lot going on." And the nastiest one, the one that actually took the piss out of me: Elliot, who I had told nothing, somehow floated to Wesley that maybe it was worth asking why drama seemed to "follow me around." Because it does. That is the horrible genius of aiming it at me specifically. Much of my life is now on record as a series of disasters. Elliot took the fact that I have been a victim, over and over, and reframed it into evidence that I am the common thread. And the worst part is I could not even argue it was untrue on paper. Drama does follow me. I write it down and post it here, under a name, but not a very hidden one.

Which brings me right back to the thing I said, last part, that I wasn't going to look at.

One night Wesley mentioned, offhand, that Elliot had asked him "if it bothered him that I put people from my life on the internet." Wesley laughed it off, thought it was funny, said "I told him you're a writer, basically." But I went cold, because I had never told Elliot I post anything. Not once. There is exactly one way Elliot knows I turn parts of my life into content. He read it. He'd gone looking, found all of it, and now he was feeding it back to Wesley a careful spoonful at a time, getting him to wonder what I'd write about him someday. And I'm not going to sit here and pretend that one didn't land on me too, because here I am. Writing about him. So...

I guess that's the thing I'm least proud of in this whole part. It worked on ME. Not just on Wesley. Because I am the guy things happen to, and when Elliot's version of me kept coming back through the person I loved, some rotted little floorboard in the basement of my brain gave way and I stood there in the dark going, what if he's right? What if you are the problem? What if the reason your life is a series of broken people is that you're the one thing every saga has in common? Marissa spent most of a third glass of wine talking me back up off the floor, and I want it on the record that she used the phrase "absolutely not, give me your phone, you're done reading YouTube comments tonight."

Wesley got quieter with me for a couple of weeks. Not cold. Not gone. Just a half-step back, a little slower to text, a little more likely to "check with Elliot about the weekend" first. I could feel Elliot's hand on the dial and I could not once catch it turning. That is what living inside this felt like. Watching the temperature drop in a room while a man across from you swears he never touched the thermostat, and then he smiles, and asks if you're cold.

Then, on a normal night, Wesley said a name, and the whole thing cracked open a little.

We were doing the regular exes conversation, the getting-to-know-each-other kind, and Wesley said, easy as anything, "my last real one was a guy named Marcus. Ended bad. He got super controlling toward the end, honestly kind of scary. Elliot clocked it way before I did, he was the one who sat me down and told me Marcus was bad news." And he moved on to some other memory. I did not move on from that, because I had just heard the script. Read out loud. Word for word. Elliot saw it before I did. Elliot sat me down. Elliot told me he was bad news. The exact play I was standing inside, running two years ago, on a different guy, narrated by the same calm man from his spot on the couch.

I asked, as light as I could make my voice go, whether he ever still heard from Marcus.

"God, no. Not in like two years. Why?"

"No reason," I said.

It was a reason. It was the only reason I had left. Because I couldn't prove a single thing to Wesley with feelings, and I couldn't fight a man who never threw a punch, but somewhere out there was a guy who had stood exactly where I was standing and been walked out the same door, and he would know. He would be the one person on earth who already believed me.

That night, instead of sleeping, I found Marcus's full name off an old tagged Facebook photo that Elliot had, for once, never gotten around to scrubbing. And I sent a total stranger a message at one in the morning that started with, "hey, you don't know me, and I promise this is going to sound insane, but you dated a guy named Wesley, and I need to ask you about his roommate."

Then I watched the little "seen" appear. And then the three dots. And then nothing, for the longest night of my life.

Part 4 is what Marcus wrote back. It's also the part where Wesley finally, finally sees it, and I'd give a lot to tell you that felt good. It didn't. It was the worst night ever, and it's coming up next.

Danny out. For now.

TL;DR idk fukken read it or something I'm tired already

Alright. Part 2.

For a few weeks after that dinner I told myself the easy thing, the thing you tell yourself so you can keep your nice life and the things in it just rolling along like normal: Elliot is just a lonely roommate, be a bigger person. I told myself that right up until I couldn't. I really do never figure these things out early enough.

So here's what came after the dinner.

Wesley and I had a trip on the books. I mentioned it last time, the plan Elliot clocked at the table with that little menacing click behind his eyes the second I said it out loud. By now it was real. Two nights at a cabin a few hours out, wood stove, no signal, and a hot tub, which was one thing that the listing photos were completely lying about. Our first real trip. First time waking up somewhere together that wasn't one of our two apartments. When you've been single as long as I had, a weekend away stops being a weekend away. It becomes a milestone with a thread count. I was excited in a way that low-key scared me. Wesley was excited in a way that didn't scare him at all, because Wesley moves through the world like a guy who's allowed to have good things, which is a trait I find so attractive and so foreign I wish that I could study it under glass.

And then Elliot got into the trip. The way water gets into a disused basement. Slow, and from a direction you weren't watching.

First he was just around more. For two months I'd basically never laid eyes on him. Now he became a fixture. We'd sit down to watch something at their place and Elliot was already in his spot on the couch, and it quietly became the three of us, him two cushions down, laughing a half-beat early to prove he had indeed seen this movie a couple of times before. We'd go grab food and Elliot "hadn't eaten either," so. I'd come back from their bathroom and he'd be standing closer to the hallway than a person needs to stand, phone in hand, like he'd just happened to drift over there.

None of that is a crime. A roommate is allowed on his own couch. A roommate is allowed to be hungry. If you called the cops and reported that your boyfriend's roommate keeps eating dinner with you, they'd laugh you off the phone and they'd be right to. Every tile he set down was blank. You only saw the picture when you stood back, and the picture was me being walked out of the room one polite inch at a time.

I tried staying over there once. It was bad.

Wesley's bedroom shared a wall with the living room, and Elliot did not sleep, or if he did he did it somewhere I never caught him, because every hour I surfaced there was light under the door and the low mutter of a stream bleeding through the drywall, some video-essay narrator going forever about a game I'll never play. Around two in the morning, Elliot knocked. Soft. "Hey, sorry, Wes... quick thing?" And Wesley, three-quarters asleep, got up and went, because Wesley goes, and I lay there in his bed listening to the two of them talk in the kitchen for the better part of an hour about nothing I could make out. Low, easy, worn smooth. The sound of a household I was a visitor in.

In the morning there were two coffees on the counter. Two. Each made the way each of them takes it, Wesley's with the oat milk, Elliot's black, sitting side by side like a place setting for a marriage. And it wasn't that Elliot snubbed me on a third. It's that a third had never once occured to him. He looked up from his spot on the couch, perfectly pleasant, and said "oh, did you want one? I didn't know how you take it," which is a completely reasonable thing to say to a guy you met two weeks ago, and a very precise thing to say to your best friend's boyfriend standing in your kitchen at eight in the morning in yesterday's shirt.

I never stayed there again. There was no fight, nothing to even fight about, he'd handed me nothing-coffee and I'd backed out of the room. Every soft little wall he built nudged me toward my own apartment, and Wesley followed me there, because Wesley follows the person he loves, and Elliot got to keep the home, the couch, the coffee ritual, the version of Wesley that only exists inside those four walls. And from where he sat, I'd bet it looked like I was the one dragging Wesley off. I was doing the exact thing he'd built me to do. I just hadn't found the blueprint yet.

The little comments came in around then, built the same way. Sweet on top, a nail underneath.

"Must be nice," he said once, when I mentioned swapping a shift, "a job you can just shuffle whenever you feel like it. Wesley can't exactly tell a guy having a heart attack to hold on a sec." Warm the whole time. Read it flat and it's respect for Wesley's work, it's a compliment, and buried in it I'm a boy pouring beer while grown men save lives. I felt it go in. There was nowhere to put it. What's my move, stand up for the honor of a bar schedule?

Another night, apropos of nothing, while Wesley was in the kitchen: "You strike me as a sentimental guy. The type who'd hold onto something long past the point it's good for him." And he watched my face the whole way through it. I could not tell you if that's a normal odd thing to say to somebody you just met, or if he'd found the exact soft center of me and pressed on it to see what noise I'd make.

That's the other thing that started here, and I sat on whether to even put it in the story, because it makes me sound like precisely the paranoid disaster my history says I am. But Marissa says the record should be the true record. A couple of times, Elliot mentioned things about me I know I never told him. He knew I'd been ghosted after a three-month thing. He made an offhand crack about "the fedora guys," plural, like he was aware there'd been more than one catastrophe. Boring explanation: Wesley talks about me and it trickles down. That's genuinley probably it. But I post these under a name. And one night at two in the morning I did the math on how much of my actual life is sitting on this exact website in my own words, and I got to a thought I couldn't bear to look at. So we will do as adults do and defer, indefinitely, and maybe I can talk about it later.

Here's the part where I did the mature thing. I actually sat Wesley down and used my words like a big boy. I want it on the record too, because it doesn't happen very often.

We were in my kitchen, good mood, and I said, careful as a bomb tech, "does Elliot ever need, like, a lot of Wesley? Is that a fair thing to notice?"

And Wesley went soft, because he's kind, and said, "Yeah, honestly he does. He's had a rough couple years. The stuff with his mom, and he doesn't really have anybody else. I'm sort of it for him." He said it like something he was proud to carry. It made me love him more and all reservations were out the window. Because the next sentence, "I think he's working against us", doesn't survive in a room where I'm the good guy. Say that out loud and now I'm the two-month boyfriend asking a man to abandon his grieving best friend. Elliot had dug himself a moat out of Wesley's own decency, and I was standing on the far bank of it holding a bottle of decent wine and with no bridge across anywhere in sight.

So I let it go. Again. I'll write that one down too. It's a part I'd take back.

But anyways, okay. The trip.

The week before, Elliot started angling to come. Never straight at it, straight leaves prints. He started reminiscing, loud, in front of both of us, about "the cabin weekends we used to do," him and Wesley, back when, "some of the best weekends of my life, honestly," and "we never do that stuff anymore," and then letting it hang there, a request dressed up as a memory. He'd float it and look at Wesley with this open, wounded, hopeful face, and I'd watch the guilt find its footing in Wesley, and one evening Wesley actually turned to me, apologetic before he'd even asked, and went, "would it be insane if Elliot came for one of the nights? He's kind of low lately, and..."

And then I said "no."

I want that on the record, that I said no. Kind, but no. "Babe, I love that you love him. This one's ours though." And Wesley, to his enormous credit, heard me, nodded, said "you're right, you're right, it's ours, I'm sorry." And I thought I'd won. I thought that for once in my whole cursed romantic career I'd held the line at the right moment in the right voice and had it actually stick.

As it would turn out, I did not win. You can't beat a guy like Elliot by holding a boundary. A boundary just tells him which door you locked, so he knows that he'll need to come in through the wall. And he will.

The night before we left, my phone went off at eleven. Wesley. And I knew the second I heard him, because it was his work voice. The flat, calm one. The voice he probably uses on the worst night of any random stranger's life.

Elliot was on the way to the hospital.

The story reached me in pieces over the next couple hours. Elliot had "an episode." Chest crushing, couldn't breathe, dead sure it was his heart. Wesley had come home from a last errand and found him on the bathroom floor saying he was dying. Wesley did what Wesley does. Got calm, assessed him, drove him in. They ran tests half the night.

It wasn't his heart. "Likely a panic attack," the doctors said. And I need to be dead clear about this, because I have them myself: a panic attack is for real, it is genuinley terrifying, it's your brain trying to convince your entire body you are dying. I am not, anywhere in this, saying his wasn't real. I'd never diminish his lived experience in that way.

I'm just talking about when it happened.

Weeks of Elliot being fine. The trip survived every soft little thing he'd lobbed at it. And his nervous system, or whatever it was, picked the one window. The last window. The night that dropped Wesley into the exact spot he could not walk out of. His job. I'd had this pulled on me a few times as you might recall.

The trip was dead, obviously. You do not drive to a no-signal cabin the morning after your best friend maybe-had-a-heart-thing. Wesley was wrecked over it, apologized to me something like nine times, and every apology was real, and every time I told him it was fine, that he did the right thing, because he always did. That's the trap that Elliot had leveraged for so many years. My heart began to sink through the floor and out of site.

I drove over the next afternoon to help. Soup, support, good-boyfriend duty. Elliot was on the couch, in his spot, wrapped in a blanket, pale and small and grateful, thanking me for coming. And I felt like garbage, I genuinley did, sitting there ashamed of every thought I'd had about a sick man.

Then Wesley went to the kitchen to warm the soup, and it was me and Elliot.

He looked at me from inside the blanket. The grateful face stayed on. It was unsettling as shit tbh, the face didn't move at all. Same warm sick-guy voice, quiet, pitched right under the noise of the kitchen: "Real shame about the cabin. Maybe next time." And he held it, that beat past where a look is supposed to end. Then he coughed, small and weak, tugged the blanket up to his chin, and called out "thank you again for the soup, Danny," loud, aimed at the kitchen. And Wesley called back "he's the best, right?" happy. So happy. His two favorite people finally in one room, finally getting along. Sighhh.

I told Marissa all of it from the car. The reminiscing, the boundary I held, the eleven o'clock call, the timing, the soup, "maybe next time."

She went quiet, the way she does when she's ruminating or checking alternate timelines or whatever it is that she does to activate her sight-beyond-sight. Then, low, not even her scary voice, something flatter than that: "Danny. A roommate who's scared of losing his friend gets clingy and annoying. He doesn't keep a calendar. This guy is running a campaign, he's better at it than you are, and the real problem is he's better at it than Wesley is, and Wesley doesn't know there's a war on."

"So what do I do."

And Marissa, who has been on the wrong end of a patient man, who packed a U-Haul once just to get out from under one, told me the thing I didn't want and couldn't argue with. "Right now, nothing. You move on him now, you lose. So you just start keeping track. Quiet. Dates, what he actually said, all of it. Because it'll get worse at some point, and when it does, you'll need to show a pattern, or it's your word against the nice sick man under the blanket."

I truly am starting to dislike that poor sick man under the blanket...

Part 3 is when the campaign stops going after the trips and the couch and the soup, and comes for the only thing I actually cared about protecting, which is what Wesley thinks of me. And it works. For a stretch. Part 3 is the closest I've come to losing something I wasn't ready to lose. Might take a bit to churn it up and get it out.

Until then, Danny out.

TL;DR: The "he's just a lonely roommate" theory did not survive Part 2. Elliot folded himself into everything Wesley and I did. He had a panic attack with surgical timing before our couples getaway, and I only knew for sure when he told me "shame about the cabin, maybe next time". Meanwhile, Wesley doesn't even realize there's a war going on.

For context, this story didn't happen to me exactly, though I was a witness. It happened to a friend of mine about a decade ago and I recently got the go-ahead to share. Names have been changed to protect their identities.

This was long before I knew what a 'Nice Guy' was. This centers around two people, one of whom is a friend we'll refer to as Tori, (Not her real name), 23 F, and the NG in question we'll call Billy, age unknown, possibly very late teens? Hard to tell because he had a youthful looking face.

Billy was average height, light brown hair, very skinny, dressed all in black (black everything: pants, shoes and shirts), smelled like he never showered (horrid BO) and for some reason always acted all high and mighty, like the world owed him something, even though his grades were poor, even said once he got a 50 average because "His teachers obviously couldn't handle how truly intelligent he was and deliberately made him fail out of jealousy", or some such nonsense. Can't remember exactly what he said, but the gist of it, he was convinced he was smarter than everyone else.

Moreover, he acted as if he was God's gift to women; he tried to cozy up to any woman that caught his eye, but seemed especially fond of blondes. That is shown below.

Tori was a slightly shorter woman with long blonde hair, blue eyes, very pretty. Often dressed smartly, mostly in suits, though actually quite feminine.

Billy met me and Tori back when we were studying both history and literature on campus. Tori I hit it off with almost immediately over a shared love of history, though we were not really close and only rarely spoke one-on-one.

Billy, on the other hand almost immediately started acting as if the two of them were close, trying to sit next to her every day and acting out often to try and get her attention, (often loudly exclaiming her name), even though she was (and to this day still is) happily married.

She often glowingly spoke about her husband and mentioned once about how the two of them were High School sweethearts with a big smile.

Nevertheless, Billy shared his thoughts about her, loudly: He was convinced that her husband was an abuser he was somehow coercing her to say such positive things about him.

Billy would insist that he and Tori were "meant for each other" and that when they met, it was "love at first sight", even though Tori clearly stated she was not interested, Billy insisted and just said "Her husband is brainwashing her. It's a common thing with abusers to break their victim's will and make them think they love them, but they really don't."

Every day, Billy would walk into class and try to talk her into leaving her husband, then make a fuss when she refused, saying "He could tell at once they were soul mates" and "I can treat her like the princess she is" and other such NG rhetoric.

For her part, Tori would just try to ignore him, though this didn't deter him.

When I asked her why she didn't report him, Tori said, "I've handled annoying guys like him before. Just ignore him long enough and he'll get the hint".

Oh, how wrong she was.

Instead of giving up, Billy doubled down on his efforts and soon began to insult her husband, even though he never actually met the guy. He would claim her husband was cheating, question her "Why do you stay with the wrong man?", say she deserved better, said he was going to one day be wealthy and would take care of her, just about every trick in the book.

Naturally, none of it worked and Tori did her very best to just ignore him, convinced he would just give up. She eventually did fire back and state Billy did not know her situation and he did not know her husband.

Billy's reply?

"But I DO know him and his type! I can tell right away you are unhappy. You're only pretending you're not. I can see it in your eyes!"

Tori, with the coldest glare responded, "You don't know me at all. You don't know him at all. Now knock it off and leave me alone or I swear, I will report you."

Deflated, Billy spent the rest of class sulking quietly. But he wasn't done yet.

Things came to a head when, a week or so later, Tori showed up for class and after rejecting Billy's advances (usual "I can treat you better than he can" argument) for the umpteenth time, she told him the most shocking news he had ever heard: That being she had gone to the doctor and confirmed she was pregnant.

Right there, in the middle of class, Billy just up and started sobbing. When asked what was wrong by the professor, Billy, in between tears exclaimed, "The love of my life is going to give birth to an abuser’s child! He knocked her up and he's going to mistreat that baby and she's okay with it!"

Naturally, the professor didn't find this at all sympathetic and told Billy to knock it off. Right there, Billy stood up and, tears still falling ran right out of the classroom. Tori, on the other hand looked as if she wanted to die of embarrassment.

The professor continued the lesson, and the very next day, Billy didn't show up, nor the next day. Eventually, I came to find out he had dropped out.

I didn’t find out what happened to him until much later (see below), but I do know Tori later gave birth to a healthy daughter and she and her husband are still together, still happy to this day.

UPDATE: I can't believe that I'm saying this, but there is an update after a decade. So, out of curiosity, I actually looked up Billy's profile on FB, and I found out what happened to him.

So, after he dropped out, Billy went through a depressed episode (often lamenting he had “lost his one true love”) and struggled a lot with his mental health. After a few months, he actually got into therapy and he got over Tori. Took him about 5 years, but he met a woman and they married and now have two kids.

From what I can see, they actually are happy. Seems that he lost his Nice Guy™ status, cleaned up his act and now he’s doing well for himself.

I guess happy endings do come after all.

Tori and her family are still happy, BTW. Her daughter is turning 11 next week.

The first time I met my boyfriend's roommate, he cooked me a plate of food I didn't ask for, sat across from me and watched me eat every bite of it, and then, while my boyfriend was in the other room getting the wine, leaned in and told me quietly that he really hoped I wasn't just a phase.

Smiling the whole time. Warm voice. The kind of thing you could repeat back to someone word for word and they'd say "aw, he's just looking out for his friend."

Wesley didn't hear it. Wesley never hears any of it. That's the entire saga, right there, and if you want to save yourself four more parts you can leave now and I won't hold it against you.

For everybody staying: hi. I'm Danny. You might know me as the guy who dates men who turn out to be biohazards. If you're new, the short version is that I work at a brewery, I'm gay, I'm twenty-eight, and I have a documented history of walking through a door and finding a nightmare on the other side of it. Tonsil-stone guy. The man who ferments a colony with his own body. I've earned the flinch you're doing right now, Redd. I get it. I had to bribe you back though, because I guess a small and not-so-secret part of me enjoys the indirect-spotlight.

Anyways, point was... I really need to impress upon you how big a deal it was that this time, I actually found a good one.

If you read my last bar post, you read me have a small breakdown at eleven at night about how I've never had a person whose drink order I knew by heart. A widower came in, bought a beer for his dead wife, and I stood there afterward pouring it down the drain and feeling like the loneliest man in a building full of couples. Some people sent me nice things. One sent things that started nice and turned into a proposal by the second paragraph, and to him I say: seek help, and also, respectfully, no. I really do attract some odd ducks as the commenters have pointed out.

I bring it up because that's the Danny this happened to. That guy. The lonely-hearted second-beer drainer guy.

Now let me tell you about Wesley, and I do want you to actually like him, because you're going to need to, later, when I'm asking you to be scared for him.

I met Wesley on a hike, which I only went on because Marissa showed up at my apartment on a Saturday, announced I was "becoming furniture," and did not leave until I had shoes on and was in her passenger seat. Marissa is my best friend. If you've read the other posts you know her as the woman who is always right and who communicates entire paragraphs through a single disappointed exhale. She'd decided I needed to be somewhere that wasn't my couch or my job, and Marissa's decisions have the legal force of a court order. So: a trail. In the outdoors, where I have no natural predators except my own knees.

Wesley was the guy who stopped to help when I rolled my stupid ankle on a fucking wayward root about a mile in. Not in a big heroic way. He just crouched down, asked if I could bear weight, pressed the side of my foot with two fingers like he was reading it, and said "you're fine, it's a sprain, just walk it off. but go slow to start." Turned out he's a paramedic. Turned out he does that, reads people's bodies to see how scared they should be, for a living. Even if the wound is grievous, Wesley never got scared. He walked the rest of the trail at my sad limping pace when he could've been done in half the time, and he did it like it wasn't a favor, like slow was just the speed he felt like going that day.

He texts back. He asks a question and then listens to the answer instead of waiting for his turn to say the funny and awesome thing he was thinking of. When he says he'll be somewhere at seven he is somewhere at seven. Six fourty-five, even. He ordered water first, the night he finally came into my bar, before he ordered anything with alcohol in it, because he'd worked a fourteen-hour shift and knew what his body needed, and I know how insane it is that "a tired man drank a glass of water" is a detail that made my heart do something, but idk bro... you have not dated who I have dated. You don't get to judge my green flags. Those green flags have been through things, even if they aren't as tattered and worn and disused as the red ones are.

Two months in, I was happy in a way that was making me physically uncomfortable. I kept waiting for the tonsil stone. Not a literal one, Wesley's mouth is a normal mouth, I mean the catch, the reveal, the... thing. The impact. My therapist has unpacked this with me at length. Every kind thing he did, some paranoid little animal in the back of my skull went "that's the setup, Danny, look harder." And every time, I looked harder, and it was just him being nice. All that only somehow served to make the animal louder. I told Marissa I thought something was wrong because nothing was wrong, and she put her wine down and said, "Danny. What if the whole thing is that this one's just good," and I genuinley did not know what to do with that sentence. I've gotten so fluent in disaster that a good man reads to me like a language I simply don't speak.

Here's the thing I didn't clock as a problem, because I'm me: Wesley had a roommate.

That's normal. Rent is fake and evil and everybody I know under thirty-five has a roommate or three. Wesley shared a two-bedroom with a guy named Elliot he'd lived with for six years. Six years is a loooong time. That's a marriage, basically, in roommate years. And for the first two months, I never saw the guy, like hardly ever, because Wesley always came to my place or we went out, and I didn't think anything of it. I liked that Wesley came to me. I thought it was consideration. Turns out it was avoidance, and Wesley didn't even fully know he was doing it, the way you don't notice you've been steering around a pothole for so long that you've forgotten the road was ever straight.

Then Wesley said, "you should come over Friday, Elliot's making dinner, he really wants to meet you."

And I said yes, because I wanted to be a good boyfriend and meet the important people, and because I had no reason not to honestly. I want that on the record. I walked into that apartment with an open heart and a bottle of decent wine and zero idea. No idea whatsoever.

So yeah, Elliot answered the door.

IElliot was maybe thirty. Soft, pale, the indoor sort. The specific complexion of a man whose primary light source has a refresh rate. He was wearing a cardigan over a video game t-shirt and he had the careful, deliberate calm of somebody who has practiced being unbothered in a mirror. Not gross. This isn't a Gary situation, there's no smell, I promise you nobody's hygiene is a plot point this time. Elliot was clean. Elliot was fairly groomed. Elliot's whole thing was that he was clean and groomed and quiet and looked at you a half-second too long before he answered anything.

"You must be Danny," he said, and shook my hand, and held it. Not hard. Just a beat past when a handshake ends. Maybe I was overthinking it, I told myself. Then he stepped back and said, "come in, welcome to our home," and put a little weight on the OUR that I felt in my teeth. I didn't recognize it as the impact yet.

The apartment was Elliot's. I understood that within about thirty seconds. Not on the lease, maybe, but in every way that actually counts. There was a spot on the couch that was clearly his spot, molded to him, angled at the TV. There was a whole shelf of his stuff, his figures, his little painted guys, arranged with real love, the cleanest and most cared-for surface in the place, and I thought about Upperdeckerbeard's anime figures gleaming in a filthy apartment and had to physically tell my brain to stop, different guy, be fair. There were framed photos on the wall and every single one of them was Elliot and Wesley. Trips. Concerts. A ski thing. Ten years of two guys. Not one photo of anybody else. It looked like the apartment of a couple, and one of the two people in the couple didn't know they were in the couple. One of the guys was just on free trip to Aspen because he was cool like that. People wanted to be around Wesley. I understood the compulsion.

I'm dropping some fairly obvious breadcrumbs here but you'll have to watch the entire horrible circus unfold.

Anyways, Dinner was actually good. I'll give him that. Elliot cooked well and he knew he cooked well and he made sure I knew he knew. And the whole meal was a performance with an audience of one, and the audience wasn't me, it was Wesley, and I was the guy who'd wandered onstage during someone else's play.

Everything was a reference I wasn't in. "Remember when we" this, "you always" that, a decade of shared shorthand deployed like a rather spiky fence. When I told a story, Elliot waited for me to finish and then told a better version of a similar story that had happened to him and Wesley, so that mine landed and then immediately got buried. When I mentioned the trip Wesley and I were planning, Elliot said "oh, he didn't mention that to me," light, easy, and I watched Wesley's face do a little apologetic flinch, like he'd been caught, and I thought, why does he look caught, he didn't do anything.

That was the thing I kept feeling all night and couldn't stick a name on until later. Elliot never said one aggressive word. He was a gracious host. And somehow, by the end of dinner, Wesley was apologizing for things. Small things. For not telling Elliot about the trip. For the wine being a red when Elliot "usually does white on Fridays." For me, a little, in a way I couldn't point to. Six years of practice will do that. Elliot could make Wesley feel guilty with a pause and a plate of food, and Wesley didn't even feel it happening anymore, because to him it was just Friday, just the guys, just how it always is. But it had some weird energy to it.

Then Wesley got up to open the second bottle, the good one, in the kitchen, out of the room.

And Elliot set down his fork, and looked at me with that half-second-too-long thing, and the warm host face was still on but the eyes underneath it had gone flat and patient, and he said, quietly, in a completely pleasant voice:

"You seem nice, Danny. I mean that. I just really hope you're ...not another phase. He does this. He gets excited about someone, and it's very intense for a couple months, and then it's over, and I'm the one who's here when it falls apart. I'm left to pick up all the tiny pieces... So." He smiled. Picked his fork back up. "No offense. I've just seen the movie a couple times before."

And Wesley walked back in with the wine and said "what'd I miss," and Elliot said, bright, "Oh, I was just telling Danny how glad I am he came," and Wesley beamed at both of us like a man who had everything he loved in one room. Sigh.

I said it was nice. It was. Marissa made me promise to stop pretending my feelings are evidence. So I unpacked it all...

What did I have here, really? A guy who cooked me dinner and said he hoped I'd stick around. Though he did approach it in a roundabout way... But if you read it back cold, it's almost sweet. Maybe Elliot is just a lonely roommate scared of losing his best friend to a new boyfriend. That's valid, but I think its only part of the actual truth. We had yet to really unpack the depths of Elliot. And I was scared to look.

But I drove home with the splinter under my fingernail, and I couldn't find it. Not yet. It wasn't that Elliot had done something. It's that if I tried to tell Wesley what I felt, I'd be a two-month boyfriend asking a man to distrust the person who'd held him up for a decade. Elliot had six years of proof that he was the good guy. I had a feeling and a criminal record of dating monsters. If it came down to my word against his, I already knew whose word won, and it wasn't the guy who once drove a jar of a stranger's ferment home instead of throwing it in a dumpster eleven feet away.

I texted Marissa from the car. Just: "met the roommate."

She wrote back: "and?"

And I sat there in the dark of Wesley's parking lot, looking up at the lit window where two silhouettes were doing dishes together in a rhythm they'd built over six years, and I typed the truest thing I had, which was: "I think he's going to try to get rid of me and I don't think Wesley will ever see it coming."

The three dots came up. Went away. Came up again.

"ok," she wrote. "then we pay very close attention."

Part 2 is when the small stuff stops being small. It happens slow and deniable. For a while I keep talking myself out of it the exact way you're all about to talk yourselves out of it now. "he's just insecure, be nice to him" You'll see how well that holds up.

But I told you Part 1 had a good one in it, and it did, and I got to be happy for a little while. Wesley is worth every part of this that's coming. Remember that. When it gets bad, remember I told you he was worth it.

Danny out. For now.

TL;DR: I finally found a genuinely good man. I was happy for two entire months until I met his roommate of six years who is definitely going to try and get rid of me... and I already know if it ever comes down to my word against his, I will lose.

So I may or may not have come across a Reddx brand Mandela effect? I’m a little confused if this is just my memory being wonky from the Chemo, since I got into reddx’s content around the same time I went through treatment for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. So totally open to being wrong, but just want to confirm I’m the only one this happened to.

Out of all the stories I remember listening to, linkbeard happens to be one of my favorites. If I had to compare it to any modern stories it would be to our current, “don’t hug the mascots” but WAY tamer and also TTRPG horror story. I’m totally not trying to get more people to listen to that story, why would you suggest that?

Tasteless joke aside, I get to the part where our tiny hairy potato gets Epona and Linkbeard has a fit. Redd says something that makes my ears perk up.

“Why do you need to have the exact same horse? You could have a pink horse, you could name it Tom.. why wouldn’t you want a pink horse name TOM?!” *cue him laughing*

Except, that’s what my memory of it was. What he actually said was,

Why do you need to have the exact same horse? You could have a pink horse, you could name it Tom.. why wouldn’t you want that?

See small difference, but I could have sworn he said it differently. However, like I said this could just be the Chemo talking, so I pass the judgment and to you. Here is the compilation, and unfortunately i forgot where the timestamp was. If I find it before someone else, I will comment it.

https://youtu.be/j7-qEQ0-1ps

Bert is back! I have been moving and I finally have some freetime to write out these stories again. Enough about me, let's get onto our adventure with the cast:

Cast

Bert: That's me! I am a nerdy guy, pretty quiet, and I am friends with Ernie

Ernie: Some guy I hang out with for some reason and he is super loud and annoying

Ernie's Dad: Essentially Ernie if he was older, hair on every inch of his body, and he smells like he doesn't wipe (his ass or anything other body part)

Vic: My friend that likes Magic: the Gathering and she has dated everyone except for me

Anthony: New friend of mine in this story, he is super jacked, but he is a nerd. He likes Magic: the Gathering too!

Junior Year

Like most of us, Ernie has a dad. Ernie's dad was a gross guy, and I learned a lot about him before meeting him. Ernie would get grounded a lot for some of the dumbest things, or Ernie would get into trouble for just doing normal stuff. One time Ernie got grounded for talking too loudly, but it was so odd to me because Ernie literally speaks loudly all the time. I would eventually meet this man because my parent's were picking up Ernie for us to go to Friday Night Magic.

My parent's and I at the curb of Ernie's place.

Ernie: "Hey Bert!!" Ernie yells at us from his window

Ernie's Dad: "God dammit! Ernie, be quiet!" Ernie's Dad walks out to our vehicle

Ernie's Dad: "Sorry 'bout him, he got the 'tism. I hope Bert and Ernie have fun at Magic. You know, I taught him everything he knows."

Bert: "Oh cool.." I say quiety and super awkwardly

As Ernie's dad walked away, I noticed something odd. So what I am about to say, there is nothint wrong with it. BUT when a man, or woman, smells bad, they should not be wearing this: a kilt. This man was wearing a nasty kilt, it looked like it was once a solid color, but not anymore! It had food and drink stains, and what I hope to be sweat stains in the back. My parent's must have noticed it too, but we never talked about it because all my parents would talk about was what happened after Ernie's dad walked away.

Ernie's Dad sees a mailman.

Ernie's Dad: "Hey!! Where's my mail? You passed my house, what the heck?"

Ernie: "Yeeeep.. This is awkward.." Ernie goes silent only when it comes to his family

Ernie's Dad: "I need my check! For my disability! Come on man, it's been a while."

Ernie's step-mom was mentally ill and Ernie's dad was always between jobs or just jobless, so Ernie's dad would take his wife's disability check for his own. It wasn't something Ernie would talk about at this time in his life, but eventually I would learn a lot about his family. But one good thing in his life was our friendship, and a perk of that was my cool parents. I had this college lecture coming up, just a small event for planning your future, and while we were in my parent's car, my parent's invited Ernie to go with.

I meet with Ernie and his dad for the lecture.

Bert: "I'm glad that you came, Ernie. I think this will help you figure out what you want to do after school."

Ernie's Dad: "Ernie isn't going to college"

Ernie: "Dad.. stop.."

Bert: "Why not? I don't really care if he goes or not, but it is his choice."

Ernie's Dad: "We can't afford it. We will never ever be able to afford it."

Bert: "Well there are many payment options, like..."

Ernie's Dad: "I said no. We can't afford it. I'm only here for my son."

That always stuck with me. How can a father say that they're there for their son, but the irony in that is that they aren't actually supporting their child or children. It's just a shame that Ernie has a dad like him, he deserves better and I wanted Ernie to be better than his flesh and blood. Ernie may have been annoying, but I still saw potential in him, obviously since I was his friend and we did mesh well.

Anyways, back to Ernie being weird. We all have a anime phase right? Well I got really into Attack on Titan and Death Note back in Sophomore year of high school, then watched many different ones after that. Ernie got to see me watch anime in class or when we hung out and he wanted to get into it too.

Ernie: "BERT!!! WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING?!" Ernie yells in my ear

Bert: "Jeez Ernie, chill out. It's just Sword Art Online. It's getting kinda bad, I'd only watch the first half of season one if I were you."

Ernie: "Hmm.. Maybe I will..."

I never got Ernie's opinion on SAO, but you know what I did get his opinion on? Like a lot? Highschool DxD. I know nothing about this anime besides that it has anime girls. Ernie was the type to say that he watches perverted anime for the lore, but we all know why he was watching it. Wish I remembered any of our conversations about Highschool DxD, but I did tune Ernie out any time he would hype up the anime.

I know you're thinking it: what's going on with Vic at this time? Oh, you weren't? Well that's ok, I will fill you in anyways! I met this guy Anthony because Ernie was friends with him. Anthony was our odd friend of the group, he was pure muscle and into sports, buuut he had a soft spot for nerdy things like horror/scifi movies and gaming. Ernie and I taught him how to play Magic: the Gathering, which we invited him to play at Friday Night Magic.

Vic and I playing at the game store.

Vic: "Hey Bert. Who's your friend over there?"

Bert: "That's Anthony, he's still learning the game."

Vic: "I'm going to go beat him."

Bert: "Wait, he's new.. You meant in Magic, right?"

Vic: "What about Magic?"

Vic and Anthony ended up together after that night, it was sweet and I was happy that I could see a relationship just form like that within a friendgroup. And yeah, ReddX, I was jealous. Magic: the Gathering really molded my life at the time, besides high school I suppose, but the game led me to have a friendgroup and to be social. Thank you for reading this, it means a lot to tell these stories about my old friend.

Heeeeey ReddX! I hope you have read through my other series, Why I don't play Magic Anymore, since this is the prequel to that series. Anyone remember Ernie? Yes, yes, this is the stories that lead us to my other series. I really wanted to make these posts because when I started to listen to your videos about neckbeards I realized I knew one... Myself!!! Oh, and my friend Ernie is one too. I have some tame and then some disgusting stories about my once friend named Ernie.

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I found you calling me Bert in the other story funny, so I am now calling myself Bert instead of OP. Also at some point I will go on tangents about Vic or other peoples because they're interesting stories, so this isn't exactly all about Ernie. Tagents are my favorite hobby by the way!

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Cast

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Bert: That's myself, I am a nerdy guy and I am super quiet in school

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Ernie: This kid won't shut up. He may be skinny as a treebranch, but he has the stank of a neckbeard, yuck

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FRESHMEN YEAR

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Soo I wasn't friends with Ernie for Freshmen year, but I still did know him and we can start an introduction to who he was. Ernie always had greasy hair for as long as I have known him, as well as having horrible acne all over his face, and he just always smelled like something was rotting in his clothes. Another thing I had noticed was that Ernie had shoes that were just absolutely destroyed, he had these red sneakers with big holes and you could literally see his feet. This wasn't exactly Ernie's fault, except that he could have taken more showers, but otherwise I learned later on that his family was poor and really not the best parents.

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While Ernie was gross, so was 90% of kids in highschool, but only a few of them could be as annoying as Ernie. Yeah, not sure how I really got to be friends with such an annoying kid, but I did. I was in English/History class with Ernie for first period, and I remember being glad that I wasn't sitting near him.

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Teacher: Can everyone please go to page 24 in your textbook?

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Ernie: \blurts out* What's funnier than 24? 25!!!*

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Teacher: Ernie! Please be quiet

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Ernie: \now whispering, but the class can still hear* What's funnier than 25? 26!*

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Teacher: Ernie, just go to page 24 outside in the hallway

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You ever have a cool teacher? Yeah, my freshmen english teacher was actually really funny. So whenever Ernie was acting out, our teacher had a joke or two, but I can't really remember any of the jokes. Buuuut what I do remember was when our teacher forgot Ernie's name, now that stuck with me.

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Teacher: I'll be picking some kids to read the next few passages... Um, uh... Ernest! You'll be next!

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The Class: ...Who?

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Ernie: Did you mean me?

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Teacher: Yes, Ernest, go ahead and read line 5

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The Class: \all laughing at Ernie and the teacher**

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Ernie: \screeches** My name is Ernie, not Ernest!

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So Ernest.. I mean Ernie was really into gaming. At this time he couldn't afford the newest console (Xbox One) but his family could afford smart phones, so that was his choice for gaming. Since nearly every kid had a phone at this time, or an ipod touch, and device rules were weird for the time, Ernie pretty much played on his phone all the time. Ernie would play geometry dash, with his headphones on, pretty much anytime in class. As far as I knew at the time, Ernie was failing english/history class, and I wouldn't doubt that he was failing his other classes too. Ernie has a video game addiction, he would play geometry dash instead of doing geometry, and as far as I know, he still does have this addiction today.

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There is one other story that I remember about freshmen year, and it honestly concerned me. Ernie was drinking... Coffee! Ok that doesn't sound too bad, buuut we were all like 14, so I was confused why he would even need coffee. Nowadays, I drink coffee and I don't even like the taste, but I always thought that kids really do not need caffeine, especially kids like Ernie that have issues with focus. I should say here that caffeine can actually help people with focusing problems and ADHD, and Ernie may have been more tame by drinking coffee, but who knows.

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Ernie: Bert, you really need to try this brand of coffee, it's called Death Dark Coffee

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Bert: Dude, I do not like coffee, why do you even need coffee at our age?

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Ernie: \screeches* This coffee is so good compared to other coffees!! You just wouldn't get it I guess*

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Bert: I think I'm good without it

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I will see you in the next post, when Ernie and I become actual friends in Sophomore year. Thanks for reading!

Welcome back to The Adventure of Ernie! This post will begin my friendship with Ernie and also my start into the hobby of Magic: the Gathering. Yeah, the card game really did shape my life in highschool and after highschool, which is why I made my other series: Why I don't play Magic Anymore, so go read that. As ReddX says in his video, it is my personal choice to leave the game, and I have been much happier for doing so. Anyways, lets get into the story today.

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Cast

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Bert: That's me, I am a shy guy that is into Yu-gi-oh! and now Magic: the Gathering

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Ernie: Nerdy kid that likes Magic, can't shut up, and he is stinky

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Samson: A big guy that is friends between Ernie and I, he is a big nerd and into Magic

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Vic: An alternative chick that will tell you straight up anything wrong with you

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Mac: A guy obsessed with Magic, he won't shut up, and he has a crush on Vic

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Sophomore Year

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It was hard for me in highschool because a lot of my friends growing up went to a different highschool and my childhood friend was moving away the summer before Sophomore year, but right before the end of Freshmen year I had started playing a game called Magic: the Gathering. I started out playing the card game in my math class with Samson, a classmate that I had a few classes with, and we would literally choose to just ignore the teacher and play magic. I don't really remember why or how we got away with not paying attention to class, but we did. Ernie was a friend of Samson's, and Ernie knew how to play Magic, and I honestly did not like Ernie at the time. Pretty sure everyone found Ernie annoying, but I still became his friend, even if he was annoying. I would say that I have a high tolerance to annoying people, that's the best way I can describe it.

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The issue with Ernie playing Magic with Samson and I was that he was much louder than us. Ernie was not quiet, he was loud at every moment, and us playing the game in secret was no longer a secret.

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Teacher: These are the formulas for the next quiz on... \gets interrupted**

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Ernie: Now I play Lighting Bolt! BOLT THAT BIRD! \screeches like a bird and makes a boom noise**

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Teacher: What are you doing Ernie? Stop and be quiet!

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After getting caught time after time because of Ernie, the three of us were seperated in the class. I'll be honest, I don't really know what happened to Samson. Samson was the person that introduced me to Ernie, but then all of a sudden Samson like disappeared from our lives. One time Samson came over to my house, my parents liked him and asked about him after that time, and I didn't know what to tell them because the guy just didn't talk to me anymore. Maybe his parents didn't like Ernie's and my influence on him? Who knows?

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Magic: the Gathering was essentially on my mind all the time during highschool, yes I was addicted, and I started to go to a local game store to play the game. This was back when I actually liked local game stores, and the one I went to at this time was actually professional and not having intercourse with their customers.. at least they weren't telling me that. We all love references, right? Sorry for wasting time, so anyways I started a friendgroup at school that all played Magic, and we'd all go to FRIDAY NIGHT MAGIC!!!!

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Ernie: \yelling* How do I keep losing?!*

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Ernie's opponent: Woah, calm down

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Ernie: No! This is bs, I call for a rematch

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Ernie's Opponent: That's not how a sactioned event works, I won fair and square

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Ernie: \like always, he is screeching**

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LGS Employee: Ernie! Ernie! You can't be yelling and swearing, this is a family establishment

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Ernie: REEEEEEE

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Ernie had this issue with pretty much anywhere he would go, he just can't use his inside voice and he gets very defensive whenever he would lose a game. We had many moments when Ernie would get almost kicked out from the game store because of either being too loud or swearing too much. I would say that swearing isn't that big of a deal for a game store, but this game store did actually have family events going on all the time, sooo it made sense.

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Moving onward, I had another friend that I would see at the game store: Vic. Now Vic and I hadn't seen each other since middle school when she had dated my friend, but she was the only other familiar face to me and I was the only other familiar face to her. Vic was really into being a strong Magic player, far more into it than Ernie and I. We played standard at this time because that was the most popular format to play at the time, which standard is just playing with the newest set of cards and would rotate to be new and fresh. The game store made you pay to play, which Ernie and I could only afford to play and not really get anything else. While Vic was able to not only afford to play, but be able to afford getting packs, which then she could make better decks. Plus when you win while playing, you got even more packs for winning, so Vic had some good decks compared to Ernie and I. Why am I explaining this to you? Because Vic and Ernie would end up matching up against each other for the first time.

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Vic: So you are Bert's friend?

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Ernie: Shut up and let's duellllll!

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Vic: You're rude

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Ernie: I'm here to win, let's get on with it

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Vic: Wow, I'm going to make you regret being rude to me

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Ernie: REEEE! YOU WILL BE THE ONE TO REGERT

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Vic: You mean regret..?

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Ernie: I said what I meant!

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Vic: Haha, ok then!

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Ernie proceeded to go 0-2 with Vic, and I don't mean this happened just one time, it was every time they were matched together. While Ernie was rude the first few times with his interaction with Vic, she started to realize that Ernie wasn't intentionally being rude. At this point, Ernie and Vic were actually friends, it was like a rivalry almost. It really sucked that in the future, Vic and Ernie would start to not like each other, since it was nice just having two different people be my friends. Vic had sorted out her problems with Ernie at this point, but she started to have another issue with someone else at the game store.

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I honestly don't know much about Mac outside of the game store, but he was just like Ernie: loud, gross, and obsessed with winning. Mac and Ernie's voices filled the game store whenever they were there, they just were too loud. Mac was similar in age as my friendgroup and so I would have to deal with him often, but I tried my best to keep away because I already had one loud person in my ear: Ernie. Now it was obvious that Mac had a crush on Vic, not because he would turn red or try to flirt with Vic, nah he just told everyone he was in love with her.

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Mac: M'lady, you crushed Ernie's spirit once again. May you crush me next?

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Vic: Haha, no thanks

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Mac: But you are the love of my life. We both love Magic! You are literally the perfect girl for me

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Vic: So because I am a girl that plays Magic I should date you?

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Mac: No! We have so many interests that we both like! Please m'lady, make the me the happiest man alive

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Vic: Name one other interest that we have in common

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Mac: Well.. Ummm... Video games!

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Vic: And what games do I like?

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Mac: Well just that we both like video games is enough! \screeches**

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Vic was never into Mac. Mac eventually did stop harassing Vic, which was nice because Vic would tell me constantly what he was doing and I would go to Mac to have conversations to him why he needed to stop. Each time Mac would make Vic upset, he would give her a pack of cards, which then made Vic less upset and Mac would see that as interest. Years later Mac actually toned down a lot, he wasn't as loud and he seemed to be more invested in having fun rather than winning, plus he wasn't harassing women that happened to like his hobbies.

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Next post will be about Junior year! I get to meet Ernie's dad, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Thanks for reading.

This is the last one. It's over. I'm okay. I want to lead with all three of those things at once, on purpose, because I know the people who've been reading these from the start, and sometimes there is spiraling in the comments long before I get to the end, and I love you for it, and I am genuinely fine, and the part where I'm fine is real, and it's coming, and I'm going to get you there. Take the breath with me. There. I'll wait. Okay.

So when we left off, there was a corgi named Pudding standing in Jake's living room deciding whether or not he liked me, and a folder, and a man who could apparently get into a locked apartment with a blessed new deadbolt to leave an open jar breathing on my counter facing the door. Jake and Chris came over that Sunday and we finally, FINALLY did the thing I should have done before a single jar ever touched the hood of my car. We stopped being scared in a passive way and got organized about it.

We put up cameras. Real ones. Two of them, the kind that yell at you in a robotic voice and ping your phone with a clip the second they catch motion. Chris handled the actual install, because Chris, as I told you last time, should genuinely be enrolled in some kind of engineering program instead of pouring beer for a living, and he had both of them mounted and synced to my phone in under an hour, one on the front door and one covering the back. Jake handled the strategy, because Jake watches a genuinely concerning volume of true crime, the streaming kind, the podcast kind, all of it, and for the entire length of our friendship I have gently made fun of him for it, and on that Sunday afternoon it finally, completely paid for itself. Because Jake's whole point, which he made while Chris was up a ladder cursing at a drywall anchor, was that the move here was not to confront Gary. The move was to CATCH Gary. On camera. Committing one single clear, undeniable, timestamped crime. So that the file in the police system stopped reading like "a sad man keeps finding jars" and started reading like "here is high-definition video of a named individual entering a residence that is not his." Document. Allies. Systems. For the first time in any of these stories I wasn't just reading the playbook at people, I was actually living inside it, and it felt, I have to tell you, incredible. It felt like standing up.

Pudding, for what it's worth, decided he liked me about twenty minutes into that Sunday, and I want to put on the record what that did for me, because it's not nothing. He's maybe thirty pounds of corgi built like a loaf of bread balanced on four little fence-post legs, a dog who has clearly never had a difficult day in his life, and he took one look at me sitting on my kitchen floor in a state, marched over with the short-legged determination of a much larger animal, climbed bodily up into my lap, which for a corgi is a whole athletic event with a running start, put his head down against my chest, and exhaled through his nose like he was settling in for the long haul. "Oh, that's it, you're his now," Chris said, and coming from the dog's actual owner it felt like an official handoff. I don't fully understand the mechanism by which a dog deciding you're acceptable repairs something structural in a person, but it does, and I'd been running on empty for six weeks, and I sat on that floor and got my whole head back together under the weight of a small smug corgi who had decided my entire crisis was a fantastic opportunity for a nap.

And then, while we were figuring out camera angles, Chris found out how Gary had been getting in, and it was so stupid and so small and so obvious that I had to physically sit down on my own kitchen floor all over again.

My building has a back laundry room. And the laundry room has a door out to the alley that the landlord props open with a single brick "for airflow," year round, a brick I had walked past a thousand times and never once registered as a thing. From the propped alley door you get into the laundry room. From the laundry room you get into the utility hallway. And from the utility hallway, if you know which unit is which, and Gary clearly did, because Gary had clearly been studying my building the way other people study for the bar exam, you can reach the entire back row of apartment service doors. The ones everybody forgets they even have, because they all open onto the same strip of grim concrete nothing and nobody in the history of the building has ever used theirs. The coasts get fire escapes, the middle get these grim alleyway hatches. Mine was bolted shut. But the bolt was the original. The bolt was, and I'm estimating based on the paint, from somewhere around the mid 90s, and Chris, demonstrating, opened it with the corner of an old library card and the specific heavy disappointed sigh of a man whose intelligence has been personally insulted by a piece of hardware.

So that was the whole answer. That was the magic. No ghost, no master key, no supernatural devotion. Just a determined, patient man, a brick somebody kept using to prop open a door, and a building that trusted everyone in it equally and completely. I had spent good money changing the FRONT locks twice, like an idiot, the first time after the Polaroid showed up and the second the very morning after he left a jar breathing on my counter, getting blessed by a locksmith both times, while the back service door sat quietly in the dark the entire time going "hello? remember me? we've never met, you and I, but he and I are very close."

We fixed what we could. I had a real new bolt put on that back service door, the kind that means it, not the limp mid 90s thing Chris had popped open with a library card. I got the landlord to pull the brick out of the laundry room door too, which took three voicemails and me sending him a photo of his own propped door with the caption "this is how," and even then he acted like I was the unreasonable one, like the brick had rights. But I knew the brick was never really the lock on this. That back door still opened onto the same strip of concrete behind the building that anyone patient enough could walk right up to. The bolt was the line. The bolt was the thing that had to hold. Chris re-aimed the back camera to stare straight at that service door, and then we waited. And I'm not going to dress up the waiting as brave, because it wasn't. I spent it on Jake's couch eating cereal directly out of the box and flinching at my own phone every time it lit up, which on a normal day is a lot, because I have notifications on for everything like a maniac for some reason.

The waiting is its own specific kind of bad that I don't think gets talked about enough in these stories. Everyone wants the confrontation, the big moment, the catch. Nobody tells you about the two nights before it where nothing happens and the nothing is almost worse, because your body doesn't know there's nothing happening, your body thinks every single creak of Jake's old apartment is the start of it. We had a group chat going, me and Jake and Chris and Marissa, and it just stayed open the whole time, low and constant, somebody always awake in it. Marissa would send a dumb meme at 2 AM and it would land like a hand on my shoulder. Jake kept us calm by narrating the whole thing like one of his true crime episodes, which sounds insane but genuinley helped, because in his telling I wasn't a scared guy on a couch, I was "the victim who did everything right," and I needed to be that guy for a few days more than I've ever needed to be anyone. Marissa, for the record, called the whole plan a full week before any of us got there. She always does. I have made my peace with living one week behind that woman for the rest of my life.

Tuesday night. 11:40 PM. My phone went off with the specific tone I'd set for the back door camera, the one I'd hoped I would never actually hear.

The back service door. And there he was. Gary. The chore coat. A jar. Standing at my back door in the dark, and the nightvision had rendered the whole world in that grainy underwater green, and I watched him reach out and try the new bolt. Gently. Almost tenderly. The way you'd jiggle the side of a crib, just slightly, just to confirm the baby's still asleep. He tried it once. Twice. A third time, patient, unbothered, like a locked door was simply a thing that hadn't opened YET. Except this time it didn't open at all. The old bolt, the limp mid 90s one, would have handed him the door in about four seconds. This new one held. I sat on Jake's couch and watched a fresh piece of steel do the one job I had been failing to do for six straight weeks, which was simply stay shut between that man and the inside of my home. He worked it one more time, almost puzzled by it now, like the door had broken a promise. And then, for one second, one single second, the calm came off him. His shoulders bunched up toward his ears and his free hand flattened against the door, palm and fingers spread wide, and he leaned his whole weight into it and dropped his head forward until his forehead was resting on the wood, and even through a cheap camera mic I could hear him breathing through his nose, slow and heavy, like something deciding was happening within his chest. It lasted maybe a second and a half. And then it was gone, folded back down wherever he keeps it, and he straightened up calm again, calmer than before, smooth and total like it had never cracked at all. And that was the part that put the hair up on my arms, because a man who can put a thing like that away that fast was never not choosing it. And then he set the jar down on the concrete in front of the door, centered, squared up, facing it, the exact way he'd left every other one. And then he didn't leave. He crouched down next to the jar on the concrete, and he stayed there, looking at it, for an uncomfortably, visably long time.

And then he did the thing that I am going to be carefully unpacking with a licensed professional for a good while.

He unscrewed the lid. And in the green camera light I watched him lean down over the open jar and bring his face close to it, and his shoulders moved, and the camera's little microphone caught the sound, and I'm sorry, I'm so genuinley sorry to do this to you, but he was talking to it. Low and soft. The mic only got pieces of it, fragments coming in and out under the hum of the alley. "...almost home now... gonna be such a good... he runs warm, you'll like that, you'll like him..." And then he picked the open jar back up off the concrete and held it up toward my closed, locked, finally-holding back door, lifting it the way you'd lift a baby up to a window to show it the view of its new house, and he said, clear, clear enough that the mic got every word of it clean:

"Can you smell him yet?"

And that's when I understood the whole thing. All twelve years of it, all at once, sitting on Jake's couch at 11:42 at night with a box of cereal in my lap.

The jars had never been gifts to me. The jars were field trips. He had been bringing the mother into my apartment, over and over, not to leave me something, but to let HER learn the smell of my home, my space, my things, me. The bond he kept talking about. How she learns your body. He wasn't trying to get me to take the colony. He was teaching the colony to recognize me, patiently, repeatedly, the way you would work a scent off a piece of clothing into a tracking dog, except the dog was a beige organ in a jar and the man had been running the program daily since 2012.

I want to be honest about what that did to me, sitting there, because it wasn't a clean horror-movie chill. It came in waves, the way the bad realizations always do for me, where first your stomach drops, and then about three seconds later a second, worse thought arrives behind the first one and knocks it over. Wave one was just: he's been in my home a lot more than I thought. Wave two, the one that actually got me, was: every single object he left wasn't a message TO me, it was a lesson FOR it. The jar on the porch facing the door. The open one breathing on my counter. The Polaroid of my fridge. None of it was ever about communicating with Danny. I was never the audience. I was the curriculum. For six weeks I'd been reading these jars like love notes I didn't want, getting the meaning of them completely backwards, when the whole time the actual recipient of the project was a colony of yeast being slowly, lovingly trained on the smell of me. I had to put the cereal down. I didn't eat for a while after that, and not in a dramatic way, just in the way where your body quietly closes for renovations without asking you first.

I did not go home that night. I sent the footage to the officer at 11:52 PM, with the timestamps, and a one-line message that I rewrote four separate times trying to make it sound like a calm and reasonable adult and that I eventually just sent as it actually was, which was: "he is at my back door right now please." They sent a car. He was gone by the time it arrived, of course he was, he always was. But this time it didn't matter that he was gone, because this time there was video. Clear, named, high-definition, timestamped video. A man with a name. A man at my back door at midnight, working a bolt that for the first time would not give him. A documented attempt to enter. A pattern of prior contact six weeks deep. And the folder. The whole sad patient beaver dam of a folder, every twig of it, the napkin and the Post-it and the Polaroid of my oat milk, all of it finally heavy enough that the system had to actually look.

The video changed everything, exactly like Jake said it would. With the footage and the folder together, the report finally had teeth. The same officer who'd told me weeks earlier that a jar on a porch wasn't much to work with called me back herself, and her whole tone was different, because now she had a face and a name and a clean clip of a man at a stranger's back door at midnight, patiently working a lock that would not open for him, and a paper trail underneath it deep enough to stand on. That's the thing nobody tells you about the beaver-dam approach. For weeks it feels like you're doing nothing, like you're just collecting sad little twigs while everyone tells you it's not enough yet. And then one night you have the one twig that matters, and suddenly the whole pile underneath it stops being twigs and becomes the reason anybody believes you at all. The folder wasn't busywork. The folder was the case. The folder was the thing that meant I didn't have to convince anyone of anything, I just had to hand it over.

There was a no-contact order. Chris banned Gary from the brewery on the spot, printed his photo, and taped it up behind the bar with the others, the full "do not serve, do not seat, call a manager immediately" treatment that I have now, unfortunately, gotten more than one man in my life.

The first night I went back to my own apartment, days later, with the new bolt and the cameras and the brick finally gone from the alley, I stood in my own kitchen for a long time before I could put my keys down. The smell was gone. I'd had the place professionally cleaned, every soft thing in it washed twice, and there was nothing there anymore but my own apartment, my own normal life smell, oat milk and dish soap and the candle Marissa got me that's supposed to be "fresh linen" and is actually just a smell called blue. And I stood there and I cried a little, in the dumb relieved way, the way you do when a thing is finally over and your body figures it out a few seconds before your brain does. Then Pudding knocked over the trash can looking for the cereal box, and the moment ended, the way moments do, and I was just a guy cleaning up after a dog in his own kitchen, which is the most ordinary thing in the world, and I have never in my life been so grateful to be doing something ordinary. The officer called me a few days later, and she was gentle about it, and she told me that they'd done a welfare check on Gary, and that what they found at his place was, in her words, "a situation," and that there were now people involved whose actual job is that specific kind of situation. She didn't give me the details. I didn't ask for them. Because there's a version of all this, and I've made my peace with sitting inside it, where Gary is also a person that something went badly and quietly wrong inside of, somewhere along the way, alone, with a jar. And I have found that I'm able to hold "he terrified me and violated my home" in one hand and "I genuinely hope he gets actual help" in the other, at the same time, without either one falling out. I'm putting both of them down now. Gently. On the counter. Lids on.

I keep thinking about the never-missed-a-day part. He told me, that very first Tuesday, that he'd fed her every single day since 2012, never missed once, not even with the shingles. At the time I heard it as a brag, the kind of thing a hobbyist says to impress you. I hear it completely differently now. Twelve years of a man getting up every single day to tend to one thing, with that much devotion, that much consistency, that much love, and the one thing was a colony in a jar, and the love had nowhere else to go and nobody to spend it on, so it pooled, and it curdled, and eventually it came looking for a body to attach itself to, and it found mine across a bar on a Tuesday. I don't think Gary woke up one day deciding to terrorize a brewery employee. I think Gary has been profoundly, dangerously alone for a very long time, in a way that bent his whole world around a single object, and I happened to be the warm thing that wandered into the frame. That doesn't make any of it okay. He still got into my home. But it does make it sadder than it is scary, now that I'm safe, and I think the sadness is the more honest feeling, so that's the one I'm keeping.

Here's the part I keep circling back to, the part that I think is actually the point, if there is one.

I never tasted her. I'll say again, I am not a fucking animal. Six weeks. A dozen jars. A man weeping proud grandfather tears over a fresh disc budding off an old one. A Polaroid of the inside of my own refrigerator. A voice in the green dark holding a jar up to my door and asking it if it could smell me yet. Through every single bit of it, the one boundary I never crossed, the one hill I was apparently always, bone-deep, willing to die on, was that I did not, at any point, put it in my mouth. And in a saga where I made the wrong call at almost every available opportunity, where I drove it home and kept it in the fridge and changed the wrong locks twice, that is the one thing I got completely, perfectly right, and I have decided I'm allowed to be proud of it. You take your wins where they grow.

I threw out the original fridge jar. The travel starter, the very first one, the one I'd kept for six full weeks like the world's worst houseguest. I walked it out to the dumpster myself, in the daylight, with Jake and Chris as witnesses, like a small grim funeral, and I'll tell you the stupid last thing, the thing I'm a little embarrassed by, which is that I held it carefully the whole short walk and I did not let it get cold on the way, because some programming you don't fully delete, you definately just learn to live next to, quietly, and forgive yourself for.

So thank you for reading these. Thank you, genuinely, for being so much cheaper than therapy for so long, although I want you to know that I am also, finally, in addition to you, now actually doing the therapy.

Pudding the corgi is technically still Chris's dog, but he has been spending most of his weekends at my place lately, because Chris keeps saying the little guy "asks for me," which I'm fairly sure is just Chris's way of making sure I'm not alone in that apartment at night without ever turning it into a whole conversation about it. Pudding does not like the smell of vinegar, and as of about six weeks ago neither do I, and that single shared aversion is essentially the entire foundation of our relationship, and I have to tell you, it's enough. It's more than enough. Hug somebody tonight who uses dead store water.

TL;DR: The man fermenting a colony with his own body was never trying to feed it to me, he was conditioning twelve years of homegrown bodily yeast to recognize my scent by repeatedly carrying it into my home. I got him a no-contact order, a brewery ban, a folder with actual teeth, and a welfare check that found a whole situation now in better hands, and left me with a part-time corgi, ongoing therapy, a permanent hatred of vinegar, and the quiet lifelong pride of being the one idiot in this entire story who, against every odd, never once put it in his mouth.

At least, not directly... I need a shower.

Danny, out.

Okay. So a lot has happened since the baby book opened, and I need you to take a breath with me before we get into it, because I had to take several, mostly into a paper bag Jake keeps in his car for exactly this reason now.

Quick recap for anyone just walking in. A brewery regular named Gary feeds a twelve year old fermentation colony with his own bodily fluids and has unilaterally decided that I am going to co-parent it with him. That's the recap. That's the whole stable foundation we're building today's house on top of. If that sentence didn't fully land for you, go back and read part one, because I do not have it in me to re-describe the jar from scratch. The jar from part one currently lives rent-free in the exact part of my brain I used to use for remembering passwords, which is why I have been locked out of my own email twice this month already.

So. The travel jar. The "starter" he left on my car. I kept it in my fridge for an entire week like an absolute coward, and I want to get ahead of the comments, because I know several of you are going to do the thing where you get mad at ME, the actual victim here, and tell me I should have thrown it out the instant I got home. You're right. I know you're right. I am aware of my mistakes. I am LIVING inside my mistakes, they have a long-term lease, they pay rent in nothing and they never do the dishes.

Here is the genuinely stupid reason I didn't throw it out, and I genuinley knew it was stupid even as it was happening. I was scared he'd ask about it. I had a whole anxiety movie playing on a loop where Gary comes in on Tuesday, leans across the bar, and goes "how's she doing," and I have to lie, out loud, to a grown man's hopeful face, about the health and emotional wellbeing of his bodily child. So I kept the jar. To have a true answer ready. So I wouldn't have to lie. That's the logic of a hostage who's started decorating his cell, and I knew it was the logic of a hostage the entire time I was clearing a shelf for it in my fridge, next to the oat milk.

Tuesday came. Gary came.

And Gary was different, and the difference is the whole reason this part exists, so I want you to feel it. The first week, Gary was a strange man with a jar. This week, Gary walked in already mid-conversation, like we'd been talking continuously for all seven intervening days and I'd simply stepped out of the room for a moment and was now stepping back in. "There he is," he boomed, arms spreading wide. "There's my co-pa. How's our girl. You been feeding her? She take to you yet? She runs a little shy at first, she gets it from me."

And I said the line I'd been rehearsing in the shower for a week. I said, "Yeah, she's good, she's doing good, she's in the fridge."

And Gary's entire body changed. Visably. The arms came down. The big warm energy drained right out of his face and was replaced by something quiet, and the quiet was so much worse than the boom. He looked the way a parent looks when a babysitter mentions, casually, that they let the kid play near the pool.

"The fridge," he said. "Danny. You put her in the fridge."

And then he explained to me, in the patient, wounded, deeply disappointed voice of a man who has just caught you doing something morally serious, that cold "puts a mother to sleep," and that "a sleeping mother can't bond," and that the bonding is the entire point, the bonding is, and I wrote this quote down on a cocktail napkin in the moment because my brain would attempt to repress this to keep me from lasting damage otherwise, "how she learns your body." How she learns your body. I still have the napkin. It's in the folder now. We'll get to the folder.

Then he reached into his coat.

Gary's coat, I should describe, because the coat is full of surprises... It's a canvas chore coat, the color that all canvas chore coats eventually become, and it has pockets that very clearly hold significantly more than a pocket is structurally supposed to hold, so that the whole garment hangs off him heavy and clinking and slightly damp, like a tool belt that gave up. And out of one of these pockets he produced a jar, and this was not the dainty bar jar from last week, and it was not the travel starter. This was a full quart. And the mother inside this one was BIG. The mother inside this one had grown to fill nearly the entire jar, pressed up against all the glass at once, beige going to a bruised grey at its thick rounded edges, with the overall size and apparent weight and frankly the apparent personal history of a tongue that had been removed from some large animal and then politely asked to keep on living.

And it had a second disc growing off the first one.

A smaller one. A pale, fresh, soft-looking one, budding off the side of the big one like a lily pad off a lily pad. They call that a baby SCOBY. We covered that acronym in the last part. Knowing the real and normal term did absolutely nothing for me when Gary lifted the quart jar up into the warm light of those rustic Edison bulbs, gazed at the little one with his eyes going genuinely, wetly soft, and said, "She had this one last Thursday. First one in two years. I named her after my mom."

I have met a frankly unbelievable number of frightening men through this bar. I've cataloged at least one of them for you already. Gary is the first one who managed to frighten me while crying soft, happy, proud tears about a grandchild.

I'm going to pick up the pace now, because the gross-out crowd has been generously fed at this point and the rest of you need to understand exactly when and how this stopped being a funny story I tell at parties and became a thing I have a folder about.

I never told Gary where I live. I need that in bold and I need it on the record. I NEVER told Gary where I live. We have a hard policy at the brewery, a policy that was born directly out of previous sagas and that Chris enforces like federal law, that staff do not give regulars any personal information, none, not your last name, not your neighborhood, nothing. And I follow that policy like scripture now. I follow it because of every single thing you have already seen in the tales I've shared. So understand that there is no version of events where I slipped and told him.

Thursday, my actual day off, I came home from the gym around noon, and there was a jar on my porch.

Sitting on the railing. Centered. Facing my front door, squared up to it. The lid sweating gently in the heat. And taped to the side of the jar, facing out, was a Polaroid. An actual physical Polaroid, the kind you have to own a specific old camera to even produce. And the Polaroid was a photo of the inside of my refrigerator. My fridge. With the door open. With the original travel jar from part one clearly visible on the shelf, exactly where I'd left it, sitting right next to my oat milk and one extremely sad lime.

He had been inside my apartment to take it.

I called Marissa, and I didn't manage to say any words at first, I just made a sound into the phone, an involuntary one, and she made a sound right back, the doubt sound, and then she was quiet for a second, and then she said the thing. The thing she always, eventually, ends up saying. The thing that means we have officially crossed the line out of the part where this is a story and into the part where this is a horrifying real-life situation. She said, "Danny. This isn't funny-weird anymore. This is scary-weird."

She is always right. She was right about the last guy, and the guy before that, and the guy before THAT. I have a perfect, unbroken, slightly humiliating record of Marissa arriving at the correct conclusion roughly a full week before I do, and of me spending that week constructing elaborate reasons why she's overreacting, right up until the moment I'm standing in front of a Polaroid of my own oat milk.

I called the police non-emergency line that afternoon. The officer I got was kind, and tired, and clearly had eleven of these going at once, and she walked me through it gently. The hard truth she gave me was that a jar on a porch, plus a photo that "could have been taken at any point in time," without any sign of forced entry, was simply not very much to act on. There was no broken window. There was no kicked-in door. Legally there was a lot of nothing. But, she said, and this part mattered, I should document everything, every jar, every note, every time, with dates and timestamps and photos, and call back the instant I had something more concrete, because patterns are what make a case.

So I started a folder. A real one, a literal folder on my phone and a physical one on my kitchen table. Photos, dates, times, the napkin, the Post-it, the Polaroid of my fridge. This is how I do this. You know this about me by now. I do not confront. I have never once in my life successfully confronted anyone. What I do is build a paper trail like a sad, determined little beaver, one twig at a time, until the dam is big enough that the system has to look at it. Document, allies, systems. That's the whole playbook. It's all I've got and it has, eventually, always worked.

I told Chris everything that Tuesday night too, in the walk-in again, because the walk-in has become where I have all my worst conversations now, surrounded by grain sacks at thirty-eight degrees. He listened the whole way through, and at the end he wasn't doing the "Gary's harmless" thing anymore. He'd dropped it completely. He just got quiet, and then he said, "Okay. We're not doing harmless. Forget I ever said harmless. Send me everything you've got and I'm putting his face behind the bar tonight." And he meant it. He had the photo taped up before I'd even clocked out, right at eye level by the register where every bartender would see it, with DO NOT SERVE written under it in the same marker we use for the specials board. There's something about watching your boss treat your nightmare as real that does more for you than almost anything. It moves the weight off your own back for a second. I want every person reading this who has a Chris in their life to go thank them, and I want every person who doesn't to understand that finding one is worth more than almost anything else I could tell you.

I changed my locks on Friday. I want you to picture the conversation where you ask a locksmith to come same-day, and he asks why, perfectly reasonably, and you have to decide in real time how much of the jar to tell a stranger. I told him about forty percent of the jar. Just forty. And the man went pale, and quietly upgraded me to a better deadbolt, and then he did the entire job for free and told me to "stay safe out there, brother." That is how much of the jar forty percent is. Forty percent of the jar is a free deadbolt and a blessing. I tipped him anyway, the full amount, because he wouldn't take the job money and I needed to give the universe something in exchange for a man being briefly, simply kind to me in the middle of all this.

Saturday there was a new jar.

New locks. Friday locks. Brand new deadbolt the man blessed me over. And on Saturday afternoon there was a fresh jar sitting on the inside of my locked apartment, on my kitchen counter, lid off, open to the air, breathing. I had immediatly, stupidly, believed that new locks would do anything at all.

I spent the week on Jake's couch. Everything did turn out moderately okay in the grand scheme, I need to keep saying that, partly for you and mostly for me. I have people. I have a whole network of people who show up, which is more than the men in these stories ever seem to have, and which I'm starting to think is the entire difference between me and them honestly. Jake gave me the couch and the emergency paper bag. Chris came over with his tiny, deeply stupid, profoundly good-hearted corgi named Pudding, and the three of us came together to figure out a camera system, because I am done being surprised in my own home. Chris should be in some sort of engineering course, I swear.

But before I go I need you to understand the part that the police report can't hold, the part that isn't evidence. The smell was in my apartment now. The gym-bag-in-a-hot-car-since-Obama smell, the one with the human note at the very bottom of it. It was in my kitchen. It was in my home. And a smell is a different category of violation than a jar on a porch, because a smell doesn't stay on the counter. A smell gets into the soft things. It gets into the dish towels and couch cushions and my favorite hoodie hanging on the chair. I've washed everything twice and I still keep catching a whiff, and I genuinely can't always tell anymore whether it's really there or whether my brain is just serving it back to me unprompted, and either way I haven't figured out how you change the locks on the inside of your own nose.

TL;DR: The man who ferments a colony with his own fluids, despite never once being told my address because we have an ironclad policy specifically so that this cannot happen, has now been inside my locked apartment at least twice, the first time to photograph the inside of my own refrigerator and tape that Polaroid to a jar left squared up to my front door, and the second time, AFTER I paid a man to install a blessed new deadbolt, to leave an open jar breathing on my kitchen counter, and the smell is now in my home and possibly permanently installed in my brain.

So I work at a brewery. If you've read literally anything I've ever posted you already know this, and you also know that the brewery is where roughly ninety percent of my life's worst men have entered my life through the front door like they had a standing reservation. I have started to think of the front door as less of a door and more of a portal. A portal that exclusively spits out a certain kind of guy. The universe sees me wiping down a bar top, content, briefly safe, and goes "no, not like that," and opens the portal to the netherzone.

This one came in on a Tuesday.

I want to be clear right up front that I am not writing this because something happened and now it's over and I get to tell you about it from a comfy distance like a normal survivor of a normal bad time. I'm writing this because something is STILL happening, and Marissa told me that if I'm going to keep getting these little jars I should at least keep a record, and I said "a record for who, the police?" and she went quiet in the specific way she goes quiet, which is its own complete sentence. So. Here's the record. Hi police, if you're reading this in the future, I'm sorry in advance about the photographs that are coming, and I want it on the record that I asked her not to make me do this.

Let me set the scene, because the scene matters.

We do a thing on Tuesday nights called Homebrew Night, where local guys bring in stuff they've fermented in their garages and basements and we all stand around and pretend to take it deadly seriously. It's wholesome, mostly. I genuinley love it on a normal week. It is a room full of dads in untucked Hawaiian shirts comparing hydrometers and talking about water chemistry with the intensity other men reserve for sports gambling. There's a guy named Phil who makes a gose so salty it has reduced grown men to tears, and not good tears. There's a retired chemistry teacher named Bonnie who could out-brew every man in that room and knows it and lets them keep their little egos because she's a saint. It's a good crowd. It's MY crowd, in the sense that I'm the taproom guy, which means my entire job on Tuesday nights is to stand behind the bar, accept whatever gets slid across to me, taste it, and then say something encouraging that is not technically a lie.

I have gotten dangerously good at this. My signature move is "ooh, that's got a finish." A finish can mean anything. A finish has saved my life more times than the Heimlich. A beer can taste like a flooded basement and I will look the brewer dead in his hopeful eyes and say "you know what, that's got a real finish to it," and he will glow, and we will both walk away having gotten exactly what we needed out of the interaction. That's hospitality. That's the job. Twelve years of it have built me into a man who can keep his face completely still while his mouth fills with regret.

I'm telling you about the still face because you're going to need to understand the still face.

And then there's Gary.

I'm not going to describe Gary the way you want me to describe Gary, because the rules I have for myself, the rules Marissa makes me follow now after everything, say I'm supposed to tell you what I saw and not editorialize it into an insult. So. Just the facts of the man. Gary is maybe fifty, maybe a hard forty-five, the kind of age that stopped being a number and became more of a texture. Gary has a beard that does not so much end as it transitions, in that there's no clean border anywhere between the beard and the chest hair, it's all one continuous pelt that travels up over the cheeks and down into the collar of a shirt that has very clearly been worn to dinner, and to bed, and possibly to a funeral, in that exact order, without ever once visiting a washing machine in between.

Gary smells like a damp basement that found religion. I cannot improve on that description so I'm going to make you live in it. There's a mildew base, the wet cardboard and old-foundation smell of a place water gets into and never fully leaves. And then on top of the mildew there's a sweetness, and the sweetness is somehow the worse of the two, because your animal brain catches it and goes "oh, fruit, food, good," for about a quarter of a second before the rest of the information arrives and it goes "no, abort, that is not fruit," and you have to stand there and live in the gap between those two thoughts while you pour the man a beer.

On this particular Tuesday, Gary slid a Mason jar across my bar and set it down with the gentleness of a man placing a sleeping infant into a crib.

The jar was full of something the color of old dishwater. Cloudy, slightly luminous under the Edison bulbs we have because Chris thinks they're rustic. And floating flat on top of the dishwater was a beige disc, about the diameter of a coaster, with the exact look and apparent texture of a slice of deli ham that had gone to live in a pond and made peace with its new life. The disc had veins. I need you to sit with the word veins for a second, the way I had to. It was a wet, rubbery, faintly vascular pancake suspended in fog, and as the jar settled from being carried it did one slow, lazy, self-satisfied bob, and a single thread of brownish sediment unspooled off the underside of it and drifted down like a tail. I cannot stress the hygene of all this enough, which is to say there wasn't any, anywhere, in any direction.

"That's my mother," Gary said.

I said, "Oh. Is she.... Okay?"

And Gary laughed, low and warm and patient, the laugh of a man who is absolutely going to explain, at length, and who has correctly identified that I am trapped behind this bar by both the physical layout of the room and the entire architecture of my personality.

A SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast), for those of you lucky enough to have kept your lives clean enough to not know, is the thing you grow kombucha on. The letters stand for symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. It's a living colony. Homebrewers and fermentation people affectionately call the big mature one "the mother," and you feed her sweet tea and she turns it into fizzy sour tea, and people put it in cute swing-top bottles and sell it for six dollars at farmers markets. That part is real. That part is completely normal. You can google every word of it and feel totally fine.

I need you to physically hold onto that fine feeling, because we are about to walk out of the land of fine together, hand in hand, and I want you to remember what it felt like, because we are not coming back to it. Not in this part. Not in part two. Take a picture of the fine feeling. There. Okay.

"She's twelve years old," Gary said, tapping the glass with a fingernail I am choosing, as a mercy to both of us, to describe later. "Started her the year Obama got reelected. Fed her every single day since. Same time every day, rain or shine, never missed once, not even when I had the shingles." He leaned in across the bar, and the basement-that-found-religion smell leaned in with him like a second person joining the conversation. "You wanna know what makes mine different from every other guy's in this room?"

No. I want you to understand that the answer the entire human body produces to that question, unprompted, at a cellular level, is no. Every cell I own filed the same response at the same instant. A choir of no. A no you could hear from space.

"Uh... Sure," I said. Because I'm an idiot. We've established this across multiple sagas. I am aware. I'm not a smart man but I am, at least, YOUR idiot, and I have stopped pretending otherwise.

"I don't use store-bought water," Gary said, and he said it the way you'd announce a pregnancy, or a remission. Proud. Shining. "Store water's dead water. Chlorine, fluoride, the whole government cocktail. A living mother needs living input or she goes flat in her soul, you understand? So I give her me." He spread his hands, ta-da, presenting himself. "Spit. Sweat. Little bit of whatever she's asking for that day. You feed a mother long enough, son, and she starts to tell you what she's hungry for. And you learn to listen."

I'm going to be straight with you about my face, because I promised you the still face would matter. My face did absolutely nothing. Twelve years of "ooh, that's got a finish" had finally, at long last, found their true and highest purpose. On the outside I was a serene man, a calm pond, a customer service Buddha. On the inside, a little alarm was going off immediatly in a room I keep specifically for this exact purpose, a room that has gotten an absolutely unreasonable amount of use over the years, and a tiny version of me was sprinting around in there knocking over filing cabinets and screaming in a register only dogs can hear.

"You should taste her," Gary said, and he reached out and started, slowly, lovingly, to unscrew the lid.

Here's the thing about a smell that has been sealed inside a jar for any length of time. It does not waft. It does not arrive politely. It pounces. The instant that lid cracked the seal, the air around my entire end of the bar changed temperature and pressure, like a tiny weather event. It was vinegar, yes, up top, but it was vinegar that had a JOB, vinegar that had been places and seen things and come back changed. And underneath the vinegar was the unmistakable smell of a gym bag that had been left in the back of a hot car since approximately the second Obama administration, which, you'll recall unless you suffer from severe short term memory loss caused by ReddX-brand SuperAIDS, is the exact era Gary had personally cited as this thing's birthday, which means the timeline checks out, and I genuinely hate that the timeline checks out. And then underneath even that, at the very bottom of the smell, way down in the foundation of it, was a back note that was simply, biologically, undeniably human. And that's the one I can still smell when I think about it, which is right now, while I'm typing this on my couch, so. You're welcome. We're all in it together now. You would've never considered this possibility. No sane person would. But Gary as we would find out, had more than a few loose screws.

He tipped the jar slowly toward me across the bar. The mother slid forward with the motion and pressed its wet beige face flat against the inside of the glass like it had been waiting twelve years for this and wanted, very badly, to get out and meet me. A lone bubble crawled up the side of the disc, paused at the top, and let go.

"Open up," Gary said, soft, encouraging, a dad with an airplane spoon.

And Chris saved my life.

My boss. My balding, exhausted, beautiful angel of a manager Chris materialized at my elbow from somewhere in the back, took one look at the open jar, and said, in the flat authoritative voice of a man invoking law, "Gary. No open containers behind the bar. Health code." Which is not a real rule. There is no such health code. But Gary doesn't know that, nobody knows that, it sounds exactly true enough, and Chris used it to steer me bodily away from the bar and into the back hallway by one shoulder, the way you'd guide a kid away from a thing on the sidewalk you don't want him to look at too closely.

In the walk-in cooler I told Chris everything in one continuous breath with no punctuation in it anywhere. Chris listened. He's a genuinely good man and he gave me his full attention even though we were both slowly freezing next to a stack of grain sacks. When I finished he was quiet for a second, and then he said, "Okay. That is, hands down, the most disgusting thing I have ever heard a human being say out loud. But Gary's harmless. He's lonely, he's odd, he's been coming for years, and he's never once caused a problem. Just don't taste it. Don't taste anything he brings you ever again. He comes every Tuesday, you'll be fine."

He comes every Tuesday.

I want you to know that I genuinely, naively, STUPIDLY believed that "just don't taste it" was a complete and sufficient plan that was going to hold. I thought the jar was the worst part of this. I thought the worst part of my week was that a man I see every Tuesday had spent the Obama administration cultivating a beige organ in dishwater out of his own spit. I went back out, I finished my shift, I poured Phil's tearjerker gose for three more dads, I said "ooh, that's got a finish" on autopilot, and I let myself believe the weird thing had happened and was now safely behind me.

Reader, the jar was the welcome mat. The jar was Gary only just clearing his throat.

When my shift ended a little after midnight and I walked out to the lot, there was a second jar waiting for me on the hood of my car.

It was smaller. A travel size. A little four-ounce thing with a beige coin of culture floating in it, a baby version of the one on the bar, sitting centered and deliberate right on the hood of my vehicle. And taped to the lid, on a yellow Post-it, in handwriting that pressed so hard the pen had torn little valleys through the paper, it said:

"A starter of your own. Now you're a parent too. Don't let her get cold. Yours, G."

I stood in the parking lot for a while. Longer than I'd like to admit. I want to tell you I picked it up to throw it away, but you've read these before and you know me and you'd know I was lying. I definately didn't taste it, I mean, I'm not a fucking animal. But I also did not throw it in the dumpster that was eleven feet away from where I was standing, and I have spent a lot of the following days trying to honestly understand why, and the closest I've gotten is this: something about the words "don't let her get cold" got into my bones and sat down and refused to leave. It's a horrible sentence. It's also, structurally, a sentence about caring for something small and helpless, and I am apparently so easily hijacked by that exact phrasing that a stranger weaponized it against me on a Post-it note in a parking lot and it WORKED.

So I drove home with a jar of a strange man's bodily ferment buckled into my passenger seat like a foster child I'd been awarded custody of by a court I never agreed to appear before. The whole drive I kept glancing at it. It glowed faintly under the streetlights. I told myself I'd deal with it in the morning.

Marissa is the one making me post this. She came over the next day, I told her the whole thing, I showed her the jar, and she made the sound. You know the sound. It's the one that communicates more doubt than any actual word could. And then she said that if I was going to be a parent, I needed a baby book, and that the baby book should be made public, because if this kept going I'd want a timestamped record that wasn't just my own memory, which she does not fully trust, which is fair, because neither do I.

I really, genuinely hope there's nothing else to add to the baby book.

There is going to be so much to add to the baby book.

TL;DR: A Homebrew Night regular named Gary, who smells like a basement that found religion, has spent the entire span of time since 2012 feeding a twelve year old kombucha colony with his own spit and sweat because he believes store water is "dead," tried to feed it to me mouth-first across my own bar, got intercepted at the last second by my boss invoking a health code that does not exist, and then left a travel-size jar of the stuff on the hood of my car with a note congratulating me on becoming a parent, and I, a man with a documented and frankly historic inability to throw harmful things away, drove it home and put it in my passenger seat instead of the dumpster eleven feet away, because the note told me not to let her get cold and apparently that's all it takes to fully commandeer me.