Do I Have to Draw You a Map?!

[QUALTHWAR]

Hey, here’s some really boring crap! I thought I’d list some of places where I’ve lived and a little about what went on there. I call it the Who the Hell Cares Tour. Actually, some of it is a little interesting, I guess.

This is my first apartment. 2 of my friends already lived there, and I moved in about a week or two after turning 16. We lived downstairs. Dropped out of school and supported myself as a produce clerk in a grocery store. The week we all went our separate ways, I was so drunk on vodka that they had to drag me out of a car and into the apartment. I threw up on the floor and slept in it all night. Party on! We tried to get a cat drunk on vodka, but it didn’t want anything to do with it. Duh! The tiny freezer in the fridge was stuffed with TV dinners. We moved out and i left the puke on the floor. The landlords lived in the house next door and were away for vacation. They came back to an empty apartment that was all closed up, steaming hot, and smelling like puke from the big pile on the floor. Good times!!

 

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My second apartment; an efficiency. This place was 25 dollars a week. It was 35 for apartments with AC, but I couldn’t afford it. It’s the place on the right by the fuel tank. The place has AC now, but didn’t then, and no fuel tank then. It got really hot and one night I couldn’t fall asleep so I moved my bed over by the fridge and opened the fridge door. Pointed a fan into the fridge and the cold air helped me sleep. I had no food in there, but forgot about the frozen shrimp bait in the freezer. I closed all the windows and when I woke up the next morning, the place stunk like hell from thawed shrimp.

 

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I lived in two places here; the one on the left and the right. I didn’t have my own room in the left place and slept on the floor. The right place, I had a small bedroom. If you look at the right apartment, my room was where the door is behind that little palm tree; on the left side of the building. That room was small as hell. I lived with one of the guys I lived with in my first apartment, and his older sister lived there. She used to get mad and pound on the door when my girlfriend and I were messing around. I actually hammered my girlfriend the first night we went out in the left apartment. We did it on blankets on the kitchen floor. We got married; she was my first wife, but we didn’t get married when I lived here; not yet. I was about 17 now.

 

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Movin’ on up! I went from a tiny room apartment, to living in a house. This was my future wife’s parent’s house. But you see the edge of that house on the left? That back window over there? This old lady let me stay there, but I did pay her. I had my own bedroom and bathroom, and basically lived on one side of the house. Her son grew up and moved out and I lived in his old room. But I was only there to sleep. The rest of the time, I was next door at the house you see in the pic visiting my girlfriend and her parents.

The old lady got uncomfortable with me coming in at 2 AM; thinking it might be a burglar, so I had to move out. I had no place to go because my stepdad was a jerk, and I had lost my job. My girlfriend’s parents let me stay there, but not in the same room as my GF. They eventually said that I had to move out or we needed to get married because it didn’t look good to the neighbors. We got married. I had turned 18 two weeks before, and my wife was still 17. We lived here until I found a job.

 

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This place with 140 or 145 a month. It was in a large apartment complex. It had a large pool with a diving board and a community house. They actually had one or two other pools, but they were smaller.

I got a job working at a concrete plant that made sewer pipes, and blocks, and whatever. It was a hard, freakin’ job. 10 hours a day, one 20-minute lunch break a day, 5 days a week, and half a day on Saturday. It was like 55 hours a week of brute force. I used to take like 6 sandwiches to work with me and I’d eat every one of them while working, and during lunch. I lost my job, sold my muscle car, kept my wife’s car. Used the money to go to Disney World, buy bowling equipment, and bowled until the money was gone. Moved back in with wife’s parents.

 

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Ok, back at my wife’s parent’s house for awhile. They said I needed to either find a job or go to school. I started going to a vocational school to learn horticulture so I could do landscaping in Florida. After 9 weeks of that, decided I wanted to move back up north with the wife. We moved into a farm house near where I grew up on a farm, but I hated it. Had a job helping a contractor build houses, but hurt my back. Decided I wanted to go to college at a school that Playboy Magazine rated the number 1 party school in America. I don’t have a pic of the farm house because it was too isolated for google street view.


Edit: Forgot one.


I forgot that we rented a house for awhile before going up north. It was wintertime and the place had one heater in a corner of the living room. The living room was hot and the rest of the place was cold. There were this group of titty bars down the road and I went there with a friend one night. The next day, my friend and his girlfriend was visiting and I mentioned one of those bars we visited the night before. He said he never heard of it and I say, “Sure, you know the place. We were there last night.” Oh man, I wasn’t even thinking, and his girlfriend got mad.

 

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This is the hell hole trailer park we moved into in the college town. This place was in a valley and it was a bitch trying to get a car up and down the hills with the ice and snow. We lived in 2 trailers here. You see those mailboxes out front? They used to be separate mailboxes nailed to a long board. I watched this lady pull alongside them with a van and got too close and knocked a crapload of boxes off the board with her side mirror. The second trailer we lived in here we decided to buy by making payments. I think it was 145 a month.

My wife and I cleaned a Morrison’s restaurant every night for 140 bucks a week. It was nice in a way because we only worked a few hours each night, but it was a pain because we never got a night off. This assistant manager used to plow one of the girls at night all the time with the lights out in a manager’s room. He was married. My wife and I got horny one night after everyone left, humped on the carpet over by the table where the employees sit on break. No one was there, but right after we were done, the manager showed up in the middle of the night and my wife had just went to the bathroom to get cleaned up. There was still a blanket, or sheet, or something on the floor that looked suspicious, but he never said anything. I’ve often wondered if he was watching us, because he came in right after we were done.

 

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We had that trailer we bought moved over 100 miles because my cousins got me a job at a car dealership washing cars, undercoating, and doing odd jobs. I wanted to be a mechanic, but they didn’t need any more mechanics. This is the hell hole of a trailer park we moved into. The big white building was the mail room. We lived in the very back on a corner lot. We traded our trailer in on a new, bigger, nicer trailer. I planted a nice tree, built this really big deck, put cut telephone posts in the ground for a nice green wire fence, and assembled a shed. We probably had the nicest place there. A tornado took our shed and my neighbor said it looked like a rocket taking off. It ended up in a heap in the middle of a cornfield. Insurance paid for that and while coming home at night with the new shed in the trunk, some crazy girl slammed into us in the rear, spun us out, and ruined that new shed. By the time the insurance paid for another new shed, all the stuff we had outside, including our lawn mower, had went to hell. My wife and I broke up, I met my current wife, and we moved back to Florida.

I did become a mechanic while here. I went to another place and told them i was a mechanic and had to figure it out as i went along. Actually, what i did for awhile was use the phone in the shop to call garages and i'd ask them questions. I'd pretend to be a customer with a car problem, and ask them what they thought the problem was. After a year or so of doing this, it seemed like i was right more often than they were so i stopped calling people. Lol! My employer never caught on.


Edit: Forgot one.

While we were waiting for the trailer to be moved, we stayed at my cousin’s big, white house. We actually stayed in their upstairs garage apartment. It was winter time and we had a sheet over a doorway that led to the bathroom that kept the heat into the room. The cold side of that sheet lead to the bathroom with no heat. It sucked. My wife was washing clothes in the basement of the house once and there was a big, dead rat in a heap of clothes. We were glad to get out of there.


Edit: Forgot two.

I forgot, but my first wife and I split up for a little while and I moved in with a girl and her family. Her bedroom was upstairs in a converted attack. We came home late one night and it was dark in the attic room and I knocked over a TV and shattered it. Good times! I think it was one of these houses, but it’s hard to tell.

We got tired of the heat in the attic and living with her parents and we moved into a small efficiency that now seems to be gone. I think it was about where this building now stands. The efficiency was a piece of crap, but at least it was cold in there.

 

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You see a bunch of trees and whatever. There used to be this old building there, but it was torn down, or burned down, or both. I don’t know if there’s anything behind all that foliage or not. We lived at the Salvation Army for one night in separate rooms, and they fed us. There was a common room with a TV and bums and poor people everywhere. They locked us in our rooms at night to protect us.

The next day, they gave me a note to give to this day-labor place. My wife’s son was about 3 months old and the note said I had a family and needed work badly. I was living on unemployment at the time, getting 184 dollars every 2 weeks. This was unemployment from up north. They forwarded a check to me in Florida, something I don’t think they’re supposed to do. The check was for a week, not two, and it was for 92 bucks. The place that’s now gone cost us 45 a week with a 25 dollar deposit. That left us 22 bucks. This place was the pits. We had no bed, just a couch; not the kind that pulled out into a bed either. We both tried to sleep on a small couch together.

The only sink was some tiny thing in the bathroom. We washed dished in that. No TV, no AC. A hotplate, and a little silverware. A couple lived next door and rented rooms out for the lady who owned the house. They said we could move in for 50 bucks a week. We had a large bedroom, could use the kitchen, whatever.

 

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So we stayed at that tiny apartment for one week, and moved here for 5 bucks a week more. But the first night here, we couldn’t get the windows open in the bedroom; no AC. They were stuck from paint, and it was hot as hell in Florida. We went next door to the apartment we moved out of, and I used a knife to get the door open. We slept there that night and got the windows open the next day. We lived there for months, but got tired of the heat moved to a place with AC.

 

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There used to be efficiency apartments (lots of them) and swimming pool here; about where that large tree is is where our room was. All we wanted was AC. We had the AC on full blast and it was cold as hell in the room; plus we had a swimming pool. This place was 120 bucks a week. We couldn’t afford it, so we moved out after a week.

 

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We moved into this place that’s been turned into a retirement place now. At the time, it was like a motel and we rented our room by the week. No AC, but we did have a pool. One of the cleaning ladies told us about where she lived and said it was a lot cheaper. We didn’t live here long and moved nearby where the cleaning lady lived with her husband.

 

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This place is was a roach motel. They were small apartments and German cockroaches were everywhere. Our daughter was born while we lived here. We didn’t have a crib for her when we brought her home, so she sleep in a big dresser drawer for a night or so until we got a crib. There was some couple who lived there for a week or so and she would scream and go nuts when they had sex. The windows were always open because no one had AC.

 

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We moved to this place. Big apartment house. It looks a little better now than it did when we lived there. The top room that sticks out is actually a porch that runs across the front. We had a hurricane once and there were people sleeping on that porch because they had to evacuate their home.

 

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Another place that’s no more. This parking lot used to be a 2-story house. We lived in the top apartment. The place was hot even though it had AC. The AC was just some old window unit that didn’t work well, and the hot water heater for the whole house was upstairs in our place. Roaches everywhere. The place was craptacular!

 

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This place is right across the street from the house torn down. We lived in the upstairs. It looks a lot better now than it did then. It rained really hard one day and this guy and girl was like body surfing down the street. The plaster on the ceiling fell in right above one of the kid’s cribs, but they weren’t in it at the time. I got mad and called the fire marshal. They came out and fined the crap out of the people, and I said I wasn’t going to pay the rent until the fixed everything. A realtor lady was taking care of the place and didn’t really do much of anything to get the rent from us. We eventually moved.

 

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This was a triplex. I hated the hell out of this place. I lived in a small town (6500 people) until I was 8. Then we moved to a farm on the edge of a town with 65 people and one little general store. No cable, a few kids to play with. Because of this, I hate isolated places. This place felt isolated to me even though there were houses everywhere. I think it was because the nearest store was about a mile away. That and we were on the right end. Anyway, a man and wife lived in the middle apartment and these low-life jailbirds lived on the left side.

The lady went to a bar with one of the guys and when they came back home, the lady’s husband was mad and said something to them then turned to walk back to his apartment. The jailbird guy slammed this guy in the back of the head with a club. A helicopter landed in the road to take the guy to the hospital, but he was brain dead and they took him off life support. The guy basically killed him. I was taking a sobriety test at the time about 10 miles away. I had stopped to piss in a parking lot and a cop saw me. They had several cops there, a video recorder, and their sergeant came to watch. I passed the test and they let me go. When I got home, I found out what had happened with my neighbors. The landlord kicked everyone out after that.

 

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This place looks like crap now, but looked better when we lived there. There was a McDonalds right around the corner and a busy road a block away with plenty or stores. I didn’t feel isolated anymore even though we were at the end of the road. My work was maybe 4 blocks away; it was sweet. Anyway, the kitchen in this place had no counter space. If it did, it was a narrow strip maybe 6 or 8 inches wide. The toilet was running without making noise so we didn’t know it. Our water bill was real high and I asked the landlord to reimburse us the money for the leaking water. They did, but not for several months because they wanted to see what a normal bill was without the leak. When we’d call them, we’d get their recorder and the lady (and the man) was Jewish and she had this really annoying voice like Fran Drescher. Her hair was this big pile of black frizz. She’d say, “This is Phyllis, don’t hang up.”

 

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This is a duplex. We lived here longer than any other place, and there’s a good chance that this might turn out to be the place where we live the longest during our entire lives. We lived in this duplex for 15 years. 15 freakin’ years. We raised our kids here. I got all my college degrees while we lived here. I became Qualthwar while we lived here.

You see that tree out front behind that car? Those things are like a cross between a tree and a bush. They can grow to maybe 40 feet tall, but they sprout branches from the ground up. I took this tree and over the years, I kept cutting the low branches off and formed it into a tree with a canopy. I then parked my car under it. They’ve since cut it down, probably a hundred times by now because it keeps growing back like a weed.

To the left was another duplex that the people bought. This older lady lived in the front and her relatives live in the back. She started going crazy. She would yell, squirt water over the fence, but mainly at the people in the back apartment, not us. She had this big fish pond outside with Koi fish. It would be the middle of summer with water evaporation at its height, and she thought her fish pond was losing water because someone was drilling holes in her pond from the other side of the fence. I finally got tired of her crap, started videotaping her, and the state attorney’s office did something about it. She moved to an assisted-living home. Got her ass out of my hair.

The back porch area was full of junk and car parts. I wanted to clean it up for my wife because she would go out back and smoke. So I cleaned stuff up and built a little get-away for her with a TV and everything. It turned out that I liked the place so much that I spent a lot of time out there; more time than my wife did. The TV is inside the plastic container. I would take off the bungie cord and lift the lid. It was protected, even from rain, unless it rained really hard and started spraying and blowing.

 

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After 15 years of living in a duplex, we wanted a house. We lived here for a year, but I didn’t like it much. It was small. Just slightly larger than the duplex, but it had 3 bedrooms, so the rooms were smaller than the duplex with 2 bedrooms. My big-ass desk barely fit in one of the bedrooms. Our landlords were jerks. The back lawn was almost all dirt and uneven as hell because they used to have an above ground pool. It was s bitch mowing the lawn. I tried to build a nice, little back porch area like we had at the duplex, but really couldn’t because the duplex had an area around 6x8 with a roof overhead that was the starting point for the porch area.