Empty Promises

Empty Promises and Dirty Apartments

(Originally published December 14, 2010)

RUNNING THIS WEBSITE has become like owning the LA Clippers or being a deadbeat dad. I once did a standup routine about this that was very poorly received. It went like this:

I did that bit for a crowd of 40-somethings at an amateur comedy contest. I’d never used it before, but I liked the idea of a long, dark, extended metaphor that trivialized child abuse by comparing it to sports fandom, and, further, looking like the only comic there who’d had a happy childhood.

“This is your year, Clippers fans,” and “I promise I’ll be there at 4:00,” remind me of my most recent posts:

“Exciting stuff on the way!” “Updates coming soon!”

Then a month goes by and the boss asks why you’re wearing sunglasses indoors.

“Did CritelliComedy.com do this to you?”
“No... I... fell down some stairs.”

And the cycle of abuse continues.

The last few posts got so trivial and pointless I just deleted them. It’s not so much laziness as perfectionism. I wanted to make something great. Instead, I’ll take the USC football approach and follow past greatness with something mediocre or questionable, the way Lane Kiffin succeeded Pete Carroll. (According to Dictionary.com, “succeed” has six primary definitions, of which I’m using the sixth, “to come next after something else in an order or series.” “Lane,” “Kiffin,” and “succeed” are words that, when used in conjunction, preclude the word “succeed” from referring to its four primary definitions: “to happen or terminate according to desire”; “to thrive, prosper, grow”; “to accomplish what is attempted or intended”; or “to attain success in some popularly recognized form, as wealth or standing.” Or, to put it another way, “Lane Kiffin sucks.”)

Therefore, the meat of this post will be light and frivolous, but if it gets me back on the wagon and updating, so be it. And speaking of light, frivolous meat, a piece of shrimp fell behind the oven yesterday.

In the course of some fancy skillet/spatula action - I Googled the word “skillet” and the first page, all 18 images, was nothing but promo pictures of “Skillet the band, an American Christian rock group originally formed in Memphis ” - a single shrimp flew out of the pan and disappeared. I discovered it back there, wedged next to the refrigerator, unreachable by hand, and had a choice: leave it or retrieve it.

What I chose to do was borne of my past and would ultimately determine my future.

My old semi-roommate M_____ came to visit yesterday. M_____ grew up in the same hometown as one of my Freshman year roommates – who, for the sake of simplicity, I’ll call “The Asshole” – and spent a solid chunk of time living on our couch. M_____’s a great storyteller in the tradition of Homer or Aesop, and a few weeks back, while we were watching football at my other Freshman roommate’s house – Matt, the one I liked - M_____ launched into an epic tale of apartment mess, the kind that can only happen in college. I’ll retell it as best I can while still not doing it justice…

For one semester, M_____ paid rent at a place he almost never saw because he always slept on our couch. His two other roommates each stayed at their girlfriends’, so the apartment they shared became disgustingly filthy because no one had to live there day-to-day. I can’t speak firsthand to what developed – one detail I remember is “the sinks were filled with chicken parts” – just that it wasn’t dealt with responsibly. I don’t know what was the last straw - I don’t want to know - but it became too dire to tackle alone, so they had to call a maid service.

Two maids showed up.

Maid #1, upon entering the apartment, rushed to the bathroom and immediately vomited in the sink. She reentered the kitchen, thinking she could overcome her body’s natural urge to purge itself of toxins, but every time she approached a bad spot her food came up again.

Maid #2 toughed it out, though the two of them used as much cleaning solution on themselves as they did on the apartment. (“It was so bad,” M_____ recalled, “the maids figured that just being there was worse than pouring bleach directly onto their own skin.”) The maids only got through two rooms, but the bill was $170.

“Probably factoring in the inevitable doctor’s bills,” I said.
“Probably.”
“Actually, being subjected to that environment would be like getting vaccinated for thousands of diseases at once. They should've paid you!”

Fortunately M_____ didn’t make messes where he actually lived, on the couch in my apartment, except once during a drunken argument between him and The Asshole in which he threw a bowl of Linguine Alfredo at The Asshole’s feet.
“Pick it up,” M_____ said.
“No.”
“I’m not picking it up, so if you don’t pick it up, no one will.”
Matt and I looked at each other, and one of us whispered to M_____, “I don’t want you to lose this argument, but you can’t just leave that on our floor.”
“Listen, just back me up on this, okay?”
“No, no… you can’t just throw Linguine Alfredo on our floor. I’m very sorry…”

Of course, he could’ve thrown Linguine Alfredo on the floor if  he we still had our own personal maid, but that arrangement had ended months ago.

The first week of school, a girl named Jessica stopped by and the Asshole introduced her: “This is Jessica. She’s gonna stay over sometimes and clean the apartment once a week.”
“Okay.”

The weird thing is, that’s what happened.

It was disorienting at first, waking up groggy to a cute blonde in boy shorts asking where we kept paper towels or Lysol, but those visits because less and less frequent as the Asshole drove a wedge between us. A real conversation:

“I can’t stand guys who are materialistic,” Jessica said. “It’s so unattractive!”
“I only keep $50 bills on the outside of my billfold,” The Asshole said. “Anything less makes me feel cheap.”

When Jessica left, The Asshole acted like we hadn’t lost a maid but hired a second. He started leaving plates coated with eggs in the sink, and walking into my bedroom smoking a cigar. I'd say, “Hey, can you not smoke that in here maybe?” and the Asshole would take a long puff and blow it in my face before walking out.

Happenings like these are what prompted the Linguine toss and the eventual exit of The Asshole, but that year was a struggle, with or without him, to keep our apartment clean. I was partly to blame, so, knowing I needed to improve, I bought the trashcan for my next apartment the following year. It was one of those huge, plastic 85-gallon containers that’s meant to be left on the sidewalk or to hold leaves during raking season, but I set it in our kitchen. Not only was it an eyesore, it didn’t need to be emptied for weeks, which was a good thing and a bad thing but mostly a bad thing because our place reeked of old garbage. Sometime during the move Junior year, the 85-gallon container got “lost.” It may have been an inside job.

Since then, I’ve straightened up, so much so that my current apartment has been described by female guests as “neat and tidy,” “very mature-looking,” and “FOUR STARS! A MASTERPIECE!”

Then, yesterday, a shrimp fell behind the stove.

While trying to figure how to fish the shrimp out, my history with filth flashed through my mind. On the one hand, I couldn’t reach it without moving the oven away from the wall and potentially severing the gas line – Could this happen? I believed it could. On the other hand, you can’t just leave shrimp behind the oven. That’ll start to smell, right? I’m not an expert, but I did study the subject in college.

The problem was that I could only get the oven about four inches from the wall. It’s three feet high, and I didn’t have anything long enough to reach the shrimp (har de har har, guys – if my penis were that long, it’d be too unwieldy to do anything else, so I’m glad it's not). I finally settled on a belt, a stiff black one {har de har har!} that would allow me to prod gently with the tip (HAR DE FUCKING HAR!!) until I got the shrimp out to where I could grab it.

This took an entire ten minutes, but it had to be done. Because when I moved to my new place, I promised myself I wouldn’t live in filth. Not anymore. Later, I made other promises:

“Exciting stuff on the way!” “Updates coming soon!”

I’m tired of breaking promises. I want to be better. I’ll try to be better.

No one should have to root for the Clippers.