Saturday in Bizarroworld
If I told you yesterday, that today your maintenance man would make you cry and you would make him cry, what would you have said?

This morning dawned bright and clear and January-Indian-Springy. Not that I would have any clue about this, nor would Carmelita, since we both slept till eleven, having driven the night before to Chapel Hill to see the inimitable Nina Nastasia play at the Local 506. It was the first time I felt pure, unhampered happiness in too many moons, Henshaw. It was a perfect show, the perfect evening all around, and I awoke to the sunny morning feeling all shiny-fresh-slated and contented.

But onto the tears!

The first thing I heard was what I thought were repair guys talking and knocking around outside my window, since this house is under perpetual repair at one corner or another, always. I went into the kitchen where Carmelita already stood, and she shushed me and pointed to the window.
“I had to crawl past my window, out of bed,” she said.
I looked out the window and saw our neighbor-man and a lady with a red face, screaming at each other in the small parking lot. They’re probably in their late forties, a fact which made the woman’s slurred words and the man’s open crying a step beyond sad.
“Oh, god. That’s horrible,” I said.
“Yeah. They’ve been at it for at least an hour, just walking all over. They were outside my window for a minute, then I came back from the bathroom and we kind of saw each other and I guess they realized that people, like, live here.”
“Why don’t they go inside?”
“I dunno. I’m sure they started there,” she said, opening the fridge and scanning its contents, “but they’ve taken that show on the road, today.”

The sad fighting couple were fighting right outside our back door, so fifteen minutes or so later, when we went down to the basement to get our bicycles, we were forced to walk right past them. When I opened the screen door, the four of us glanced around the vicinity of one another’s heads for a moment, then everyone looked away and we walked on by, leaving them the illusion of their private fighting bubble. They turned back to their fight with the same intensity at a lower volume.

I hadn’t been down in the basement in months. It’s a truly creepy place. Myriad offshoot crawlspaces shoot off and snake around in all directions under the house, creating the perfect homes for ancient bedframes, rats’ nests and probably escaped mentally disturbed convicts like in the movie Session 9. When we moved in, we put our bikes up against a wall near the front of the basement and trotted quickly back up the wooden steps, to the bright day above. Carmelita's taken her bike out for periodic rides and tune-ups, but since we moved here, I haven’t ridden mine once.

This morning, our bikes were gone. In their place were boards and sawhorses. A can of turpentine sat on top of Dangercat’s cat carrier, leaving a ring of stickiness when I lifted it off. We went up and got flashlights and shined them down those dark, twisty corners, but our bikes hadn’t been moved. They were just not there. I stood for a moment, thinking about my pretty cherry-red cruiser and how I’d abandoned it to the scary basement, all those nights it spent alone down there, and I felt sorry and I felt served right. Marshall bought me that bike, and that made it sadder. But Carmelita was feeling something different. She’d ridden her bike, which she’d spent a summer lovingly constructing, herself. It had an antique French frame, a shiny bell and mirrors, and she’d ridden it just days before. I looked over at her and as she spoke, her voice shook. “If Billy moved my bike. If he touched my bike, I’m going to. I’m going to put a hurting on him.”

Billy’s our maintenance man. And with a phone call, Carmelita found out he had not moved her bike. He had tossed it out into a dumpster that’s since been hauled away from our house, assuming it was trash. The sound of the drunk lady’s shouting was nothing, nothing, nothing, compared to Carmelita’s rage-filled screaming. She started crying right away, but this did not compromise the precisely-crafted stream of invective that rang out, across the veranda and across the world. Do not cross Carmelita.

It turned out my other roommate, Ginger, was having a rotten morning, too. Her grandpa was in ICU because a routine operation had gone horribly awry, and it was more or less the hospital’s fault. So a little while later, after Ginger made plans to hop a plane to Alabama the next day, the three of us loaded up into Carm’s car, to drink Coronas at a restaurant overlooking the ocean. In the car, Billy called Carmelita back.

She paused as he spoke, then said, “Don’t worry, Billy. I was angry because I worked hard to build that bike, but it’s okay, now. I forgive you, and I’m sorry for going all ape-shit.” He spoke then, and she turned to us. He’s crying, she mouthed. Then, into the phone. “No, I mean, you and me, we’re cool. It’s okay now, man. We’ll work it out, totally.” They finished talking and she hung up. There was silence for a few minutes. Then she said, “Now I feel bad for him.”

And it turned out that he hadn’t seen my bike down there in months. He tossed Carmelita’s, but mine disappeared sometime, somewhere back in the months that’ve gone by. Stolen or turned by neglect into another of this houses’s ghosts; either way, I feel more guilty than Carmelita.