The Girl Next Door: Episode 2

By Tenzin McGrupp © 2003

Cindy knocked on my door for nearly ten minutes before I got up to answer. I was in the middle of a dream, talking to my high school baseball coach about the essence of hitting, when I abruptly awoke to the shrill pounding on the door.

“What?” I snapped as I opened the door.

She flew past me muttering something about needing to use my phone, and before I could close the door and turn around, she had my phone in her hand and she was screaming at the top of her lungs.

“Bobby, you fucking asshole!”

I sat on the edge of my couch and turned on the TV, as she paced back and forth shouting obscenities and holding back tears, trying her hardest not to cry, while I tired my best efforts to pretend not to be listening in on her drama. In the middle of her Sunday morning tirade she managed to help herself to a beer in my fridge and lit of a cigarette.

She hung up the phone six minutes later and launched into a rant about her previous 24 hours. She and her friend Janet went to look for a rug for her apartment, and they got stuck in an elevator in a revolting building near the Flat Iron District for two hours on their way to an appointment to see a Persian rug importer.

“It was awful. We only had a half a pack of cigarettes between the two of us.”

She continued her story about her awful Saturday, and after they got out of the elevator, they went to a bar around the corner.

“Janet got so drunk that she passed out in the bathroom and some bitch stole her wallet and Metrocard.”

“Shit, what happened?”

She lit up another cigarette and in a pissy voice said, “The bartender, a cute guy named Big Pete, realized that it was probably one of his regulars, this Russian bitch named Marina, Marcia or Marissa or something like that. Of course that didn’t help me any. We put Janet in a cab and I had to take her home. Of course she decided to puke in the backseat, and the fuckin’ cab driver, this Al-Qaeda wanna be, who smelled a lot worse than Janet’s puke, stopped the cab, and demanded $20 plus the fare on the meter.”

“Actually, she did puke in his cab, and he’s gotta clean it up, you know. That’s standard,” I told her.

She didn’t like my answer and continued, “So we’re like ten blocks from her apartment and I’m like fuck it! Fuck that elevator. Fuck the Al-Qaeda cab driver. Fuck that Russian bitch of a thief. Fuck that bartender Pete. And fuck fucking Janet. I’ll drag the bitch if I have to. So I did. For ten fucking blocks! And when I get there, her boyfriend Gregory was such an asshole to me. He didn’t even bother to help me get her cleaned up and into bed. I wanted to fucking stab his eyeballs right out of that dumb head of his.”

I still hadn’t woken up yet, and I realized the entire time she was telling me her story, I was sitting in on the couch, in my boxers, with a huge morning woodie. Yep, she was too self involved in her own drama to notice I had a hard on. I excused myself and asked her a question.

“Who the fuck is Bobby?”

“What?”

“When you ran into my apartment this morning the first thing I heard you yell was, ‘Bobby, you fucking asshole!’ or something like that.”

She paused, then sighed. “He’s this guy I had been dating for a few weeks. I never told him what I did for a living. But he found out someway and flipped out. He started calling me all these names and then went to Kinko’s and photocopied my picture, wrote down my cell phone number, and the caption: ‘My ex-girlfriend is a hooker. For a great blow job call 917-267-9278’ and he hung them up all over the Upper West Side.”

“Wow that’s fucked up. He is an asshole.”

She shrugged her shoulders, took another slow drag on her cigarette and blankly stared at my ceiling for a few seconds before she responded.

“But it was free advertising. I got three new clients.”

Tenzin McGrupp is a writer from NYC.