The Dead Ni- Ni- in the Garage

It wasn't a matteror whether or not Benjamin deserved to be dead. I was sure I hated him for what he had done to me and my place. With all the choas he had brought into my life, I just wanted him gone--out the front door, and out of my life. Getting him out wasn't proving all that easy. It wasn't like i could tell him "get out" and he'd get on his bicycle and ride away. I was trying to be coy and clever, and not let on to Benjamin that anything was different. That was the first time I pieced the events of the previous 18 hours together, and I knew I wanted him out, and I wanted my personal security back. Instead of being a visiting friend, he became a ravaging pirate.

I finally took notice of what had been happening around me when I was still in an orgasm fog. For awhile I didn't care about anything. I was sexually alive again, and I had been relishing in it. In the meanitme, moments we were in the house at the same time, but not in the same room, and other times I could flash back and see things happening in my head quite visually. It took me a long time to realize Benjamin was creating chaos. Where there had been function, he killed it; where there had been order, my personal items had been replanted about my house in random disorder.

"It'll be like Christmas every day. You'll never know what you'll find!" Benjamin explained his actions as if premeditated for my benefit. I told him I didn't like the idea, and I could tell from time to time he was still doing it. All the different remotes for all the different electronic devices had been rid of their batteries, and many of their covers. Finally the last remote went down, but I retrieved it and guaraded it like a hawk.

I started leaving things in unusual places for my benefit, if needed. He didn't say anything about the butcher knife in the bathroom, but I know he saw it. And I was keeping my three darts very handy. Our physical relationship had flipped in my head. I couldn't understand what he was about, didn't get his purpose. Later I realized by the third day he had been out of the psych ward, the medications that had stablized him were out of his system. I knew he was bipolar, but he wasn't acting like anything I'd experienced before. He left his written prescription from the hospital laying around. Maybe he'd even said something like, "Here, do you want these?"

Benjamin had also started weaving things--mostly extension cords and my belts. I had a couple of very long extension cords stretched out in the house, and he flipped them around so that the plug was at the wrong end, and they consequently wouldn't work without being re-stretched. There was another cord, and I even spied it to suspect what was coming. I had pulled out an electric vibrator from the back of a drawer, and he wove the cord so that it was just shy of being able to plug it in. Set up for frustration. I saw it in the light, and by dark it wasn't available because of what he had done

And somehow along the way, my refrigerator died. I assumed at first that he'd unscrewed the interior light bulb--and maybe he did. He took the lids off all my kitchen spices so they got damp and were basically ruined. When the stuff in the refrigerator was obviously warm, I checked to make sure it was plugged in, and it was. The refirgerator just coincidentally quit working, and I told Benjamin not to open the door anymore. I knew it would be bad smelling, and a problem to deal with. As it ended up, it was sufficiently cold outside for chilling perishables in the afternoon sun, and I used the "outside" as my refrigerator.

It generally doesn't get that cold in Texas, but this particular year snow had actually fallen three times, and snow was still on the ground. The temperature hadn't been above zero in almost a week. Texans don't have thick skin to cold weather.

If Benjamin had actually intentionally gone into the garage that evening, he didn't have enough clothing to keep him warm through the night. I hated him. Maybe I wanted him dead for all the chaos and aggrevation he'd brought to my life. People say that, and they don't mean it. Whatever the case, I didn't want a dead nigger in the garage.

I didn't have the remaining remote to the garage door Actually, I had it but it didn't work because the battery was out of it. I thought Benjamin could have been out of his head enough to take the remote and plan to stay in the garage. He'd been homeless when I met him at the psych ward, but it didn't come up in conversation then. I knew he may have considered the garage a place to hang out, witthout me knowing where he was.

I finally ran him off to the corner drugstore to buy me some smokes. He never came back with my smokes, making me more irritable, and I saw the garage door go up one time when I happened to be looking outside.

I got half of what I wanted. He was out of the house, but his damn bicycle was still parked inside my house. It was incredibly heavy, or I was incredibly weak, in my underweight, model thin state. Twice I'd tried to move the bicycle, and when I picked it up it fell right over. He had all sorts of back pack looking sections, stuffed full of something, making the bike too heavy for me to deal with. I'd tried to get it out front so he could take his bike and go, but my wrestling with it was comical. I'd pick it up, and it would fall back over. I couldn't get it out the front door, so I realized he would have to come back in the house. Once back in, I'd have to come up with another plan to get him out of the house.

That morning earlier, he'd told me something. It must've been five or six sentences. But the words made no sense the way he was using them. All of a sudden he expected me to learn a brand new language, of his creation. In the hospital he'd said he spoke nine languages. By now I figured out where that came from. Another patient, an older man, had said that he spoke seven languages. Benjamin had to know more than him, than anybody, you know. I'd never know a schizophrenic when they were in psychosis, but that must have been what happened.

Hell, I was just back from the hospital less than a week when Benjamin showed up. I didn't need to be dealing with anything, and I was in way over my head.

If Benjamin had the only nworking remote in the garage with him, there was nothing I could do. I'd nseen the garage door open a second time after he came back from the store. I was pretty sure he was in the garage, and I wondered how long it would take a human being to freeze to death.

And I was so furious at him for all he had done, I almost didn't care if he froze to death.

But when I went to bed that night, I wondered what the next day would hold. What was I going to to if tomorrow brought me a dead nigger in the garage?