Shortly after I arrived in Hollywood I met a girl from the Recycler looking for a roommate. I was barely 21, she was late 20's, a waitress, and as it turned out also a petty drug dealer but that's for another blog.
Anyway,
She and I lived off Yucca and Wilcox in Hollywood. We were on the ground floor and directly above us was a young couple. The only time we ever heard them was Friday and Saturday nights anywhere between 11pm-4am for the infamous Hollywood rendition of, "You don't love me!"
She would scream at him. He would scream at her. They insulted each other. And then they would throw things at each other. And this would go on for hours. Weekend after weekend. Month after month.
"How do they still own anything to throw?" My roommate and I would ask each other.
On the weekends my roommate and I were (usually) home no later than 2 or 3am. Sometimes we would catch the couple upstairs mid-fight, sometimes towards the end when they were throwing things at each other.
And then one night my roommate and I were so drunk we ripped open my bedroom window and just joined in their argument.
Dumb. Dumb. Stupid thing to do. But by now we knew their fight. We knew the script by heart. We knew every insult and accusation and had role played them many times, mouthing the words along with them, and miming each crashing sound pretending to throw things at each other, sometimes ducking out of the way just in time, sometimes pretending we got hit and dramatically falling to the ground.
It was like my roommate and I were 10 years old and we were playing a game of Mad Spy vs. Spy.
It wasn't so much that we joined their fight, we just fought their fight for them, more or less.
She, the girlfriend, was obviously young, in love, and pissed off.
Her boyfriend was apparently good looking enough to have sex with a lot of cocktail waitresses (I guess), and it seemed he was just using this poor girl for money and a place to stay. Ah yes, a Hollywood love story!
The boyfriend being unemployed was something they fought over, a lot!
On this particular late night, after we ripped my bedroom window open, my roommate stuck her head out my window and screams, "And get a job you lazy a**hole!"
"All you do is sit around my house, eat my food, steal money from me and f**k cocktail waitresses!" I screamed.
"Do you know how f**king hard I work just to support your lazy ass!" My roommate yelled back.
And this little piece of theater between my roommate and I went on for about 5 minutes before we got tired.
Pretending to be them was exhausting!
And then it was silent. You could hear a pin drop. Not a sound. Nothing.
A few moments later,
We heard her meek little high-pitched voice, the girlfriend's, "Well it's true." She said.
"Oh we know it's true!" My roommate yelled back. "You've been saying it every weekend now for about a year!" and then slammed my bedroom window shut.
All next week my roommate and I wondered if the young couple upstairs were going to fight again the following weekend.
And sure enough,
Just like clockwork,
The following weekend came,
And after 3am we heard them fighting.
Only,
This time,
The girlfriend added, "You know they can f**king hear us downstairs!"
I'm reminded of this story about the young couple who lived above me on Yucca and Wilcox, because just now, a minute before I started typing this, my neighbor, a young woman, who like clockwork at least once a week, was just screaming into her phone to her "bastard boyfriend".
I wonder what my old roommate is up to these days?
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