November 19, 2005

• The Frat House: Life With Bob 1987-1992

  

  A "Reminiscence" by Michael F. Nyiri

  11/19/05

  "Jim, I've got some news." I began hesitatingly, after my roommate got home from work one evening. "It's sort of bad for you, and good for me." We had been living in the Casablanca Arms apartments, in a small but conveniently located place by the pool, for only about five and a half months of a six month lease. Jim hadn't liked the fact that the "two bedroom" apartment really had only one bedroom, the master, with it's own bathroom, which was mine, leaving him a small "hole" that didn't even have a door. He did have the run of the living room, since I had my television and video editing rig set up in my bedroom. It seems we had just gotten settled in the apartment, "back in Lomita" after two years in Hermosa Beach, when I suddenly broke this "bad and good news."

  Bob, our lethargic friend from right up the street, had lived in the same house since he was a child. He was an only child, who had been pampered a lot by his mother, with whom he shared the house as an adult.  His mother had recently died, and both Jim and I had attended the funeral. I was a pallbearer. Bob also had shared the house with two cousins, living there to help out with his mom, who was disabled, during the last year of her life, and when she passed away, Bob dismissed his cousins and asked my friend Mike and I to move in with him. Jim didn't take the news too well, and I did feel as if I were letting him down, since we had lived together on and off for most of the last decade. It was 1987. We were in our mid thirties. All of us were single, and we all partied together. On "Boy's Night Out", when Bob's mother had her bridge buddies over to his house, he would drive his custom Nova or Chevy shortbed pickup over to either Mike's, Dan's or Jim and my apartment, and we all hung out with each other on a regular basis.

  "Bob invited me to live with him, and he's only going to charge me two hundred bucks a month."
  "Mike, we just moved in here six months ago. This means I'll have to find another apartment. I've moved two times in the past two years as it is."
  "I know, Jim, but since I got the new job I'm not making what I was as a manager for Target Stores, and this is a great opportunity."
  "Yeah, for you, maybe." Jim couldn't hide his spite. We split an $850.00 a month apartment, and this would successfully halve my rent payment. Besides, Bob was giving me the cousins' room, which was a custom built double sized bedroom 10 by 24 feet in size. It was one of those moments in which you just can't pass up the opportunity.

  In the end, Jim "gave in" and he was able to get an apartment in Harbor City for a cheap price. He didn't need much space, but I have always had lots of "collections" so the place at Bob's was a great fit for me. I was a fan of the stop motion cartoon character Gumby back then, and had lots of Gumby paraphanelia, including a 6 foot tall inflatable plastic Gumby. I cleaned out the bedroom area in Bob's house, and painted the walls "Gumby Green". Pretty soon, Jim, Bob, and I were packing my stuff, and I got settled in the new house. Bob had a bedroom as long as mine, also specially built. Mike got Bob's mother's old room. Bob was the typical "Southern California Guy" with a speedboat mounted with a hemi engine, complete with blower, a surf board, a hot tub in the back yard, and two vehicles. He was pampered, as mentioned before. But he was 10 years older than Mike and I, and had stagnated into a life of compacency, preferring to watch sports on his 60" projection bigscreen TV, while smoking vast amounts of marijuana. Bob was a consummate sports nut, who perused the sports page in the newspaper as if it were the Bible, every morning while he sat for long hours on the toilet. His life was a series of routines, and he didn't work, because his mother had enough money so that he didn't have to, and after she died, he inherited everything, including the house, which had been paid off many years earlier.

  Mike was a Mormon, who moved in with his "stores" and his gun collection. He was a news junkie, and an electronics freak. He also owned his own camper which doubled as his "living room" and he parked it in the spacious driveway along with Bob's truck, car , and my motorcycle.  The actual living room in Bob's house stayed much the same as it did when his Mother died, and we hardly ever used it, since Bob's television was in his bedroom, and I turned my room into both a bedroom and a living room, complete with couch and coffee table, by splitting the long length down the middle with my bookcases, which stand about six foot tall.

  Besides the homes I shared with Pat in the 90s, after I moved out of Bob's house, most of my living arrangements have been similar. Usually I would live with one or two guys, and we would each have a place where we could "escape" to be on our own. In Bob's big house, my "suite" was like an apartment with my own living room. Mike had his camper for a retreat, and Bob never left his bedroom, except to get up to fix lunch or dinner or go to the bathroom. Anyone coming to the front door, especially after we had been there for a few years, would see a living room which seemed to be preserved in the past, as Miss Havisham's dining room in Dicken's "Great Expectations". Once or twice I wanted to do something about the living room, but Bob wouldn't let me. He felt, I think, as if I would be destroying the memory of his mother. Bob was a bit weird, in that for a couple of years following his mother's death, he still kept buying favorite potato chips and other foods that only his mother had eaten, even though she was no longer around.

  Duriing the last couple of year's of Bob's mom's life, the house began to show signs of neglect and fell, slowly but surely into disrepair. While I lived there, both the plumbing and the electricacl system deteriorated. Since I was employed in the electrical industry, I worked on "fixing" some of the smaller electrical problems, and I manned a "snake" on a couple of occasions to clear the pipes, but Bob rarely moved, and his lethargy and uncaring mood about keeping his own place together sometimes was the root of lots of arguments among us.

  Wednesday was still "Boy's Night Out", and was usually a poker night at Pete's. All other nights of the week, the party was at Bob's. I nicknamed our place "The Frat House", because I had never seen as many guys in one place all the time since college. The large but loosely organized group of friends who hung out at Bob's were called "The Backyard Buddies". There were about a dozen of us. On any night of the week, either Pete, or Dan, or Paul, or Scott, or somebody, would drop by, unannounced, open the screen door to Bob's room at the back of the house, plop down on one of the mismatched chairs with sinking cushions and cigarette burned arms and start "partying." The party never ended, and this stream of visitors would continue, until Bob got tired, which he did, like clockwork, every night at ten p.m.

  The party would begin again at 11am the next morning. Bob arose at 10, and went to the bathroom with the sports page, and stayed an hour. Then he would eat breakfast, usually a bowl of cereal. Next he would turn on his television and tune into whatever sporting event or old movie that caught his fancy. Bob was my first friend with a bigscreen, one of those foldout models where the projector folds away fromt the screen. His first bigscreen was one of the first models, with a curved screen and a separate projector. Friday nights were "fight nights". During football season, Saturday we watched USC football, and Sunday was the NFL game of the week. Monday nights we watched Monday Night Football. If I were busy, or away, it didin't matter. There was always somebody else camped out with Bob. He sat in a comfy chair with a soft spot in the cushion so deep that one literally "sunk" into his seat. We joked about how Bob was putting down roots through the chair, and he was like the "tree of Lomita" never moving from this rooted place.

  Next to Bob was another chair, and there was a loveseat on the other side. A hassock sat in front of the couch. Sometimes the amount of guys gathered in Bob's bedroom, around his throne, was enough that people had to sit on the floor or stand by the screen door, after the two "seats" on his bed behind the loveseat filled up. Bob operated a first come first serve seating arrangement, and every time somebody would leave to go home, the seating positions to fill the better space resembled musical chairs. Many times I would emerge from my own room, when I was done writing, or reading, or watching one of my laserdisc movies, and walk into a full fledged party in Bob's room. Everybody brought their own booze. Bob didn't drink.

  As I advanced through the ranks of the company for which I worked, my rent never went up. In fact, Bob was so lethargic a landlord that I wrote most of the household checks and paid the bills. I made more and more money, as I got raises and promotions, which gave me lots of extra spending money. My motorcycle didn't cost too much to maintain. I collected lots of books and laserdiscs while living with Bob, and bought my classic 66 Caddy with $1500.00 cash I had saved rather easily. If I wanted to be alone, I went to my own "rooms". If I wanted to party, I just "visited" Bob. Living in the Frat House was a great time, except for Bob's unwillingness to keep up his own house. I  and Mike split the household chores. We were having a great time. Bob drew his money from his Mom's existing account, and he never alerted social security that she had died, and promptly cashed his Mom's social security checks with regularity. We all told Bob he would be "caught" eventually, and he was, and ordered to pay a goodly sum, with penalties, back to the government.

  Mike eventually moved out of the Frat House, and followed his ailing mother to Virginia. Jim, my previous roommate, became our new housemate, and finally Bob let us reorganize the living room, which had been an unvisited shrine to his mother's memory. I'll never forget the thrill when I took down his mother's display paintings and replaced them with rock and roll posters. Now the place really resembled a frat house.

  Some of the members or our "Backyard Buddies" fraternity, named for our backyard barbecues on weekends, were: Pete, (Popeet, or, later Speedy Pete) who always spent his nights escaping his wife at Bob's. He was supposedly doing something else, after work, and only spent an hour or two. He did come over a lot on weekends. Joel: My present roommate, who lived in Long Beach at the time, known for his wry sense of humor, and devil's advocate's opinions. Dan, the Crazy Canuck, big and brawny, who took up a lot of space. He had to move back to Toronto when the IRS discovered his social security number was faked. Paul, (the Godfather) of Italian descent, who loved convertibles and women, but never seemed to have any in his life. Scott, or Nervous Guy, who supplied Bob with his marijuana, and his brother and girlfriend, the only gal who regularly hung out with the guys. Jim (The Professor) who hailed from Chicago, and was into model racing cars. Other guys came and went. Everybody liked to jaw about their car wrecks, their insane drunken nights, and their connections with everybody else. For a few years, I loved living in the Frat House. Then things started falling apart.

  The plumbing and electricity got to the point where professional help was needed, and Bob didn't care. Jim left providing another roommate slot, and that went to Joel. Our plumbing got so bad that we had to scoop up standing water out of the bathtub after showering, and since the toilet didn't flush, dumping the water into the toilet served as the flush lever. I'm surprised the house didn't burn down because of the wiring, which was vintage from the 40s, when the house was originally built. I used to get mad at Bob all the time, but he rarely lifted a finger to do anything. We had an infestation of grain moths, which burrowed into the unused bags of flour in the kitchen and made their nests. All the cleaning out was performed by me, and when I finally got together with Pat in 1992, she wanted desperately to "rescue" me from this awful existence.

  Paul moved back to Pennsylvania. Pete and Nervous Guy still hung around, but the glory days of the Frat House were gone. Eventually I left too, and Bob and Joel remained in the dilapidated house, and Joel got to be the "caretaker". In time, I would return, on "weekends" after I broke up with Pat and before I moved out of our house, and I was sleeping on Joel's foldaway bed in the living room one evening when Joel came home and found Bob dead of a heart attack in the bathroom. But that, as they say, is "another story" and will be the conclusion, later to be written, of "The Frat House."

  Stay tuned. To Be Continued as written.

  ---

  This is a reminiscence of the "Frat House" and also a tribute to my friend Bob, no matter how bleak a portrait I might seem to be painting. Bob died too soon at 47, of a heart attack, right before Christmas in 1994. The next chapter will describe the weirdest night of my life, the night of Bob's death. One moment he was full of life, and the next he was lying naked on the bathroom floor. Since the house was in an incredible state of dilapidation at the time of his death, the police thought he was murdered. We had begun calling the Frat House "Boo Radley's" by then. Bob's inlaws, whom we never saw, came out of the woodwork, and had nothing but sore words for their deceased relative. During the funeral service, at which I was a pallbearer again, our friend Pete gave the most heartaching eulogy. To a lot of people, Bob was a "hermit", and one of those guys with lots of cats roaming over his unkempt property. To those of us who knew him, he was a friend, a walking sports encyclopedia, and a great guy. RIP, buddy. MFN

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