After Al moved out to live with his girlfriend in, say, 2001, I got Bill a job at Erin’s startup and invited him to move in with me at the Lexington “Luxury” Apartments on Montavesta Drive. Al took his couches, so I bought some old, green, rather odoriferous couches off of Jed, and set them up in the living room. Bill didn’t have a bed at the time, so he said he would just sleep on the couches until he got one. He never did. Those couches ended up being Bill’s bed for the next two years.
At first we had few problems living together. Sure, I was messy, and sure, Bill spent hours on the phone with his girlfriend 80 miles away simply repeating the phrase “I love you” again and again, but we were mostly untroubled. I decided to try another attempt at bettering myself through education, and figured I would re-do some of the credits I flunked out of during my previous attempts at college. My choice? Lexington Community College. (I thought it would be a little easier… as well as cheaper.)
The only thing we did together that we enjoyed was smoke weed. We didn’t play RPG’s anymore, nor did we play any board games like BattleTech or card games like Magic: The Gathering. It was just weed, weed, weed, all the time, almost as bad as when me and Christian were hanging out together. It’s no wonder I ended up psychotic, if the studies linking marijuana and mental illness have any merit. Needless to say, I don’t remember a lot from that time period.
Anyway, as I descended into a haze of marijuana smoke, I began to become… unhinged. I started skipping my college classes again. I started obsessively playing the horrid game Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball about six hours a day, trying to collect all the suits, fantasizing that I was romancing the women while simultaneously living some weird dress-up simulation with them. I was . . . unbalanced.
At the same time, I began to neglect basic duties around the apartment . . .and unknowingly antagonize Bill. I would do things that would piss him off all the time . . . like not cleaning up after my pets. Sometimes he would tell me specifically that we just bought some smoke and he did not under any circumstances want me to smoke all of it while he went home for the weekend . . . and sure enough, when he got back, none would be left. In addition, he would spend a day cleaning the apartment and tell me not to mess it up, and two days later it would be a wreck. Bill refers to this period as “A Dark Time” and it poisoned our relationship forevermore. He has a hard time forgiving it . . . and especially forgetting it. He still brings it up to me every so often.
Me and Bill eventually realized that it wasn’t working out in 200X, right about the time of my mental breakdown, and I decided to move in with Christian, since we had become pretty close friends. But that was an abortive attempt, interrupted by my arrest and descent into mental illness. I ended up back in [REDACTED], living with my Granny Bernadette.