First Posted 27-Nov-2014
She isn’t anyone specific. She’s a porn trope, if anything. Nubile, servile, likes to get drunk and high, shameless hussy and for me, dark brown hair, olive skin, blue eyes, and petite. The girl of this narrative was a damsel in distress. Her boyfriend had beaten her again, had kicked her out, in a cocaine fueled meltdown in which he accused her of stealing all his coke and sleeping with his best friend. I can believe the stolen coke bit. She was bisexual so the cheating thing may not be all that the boyfriend thought it was. She was homeless, needed a place to stay for a couple days, and thought I’d let her stay with me.
SumYung HotTea starts her stay on Wednesday night in the other bedroom and it’s about normal. Then on Friday, “would it be ok if her lesbian girlfriend came over?” She decides to cook an elaborate meal for said girlfriend. Steak, shrimp cocktail, green beans, baked mac & cheese and chocolate mousse. We go to Save-A-Lot to shop for all this. She starts cooking at 1pm for a 6pm service to the girlfriend. We eat at 9pm. The kitchen is a mess. She burns the mac & cheese so bad the pot she used is ruined. She still tried to serve it. They go into the other bedroom at 11:30pm. I smell weed. I hear arguing. One of them has old L.L. Cool J. rap playing low. By 1pm I am asleep and the house is quiet.
I’m a dishwasher by trade. I’m also a foodie and sometime line cook. Her menu is an hour, tops, including prep and cleanup. 8 hours to make a mess of my kitchen and leave me with an overdone steak, watery green beans, burned mac & cheese with nasty curdled eggs and instant chocolate pudding spattered on my kitchen walls from her attempt at whipping it into a mouse isn’t fun or sexy. No hint of her showing interest in the mess she made. “It’ll be great.” No, it wasn’t great. Pissed me off.
Saturday morning I don’t see them. I do my usual, keeping NPR streaming in a window on my laptop. I get ansty and head out for coffee. I’m back by 3pm or so. I’m mad. I live in a neighborhood that is trying to shed itself of addiction and all the satellite crime that comes with it. My lease specifically says drug use is a violation of the terms and cause for eviction. Plus, with the ways that I am a hot mess I can’t do addicts. Recovering addicts, maybe. Actively using addicts? No.
SumYung HotTea resurfaces around 4:30pm Saturday. She looks like hell. She has a fat lip. Her neck has finger marks on it. I ask her if she’s ok and I get hairy eyeballs and a flipped bird.
I let her in assuming that she’d heard me when I said she could only stay a few days until she could find another place to crash. Now it’s been a week and my weekend featured my own personal porn trope that was the furthest thing from sexy. It was drama. I didn’t see most of it. Instead of a personal sex-tape with two hot lesbians I had one of them still in my house hungover with a fat lip.
Saturday night was quiet. She spent most of it in the other room watching YouTube videos of various rap artists. I went to church Sunday and knew I couldn’t let her stay any longer. Between the addiction and the apparent abuse I had she brought two of the four horsemen that destroy relationships into my home. She had made my house unsafe. She had to go.
At church I talked to a couple friends who volunteered to come over and help me make it clear that she had to leave right then. It was an angry hour as she told me what a shit I was for kicking her out. She left, though, and my house settled back into it’s usual calm.
I want to help. I want to serve those who can be served. I am also deeply broken with a past that I am not only but I am. That past means I choose to live an intentional life with boundaries that keep me safe. I’m sorry SumYung HotTea suffered for my failure to recognize my own limits and allow her into my home. But, the blog posts that this one stands in for remind me that I made the right choice. It might make a great porn video to have two sexy lesbians smoke weed, get drunk, play rap music and have sex with fat old man. It’s a really stupid thing to attempt IRL. SumYung HotTea’s been gone a year and that’s good.