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Big Yellow

Bill Tope

    Before I ever met him, Brett was described to me by my Iranian friend and housemate Vahid, as “some barfly from The Stagger Inn,” referencing a tavern where we all hung out. Brett, who fancied himself a “real man,” and who had somehow become my latest in a long line of itinerant housemates, usually glommed onto broken, lonely or neglected women because their standards usually weren’t as high as more confident women. Nowhere near as high.
    We all lived in a large, three-story building known locally as The Big Yellow House for the awful mustard yellow paint on the exterior. I stayed there in the 1970s. Five students—three men and two women, usually—shared the expenses, which were minor, befitting our status as poor college students. Brett had a room on the second floor and it was a veritable rat’s nest. Though later laden with soiled linens, grungy walls and a carpet that was a single step up from a dirt floor, it had started out as a pretty nice room—till Brett got hold of it. He usually wouldn’t bring his dates home with him: “If they can stand this mess,” he’d say, “then they’re not the kind of girl I want to screw.” Everyone, he maintained, must have standards.
    One time he got lucky with the single mother of a little girl, who lived just down the block from our home. Next morning, Brett came home whistling and I asked him, “Have a good night?”
    “She was fat and ugly,” he admitted, “but she screwed good!” High praise indeed. Perhaps it’s apropos at this juncture to mention that Brett had a bit of a drinking problem. The only problem as he saw it, was that of getting the alcohol out of the bottle and into his belly faster. So, after Brett’s initial amorous evening, he sought to replicate the experience and proceeded to pound on “Rose’s” front door, at midnight, raising all kinds of unearthly clatter. “Go away, Brett!” urged Rose, upset because little four-year old Betty was home with her that night. “Open up,” he bellowed. “I want to screw you!”
    “You’re frightening my daughter!” she cried, then implored desperately, “Please stop.” Across the neighborhood, lights began flashing on in windows. Finally, a police car came rampaging down the road, its colorful array of lights blazing away. Brett immediately took off lumbering the two-house distance back to Big Yellow. But the squad car continued on its merry way, concerned not at all with mere sexual harassment. The next day Brett was all smiles; he laughed about it.
    “I had the little girl crying,” he reminisced. “I guess my sex drive is pretty strong,” he congratulated himself matter-of-factly.
    And Brett always had an abundance of sage financial advice to tender any unsuspecting male. “Always break up with your girlfriend during Christmas and around her birthday,” he counseled. “That way,” he concluded triumphantly, “you don’t have to buy her a present!”
    When an equally alcoholic housemate—“Jenks”—suspected that Brett was pilfering his stock of orange juice, he made no bones about it: he confronted him. Jenks was drunk that night but then, so was Brett. And since Brett, an athlete in high school, outweighed Jenks by easily a hundred pounds, the outcome of this grudge match was never in any doubt. At 2 a.m. Brett danced into the kitchen with his latest date and began a fruitless search for additional alcohol. At length he sat sucking on a bottle of Angostura bitters; his companion, the lovely Diana, was taking this all in rather blandly; there is little doubt that she was profoundly stoned. Jenks took that moment to make an appearance in the kitchen and after first casting a dark look at Brett, opened the refrigerator door, extracted his carton of juice and shook it, checking its volume. He frowned, then immediately began berating Brett for his “orange juice thievery.” At first Brett laughed at Jenks, at the fussy little insect character that he had become, but Jenks turned livid. “I’ll have your ass up on charges,” he threatened. He made his fatal mistake when he pointed his index finger at his nemesis and said, “don’t you ever freakin’ take my orange juice again!”
    In short, Brett went berserk. Climbing to his feet, he snatched the carton of juice out of Jenks’s hands and proceeded to pour it on the little guy’s head. Still Jenks couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He spluttered, “Why you fat ass...” It was at that point that Brett hoisted the kitchen table—heavy oak—and smashed Jenks like a bug. He ripped a leg off the table for good measure. While this was going on, a newly sobered Diana climbed out a window and fled to safety. Of course, there were police and attorneys and emergency rooms and all the rest, but those are mere details. Brett, having connections, did no jail time. Nobody, it turned out, ever even remotely learned their lesson.
    Dorms and college houses are bastions of storytelling, some of it even true. Big Yellow was no exception. When it came to “when did you, you know, lose your...umm, Cherry?” everybody sat around the living room, stoned, reminiscing.
    One girl said she was seventeen; a guy said nineteen; another girl chirped, “Any day now!” Brett, predictably, topped us all. “Thirteen,” he said with an air of wearied sophistication. “Thirteen?” we exclaimed, not sure if he was telling the truth or not. “What was her name?” someone asked. He shrugged.
    “Some retarded chick, from the Special School District,” and laughed, full of fond memories. “We all did her,” he remembered.
    “All of you?” asked John, the gay house manager. “How many were there?” Brett actually began counting on his fingers. “Fourteen,” he said at last.
    “Man,” said John. “And people say gays are indiscriminate!” Brett, taking up the thread, went on to say that someone had actually urinated in this unfortunate girl’s vagina. We just stared at him, horrified. Under scrutiny, Brett’s face got red as a beet and he confessed that “It was me. Hadda go to the bathroom real bad,” he explained.
    Brett and I both worked in a family-owned restaurant and one day back in the kitchen the three cooks—Brett, myself and Rocco—an African American man about our age, were talking about—what else—sex. Rocco told us he had bedded over two hundred different women “so far,” and he already had five kids. Brett said that’s nothing: he turned up a small cassette player and inserted a tape. Coming from the speakers was the tinny voice of a woman we all knew, enraptured in passion. Brett explained that he had “wired his bed” prior to entertaining this woman one night. He had actually taken the tape, he said, “To White City,” home to a regional porn festival, with some of his best (male) friends and entertained them all with her moaning and gasping. He laughed uproariously. Rocco and I, once again, just stared at him.
    Time wore on and eventually everybody got degrees of one sort or another. But just before he graduated, the lion was bearded in his den: Brett somehow got a regular, permanent-type girlfriend, with whom he was going to live. He had always waxed eloquent on the prospects of such a person in his life: “You know,” he’d say, “about a two or three year relationship, where the girl would post your bail or take you in if you’re drunk, and like that...” As I helped him load his belongings into the truck he’d rented, Brett paused and patted a disreputable old recliner sitting in the corner of his room. The fabric was torn and the stuffing was coming out on all sides. “A lot of good screwing happened in this old chair,” he remembered fondly. “I’ll leave it to the house,” he announced generously.
    Brett waxed eloquent in his final minutes in Big Yellow, about how to “control” the women in your life. “You screw them in the ass,” he advised, “in order to humiliate them.” That left us all...speechless. Then, taking a shoebox full of unused condoms—the used ones he’d left in his closet, we’d find out later—he staggered, drunk, down the stairs, out the door, past the rented truck and into the street, where he was immediately run over by a liquor store delivery truck. The last I saw of Brett, the EMTs were loading him onto a stretcher as Brett grappled with a bottle of Crown Royal. But I did hear from a mutual acquaintance that he’d eventually become a lawyer and then a judge. He was really going somewhere, they said.

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