An unplanned visitor

Toward the end of January 1997, I got a surprise phone call, it was from Perd, Chez' stepbrother. He was in Poway, just a few miles north of San Diego. He was there to see his father and half-brother. He wanted to look me up and hang out for a bit.

I drove up and somehow managed to find him (without GPS or Google Maps). I hadn't seen him in about seven years. He had grown his hair long. He told me that in the time that I'd last saw him, he'd had a child. However, he and the mother never got married. They lived together while she was pregnant, but decided she didn't want him around after she had the baby.

We just drove around San Diego a bit and talked. We didn't mention Chez. Perd told me he had been playing bass in a band in Roswell and was hoping to find a band here he could play with. I took him back to his father's and we figured that we'd be hanging out some more in the near future.

About a week later, Perd called me and told me he had found a job in Downtown San Diego. Since it was too far to drive from Poway, he asked if he could stay with me and Kelz for a couple of weeks until he got enough money to get his own place. I asked Kelz and she didn't have a problem with it.

I told Perd he needed to draw from his experience living with a pregnant woman when dealing with Kelz. He knew what to expect. I told him that she basically slept all the time, so he probably wasn't going to have much contact with her. But if she was asleep in the living room, he couldn't watch TV or do much else.

The sleeping arrangements were that he would sleep in his sleeping bag on the floor in the bedroom. This wasn't a problem. I tried to be very quiet when I woke up early in the morning to go to work. I guess he was a heavy sleeper. One morning, he woke up and it appeared that I was still in bed. He thought that I was going to be late for work, but he saw that it was Kelz in the bed. I had managed to leave and she came into the bedroom and got into the bed without waking him up.

The job Perd had was working for a telemarketing company. It was obviously one of those ripoff operations, but he didn't really care as long as they paid him.

Perd and I would go out to see live local music. One Friday night, on February 14th, all three of us went to a Valentine's Day showcase at the Wikiup Cafe. Abed
was going to be performing. The opening act was a group I was familiar with, which performed most percussive music. Perd was impressed and thought about how the rhythm could be integrated into other musical projects.

When Abed got up to play, he started having a little breakdown because it was Valentine's Day and he didn't have anyone special in his life at that time. He didn't feel like he had anything to offer to the theme. The organizer of the showcase got up and explained that it was called a Valentine's Day showcase only because that happened to be the day it was scheduled, not because it was supposed to be the theme surrounding the presentation of the various acts. Abed was able to complete his set. Perd enjoyed the angst-filled performance.

Otherwise, Kelz and Perd didn't have much interaction. She was still angry about the last Chez encounter, but seemed to tolerate Perd's presence. Since I had to go to bed early and Kelz was sleeping all the time, Perd was able to keep himself occupied by reading my collection of comic books. At first, he did that by sitting in the bathtub. When he told me that, I showed him how he could shut the door to the sink area of the bathroom to keep the light out of the living room and sit at the make up table section next to the sink. He seemed to prefer doing that.

One thing that Perd found surprising was that Kelz and I would watch "Dark Shadows." He thought it was weird that we were both into this soap opera from the 1960s.

After about three weeks, Perd got his first paycheck. It was way less than what he was expecting. He decided to quit that job and find something else. He was going to move back in with his father until he could figure out what that was going to be.

I wished that things that been that easy when I was living with Chez.

(This is not the end of the story with Perd. I continued seeing him from time to time over the next year and a half and he will appear in a couple more posts, including tomorrow.)