"I've been in San Clemente for a long time. If people know me, they have tried my food," Carbonara said. "I'm really confident about my cooking." OR He admitted he was gay after leaving WWE in 2004 with the idea of using his homosexuality in a wrestling angle, although neither Vince McMahon's company nor rivals TNA would hire him in that role. "He told one friend as recently as Monday that he was having problems and was contemplating suicide."

The apartment on Homesgarth is legendary.  It has somehow managed to have been occupied by an elaborate string of friends for over ten years now.  Whenever someone moves out another acquaintance or friend fills the room.  Stories are celebrated and passed down by occupants.  Reality and myth are attached at the hip. 

Greg has been there for 8 years and is the longest standing resident in the three-bedroom apartment located behind a salon run by two women who crawled out of a trash bag.  My best friend Grits currently lives with Greg and tells me to try it out. 

I get the bedroom overlooking a cemetery, one I’ve walked through at night on occasion to listen to the chattering of the rats.  I position my word processor by the window overlooking the cemetery and write dialogue for rats. 

In a given week we drink several cases of beer and a family-sized bottle of gin and vodka (cheap).  We play Thursday-Slursday watching E.R. and Survivor, each of choosing a character, and drinking for key phrases and each time our characters appear on screen.  One night we go the extra mile and play a drinking game to Willem Defoe in The Last Temptation of Christ.  We do shots for Satan. 

The attached garage is literally a labyrinth of beer cans and liquor bottles and I’m pretty sure something is living inside it.  You can walk through it unseen but never at night. 

Greg creates a character for each of us on The Sims at his computer, where he spends most of his time, occasionally blasting us with midget porn, amputee porn, and bukkake scenes starring discontented faces of college girls and matures, while Grits and I watch WWF and record “beat downs” on Greg’s digital camera, one incident specifically involving me beating Grits over the head with an apocrypha.  And as Karma would have it, my Sims character got cancer and died. 

I’ve never seen a girl at this house. 

Consequently, I’m trying to fuck a waitress at the restaurant where I cook and get harassed by the owner’s sister, who sees me cutting too many onions on the meat slicer and begins losing her mind, not for cutting onions on the meat slicer but because I’ve cut too many.  When I ask her to tell me how many ounces to slice, she shakes her head, completely baffled at the question and tells me to use common sense.  Common sense is her answer for everything.  When she sees me cooking she tells me it’s common sense; when she sees me smoking a cigarette on the patio she whispers, “Common sense,” and when she sees me flirting with Christina she screams at the top of her lungs, her jagged index finger wagging emphatically, “Common-fucking-sense!!!” before slogging off to the bathroom with a hardboiled egg between her lips. 

Christina never comes over, even though I moved out of my parent’s attic so that I could fuck in my new apartment.  And she won’t let me fuck her in the back of her Toyota Corolla behind either bar we regularly visit because her last boyfriend knocked her up in the backseat of her old Sedan.  I get out of the car and walk back into the bar. 

It isn’t long before she stops slamming her checks on the cook’s table and flirting with me in the walk-in refrigerator again, while I hold 25 lbs. of fish under one arm and lean against the condiments, as she pours a glass of boxed chardonnay and tries not to smile.