Did I do the right thing?

So, I get this call from Marissa on Tuesday that her long-lost aunt is in town. "Great," I say to her, continuing, "What does this have to do with me?"

Well, she and her boyfriend needed a place to stay. The two of them had been in town for a few days and stayed at Marissa's other aunt's house, and according to that aunt, the whole family was sick with the flu. "Terrible," I say, and then something like, "So when can I expect them?" There is one catch - they were homeless.

At the time, I thought something naive, like "'tis the season," or "it'll make for some interesting conversation..." you know, stuff like that. Boy was I wrong - and right, respectively.

Marissa brought them over while I was working at the library. Now, Marissa doesn't call me that often at work, and during this three-hour shift, she phoned me like four times. Once, she just wanted to talk and asked me what time I was coming home. Already I knew this was not the hippie-fest I had imagined. The other phone calls from Marissa were requests for Celtic music (apparently they HE didn't like the Talking Heads, pfft.) and another request for some Blackberry Brandy from the liquor store.

(At work, I had joked around with Jill (coworker) about what I could possibly talk to them about. Questions to avoid included 'how did the two of you meet?' and 'So, you're homeless...what's that like?' We also joked how at least they wouldn't have too much baggage - unless they brought a shopping cart full of their belongings. Basically, I was making little jokes, and at that point I felt bad...)

I could get the music, but fortunately enough, the liquor store was closed. As I walked into my kitchen to greet our guests, Marissa comes in and mouths "Oh My God." I still thought to myself, "how bad could it be?"

Bad.

Very, very bad.

Keanu Reeves in Shakespeare bad.

Bad with a capitol B.

Walking into my living room, I smelled them before I saw them. I'd like to consider myself a pretty open-minded guy, but this was ridiculous. Aside from the smell, it was obvious that they hadn't seen a laundromat in a long, long time. Talk about layers - at least they looked comfortable. She had on two winter hats - that she didn't remove the entire time I saw her. All I could see of her was her hands and face. I made some small-talk with them about traveling, and could tell that this small-talk was getting nowhere.

An example of the small-talk I had with him (whom I will call 'Billy,' although I'm pretty sure the name he gave us was fake anyway) went something like this.

Travis: So, you guys have traveled a lot, what's your favorite place you've ever been to?

Billy: Nowhere.

Travis: - - - Oh. Kay.

Yeah. That's about as deep as it got. Any questions directed towards her (whom I will refer to as "Sally") were immediately answered by Billy in a way that stopped the conversation completely. He had quite a knack for that.

So they mentioned they were looking for a used van for very cheap. As I could already not stand these two, actually just Billy, I immediately began underlining and circling phone numbers in the Yellow Pages and brainstormed a few people I thought might be able to help. Since it was getting late, a fact I knew as I looked at the clock like every two minutes since I'd been home from work, we all decided that tomorrow they would make a few phone calls.

I wasn't tired, but I sure was getting sick of trying to find something to do with these two. Board games? no. Cards? no. Listen to anything besides Celtic music? no. For homeless people, they sure were picky. And rude. So, we decided that we would head off to bed - at around 9:30. Before I settled in for the night, I made a point to tell them all about the shower and get some clean towels for them to use, which proved completely unnecessary as they did nothing but play Super Nintendo (in Billy's case) or watch Super Nintendo (in Sally's) all night. The towels were still in the same pile the next day, untouched. I don't think they even washed their hands after using the bathroom, and I would argue also that they did not brush their teeth, although I cannot prove this.

Oh, and about the Super Nintendo situation, Billy asked in his usual fashion, "how come you don't have any good gaming systems?" and as we discussed games, he remarked that there seemed to be a lot of "stupid ones" in my library of very few. I asked if he ever played a particular game, one I said was one of my favorites as a kid, and he said that one was also "stupid."

You know, for so many stupid games, he sure kept himself busy all night playing them...

So I get to bed and Marissa decides to tell me what I missed while I was at work. First, she tells me that they came from a cultish, faith-healing community in northern California, and that Billy "read into Marissa's soul," and told her that I was not her true soul mate. I laughed at this, and then she told me the rest. He said to her that her soul needed healing, and that he would conduct the ceremony for her, where he would rebuild her tissue or some shit like that by HAVING HER LIE NAKED IN FRONT OF HIM WHILE HE BURNED SAGE. Because he learned from a faith-healing Native American, we were supposed to believe he was the real deal.

Wait a second. Put the two of those things together, and this kid, who is dating her middle-aged aunt and playing 'Donkey Kong Country' in the other room, was definitely coming on to her. It was then that I decided that they needed to go, and I spent the next day trying to figure out how.

After struggling to fall asleep to the sound of the synthesized SNES soundtrack, we awoke around 11 a.m. and I immediately got the Yellow Pages and handed them to our guests. Billy, who apparently knows everything, unsurprisingly handled the situation in an odd fashion. He would glance at something I circled and said "I sold used cars for a while and I can tell that this one is too expensive."

??

First off, how long is a while, and how did he get hired in the first place, and why not just try and call a few of those? He decided that course of action was not the best way to find a used van. Sally, perhaps sensing (as she claimed to be psychic) my growing anger, decided to call a few places. This did not pan out, as after a few, they decided not to look anymore. Craigslist was also recommended by a friend to find a van, and Billy claimed to have already tried that route and that nothing cost less than $1,000. Well, Marissa and I had to be somewhere at Noon, so I said they could continue to look at Marissa's mom's (Sally's sister's) house. Sally seemed to be all for this idea, while Billy said he was too tired and just wanted to hang out in our apartment all day.

I had had enough at this point. I said to him, after considering many different things to say and decided that this was the most polite, "you're not going to find a van sitting on your ass here without a phone or the internet." So, much to Billy's chagrin, they piled into the back of Marissa's Caliber and we dropped them at her mom's house.

Now, we had a few errands to run and had decided that the best course of action to take was to gather up all their filthy, smelly crap and transfer it from our car to Marissa's mom's car. The only snag in this plan was that at her mom's house were the two vagrants and our clean laundry, which was waiting for us by the door. Marissa claimed to need the laundry, and I said we'd get it later. Well, as we pulled up and frantically transferred all their worldly posessions into the other vehicle, Sally and Billy came outside to say hello. Billy was holding our laundry in his hands and looked like a puppy from the Humane Society - you know, the puppies that make you feel so bad that you never want to go back. He gave the laundry to Marissa and I didn't talk to either one, put the laundry in the car, and immediately drove to the liquor store. I needed some scotch. Bad.

So that was that.

We then went to Marissa's other aunt's house, the one who dropped these two tramps onto us a day prior. She gave Marissa $100 for the job and so we returned it, saying it was not worth the money. After a brief conversation, we realized that the flu was merely an excuse to get the two freeloaders out of their house - it's too bad they didn't tell us that when they talked us into taking them for "a few days." But I won't hold that against them. They somehow put up with Sally and Billy's ways for 5 days, while Marissa and I couldn't handle it for even a few hours.

So, as the title of this blog suggests, did I do the right thing? Should I have told him off, or at least tried to put into words why we could not deal with them for any more time?

I tell you one thing, I don't feel the least bit sorry for them anymore, or bad for what I did. I don't know where they are now, and I could care less.

So I learned a valuable lesson this week:
Do not, under any circumstances, let homeless people sleep in your apartment.