Antoinette

Before we found our sweet apartment in Quincy, we saw a real gem in JP. “You shovel?” asks Antoinette, the over-sassed, lunatic landlady. She continues to challenge my boyfriend. “I want somebody out here in the winter.” Here’s her other query: “You guys smoke?” “No,” we reply truthfully — thinking that’s what she wants to hear from prospective tenants. “Oh, well sometimes my brother is here and he smokes. So I don’t want any complaints about the smoke,” she says, all while waving a magenta acrylic nail at us. I wait a beat. “So does your brother smoke cigarettes or crack?” I ask. Yep. That shut her up. And just like, we walked out the door and she was out of our lives forever.

Drowning.

Got a lesson in scuba diving on the Red line last week. The drunk ones always find me. Guess I look empathetic. He told me I was running out of time. That it was necessary I slap on a wet suit and get the hell out there. And that if I had to puke, to quickly remove the mask under water and puke, puke, puke. When I told him my stop was next, he realized he missed his own stop and belched all the way out.