Happy Birthday, Pomona

pomona looks up
Originally uploaded by madabandon.

Today is proclaimed Pomona's birthday. She is sixteen. I don't know her actual birthday. I got her from Kym, who used to cut my hair; now she lives in Berlin or maybe Portland. Someone had given Pomona to her as a gift, but she was allergic to cats. So I drove to Staten Island, where Pomona was staying, and took her home with me to Park Slope, on Fifth Street between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West, where I lived with a crazy fat lady in the apartment below mine. Pomona was tiny and round, and that is why I named her Pomona. Kym had called her Velcro because she would fling herself around and seemingly stick to vertical surfaces. The fat lady in 1R claimed that my piano playing was giving her cancer. When I would practice she would call my phone and hang up the moment I picked up, or she would buzz my doorbell incessantly. She also banged on her ceiling with a broom or something. She would sometimes scream. She had all windows in her apartment covered over with old yellowed newspapers. She used to steal mail from the other tenants in the building, and the day I moved out one of my neighbors told me that she managed to drive out every tenant of my apartment within a year. The previous couple had been a black woman with a white boyfriend, and she obviously harassed them. That is why they were so eager to show me the apartment, and why they left their brand-new expensive air conditioner there. When I moved I wanted to make a tape-loop of my piano playing and leave it running on a boombox in the apartment 24/7. Once her puny husband came up and buzzed my door at six in the morning to tell me that "the goddamn piano playing has got to stop." I told him that he had to leave and he didn't leave and I didn't open the door and I called the police and they came and made him go back inside his apartment. The landlord let me break my lease and even paid my expenses for moving, and so I came to Brooklyn Heights with Pomona and Tuna, whom I had found one month after Pomona. So Tuna's birthday is May 2, because I don't know his real birthday. But he comes from Staten Island too, but that is another story for another time. I lent that air conditioner to my brother, who had moved to a duplex on Union Street, and when he moved a year or two later he sold it to someone for twenty-five dollars. I was annoyed, but I didn't take the twenty-five dollars anyway.