[Continued from "TT, Part 2."]

I moved in with Chris, a Ph.D. candidate at Caltech, who was already living in the back bedroom of a two-bedroom unit of a duplex building.  TT owned the building and lived in the adjoining unit.  Both units shared a cute back yard complete with a lemon tree that produced huge, but tasteless, lemons.

Chris kept his bedroom and I moved into the front bedroom.  Unlike the back bedroom, which utilized one of the hall closets for clothes, my bedroom had a closet in the bedroom.  My bedroom also had a door into the laundry room, which was connected to the kitchen.  I could walk from the front door, to the dining room, through the kitchen and laundry room, and to my bedroom, all without walking down the hall, which did an excellent job of transferring noise to the back bedroom.  Chris and I were able to live very separately for the most part.

Living separately was not all that difficult since Chris was at Caltech most of the time.  I was either at work or at school, and thereby avoided Chris for the most part.  To avoid fights, we agreed to split the cost to hire a maid.  My dog stayed in my bedroom when I wasn’t home; Chris wanted nothing to do with letting her out.

Once I lived right next door to TT, it was easy to participate in the various fun activities he organized.  Well, I could participate in the ones that took place when I wasn’t working or going to school.  Oftentimes, I went to the beginnings of a backyard Saturday night party before I had to be at work.  Busy nights at the pool hall/bar/club/restaurant were not to be missed, both for the potential tips and to show the boss that I was dedicated to work – my boss had a management style that assured the employees were often scared of getting fired.

At one of TT’s parties he served sangria.  I was lucky enough to have not had sangria all night, like many of the guests.  The sangria was sweet, as all sangria is, and deceptively strong, as all sangria should be.  However, TT’s sangria had the extra benefit of making overconsumers, to a one, puke and suffer from a horrible hangover.  The next day, after many of the party’s guests had reported such ill side effects, I asked TT what, exactly, was in his sangria.  He showed me the recipe, which looked pretty basic, with red wine, brandy, and simple syrup.  TT said that the simple syrup seemed like too much of a pain in the ass to make (because dissolving sugar in water can be quite daunting), so he just used corn syrup.  No wonder everyone was so sick!  One had to be careful drinking TT’s alcoholic concoctions.

Along with parties and other elaborate get-togethers, TT had various projects ongoing.  One was his vehicle, a Land Rover Defender 90 to which he was often adding gadgets and accoutrement.  He got a lot of looks when tooling around town.  He got looks and pulled over when we were in Mexico.  Often, the cops just wanted to look at all the various silly-looking attachments TT had adhered to the vehicle.

Another one of TT’s projects involved getting women naked.  Of course.  He said men could participate, too, but it was pretty obvious he only said that to avoid the inevitable “discussions” he would have had to have if only women were involved.  Back before digital cameras, TT used his video camera attached to his computer to take still photos.  The project involved taking a photo of every participant’s eye, ear, mouth, nipple, navel, and knee.  Each photo was a close-up of the particular body part.

The idea was to display all of the photos in a grid up on a wall.  Each of the photos could be moved to any other spot on the grid.  The viewer could move the photos around in an attempt to match up the body parts.  Once TT put all the parts up, it was difficult to know which navel went with what ear that went with what eye.  It was even difficult for me to pick out my own body parts.

I had sat for TT’s project.  To make my nipple more photogenic, there was a fluffer on hand to make my nipple hard.  It was on the day TT was taking pictures of my body parts, and the fluffer had my nipple in his mouth, that the man who would become the Ex picked me up for our second date.  He should have known then I was pretty liberal and generous with my body.

[To be continued ….]

I swear.  True story.

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