I don’t think it really bothered Mom. She wasn’t home that much anyway. She’d bitch about it sometimes when she brought a bunch of her friends home, to jam and smoke and eat. It was always the same scene, party time, she’d come in with a bunch of them, hyped on the music like she always was, stoned maybe, too. They’d be carrying instruments and six-packs of beer, sometimes a brown bag of cheap groceries, salami and cheese and crackers or yogurt and rice cakes and tofu. They’d set the groceries and beer out on the table and start doodling around with their instruments while my mom would say stuff like, “Damn, look at this dump. That damn landlord, he still hasn’t been around. Billy, didn’t the landlord come by today? No? Shit, man, that jerk’s been promising to fix this place for a year now. Damn.”

Everyone would tell her not to sweat it, hell, their places were just as bad, all landlords were assholes anyway. Usually someone would get onto the Skoag thing, how it was a fine thing the government could take care of alien refugee trash but wouldn’t give its own citizens a break on rent. If there’d been a lot of Skoags at the café that night, Mom and her friends would get into how Skoags thought they were such hot shit, synthesizing music from their greasy hides. I remember one kid who really got worked up, telling everyone that they’d come to Earth to steal our music. According to him, the government knew it and didn’t care. He said there was even a secret treaty that would give the Skoags free use of all copyrighted music in the United States if they would give us blueprints of their ships. No one paid much attention to him. Later that evening, when he was really stoned, he came and sat on the floor by my sofa and cried.