THE LONG BLACK HAIRS

            Hiroya was a fat Japanese man, friendly, gregarious, with long, wild, black hair, that hung in a tangle in his face.  He was an artist, and used to show his graffiti-based paintings in the hall.

            Hiroya shared a bathroom with us on the third floor.  Every day he would flood the bathroom floor, and every day the maid would argue with him about it.  Hiroya would swear up and down that it hadn’t been him, that a junky or a homeless person had broken into the bathroom and done it.

            I was coming down the hall one day when I heard them outside the bathroom, arguing:

            “Every day there be two inches of water standin’ on the floor!” the maid was screaming in her thick Jamaican accent.  “Every day I be havin’ to mop this floor!  Every damn day!  I be tired of it!  Next time you mop yourself.”

            “It the homeless,” Hiroya said in his broken English.

            “I know it not be no homeless!” the maid yelled.  “I know it be you, Hiroya, because the long black hairs be a swimmin’!”

Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton

Comments

[former resident]

dear hiroya. somewhere i still have one of his bunnies, which he gave me one valentine's day. r.i.p.