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Have I ever told the story of how my mom almost died because a giant Gene Simmons burned down her apartment building?
I wanna hear! (I mean I’m really glad your mom is okay, but this sounds like an incredible story amd I can’t miss out.)
Okay, so when my mom was 19 and living in San Francisco, she broke off her engagement to this really sweet Belgian boy because was like “holy shit, I love girls” and moved into a shitty apartment in the student corner of town because rent was cheap and the people on the block were her kind of folks.
One morning, she gets home from work and it has just been the shittiest day ever because it was laundry day so she had to wear the clothes she hated most, the shift leader was talking about layoffs, and her car had literally exploded on the Golden Gate Bridge on the way home. She is exhausted and thinks to herself “well, at least this day can’t get worse”.
My mother later told me that uttering this sentence is like standing in front of god with your arms flung out screaming “whatca FUCKING GOT???”
She collapses in bed still in her most hated outfit and passes the fuck out.
On the bottom floor are a pair of art students who I could never quite confirm mom was quietly banging in her spare time, who were building a giant Gene Simmons statue out of scrapped denim jeans for their final project. Something about meta-symbolism. They had left a can of open turpentine by the statue and also an electrical outlet.
While no one was paying attention, the outlet sparked, the turpentine caught, and the 20foot tall Jean Simmons lit up like a goddamn fireworks show.
Mom wakes up to screaming and the sound of someone banging with all their might on every wall and door they pass in the hallway to alert the apartment dwellers of their impending fiery death. She is very tired. She hasn’t eaten in like two days. She can barely think. So she just kinda stumbles to the door. As she’s reaching it, she notices smoke coming out of her electrical outlet. Mom originally went to school for physics and mathematics before she dropped out, so she stops for a second and thinks to herself “wow, the smoke is exiting the outlet at a complete horizontal for a solid 6 inches before it starts to rise, there must be a lot of pressure buildup for that to……HOLY FUCK I NEED TO RUN” and just fucking books it out of the building.
She stands there on the ground with other students watching everything they own go up in smoke while Jean Simmons’ terrifying two story face laughs at them from behind the building. Mom says that she never got the smell of smoke and burning tar out of her most hated work outfit and eventually embraced that fact and burned them.
This is also the story of how my mother ended up homeless and standing naked in a stranger’s bedroom with an absolutely petrified 22 year old cop holding a gun to her head while she cried and laughed like she had gone round the fucking bend, but mostly this is the story of why my mother once slapped me across the face so hard I saw birds because 3 year old me tried to comfort her one day by saying “at least it can’t get worse!”
Okay now I need to hear about the cop thing please? Very interested ^.^
So Jeans Simmons burned down everything mom had ever owned right? The emergency responders brought these little kits with toothpaste and a hairbrush and deodorant and such. But the shift leader who’d been talking about layoffs was in fact correct and she was fired the next day, so now she’s homeless, has no money, no clothes, no possessions, hasn’t spoken to her family in three years, and her car is still a smoking wreck on the side of the bridge waiting for a tow. All she’s got is the little emergency kit, her least favorite work clothes that smell like fire (incidentally she didn’t smoke another cigarette for 15 years after that day), and her vinyl records that have been melted into slag.
And as she’s standing on a street corner that evening, waiting for a bus, smelling of smoke and wondering why the fuck she’s still holding her melted records, it starts raining cats and dogs. Mom takes one look at herself in a shop window and realizes she’s not going to make it like this. But luckily she’s just hooked up with the local queer circuit, and there’s a dungeon Mistress who’s going out of town and needs someone to watch her cat. She says mom can stay there until she gets back and then she’ll help mom figure out something more permanent.
So mom picks up a key and comes by the next day. She only has to spend a few minutes in a house that doesn’t smell like soot and tar to realize how bad she must smell and decides then and there to burn her clothes. She wasn’t exactly thinking through what to do after that, and suddenly she’s staring at ashes in the fireplace and realizes she has nothing to wear anymore. At this point, mom just stops thinking, turns around, and goes to bed naked because why the hell not.
Problem is, Dungeon Mistress didn’t tell the neighbors she had a house guest. So all they know is that an incredibly be-draggled young woman who smelled terrible wandered into the apartment after Dungeon Mistress left town and started a fire in the fireplace.
So they called the cops.
Now mom hasn’t slept since the fire, in part because hello trauma and in part because sleeping on the street in SF isn’t the best choice as a 19 year old homeless girl. So she’s fuckin dead to the world. Until next thing she knows, the bedroom door of the apartment flies open and there’s this baby faced cop standing in the doorway yelling orders at her. She’s panicking and falls out of bed and is still super naked and way too tired and hungry to think properly, so as soon as she registers “gun aimed at my face” she just starts fucking LAUGHING. Like, howling, cackling, rib-cracking laughter, tears just pouring down her face the whole time.
And this cop is just fucking terrified because ~what~ the heck?? He keeps trying to yell at her and she just keeps laughing, and at some point she just sits down on the floor, still laughing, and the cop just sort of nervously drops a sheet over her and is like “I still have to ask you to leave” and mom was like “I’m fucking cat sitting?” And of course the cat chooses then to just come over and headbutt her because it’s hungry.
So mom ends up giving him Dungeon Mistress’s phone number who confirms what she’s doing there and is frankly ~fucking pissed~ that mom’s being put through this. The cop is like “maybe try not being homeless and looking like a wreck next time?” And mom looks like she might deck him so he just fuckin scoots.
Mom spent a few months couch surfing with Dungeon Crews and shelters like that before she finally managed to gather some clothes of her own and get a new job. But that experience pretty well solidified mom’s opinion of “fuuuuuuuuck cops” and set her on the path of being a political agitator.
And the moral of the story is that if you’re having a bad day, try to make responsible decisions like not burning your only set of clothes or not daring god to personally ruin your month.
when the name changed to Jean Simmons the first time I didn’t notice the pun and I was like, they changed the name to a more androginous one? was it a genderbended Gene Simmons? A lesbian Gene Simmons?
Now I deeply wish that they had been building a lesbian Gene Simmons, but sadly he was merely made of denim.
JEAN SIMMONS *wheezes*
Published
Penhales 