Tales of Salisbury madness:Part 2

Simone was a woman I used to live with on Camden Avenue, in a huge group house. She was a friend of our roommate Angie and was desperate for a place to live. She was an expat German who had married an American serviceman and come to this country, only to have it bust up shortly after she got here. Little did we know that when Simone moved in we also got blessed with her boyfriend, Bill.

In the few times I had any direct contact with him, he struck me as the kind of fella that’s nice and personable enough, but a very forced kind of way, like he was keeping something under control just behind the eyes. He was a big, muscular guy who was trying to join the military himself had the haircut in anticipation.

I came home after working late and walked into the room where we kept our answering machine and listened to the messages. There were two, both from Bill.
“Hey Simone, it’s Bill.”, he started in a affable tone, “just catching up. O.K. so, give me a call, or I’ll come over and kill your roommates.” as casual as if he said,”Catch you later !”

That literally sent a chill up my spine into my chest, causing me to lose a breath. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears as one of the most common slasher flick cliché came to life before my eyes, made more vivid by the fact that the only light in the room was the blinking red one on the answering machine. Then there was the second message.

His tone had changed, now was talking low and what he probably thought was “sexy”, but with his jocky cadence was more like, “porny.”
“Simone, baby, I wanna drag my knife across your body, I want to cut your clothes off. I gonna give it to you, whether you want it or not.”

What the fuck, I thought, does this guy knows this is all our answering machine? I turned on the living room light and the phone rang. Bill. The voice he used was the same “Hello, Mrs. Cleaver, is the Beaver home?” as the first message.

“Is Simone there?”, he asked.
“No.”
“Thanks!”

I talked to my other roommates about this, and one said,”Don’t worry, she’s breaking up with him.” I was naive enough to believe that this would be the last we’d hear of him.

I woke up about 3 am one morning about a month later to an awful racket downstairs, like people falling down the stair case over and over. I sat up and rubbed my eyes, wondering if I was still asleep then started to get up to see what was up. I stopped when I heard our front door open like someone had been pushed through it and heard Blotto(one of the other roomies) yell, “You know where to come back if you want anymore, bitch!”, so I put my head back down to bed.

The next morning I walked down the stairs and noticed blood on our banister and smeared on the glass in the front door, but I wasn’t able to get the full story until that night allowed my curiosity to fester almost to the braking point.

Simone went out with Angie and her boyfriend and came home with a guy who was not Bill. Since she lived on the first floor of the house, it was easy for Bill to look in her window, as it turns out he had been doing for a while. He burst in the house and kicked open Simone’s bedroom door. The new paramour, not having signed up for this, took off, leaving Bill free to choke Simone. Angie’s boyfriend tried to help, but just got swatted away.

That meant BLOTTO TO THE RESCUE! Perhaps I should describe Blotto, he was extremely obese,with no trace of a neck, but still maintained the quickness he had when he played football. He had spent a lot of his post college time bouncing at area bars so he had a well honed talent for taking care of drunk guys who underestimated him.

Blotto came in and pulled Bill off her and tried to get him out the door, but he wasn’t leaving that easily, pulling away from the door and into our living room coming to rest on one of our couches. Bill tried to get him off by punching him in the side, but this merely angered him as he answered with his own blows.

He finally got Bill out, but wasn’t able to lock the door before Bill came back for round two, this time armed with brass knuckles he had on his motorcycle. Blotto immediately disarmed him and started to work him over on our staircase, which explained the banister blood. Then he shoved him out and said the “you know where to come back” thing that made me comfortable enough to go back to sleep.

It wasn’t until after all the excitement settled that Blotto took a closer look at the brass knuckles. In the darkness and confusion, Blotto didn’t notice that the knuckles were actually the handle of a rather large knife with a curvy, showy blade. I could have only assumed this was the knife he had referred to in his charming phone message a month earlier. Paging Dr. Freud!

I slept so deep, the police arriving didn’t wake me up, as they took statements and evidence to eventually charge Bill with assault with a deadly weapon. Not aware he was about to be arrested, he showed up at our house the next day and sheepishly asked for his knife back. We had to break it to him to it was now possessed by the Salisbury police. When your “sensual aids” become “evidence”, it’s not the sign of a healthy relationship.

I have to honest, the rest of this story is a bit lost to time, so I only remember some of the details. I know that at the trial, Blotto told his side of the story and Simone told hers. She had seem to totally forget the fact that Bill had tried to choke the life out of her and that Blotto had risked his life to save her. In fact, she had started complaining that Blotto should stay out of her and Bill’s life because, since the incident, they had gotten back together. The thing that pissed her off the most was that this was hurting his future in the military, not grasping the fact that they had rules about things like this to keep people like him from having unfettered access to explosive ordinance.

The judge said that he could tell that Simone was lying and he was abusing her, but he couldn’t prove it without her saying he did it. Blotto, however, told the truth and the police had the knife to prove it. I had heard the judge had remarked about Bill’s cutlery of choice,”I have opened my utensil drawer to get a knife to cut my steak a hundred times and I’ve never seen one with a blade like this.”

Bill got put on probation and had to keep 500 feet away from Blotto, which is tough to do in a town like Salisbury. We ran into him one night at an area bar when he was hanging out with one of his friends. Blotto said to me,”as long as he stays away from me, I won’t be a dick about it.” But Bill and his pals left soon anyway. A friend of ours heard one of Bill’s buddies ask him,”You mean that roly-poly motherfucker beat your ass?”

The peaceful coexistence was short lived as Bill started regularly dropped by our place to pick up Simone and occasionally spent the night under Blotto’s roof. Eventually he had enough and called Bill’s probation officer. Bill went to jail and Simone was so pissed off she immediately moved out.....and moved into Bill’s.