My closest encounter was living in a rental accomodation with a guy who was addicted to a whole lot of pills and he had a friend named Brett who was a hooker and she was also addicted to a whole lot of pills...and alcohol. The guy also had a large paranoid german shepherd with a very hostile attitude toward cops, postmen, and any other stranger who might appear at the door...but it was okay with me, him, or Brett, because it knew us.

The German shepherd and the guy slept in the same bed...but it was a platonic relationship. Brett used to show up now and then, maybe once a week, and sleep over...also platonically, I assure you. Nothing happened. The guy wasn't even slightly interested in sex (too strung out all the time, I guess) and neither was Brett when she was "off the job", so I guess she found it refreshing that he felt that way. They would all use the bed at various times (guy, Brett, dog in whatever combination)...strictly for purposes of conking out for awhile and sleeping off whatever they had injested.

The place was extremely dirty and crazy. It was my own bad judgement that I rented there, and I only stayed about 3 months, till I found another place. My own room was okay...the kitchen was half okay, the rest was a disaster.

The guy had accumulated about fifty parking and traffic violations and had paid none of them, so the province suspended his driving license. He still drove anyway, when he was lucid enough to manage it, usually to pick up drugs from the 3 doctors he knew, and sometimes he gave Brett a lift somewhere.

One time she showed up in the middle of the night with two sprained ankles...barely able to hobble around. She stayed about a week that time. Brett was technically good looking if you didn't notice the empty look in her eyes. She was strange to talk to, but my impression was that she was fairly smart...only thing is she was really stoned or drunk most of the time.

She may have sprained her ankles because of the high heels she wore. They were really, really high heels. She dressed all in black and had jet black hair.

And that's it.

No, wait. There was this other girl who claimed to have been "a lady of the evening" (the exact words she used), but said she wasn't doing that anymore. She was so ugly and unpleasant that you had to kind of wonder who her customers would have been (who is that desperate?), but that's what she said anyway. She and her equally weird girlfriend moved in on a naive do-gooder friend of mine, a very gentle person, who was sharing a house with an embittered old man (the owner). He offered them a port in a storm. The old man couldn't get along with those two aggressive women around, but they simply wouldn't leave, and they basically took the place over...bullying him and my friend unmercifully for a few months. The old man finally became so desperate about the situation that he tried to kill himself and them by setting the house on fire in the middle of the night. It didn't work. The fire department came, the house got ruined, the cops put the old man in a mental home, and my friend and the two women ended up on the street.

Life. You have to witness it to believe it.