countessian

the handcuffs and the polaroid

This photograph was taken by Sally Fay Dalton, using a Polaroid camera that we found attached to a pair of handcuffs. We came across the handcuff-cam when we were forced to clear the blue room of a former housemate’s belongings after he disappeared without paying rent. Well, he left fake cheques to pay for rent, but that doesn’t really count.

He still owes us tons of money, and left us with

• the world’s dirtiest room (seriously — we waded knee-deep through dirty laundry to find moldy cheese in the bed)

• stacks of blank sheets of fake cheques
• at least 100 photographs of himself
• his diary from several years ago, in which he earnestly professes his desire to turn his life over to God and also star in a Broadway play
• multiple copies of his credit report (note to whoever marked off all those debts as identity theft — you’re an idiot)
• a pile of letters from lawyers offering their services following his arrest

In the three months following his departure, first his mother told us that he had to go to the East Coast for work (but his company already told us he’d lost his job) but that they were getting together the money he owed us to pay us back, then he called with a convoluted story about getting arrested in Mexico while filming a documentary about corrupt police forces.

He said yonks ago that he was sending us a cheque “tomorrow”—we were both exceptionally restrained and managed to supress the urge to say “oh, that’s ok, we’ll just write ourselves one on your fake cheque paper!”

Sally Fay’s got the key to the cuffs around her neck, and we’re getting lots of pencil-scrawled letters from his jail penpals.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 11:34 am. It is filed under documentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.