To mangle a quote from the late, great Dave Barry, I wish I was making this up. I hear that other people have nice, calm lives where things like this don't happen. It must be nice.

Life in Lemay, land of Decade cigarettes, lottery tickets, Bud Light, and white trash in general. You gotta love it. Given that, you can all imagine that I was not at all surprised to hear someone tapping on the glass on my window, around midnight.

I opened the door. It was Copal. She was, as usual for her, drunk. She had only her clothes. She had on a very form fitting short sleeve shirt and shorts that looked almost like they were painted on. She was barefoot, and her knee was badly scraped. "I love you," she slurred. Uh oh. She wants something.

"He kicked me out. Can I stay the night?" she said, coming in without even waiting for my answer. The last time I had seen her, a friend of hers , let's call him Nemesis, had come by. "I have $50 worth of weed. Let's have an adventure," he said. She left without saying goodbye, or even acknowledging me. She moved in with Nemesis.

She sat on my couch, "Why did he kick you out? I thought you were happy there." I asked. "He didn't kick me out, and I was happy there," she answered. Not even back for ten minutes, and already she was changing her story.

She looked at me. "Wanna see?" Oh lord. She showed me her breasts, and pulled her shorts down. "You want to smell it?" she said. Uh, no. "I must not have been fcking, because I still have a pssy," she added.

At one time I really liked her. But that crashed and burned, and rightfully so. I looked her over at this point. Once she had been very attractive, but in the few weeks since I had seen her she got that hard look you often see on homeless people. Her looks-- her only asset-- were going.

"How did you hurt your knee?" I asked. She didn't have an answer. I think I heard the word "pot" among the slurred speech.

Both my landlord and myself had put a lot of time into helping her. We felt we were making progress, and then she went back to her old ways. To be helped, people first have to admit that they need help.

I mentioned to her that I had talked to my landlord, and that he had said that he wouldn't take her back. And that she would have to go when he woke up. This did not deter her. "I'm not going back to Granite City," she said every few minutes. My landlord had her living in a house he was fixing in Granite City, until she decided to abandon that.

"Nobody's asking you to do that," I said. She then ranted on about a woman I will call Theosophy, striking the air with her hand. I had no idea if Theosophy really existed, or was one of the many invisible people her imagination had conjured up.

I went into my bedroom, which is right next to my living room. I had to work on some travel arrangements anyway, so I decided to stay up all night. With a crazy woman in the room next to me, that was my best option.

Every once in a while I could hear Copal arguing with one of her invisible tormentors. I heard her tearing up some papers. I went out to investigate. She calmed down, and promised to go to sleep.

I eventually dozed off. I woke up to the sound of things being haphazardly thrown around.

"I brought a phone with me. Where is it?" she said. And then "When I came here I had shoes, and I was wearing a green tank top and a bra. What happened?" she said.

She certainly hadn't been wearing what she said she had. And there was no room whatsoever for any sort of cell phone, no matter how tiny, to have been hiding.

"You were wearing what you have on now. And you didn't have a bra. And I don't remember a cell phone. Remember: I was sober, you were drunk."

After hearing that, she started searching for her cell phone and her clothes again, ranting again about how much she hated Theosophy, and how she didn't want to go back to Granite City.

She wanted to use my phone. Luckily enough, I was between phones at the moment. I had ordered one, but it hadn't arrived. And, soon after she had asked me for my phone, she asked if I knew her friend's number. Even if I had a working phone, it would probably have gone down something like "OK, call 555-1212. OK, try 555-1213..." and so on.

Sober now, she walked to the kitchen refrigerator and downed a quart of milk in one gulp. "I gotta go back and get my stuff," she said. I was relieved. She was going to leave, and my landlord was still asleep.

She walked out my door. I locked the door with both the regular lock and the deadbolt. Soon after, it started to rain heavily.

Later in the day, my landlord said "I got a text message from Nemesis: 'I KICKED THE DRUNKEN B*TCH OUT.' I think we both know who he's talking about."

And there she was: She had gotten kicked out onto the street because of her drinking. She had forgotten what she had worn earlier. She had forgotten how she had injured herself. And she was on the streets again, in the rain, alone.

And, even now, I suspect she thinks she is OK, and it's everyone else who has a problem. What new lows does she have to sink to, in order for her to realize that, as Sid Vicious would say, "You've got a problem: the problem is YOU."