u/BelzOnBooks

My first resubmission to App Store Connect has been in the Ready for Review stage for 10 days now; how long does this process typically take?

It was Baltimore in the early 80s. Jared lived in a basement apartment downtown in Bolton Hill, one room with a small kitchenette off the back and a bathroom. 

Calling it an apartment was generous. His bed was a mattress and box spring sitting in the center of the room with no sheets on it. There was a pillow, I think. The place always had a very distinct odor because Jared rarely bathed. I met Jared through a friend who lived downtown, on the same block. Jared was in his late twenties or early thirties, though he looked anywhere from forty to fifty depending on the day. He was small and scraggly with round wire-framed glasses, the John Lennon kind. He sold weed and acid mainly, sometimes hash or Thai stick if he had it. He was also a junkie, which over the years had produced two notable side effects: epilepsy, and a permanent hole in his arm.

He liked to show you the arm. He’d slap it the way you’d slap a table to make a point, and it would start bleeding right on cue. Then he’d look at you and wait. It was his thing.

On a shelf near the kitchenette he kept a handwritten sheet of paper with instructions for what to do if he had a seizure while you were there. It came up a few times. Foaming at the mouth, the whole thing. It was pretty scary. The instruction sheet helped.

He told me he’d started using when he was twelve. His parents were hippies, artists, who spent most of their time out in New York City partying and traveling. They’d leave him alone in their apartment for long stretches while they went out and ran with people like Frank Zappa and various other artist weirdos. The building maintenance man lived in the basement and befriended Jared, took him under his wing. The maintenance man was a junkie. That’s how it started. Jared had been using so long at that point that he said he’d given himself the epilepsy. He said it matter-of-factly, the same way he said most things.

After I graduated high school I moved into a basement apartment on Calvert Street, not far from Jared’s place. One afternoon he showed up at my door.

A few weeks earlier he’d been riding his bike when he had a seizure and crashed. The police found him unconscious on the sidewalk. He had a thousand hits of acid and a quantity of weed on him. It wasn’t his first bust, so he was looking at doing some real time. He’d been missing his court dates since then, which meant he couldn’t go back to his apartment. He needed somewhere to stay.

For the next several weeks Jared basically lived with me and my roommates on our couch. From that point on, all kinds of street urchins started turning up at our place looking for him, looking for drugs. Strangers knocking at all hours of the day and night. Is Jared here? Sometimes at two in the morning, sometimes at six. We got used to it the way you get used to anything when you don’t have much choice.

When Jared finally left, we threw out the couch because of the smell. That was fine. We’d found the couch in the alley behind our building in the first place. Throwing out the couch wielded a nice perk though, we found a sheet of acid underneath of it. We knew where it came from and who it belonged to but Jared was M.I.A. and on the lamb or maybe in jail. We waited a week or so to see if he’d come and claim it, he never did. Needless to say the next month me and my roommates spent most of our time in outer space.

I’m not sure what ever happened to him. I’ve thought about it occasionally. He’d been using since he was twelve. He already looked like an old man when I knew him.

I would doubt he’s still alive.

The unpredictable nature of youth has time going by slowly, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour. The routine of adulthood has time flying by day by day, week by week, year by year.