Real World: One Way Ticket to Rock Bottom

This week’s previously is all about Jimmeh’s abusive relationship.  Brace yourselves, Gasmii: this episode is a full-on, hardcore after school special.  They’ll be able to show it in high school health classes when the VHS tapes of old Lifetime movies get worn out.  Abuse is bad kiddies, and it must be dealt with by going to therapy.  I’m sure this is news to all of you.

Man, MTV had no idea they would end up with this much golden material when they cast Jimmeh, did they?  It seems like she didn’t even use it to get on the show, it wasn’t even in the trailers.  I didn’t see it coming, then she told Meathead about it and now it’s one of the biggest parts of the season!  But enough about that, let’s get to it…

Jimmeh is schwasted.  Naked, crying, falling down, breaking shit, incoherent, out-and-out wasted.  Basically, the girl is on the verge of out-Tonyaing Tonya.  And then the editors of the Real World borrow a page from One Tree Hills’s book (Ummm… let’s pretend I didn’t just admit that I’ve been watching One Tree Hill for SEVEN YEARS AND COUNTING):

The process of watching the events of these 10 hours will be so very enriched now that we know where they are leading!

One fateful St. Patrick’s Day (we know this is St. Patrick’s Day because it flashes on the screen- we never could have figured it out by the green wardrobes and various other clues), in a house in NOLA, a telephone rings.  Little does it know the terrible fate that awaits it (in approximately 10 hours).  Oh, oops- spoiler alert!  Anyway, the poor, unsuspecting phone tingles away until it finally awakens one of its undoubtedly hungover masters from a deep slumber. Preston answers the phone- let’s call him Alex, after Alexander Graham Bell- and is greeted with a slurring friend of Meathead who insists that Preston “wake his ass up.”  Preston wisely chooses to hang up on him.

Neither Preston nor Alex appreciate a drunken idiot slurring orders at them this early in the damn morning.

Jimmeh tells us she is in a dark emotional place right now.  She remembers the day the abuse started and everything else about it, but she bottles it in and doesn’t let it go.  She says you need to be ready to talk about something like this before you can do it, and she isn’t ready yet.

Meathead’s goal for the day is to pee green.  Gotta love a man with goals.  Apparently this is an annual thing for him, as well as his slurry friend from this morning.

Preston pipes up to fill Meathead in on the early morning wake up call.  It seems Meathead’s friends from home have been up since 4 AM.  Wow, that is just plain inhuman.  Meathead hypothesizes that they are probably all passed out by now.

Starfish walks in an suggests they get clover tattoos.  Meathead enthusastically suggests they get them on their asses, and when Starfish declines he wonders where she would prefer to get the tattoo she was clearly never going to get in the first place.

The roommates all pile into the car, some dressed up in green and others dressed down.  We learn that Hair has a random boner and Starfish is apparently 100% Irish.  Not sure if that’s every day or only on St. Patty’s.  Oh wait, she’s got “a little Guatemalan” in her.  Well, if she means that in terms of her ancestry, then she is not 100% Irish.  If she means that in any other terms, I don’t need to know.

Meanwhile, Hair contemplates changing his name to “Little Guatemalan.”

They reach their destination and Meathead, Jimmeh, Starfish, Eyes, and Preston join the block party already in progress.  At first I thought Lips, Ruthie Jr., and Hair were being super lame, but we’ll soon find out that is not the case.  Much drinking and revelry commences.

It turns out the roommates that I thought were lame are actually going to the soup kitchen to feed the homeless, so it turns out they’re just the three with some semblence of responsibility and compassion.  Loretta is appalled when she learns that the rest of the roomies are out drinking instead of there helping.  Unfortunately, she’s been too busy being a part of the real world to keep up with the typical behavior of the Real World.  She wants to know where their priorities are.  I’m just surprised Hair showed up, since the soup kitchen does not do hair.  His skills are of no more use here than they would be building a house.

At the bar, Jimmeh and Meathead have lost Starfish.  The others are nowhere to be seen either, but Jimmeh is only concerned about Starfish, who has apparently been alone for half an hour already.  Damn, she could have found a dozen creeps by now easily.

I found her!  Finding drunk people dressed in green on St. Patrick’s Day would be the best real life “Where’s Waldo?” game EVER!

What do you know?  Jimmeh’s drinking!  I did not see that one coming at all.  Oh, and Starfish wanders off with some guy.  I’d be worried, but he’s only like a 1 out of 5 on the Scale of Starfish Creepers.  It’s out of 5 because that’s how many appendages starfish have.

Jimmeh tells Meathead he’s allowed to sleep with other girls.  He says he hasn’t, but he wants to.  She repeats that it’s ok, and then I think he says he wants to have sex with Jimmeh tonight.  Except that we know from the beginning of the episode that there is NO WAY he will want to hook up with her in less than 10 hours.

Hair goes out behind the soup kitchen, where poor Loretta is trying to take a well-deserved break, to make up some bullshit story about a fire in the kitchen.  He is so totally that asshole who says “bomb” on an airplane.  Turns out there was a small fire on the stove that has already been extinguished.  And just when I’m telling Loretta to smack him, she totally does!  She’s my new hero!  I mean it’s nice of her to feed the homeless and all, but smacking Hair is also important for society, and it’s about time someone took up the cause.

Can you smell what the Loretta is cooking?!?!

Well, we’re clearly almost at 10 Hours Later, because Meathead and Jimmeh arrive back at the house and her cab exiting strategy is as follows:

I’ll bet she thinks she’s upright and the cups are upside down.

As you can probably imagine, the stairs are nearly an insurmountable obstacle.  Meathead is beyond amused and cannot stop laughing.  Jimmeh somehow makes it inside and slams the front door, and then…. the phone rings once again.  Poor unsuspecting Alex, just trying to do his job.

Jimmeh answers the phone, and it’s a drunk guy asking for Meathead.  It may or may not be the same one as before.  And then, poor Alex suffers a tragic fate.

Much like Humpty Dumpty, the roommates could not seem to put Alex back together again.

Alex lies on the floor pondering where his life went wrong.  Maybe things would have been better for him if he had been shaped like poultry, like the duck phone on Jersey Shore.  I mean sure, this isn’t the greatest gig, but maybe one day he’d be able to work his way up to a plum movie role like the hamburger phone in Juno.  Landlines like him are a dying breed; he’s just trying to make a living.  Is that so bad?

Meathead tries to put Jimmeh to bed, and tells us she went from being good, okay drunk to… lying on the shower floor with the water on, crying.  Meathead tries to help her but she tells him to leave her alone.

Meanwhile, back at the soup kitchen, Hair is hovering over one of the homeless people trying to eat dinner, asking if he can talk to him.  Because that’s not annoying or creepy at all.  The guy says they can talk after he, you know, eats his food.

They go outside and Hair explains that the reason for his fascination is the fact that they are close in age.  The guy says life is hard because he didn’t have a father, and he sleeps in the tent behind the kitchen.  He says it’s only temporary, and Hair asks him where he sees himself in five years.  What is this, a job interview?  The guy says he hopes to get a job, and he was going to join the military but he only has a GED and the military won’t accept that.  Hair says he also has a GED.  I’ll bet that fool was homeschooled.  At least it would explain SOME of his social awkwardness.

On the way back to the house the topic of religion comes up.  Lips says she’s Catholic, so she should go to church a lot, but she doesn’t.  Ruthie Jr. is Muslim, and tries to explain the difference between mosque and church to Hair.

Back at the house, Lips and Ruthie Jr. see what a mess Jimmeh is and start to worry.  Meathead tries to put her to bed, and she keeps crying, saying she wants to go home and she’s terrified of him.  Lips says something mental is going on with Jimmeh because Lips doesn’t act like that when she’s drunk.

Meanwhile, Ruthie Jr. and Hair attempt to operate on poor Alex.  Hair tries to take charge, saying he used to work for a phone company, but when Ruthie Jr. lets him take over, he looks at it and says “Oh, it’s like really broken.”  He attempts to perform surgery on Alex anyway.

If Hair were a doctor on Grey’s Anatomy, he would be McWhiny.

Meathead tells Lips he’s going to leave the house for a while, as Jimmeh wanders around naked, wrapped in a comforter.  Hair is grossed out when he sees her vagina tattoo.  I know, I know, girls are icky and have cooties.  He tells Meathead how grossed out he is, while Jimmeh has moved on to throwing stuff around the house.  Meathead invites Hair to hide in the closet with him.

Ruthie Jr. and Lips start yelling at Jimmeh to calm down, but she is clearly beyond help at the moment.  She suddenly wonders where Starfish is.  She’s still out with that guy, of course.  He tells her she’s cute, they kiss and get in a cab.  Again, I know he’s a random, so Stranger Danger and all that stuff, but I maintain he is nowhere near the creepiest guy she’s picked up, and she does not appear to be in blackout mode, so I’m not too worried.

Meanwhile, in what is perhaps Jimmeh’s most shocking move of the night, she actually decides to put clothes ON.  She declares she is going to the airport, and walks out of the house and down the street.  Lips is concerned, but Hair decides that she is walking in the direction of Mississippi, so she’s going the right way to get home.  Lips chases her down the street, despite the fact that she is not wearing pants, telling her she’s going to get hit by a car.  Jimmeh plants herself on a random stoop, and at this point Ruthie Jr. has caught up to them.  She grabs Jimmeh by the face and tells her she needs to come home with them, and Jimmeh says she wants to go “home home” as in Mississippi.  Eyes is there now too, and picks her up and carries her back to the house.  He asks how much she has had to drink.

At this point I’d estimate about half the Mississippi River.

Eyes puts Jimmeh in her bed, while Lips and Ruthie Jr. ponder their lost night of drinking.  They hear Jimmeh, who has made her way to the piano and started playing.

And the piano sounds like a carnival, and the microphone smells like a beer…

They feel bad for Meathead, since he’s the only one she’ll listen to.  Ruthie Jr. declares that their house is falling apart, though, to be fair, Jimmeh’s kind of tearing apart.  And it all started with poor Alex…

Meathead comes home but stays in the front yard because he doesn’t want to go in.  Ruthie Jr. locks the front gate to keep Jimmeh in because she’s insane.  Meathead is sad that his buzz has been so effectively killed that he didn’t even pee green.

He comes inside and asks Jimmeh what she did when he sees the trashed house.  She says she doesn’t remember anything after taking shots at the bar.  He tells her she went from being a fun drunk to being belligerent, and he couldn’t even get her off of the floor.  He says she holds her issues in and then explodes.  She says she doesn’t like thinking about it and therefore doesn’t until she gets drunk.  He says she needs to deal with life head on because tonight she hit rock bottom.  Yeah, she really did.  She hit rock bottom at full speed.  She says last St. Patrick’s Day was the last time she was abused, and she still hasn’t dealt with it and gotten over it.  He tells her she needs to deal with it because things don’t just go away.  He tells her she needs to deal with it, and she needs to do it on her own.  He wishes he wasn’t addicted to pain pills, but he was and he had to deal with that.  Now it’s her turn.  It doesn’t make her less of a person, everyone has their demons.  She whispers to him that she can’t do it without him.

Starfish arrives home with her random guy of the week in tow.  He introduces himself to the roommates, and Starfish wanders to the phone to call a cab even though they allegedly JUST GOT OUT OF ONE.  Starfish seems drunker as she wonders if it’s “really 100% broken,” even though she demonstrated earlier that she does not understand the concept of 100%.

Since they can’t call a cab, Starfish decides the answer is to make out with the guy in every room of the house.  After that, he does leave, and Lips tells Starfish that this guy, who was named Grant, was “granting her a little tongue.”

Also, granting her pocket with a pool cue; this is how good girls play billiards.

Jimmeh is shivering as she climbs into Meathead’s bed without him.  Lips covers her with several blankets.  She thinks she died tonight, but Lips assures her she did not.It turns out Ruthie Jr. is friggen Macgyver or something because she fixes Alex!  She calls herself Bob the Builder, but I’m sticking with Macgyver.

Either way, I’m just glad someone gave Alex the TLC he deserves.

Hair asks Meathead where he’s sleeping tonight, but he’s not sure.  He feels bad, but some of the stuff she said weirded him out.  Meathead says she’ll be sleeping with Hair soon, and he literally chokes on the thought of icky girl cooties in his bed.  Just to clarify, that’s not a gay joke, it’s a “Hair has the mental maturity of a five year old” joke.

Ruthie Jr. recaps the night for Preston, who missed everything.  He is surprised to learn that she cried for an hour and ran down the street twice.  They also talk about Starfish creepin and bringing a creep home.  She wishes him a Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

I’m going to assume this sunrise means that it is no longer St. Patrick’s Day.  I’m also going to assume the roommates are relieved it’s over.

Lips is emailing her mother to explain why she couldn’t call the house, while Preston declares that Jimmeh needs to get some help and deal with her issues.  Starfish wakes up and joins them, commenting on surviving St. Patrick’s Day.  Meathead says he almost didn’t, and I’m pretty sure Starfish still has no idea what the hell happened while she was creepin.  She asks Lips if she was making out with Grant “fun, cute or like sexually.”  Lips says sexually, which Starfish finds embarrassing.  Jimmeh wakes up, looking rough as expected.

Jimmeh and Starfish are at the grocery store, which strikes me as odd because do we usually see Real Worlders go food shopping?  Then we cut to them walking outside, without any groceries so I just don’t get it.  Starfish asks Jimmeh how she’s feeling about everything, if she’s embarrassed or pissed or what.  Jimmeh says it’s frustrating that she can’t remember how it started.  She says it happens when she drinks because she lets her guard down and that’s when the memories start flashing the most.  Starfish says that would make her not want to drink, but Jimmeh says even though it’s induced by the drinking it won’t go away if she stops.

Jimmeh realizes that she needs therapy, and she can’t deal with this alone or when she’s drunk.  She tells Meathead she’s going to the battered women’s shelter to talk to the woman there.  He tells her it’s a long process, but she’s taking the right steps and now she needs to talk to someone who knows about the topic, because he doesn’t.  He tells us it takes a big person to realize when help is needed.  He tells Jimmeh that being in New Orleans got him away from his friends and his addiction, and it’s giving her an opportunity to be away from “that douchebag.”  He offers to go with her to the shelter and stay outside while she talks to the woman.  Awwww, see, he’s not all bad!  I really do think he’s a good guy most of the time, and he does care about Jimmeh as a friend at least.  For what is at least the third time, we see the clip of Jimmeh telling us that Meathead walked into her life for a reason.  Damn, they’re getting a lot of mileage out of that.

The next day, before they go to the shelter, Jimmeh says she’s having second thoughts because she knows once she walks through that door, there’s no turning back.  I think she’s past the point of no return either way at this point.  Meathead tells us he knows the feeling, you’re sick to your stomach, but dealing with the past makes anyone stronger.

Are you listening, Tonya?  Jimmeh has gotten farther in two episodes than you have in eight years.

They get to the shelter and Jimmeh sits down with the woman, whose name is Dale.  Dale tells her she’s been doing this for many years, so nothing is going to shock her, and asks Jimmeh to tell the story from the beginning.  She tells Dale what happened, and Dale asks about her friends.  Jimmeh says she didn’t want her friends or her mom to think she was weak, she thought it was her fault and she could change it, and all of the other things victims of abuse always say.  Dale tells her she needs to get mad, but Jimmeh says she’s numb, which Dale says is bad.  They agree that drinking is not the answer, and Dale says she needs to get ticked off, and asks if she thinks she’s better than this.  Jimmeh nods unconvincingly.  Dale tells her even the most poised, confident women think they can’t do better.  Dale asks to see her once a week and Jimmeh agrees.  None of it is anything we haven’t all heard before a million times, but I like Jimmeh so I feel bad for her and hope this is what helps her get through everything.

On the way out, Meathead introduces himself to Dale and Jimmeh tells her he’s the first one she opened up to.  Dale says they need more men like him, and with the exception of his behavior in last week’s episode she’s right.  Meathead says he had a similar situation with the addiction, and he’s glad Jimmeh is talking to someone who can help her, just like his dad made him talk to someone who knew what to do.  Meathead is excited that Jimmeh is taking her steps, and hopes she can see it through.  She tells us there’s still pain and she still doesn’t understand a lot of what happened but she’ll keep going.

Jimmeh says her mom doesn’t know about the abuse.  She thinks it’s going to break her heart.  Oh no, I have to watch her tell Alice?!  This is going to break MY heart!  Alice wants to know why she’s telling her now, and Jimmeh says she wasn’t ready to talk about it until now.  Jimmeh says she knew Alice had a feeling because she questioned her about bruises that she had.  Alice asks why she didn’t tell her, and Jimmeh says she didn’t plan on telling anyone, but one day she opened up to Meathead.  Alice says sometimes you need to say things out loud to accept it.  She says she raised Jimmeh to be too independent and too strong.  Jimmeh tells Alice she’s going to see the woman at the shelter, and Alice’s voice is really high pitched as she says Jimmeh needs that to make sure she doesn’t get into this situation again.  Jimmeh’s crying as Starfish comes over to cuddle with her and comfort her.  Alice tells her no matter what happend in her life, Jimmeh can always come to her.  It’s all very cliche, but like I said, I like them so much that it’s also sad.

She hugs Starfish and thanks her for being there, then buries her head in Meatheads shoulder and starts sobbing.  Starfish, Lips, and Preston join and it’s a big old fashioned group hug lovefest.

I want to be a part of this group hug!

Next week:  the inevitable episode about the pain pills and Meathead’s addiction.

Well, as I said in the recap, this episode was cliche and after school special, but I do like Jimmeh and hope therapy works for her.  She seems to have a good head on her shoulders and good family and friends, so that helps.  As always, any episode with less screen time for Hair is a plus.  Do you believe more than half the roommates ditched the soup kitchen to start drinking earlier?  Are you hoping the rest of the season goes back to the fun of the first few episodes?  Are you, like me, hoping Eyes gets some more screen time ASAP?