Our friend Jeremy recently blogged about his 18 months living in our house while Elysia was stationed in Norfolk. He remains grateful that he was not kicked out for setting a kitchen towel on fire his first weekend in the house when I returned home to find all of the windows open.
Little does he know how low my standards were for roommates.
You can’t do any better than that, Jeremy? You call that a fire?
New York City has to be the ultimate test of how much you can tolerate in order to live there. During eleven years I lived in seven different apartments and had fourteen different roommates. But while I have my share of stories, in New York City you always hear of a greater horror when you compare notes with other people.
Your problems are trivial when your friend describes the screaming in the hallway and the blood she found smeared on walls going down several flights of stairs. Or the co-worker who came home to find that his neighbor had been keeping a woman chained in a closet.
And then there was the guy in the East Village who made soup out of his girlfriend and served it to his friends. Fortunately I had no connection to that one but undoubtedly many New Yorkers took a second look at their roommate that week. And wondered when the newly vacated unit would be cleaned and available. Or even just available.
Compared to that I just knew some eccentrics. I lived briefly with a British woman who had a nice apartment and was fairly normal until she lost her job. She then spent every waking moment watching movies in the living room. I like movies, but she would only watch Westerns. She would rent six John Wayne movies at a time and the Indians would circle the cowboys from 9am until 3am.
Woo-woo-woo-woo-woo!
After many weeks she ultimately moved back to England and sub-leased the apartment to a friend. I was included with the apartment like furniture and met my new roommate after she moved in. Awkward.
In Brooklyn I looked for a roommate with a job but asked too few questions. I found myself sharing my apartment with someone who made a living buying and selling museum-quality chinese snuff bottles. All kept in a briefcase, about fifteen of them worth tens of thousands of dollars apiece.
It was a risky venture where he would buy a bottle at a prestigious auction house and then try to quickly sell it on the other side of the world before the invoice was due. Or at least that was my impression. Years later I did an online search and found out that he was caught stealing two bottles from a university collection and was convicted. I am now fairly certain that the first bottle was stolen while he lived with me.
I am not sure why we decided to part ways but I do remember the 11 empty bookcases he left. A city of skyscrapers in the living room, galley kitchen and bathroom of my 450 square foot fifth-floor walk-up. Had the FBI contacted me I would not have been able to do much but gripe about carrying the bookcases to the curb.
In contrast, when Elysia moved back and Jeremy moved out, he only left behind some insect repellent.
How mundane.
One Response to “The Low Standards of Jeremy”
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I wouldn’t have been very good in soup.