Raising Your Roommates

It’s difficult raising your roommates. Especially when you realize that you’re just raising an earlier version of yourself—maybe even one removed by only a couple months. I’ve just moved to New York from the West Coast and was forced, due to expenses, to room with two other people. This really isn’t that uncommon in Manhattan. Even young professionals often have several housemates to save cash.

My female roommate is a very mature Italian jazz musician in her mid-thirties named Silvana. She’s clean, courteous, and employed: all of the things you could want in a roommate. On the other end of the spectrum is my male roommate Ben. Six months ago Ben left his studies as an engineer at a college in Virginia and decided that he was going to be a rock musician. Being the consummate romantic, Ben took little more than his guitar and his clothes and flew his twenty-year-old-self out to the Big Apple to be a star. There’s simultaneously something profoundly stupid and admirable about this kid leaving his comfortable home and trying something like this. I certainly couldn’t have at his age-- but then again I wouldn’t have had a mother sending me a weekly check to pay the bills.

Predictably I never really have a problem with Silvana. It’s Ben that drives me nuts on a regular basis. Before I discuss some of Ben’s little shenanigans, I just want to apologize to my parents and roommates past, because I’ve certainly had my share of “being Ben.” I honestly have no idea how people put up with me. Really. I guess Ben is just the kind of karmic kick in the nuts that I needed to reform my evil ways.

First let’s talk about the shower. Ben has this huge fro. As far as I know it’s the biggest thing about him (maybe). I only bring this up because when a person like Ben takes a shower, they know they are going to drop enough hair in the drain to clothe a naked-mole rat. It’s just common courtesy to clean the hairy nublins out of the drain afterward! Right? I think so. But does Ben clean his nasty-McNasty curlies out of the drain? Nope! If my shower follows Ben, I know with dreaded certainty that I will be fishing midget Chewbaccas out of the drain in a goopy mess that makes me want to vomit. It’s taken me years, but I finally know the pain my poor sister suffered who shared the shower back home at my parent’s place (and why she was always complaining of my wolf-man-like hairiness).

Which brings me to the cleaning. Ah the cleaning. I had no idea all these years that I was behaving like a spoiled twenty year old, but Ben’s brought this abysmally to my attention. Every Friday or Sunday, when Silvana and I pick up mops and scrub brushes, brooms and detergent and get to work, Ben can be reliably found asleep on his bed or strumming away at his guitar. When asked to help, he either wonders off or tells us “in a minute, in a minute.” It’s with this last mantra of “in a minute” that I really feel the karmic punch in the stomach, because this is exactly the type of thing that I would say to my mother or father when they tried to get me to do my chores back home. I think that it’s because of this that I don’t really press or complain about this more: I’ve had my share of laziness and now the “Tao of Mark” is coming back to haunt me. Sorry mom. Sorry dad. I realize now that raising kids is tough work.

Aside from slacking off and strummin’ his guitar, Ben has decide that he is one of the great authors of our time (in his six short months in New York). This is fine. Really. I don’t mind him writing bad poetry that laments in a pseudo-Shakespearian/romantic style the loss of his last girlfriend (“Oh how doth the withered leaves whence green torment the brown of autumn on the lovelorn life of love past”). It’s actually kind of charming in a young-and-naïve-high-school-girl sort of way. But when he sees me trying to write and comes up to give me advice, that’s where I draw the line. Big time. Especially when he directs me to his “subway poetry,” which he writes everyday on his way home from work.

“You know, Mark,” he told me after plopping down the “Poem-a-Day” book he has been reading, “I just can’t seem to find any poet or writer that I think is really good-- that really speaks to me. Do you know any writer who is witty like Oscar Wilde but modern and smart?”

“Well, there’s David Sedaris, Vonnegut, a couple columnists like…”

“No,” he cut me off with a dramatic flourish taking in the room and finishing with a clap on his super-tight emo jeans, “I’ve read them. I don’t think there’s anyone out there for me. I guess I’ll just have to be the writer I’m looking for.”

“Guess so, Ben,” I tried to ignore him and return to my writing.

Several days later, and several bad subway poems down the line, Ben excitedly announced to the world that he had, in fact, become his “new favorite author.” This was a bold claim indeed. I don’t even think that Shakespeare was his own favorite author, or that any living author could say that without being laughed off the world stage.

“But check out my new poem on the world’s destruction, posted now on my Facebook,” he urged me.

I sighed and logged in to the page to scan over a poem littered with strange archaic language mashed together with the zest of a schizophrenic hobo trained in sonnets. Tenses were misused and grammar went by the wayside, but it sounded flowery and vaguely like early modern English to someone who didn’t know any better. The main thrust of the poem was that the world was slowly falling apart with ominous signs appearing everywhere.

“It’s interesting,” I commented neutrally. “It actually kind of sounds like that poem by Yeats: The Second Coming.” I meant this comparison in the broadest way possible, like an elementary school teacher complementing a child drawing a lady with long hair and an inconclusive smile as the painter of the Mona Lisa.”

“Yeats?” he asked.

“The poet,” I responded.

“Oh, yeah, I get that a lot. Many have compared my poetry to Yeats and T.S. Elliot.”

Really, Ben? Really? Have you won a Nobel Prize, written several of the most influential poems in the English language, and know at least seven languages fluently?

I might be acting a little harshly toward Ben. I could just be taking out my own frustration as I try to find my own inspiration to write. It’s possible that Ben is an undiscovered genius that even I don’t detect. His childlike bravado and naïveté just irk the crap out of me. I might have once been this way, but life and its lessons have shown me that there are many, many talented people in this world, and it pays to be modest.

Ben also displays behavior that, in spite of my bad habits in the past, I never acquired: the mooch gene. What’s the “mooch gene”? Well, the mooch gene compels its “mooch” carrier, to beg, borrow, and plead for items on a continual basis. Right now scientists are looking for a cure for this pernicious gene, which has an early onset in adolescence. There’s even hope that with President Obama lifting the ban on stem cell research, we may see a partial cure preventing moochie girls from borrowing their roommates’ fabulous shoes and Friday night dresses by 2010—but don’t hold your breath.

Ben’s mooch gene is activated on many occasions, but particularly in the presence of ethanol. Because Ben is twenty years old, he still has trouble getting alcohol, and consequently, there’s a certain mystery about it that makes it extra “neato” to him. When Ben does get his hands on a beer, he usually drinks instantaneously, leaving him to search like a hungry animal for that mysterious “forty” that rolled behind the couch (it happens…).

I used to feel bad for the little guy. In fact, when I first moved in I was a chump for his big, brown puppy dog eyes, and when he asked for a beer, I gave it to him. His mooch gene must have become phosphorylated at this point, because his moochiness soon expressed itself, with him taking my beers from the fridge and telling me not to worry because “he’d pay me back soon.” Occasionally he does “pay me back,” but it’s never in kind, because anyone with dookie for brains will tell you that a six pack of “Heineken” is never the same as a forty of “Miller High Life”! Things have gotten so bad that I’ve taken to keeping my beers in my room, preferring to drink them warm rather than risk Ben stealing them from the fridge.

Ben’s moochiness knows no bounds, extending itself beyond beer to almost any food item that makes its way into our apartment. The other day I came home to find that Ben had used all of my pasta sauce (“sorry, bro”), and several days ago he took a couple artichoke hearts from a jar that my girlfriend had brought especially from California. The pasta sauce was annoying, but the incident with the artichoke hearts thoroughly pissed me off.

“What’s this?” I asked him, noticing that the jar of artichoke hearts had been opened and left on the counter unrefrigerated.

“Oh yeah… I needed an artichoke for my Orange Chicken. You know?”

I shook my head. No, I didn’t “know.” Artichoke hearts for Chinese food? Whatever.

“How long has this been sitting out here unrefrigerated?” I gritted my teeth.

“Ummmmm…” he strummed his discordant bass guitar, “About three days.”

“Three days?” I held my anger in check and tried to be polite. “Ben, I need you to get me a new jar of pasta sauce and another jar of artichoke hearts.”

“Why?: he frowned. “You still have a full jar of artichokes.”

“Yes, Ben,” I put the jar down on the table a little too forcefully, “but it’s bad now. You have to refrigerate these when you open them. It says it right here on the label,” I pointed to it for him.

“Ohhhhh…” he nodded vacantly and flipped through his biography of Bob Dylan. “I’m sorry.”

And I honestly believe he was. Unfortunately he’s just too absentminded to be considerate.

“Mark…?” he called to me as I turned to walk away.

“Yes…” I turned around.

“You know how you let me get that documentary of Bob Dylan through your Netflix account: ‘No Direction Home’?”

“Uh huh…” I said, feeling like a parent about to scold a bad child.

“Well, I don’t know what came over me, but I accidently ripped the return envelope for the movie into tiny pieces. I don’t think there’s any way for me to send it back, you know, unless I tape it back together or something...”

UGH! I don’t have a TV and Netflix is one of my only sources of entertainment. Unless you send in your current DVD, you don’t get another one.

“Well, I guess you should go get some scotch tape, because you’re going to need to tape that envelope up,” I told him.

He wrinkled up his nose like a truculent child and returned to strumming his bass.

God. What is Ben doing to me? I feel like a freaking parent! In fairness to Ben though, he did try to make partial amends ends earlier today—well, sort of, kind of, not really-- in his own Ben way.

“Hey Mark, you know those artichoke hearts?”

“Yes,” I perked up, expecting to hear that he had bought me a new jar.

“I know that they’ve been left out for three days, but I wanted to show you that they’re ok. So I’ve been eating them all day, and check it out! I’m perfectly fine!”

I covered my face. No comment. Really. No comment.

Maybe I don’t have to do anything after all to teach Ben a lesson. As they say, revenge is a dish best served three days old, at room temperature, and a-la-cammode.

-Mark Jordan