Momentarily, the squishing stopped, and I heard the tapping of his finger on the volume key as he lowered the sound of the moaning video. There was silence, and I stirred again, just to say, “Yep. I am totally awake. Let’s just everybody put their penises away, and we can get on with pretending this never happened.”
The silence lasted, and I let out a sigh that we’d solved the problem swiftly and amicably, with no seed being needlessly spilt.
But the silence lasted only twenty seconds. There came again the “tap, tap, tap” of the volume returned to its previous level, the moans resumed breathlessly from his headphones, and the accompanying “squish, squish, squish” carried on with renewed vigor.
“OH MY GOD,” I screamed in my head. “NOW WHAT?”
Still determined to solve this without having to actually acknowledge that I’d been awake this whole time, I took drastic action. I started to roll over. Until then, I’d been steadfastly facing the wall, giving Troy all the privacy of my turned back. But surely if I turned to face him, even with my eyes still closed, he’d have to stop. No man in his right mind would take that kind of risk.
And so I rolled, more dramatically than I normally would, grumbling and fumbling like an old man looking for the glasses atop his head, coughing for extra measure to indicate full alertness. When I finally landed on my other side, facing Troy’s direction, I noticed he’d stopped yet again. Frozen, I imagined, like a deer in the glow of his laptop.
For five whole minutes, there was nothing but the sound of the whirring computer fan and the occasional click of his touchpad. Glorious silence. I started to focus on falling asleep, wondering how I’d recount this story at breakfast tomorrow.
But sure enough, the subtle moans rang out again, and the “squish, squish, squish” continued, now more strenuously than before, like he was rushing to get it over with, angry at having been interrupted.
Finally, I rolled onto my back and stretched out my arms above me, letting out an obnoxious yawn, like I was stirring myself from a particularly good dream but wasn’t quite awake. This had to end, but I still refused to acknowledge that I was fully awake, intent as I was on avoiding the awkwardness as much as possible. And so I leaned forward, pretending to be half-asleep, and reached into the mini-fridge for a bottle of water, which I opened and chugged unpleasantly. If convincing him I was awake wasn’t enough, I figured, maybe my slobbering would kill his libido entirely.
Meanwhile, Troy had shifted his pillows to obstruct his exposed lap, and the squishing had abated. I maintained the pretense of being half-asleep, fully vertical in bed with the bottle of water still dripping on my lap, but my eyes still closed. I made an exaggerated effort to reach for my cell phone and lay back down, facing the wall, with my phone illuminated against my face. There would be no mistaking now that I was awake.
Defeated, I heard Troy shift on his sheets, pulling his boxers back up, and then the sound of him stumbling toward the door and down to the bathroom, presumably to complete whatever business he had to attend to.
Vindicated, I turned off my phone. And in beautiful silence, I was able to finally fall asleep.
In the days that followed, Troy gave off very little indication that he knew what had happened, or at least managed to convince himself he’d been stealthier than he had been. Though, of course, I wouldn’t expect him to walk in and say, “Hey, that was crazy last night, wasn’t it?!” But it would’ve been nice to detect at least a hint of shame in place of his typical bravado.
I didn’t hesitate repeating the story to my friends the next morning: the Almighty Ladies’ Man, Troy, staggering home on a Friday night, drunk and dejected, vigorously massaging his neglected manhood. I happily admitted to being the unwitting dope in this story, if only to expose Troy and his shameless semi-public masturbating.
• • •
One afternoon, not long after The Night of the Incident, Troy stopped me in our room. A rare moment of communication.
“My parents are coming this weekend,” he said. “They want to take us out to brunch.”
It wasn’t a question, more a delivery of an uncomfortable fact that neither of us wanted to hear, like announcing that a nearby nuclear plant just exploded.
“Oh,” I said back, and then, without thinking, “Um. Sure. I’ll be around.”
Goddammit. Why, in this moment, I didn’t think to come up with an excuse—literally any excuse—is beyond me. This is what I do. I panic. I say yes to things. I can’t say no, especially not to food. What was I supposed to do now? I considered driving my bike into traffic just for a believable pardon.
“Oh, OK. Cool,” Troy said. I could tell he was thinking the same thing. I wasn’t supposed to say yes. He was just delivering the message, one I’m sure his parents forced him to deliver. Either that, or all of his other friends were too obnoxiously fratty to bring around, and I was simply the safest option. As far as they knew, I was Troy’s only friend.
When the weekend came, we walked silently to the only brunch place in town, where his parents were waiting. They were just as serious-looking as the first time I’d met them, on move-in day nearly a year ago. Stern and intellectual. Both doctors.
The entire meal, Troy barely spoke more than a few sentences, lifting his eyes from his plate only to stick his knife in the cup of butter or to take a sip of orange juice. It felt like we’d all just gone to the same funeral.
“So, I’m gonna have to be the one who turns this meal around,” I thought. “Just like I fix everything in this relationship.”
For the rest of the meal, I spoke to Troy’s parents as if they were my own, regaling them with stories of our inseparable friendship, the nights we spent keeping one another awake, watching movies, and comforting ourselves to sleep.
What can I say? I know how to work for a free meal.
• • •
A month later, as the school year was coming to an end, and my time with Troy was finally almost over, I had my own moment of drunken weakness.
By then, I’d been selected as the dorm historian, a meaningless role that had only one responsibility: writing the dorm newsletter. Except the newsletter wasn’t actually a newsletter, but an Onion-like page of satire taped to the back of the dorm’s bathroom stalls. A dumb piece of potty-time entertainment that fell to me.
For the last issue, I drank perhaps a few too many sips of cheap boxed wine while I was writing, and concocted a list, cleverly titled, “Things Not to Do While Your Roommate Is Sleeping.” In my defense, for the most part, the list was entirely innocent. At least 90 percent of it had absolutely nothing to do with Troy. Things like “Don’t eat a bag full of cured salamis and cheeses” and “Don’t perform maintenance on your personal pubic hedges, no matter how aggressively your freakishly pubescent body parts have begun to shed their fur.” And of course, being the drunk asshole that I can be, I added as a final touch, and in caps for unmistakable emphasis: “And most important, DON’T MASTURBATE WHILE YOU THINK YOUR ROOMMATE IS SLEEPING. TROY, I’M TALKING TO YOU. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID.”
Save. Print forty copies. Tape to the back of forty bathroom stalls. Wait to be murdered.
Now, before you write me off as a terrible asshole who broke some kind of deep, unspoken code about never tattling on your midnight-masturbating roommate, it was ostensibly a newsletter full of satire! At the very worst, everybody should’ve assumed I was making a horrible joke, except for all of the people I’d told the truth, which included basically everybody.
Regardless, Troy never mentioned it, either because he never shit in our dorm, or because he pretended, as always, he was too cool to care.
In any case, Troy was the last man I ever (reluctantly) shared a bedroom with. And I hope this story stands as a warning to any man who may consider sharing a bedroom with me in the future: Let it be known that this is my territory. What happens here is in my control.
And if you try to secretly masturbate behind my back, I will tell everybody we know that it happened.
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ON LIVING ALONE IN NEW YORK CITY
There’s a point in the process of searching for an apartment in New York City, perhaps when you’re standing in a paper-bag-turned-bedroom, staring at a toilet beneath a kitchen sink next to an icebox plugged into a power strip that’s dangling from a hole in the wall, when you start to wonder if death might truly be the answer. A coffin costs less for the same square footage, after all. It’s got hardwood finishing, with bedding and draperies already installed, no year-end rent increases, no neighbors to complain that the TV is too loud, a solid foundation, and most important, no roommates to judge you for decaying in the same spot all weekend. It’s really the perfect arrangement, all things considered.
But a coffin isn’t always the answer, which is how I found myself, like millions of would-be New Yorkers every year, in search of a place my living, breathing body could occupy for less than the cost of sacrificing my firstborn. (Though, to be fair, I’d gladly sell my unborn children to a labor camp in exchange for a two-bedroom Greenwich Village loft with a washer and dryer.)
I first moved to New York City four years ago, and by most standards, my first apartment—in the deep Brooklyn neighborhood where Meryl Streep’s character lived in that movie where she kills one of her kids—was an absolute mansion. I had a bedroom that fit both a mattress and pillows, a bathroom with a mirror, and a kitchen with a window. The neighbors I shared a wall with only had vigorous animal sex once in three years, as far as I could hear. And I found only one or two cockroaches, near the refrigerator, but they were both already dead, so that basically doesn’t even count. Any apartment in New York with a mirror, a window, and a mysterious air for killing cockroaches is luxury living.
Of course, like many New Yorkers, I had a roommate: a former college classmate named Lindsey who is too pure for this world, and certainly too pure for the havoc I wrought upon our bathroom and kitchen. For three shared years, Lindsey generously cleaned our common spaces every week with no help from me. Which I justified by reasoning that she actually must really enjoy cleaning—and she did, I could see it in her eyes—but the truth is, I was lazy and she wasn’t, and every time I said I would get around to cleaning the toilet, she would rightfully call my bluff and clean the damn thing herself. Besides, I barely left my bedroom or made our apartment feel like anything more than a hole that I hibernated in when I wasn’t out getting drunk.
I was an awful roommate and an even worse person, but Lindsey never called me out on it. She just channeled her disapproval into cleaning the toilet and letting the shiny spotless porcelain bowl speak for itself. The guilt I felt for imposing my monstrous lifestyle on someone as genuine and gentle as her was too much to bear. I ended our three years of shared mansion living and began my search for a private nest I could destroy guiltlessly on my own.
There are a lot of factors to consider when trying to find a new apartment, especially if you, like me, spend twenty-three hours a day decomposing indoors. Your apartment walls have to contain your sounds and smells, your door must be thick enough to ensure any potential callers always assume you’re not at home, and your neighbors must be of the kind that are prepared to see a specimen like yourself emerge Gollum-like once daily to retrieve carbohydrates and alcohol.
Finding an apartment means you have to find the answers to a laundry list of questions that at first seem entirely unimportant, but prove to be the most important questions of all. Like: How cute are the local Starbucks baristas? Can you imagine yourself carrying out a sordid love affair with the tallest, handsomest one, communicated only through messages drawn in cappuccino foam atop your daily lattes? Will he find you the day you decide to move away and tell you that he wants you to stay—no, he needs you to stay—because he can’t imagine his life without you, can’t imagine what his days would be like without your smile walking through those doors every morning?
These are the types of questions they don’t tell you to ask. But they matter.
Also: How shirtless is the local running community? How often does the Italian family who lives next door use an entire head of garlic to make marinara sauce for breakfast? Do the tenants who live directly above your prospective unit own an elephant or other large elephant-like animal with diabetes, causing it to roam across the hardwood floors multiple times a night to relieve its diseased elephant-sized bladder? And perhaps most important, what size towel do the neighborhood bachelors use to wrap themselves post-shower, and how thin are their bedroom curtains?
Armed with the right questions, I tried at first to find an apartment on my own. If I was gonna strike out on my own, I figured, I should really go for it. Brokers, after all, are a sleazy breed of human who don’t give a shit whether you live or die. They’ll gladly sell your dream apartment to the couple waiting behind you with their IKEA bed frame at the ready, prepared to swoop in and claim the room you planned to masturbate in for their own perverted pursuits, like having sex with each other at the same time. Like monsters.
But you realize how quickly and drastically you’re willing to drop your standards when you try anything on your own. Poring through Craigslist, I found only one listing in my price range, albeit one I found virtually impossible to refuse. It was a luxury downtown loft, furnished to perfection, and completely free. The only catch: in exchange for free room and board, the man listing the apartment demanded to spoon-feed his tenant three meals per day.
“Look,” I told my parents, “it’s got exposed brick walls, stainless steel appliances, a Whirlpool bathroom, and it’s all for free. And it comes with three meals every single day, and I won’t even have to feed myself. I’ll never have to worry about going hungry again.”
But that day, some guy got killed by some other guy because they met on Craigslist, or something equally violent and tragic, and of course, that was the one night my parents decided to watch the news. And then suddenly everyone on Craigslist offering a free apartment in exchange for spoon-feeding their tenant three meals a day must be a killer.
I tried telling them everyone in New York City is a potential murderer. I mean, that’s sort of this city’s deal. Lindsey probably tried killing me in my sleep plenty of times, and I survived living with her for three whole years. What’s a guy with a spoon fetish gonna do? Feed me to death?
But I was forced to relent. I abandoned both my hopes for a generous apartment sugar daddy and the prospect of successfully finding an apartment alone.
So I hired a broker named Pam recommended by a friend. Pam was an older, oversized woman, in her sixties, who moved like she was running away from a very small, very sluggish axe murderer, which is to say, she barely moved at all, but in a very urgent way. She took deep breaths in the middle of her sentences, and spoke cautiously, like someone was listening to our conversation. Her attention was always half-focused on what was happening around us, and so she never quite seemed to notice what I was saying.
“I thought you were supposed to be a girl” was the first thing she said to me, outside the building where we’d planned to meet.
“Oh. Um. No? I’m a dude,” I said. I’d texted her I was “Arielle’s friend Matt, and I’m looking for an apartment,” but I realize now I might not have been clear enough. “Is that . . . gonna be a problem?” I asked her then.
She shrugged her shoulders and heaved herself inside anyway. I followed along, uncertain. We climbed into the elevator together.
“You’re the first one to see this apartment,” she huffed. “The landlord didn’t get me the keys until today. A piece of work, he is.” She turned to me and made sly eye contact. “The kind of guy who beats his wife, ya know?”
I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I mean, what the fuck are you supposed to say to something like that? The “kind of guy” who beats his wife? Does he beat his wife or not, Pamela? If he does, why are you so casual about this? If he doesn’t, what the fuck are you talking about? I looked at the ground. “Oh. Uh. OK. That’s . . . that’s something.”
We didn’t s
ay anything else. The elevator doors opened, and Pam led me twenty feet down the hallway to the apartment. She burst through the door and collapsed immediately onto the closest piece of furniture she could find, out of breath from the taxing elevator ride and stroll. Granted, we were on the eighth floor, and it’s possible the high altitude was harsh on her feeble lungs. “Make yourself useful and turn on the air conditioner,” she barked.
I did as she asked, and left her to defrost while I reviewed the apartment, though there wasn’t much to review. It was a one-room studio, big enough to fit a small bed, a couch, and a dying old woman without feeling too crowded. There was a tiny bathroom and a kitchenette, and two windows that faced a solid brick wall, so nobody could see in or out.
Pam’s phone rang and she answered. She spoke to the other person for five minutes, hung up, and turned to me. “One of my friends just died.” Breath. “He was like a mentor to me.” Breath. “Anyway, you want this apartment or not?”
I paused for a second. I looked around for hidden cameras. And then I told Pam no, I wasn’t interested in this beautiful litter box of an apartment, but maybe the next one, and also are you sure your blood pressure isn’t dangerously low today, because that’s the only fucking explanation I can fathom for a woman behaving as strangely as you are, except I didn’t say any of that because I’m too polite, I just said, “No, thank you, ma’am. Now please can we go before you murder me?” And then we left.
The next day I got too drunk at a bar, probably because it had been forty-eight whole hours since I’d started looking for an apartment, and I hadn’t found one yet, and I was ready to die. I was slumped at a table, my friend Jennifer standing fifteen feet away at the bar.
Everything Is Awful Page 16