Once, while I was broke and lonely in New York, I lived in a strange place. Well, I've lived in plenty of weird places, almost exclusively perhaps. One usually does a few times while inhabiting this city, especially if one doesn't arrive with, and keeps, a lot of dough. Even then, maybe especially then, weirdness will ensue. But this place had a certain particularity to it.
I had left a man that summer of 2006, the one I came to New York with, and I was on my own for the first time. In the beginning of this new era, I had stayed in a Tribeca loft with three guys who were starting a ping-pong club that was just about to become super hip. I got my own room and I loved the place. The loft was huge, the ceilings were soaring, the floors were hardwood and the ambiance was one of excitement. I had brought three huge garbage bags filled with clothes, a small dog named Walter and a few books I had no time to read. I was free, happy and kind of young. It was a splendid time, until the guys lost the lease due to some bickering with the landlord and we all had to move out.
Excited to be on my own, I decided to part with my buddies and move in with a stranger on Broome Street in an apartment I had found on Craigslist.org. I wanted to live with a guy as I figured he wouldn't steal my shoes or use my clothes and I was also under some temporary impression that men are easier cohabitants than women. I might have been wrong, in this case I certainly was. Let's call this guy Juan.
Juan was a ladies man, he told me during our first meeting. He also was a banker on Wall Street who wore suits and brylcreem. He told me he chose me as his roommate ("I have interviewed 30 people") because it would be easier for the women he brought home to trust him when they saw he lived with a pretty blonde who wasn't his girlfriend. This should probably have been a red flag of sorts, but I wasn't really paying much attention to Juan. The apartment was tiny, but its location was fabulous and my room had two big windows facing a bustling Broome Street. I wanted to live there, not necessarily with Juan but I was ready to ignore most things for my new little space.
Things got weird quickly. Juan immediately showed an affinity for lining up tiny flat stones along all horizontal surfaces providing enough space for such a row in our shared living quarters. Every windowsill, each shelf, all the sinks and even the stove had a row or two of little smooth rocks serving no clear purpose. In New York, such a hobby is just silly. Nobody's apartment is big enough to waste space like that and ours was smaller than most. In disbelief, or perhaps obstinacy, I would sometimes remove one and put it somewhere else, hoping to find it replaced the next morning and thus be able to eagerly diagnose his behavior with some syndrome, but the stones were apparently fine wherever they were put. So he might not have been psychotic. I was amused by the stone rows but a little irritated. Aesthetically, appalled.
Juan, the ladies man, brought many girls home. Some stole my shoes and used my clothes. Others borrowed my makeup or kept me up at night with their drunken chatter that our thin walls couldn't protect me from even after I went to bed. My plan had gone awfully wrong, but still I was kind of happy on Broome Street. Until his intended came along in a pair of transparant heels.
She was a true hootchie, she was louder and gaudier than the rest of them, seemed displeased with everything and unsure of nothing. Suddenly she was wearing a diamond ring the size of one of his little smooth rocks. Juan had "accidentally, I swear" proposed during a drunken trip to some beach where he'd purchased said ring for $17,000 and put it on her sloppily manicured finger. They had been dating a week or so. The girl was ecstatic, Juan was petrified. Both were in my living room every night, discussing the wedding plans. At first, I was entertained by the whole affair. It seemed so ridiculous that it was almost interesting. I heard them bicker through the walls, about exactly each topic they brought up, then I heard them have sex and then I heard her snore and him pace around the living room, possibly aligning stones to calm his nerves.
He asked me to come out for a drink with him one evening after work. I indulged him because I felt sorry for him and I thought he might need someone to talk to. He was sweaty with anxiety, finishing three drinks while I was sipping one, saying over and over he couldn't marry the girl but couldn't afford to leave her without getting the ring back. I nodded at this conundrum. He, perhaps mistaking my nods for some kind of approval, asked me to help him somehow remove the ring from his fiancée's finger so he could break up with her for losing it and sell the ring.
"But how," I asked, "would I remove it?"
"Just maybe ask to try it on and then leave to go to the store? Say you forgot it you had it on and then you got robbed?"
I moved out pretty soon after that conversation, six months after I moved in. I wonder what happened. I wish I could remember his name, I'd befriend him on Facebook in a heartbeat out of curiousity.
Isn't that strange, to have lived with someone whose name you can't recall? Only in New York.
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