Introduction
Well, it’s back-to-school time, and nowhere is that more
exciting than in a college town. I rode my bike through the Berkeley campus recently
to enjoy the secondhand tension and giddiness of the new kids milling around.
In their honor, I’m running this piece from my archives about moving into my
new apartment, and getting to know my new roommate, at the dawn of my sophomore
year at UC Santa Barbara.
Enjoy please enjoy.
Moving in to my
college apartment – September 21, 1989
We’re all moved in here, pretty much. We’ve had a hell of a
time trying to get furniture. The manager is always ready to talk our ears off,
but never seems to get anything done. We had a big mix-up when T— arrived: seems
the manager thought that my brother Geoff was our third person, because he
happened to be hanging around when she came by. So when T— showed up, she tried
to get rid of him. What a mess. I’m working really hard to believe that the
manager isn’t just being racist (i.e. maybe she wouldn’t have rented to T— if
she’d known he’s black). Maybe she thinks Geoff was planted as a ruse. I still
can’t convince the manager that Geoff doesn’t have a set of house keys.
I got my new roommate at random. I was in the housing office
trying to find an apartment for T— and me, and absolutely couldn’t find a place
the two of us could afford on our own. Last year we had three guys in a
one-bedroom and it didn’t work out so well, though that was mainly because the
third guy was a jerk. Still, we wanted a bit more space ... but I finally gave
up. Thus the third roommate I now had to produce out of thin air.
I have to admit, it makes me feel like something less than a
social success to be in this position. All my friends from last year met their
future roommates in the dorms. The dorms were like the perfect dry run. Not
having lived in the dorms, I didn’t have this option, and I couldn’t predict if
any of my pals would make a good roommate. Besides, if you consider the odds of
growing to hate your roommate, it’s best to pick a mere acquaintance; that way
you don’t risk ruining a friendship.
And why didn’t I live in the dorms? Too pricey. Even the bottom-of-the-barrel,
very cheapest off-campus dorm, called Fontainebleau, cost too much (though I actually came within one
signature of committing to it before chickening out). It was $4,500 for nine
months and I was afraid to ask my parents for that kind of money. (Not afraid they’d say no, which is a
certainty, but that they’d be disgusted with me for even asking.)
Not that I’m bitter about missing the dorm experience. For
$4,500 you live in a closet (albeit a closet with two beds and two desks) and
eat recycled food. My freshman friends last year waxed eloquent on this point. The
unused French toast from breakfast is repurposed for grilled cheese sandwiches at
lunch. Quiche from today’s lunch is tomorrow’s soufflé (which, in dorm kitchen
parlance, means any unidentifiable food that is covered with a fresh layer of
cheese and re-baked). Most students like dorm food at first, because it’s not
the whole wheat, lentils, alfalfa sprouts, and ground turkey they had to eat at
home; refined flour and fat at first seem like luxuries. This gets old, so soon
the students are merely tolerating their dorm food; then they start
complaining; then they subsist on microwave popcorn and Pop-Tarts for the rest of
the school year. Me, I gotta have my own kitchen, even if it’s infested with
roaches.
My new roommate is really strange. He’s the result of my settling
for almost the first guy I could find hanging around the Community Housing
Office. It was my third visit there and I was desperate, and grabbed this greasy,
puffy, nerdy guy and said, “Dude, you can be my roommate. It’s the Penthouse
apartments on Abrego. Come sign the lease.” The guy looked really hesitant, and
just stood there humming and hawing and mumbling stupid things like “Um, I don’t
really know you,” until I was ready to punch him in the face. Standing nearby
watching, looking amused, was this really thin, pale guy with a huge curly sphere
of hair ensconcing his head. He was like this giant photo-negative dandelion. He
walked up and said, “Hey, I’ll be your roommate.” Now the first guy looked
torn, but I wasn’t about to give him a second chance—he was dead to me. The second
guy, my new roommate, is named C—. I instantly took a liking to him, and this
liking has grown over time.
C— is an art studio major, and he doesn’t own anything. I mean, he literally has no belongings other
than a big Glad bag full of his clothes. His wardrobe is about the size of my “unwearable”
collection (which I stuffed into a Huggies box that serves as a table for my
typewriter). Among his garments there’s not a shred of cotton anywhere. I think
he’s trying for the “starving artist” look. I can’t quite place the fabric ... all
weird shades, stripes, or plaids, some of them having a weird shiny sheen to
them. Maybe they’re the same material as those original Star Trek uniforms. I checked the labels: lots of Rayon and Polyester. Actually, cotton
is represented, but only as a part of
a complex hybrid involving at least two other fabrics. C—’s attire is sort of
like what a real bona-fide grownup would wear if he couldn’t afford new
clothes. Wait … could these threads be hand-me-downs from his dad? No, couldn’t
be that, because come to think of it, these clothes actually look a fair bit more
stylish than what forty-somethings would ever wear. Could it be that C—’s wardrobe
is actually cool? Hell, I don’t know.
(I mean, how would I know?)
I had to ask C— where he got his weird boots. He said he got
them from some old man and before he could wear them he had to pull out these
funky inserts that were supposed to fix up the old man’s back. Those boots look
like something out of an ancient still life oil painting, maybe of the Georgia
O’Keefe vintage. I guess that fits: an art studio major ought to look like he came right out of some weird painting. C— always wears
a pair of jeans with paint spattered all over them. He calls them “work pants.”
Except that all his pants look like
that and I don’t think he ever works. I mean, I guess he works in the sense
that painting pictures is work, but it seems like he’s having too much fun to
think of it that way. He likes to say, “I’m gonna head over to the studio and
put the hammer down.” But he says this in a laughing way that implies “as if.”
The thing is, C— could probably afford a lot fancier duds if
he wanted to—he might just have to cook once in a while instead of eating out
every meal. Okay, I’ll give him a little
credit: he went to Lucky’s the other day for a major shopping trip. Here’s what
he bought, taken right from the receipt: “deli, chnk tuna, Campl soup, clam
chowder, boysen prsvs, clam chowder, ll pnut btr, salami, mayonnaise, whp crm
chs, tomato soup, bn/bac soup, mex salsa ml, campl soup, salami, olym rnd tp,
kleenex, lettuce, non food, coke clas 6p, dr pepper.” I’m not sure what “olym
rnd tp” is … I think it’s bread. And I know what the “non food” is: Velveeta.
The Penthouse Apartments are much nicer than La Loma, where
I lived last year. I will confess that La Loma had one advantage, at least on
paper: it had a pool. That said, I never so much as dipped a toe in that pool
because on my first day I saw the neighbors giving their dog a bath in it. I
don’t know why this bothered me so much; I guess I just wondered what else that
pool was used for. It’s also the case that I never saw a single tenant swim in
it ... what did these people know? My roommates steered clear too, other than
one of them throwing up in it one night.
So, the Penthouse Apartments look pretty sharp, with their
crisp blue doors against the white exterior walls. La Loma was this uniform ghastly
green. Also, the Penthouse has regular
college-aged neighbors, instead of the blue-collar guys from last year, packed
like ten to an apartment, who seemed to despise all college kids. Not that
everybody here is a UCSB student. It turns out the guys next to us in #23 aren’t
really college students per se—they’re all here for the English Extension
program. One guy is Swiss, another Japanese, and the third Korean.
The Korean, A—, is really strange. He just cruises right
into our apartment like he owns the place, and talks our ears off while picking
up and inspecting all our belongings. On the plus side, he’s also very
generous, feeding us tasty Korean dishes his mom somehow mails to him.
(Freeze-dried, perhaps?) He also offers us free cigarettes, which we decline,
and various Kent-branded chotchkies (pens, lighters, keychains) from his dad,
who manages the Kent affiliate in Korea. A—’s English is surprisingly good,
considering that he’s only been in the U.S. for eleven days. He complains that he
doesn’t get along with his roommates very well. Apparently the Japanese guy
hardly speaks a word of English, and the Swiss guy only speaks German—that’s all
he needs, because he always has at least half a dozen other Swiss guys couch-surfing
in the apartment and “borrowing” A—’s stuff.
Whoever it was at the housing office who thought it would be
cute to put these guys together sure wasn’t thinking very clearly. As if it
weren’t hard enough for a foreigner to adjust to a new country, each of these
guys has to cope with three distinct cultures, all squeezed into that tiny
space. Shouldn’t these people live with Americans so that they can learn the
language the way we speak it? As it is, they’ll all probably reinforce each
other’s mistakes. I guess it could be worse: they could be sharing a tiny apartment
in La Loma.
Of course, the Penthouse isn’t without its problems. The door
jamb is broken so we can’t lock the front door, and the “porch” light outside
is full of water. The chandelier/fan unit in the kitchen hung too low, and I
would always bump my head on it, so I finally got pissed and took the whole
thing apart, and at least half a cup of orange water poured out. Good thing
this was before we tried turning it on. After removing the lamp part for head
clearance, we were left with these hanging wires, and theorized that when the
maintenance guy, Calvin, would try to rewire the light next year he’d have to
use trial and error, and could end up knocking out power for all of Isla Vista.
So T—, being the electrical engineering major that he is, enclosed a schematic of the wiring before putting the thing back
together.
The bathroom is really not this apartment’s best feature.
Due to routine flooding I should probably invest in waterproof shoes. Check out
the neat pattern on the sink tile. You know what that is? It’s human hair! Left
over from last year’s tenants! Preserved, like a fossil, or a scorpion’s
skeleton encased in amber! I think it’s actually set in epoxy; I’ve scoured and
scoured but I can’t get rid of it. But now that I’m satisfied that this hair
wont’ interact with me or any of my toiletries, I kind of like it. It looks kind of cool! It could actually be
decades old!
I’m not so happy about the sink itself. They gave us this
little rubber plug that we have to shove in there whenever we run the water,
whether we’re filling the sink or not, because otherwise the bathroom fills
with this terrible raw sewage smell.
The toilet pretty much works, though it does slobber a
little and of course overflows from time to time. But a real bonus is that the seat isn’t
cracked. You literally cannot cut your bottom on it. It is also attached pretty
well; it doesn’t slide around like so many cheap apartment toilet seats.
Now, we’re not so lucky with the shower and tub. The lag
time on the shower is devastating. You get the water temperature just right, then
engage the shower head, and everything’s fine, and then suddenly the water is coming
out scalding hot, it’s just blanching your flesh and you grope desperately with
the controls to cool the water before all the skin melts off your body. And
nothing changes, at least at first, and then suddenly it’s liquid nitrogen
spraying on you, and you have to hold still lest you bump into the wall of the
shower and have your arm shatter like glass. You go back and forth between
boiling and freezing until you’re too scared to continue and just decide your
shower is over. Now you find yourself standing in four inches of dirty, sudsy water,
which forms grey rings around your ankles. The drain at this point is making
sounds like a fat kid choking on a piece of chicken skin, fighting for air.
This bathtub drain seems to have a more or less infinite
amount of human hair trapped in it from probably every past student ever to
live here. Every morning I go at that drain with the plunger, and the drain
vomits up another big clump. See that thing that looks like a rat? It’s just a
big clump of hair! I haven’t thrown it out because I’m kind of hoping my
roommates will step up and do it, in the spirit of fairness, since I’m the only
one who ever plunges. I’ll admit that I’m actually just too scared to throw out
the hairball ... I mean, what if I it turned out it was a rat?
But things are coming along. We’ve actually managed to score
furniture. None of us owns any furniture at all, and in fact most UCSB students
don’t own any furniture, but the landlords play this stupid little game where
they pretend the place comes unfurnished. I guess they don’t have enough
furniture to go around, so getting anything is like horse trading. Except we
have nothing to trade, we just have to beg. Now the apartment is finally
equipped: two desks (but no dressers), five chairs (two ripped; all heinous
blue-green vinyl), three beds (none of them capable of being stacked as bunk
beds, so they take up most of the single bedroom), and yes, the pride and joy
of our furniture fleet: a sofa. That was really hard to get ... almost nobody
gets a sofa just by asking. But the manager finally took pity on us when she
saw T— sprawled out on the coffee table after eating too much. I’ll have to
remember that as a tactic for next year!
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