No apartment (part 2)

My living situation in Williamsburg was somewhat idyllic for the first 10 months. As i've described in previous blogs, S, J, and I all got along well. S wasn't quite as social as J or myself - she spent most weekends at home in her room with her boyfriend - but I'm a homebody by nature so I understood the appeal. As long as she wasn't disrupting my life in any way, she was welcome to do whatever she pleased. Even if it was weird. And involved her boyfriend hanging out at our apartment all the time in a bathrobe.

Really the only thing that bothered me about our living situation were the notes. Instead of telling us anything, S would tape up "friendly" reminders in various spots around the apartment. In the bathroom there was the "please clean out the drain after showering" and the "please hang up the mat to dry" notes, in the kitchen and living room windows there were instructions on how to lock the windows.

The drain fight is something that would always give me a good laugh. I had wavy sandy blonde hair at the time, S had long straight (dyed) black hair, while J had buzzed her head (leaving her bangs). I'll admit that probably once a month I would leave hair in the drain. I'd remember about it within 15 minutes of my shower, but by the time I went in there to take care of it, S would have already cleaned it out. (And then proceed to passive aggressively huff and puff in my direction for the next hour.) Now most people in their mid-twenties would just throw the hair away or flush it. Not S. She wanted to "teach" me a lesson. Any hair she found, she then put on display on the top of the tub, which I would promptly get rid of as soon as I saw it. Our guests didn't need to see that. The funny thing about the hair was that 99% of the time drain refuse on top of the tub it was definitely not mine. Or J's (she didn't have any hair to lose). It was black and certainly not a follicle of mine. But i wasn't about to start a war about hair. So I just took care of it and kept my mouth shut. Until S decided to kick me out of the apartment.

As I recounted in a previous entry, S decided that passive aggressive behavior should not be limited to notes - it should also be used to give roommates the boot. She took the time to independently ask me and J what our plans were for the next year, supported me in my decision to purchase a big kid bed ("because you're not moving any time soon"), and told me that she was planning on moving in with her boyfriend. What she neglected to tell me in the whole boyfriend living scenario was that I would have to be sacrificed to the craigslist gods.

Once I had suggested a friend to take her room, S realized that it was necessary to call a roommate meeting. J and I had figured out her game and it was time for everyone to sit down and talk. In the two weeks that went into finding a time for the three of us to meet, J and I had deduced the following: 1) S was kicking one of us out so that her boyfriend could move in; 2) My room was the obvious choice for her as her boyfriend needed the smaller room to store his stuff; 3) Neither of us wanted to live alone with S and her boyfriend.

The meeting began on friendly terms, but the niceness didn't last long. S started by saying that she and F had decided that their relationship had progressed to a level where they needed to live together. (This was shocking - especially since F stayed at our place every night, had a key, and was normally seen in our apartment wearing a bathrobe.) That being said, her and F had decided that he was going to move into our apartment. And that she was very sorry, but one of us needed to leave. And that there was no rush, but it needed to be done by August (it was June 8).

From there, the conversation went from awkward to ugly. J and I pointed out that we all had agreed to live at the apartment for at least a year. We were holding up our end of the bargain by being good roommates, but she couldn't just decide that one of us needed to leave. If her and F wanted to live together, they should find a nice little apartment SOMEWHERE ELSE instead of displacing someone. Also, neither of us had agreed to living with a couple, and to do that means that the single person is always going to be the odd person out in any discussion. Finally, we pointed out that it wasn't her apartment to kick us out, even if she had been rearranging the furniture and leaving us notes everywhere. In the end, I just didn't have it in me to fight. I said I'd move out ASAP. S had created a hostile living situation and I didn't want to be a part of it. I'd be out definitely by August, but maybe even July.

This entire dialogue was also probably transcribed by F, who was "hanging out" in S' room during this whole conversation. I really wish he would have transcribed it. Then we would have evidence that I said July. And that S said this was fine. As it happened, I found an apartment no less than two weeks later. No one was home when I got back to my place. There was no way of knowing when we all would be in the same room - especially since we all had been avoiding each other. I wrote up a nice email to both J and S, letting them know that I had found a place and my stuff would be all out of the apartment by July 1. I'd take care of canceling the cable, leave my share for the utilities in June, and just needed to know the protocol on how we would need to proceed on getting my security deposit back. It KILLED me to write that letter. I wanted to insert swear words and mean comments after every sentence, but I didn't. I probably should have, because S' response opened with the following:

"It's great that you found a place, but as per New York City housing laws/common courtesy, you must give 30 days notice before moving out of an apartment in order to receive your security deposit."

That was one of the few moments in my life where I came close to punching a wall (a la Andy in 'The Office' when Jim takes his phone and hides it in the ceiling). I decided that it was best to not write anything, just wait until I got home and talked to her about it in person. Most of this was out of maturity, but I really think part of it was that I didn't trust myself to send an email back that wouldn't be flagged by our IT department at work for the number of obscenities. Luckily, S wrote me again later that day saying that this was probably a conversation that we should have in person. Given the responses I had dreamed up and the suggestions my coworkers were providing me with, this was really a good idea.

That night, S and I had our little chat. She opened the conversation by saying she couldn't believe I could do this to her. F was apparently still on his lease through July and she didn't understand how I didn't think about this when setting up a new place to live. I countered with pointing out that I had told her July was a possibility, and that I needed to do whatever was necessary to get out of the apartment and be in a good place before she kicked my butt to the curb. It wasn't my concern that F didn't have his stuff ready - they should have thought of that before they kicked people out - plus all I wanted was my security deposit back. I was not willing to pay for his stuff to occupy my room for a month. S told me I was being unreasonable and that I couldn't imagine how it felt to get an email saying that someone was moving out without giving proper notice. I was being inconsiderate to others.

I had held myself together well and was polite until that second. The rest of our conversation went somewhat like this:

Me: "Yeah, I have a good idea how that feels. It feels a ^%&^% lot nicer than when your roommate tells you she's kicking you out so that her boyfriend's band equipment can have a room."
S: "You know F has to be by the L train so he can go to band practice"
Me: "F is a big boy. He could transfer trains if he had to like the rest of us do for our jobs. It's not even about the money anymore. You can have it. Fine. I'll pay for F to keep his guitar in my room for a month. All I'm saying is that if anyone is being inconsiderate in this situation it's you. All I'd like at this point is for you to acknowledge that you are the one being discourteous. I cannot even FATHOM how I ended up the bad guy in this. That i'm the one not upholding COMMON COURTESY. I hope you and F have a wonderful, boring life together in your little apartment."

That marked the one and only time in my life where i've actually told someone off. I packed up my things the following week and left that place as soon as I could move into my new one. The day I moved out, F was already moving his stuff in. He didn't even wait until I was gone.

The moral of this story is to stick with amateur burlesque show winners/tap dancing kazoo players like J. Those are the roommates that remain friends for life. (Making sure that you're on a lease is a close second in the morals department.) The S' of the world end up sharing a tiny apartment with their boyfriends and wearing bathrobes all day. J told me after I moved out that I missed an unfortunate incident where F accidentally flashed her due to a wardrobe malfunction. I'm glad I got out when I did.