Ahhhh…
(pours drink…lights cigarette…)
OK, well, way back in my freshman year of college, this guy lived down the hall from me. I actually went to high school with him, but I never really knew him then. I only started to get to know him when I was in college. Me and my friends would hang out all the time, and this guy (let’s call him “Johnny”) would kind of tag along with us. He was weird, and gangly, and always mooched weed or food off of us, but he was relatively benign and we let him hang out with us.
The next year, I lived in the same dorm, except in a double-single (i.e. a double, but I had the whole room to myself.) Johnny also lived down the hall, again. Me and my friends, again, would hang out, and Johnny would again tag along with us. I really didn’t mind him, and considered him to be one of my friends. (Later that year, a girl who lived in that dorm would tell me that she once walked by Johnny’s room – which he shared with a roommate – and the door was ajar and she looked in there and saw Johnny laying on his roommate’s bed and masturbating. Yes, not his own bed, but his roommate’s.) This is when I started to be a little suspicious of the guy.
My friend Nate and I wanted to move into a house the year after that, and we needed a third guy. That third guy was Johnny. Everyone else already had living arrangements, but it wasn’t like we were really turning to him in desperation or anything, at this point I still thought he was an OK guy.
Well, we all move in together, and pretty soon, Nate decides he doesn’t feel like living with us anymore – primarily because Nate was in a band (well, a loosely organized band – I was part of it too, for a while) and Johnny was always complaining about having to listen to it, even though we all agreed when we first decided to rent the house that we would be playing music. Johnny just complained and complained and eventually one night they got into a really bad argument and Nate decided to move out. I think really he just wanted to live with his girlfriend, and didn’t like his room in the house, more than anything else – he’s not a pushover and I think he was really just using the music issue as a reason to move out. So he moves out, and lines up a friend of his to take his room on the lease. But, this friend can’t move in for three months.
So for those three months, it’s just me and Johnny, living together. And he starts to really get on my nerves. First of all, at this point he basically had no friends. He didn’t have a job, and didn’t go to school. He lived off of a settlement that he got after he was injured in an accident. It was at this point that it slowly started to dawn on me that this guy was really not very intelligent, not interesting, and just kind of an asshole. I realized that he didn’t…know anything, I guess, not anything of real value. All he ever talked about was cars – I mean, I like cars, but he literally will talk about NOTHING but cars. And at totally random moments, too. Up until this point, I didn’t spend much time alone with him – it was just in the context of hanging out with other people, so I didn’t really realize how totally inarticulate and annoying the guy was. He has an extremely annoying habit of always bragging about how sophisticated his mom and stepdad are (they don’t have a TV in their house…they listen to opera…they travel all over the world) and at other times, trashing them (they don’t love him…they don’t ever let him come over…they don’t ever pay attention to him…) etc. Picture all of this complaining, and babbling about cars, coming from a dull-sounding, lisping, slack-jawed voice.
For a while I was nice. I’d indulge his bullshit. Then he really started to overstep the boundaries. Once, he drank a bottle of orange juice that my girlfriend left in the fridge. I told him about it, when she realized it was gone, and his response – I swear to God – was “I just thought it was yours.” I said, “What the fuck? And then that would have been OK?” He said, “You know, I thought we were close like that.” I was like, “no, no we’re not.” And then his response was “well, she’s always over here, you know, and like, she always uses our bathroom and stuff.” Literally, that was what he was doing – trying to justify drinking her orange juice, without her knowing, by the fact that she used our bathroom.
I told him that he really needed to get a better grasp on the idea of boundaries and personal belongings, and that he couldn’t just use my stuff when he felt like it. He apologized, like, every day for the next two weeks.
But I guess it didn’t sink in, because another time, I couldn’t find my keys. I was looking all over the goddamn house for my keys, and they were nowhere to be found. Finally, I knocked on Johnny’s door and was like, “hey, have you seen my keys?”
His response: “Uh…yeah, actually, I was playing with them.”
I WAS PLAYING WITH THEM!
I was like, what the fuck, man, give me my goddamn keys. After that, I just basically stopped talking to him, and just lived upstairs in my room. Sometimes he’d ask me to borrow things - a TV, video games, etc - and since I really didn’t need them, I let him use them just to keep him quiet. It worked. He more or less keeps to himself, stays barricaded inside his room getting high and watching movies.
He has no idea how much I hate him. Over the past year, we haven’t interacted much, although there were some memorable moments - like him watching the “Zeitgeist” documentary about how Bush supposedly blew up the Twin Towers, and then ranting to me about how “true” it was (I set him straight and told him it was all bullshit.) Ah, there are others…many others…it’s not like I’m at war with this guy, I just find him to be a really really dumb, annoying person, and I’m just waiting it out until my lease is up and I get to move (which is, fortunately, very very soon.)
Ahhh…can’t write anymore for now. That was quite a task. Hope you found it interesting. I’ve got to go for now - cheers, peace, punk rock, and all that good trash.
-AT out
edit - one more thing - I just remembered, I have it on good authority from a guy who grew up right next door to Johnny, that when he was in high school, he beat up his mom and was taken away by the cops.
