America's Top Roommate
Yes, this is my new roommate.As I sit here in my living room typing this, one of my new roommates is in the next room taking topless photos per a request by the assistant of a premier art photographer for potential work as a model.
Now this, of course, is the point where you are supposed to interject with a good amount of incredulity about the truthfulness of the situation I just described and rightly so because I felt pretty ridiculous typing the above sentence. But no, I am not trapped in an episode of the Real World (though there's still time) and I did not just sneak in here through the backdoor.
Perhaps I should go back to the beginning. I've found that it's usually a good place to start.
I had been staying with my friend Jeff and his girlfriend Meg in an extra room at their place in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood in Chicago for what was supposed to be a couple of months until our other friend Eric found a condo or apartment for us. That was supposed to be done by January but it didn't work out and the "temporary situation" stretched into six or seven long months while I slowly transformed into the poor man's Kato Kaelin. Finally, Jeff announced six weeks ago or so that he and Meg were going to move out by June 1. Therefore, figurtively at least, I had to sink or swim.
Finding a place with other friends didn't pan out for one reason or another and so I decided to spin the cyber wheel of Fortune and try my hand at finding a sublet on Craigslist. I hadn't had strangers as roommates in about 10 years since my sophomore year of college when I lived with a shy engineering nerd and a metrosexual professional bicyclist guy who wore lots of tight, colorful spandex but I wasn't opposed to it.
There were certainly lots of listings of people seeking roommates online - hundreds of them a day. I sifted through them looking for something $500 or less and something near the westside neighborhood I was currently living in. Some of the ads either seemed too picky ("I'm looking for someone super neat, responsible, non-smoker, makes lots of money, 6"3, passive aggressive, little body hair, likes the music of Jimmy Buffett,"), too ridiculous ("I'm a gay hippie and I'd love a new roommate to play bongos with!") or too shady (One guy kept posting the same ad over and over for a female roommate who is 'open minded' aka 'will have sex with a loser like me for cheap rent'). But I was able to find a reasonable amount of ads that attracted my attention and I wrote a few asking to see them. The adventure had begun in earnest!
Luckily my apartment search wasn't Single White Female bad.
Apartment #1
"Female seeking two roommates at Western and Division" AKA Serious Sally
The experience of finding a roommate online, I learned, lies somewhere between finding a job and online dating and just as awkward, demeaning, full of false moments and play acting as both of them. My first interview/date was at a place eight blocks from my own apartment. I liked the location and the price of this place so I went to look at it one evening in mid-May.
Apartment #1
"Female seeking two roommates at Western and Division" AKA Serious Sally
The experience of finding a roommate online, I learned, lies somewhere between finding a job and online dating and just as awkward, demeaning, full of false moments and play acting as both of them. My first interview/date was at a place eight blocks from my own apartment. I liked the location and the price of this place so I went to look at it one evening in mid-May.
Overall it wasn't a bad crib, but the bedroom was miniscule (though painted with a red sunburstish design by a musician/artist guy who apparently wanted to make the room look like a rockin' guitar) and the self-described 28-year old professional female was a mousey, slightly awkward girl who seemed like she was opposed to noise, humor and fun. She blushed and tried to explain away a couple of bottles of liquor on the fridge saying that they were leftover from last year's housewarming party. As if seeing a bottle of Absolut would automatically make me condemn her as a lush. So since I don't really want to live as if I'm on air at a NPR program, I decided I wasn't really interested in the place. Of course, we both played the polite 'I'll contact you' game, but we both knew it was a charade.
Apartment #2.
"Apartment to s
hare till November with social worker" AKA Tokin'Jill was hilarious. She was this older (well, 33) punk rock/metal chick with stylishly spikey dyed red hair, piercings and tattooes and a husky "Yeah, man, like totally. TOTALLY," way of talking. She had recently lost her job working for a shelter and also broken up with her live-in boyfriend and was looking for a sublet until November when she planned to move well, somewhere. I felt pretty comfortable around her, and apparently she felt the same because within 10 minutes of my visit, she broke out a pipe and started smoking weed. "It's helping me quit smoking cigarettes, man," she said. "I was smoking like 2 to 3 packs a day for awhile."
Apartment #3 "East Ukrainian Village June through September Only"
Tim may not have been the most uptight guy in the world, but he seemed to be the day I met him. Apparently his current roommate, a tall muscular black guy who looked like an extra from a Janet Jackson video I met briefly, found the place off Craigslist in April and moved in after talking Tim out of a deposit. Five days later the roommate announced he was leaving at the end of the month and couldn't pay him anything else and was a jerk about it. Tim felt burned by it, and ended up treating me like I was being interrogated in Guantomino.
"Do you have an office job? OK, what's your income? You're 30? Good, I don't want any 25 year olds. How often do you drink? Have people over? Smoke?"
Luckily there was no waterboarding involved. He was also very insistant I pay a $450 deposit at least a week before I moved in and told me about 10 times that I'd have to move out September 30 no matter what.
That said, I liked the place and the location (next door to Pizza Metro, yum!) but he kept moving the deposit date up and it made me feel a bit uncomfortable.
Apartment #4 "Spacious Wicker Park Vintage Apartment, Available Now" AKA The Competition
This "vintage" apartment (interpretation: really old and crusty) was on prime real estate a block from the so called 'Crotch' in Wicker Park, the happenin' intersection of North, Milwaukee and Damen where hipsters, stroller pushing yuppies, and cocktail swilling young professional trixies converge for fun and frolics. Residing in the apartment were two females in their mid 20's, a redhead who resembled a young Catherine O'Hara (perhaps pre-Beetlejuice?), and a chubby, bubbly brunette who made jewelry for a living. The thing that struck me about the brunette was that she had the 'Alpha Girl Voice', that distinct diction hot popular girls begin to develop in Junior High. "So, like, um...what do you want to know about our apartment? Yeah, like, for SURE. Totally! For sure. Oh my GOD, for SURE!" You know what I'm talking about.
But as she was talking to me, I couldn't shake the feeling that she wasn't attractive enough to have the Alpha Girl voice. It was the equivalent of a burly bearded guy in a ragged flannel shirt and a greasy ponytail talking in a smooth British accent. Larry the Cable Guy as James Bond. It was discombobulating. Also, since this was a very popular location, (they said I was one of 15 people coming to look at the place) they scheduled several people to look at the place at once. So three minutes after I got there, a quiet college guy walked in and the girls split us up and showed us the place individually. Then we stood awkwardly in the kitchen trying to make small talk and ask questions and I'm wondering...um, I guess I'm sort of competing against this guy. Should I try to dominate the conversation? Make jokes to get the girls to like me? The job interview/date aspect of this process never became more noticable. And it threw me off....I brought up the fact that I had Rock Band (hey, I thought it was a good selling point!) they looked at me like I said I made a sex video with R.Kelly. "Uhhh...OK," said Wannabe Alpha Girl. It was clear that I wasn't going to make the elimination round.
Apartment #5 "Logan Square Subletting" AKA The Hippies
I admittedly was skeptical about this place from the get-go because a bedroom for $225 in a decent neighborhood in Chicago seemed ludicrous. In the ad they even noted that the bedroom was "humble" so I was half-expecting to be in a stable Baby Jesus style. Instead, it was a small youth center recently converted into an apartment. Of course when I say apartment, I mean a huge open empty room with five dusty jail cell sized bedrooms along the wall marked by five heavy metal doors. In the kitchen, there was still a industrial-sized soap dispenser attached to the wall - part of the legacy of the youth center.
Apartment #5 "Logan Square Subletting" AKA The Hippies
I admittedly was skeptical about this place from the get-go because a bedroom for $225 in a decent neighborhood in Chicago seemed ludicrous. In the ad they even noted that the bedroom was "humble" so I was half-expecting to be in a stable Baby Jesus style. Instead, it was a small youth center recently converted into an apartment. Of course when I say apartment, I mean a huge open empty room with five dusty jail cell sized bedrooms along the wall marked by five heavy metal doors. In the kitchen, there was still a industrial-sized soap dispenser attached to the wall - part of the legacy of the youth center.
Residing there were four fresh-faced hippie kids, none older than 19 or 20. Ellen, the girl I had contacted first, was a serious looking girl with a indie-rock bobbed haircut and tattoos spotting her arms. Another girl had purple streaked hair tied back with plenty of colorful ribbons and was wearing a long flowing red dress and purple hose. There was hardly any furniture inside the large common room, instead there was lots of random artsy stuff - paintings, blank canvas, acoustic guitars, two sets of bongos and MacBooks (the official computers of aestheticians, right?). I wasn't there five minutes though, when they announced they had to leave.
"We're going to the Moon festival," announced Purple Hair. "Wanna go?"
"What's the Moon festival?" I asked.
"Um, lots of just hanging out, playing percussion and just experiencing community." (Interpretation: Hippies smoking weed and banging on bongos.)
"No thanks, I have stuff to do."
Apartment #6 "$394 Looking for Roommate to Share With Two Others" AKA The Tease
This ad immediately caught my eye because the apartment was literally across the street from mine above a comic book store. And Amber, the girl who wrote the ad, seemed to think I sounded like a good fit too, because she gave me her phone number in the email she sent me. "I didn't even realize I did," she said after I called her. "I didn't give my phone number to anyone else."
However, she said she was very wary "about this Internet thing" and only agreed to show me the apartment if I first met her in a neutral place. So we agreed to meet at 8 p.m. on a bar that was between our locations, in other words, next door to me and across the street for her. In fact, while sitting at the bar, I saw her leaving her apartment to come meet me. After spending an hour and a half chatting and drinking a couple of beers with her, I got the distinct impression that Amber was a party girl that was finally beginning to settle down a bit from her college days, but still maintained some wildness. Of course, maybe her prominent nosering helped give off that impression too.
Finally, she said "OK, I don't think you're a freak who's going to kill me with an axe. I guess I can take you to see the place."
It was an amazing apartment. It took up the entire second floor of the building with well maintained hardwood floors, high ceilings, spacious rooms and a classy feel. I had a good feeling about it. But Amber wanted me to meet her roommate first. Her roommate however, worked at a restaurant late and wouldn't be back for another hour or so. "Do you want to wait?" she asked. "Sure," I shrugged, wondering what we might do for an hour. She suggested going to the grocery store and getting more beers. So, maybe she wasn't as partied out as I had thought.
Two hours later we had downed a six-pack of beer and were sitting comfortably in her living room playing board games and listening to The Talking Heads. We had come a long way from her suspecting me to be a murderer. But a half-drunk horrified thought came to me, 'She's being flirty...what if she tries to put the moves on? Do I tell her 'no' because I don't want to complicate the potential roommate situation?' Luckily the roommate came home before that kind of scenario could arise. But what would this other roommate think of this intoxicated strange man doing in her apartment at 11:45 p.m. on a Sunday night. To make matters worse, Amber announced that she had to get up at 5 a.m. the next day and was going to bed....leaving me to chat with roommate #2 alone.
"So um....hi."
After about 5 minutes of reasonably normal conversation, Roommate #2 politely told me she had to leave to pick up her boyfriend and so I left. Not the best of situations but I thought that I sort of had it in the bag considering I spent four hours drinking, flirting, and playing board games with Amber.
But she was terse when I called her the next day to ask when they'd be making the roommate decision.
"I think you should go ahead and keep looking just in case," she said vaguelly.
"Well, I will but you guys are my number one choice."
"Yeah, but you should still go ahead and keep looking."
"So...what are you saying?"
"I don't think it's going to work out."
"What, so you're not going to call me?"
"No."
"Huh."
And that was basically it. No explanation, no nothing. I felt rejected, but more than that I felt led on, played, had my heartstrings tugged. Amber wined and dined me, brought me home, chatted the night away with me, used the phrases "your bedroom" when referring to the third bedroom, everything but made me a key. And here I was, the jilted bride, holding the flowers at the altar and wondering where I would go next. Sigh.
Apartment #7 "Room For Rent Right Off California Blue Line. Wonderful Deal" AKA The Couple
This ad charmed me because of the whimisical descriptions of the apartment:
"*excellent troll stoop. it's like we live in a cave!
* 2 fabulous roomies with exquisite taste.
*shower that is actually a bathtub with gorgeous claw feet! "
and because the girl that wrote it also said the magic words: Xbox 360.
Amy wrote me the next day after I sent her an email and said I sounded like "the most intriguing candidate." I arranged to come visit the apartment the next evening. Amy wasn't there when I came by but I did talk to the current roommate Betsi and Amy's boyfriend Alex, who I'd be living with. We got a long well enough, but his expression lit up when I mentioned I owned the game "Grand Theft Auto 4". "Wow, I want to play that!" he said. "You can if I'm your roommate," I said like Monte Hall in "Let's Make a Deal." "You just shot up the list in my book," he said. Once again, I got a good feeling.
Apartment #7
"$425 Cheap and Completely Charming, the Perfect Summer Locale" AKA The Actress
In case you're wondering, by the way, no I did not intentionally seek out girls to live with. I looked for location and price. I swear! Anyway, two or three days after I emailed her, (and a day after I visited Alex and Amy's place) Eva called and left a voicemail on my cellphone. "I've gotten a million emails, but I called you first because you wrote a lot about yourself and you seemed cool. Call me and we'll set up a meeting."
I called her back shortly after and we talked. She had a great voice, she was funny and I made her laugh. Things were good. I wasn't however, totally prepared for how attractive and alluring she would be. A tall, statuesque blonde with bright blue eyes and curly blonde hair to go along with the musical quality of her voice. Yikes. It didn't surprise me at all to learn that she was a stage actress. She even had a stage-ish name: Eva Swan. So, what happened when we talked I totally blame on the effect that most beautiful girls have on me: retardation. For example, when she told me she was playing a buccanneer in the lead role of an upcoming play called "Bloody Bess" I told her with a smirk on my face: "That's cool because there's a good friend of my uncle who is involved in lots of productions involving pirates.....His name is Johnny Depp."
Yes, this is completely true, but I still felt like the biggest name dropping D-bag in the world for saying it, especially in that 'Check out how awesome I am' tone. I sprawled out in her couch and chatted with her for 30 more minutes...not asking many questions about the apartment, but more talking about my life story and asking about hers. I must have seemed like David Brent from the BBC Office when he awkwardly interviews his second secretary. After awhile, she got up and looked at the clock and said..."Um, well...unless you have anymore questions..." clearly ready for me to leave. Which I did, apologizing profusely for taking up so much time.
She did politely say that she'd get back to me. But I was quickly running out of time. I had to be out by May 31, and it was May 26th already.
But the next day, I got an email from Amy:
"hey ryan.... WILL YOU OFFICIALLY MOVE IN WITH US?! you're our winner!" she said effusively. She went on to say that I had beaten out 'a guy named Will, a gay guy, and another guy' and that 'the Xbox 360 put me over the top.' That's right, when I can't count on my personality to ingratiate myself to others, I rely on personal technology. But either way, I accepted.
The rest is history. I moved in this weekend and here I sit typing this. Oh right, the topless modelling thing.
Well, on Sunday night I talked to Amy about writing an article for the RedEye newspaper and she casually mentioned that she was going to be in "Seventeen" this month. "What?" I asked.
"Oh, well...", she seemed slightly embarassed explaining, "I was in America's Top Model a couple months ago."
She went on to talk about her experiences...going from a small town in Oklahoma to New York for the show. About getting booted off the show because
Tyra Banks didn't think she was serious enough about modelling....about wearing a headband the other judges didn't like. It all seemed surreal hearing this from this very unassuming, unpretentious girl.
So I ended up spending much of the rest of the night searching on YouTube for videos to try to get to know my new roommate - a rather fitting end to my roommate adventure.
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