The Many Faces Of The Craigslist Roommate
So Ruby left, to who knows where. She unfriended me on the Facebook, and I guess I don’t blame her; I was the bad cop. But every now and then, I look her up online to see what video montages Ruby’s fans have made for the scene queen lately, and to marvel that such a creature exists.
After Ruby moved out, I killed off my pseudonym, and let my blog die. I got my first real job (working for an online science blogging network), and for the first time since moving to NYC had a relatively stable income. June and I took over the lease, and we finally each got our own room. We lived with this arrangement for the next two years, but things eventually fell apart as New York took us each down a different path.
June and I had become friends when I was 11 and she was 10. I was visiting my grandpa for the summer, staying at his house in a cow town in Michigan, and her family had just moved in across the street. Her basketball rolled into my yard while I was picking up sticks, so of course we became instant friends. It was she who put the idea of moving to New York in my head in the first place, probably some night during a slumber party. It was always her dream, not mine. She was a dancer, and knew from the movies that NYC was the only place to make it big in that field. She wouldn’t have moved here if I hadn’t come here first, though, and she wouldn’t have lasted long had I not supported her emotionally and financially during the initial months.
She got a serious boyfriend the first weekend she was here, only days after her previous boyfriend drove her and all her stuff here in his pick-up truck and they had tearful goodbyes. The whole time we’ve lived in NYC, she’s never been single more than a few weeks, whereas I haven’t dated anyone for more than a few weeks. She’s beautiful and she knows it, but she picks guys out of dependency, not desire. It’s not just the kind of dependency that fills a void of loneliness, the guys she picks take care of her. They see to it that she is fed, drunk, and has all the drugs she wants, and she takes care of them, with all she has to offer.
But I know that despite all this surface contentment, she isn’t really happy. She isn’t dancing, she never “made it.” She settled. For years I watched her put instant gratification over her real passions, and now it is a hard way back. Maybe there is no way back, only a different way forward, and I hope she has what it takes to find a way to stand on her own two feet again. But every time I see her, and she has new bruises on her arms, and I ask her how everything is with her boyfriend and she says “good,” I get less and less hopeful.
In January I asked her if she wanted to renew the lease and keep paying for her uninhabited room, even though she was at her boyfriend’s all the time; she said yes. Things weren’t going so well and she would probably be moving back any week.
Two months later, she said she wanted to sublet her room to a coworker at the restaurant where she works who was going through a rough time. The son of a famous existentialist author from NYC, Toby had grown up too fast and got into the less-cute kind of drugs that the city has to offer. My friend claimed he was sober for 7 years, but had recently broken up with his long-time girlfriend and was crashing on his younger brother’s frat house couch, where he was exposed to temptation nightly. My friend thought that if he could stay in her room for a month while he looked for a new place, he could be helped. Maybe he wouldn’t end up like her other coworker who, the previous year, after struggling with drug problems and a failed relationship, shot himself up with heroin and jumped off a 25-story building.
I agreed that Toby could stay here under the conditions she laid out, which were that half his rent would go to me and he would be out in a month. A month later, she changed her mind about the payment and he was still there.
I didn’t talk to him much. He was nice, really nice. But the childlike desperation he exuded whenever I talked to him terrified me. I felt that if I gave him an inch, he would have taken a mile, and with my new, extremely intense job at the publication I have wanted to work at since I was 15, I simply did not have the bandwidth. I said he could live there, I made no promises about being his therapist or his friend, and I needed to put myself first.
This isn’t to say we didn’t have friendly chatter when we saw each other, which was rarely. He slept all day and mostly stayed in his room, my old room. We would go days without seeing each other, and the other times I would wake up to go to work in the morning and run into women I’d never seen before in my bathroom. I noticed there was beer in the fridge that I didn’t buy, and was concerned because when he moved in he said he didn’t drink because it made him want to do other drugs.
I told June that Toby’s time was up and he needed to go. He was getting weird in ways I didn’t really know what to do with. I realize now that he was using again, in my apartment. She avoided the conversation, as she always does when it involves something that isn’t as easy as deciding which bar to go to, but the problem took care of itself. One day I came home and Toby was moving his stuff into the hallway. I asked what he was doing, and he told me he was storing it at his dad’s like nothing was odd. Good, I thought, it wouldn’t be so hard for him to move out then. I asked if he needed help but he said he didn’t. I never saw him again, but a week later I learned that his dad had sent him to England for a six-month inpatient rehab program.
It’s no joke that it’s tough to make it in NYC. Considering all the places I’ve called home and the people with whom I’ve shared my personal space over the past three years, it’s incredible to me that I have avoided a life of drug addiction and socially acceptable prostitution. It’s a terrible, wonderful city. But I’m here, and I’m happier than I would be twiddling my thumbs in any suburb.