Leaving Home

My first roommate after leaving home was my best friend, a fellow seven years older than me that I'd met ... well, as it happens, I don't remember how we met.  It must have been some casual labour job that I did one summer during high school.

Mike and I would meet for dinner at places like My Marvin's or Sam's Delicafe downtown, which specialised in smoked salmon, blintzes, felafel and cabbage rolls ... but I'll talk about that later.  After three hours of talk and tea, we'd retire to his apartment and go on talking until one or two in the morning.  By the time I was 17 years old and in my last year of school, on Fridays and Saturdays I had no official curfew.  Mike would drive me home in his light blue 1977 Trans Am, and we'd sit for another hour in front of my parent's house ("home" at that time, but not now).  Then I'd get out, pat the back fin of his car twice as I walked around and he'd drive off.

We talked about the usual things, politics and art and such, especially literature and writing.  I'll go into all that another time; here I just want to note that like any 18 y.o. living at home, I'd complain about my parents and Mike would be sympathetic.  He lived in a two-bedroom basement apartment that was rented to him by his mother, who lived on the main floor of the house upstairs.  So Mike had reason to empathise.

Quite often he'd say that any time I needed to leave on a moment's notice, I could come and stay with him.  I never told my parents about this; they barely knew that Mike existed, as I never spoke about him to them ... but I found his offer comforting.  I used to tell him that it couldn't be that hard to move away from home, since just about everyone does it.  Still, I wasn't in a hurry to move out.  When high school ended, I'd gotten a good job and I was enjoying the money; my parents were well-fixed and didn't charge me rent; I had a basement room and I could live in solitude most of the time.

Still, the inevitable fight happened (I'll tell that another time) and I packed two suitcases and marched out without notice.  I showed up at Mike's and like a good guy, he kept his word.

I lasted six weeks.  We remained friends; in fact, he would later be my Best Man.  But he was next to impossible to live with.

His apartment was furnished, so everything was of course his, from the dishes to the bed I slept in.  The television was his, the sofa was his, the chairs were his, the books on the shelves were his.  My "room" was a closet, which was fine as my mindset was firmly Bohemian at the time; I could live anywhere that Larry Darrell of the Razor's Edge could live.  Mike freely shared his things; he wasn't bossy or selfish or resistant to my presence.  But he was "thrifty" on an order I'd never experienced.

He didn't like the way I did the dishes, as in his opinion, squirting soap into a sink full of water and then washing dishes in it wasted soap.  He liked to brush the tip of his finger on the top of a soap bottle and use that tiny dab for each dish.  He'd wet each dish in continually slow-running water (which he didn't pay for), rub into it the dab of soap, scrub with a wet dishrag and then rinse, putting it in the rack.  True enough, it works.  Now and then, I've done dishes that way since.  But it was weird to me.

Electricity, which he did pay for, was a problem.  I'd be watching television by myself and get up during a commercial, to make a sandwich or pee, and when I got back, the television would be off, the lights would be off and I'd be facing a black room.  If I protested, he'd argue that if I wasn't using the power in that room, no matter how long I was gone, I ought to turn it off.

When I left the apartment, a basement you'll remember, I used to sit on the steps leading up to the outside and put my shoes on.  One day Mike got mad at me for sitting on his sofa because, he said, my pants were still dirty from the stairs.  I found this one hard to understand.  Basically, he was saying, I'd sit on the steps, which were dirty from being walked on with street shoes, then I'd go out and spend my day doing things, then I'd come back to the apartment — with my pants still dirty — and sit on his sofa.  I remember him going into a sincere argument that furniture, like anything else, was a temporal waste of money.  Nevermind that the sofa was paid for.  What mattered was how long the sofa would last before it had to be thrown out, requiring the purchase of another sofa.  The longer something lasted — and this obviously applied to anything in the house — the more money was saved.

Well, that was enough for me.  I told him that I didn't care how much destruction I caused to furniture by sitting on it, as I considered that to be the purpose of furniture.  I promised I'd find another place and I did, within 36 hours.  And that is a story for another day.