My Roommate Paulie

So, I am looking for an apartment on Long Island. Even though I work on Long Island, I don’t know anyone on Long Island. For this reason, and because I have no money, I have been looking for roommates on Craigslist. Last week, I talked to this guy, Paul, who is also looking for an apartment. He does construction and he had a thick LI accent on the phone, but he sounded like an OK guy, and I was trying not to be judgmental, because effete, elitist beggars cannot be choosers. It’s not always easy to get us effete elitists to admit that we are in a begging position, but an effete elitist looking for a roommate on Long Island may be one of the most obvious, red flag beggars there is. This is because people who rent apartments on Long Island are all from Long Island, and they either do labor-intensive work or they don’t want to move to the five boroughs for exactly the opposite reasons from why everyone in the five boroughs wanted to leave wherever they were from—they are more comfortable living somewhere that is a little trashy and uncultured. But really, you don’t need to be best friends with someone to share a toilet and occasionally watch an episode of South Park together and I don't exactly sit around reading opera scores while smoking a pipe, even if I do read The New Yorker cover-to-cover every week.

So Paulie and I met for a beer yesterday to talk about some apartments that we would look at and to see if our roommate philosophies would mesh. I came from work. He came drunk. This didn’t bother me. I didn’t even notice that he was drunk until he began to ask me the same questions two and three times and repeat his mantra like a Molly Shannon character. It was a live-and-let-live philosophy involving lots of beer and hockey. The hockey didn’t bother me. I don’t know anything about hockey, but playing it seems like something that a no-nonsense, respectful guy might do (probably because I expect even the gruffest Canadians to be excessively polite). Plus, he had lived in the mountain states in his hockey days, and I counted any experience west of Pennsylvania as a plus. It also didn’t really bother me that he admitted, without being asked, to drinking five beers a day. I don’t know how many that actually means, but I have one beer on most weeknights, and I figure that the number is fairly unimportant, except to one’s own liver, so long as one is just trying to pass out in a recliner in front of the TV.

The casual racial slurs didn’t bother me too much either. I have found that those are almost de rigueur for a large percentage of white men on Long Island. (A couple of times in my life, I have found myself in this dip-shit position where I meet someone, don’t confront them about their almost immediate racism, and hate myself shortly thereafter when I have to stop talking to them for some wholly different thing that they have said or done.) It was only when he scarily yelled at the unattractive girls sitting next to us, “Did you watch the Penguins-Flyers game today?!,” yelled at the nearest one for not liking hockey, yelled that he had been a hockey player, and then proceeded to frighten them with some “spongy-area” level sexual come-ons for like fifteen minutes that I realized that I probably couldn’t live with this guy. It was such a showing for a guy meeting a prospective roommate on a Sunday evening that I wondered if he had done it on purpose, as a way of making sure that I wouldn’t want to live with him. However, when I left him a message to tell him the deal was off this morning, he sent me a text telling me not to be a pussy or I’d never make it in New York (whatever that means for a city where many of the guys who "make it" are borderline anorexic and have no problem spending two thousand dollars on a pair of used sneakers). But I think he would have said something like that whether or not he'd acted like an asshole on purpose.

So I'm thinking more seriously about getting my own place now.