Making Rent

It took me six months after graduating college to realize I’d never be able to live with my parents again. This makes it sound like they chased me out, or perhaps made unreasonable demands, but I want to be clear that’s not the case. My parents are some of the most loving and supportive people in the entire world, and I’m blessed for having them in my life.

Not something most authors claim, I think.

That having been said, our personalities are entirely incompatible. My parents are thorough, organized, and driven. I’m lazy, slapdash, and, especially at that time of my life, motivated only to make enough money to pay for my World of Warcraft subscription. I slept in late, stayed up late, never cleaned, did no chores. Just went to work, ditched out as soon as I could, and came home to raid.

Terrible disease, that game. Don’t ever start. I wasted my early twenties alone and met my future wife within weeks of quitting cold turkey. Quitting was the first right choice I made in my life.

As you might imagine, paying no rent and contributing nothing but dirty dishes couldn’t last forever. There were fights–screaming, usually on my part, not physical–and both sides understood the status quo could no longer be tolerated. I jumped on the first ad I saw and moved out a week after the decision was made.

I should mention this was the early aughts, just after the Great Recession, and I was fortunate enough to have stumbled into a stable union job. Property prices were in the toilet and, with a fairly minimum income, I could actually afford some rents in California. I still needed to pay for the Warcaft, so I went on the cheap end of even that: $200/month for a room with a private bathroom about fifteen minutes from my work. I recently looked for an equivalent rental and they seem to range between $1,000 and $1,500/month. If the market had followed inflation, my room would go for $294/month today. I have no idea how the kids today are surviving. I suppose they aren’t.

Mind you, the good deal came with a few caveats, some of which were apparent to me immediately and some of which only appeared later. The three bedroom house had five tenants: me, the landlord, his sister, and their significant others.There were also three dogs, one of which was a Harlequin Great Dane and the size of two other people. The more I got to know each of the housemates, the less I wished I knew them.

Starting with the least objectionable, let’s take the landlord’s sister. I saw her maybe three or four times in a year and a half. She would monopolize the bathroom I used for long showers–unfortunate as I’m just Italian enough to have my hair grease up like a bad diner’s eggs–but, other than that, stay in her bedroom or leave on long, uh, ‘business trips.’ More on that later.

Then the landlord himself. He was a furry, which I suppose I should have guessed by his personalized license plate declaring himself to be a wolf. So help me, I thought it was a metaphor. His hobby itself didn’t bother me, but the lousy internet in the house forced me to occasionally reset the router in his room or miss a raid. The router was in his room, which he decorated with extensive werewolf pornography. More on that later.

Next, there was the landlord’s boyfriend. He was a tiny, tiny person who also played World of Warcraft, making us fast friends. I soon came to regret ever giving him the time of day, however, as I soon became his personal therapist and he would spend long hours in my room telling me all the things the landlord had done to hurt his feelings. I would advise him to leave if he felt so miserable, and he would sigh and wish he could, then I would go back to my raid. I suppose he might have been trying to tell me something more profound, but more on that later.

Finally, there was the landlord’s sister’s boyfriend. He was a charming, charismatic, friendly sort, which made him the absolute worst. He worked as a cop whose precinct included my workplace–all the more reason to be friendly!–and also, as I found out later, as a pornography producer who used the house as his studio. Being the oblivious sort–after all, demons were menacing–I didn’t notice for the first few weeks as he filmed in a living room separated from the rest of the house by a curtain.

No wonder I could afford the rent.

I first discovered his extracurricular activities following a long raid, when I was helping myself to some leftovers in the fridge late at night and heard, well, you can probably guess what I heard. The boyfriend must have heard me fiddling in the kitchen because he emerged, shirtless, with a camera around his neck and let loose with an explanation any cult leader would have been proud of. Yes, I agreed, all very normal, I’ll just eat this back in my room, lots to do you understand.

I never did see exactly what was on the other side of that curtain in the living room, nor did I really want to. After all, what I was doing for the rent was far less invasive than what was happening over there.