The First Time I Bought a Book (My London Roommates, Part One. Or is it Part Two?)

A while ago, I wrote a short post about my roommates in London. Someone suggested dedicating a post to each of these people. I don’t know about all of them, but here’s one post about my time in West London, a land of cricket and garage sales.

It took me a while to find this tiny place. During my search, I read The Loot every day and looked for ads. One of them seemed interesting. It was a cheap room in a nice neighborhood. The ad said “Men only.”

When I reached the house, the landlord showed me around. Here was where my room would be, and here was the common area where I would probably end up drinking Foster’s and watching Rugby with Australian dudes. Seemed good enough. “Just out of curiosity,” I said, “why ‘Men only?’” And the landlord, with no sense of concern, said, “First of all, men keep the house in better shape. And, you know how it is…you put a group of men and women together there’s bound to be problems and fights. That’s why I never let black people live here anymore.”

Anyway, so I kept looking until I ended up in Perivale with a born again landlord, a Christian South Korean guy, and a spiritual Polish woman (I wrote a little bit about them in that earlier post). It took me an hour and a half on the Tube to get to London for band practice, and I got sick of looking at sad commuters, so I went into an Oxfam store and bought a second-hand book. This was the first time I bought a book rather than have one given to me with an official recommendation, usually by my sister. It was Closing Time, and it included the sentence “Mere happiness was not enough,” which made me think about the meaning of life, and still does.

Meanwhile, there’s not much I can add about these three. I made the Polish woman cry. She was talking about the Holocaust and about how Polish people helped the Jews. I guess that’s what they teach them at school over there. And smart-ass me had to argue. Sometimes I don’t know when to shut the hell up.

There will be other roommates with better stories, I swear. Imagine Melrose Place on acid.