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.

Some of My Roommates in London

A French man. Cool guy. We used to finish a bottle of Whiskey every day together. A French woman. She was his ex-girlfriend. She was so drunk one time that she fell asleep on the tiny highway divider outside our home.

A Spanish woman. She was cool. Two Peruvian ladies. They stopped speaking English when I tried to get them to pay bills. We had a big bonfire in the back and burned all of their stuff.

A few Israelis. One of them was destined for greatness but he was too complicated to achieve anything. He played me some of his songs and I had Dollar signs in my eyes, like Brian Epstein listening to the Beatles for the first time. We used to bring chairs outside and play music by the highway, him on the guitar, me on the harmonica, and wait for cars to get caught on the speeding camera. One day a few of us were sitting in his room, listening to music, when suddenly he got up and looked confused. “What was I about to do?” he asked. No one answered. He sat down again with a smile, saying, “Oh, yea, nothing.”

An English guy. He used to fall asleep with cigarettes in his mouth, burning holes in his bed sheets. The police followed him to the house one night because he didn’t pay his pub bill and I woke up with a flashlight on my face.

Two South African couples. One of the girls ended up marrying the French man, the other one, her first cousin, is now with the singer from my band. The South African boys returned to South Africa. What can you do. Actually, there was another South African. She taught me Yo ma se Chat. Other South Africans taught me Yo ma se falepte pus.

A couple from Czech Republic. They used to take showers together and giggle. He was a country boy and she was from Prague. This meant she was open and friendly while he was close minded and his best friend was a policeman with a mustache. Just goes to show things are the same everywhere.

Our landlord was an old man with a glass eye.

There was an Irish deaf guy. We didn’t have central heating, and his room was the only one without a radiator, so to keep warm he left his hairdryer on all day. He didn’t realize it was noisy, see?

I had a South Korean roommate, too. One day I thought, What if he had some South Korean lady friends he could introduce me to? So I asked him, “Did you come here alone?” -- “Three months ago,” he answered. “No,” I said, “I mean, are you here alone?” -- “I don’t know yet,” he said.

There was a Polish woman. She had positive affirmations all over her room and a large picture of a married couple taped to her mirror. That’s what I’m saying, see? Life is funny and sad at the same time. And it’s the same everywhere in the world. And it’s always been like that, and always will.

Chicken Nuggets

Thank you all for your comments on the previous post. Now, it's not every day I can come up with something like that, so instead of trying to top the previous post I will just give you a meaningless story:

In London, my roommate had a friend stay over for a while. He was from a small Kibbutz and I was from Tel-Aviv, the big city, which meant we had nothing in common. Long story short, he finished my chicken nuggets. Not a big deal, unless you go down to the kitchen craving chicken nuggets only to find an empty box in the trash. So obviously, I did what anyone else would have done in my situation: I wrote a note saying, “You’re not in the Kibbutz anymore. Over here we don’t share our food.” Then, of course, I took out the empty box from the trash and with a large kitchen knife stuck the empty box with the note to his door. Obviously.

A minute later he comes home and sees a piece of trash and a note stuck to his door by a big horror-movie knife. And he looks at me and I’m ready for a fight, but he shrugs and hands me a family-size box of chicken nuggets he just bought at the supermarket.

It’s been a while but God help me, I still have a long way to go. At least I’m vegetarian now.

The Devil in My Cereals

When I lived in London, I used to get mad at my roommate for eating my cereal. Oh, I knew better, but I couldn’t help myself. Knowing it was wrong of me to get angry, I would wake up in the morning, after he had already left for work, and I’d notice the box wasn’t placed in the exact same spot I left it the day before. It wasn’t money, or the fear of running out of cereal or anything semi-logical as that. I simply let my ego take control of me. I was mad because I wasn’t asked; was not given the opportunity to sit in my royal chair and be the benevolent roommate that says, “Of course you can take some of my cereal. What’s mine is yours.”

Then one night we went to a club. We were each wondering the club by ourselves for a while when I saw him sitting on the stairs next to an Irish guy. I wasn’t close enough to hear what that man was saying, but he seemed to take the conversation very seriously, lifting his finger and moving it decisively. He was having the most important conversation of his life. Sitting next to him, my roommate was laughing himself to tears. He gestured for me to come closer and said, “I don’t understand a word he’s saying. He’s been talking to me for an hour.”

Some time later, it was just the two of us again. Two friends in an unknown territory. Lewis and Clarke. And I felt ashamed of myself for the way I had felt before. There were real moments in life, like sitting in a club with my best friend, and there were fake moments and emotions, like worrying about cereals. Things started to make sense.

The next morning. . . . Is there even a point in writing what followed? It's unbearably clear and predetermined, isn’t it? Human, all too human. I mean, is there anything better after a long night of partying than eating an overflowing bowl of cereal? I hated him as my ego resurfaced. That bastard finished my cereal. And you know what? It wasn’t the cereal; it was the principal.

Whenever you talk about a principal to justify your feelings you can be sure that in this battle the Devil has won.