by Stephanie Wu
Two months or so into our living together, I got a panicked call from Grant. “Dude, we just got robbed,” he said. He was panting and hysterical and ranting, and while we were on the phone, I knew something was not right and that he was screwing with me. I was headed to a show, but turned around to go home. When I got there, Grant described how he tried to come in through the back garage entrance like he normally does, but it was chain locked. When he came around the front, the door was open and his television and computer were gone, as was some artwork.
As he was telling me what happened, a cop showed up—an overweight Latina lady who clearly did not care because robberies happened all the time. He showed her a seven- to eight-inch cut in the kitchen window screen and said they must have climbed in through there—even though the screen was on the inside of the glass window. The cop was sitting there being useless, so I asked Grant to show me how exactly they broke in, but he couldn’t replicate it. I kept saying that it didn’t make sense, but it was awkward with the cop there. I was livid, but at this point, I hadn’t even checked my room yet. The cop needed a list of everything stolen for insurance, and I said I’d go look in my room. “They probably didn’t take anything from you,” Grant said. I wasn’t sure how he could assertively say that they hadn’t taken any of my things. When I got there, my laptop, handheld camcorder, and backpack were missing, as were my passport and hard drive. There were also less valuable things missing, like a stack of shirts I’d collected over the years and half a bottle of cologne. It didn’t seem like things a burglar would take, instead of my TV, which was still there.
I had a hunch that Grant was behind all this—I already thought he was a bit of a klepto after he was fired from his bar job, had tried to steal from Best Buy, and was caught with my shirt—but I couldn’t turn to the officer and say, “I found him!” I kept questioning him after the cop left, and asked if his home insurance would cover the things I’d had stolen. He took my receipts but later said that his insurance couldn’t help because I wasn’t technically on the lease, just subletting. So here I was, living with a guy who I’m 99 percent sure staged a robbery so that he could get money back in insurance. I felt so defeated, but I never confronted him. Instead, I made plans to move within the next few weeks. We were never able to talk the same way again—we went from buddies to strangers living together.
I’m much more wary of people now—I think I lost a bit of innocence living with Grant, which is probably a good thing. I’m still pissed that he got away with it. I guess karma will take care of him someday. I think he had the balls to steal from me because I wasn’t a poor, starving artist. Because we’re both in the entertainment business, I’ve daydreamed that somewhere down the line I’ll be in some position to ruin Grant’s life without him knowing.
—T, 33 (M)
THE SERIAL ROOMMATE
I USED TO WORK in the advertising world, where we always went out drinking at night in huge groups. One night, my coworker Jane and I realized we both had roommate situations we wanted to get out of—the guy I lived with picked his feet all the time—so we decided to look for apartments together. This was about ten years ago, and we stumbled upon a rent-stabilized two-bedroom apartment for about $1,700 a month on the Upper East Side. My coworker wasn’t set on it, but she hadn’t been through the whole New York City apartment search craziness before. I didn’t care how small it was, I knew we had to take it.
We hadn’t worked together for very long, and I didn’t know Jane all that well. Living together was very interesting, because she had some eating issues. She often sat in her room and ate fat-free pudding by herself. And she started seeing a therapist because she ate all of my food, and the therapist suggested that we padlock the cabinets and lock up my food so she didn’t eat all my cookies in one sitting. I told her that wasn’t possible—we weren’t living in a prison. I was fine with her eating my food, as long as she replaced it.
She was also very tight with money. We made about the same amount because we worked together; I don’t know what she spent hers on—pudding, I guess. When we went to bars she brought little bottles of vodka with her and then only ordered cranberry juice and poured the vodka in. She was a weird girl.
Our office Christmas party was always a shitshow—they even hired a DJ. One year, we all got drunk, and it was on a weeknight and we had to go to work the next day. The next morning, I rolled into Jane’s room, still hungover. She looked at me and whispered, “Is he gone yet?” She’d brought a project manager home and hooked up with him, and thought he was still in the apartment.
Jane was always desperate to have a man in her life. She met a guy on Friendster, and they went out and started dating. Then they started having loud sex all the time in our apartment, though he lived by himself. That was when I got fed up and basically kicked her out. From what I know, they got married and it all worked out for her.
The great thing about our apartment was that we became friends with everybody on the floor. It was like Melrose Place without a pool. We could walk through the hallways and say, “We’re going out, who’s coming with us tonight?” It was like a dorm, bizarre but fun.
The day we looked at the apartment, we ran into the guys who lived diagonal to us while they were on the way to the gym, and the woman from the management company introduced them to us. The minute we moved in, we became friends. We ordered a print from Art.com for our wall, and when we came out to go to work the next morning, they’d drawn in a big F on the box to make it Fart.com. I’m still great friends with those guys. And then there were two girls across the hall, Rita and Mia. Once I went into work and I had a voice mail from Mia’s mother, asking if I knew where she was. I don’t even know how she got my phone number. Mia had a crazy boyfriend with a cocaine problem, and his mother told her that he still used her credit card and was ordering escorts and charging it on her card. Rita and Mia’s apartment didn’t have a dishwasher so they often came and used mine. They were always asking me for toilet paper. And the other room on the floor belonged to a Portuguese guy who always showed up in his boxers and shirt, and in his heavy accent, said, “I bring you wine from my country!” He was ridiculous, but the wine was really good.
There must have been something special about the apartment complex, because through the neighbors who had lived there for several years, we met former residents. I’ve been at birthday parties with generations of people who have lived in the building. I have a good friend who I met at one of these parties, and though we never lived in the building at the same time, we’ve become very close. He’s in California now, and I see him all the time when I’m there. I haven’t lived in that building in five years, and I’m still friends with so many of them.
I had so many roommates—eight over five years—in the apartment that I kept a list. After my coworker moved out, I found a guy on Craigslist. He was somewhat normal—I always got along better with guys anyway. He moved out because his girlfriend got mad that he was living with a girl. I also met roommate number three, Charlie, on Craigslist, and we later realized we had mutual friends. He started to date a coworker of Rita from across the hall. He was working at a college in Queens, and someone went on Match.com and found out he had an active account. Then we found out he had a girlfriend in Queens as well. He had a side coaching gig in Brooklyn, and he had a girlfriend there too. The big joke was, how did he keep the Bronx and Staten Island out of it? He had girlfriends in three boroughs and an online dating profile. We got along great though; I loved living with him.
After Charlie was a girl who worked at a department store as a buyer. She had nothing between her ears, a total blonde. I’m blond too, but I have a brain. She had a forty-five-year-old boyfriend who lived in Seattle. And she had a weird, creepy doll on a wreath she brought back from Germany that she wanted to hang up. I kicked her out eventually because she drove me crazy. I always felt like I had to invite her out, but I didn’t want to hang out with her because she was so stupid. Then there was a guy we called Roach. We�
��re still friends, but he had a lot of loud sex. The wall wouldn’t stop moving. He moved out because he wanted to live in a bigger place with guys. After him was roommate number six, a Swedish girl who couldn’t afford it. Then Evelyn, who was very young and didn’t realize how much things cost. She always wore these big cross earrings that freaked out my Jewish friends. And my last roommate was a friend of a friend from Australia. She was the best—I love her to this day. When she moved back to Australia, my friends told me I’d been doing this roommate thing for too long. “It’s time to live alone,” they said, and that’s what I’ve done ever since.
—G, 34 (F)
THE CABDRIVER
AFTER GETTING MY MASTER’S DEGREE, I moved in with my college boyfriend in New York. He was living in a first-floor four-bedroom apartment, where the other tenants were Karen, a hospital secretary who he was subletting from; Carlos, an illegal Mexican immigrant; and Frank, a white cabdriver. My boyfriend was paying three hundred dollars for the room at the time and got permission for me to move in with him. Our bedroom was on the corner with a window facing the street, and for a while, I naively thought there was an unusually large number of cars backfiring in the neighborhood. Carlos and my boyfriend were friends, and we saw Karen at dinner or on the weekends. But we barely saw Frank—he was around a bit more before I moved in, but we only ever passed each other in the hallway before he shut himself in his room. He lived behind that door and did not socialize with us.
One weekend, we were out on Long Island when we came back to an insane situation: Frank had died in his room overnight. Karen had walked past Frank’s bedroom on the way to the bathroom at six in the morning and heard a weird gurgling sound, but he was so reclusive that she didn’t do anything about it. By eleven A.M., she noticed a terrible smell coming out of his room. We were all ignorant about death, and the initial comments from the cops and EMTs were that Frank might have choked on his own vomit. This was a guy who came home and went straight into his bedroom with a six-pack of tallboys. He also took ibuprofen for a knee injury, which is apparently bad for your kidneys. And on top of that, Frank had been mugged earlier that week. We never found out from his family exactly what happened—whether it was related to the mugging, or if he had had too much to drink, or maybe a concussion. Karen felt terrible about not doing anything when she first heard something, but what could she have done?
Afterward, the apartment smelled horrible, and we had to wait for so long while the police stayed in the apartment with us. We gave them coffee and cookies while they chitchatted with us and told us that on the weekend, there was only one medical examiner on call for all five boroughs—this was back in the early ’90s. The medical examiner came later that afternoon, but the body wasn’t removed until the evening by someone else. We were in the apartment the whole time, and the EMTs suggested that we burn coffee grinds on the stove and put vanilla on the doorframe of his bedroom to cover the smell. But between the dead body and the smell, we couldn’t sleep there that night, so we went back out to Long Island. I knew we were abandoning Karen, but Frank’s father and brother had been contacted and showed up—we didn’t know Frank well at all. I think his family knew that he was a bit of a black sheep, that he wasn’t very social and had his own problems.
We later sublet Frank’s bedroom as well so the two of us could have more living space. We watched TV in there—I guess it didn’t bother us that badly, especially after a paint job. It was such a crappy apartment anyway, and impossible to get any repairs done there. We constantly had a leak in our bedroom ceiling, and we kept a bucket handy. The leak eventually wore through the plaster and was like a faucet pouring into our room. It was hard to fight with the super or landlord because our names weren’t on the lease. I asked Karen to withhold rent at one point so that we could get the fixes done. It was then that I saw a bill for the rent, and as far as I could tell, it looked like the total was $927. This meant that Carlos, my boyfriend, and I were each paying $300 for crap while she was only paying $27 a month—no wonder she wasn’t helping us fight for repairs. We didn’t live there much longer after that. That pissed me off so much that I’m embarrassed to say that I stiffed her the last month’s rent when we moved out, because I thought she wasn’t paying enough.
—J, 48 (F)
THE WIDOWED ESCORT
IN THE EARLY 1990S, before Craigslist, there was a service in New York called Roommate Finders, where everyone using the organization paid a fee and was prevetted. It was much less efficient, but felt professional and safe. They had an office on Fifty-seventh Street, and I went there to look through binders of people looking for roommates. I interviewed with many of them, and those who didn’t pick you called and said, “We’ve decided to go in another direction.” It was like a job interview, and I remember feeling crushed because some of these people were so cool and I wanted to live with them.
When I first spoke to Diane, she told me she was a widow in her thirties and lived on the Upper East Side. The apartment was in a luxury building with a doorman and a semicircle driveway where cars could drop people off. It was very affordable, five hundred dollars a month. But when I got there, she was definitely in her mid-forties or early fifties. The apartment was full of magazines from the ’70s and had tons of stuff in it. My room was a barebones, drywalled space with only a bed in it.
I was starting out in publishing and was very excited to get my career going. But all of a sudden, things began to get crazy. I don’t know what Diane did for work—she might have been a sales rep for an accessories line, because there were always samples around. We got eviction notices all the time, even though I was paying rent every month. I started coming home earlier at night to try and do some freelance work. One time I came home and the door was double-locked. I was getting agitated because I had a phone call scheduled when Diane finally answered the door wearing a sexy kimono. I heard someone in her bedroom, and if it weren’t for my phone call, I would have been a little puckish and stayed in the living room to see what happened. The minute my phone rang and I went to my room to take the call, I peeked out to see what was going on and saw a guy bolt from her room out the door. And yes, there was money on the table.
It was very sad—Diane was clearly turning tricks. Sometimes I came home and she introduced me to her so-called friends, “Bob” or “Stan,” businessmen who were presumably going back to their wives in the suburbs. They were very nondescript-looking men in their forties and fifties. I could tell she had been a beauty back in the day—she had an Ann-Margaret thing going on. There were always guys running in and out of the apartment and cash left everywhere. It was very strange, but thankfully I never heard them getting it on. We chatted sometimes but she never acknowledged what was happening. She didn’t want to lose that facade with me, but I think she thought I was an idiot who had no idea what was going on.
It did get a bit gross too—I went to the bathroom one night and there was a huge dildo by the bathroom sink. And once I was watching TV and she sat down next to me on the couch bottomless. After that, when friends came over, I told them not to sit on that part of the couch. She was also very spiteful. I had a zit one day, and she called me out on it: “What is that gross thing on your face?” And once I was wearing a vintage dress that a relative had given me, and she said, “Are you secretly rich?” I think she had been part of the fashion community in a bigger way before and wanted to maintain that veneer.
Diane was very good at keeping up appearances. As far as the world knew, she had an apartment on the Upper East Side with a doorman, and no one needed to know that this was how she was making ends meet. It was a tragic New York story. I never told Roommate Finders the truth—I just wanted to get away from there.
—C, 43 (F)
THE TOP CHEF
I GOT INTO COOKING at a very young age, because my family was in the restaurant business in Montreal. I grew up in the industry and fell into it, and I’ve never looked back.
I’ve had roommates my whole life. I went to
two different military schools, and one roommate used to sleepwalk a couple of times a month. You never knew when he was acting out his dreams. I woke up one day and he wasn’t in the room anymore. I looked for him everywhere, and it turned out he was standing at attention in his full uniform, with his belt buckled and shoes shined, in front of the mess hall. That was our routine every morning—wake up, get dressed, and line up outside the mess hall. Sure enough, he was out there completely alone, and that’s how security found him. We later put motion detectors in our room in case he happened to open the door, since it could have been dangerous.
I studied at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, and afterward traveled and worked in France and Vietnam. Those experiences gave me a good base of French cooking, classic cuisine, and exotic Vietnamese cuisine. Then I worked for a couple of restaurants in New York City, including Le Cirque. In New York, I lived with three chefs from school in a tiny three-room apartment in Astoria—we could high-five each other from our beds.
A few years later, I heard about Top Chef because my sister was a fan of the show—she watched Project Runway and Top Chef when they first came out. She was constantly e-mailing and texting me, saying I needed to watch the show and get on it. At first I was a little skeptical, but I did enjoy watching the show. At that point, I had been in the business for a while and was a bit jaded and looking for something new to do. So I applied, and before I knew it, I was on Top Chef.
