How to Grow Up (2 page)

Off a narrow hallway sat my new roommate Christopher's room. Christopher was a twink. He was as skinny as a string bean, with those undeserved muscles boys get simply for being boys, with wide blue eyes and a scoop of golden hair on his head. Christopher had grown up on a farm in the middle of nowhere, cultivating a fierce bitchiness to get by. He was sort of the “head roommate”—his name was the only one on the lease, and he was the only one who had the landlord's phone number.

Bernadette's bedroom was lined with books. A collection of feathered jewelry hung on the wall, and a giant broken mirror sat on the floor. Much of what I saw in the house appeared to have been dragged in from the street, a look I was familiar with. Back in the Blue House all of our furniture had been found on the street. The realization hit me: Everything the movers were lifting into the house was stuff I'd actually
bought
. Things I'd selected because they were what I desired, and I'd paid for them. None of them were pieces I'd pulled into my life because I just needed something—a table, a chair—and there it was, right there on the street, and it was free, and I had no money. I hadn't intended to weed out my curbside finds and replace them with nicer pieces; I just had, slowly, over time.

It was a breath of fresh air to leave my secluded North Beach apartment with its funeral dirges and memories of a broken relationship and land in this house, with young people for whom life was still new. Nightclubs were still exciting; bars were not drab. Music was something to be endlessly discovered, as were people, as was everything. My new roomies would be invigorating. The persimmon tree promised.

“It is cool that I'm moving in,” I agreed with Bernadette. “I'm really excited to be here.”

•   •   •

I referred to this new apartment as the Blue House Light, and in many ways it was. There was partying, for sure, but no all-night cocaine parties. If my roommates indulged, they did so at other people's houses, which seemed like the best you could hope for when cohabiting with twentysomethings who made their living bartending or enacting drag performances. The place was dirty, but there were no bugs, no mysterious fungi sprouting on moldering dish towels. And rather than a rebellious refusal to clean, there were sporadic, optimistic stabs at spiffing the house up, mostly by Christopher. Perhaps as part of his head roommate duties, he would sometimes wake early on a weekend, smoke a bowl of weed, and cheerfully mop the kitchen floor, scrub the crust off the stove, toss leftovers from the fridge, episodes of
Ab Fab
blaring from his computer all the while. Of course, no one's erratic attempts at cleanliness made much of a difference in the long run; what the shabby place needed was really a deep,
deep
cleaning, probably by professionals. I tried to stay out of the scant common space, in an
effort to both avoid the yuck and not add to it. I kept to my bedroom.

Something about how roomy my bedroom was made it feel not so much like I was living with some twenty-year-olds and more like I had my own studio apartment in an old-timey building where I had to share the toilet and kitchen with other renters down the hall. I kept my room neat, even swept the hardwood floors, and cultivated the illusion that it was unconnected to the general mess outside the door. Working from home while Christopher and Bernadette were at their day jobs, I enjoyed the silence, punctuated only by the birds in the backyard. I'd sprawl on my bed during breaks throughout the day, flipping through magazines, or sit on the floor and make crush crafts for whatever current person I was obsessing over, beads and sequins getting stuck in the cracks in the boards. The house beyond, with its dirt and chaos, may not have felt exactly like home, but my sweet bedroom always did.

Of course, this was an illusion, and regularly the fantasy that I lived alone was dashed by cold, hard, noisy, dirty reality. Our walls were thin and I heard everyone most all the time: Bernadette's cowboy boots clacking on the floor as she nuked herself some grub and brought it back to her room to eat in bed in front of her TV set, curled under the covers with wicked PMS; Christopher blaring an obscure musical
on his computer as he sat at the kitchen table eating the Popeyes takeout he grabbed over on Mission Street. The early evening was his break between his day job at a bank and his evening activities as a lascivious drag queen hosting events at gay-boy dive bars. Christopher was a Superman
of sorts, changing from mild-mannered Castro banker to glitter-clumped metallic-clad Superqueen in our phone-booth-sized bathroom, leaving a trail of sparkle everywhere he went. I'd always hear him through my bedroom window as he sat outside on the back stairs, gabbing on his cell phone, smoking and ashing into the repulsive ashtray, its butts defying gravity as the accumulation grew upward and outward. Perhaps everyone was just trying to see how long it could go until it tumbled, like a disgusting house of cards. Or perhaps the game was to see which roommate would break and actually empty it. It wasn't going to be me; I felt it should be emptied by one of the more habitual smokers. Plus, I figured it came with the territory of a house of twentysomethings, and I stayed strong in my refusal to take on the Sisyphean task of trying to keep any part of the slovenly house clean.

I never got mad at my roommates for the decrepit state of the house, for their drunken entrances in the middle of the night, loud enough to wake me. I would simply remember my own twenties, and reflect on notions of karma.
You probably deserve this
became my mantra.

Whenever Christopher tromped up the stairs at two a.m., singing show tunes at the top of his lungs, I remembered the Blue House, not so different from this one except it had been worse, in all ways one could judge a home—in its uncleanliness, its disrepair, its odors, its inhabitants' imbibing of drugs and alcohol, its hosting of sordid activities. Listening to Christopher straining to get his voice into territory that is off-limits to anyone but Ethel Merman, I recalled the after-parties I once brought home from the bar, how the telephone would ring and ring and not one of
us would answer it, as it could only be one person—Cort, our landlord, whom we were keeping up with our laughter and our music, and the occasional wrestling match that would tumble onto the floor above his head.

When the buzzer rang late at night and Christopher would lead into our home a man he had just met—no, was just meeting now, for the first time, at the foot of our stairway—when he led the man into his bedroom and then left his Chihuahua crated in the kitchen to bark and bark and bark into the night, obscuring the sex sounds streaming from Christopher's boudoir, I would think,
You deserve this
, and remember my old Blue House roommate Elsbeth. She would creep from her room in the dead of night to glare at us, the after-party, all of us high on cocaine and
talking
—talking loudly, talking over one another, talking compulsively, talking as if the words in our mouths were bits of food and we were all starving. “Could you all please shut the fuck up—I'm sleeping!” Elsbeth would bravely share her needs with us and then return to her room, slamming the door. There would be a moment of stunned silence as our addled minds, momentarily derailed, struggled to get back on track. Compared to my coked-out after-parties, Christopher's booty calls and show tunes were really the
least
I deserved.

As if Karma herself recognized I was getting off a little easy in the raucous-roommate department, while I was taking a shower one night, the bathroom door was flung open and Christopher barged in, likewise naked. “Do you mind?” he asked, and proceeded to fumble around in the moldy and overstuffed shelves, ancient beauty products tumbling to the slick linoleum floor. “I
got a date and have to wash my ass out.” I could tell by his general aura that Christopher was drunk, or maybe very stoned, or perhaps on cocaine, maybe with a bit of Xanax to take the edge off the edge. The faucet turned on and Christopher began to sing a show tune. He did his business in the sink, and left.

I shut off the shower and stood, dripping, among the grime.
You deserve this
, I thought, recalling the many times I'd imposed my sex life on my roommates, either through the vibrato of my cries or by doing it in the living room when I thought no one was home or barging into a roommate's bedroom, half-naked, demanding safe-sex supplies.

I think Christopher was always trying to shock me a little, playfully. As a sober person and an older person whose wild ways were behind her, I could provide the appropriate gasp and “
Chris
-to-pher!” when he performed his wildness for me. I wasn't really shocked by drug-addled twentysomethings cavorting naked through the hallways. But it was beginning to feel a bit shocking that
this was where I lived
.
Was I in denial about how screwy and sad it was to live among such youthful disarray? Should I be more concerned? I was, and I wasn't. There was part of me that was entertained, and that part of me was also secure in the knowledge that I was just living here temporarily. Passing through. Taking my mind off my breakup, making sure I didn't lapse into loneliness. But what if I lapsed into something else? What if I just thought I was a visitor, but then I woke up fifty years old still sharing a house with a rotating cast of twenty-three-year-old bartenders?

But I wasn't fifty. Not yet. I was thirty-eight, which felt
ancient only in comparison with my roommates. I soothed my nerves with a cigarette out on the back porch, flicking the ashes into the Bloomin' Onion. When in Rome.

•   •   •

About a month later, I turned the corner by the artisanal pork and oyster restaurant and spied an ambulance at the other end of the block. I just
knew
it was at my house. It was possibly there to dig the reclusive alcoholic hoarder out from under a pile of newspaper and succulents, but more likely it was for one of my roommates. I opened the gate and found the door to our apartment swung open, the stairwell lined with EMTs and Christopher at the top, cursing.

“What's going on?”
I asked innocently.

“This your roommate?”
an EMT asked, thumbing at Christopher.

“Christopher, what's wrong?”

“What's wrong is, I am having a fucking
heart attack
, and these assholes don't fucking
care
that I have to find my house keys before I leave, and I can't find them, and I am having a fucking
heart attack
!”

“We do care,” said
an EMT in a tone that suggested he had said this many times to Christopher. “But there is a five-alarm fire happening in the city and there are a lot more calls we need to make, so we'd like to get you in the vehicle.”

“Just go.”
Christopher flipped his hands. “Why don't you go rescue important people, then, and just leave me here to
die
!”

“Christopher, don't worry about your keys,”
I said to him. “I'll be here. I'll let you in when you get home. Just go.”

“Don't fucking touch me,”
he snapped at an EMT attempting to gently help him down the stairs.

The doorbell rang hours later, waking me up. It was Christopher, barefoot on the street, smoking and tranquilized. “I was having a panic attack,” he explained. “Once they got me in the ambulance I calmed down and started hitting on them. They loved me.”

I unlatched the front gate and let Christopher in.
You deserve this
, I thought, recalling an anxiety attack that a former Blue House roommate had experienced upon realizing just what it meant to live in a home where the residents had sworn off cleaning. Those days were behind me—so why relive them? Why live in a home where you are actually afraid to put your hand into certain cabinets, because there are mouse droppings behind the stove and indeed you have seen mice dash across the kitchen floor and you are scared that there is a huge colony living in one of the cabinets, cabinets no one uses because in this home no one uses the kitchen, for no one cooks? I was haunted by these questions. After living as an extreme dirtbag for so long, the ability to withstand grime was a solid life skill that I possessed. I could imagine many situations in which this skill would be prized—after the apocalypse, for example. On a
Survivor
-type reality show. If I was ever kidnapped and thrown into a dungeon. I'd be quicker to thrive in these situations than, say, someone who'd been consistently mopping their floors their whole life. Right?

As fanciful as such thoughts were, the other side of that coin was that I could withstand living in a dirty place because it was familiar. I'd done it so long, it was something I genuinely
understood how to do. Maybe I'd started honing this skill because I was impoverished, and an alcoholic to boot. I'd taken comfort in being able to withstand conditions that many people couldn't. I was
tough
. Where I come from, toughness is prized more than cleanliness, much closer to godliness, if your god was a rough motherfucker. I felt a crooked pride; I was superior to folks whose privileged lives would see to it that they never had to figure out how to cohabit with cockroaches.

But I wasn't that person anymore. Sure, I was proud of who I was in the world and I embraced every single little messed-up circumstance that shaped me. But I didn't think it meant what I used to think it meant—that I was somehow better than anyone, that it built character. The simple fact was, I had moved in with the twentysomethings because I'd needed a cheap place to live in my most desirable neighborhood. And the thought of moving again, so soon, was scary and overwhelming. San Francisco was notoriously expensive, getting more notorious and expensive by the year. Maybe this was the best a single person who made her living writing could hope for.

Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting your enemy to die
, many a sage former drunkard has said. I tried to avoid situations I knew would just cause me to burn up with gripes and grievances. So I lived as my comrades lived, eating mostly takeout and things I could grab from the disgusting fridge and bring into my room. I never forgot that I had known what I was getting into when I moved in. Unlike my old relationship, which I'd never stopped trying to change, I was under no illusion that my house belonged to me. This house belonged to the young. Every
bit of dirt, every empty wine bottle, every booty call was meant to be here. I was the one who didn't belong.