High Quality Blur

Road Trip!

It was 2003 and I had been living in NYC for close to a year.  Slowly but surely, life was beginning to be too much.  Actually, strike that.  Life wasn’t too much.  Life was GREAT, it was ME who was too much.  For starters, my living situation wasn’t ideal.  I had been living in a three bedroom apartment with three other roommates, one of which, Melanie, should never have moved to the city in the first place.  She spent all of her time alone in her bedroom, miserable, due to the fact she was worthless and refused to find a decent job.  Looking back at it now, I think she had a small case of agoraphobia.  She only left her bedroom to watch reruns of My So Called Life on the public access channel, or to use the bathroom, though her room stunk so bad at times, I started to think she was using her closet as a porta-potty.

My other two roommates were a lot easier to deal with, though each had their own quirks.  Jodi was the second roommate.  She and I got along really well, until she got a drink in her hand.  Beer was fine, but you give that girl a drop of liquor and out comes “Blackout Jodi”, the worst drunk you could ever imagine.  I invited her to an open bar that I was working at shortly after we moved in together…huge mistake.  She ended up puking on the steps on the way out, and slapping my manager in the face as she was helping to hold her hair back.  Aside from that incident, we got along great at home.  We had a tradition of taking turns ordering Chinese food on lazy days and eating it on our balcony.  Ok…I lie.  It wasn’t a balcony.  It was really our fire escape, which was big enough to hold two folding chairs and sit comfortably.  We spent hours there, smoking joints and watching the people pass by on Northern Boulevard.

Mark was our fourth roommate.  A straight guy, chill, calm, easy going, with no attitude.  He was a bartender at Chili’s in the Laguardia Airport, and that suited him just fine.  He and I shared a 8×8 bedroom, him sleeping on a lofted bed on one side of the room, and me on an aero bed on the other.  It was a tight squeeze, but amazingly enough, we never really got on each others nerves.  Mark was quite a gentlemen, always courteous enough to give me the heads up when he felt like masturbating, giving me the option to leave the room, or stay.  Either way, it didn’t matter to him.  More often then not, I stayed, and joined in a couple of times as well.  Regardless of how well we got along, sharing what could barely be considered a bedroom with someone, and sleeping on a blow up mattress was not how I pictured my life to be.

No, my living situation was not the end of the world, but add to that the stresses of my job and it quickly began to snowball.

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