In which we are dumped
If I sound bitter and petty ... you bet I am! While I normally reserve those feelings for things like Punch-Drunk Love, I gotta vent 'em a little here in Blogland, where Pettiness is simply de rigueur. As I'm reviewing the whole debacle, I'm getting pissed off all over again. TG really shit on a couple of people who, up until that time and even sometime after, thought he was a good friend. I mean at first, we were all for him leaving N. We just didn't realize he was leaving all of us. His disappearance that cold day in March began a screwing process that has yet to completely abate. He stuck us with N, his ex-girlfriend (a woman so repellent to him, that he could not even break up with her face-to-face). She had never been our friend; during our months of living together this woman never made any attempt to be friendly, choosing rather to hole up in her room, making pronouncements to be carried out by her man. So he basically left us a total stranger to live with, his logic being that the initiator of the break up must leave the premises. Who knows, maybe he thought she would take the hint and move out immediately after he did. He was already helping her cover the rent, as well as inexplicably paying for some of her many prescription meds. Her parents had recently, finally, stopped giving her money. She worked one part-time job as a receptionist, barely making enough to cover her end of the (very cheap) rent. With him gone, her world necessarily went into the toilet, causing my first pangs of sympathy towards her. These soon turned into pangs of nausea as the next step in the post-TG horror show: the prospect of living with N, and only N.

As previously stated, we never really liked N. It wasn't that she was a horrible roommate; in fact, she was generally quiet and kept to herself. That's fine if you are in some apartment share situation in which people answer classified ads, perfect strangers purposely living together to cut the rent. Between B and I, we counted something like 14 actual friends of ours we'd rather live with, all who were desperately looking for a place like ours in which to move. After TG fled, we assumed that N would be moving back in with her parents, as she'd never be able to cover her and TG's end of the rent. Because she'd have to cover that rent if she wanted to stay, right?

When the dust settled from the whole letter-on-the-bed thing, we realized that the rent was going to become a Issue. When we moved in together, we had an interesting rent-splitting method: 56%-44%, by couple. Our apartment is a duplex, and the upper bedroom is way bigger than the lower one, not to mention facing the backyard so it is much quieter. So we decided that whichever couple got the big room would pay $200 more in rent every month. This left the lower-floor couple with a very good deal indeed, for this town anyway. B and I ended up winning the coin toss, so we got the big room. Even with the extra rent we paid, we still had a great deal. But now the three remaining tenants were facing a gap of 22% of the rent, not to mention how much of N's share of the rent that TG was covering before he skedaddled. It didn't immediately hit us that this could be our problem; we had been for the break-up after all, and wasn't this something to be worked out between the two ex-lovers? We sat idly by.

To his credit, TG didn't leave us totally high and dry. Of course, he tried. We emailed and he asked that I use his share of the security deposit to cover what would have been his share of the rent for the next few months, you know, to ease us into the 3-person deal. I replied that since I had no physical access to the deposit money, nor any guarantee that we would even get it back that I would prefer some cold hard cash up front. Thankfully, he agreed and for the next couple months, with some prodding, sent me rent checks like he was a phantom member of the household. Now during this time it occurred to us that eventually these checks would stop. But still, nobody said anything, even though it was pretty obvious where this was heading.

A month after TG sent in his last rent check, N started getting antsy. She said she thought we'd be splitting the rent 3 ways to compensate for the missing bedfellow. Now, if I had been friends with this woman, I'm sure I would have done this. It wouldn't add much more to our rent, and N's rent would have been only 50% larger, rather than 100%. But truth be told, she was not our friend, and since TG's departure didn't really add to our personal space, while it doubled N's, we said we didn't want to pay more rent because her boyfriend flaked out. Yeah, it felt a little harsh, but in the intervening months, N had not evidenced one iota of effort towards provisioning herself for her new 'lifestyle.' Even though she had admitted early on that she'd need a second job, she had made no noticeable progress towards getting work to make a living wage in New York, preferring to sit around watching TV in her spare time. Even with the 'grace' months of TG rent checks coming in, she apparently thought the money a 'gift' to the whole household, and that we'd be ready to chip in to pay her rent when it ended. Well, frankly that was not at all what we had in mind. We were sure she would move out, and felt that if we stood by our rent structure, it could only help speed her journey.

But it didn't work. We talked a few more times about it. I even got stuck talking to her alone one night. This was the first in a series of conversations I have had with her that made me feel like I was her father, being 'hard' on her because it was for her own good. Shit. That really fucking sucked. This woman is the same age as me, nearly 30, and I had to explain to her why B and I didn't want to help support her, why she needed a good job that paid enough to live on, etc. It was obviously the only way she knew to deal with problems of this size: to get somebody (us, her parents) to take responsibility for her life. Trying to be as fair and polite as possible, we said No. TG was in communication with N during this time, and he claimed that he assumed we'd split the rent 3 ways. When he heard that we were being stubborn, he profusely apologized ... to N. "I never meant it to turn out like this ..." Yes, but where was our apology? Thus, he established himself with the grieving N in opposition to us, the unfeeling couple upstairs. Stroke of genius, to be sure. But TG had no real power over the situation, not after creating it at least. So we held fast to our notions of rent distribution. Finally, she agreed, and one glorious night, she said that she would pay the full amount of the rent, but within the month she would have to find cheaper lodgings elsewhere.

She said everything we wanted to hear. It was great. She sounded mature for once in her life, like she really understood the situation. And we believed her.

6 months later and she's still here. She's still paying fully 44% of the entire rent, so in some respects she's the major shareholder of the apartment. I know we're in no position to tell her to leave. In this time, she took on an additional job at a video store, making a whopping $7.50 and hour (she has since quit this job). Aside from that, she still has her first job, 25 hours a week, as a receptionist. Because of her medical conditions (manic-depressiveness, food allergies), she needs several expensive medications (her insurance doesn't cover all the expenses). She is taking classes at the decidely expensive New School. She eats a bizarre diet similar to veganism that requires shopping at pricey shops like Whole Foods. She likes to buy funky clothes. She does not make enough money to pay her rent. I assume her parents, loving enablers that they are, have been providing matching funds to her since TG's money dried up. There is no other explanation. As a person who has been financially independent since late 1994, I find this a shite state of affairs. But the rent gets paid, and as for N, she has come light years from the picky introvert she was when she moved in. Forced to interact with someone other than her boyfriend, she has learned some of the basic protocols for living with other humans who are not her parents. We've bonded over mutual disgust for what TG did, even though her presence is part of that disgust for us.

But she's still not our friend. We still look forward to the day when she moves out or we purchase our own apartment. Either way, we'll never see her again. Like we'll never see TG again. If he hadn't been such a spineless wonder, none of this shit would have happened. He ditched N, and he ditched us as well. He left all this shit behind (figuratively and literally, since he abandoned tons of his crap here) for us to clean up. He made no effort whatsoever to stay in touch with us, even though we tried to reach out to him. And despite B's confrontation with him last month, he has made no contact with us. Our conclusion is that he must despise us. Either that or he thinks so little of our friendship that it doesn't concern him in the least that he fucked us over. As I said earlier, if he had left for Texas back in March, maybe it would be understandable. But he's still generally in our circle of friends. While his life has improved vastly, we have been mired in his leftovers ever since. The very fact that despite this we held onto some hope that we could eventually work it out reveals the depth of his betrayal. We have been waiting for 8 months for some sign from him that he valued our friendship, and we have received nothing.

I've never had somebody I considered a friend do anything like this. I've had friends disappoint me, had friends get into fights with me, had friends who slowly slipped away. But I've never had a friend just turn off like this. He was our roommate, and living with people is a notoriously quick way to sour friendships. But we saw little evidence of this while he was still here. If we had done something to deserve this, I'd sure like to know the details. Barring that, there's a big void, and that's been the hardest thing to live with.

So at some point after his departure, he met this woman from Texas, where his parents live, has fallen in love, and is now going to marry her and move South. I can't imagine he ever talks about us with this person, it would ruin the Nice Guy image he has always cultivated. And as much as I'd like to let bygones be bygones, the evolving Pushy New Yorker in me can't let this slide. I don't think it's a good idea. I don't wish him years of happiness. I can only wish that he gets fucked over to the same degree he fucked us over. I doubt it will happen; there are some guys who always land on their feet. But based on past performance, I doubt this union will last. He's proven himself to be a guy who makes sweeping life changes based on rash decisions, and when they don't work out, he dumps them. Maybe that's why he has cut us so completely out of his life, for fear that we would spread the word to his new friends. But I don't even think he's put that much thought into it.

So that's the gist of it. Obviously, the rent thing and living with N rapidly became an issue that had nothing to do with TG; it's just more fuel for the fire. It is, in the end, this dismissal of our friendship that remains the most irksome part of this story. It's like we were never friends, like it was just something I imagined existed. I ran into TG in a Williamsburg bar a couple months ago, and although intimidating, I was interested in seeing how he reacted to me. He did speak to me, but it was the tone of somebody running into a guy he met once at a party. He gave no indication that he knew me at all, or that I should know him. I was just somebody to say hi to.

During B's confrontation he claimed that he thought we had washed our hands of him; he had stayed away from us because we didn't want to have anything to do with him. Of course, while we had made repeated attempts to get him to go out for drinks or attend parties with us (all leading to dead ends), he had never made a single overture towards us. It's not really worth dissecting this response, since its skewed logic reveals the meat of his inaction: by espousing this view, he would honor our wishes … by doing absolutely nothing. It appears when the going gets tough for TG, TG does as little as possible.

And that's too bad, since most of my time knowing the guy was worthwhile. I should let my defensive aspects take over and just say fuck him, but I probably wouldn't totally mean it. I never wear my heart on my sleeve, and neither does TG, so getting these things cleared would be necessarily difficult. But some part of me still hopes that he'll email us, and start off with "I'm sorry …" In a few months it won't really matter; he'll be in Texas and we'll never see him again. But I haven't really seen him in months, and it still bugs me, so even after he's gone I know it won't end it in my mind. I'll still obsess about how it happened, still read his blog and wonder if he'll ever mention the friends he deserted and how maybe it always kind of bothered him that he left things.

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