Things Left Behind by the Guy Whose Lease I Just Took Over

In celebration of my new apartment (which I actually really like), here is a list of the things I found when I moved in not too long ago. The previous tenant left:

• a black futon mattress, on the ground, folded into quarters;
• a porn DVD: “Video Magazine Nineteen, vol. 13: College Girls” (under the futon);
• a miniature grill with two full cans of lighter fluid;
• a J°S. A. Banks tie still wrapped in tissue paper, with a $79.95 price tag;
• a drawer full of loose plastic utensils and a stack of paper plates;
• a double-boiler;
• corduroy pants and a blue button-up shirt;
• a pair of underwear and scattered socks;
• an almost untouched (still mostly shrink-wrapped) bulk package of peanut candy (which was, ahem, pretty good);
• a small box of rice;
• a Harry Potter beer stein, which is about a foot tall, has a heavy silver lid, and features the full-color insignias of all six houses; on the bottom is a price sticker reading $40;
• a suit hanging in the closet in one of those suit bags you take when you’re traveling;
• various plastic lids and tops to appliances;
• a huge pack of paper towels;
• a wobbly black desk with three white trash bags taped across the top like plastic sheeting, covered in crumbs and featuring one small chemical symbol drawn in pen;
• and a plastic double-edged skull axe Halloween decoration.

Naturally I contacted him to return some of the valuable stuff. He didn’t want any of it.

(But this was nothing compared to one roommate experience I had. I arrived in Valencia, Spain for the year without arranging anywhere to live beforehand. Through a Craigslist-type message board, I found an apartment for rent and was able to see it that afternoon. I liked the apartment and was eager to stop paying for a hostel, so I was able to work out a deal that I could move in ASAP with the understanding that the remaining two rooms were to be filled as quickly they could, either with people I’d found myself or people that answered an ad the realtor posted online.

A day or two later we got a call from the realtor saying that she had found someone for us. We could come and meet him as soon as we wanted, because at that moment he was in the realtor’s office around the corner, waiting to move into the apartment. We walked over to meet him. We were introduced to his aunt and then to him. My roommate and I exchanged a subtle look because the roommate that the realtor was trying really hard to pretend was a great choice for us was sitting in the corner of the room, breathing heavily, sweating heavily, and looking at us in a way that can only be described as “distraught leering.” He was a big, solid guy and his hair was soaked through. His aunt had actually found the apartment for him and co-signed his lease, as she was looking after him while he was in town.

He seemed nervous and exhausted and his aunt explained that had been on a bus all day, traveling from the northwestern corner of Spain all the way across the country to Valencia. We talked with him and tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, as maybe his deranged appearance would lessen in severity after a shower and a good night’s sleep. He told us that he liked to cook, and we decided that a good way to get to know each other was to make a meal the next evening, after he finished moving in. My roommate and I shrugged as we walked back, trying to empathize with his journey and the stress of meeting new people.

Long story short, the meal was surprisingly good and the awkwardness was more or less only that which occurs when you have to spend time with someone new. A few days go by and it’s fine, though I do start to wonder what I’m going to do when my girlfriend comes to stay for four months, because I definitely wouldn’t feel safe leaving her alone with the new guy when I was at work. He hadn’t yet stopped breathing heavily and interjecting strange exhortations into our conversations and so I wasn’t sure if he was as socially adept as one might hope, a notion that I was trying to pretend was my only worry about him.

One night I went out with a bunch of people and end up staying on someone’s couch across town. My original roommate was going to have some people over, and I was told that there would probably be people crashing on our couch. Cool, the bohemian lifestyle; fine by me. But I got a phone call at about ten thirty the next morning from my roommate. He isn’t home, he says, because he almost got in a fight with the new guy. Why? Because earlier that morning, a girl that was staying on our couch woke up to find the new guy giggling and taking photos with his cellphone as she slept.

She got up and shut herself in the bathroom. She called my roommate, who came out into the living room and asked what was going on. The new guy immediately got super-defensive and says that it’s his house and he can do whatever he wants. The conversation got heated and so my roommate and all his friends leave the apartment. A little while later the new guy’s aunt calls my roommate and asks him why he threatened to punch her nephew. My roommate is gobsmacked and really wanted to ask her how she could possibly think that it was he who should be worried about in this situation.

Shit. I went home and tried to talk to the guy. He was wildly pacing around the apartment and continued to chain smoke. He snapped at me when I suggested he stop smoking because it’s against the lease to smoke inside. Finally we talked for a little while and he seemed to acknowledge that he did something really sketchy, but it’s one of those situations where the shame of it makes him not contrite but want to lash out in the embarrassment he can’t handle. (My roommate said the aunt told him that he made the new guy cry when he threatened him to punch him.) He calmed down a little but then flared up again when my roommate name came up. He pushed his way out of the apartment after calling me a ‘fucking American scum’(!).

My roommate and I met at a bar to discuss the situation. ‘We can’t go back there when he’s there. I won’t go back there when he’s there,’ he said. I agreed. I had a backpack with all of my valuables in it and we both had floors to sleep on that night. We would tell him he had to leave tomorrow. But do we confront him alone? What if he won’t leave? What if he gets violent?

But not too long after we got to the bar, I get a call from the guy’s aunt asking me to meet her. I go to the apartment to talk with her, hoping that this will somehow be resolved but not looking forward to how. We agree we’ll let each other tell our respective sides of the story, and I’m trying all the while to come up with the most tactful way to explain that her nephew is and was being super creepy to people. She was actually a genuinely understanding person, and fortunately for us it turned out that the guy was already on an overnight bus back to where he came from, and she just wanted to clear everything up and suss out what might have really happened.

We went home that night and looked into his room. We stood in the doorway for a second feeling a bit of trepidation about actually walking in, like the guy was in there waiting for us, or that his essence was adrift waiting to be breathed in. We walked in and looked around the room, trying process the weird couple of days we’d just experienced. We started opening drawers to see if he’d left anything behind. Right after nervously laughing about the discomfort we felt having him in the house, we discovered that he had stashed a long kitchen knife in the drawer of the table right next to his bed.

Despite this debacle, the landlord still thought she had the ability to select sane roommates and her search continued. (She also insinuated as long as we lived there that we were somehow at fault for running the guy out.) Unfortunately anyone we might know who needed a house had found one at this point, and so the next two people that lived in the house were people found somehow by the realtor.

Roommate A and I had a few days to ourselves before we were introduced to the next guy one afternoon. We came home from work and he was unpacking in the spare room. He seemed decent enough. He was happy-go-lucky, a moderate soccer fan, and was studying economics. He was from Portugal.

In time, we learned he liked to sing loudly and would belt out tone deaf renditions of 90s US pop songs, but only the choruses or a line or two from a verse repeated over and over. This happened a lot but wasn’t that big of a deal, and it was actually kind of endearing. The weirdest thing that happened with him was a result of my girlfriend and I agreeing to go out with him and his friend. We went to the bar down the street. We hung out and talked on the sidewalk about nothing in particular. The bar always had this incredible deal on tiny bottles of beer, and so every table around us was piled with literally dozens of bottles. Anyway, his friend was nice enough but we were distracted by the act of talking to him, since his face was engineered in such a way that his mouth was always open really, really wide and would blast out pressurized puffs of air into your face every time he used certain syllables. An hour or so later we ended up in a bar that was blasting the ‘Friends’ theme song when we walked in, a song much enjoyed by the patrons, almost all of who were all jumping up and down and clapping with the claps in the song. The new roommate had been really flirty with my girlfriend all night to the point where I was wondering if I should say something to him about it. (And I’m not a needlessly upset guy). But suddenly his attention shifted to me, and he started dancing high up on my thigh, with his eyes closed and head shaking in time with the music. Then he licked my neck and kissed me a couple of times before acting like nothing had happened. Thus the flirtation balance was restored and we continued on into the night.

Roommate A moved out a little while later (supposedly because he wanted to be closer to the center of town) and was replaced with a fresh-faced eighteen year-old kid from Morocco who had never lived outside his parents’ house. I learned that he could usually be found in his room laughing at top volume with his friends on Skype or watching soccer games. Sometimes he would leave to go to the Halal market around the corner, but that was about the only place he went aside from going school, which was down the street from our apartment, on the same block.

His most perplexing behavior was his bathroom behavior. He would shut himself in there for at least a half an hour a time, and when he finally left literally every surface of the bathroom was as soaking wet as if he’d sprayed the entire room with the shower. The toilet seat had drops of water all over it, the towels were damp, the walls were dripping. This never changed and I never learned what he did; I would only hope that I got to the bathroom before he did.

One day I walked in the kitchen as he was microwaving the collapsed remains of a rotisserie chicken, but not on a plate. It was just sitting on the rotating microwave tray. A little while later his dad came to visit for a week. His dad was always neatly dressed in a suit and tie. We didn’t speak any mutual languages so he just smiled at me or shook my hand profusely every time we passed. One evening I met them in the kitchen. They were preparing dinner by microwaving a box full of popcorn shrimp, again without a plate, just sitting on the rotating tray. The shrimp had a breading that in the oven would have been crispy and nice but in the microwave completely melted and turned into a gross glop that covered even a wider section of the microwave plate. I finally asked him why he did this. Not out of anger or disgust, just genuine curiosity about what was going on. He said that he didn’t use a plate because he didn’t know you could microwave them. But what about the soup you regularly microwave in a bowl? I asked. It’s the exact same principle. I saw him consider this and agree.
The last problem I experienced in this apartment happened in August, when I was moving out as almost the entire city of Valencia goes on vacation. I left a pair of shoes and sandals and a sweatshirt and some magazines there to get later but when I came back to get them, I found that the other two guys had already gone home, the realtor’s office was closed until September, and the guy who actually owned the place was far away on vacation as well. Thus the apartment consumed a handful of my belongings.)