Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)

PART I

Breaking Away

4

Living with Roommates

Living with someone is quite different from being friends with them. Cohabitation means you will be exposed to just about every little quirk and flaw they have. Snoring, bathroom habits, bathroom maintenance, shower duration, messiness vs. cleanliness, whether they leave food out, whether they allow the dust bunnies under their bed to grow in size until they belong in Jurassic Park. Cohabitation means you get exposed to all those little things they hide from the outside world. Sometimes it’s easier to negotiate all of those issues with a stranger, with no emotional baggage or delicate friendship to maintain, than with a best friend.

Of course, there’s always the chance that the stranger you’re moving in with is an axe murderer. It’s a trade-off.

I must begin this chapter by openly declaring I was a terrible roommate. Sorry, Chris. I don’t know if my friendship with Chris grew stronger after I moved out, but it definitely ran smoother.

We were a good Oscar-and-Felix combination. He was neat and organized; I was … not. I was basically the antimatter to neat and organized.

Probably my worst trait as a roommate was that, fairly regularly, the bacteria in my dirty laundry pile would evolve into an advanced civilization. Bacterial cities, trade routes, advanced societal specialization of roles—everything you played in Sid Meier’s Civilization was developing in my pile of sweaty shirts. The moment you could see the little bacteria developing a space program to colonize other laundry piles, it was game over.

In my defense, washing laundry in our building was an epic hassle, particularly from my current perspective of comfortable near-middle-aged suburban married life. We lived in an apartment building with several hundred people, and our only option was the washers and dryers in the basement. (I don’t think there was a neighborhood laundromat.) Each washer and dryer needed, if I recall correctly, seventy-five cents, payable only in quarters. So if you were going to wash your whites and your coloreds, you had to have at least three dollars in quarters. Of course, if your loads were too big, the machine wouldn’t work properly, the load would get imbalanced, and/or the detergent wouldn’t reach certain parts of the laundry. Even in my twenties, I was roughly the size of a house, so my clothes were always big and my laundry piles were always gargantuan Dagwood sandwich-piles of scientifically groundbreaking stink. Yes, I let the laundry pile up until it was about one step away from being compost.

There were four washers and four dryers in our apartment building’s laundry room, presuming none of them were out of order. Of course, most nights, at least one of them was. And equally predictably, most of the several hundred renters in the building had the same thought of doing laundry on Sunday nights, to be ready for the week ahead, resulting in extraordinary demand and extremely limited supply. A standard drying cycle was maybe, on a good night, enough to get your clothes to only slightly damp. Wait, it gets worse; I think they locked the door to the laundry room at midnight. At about 11:30, that last dryer was the laundry equivalent of the last helicopter out of Saigon.

Early-twenty-something Jim was really not good at coordinating (A) having at least three dollars in quarters, and probably ideally six dollars, (B) laundry detergent, (C) fabric softener, (D) a washing machine open when I needed it, and (E) a dryer open when I needed it. It was like a rare astrological planetary alignment.

So Sunday night’s laundry effort—let’s not call it “doing” laundry, let’s call it “trying” laundry—was to prioritize the five shirts, five pants, five pair of underwear, five pair of undershirts, and ten socks that I needed for class or work. Everything else was a luxury. Did my workout clothes require a hazmat team yet? Eh, they can wait until next week. Okay, that sock has so much dried sweat in it that it looks and feels fossilized—put him in the priority pile. The armpits of that undershirt were so yellow you would think I sweated lemons. Put him in the “must-do” pile.

All the stuff that was deprioritized? “Eh, I’ll wash them next Saturday!” (SPOILER ALERT: I didn’t.)

You want to talk about married, suburban luxury? Today I can throw something in the washer whenever I want. I’m Henry VIII, baby.

I was late with the rent check a couple of times, and that’s a thoroughly awful feeling. I’m sure Chris felt that his credit score would be irrevocably damaged by my inability to turn in a check on time. He’s now a successful consultant, living in Florida, with a beautiful wife and child. But just think of where he would be if I hadn’t been late with the rent check those times! He’d probably be wealthy and powerful enough to fire Donald Trump!

Your Room Should Not Be a Roach Motel

Unfortunately for my past roommates, my story is much like Jim’s. Okay, I was never, to the best of my recollection, short on rent, but I was equally slobbish in my behavior and lack of cleaning habits. It was worse, of course, when I lived with someone who was almost as messy as I was.

At one time I lived in a serviceable two bedroom apartment in a not-quite-yet-gentrified neighborhood in Oklahoma City. Even with our scavenged couch, vintage 1970s floor lamps found at Goodwill, and bookshelves made from milk carton crates and 2x4s, it was a cool place.

I suppose the best roommates might be two neat freaks, but even then there might be arguments over which brand of disinfectant to use, who puts on the hazardous waste suit to take out the trash, and so on. Two slobs presents their own problems: stacks of dishes piled high out of the sink and overflowing onto the counter, the bugs that come with the filth, picking your wardrobe by smell instead of sight, and did I mention the freaking BUGS? Bugs are not desirable house guests.

Roaches are filthy. But if you develop a roach problem shortly after moving into several different apartments, that might mean that you’re filthy too. Roaches only hang around where they can find an easy meal and a snug place to sleep at night. It takes fifteen minutes, at the most, to pick up your trash, wash your dishes, and tidy up your apartment. Just do it.

Fun fact: At some point my wife will read this book, including the preceding paragraphs. She is very likely to laugh derisively and then track me down wherever I might be at the moment to shove these paragraphs under my nose and confront me about the rather slobbish behavior of several of our own children. She will almost certainly tell me that this is clear evidence I am to blame for the fact that the majority of our kids would be happy living in the kind of squalor that should be highlighted on a reality show called Junior Hoarders. Maybe not happy, but comfortable. It wouldn’t bother them enough to clean things up.

It could be I am to blame for this. Maybe there’s a “crummy roommate” gene that’s responsible for my tendency to let a pile of dirty clothes accumulate in a corner of a room for several days before I put it in the laundry basket six feet away. Perhaps I’m just hardwired to let books and baseball caps slowly accumulate on my bedside table until there’s no room for anything else, including the lamp that was originally the only thing on the bedside table in the first place. It’s not my fault. I was just born this way.

Deep down, though, I’m not sure that’s really true. For one thing, I’ve actually gotten a little better over the years about picking up after myself. I’ve even been known to decide to dust on my own, or run a vacuum over a carpet without having dropped something on it beforehand. Maybe I appreciate a clean house in a way that I didn’t when I was a kid. That would certainly explain why many of my offspring are seemingly content to live in an ever expanding pile of dirty laundry and dishes in their rooms. Maybe we all reach a point in our lives when we actually do care that our living room bears a striking resemblance to the garbage pit in Star Wars: A New Hope.

Now, there’s no telling when that epiphany might strike you. For all I know it already has and you’re positively disgusted by the thought of allowing dirty dishes to sit in a sink overnight. If so, congratulations. Also, have you ever thought about cleaning houses as a job and if so, what are your rates?

There are, of course, other important aspects of being a good roommate—like, for instance, respecting the privacy of the other people you’re living with. A search on YouTube for “roommate prank” turns up around fifty-eight thousand results. That means there are at least fifty-eight thousand people out there who you really don’t want as a roommate. My roommate Todd and I were best friends, and I suppose we could have pranked each other without being punched in the junk as a result, but I don’t think it ever crossed either of our minds. Of course, this was pre-social media, so we didn’t have the potential to share our friend’s embarrassment with everyone we knew (and a lot of people we didn’t).

The best thing that having a roommate can do, in terms of preparing you for cohabitation with a romantic partner, is help with learning to communicate. If you’re dividing the chores or the bills, it’s not always going to be easy to bring up concerns or issues that you might have, but you’re eventually going to learn how to do it productively. Otherwise, you’re likely to end up living with someone in quiet resentment, or having your living arrangements obliterated during an hours-long epic fight over some slight thing that pushed one of you over the edge.

Thankfully, I survived The Roommate Years with all friendships intact, and all things considered, I couldn’t have had a better roommate and friend than Todd. I managed to pay my rent on time, but I also monopolized Todd’s computer and his dial-up Internet connection for hours at a stretch, and he rarely complained. Mostly we got along great, though, and I have a lot of great memories of drinking a beer or two and writing another song that we were sure could be a hit. The dream of rock stardom died soon after I moved out and got married, but the friendship remained for years afterward. Here’s hoping your friendships with your roommates will continue long after you’re no longer living together. Don’t attract roaches, don’t play pranks on your roommate, and (sorry, Jim) pay your rent on time, and you’ll stand a much better chance of seeing that happen.

What Would Ward Cleaver Do?

As a Navy Man (he was also in a college fraternity), Ward Cleaver knew how to stow his gear, shine his shoes, stay neat, perform his duties, and get along with a wide swath of humanity. So should you.