Transcript
Flynn Washington (0:02)
SNAP Studios. Oftentimes, in today's urbanized, depersonalized, atomized society, who is it that actually knows you? Who knows you better than your mama? Better than your friends, better than your cousins? Your lover who sits next to you on the couch for your greatest joy? And who knows your dirty little secret? Who else but your roommate? Because one thing we can all be agreed upon. Left or right, cityfied or rural, old or poor, the one thing that unites all of us is the certain knowledge that the rent is too damn high. This means that living alone all by yourself in some glorious solitude is a luxury reserved for trust fund kids and drug dealers. And if you are neither of these, at some point you may have to open your life to someone who is more than a stranger, more than an intimate a person arriving out of nowhere to pierce your inner sanctum, who can change the very course of your destiny simply by proving to you that on the first of the month they absolutely, positively will come through with their share of the rent. Today, Snap probably presents Roommate Wanted. My name is Flynn Washington. We've scoured the newspapers so you don't have to because you're listening to Snap Judgment now. Our story begins with struggling writer Brian Boucher, who after breaking up with his girlfriend, scrambles to find a roomma so that he can afford the rent on his tiny New York City apartment. Snap Judgment.
Brian Boucher (2:13)
I hadn't lived with a random stranger since my freshman year of college. I'm not sure exactly what I was looking for really in terms of an ideal roommate. They just needed to be dependable and pay the rent. They didn't even have to be quiet. I advertised on Craigslist for the roommate. I said, looking to share a one bedroom. It's a little small. Don Williams, whose full name was John, but he went by Don, came to visit the apartment and you know, he was really, really low key. He said that he was a ghostwriter working on a project. I was sort of impressed with him. Here was the guy making a living as a writer, which was what I was sort of hoping for and had not accomplished. I just felt very comfortable with him. He moved in within days. We didn't really know whether this was going to be a long term situation or not. It was a kind of month to month. Don was willing to pay a little bit more than half the rent in return for the privacy of the bedroom. So I crashed on the couch in the living room and he moved into the bedroom. I would be like in bed reading the New Yorker and door opens and in walks Don and he's going to walk through the living room and we just sort of chuckle at each other. Like, isn't this awkward? You know, I just, I felt humiliated, honestly. I felt like, ugh, has it come to this? But it had. He didn't have that much stuff. He didn't take up any space in the kitchen or the refrigerator. Like, I guess he just had all his meals out or he got takeout or whatever. The only thing that was sort of took up space is that he would take really epic showers. The man could shower for like an hour, you know, and you could hear the water running. This was not just him like in there plucking his eyebrows. He was like really, really getting the, getting the hot water into his pores. As time went by, one thing that did seem a little strange to me was that I would be, you know, doing my thing, watching a movie, whatever, for hours and thinking maybe I was alone in the apartment. And then the bedroom door would open and he would come out to use the bathroom. And I'd realized, like he was in there, just quiet as a mouse for hours. And then on the other hand, there would be times when I would realize, like, I haven't seen him in days, I don't think he's around. So it sort of left me feeling a little uneasy, but none of my business, I figured. So in December, I hadn't seen him in some time, might have been a couple of weeks. I come home one day and find the door to his room open, which was unheard of. Someone had ransacked the bedroom and my things were untouched, like completely untouched. So it was plainly targeted at him, which was just unbelievably spooky. Whoever wanted to get at his things was so motivated that they had torn the door and the frame entirely off the wall. The door and the frame were just like hanging by, I think, the bottom hinges when I walked in. They had then taken his nice red Swiss army luggage out of the closet. So they just cut it open and went through all of his things. Like his clothes and stuff were kind of scattered around. He has like on the inside of the bedroom door, like a postcard sized piece of paper that says security check, windows locked, keys, phone, go. So that was a suspicious detail. But also the fact that the night that the break in happened, it happened on a night that I had ended up staying away from the apartment all night. So it seemed too strange that somebody should break into the apartment just the one night that I happened to be away. I called the police and the police Came by and they said, well, what was stolen? And I said, I don't know. And they were like, well, if we don't know that anything was stolen, there's really not much of a crime here for us to investigate. I filled out like there was some sort of paperwork, like there was an incident report. They were like, well, have you been in touch with your roommate? No. Okay, so could have been him as far as we know. I'm trying to reach him, and I'm emailing him and I'm calling him, and he's not responding. He wasn't getting back to me. And so the rent hasn't shown up. I thought, okay, he's awol. He's gone. I was out of my mind with anxiety after this. I mean, my imagination just went totally wild. Is this guy a CIA? Is he with the government? I thought, I have to just change the locks, because by now he seems like a suspect. I feel like I have to protect myself from him and just hope that he doesn't ever come back. By the time Don disappeared, I wasn't quite as desperate financially. I had more steady work. I wasn't financially totally destitute anymore. Like the day I was that I placed the Craigslist at what little belongings he had. I then go into the room and I pack them up and moved back into the bedroom. Which was a bizarre feeling in itself because I'm like, I've been in this bedroom that is the scene of this, like, intrusion and sort of violence and violation of his space. I went off to visit my parents at Christmas in New Jersey, and I get a call, and it was like a voice from the grave. When I heard his voice over the phone, at first I felt just completely distrustful. But then he says, look, I'm sorry I haven't been in touch, but my sister was in a car accident and she died. And so I've been in Seattle dealing with that. I felt like, oh, my God, here I am imagining that this guy is a spy or a terrorist or something. And all the while he's been at his sister's deathbed. How could I possibly have thought this about him? He had shown up and found the door locked, of course, and that his key didn't work anymore. And I said, okay, how about if you meet me at the apartment tomorrow at 3? I got on a train from New Jersey the next morning so that I could be at the apartment a couple hours ahead of time. I feel like I can't possibly tell him that I handled all of his things on the suspicion that he had either skipped town or that he was some sort of shady character. And I was just too embarrassed to say that. And so I felt like I have to recreate the scene of the crime and make it seem like I was never in there. I had to make it look like the room had just been broken into. So the clothes that had gone into plastic bins came back out of the. I brought the luggage back out of the closet and sort of scattered the clothes around on the floor, trying to make it look like sort of chaotic and the same way that it had. He shows up, it's 3 o'clock on Christmas Day. He just looks completely downtrodden and exhausted. And I greeted him saying, look, I'm so sorry for what you're going through. And he comes in, he sort of gets himself settled and then goes into the room and is just sort of taking it in, surveying the situation and looks at the closet door that's hanging off the hinges and says, well, that's one way to get into the closet and looks at his nice Swiss army luggage that's been cut open and says, well, that's a shame. So I said, you know, the cops asked what was missing, and of course, because it's not my possessions, I didn't know what to tell them. So, I mean, did they steal anything from you? And he said, well, not much. It looks like some old cell phones, a little cash, a small color printer, some marijuana. And then he said, but they won't be able to use the phones. You have to put in a security card before you can use them. And without the right identity card, the phones won't work. Which just struck me as very 007. There had been a video camera that the thieves didn't steal from him. So he was as puzzled at some aspects of this robbery as I was. At a certain point, Don said, what we should do is we should set up some webcams in the apartment so that we'll catch him if he comes back again. And I felt like, no, no, actually I don't want to like extend the surveillance state into my own apartment. I'd rather never know what happened than do that. He also put a small lock on the bedroom door, which was sort of a joke. It had been several weeks, maybe a month after the break in, and he was still trying to figure out what happened. So out of nowhere, one day he says, so I sent some things to my brother in law in D.C. from my room who's a fed, so if there are any prints on these Things. He'll figure it out. And I said, look, there's something I want to tell you. I haven't been honest with you about this, and I can't do that anymore. When the break in happened, I freaked out. I didn't realize that you had deposited the rent in my account. And then I didn't hear from you for weeks and I thought you weren't coming back. And then when you called and you told me that your sister had died, I just felt like such an. And I took a deep breath and I said, so I felt like I couldn't tell you that I had packed up your things. So I came in and tried to make it look like it looked just after the break in. Sorry, there it is. Now you have it. And he said, yeah, yeah, you handled pretty much everything in there as if that he was asking for confirmation of something that he already knew. He said, I found your prints, too. And I was like, well, wait a minute. And he said, oh, well, you know, it's pretty easy. You could just take a bottle out of the recycling bin. Up until this point, I had no idea that he was harboring any suspicions of me. There was no normal anymore after that. You know, it had been just sort of awkward to be sharing such a small space. But now we had the elephant in the room of this break in. Neither of us really trusting the other, but we just sort of limped forward in this, like, very thickened tension. I wasn't completely dependent on him for the rent money. And looking back, I don't know why I allowed this to go on. I honestly just don't know why I didn't say. Look, Don, you know, I just don't feel like this is working out. I think you're going to have to find another place to stay. And he didn't seem to want to leave, so we were just stuck together.