The Good Thief

It has been said that your friends are not the ones you choose; they are simply the ones who got there first. With that thought in mind, I now wonder how roommates get chosen.

In the summer of 2002, I moved to Montreal to start graduate school at McGill University and I was desperate to find a good place. I spent a week and a half in motels and hotels phoning potential landlords and homeowners, but the occupancy rates were against me. After one stressed out phone call home to explain where I stood, my mother suggested contacting a friend’s mother in Verdun. She owned a third-floor walk-up and I would be sharing space with two other students. The real surprise was who one of those students turned out to be.

There was a young man from Zimbabwe who had already failed one year of schooling (it did not really matter; his family was rich enough to take care of his whims and ignore his apology); the other tenant was someone that I had known since he was a boy. He was also studying at McGill in an undergraduate program for physical fitness. This living arrangement would have advantages and disadvantages that I did not foresee.

There were no obvious problems with living together. The landlord’s complaints were the worst of it. Remember, she was the mother of a friend of the family; anything that happened would immediately get back home and redirect itself into a long phone call. But again, there were no serious problems. I often acted as an intermediary when other portions of the rent were late, garbage overflowed in the bin on the fire escape, or she simply wanted to vent at someone who would listen. I still speak to her and the conversations are now always warm and comfortable. She knew that I kept the place as stable as it could possibly be.

We were not in the habit of keeping our individual rooms locked. I often watched cable in the large main room taken by my near-relative. And that relative would sometime use the mirrors on my closet when exercising. There was no shock in coming home and finding someone sleeping on your bed or using one of your chairs to change a light bulb in your own room. We were comfortable invading each other’s space.

This did not last very long. On Sundays, I worked at a privately-owned ESL school to make some extra money. These classes ran from 9 to 12 in the morning and then 6 to 9 in the evening. Usually, I came home between classes, changed, exercised, bathed, ate, and then got back on the bus for the next session. On a Sunday when the school only had a half-day, I went home early to discover that my laptop was missing.

The African roommate had told me that he would be leaving on vacation that very morning. I immediately named my thief. Then, after counting silently to ten, I contacted his girlfriend, who knew nothing of the trip or laptop (she seemed to want me to know how ignorant she was about everything). Then I spoke to the other roommate, who had been asleep with the TV on his room the whole time I was away and knew even less than the girlfriend.

I decided to write about it in my journal, all the time imagining what I would do to the missing roommate when I saw him again. In the middle of writing the entry, the house phone rang. This was the gist of the phone call:

“Hello?”

“Hello, is that ____________?”

Great, I thought. I am now his secretary.

“No, he’s not here. He’s on vacation.”

There was a brief pause on the other side of the line. And then I heard the one thing I did not expect to hear after the day I just had.

“Is that Kendall?”

After a pause on my side of the line, I managed to say something close enough to a “Yes” for him to reply with:

“Come to the front door.”

I had a vague image of myself being assaulted by students or parents upset over the grades that I had handed out in a more innocent time.

“I can’t do that unless you tell me why.”

And this was the punchline:

“Well, I have your laptop.”

*

It was a very long walk down the narrow staircase to the second-floor door. I left lights on in the stairwell and turned on the outside light so that I could see my caller. The only problem with this plan was that the frosted glass in the window did not make him any clearer. All I saw was a blurred image of someone moving about impatiently on the landing.

He was tall, dressed in black, and smiling. He asked me once again if I was Kendall and, when I gave him the same positive answer, he passed back the laptop and all of the accessories he had stored in a plastic bag. His story was that the roommate I had blamed for taking it had told him to pass by that very day to get some money owed to him. This roommate sometimes managed a nightclub and had hired this man as a bouncer. His vacation was a way for him to avoid paying this stranger what he was owed. So, breaking into our place and moving from unnamed room to unnamed room – not the most difficult things to do – he entered my room and made his withdrawal.

That incident led to locked doors, labels on everything we owned, avoided contact with each other beyond brief greetings when we were in the same room, and simply not trusting each other. This thief had revealed what another roommate was capable of and a part of me still thanks him for this. His truth was better than a lie I had to pay for.

I did not ask for his name. I simply mentioned that this was the “weirdest night of my entire life” and wondered to myself if a good thief would make a better roommate than dishonest friend.

Oh, and the amount of money he was owed? $150.00.