Sometimes a Mofo is Just a Mofo

One thing I've learned in my travels is that it's always the mofo you hate the most who ends up your savior. So it's okay to ignore this mofo but don't totally write him off. I learned this in Nepal. On the long, brutally bumpy bus ride to the trailhead, there was a pasty, long-blond-haired Brit who kept "taking the piss" out of me (as the Brits say) at every rest stop for the way I enacted various American stereotypes. The sickly young man would stare at me in contempt whenever I said something like, "Do you guys know if this is safe to eat?" Or, even more offensive: "So, what do you do back in England?" To this he offered no reply.

So I ignored him for the rest of the trip, quietly despising him. I marched on my own up the ascents of the Langtang trek for a few days, staying in guest houses for ten cents a night and eating dahl and rice, but on around Day 4 I got so sick I couldn't move. All my body's energy sucked in toward my gut like a black hole. And I hadn't slept at all the night before because it was freezing, and I'd had to share a bed with the Nepalese guest house owner and his nine-year-old daughter, and she kept stealing the blankets in the night.

I didn't know if I'd be able to reach the summit, which was a grave disappointment. Even the fat Kiwis were passing me as I rolled around on the ground in front of the guest house while the nine-year-old laughted at me. But then up came the scrawny Brit, and it took all the strength I had to greet the bastard and not ignore him or say something rude. But he had turned nice. When I told him my symptoms, he produced a plastic bag with tiny black pills. "Carbon pills," he said. I took one and he left and my stomach felt better within an hour. I reached the glorious summit a few days later, then tried to reach a further summit but fell asleep on the barren mountainside from altitude sickness. I didn't slip into a coma, but if I had I'm sure blondie would have been there with a magic pill.

Hm, strange prolegomenon to a discussion of my New York real estate broker, but I hated this bastard the moment I talked to him on the phone. Although I plan to return to France in a few weeks, I'm trying to line up an apartment for my return. I respond only to no-fee apartments on craigslist. The broker listed in the ad offered to show me some places. Brooklyn accent, no "bye" before hanging up, interrupts, the worst kind of New York rude. When I see him he fires off questions such as: "What do you do? How much do you make? How long you been here?" Of course all the brokers want to know this, but usually there's some civility along with the brass tacks. Between questions he checks his cell phone and organizer again and again.

So I started ignoring him, reading my amazing book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is so good I couldn't focus on the words toward the end because my hands were shaking and my eyes were jumping. It was so good that at the end of my yoga class, when the teacher said, "As always, dedicate your class to someone or something" without thinking I dedicated my class to the dead soldiers of the Spanish Civil War. With this book in my hands I couldn't be bothered with the schmuck next to me on the uptown train as we went to look at apartments.

But somewhere I knew that the Asshole is always the one who comes through for you. He showed me an amazing place, and I agreed to take it, and everything was smooth as ice.

Now, I seldom err about people, which is why my colleagues in anthro grad school called me the Doctor of Human Nature. But this time I was hammered! Two days later, I came all the way back uptown to his office, he handed me an application form and his personality had suddenly flipped. For 15 minutes he tried cracking jokes ("There was a prank on TV from Germany, they dug a hole in the woods and filled it with water and covered it with branches and leaves and filmed people falling in the hole, and that's like life you know, you're going along and everything's fine then all of a sudden") that went nowhere and put his family on the table, pain-in-the-ass wife and five kids, now asking about my private life. They were pathetic attempts to bond, but I thought, "Here's my theory, asshole becoming freindly" Then, as I put pen to paper, he mutters under his breath that there would be a 19 percent fee.

"19 percent of what?" I asked.

"The annual rent."

"So what's that?"

"Well, rent is $1,100, and you're getting a hell of a deal on that by the way, usually it's around $1,400, so I'll cut our normal fee and call it $2,200."

"You want me to pay a $2,200 fee?"

I explained that I only respond to no-fee ads, and he said well the studio I initially called about was no-fee but all the other ones had fees. I realize that brokers are at the bottom of the barrel and it's my fault for not being explicit at every turn about my no-fee policy, but this guy took the cake. I hightailed it out of there without a word, just as we'd started.

Oh, the point of this post is to say that this misunderstanding with the broker led me to homelessness, so now I'm at a friend's beach house in New Jersey. It's a college friend who kindly gave me the keys for the week, until I move into a sublet in Sugar Hill (north of Harlem, remember the Sugar Hill Gang? I nearly took a place in a tough neighborhood in the South Bronx, a huge apartment for only 925, but on a whim I stopped at the police station afterward and asked when the last murder was: "Last week," said the sergeant.) The friend came down for the weekend and farted a lot and watched his favorite TV show, Veronica Mars, and together we looked through all our college yearbooks and some black and whites he'd taken of the boys for a class.

We did some rough calculations of what the money we spent on that crappy Midwestern school would have come to in the stock market, as we groaned at page after page of painful idiots we suffered day after day during our indenture. There were about five for every one who brought us a smile. The poodle-haired girls and the meathead guys with mullets. Jesus, what were we (or our parents) thinking. We called Afghan, a guy from our freshman dorm, and his laugh and jokes and timing and slight speech impediment on the "ch" were exactly the same. We tried to get him to tell the story about how he once walked 40 miles to see a girl named Maria, but he said it was a sore subject, that he'd been on the brink of insanity and didn't know what he was doing.

So my friend calls this a beach house to impress the ladies, but in all the years I've been coming here I've never seen the ocean. Today I consulted a map and took a run for the shore but my legs wouldn't hold out long enough and I came away empty again. Tomorrow, for those of you who enjoy hope, tomorrow I'll make it to the sea.