Roommate #1

Sunday, June 18th, was Father's Day, but it was also the birthday of the elusive first roommate. Every time June 18th rolls around, I give a little mental shout out hoping that he's okay out there, wherever he is.

It's one of those things due to a lack of closure that will always haunt me, that will always leave this jagged hole that I can't help but pick at.

We met in high school, our relationship already built on turmoil simply due to the age, the times, the uncontrollable actions around us. My family had just moved to California, and somehow the change had sent a shockwave through the members that sent us scattering. My parents turned to foul, menacing and detached folk. My brother, a gregarious and energetic pre-teen, seemed to jump all over the top of the coursing friction and weirdness with a hyperactivity that probably saved him from too many permanent scars, but I know he got pulled down in the mire enough times to get battered (often by me). I was a teenager, and I was busy harboring and planting the anger that would turn around to bite me on the ass in my twenties, what would become the biggest and most evil monkey on my back. I was doing anything and everything I could to escape that claustrophobic house and the family that had seemingly become untrustworthy strangers overnight.

And so, I ran straight from my dysfunction and into the steam and dramatic thunder of his. It was entertaining for me as I had no personal stakes in it.

His mom parked herself in a Lay-Z-Boy, smoking one menthol after another and reading paperback romances with gaudy and ornate covers. She had this remarkable ability to completely shut out everything around her, and so to get her attention you would have to call her first name three or four times, that last time usually at a bellow that fell well beyond normal societal conventions. His sister seemed like a movie prop, like some demented director’s idea of a symbol for bi-polar disorder. She would be excited, happy and funny one moment, and would turn, literally without warning, into a shrieking harpy with a viciousness that was accompanied by a great show of throwing objects and overturning furniture. And of course he was quiet and shy, funny and brilliant, but you could see demons in his eyes and an anger you could tell even back then could very well eat him alive.

We eventually lived together, tested boundaries together, tried to figure ourselves out together; we tested the waters of that freakish couple of years between 18 and 21. He was eventually stolen and roughly carried away by a barbarian horde of his own making, a rip tide that I didn't understand. Yet.

So now, nearly 15 years later and all those unused words and aborted conversations having turned to dust and blown back into the ether, I think of him. I wonder if he made it through. I wonder if, a couple of days ago, he got to celebrate both his birthday and being a dad.