[Originally published on February 7, 2009.]

 

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Two weeks ago I made the 45 minute trip to Logan Airport after work. I don’t usually make a habit of heading over to Logan on a Thursday, but on this night I was picking up my new roommate.

While I waited for his plane to land, I hung out at the baggage claim with the security guards and watched inane YouTube videos on my cell phone. When the baggage started rumbling out onto the conveyor belt, I knew it would be only a few moments before my new roommate would stumble out into the unsecured baggage area. Upon seeing him, I was immediately second guessing my willingness to bring him into my home.

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Clad in black cowboy boots, a pair of Wrangler jeans, a crisp white t-shirt, and a Penrose drain collecting pus in a bag attached to his right hip, I shrugged my shoulders at his appearance. If I didn’t share a significant part of my DNA with this walking contradiction, I would have slowly backed my way out of the baggage area, hailed a cab, and hoped that he had forgotten the address to my house.

[Note: He’s been to my house for dinner and to do laundry on occasion, so the likelihood that he wouldn’t have been able to find the place is somewhere between slim and none.]

Instead of turning around and looking for the nearest exit, I jumped from my seat, and proceeded to meet him at the baggage conveyor. I quickly made a smart-ass comment about the bag of pus protruding from underneath his white t-shirt, to which he mumbled something about punching me in the gut. Ah, brotherly love.

In case you haven’t figured it out, my new roommate is my younger brother, Will.

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Dumb people think he’s older than me because he’s taller, but that actually flies in the face of our modern understanding of genetics and human evolution. Obviously, most people didn’t bother to pay attention to those subtle points in high school biology.

After returning from schooling in the Far East and some recuperation in Kansas from a fistulated colon, my brother decided to fill the vacancy in my rented two-bedroom duplex. So rather than playing house with a beautiful woman, I was staring at my younger brother’s Penrose drain and wondering what sort of “bromance” I’d gotten myself in to.

My brother and I collected his two bags, weighing over 100 pounds combined, and headed out of Logan to catch the shuttle back to the T. Carrying a bag weighing over 50 pounds was unexpectedly more strenuous than I had imagined, so I suggested grabbing a cab instead. Will flashed a wad of crisp bills and agreed to pay for the cab fare back to Cambridge.

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After dropping off his bags at the house, we walked over to the nearby pub and grabbed some dinner. Once seated, we were serenaded by some horrific karaoke and proffered alcohol by some scantily clad drink girls. When offered a free shot, my brother replied, “My parole officer says I shouldn’t drink.” With a look of intense fear, she turned her head in my direction. I offered to take his and mine both. She quickly placed them on the table and back peddled towards the bar. His comment made me begin to re-think my mindset about this bromance.

When we returned home, we were met with the box spring mattress I’d left in the living room, a donation from some friends’ recent move. So Will and I’s task was to reunite it with the mattress upstairs, despite my previous attempts having determined that to be an impossibility.

Unfortunately, we could not manage to cajole it through the already existing crevice in the narrow stairway, so my brother had to settle that evening for the jumbo-size, double-thick, air mattress that I had inflated in his room.

[Note: The air mattress is his; he left it with me when he traveled to Beijing, so he was really sleeping on his own bed.]

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Being that school didn’t begin for my brother until the following Monday, I returned home from work on Friday evening to find him hanging out in front of the TV. In my seat. Having lived by myself for the previous 2.5 months, I found this intrusion into my space alarming.

[Note: The TV is his; so he was probably just having flash backs to his old apartment.]

I promptly seated myself to his left and laid down the law: when the captain is home, he sits in the captain’s chair. My brother raised an eyebrow, my charming analogy completely going over his head. Or being completely ignored. I decided not to push him out of my seat, as he would have likely landed on his drain and I didn’t want to be responsible for performing emergency surgery. Or possibly surgically removing his fist from my face.

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My brother and I last lived together seven years ago, the summer before my senior year of college. He had just finished his freshman year at Miami University and didn’t want to go home for the summer. The stories of debauchery I had shared from my previous summer in Oxford had obviously seduced him. And the prospect of heading back to Lexington, KY or Wichita, KS paled in comparison. In an act of what can only be described as self-sacrifice, I offered to forgo my personal space for the summer.

I lofted my bed so that he could use my futon as his bed. I cleared a corner of my room so that he could set up a desk for his computer. And then, he took full advantage.

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While I was working two jobs that summer, he worked 20 hours a week. When I left in the morning, he was there sleeping. When I came home from my first job in the middle of the afternoon, he was there computing.  When I came home from my second job in the late evening, he was there eating/sleeping/computing or some combination thereof. My personal space was eliminated, my sanity challenged, and brotherly love was transformed into pure hatred.

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With Will sitting in “my chair” that Friday night, I began to consider the possibility that I had made the same mistake all over again. Only this time, I imagined I would wake up in the morning wanting to take a shower, but he’d have already used all the hot water. Or I’d come home from work and he’d be half-way through the movie I wanted to watch that night. Or I would be awoken early on a Saturday morning because he was vacuuming the stairs. I wasn’t excited by any of these scenarios, but I decided I could avoid them… by not pushing him out of the chair and instead pointing out to him that the “co-pilot” seat had just as good of a view of the TV.

With disaster narrowly averted in the first 24 hours of our bromance, the past two weeks have been relatively positive. Despite my flashbacks to that summer in Oxford we have managed to co-exist in a near stress-free environment. Of course, I’ve had to take on the big brother role a few times by letting him learn from his own mistakes rather than pointing them out beforehand. I thought it was the least I could do.

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The best example was our first trip to the grocery store. [Note: the grocery store is 2 miles on foot, so without a car for the last 2.5 months, I have gone through my own trial and error efforts in successfully transporting one week’s worth of food back to my house (2 hands = 2 fully loaded bags).]

I figured he should go through his own trial and error period, so when he offered to bring his fashionable grocery cart that is all the rage in the big city, I let him know I wouldn’t need it. He took that to mean he wouldn’t need it either.  So he decided to buy two gallons of milk along with the rest of his groceries, brought one big bag rather than two, and therefore had to stop every 100 feet to readjust his grocery-carrying pose on the trip home. I only stopped at the intersections to make sure I wasn’t flattened by oblivious drivers. Lesson learned? We’ll see.

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On the whole though, it’s been a fairly fulfilling experience, and not just because he’s gone to Target twice to buy things I hadn’t bothered to replace when my ex moved out (toaster, dish-drying rack, silverware, paper towels, baking sheets, etc). It hadn’t taken him long to notice that the only room that was fully furnished in the house was my bedroom. So he offered up this gem: “Besides your room, it looks like someone is squatting in a vacant apartment.”

While our bromance might be a little unconventional,  our genetic propensity to laugh at the same stupid people and lame jokes, our interest in cooking as a means of sustenance, and general approval of women dancing in night clubs, I think this could turn out to be the best roommate situation I’ve ever had…

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Unless you consider living with guys named Juice, Rusty, and Wacky Matt to be better than living as an adult with your own brother. Despite two years of college hi-jinks as a solid comparison, the current living situation is beginning to grow on me. However, that could change depending on the number of cold showers I take in the upcoming months, the number of times we go shopping together, or the first time he decides to do his laundry the night when I have run out of underwear and have somewhere to be.