The Shakey Mover
My third apartment rental was located just a quick jaunt around the block from the professors’ creepy basement on Amos Ave.
My new roommates were refreshingly kind. One was a curvy and jovial aesthetician with impeccable eyebrows and the other, a printer-paper white puffball of a gentle soul: a personal support worker. They both had weekday jobs, and the apartment was tidy, save for an always-full ashtray.
We all smoked weed and cigarettes; we all had steady jobs and were relatively quiet. The roommates watched B.E.T. every afternoon, like clockwork, while they smoked their joints. Rap and hip hop played at ear-splitting volumes wasn’t my taste at the time. But I enjoyed these folks’ pleasant company as I nuked my split pea soups and boiled water for Mr. Noodles, cigarette hanging from my smiling lips.
That is, until the day I ran out of weed.
“Do you know where I can get some?” I asked white boy roommate. He said the landlord was their guy. Marveling at the convenience of such a setup, I trotted down a flight of stairs with him and asked the (totally-not-a-murderous) landlord for a couple of grams of cannabis. Easy peasy. I enjoyed the rest of my night, sharing joints with my friendly roommates, as every pot smoker is wont to do.
Then, Landlord started showing up in our apartment, dropping off drugs. It turns out that both roommates enjoyed a little bit of everything: coke, crack, and ketamine in particular. Before they headed out clubbing every Friday night, they would ask me the same question.
“You want some?”
I never did, and I didn’t want to stay in the apartment much longer after I realized that crusty ol’ Landlord was such a regular presence. I did, however, squeeze in a few spectacular psychedelic mushroom trips in that place, including one with the girl whose room I’d been living in. Sam’s fresh new girlfriend.
On New Year's Eve, 2001, she, both roommates and I meandered across Erb Street to the video store to rent a trippy DVD and grab some snacks. Fluorescent lighting searing our retinas, silhouettes from garish movie posters burned into our memories for months to come, we barely completed the transaction before my coworker pal lost it. She started bawling under the glow of the lights outside Quick Trip Variety, in the combined haze of our cigarette smoke.
“Sam and I are breaking up,” she made no effort to hide the hunger in her eyes. This girl wanted her room back.
After our harrowing trip across the road, the four of us couldn’t get far enough away from each other. We spent the rest of the night tripping in our respective rooms (except for Sam’s girlfriend, who headed out in a taxi, sobbing).
Never one to shy away from a psychedelic experience, I made sure to watch the broken funhouse mirror of a comedy-fantasy we’d rented - Monkeybone - alone on the living room couch.
As its formerly two-dimensional titular animated character climbed out of the TV and onto the living room floor in psilocybin 3D, I wondered where I would live next.
When the film reached its merciful end, I laid around my bedroom eyeing all of my still-unpacked boxes of books, comprised largely of a disproportionate number of Douglas Coupland and E.E. Cummings volumes. The unsoothing soundtrack of Radiohead's Amnesiac emanated from my second-hand computer speakers, cajoling me to expand my consciousness in the coming year.
If I put on that record today, I can still see those swirling parquet floors and cocaine-laced laminate countertops rippling and breathing in my mind’s eye.