cleaning out my house
I think I just ended a friendship. J and I lived together in a house years ago, on a hill above the Castro in San Francisco, and that’s how we met. We each moved in as subtenants at first, until the master tenant was expelled from the house in a dramatic process I will have to share with you another day. After he vacated, J and I became co-tenants. J is a nester and a tinkerer around the house, and he had many more furnishings as well much more financial resources with which to fill the house back in once the other tenant moved out. For whatever reasons, J rapidly developed a strange proprietary attitude about the house, and quickly started acting like he was the master tenant.
It created a lot of friction between us, and was why a few months later I moved out of that beautiful, cheap, well-located house; that and the fact that he was showing little to no compassion for another friend we had move in who became addicted to crystal methamphetamine. I did not intend to maintain a friendship with J after I left the house and for a few years did not. Circumstances with mutual friends brought us back into the same circles. He told me that he always missed me terribly and considered me like a brother to him, and I eventually accepted his overtures to become friends again.
J never understood my concerns about his behavior in our house, nor did he take any responsibility for his actions and their impact on others. Besides that he takes everything personally, doesn’t know himself at all in some respects, and frequently tells little lies here and there in order to make himself look better (or to avoid letting others see what he thinks will look bad). Nevertheless, I accommodated these personality problems and we got through the bumps that came up and became closer again. You know, that person with whom you can be friends while recognizing the limitations in the relationship.
In another twist, J bought the house in which we lived after I moved out, except his contract was with our landlady because she owned the house outright and was willing to do it that way. It was a good thing for her that she did, as he worked in banking and was one of the first to feel the recent recession and rather quickly became jobless. She was able to evict him and reclaim her house, and J was forced to sell, donate or store everything he owned. He is sentimental and has had significant financial resources in certain points in his life, and he had a lot of stuff. After I moved out, it came to fill every nook and cranny of a three-bedroom house. Toward the end, every friend of his who came by to purchase things walked away with other stuff that he hadn’t been able to sell and had no space to store, or had no time left to try to pack and move. I was the very last person there, helping him until literally the very end, so I got a number of odds and ends, as it was happening at the same time as my name came to the top of the list for a rental subsidy.
Fast forward two years later, and he is still jobless and now homeless, as he has turned down a high level job overseas and doesn’t want to live with his mother, brother and sister on the East Coast any more. He made his way back to California and began staying with me in my small, government-subsidized studio apartment. I actually didn’t mind, as I like having people around like that and for the most part I didn’t miss my privacy. He stayed for about four months and said he wanted to continue to stay once he got a job so that he could save money and get back on his feet. He also said he wanted to begin contributing financially to the household once he got working.
Unfortunately, we used lots of different words to describe the new arrangement might be (contribution, guest, rent, sublease) and he knew that I was trying to get back down to Brazil for a couple of months, during which he was supposed to stay in the apartment by himself. He apparently got confused and started thinking he was the master tenant in MY apartment, doing the same kinds of things that he had done in our house: re-arranging furnishings, cupboards, shelves and furniture; telling me how things should be done with the cleaning and such; filling the apartment up with belongings from his storage area; etc, etc, etc. The truth is that he had done things like that on a minor level ever since he had arrived, but the second I accepted money from him, it got significantly worse.
This confusion came to a head following my return to town after spending several weeks with my family over the summer. J went to stay temporarily with another friend in order to give us some space while we tried to sort things out. However, he couldn’t seem to move forward in a productive and constructive conversation about the nature of his relationship to my apartment, whether or not he was giving me money. On top of that, he started attacking me personally – he takes everything personally, remember, and he was obviously starting to feel attacked by me – directly as well as subtly and passive-aggressively. As his abusiveness continued and intensified, I was less and less motivated to talk with him or see him. I asked him to take advantage of the alternatives he had pointed listed for other places he could stay. I doubt that he appreciated that I called his bluff, but it was too late. Initially his departure was supposed to be temporary, but after he got ugly and stayed ugly, I didn’t want him around at all anymore. He kept digging himself in deeper and deeper, as far as I was concerned.
Since we could never resolve his status in my apartment nor his debt to me, nor how much and when he would be contributing to the household expenses, and since the money matters seemed to be what was mucking things up, I emphasized with him that he was always my houseguest and would continue to be, and I told him in no uncertain terms that I would not accept another dime from him (and would quit asking him for clarification regarding the several hundred dollars he apparently forgot he owed me). In his last week or two in my apartment, the last week or two I was away, he insisted on doing minor improvements around my place, thinking that in that manner he was still paying me at least something.
From the time he came to stay with me, I knew that being around his former things would elicit a desire in J to have them back. I was prepared for that, and was fine with it. He asked to take some of that stuff when he came to get the last of his guest stuff, and I told him that he could feel free, in general, to take any of his belongings. At the same time I made clear that I didn’t want him rifling through my things and wanted to at least know in advance what he was going to take. He knew that I was not interested in being home to receive him, nor in witnessing his scavenging, so he would be on his own. He shared his belief that I made insufficient use of or insufficiently valued several of the items in my possession, and his belief that he could reasonably lay claim to virtually all of my stuff, including my bed and television. (That’s another story, but the short version is that they and a few other large possessions of mine were given to me to satisfy a debt from when I paid to keep his utilities on, or get them reconnected, as he was being evicted.)
Throughout all of our difficult interactions surrounding the apartment, I tried to impress upon him how it was the first real home I had had in over ten years and how important it was for it to feel like it was first and foremost mine, like I finally again had a little spot in the world to call my own. He was not sensitive to that when he was staying with me, and he surely was not going to be sensitive to that on his way out the door. Not only did he take his “guest” stuff and the items about which he specifically asked, but he took the kitchen sink sponge holder, the salt out of the cupboard, and several items that weren’t on his wish list. He had the audacity to ask me for some of MY things, and I gave him the George Foreman grill he loves so well. He got petty with some of his choices, not only in what he took but in what he left: some that were his; some that he had give me long ago; some that he had supposedly bought for me or the apartment; some of mine that he wanted; some that I had given to him; and so on. I had once asked him not to leave the kitchen sink sponge in the sink, where it was more likely to get moldy, so he had to take the little holder he had recently purchased for it; yet he left a pair of shoes which I had given him, which he said he liked and knew I never wore.
Nevertheless, I had been thinking about the last few emails he sent, and had thought I might like to reply to commend him on some comments that he made that for a change were much more friend-like than attack-like. I reread the messages and decided they weren’t that impressive – only in contrast to some of his earlier remarks – and that they did not merited an encouraging response after all. I thought about commenting to him about which items he opted to take from the apartment and which he opted to leave, but decided to let that impulse go, too. I had already told him that I no longer have any idea what he thinks we need to resolve in order to continue our friendship because over the course of countless nasty and threatening remarks he had brought up so many topics that apparently had been bothering him so deeply and for such a long time that I wasn’t even sure which ones he considers in the way. Big deal that he had finally spoken more civilly about one. Ultimately, I had no reason to think that he would suddenly, magically understand a point I was trying to make – even a “positive” one – and be able to take in the feedback, and I didn’t want to inflame him any further.
On Saturday when he left he had texted me, “Goodbye”. I texted back, “Bye for now”. I am not hopeful about the friendship, but people do change, and anything is possible.
