Roommates

Most people I knew in the 1980s moved a lot. My first few years in the Bay Area I changed addresses about twice a year. It was kind of fun because most residents here were located on a personality spectrum somewhere between oddball and completely insane, so you got a lot of different and unique perspectives. Of course this was before the internet flattened everybody out into a handful of groupthink camps.

In San Francisco, when you wanted to look for a new place to live, you could ask around, or look for ads in the local paper. Or…you went to a place in the Haight called Roommate Referral. This was a crappy little office where you could page through a couple of 3-ring binders with available housing opportunities. These were usually a single flat, or sometimes an entire Victorian house, looking for one or more people to share rent and utilities. I remember one time seeing a listing for a room in the “Kennle Club District”—meaning it was located near a punk venue called the Kennel Club, now known as The Independent—written in a strange kind of tiny scrawled handwriting. Whoever had filled out the form had listed some requirements for a roommate, like: you had to be okay with drug abuse, noise, etc. Then I saw it was signed by Michael Dean, singer for the legendary acid/horror/postpunk band known as Bomb.

I didn’t visit the “Kennle Club” flat, but I did check out a spot in the Inner Richmond that sounded promising. I called the guy up to schedule a visit, and he sounded pretty normal, though he did let me know that there was a dolphin tank in the flat. I asked him if it was baby dolphins? and he said no, it’s a full-grown dolphin. I didn’t really think about it, so I just said yeah, sure, fine. When I went to get a tour of the flat, the guy took me through the place, then we went up to the roof. He gestured to the open space in front of us and said, “well, here’s the dolphin tank.” I asked him, oh was this like a test or something? And he just smiled at me and said nothing. I don’t think either one of us followed up after I left.

The first place I rented in the Bay Area was actually really nice. The front door didn’t have a working lock, which is wild considering it was in Oakland. Anyway one of my roommates had a habit of leaving her bloody tampons in the bathroom trash can, then her dog would come in and rip them up and scatter them around the floor. So one day the other roommate swept up all the bloody shreds into a pile in front of her door. She got pretty mad at that. When our lease was up and we all moved to new places, I think he might have stolen her TV.