To Need A Bigger Boat
Author’s note: July 13th marks the anniversary of an event that, for better and for worse, changed my life. Below, for the first time in written form, is my recounting of that event, based only on my lived experience, despite my still-open case file pursuit for public records with various authorities in Hoboken, New Jersey. As such, you’ll have to take my word for it, as outlandish as it reads at points. Direct any inquiries to my underlings and the aforementioned authorities.
Additionally, to borrow a passage from one of my favorite sites on this depressing hellscape of interconnectivity: “I’VE TOLD THIS ONE SO MANY TIMES, IN VARIOUS STATES OF SOBER, FADED AND BEYOND, THAT I CAN’T SWEAR ON LEVITICUS TO ITS VERACITY. I’M SURE I’VE REMIXED IT AT SOME POINT TO FEATURE CAMEOS FROM IONE SKYE, KENNY “SKY” WALKER AND MARK HAMMILL.” So, let’s get to it, bad brain.
You know how sometimes you get a feeling in which you have unwavering conviction, one that, despite profuse evidence to the contrary, you nevertheless maintain?
We’ve all heard nightmarish stories about Craigslist roommates. Some are better than others; some end in a pile of ashes, bad feelings and property destruction, while others end truly horrifically. This one, somewhere between here, there and eternity, is mine, and mine alone.
Some background on this guy: as you likely surmised, I had found him on Craigslist the October prior when my previous roommate moved in with his girlfriend a few blocks away. I panicked and got desperate, and because nobody wants to live in New Jersey — why would you, when you’re young and able, choose to be New York City-adjacent when you could just be New York City, full stop, instead, despite Hoboken being roughly the same distance in travel-time to Brooklyn, and often shorter than that — I had to resort to everybody’s favorite platform for questionable financial arrangements and haggling.
Out of two candidates who actually came to visit the place, he was the one. He was fresh out of college when he moved in, and a Jersey native. He was pretty quiet, clean and reasonably respectful for the majority of the time we lived together; he had to wake up early each morning to get to his job all the way across New York City, so he was usually in bed by around 8:30 or so.
A most important note, while we’re here: There’s only so much you can know about a person when meeting them for the first time before you agree to live with them for a year, and even then, you can’t predict everything.
On the night of July 13th, 2017, I arrived home to my apartment in Hoboken, NJ, later than usual. I’d gone out with a friend of mine from high school after work, catching up on the hits and misses of suburban South Carolinian malaise.
That’s not important. What’s important is that, despite hitting multiple bars and taking photographs of, and with, strangers, I was still home by 11:30 pm, so everything below has to have happened before that time.
When I walked in, my apartment looked as though somebody had just been there. Being that I had a roommate, he was the first guess. His bedroom door was open, the lights were on and his fan was going. Again, it looked like he’d just been there, but it was a little eerie.
In any case, I went to bed, figuring he’d gone out with friends to watch Thursday Night Football or something. I was working from home the following day, and when I awoke, I walked into the living room to find his bedroom in exactly the same state it had been the night prior. At this point, I wondered if he’d just gone home early for the weekend.
At approximately 10:40 am, I received a call from my landlord that started something like this:
L: “Hey, are you at the apartment?”
Me: “Yes, I am.”
L: “Is (my roommate) at the apartment?”
Me: “No, and I don’t think he came home last night. Do you know where he is?”
L: “Yeah, if he’s not at the apartment, I know where he is. He’s in the hospital.”
Me: “Uhm, what?”
L: “Yeah. We’ve got a big problem.”
And he proceeded to tell me the following: the night before, my roommate had been on what you would colloquially call a “booze cruise” on the Hudson River, separating Manhattan from New Jersey — with whom, I don’t know, and if this circulates to the point at which somebody who was there that night is reading it, please feel free to contact me, I’d love your side of this — and that, at some point, he’d somehow gotten it in his head that it would be a good idea to jump into the river and swim back to New Jersey, rather than waiting for the boat to dock and taking a bus or the PATH train back.
Upon making landfall, he deposited his shirt, shoes, wallet, keys and cell phone on the Hoboken waterfront. From there, he ran to our apartment, which, depending on where he arrived on shore, was at least half a mile, and probably more.
Once there, without his keys, he rang our doorbell. Without me home to bail him out, he started ringing our neighbors’ doorbells, asking to be let in or to stay with them. My neighbors quickly grew tired of this, and they ended up calling the police, who saw how inebriated the man was and took him to the hospital.
An already-long story shortened somewhat, my landlord wanted him to move out and gave me an option to move out as well within 30 days, which I jumped at the chance to do. Still, I was panicking, and my heart was racing.
As I was still on the phone, I saw through my window that a Hoboken police car was pulling up to my building. When I heard the doorbell, I meekly got out a, “I’m sorry, I’ll have to call you back — the police are here.”
Having just heard all of this, I went downstairs and pre-empted the officers upon opening the door, something to the effect of: “Guys, I am so sorry. I wasn’t even home last night, and I don’t know anything about my roommate jumping into the river or harassing my neighbors or whatever.”
As I’m saying this, the officers are looking at each other, perplexed. I finish my yammering, and one of them holds up a plastic bag holding — surprise! — a shirt, shoes, a wallet, keys and a cell phone. He said, “…we found this guy’s stuff on the waterfront, and we just want to make sure he’s okay. What are you talking about?”
I took a moment to consider the very basis of the question and, indeed, interrogate everything I thought I knew about the universe having led me to this single moment in my life. I turned back and said, “So you don’t know anything about…my roommate…jumping in the Hudson and swimming to the shore? Or buzzing all the doorbells?”
“…no, we don’t. I think you’d better get this guy on the phone.”
The phone. Right. The thing that was staring at me from its place in the plastic bag. “I…guess I could try?”
I called, and he answered (how he managed this — among everything else, but especially this, in this moment — eluded me for a while after that, but I found out several weeks later that you can program an iPad to act as a phone if need be. Technology, amirite?).
“Hey, Rory, man, I am SO sorry — ”
“Hold up. Let me stop you right there. The police are here, and they would like to have a word with you.” I handed the phone to one of the officers.
“Hey, we’re with the Hoboken PD, and we’d just like to make sure you’re okay because we found your stuff on the Hoboken waterfront. We’re here with your roommate, and he’s telling us some pretty wild stories about your night last night.”
For reference, my roommate began his re-telling of the story, via text, with the word “apparently.” A day later, he came by the apartment to pick up some of his stuff — I had to let him in because, as we all know by now, he did not have his keys.
He was apologizing from the minute he walked in; I remained silent. About twenty minutes into him cleaning his room, he comes out to the living room and, again, starts to apologize.
“Rory, again, I just want to say how sorry I am. I really screwed up.”
“My man…you did not merely ‘screw up.’ ‘Screwing up’ would’ve been texting an ex, or Snapchatting something rotten to your boss, or sending an errant email. Maybe getting into a fight. What you did could’ve gotten you killed in any number of ways, had anything broken other than the way that it did.”
***
Coincidentally, the following night, my company had its summer party on a boat on the Hudson. In telling a story that hadn’t yet reached its resolution to my coworkers, less than 24 hours after the fact, we all took note of the fact that the ships that leave Manhattan and tour the Hudson for a few hours never get closer to New Jersey than they are to the island.
That means that the guy had to swim at least half a mile while, apparently, blacked out drunk. If that was the case, it’s a startling athletic feat that I almost, almost respect. As it was, though, I had to move. So I did, approximately three weeks later, and that was that.
