This post is dedicated to the man who has
been my unexpected roommate for a year and half without killing me or finding
himself pushed off the fourth floor balcony he’d so wanted.
He is, quite obviously, mad as a bag of
frogs, and quotes William Carlos Williams’ poems when stealing my toilet paper:
Forgive
me,
It
was so papery.
“D’ya get it?! Do ya, do ya, do ya? I mean, do ya get it??”
More a Jedi than a regular Christian, he
gives me terrible advice about relationships and marriage, and argues with me (pointlessly),
even when I have predicted his useless arguments and asked him not to share
them.
“I was on the bus... Never mind.
You’re going to give me a stupid argument about not having proof,
instead of agreeing with me like a rational person and this is going to go
nowhere.”
“Tell me.”
Jesus
wept.
“...What, you’re not gonna tell me?!”
“Oh, God. Fine.
I was on the bus, and the men said that women are the greatest
impediment to family planning. That’s
stupid.” Go ahead - I know it was killing you to listen this long without
rebuttal.
“You can’t say that! You have no proof! You @@*&(* in a (!*(&@ with a
(@#&(* hat of @#(*$* on a !@##* stick - you should have been drowned at
birth.” [Note: He didn’t actually say this, but he wanted
to.]
You know he’s serious when he makes a claw-hand
and gestures frenetically to facilitate the transfer of his ideas, or perhaps
just terrify naysayers with his T-Rex impression.
“The proof is human physiology, you ass--inine fool.”
15
minutes of two people pretending to have a polite conversation in which they
have no vested interest in winning and grinding the other to pulverised dust
later
“I mean, I agree with you – I’m just
saying you have no proof. This is not an
empirical study, it wouldn’t hold up in a university.”
I stared up at him from the garish orange
couch matching the circle of hell to which it takes its clientele, in a city in
the eastern Congo with one main road that is more pothole than asphalt, after
having explained my understanding of a Swahili conversation in a 16-seat bus
containing 22 people from a village an hour away.
You’re
right. I have not conducted an empirical
study to verify the wild hypothesis that – as a male’s contribution to the
birth of an infant is sperm, and a female’s is the conversion of her body into
a bouncy castle for nine months – a woman is more likely to want to plan her
pregnancies.
I appreciate that he cooks well, shares
pizza, attempts to keep our communal spaces clean, washes dishes, and opens
jars – he is like a multi-purpose kitchen unit.
Bonus features are filling water in various containers when possible, allowing
me to shower first, disposing of rat corpses, not recognising that I am female,
and informing me that he is a man (except one occasion when he insisted he was
an independent woman and could carry his own bucket). Repeatedly.
No, you don’t understand – repeatedly.
These invaluable services render him the
real MVP, as we have lived in a culture where I am expected to cook and clean
for men and bear their largely unwanted commentary on my hair, my weight, my
clothes, and the chances of my giving them a dowry. I accept the radio programmes he rarely
understands played at full volume and continuous verbal diarrhea as bearable
side effects.
“So you’re makin’ rice. Just boilin’ some rice. Rice party.”
“Eatin’ another egg for dinner. Like you always do. Gosh, ya really love eggs, don’t ya.”
“Are you waiting for the power? Like you do every night? Can you make the power come on? Can you be less sad?”
“Are those two buckets of water for
you? Yes? Really?
But you usually have one for me!
It is for me? But I thought you
said they were both for you! You’re
confusing me. Is. One.
Bucket. For. Me.
Forget it; I don’t want to take a shower.”
“You eatin’ a banana? Ya like that banana? Now you’re throwin’ away the peel. You look angry. Are you angry? Why are you angry? You’re always so angry. Why are
you always so (#&$(* angry.”
I will remember the way he sneezes
(because these, aside from his worthless arguments, are his only forms of real communication). Disdaining allergy medication, he instead prefers
to stew his sinuses in pestilence and dust – with pestilential tea to aid him
in this process, though he has preferred to use it as psychological terrorism
after advising The Phoenix to create gallons of it to clutter up my
kitchen. I can now hear the nuances in
his trumpeting into a wad of toilet paper (100%
recycled cacti!) indicating:
-
I’m hungry
-
I’ve soiled myself
-
I’ve fractured my rib
-
It’s morning!
-
I am about to give you the bubonic plague and cholera
– feel free to bask in my feverish glow
That last was a relatively new addition
that I didn’t recognise until I was in a village-shaped collection of mud an
hour away from the city, trying to keep my brain from fleeing through my
eyeballs. I came back home two days
later, mostly recovered, to find him with a tissue stuffed up his nose pretending
to care about Joan of Arc, when all he was thinking was likely, But no one had any proof, I mean, really,
this is all just so confrontational...
Upon our meeting, sparks and bacteria
flew and I developed a cough that would send me into agonised spasms every time
I laughed, which proves that he hates
me to be happy in any way, shape, or form.
We shared in this Angry Old Man-itis until he casually mentioned that he
also had a stomach bug.
“Oh, I’m fine – it’s just this terrible cough.”
Famous last words, I realised, as I lay sideways
on my bed at midnight, alternating between arching and curling like a birthday
whistle from the 90s – moaning in tongues amidst the mess I’d made of my room digging
for Tums on my hands and knees while trying to remember a reason to live anyway. I’d promised myself that I’d call Grandpa to
take me to the hospital and text Joseph before I died, but the trouble was that
it was just so hard to tell.
In the hope of gaining sympathy, I tried
to explain my near-death experience the next morning.
“Yeah, my shoulders hurt.”
x
I stared at him.
“Very badly,” he assured me.
The little trooper then played a rousing
game of Frisbee after which he came home looking like the ghost of a virgin
murdered on her wedding day – I hadn’t seen so much white since leaving
Canada.
“But exercise is good for you!”
“Yeah, but not that much when you’re
still sick.”
“But exercise is good for you!”
“It is!
We’re just differing in terms of degrees when you’re sick!”
“Are you saying exercise is not good for you?!”
The next morning, he confronted me, as
feverish as a red, red rose and deliriously blithering that being the centre of
attention was no big deal.
Not
all of us are young white American males – some of us are shy Indian women with
fragile constitutions and a powerful urge to set you on fire.
The best part about him is that he tries
to understand the differences between us sometimes, though with a poor rate of
success – such as when he held up an ice cream party for me – and tells me to do me.
And that is what I take from this insightful
white American male with a passion for languages and a thirst to discover how
and why the world works the way it does and how we could make it better: You
do you.
That, an addiction to various American
serials, and The Beatles. (Although if I
hear one more time that I gotta listen to
the Magical Mystery Tour ‘cause it’s comin’ to take you away, none of this
will have been worth it.)
Thanks, man – our matching outfits
connect us across the globe and attest to the fact that, while we rarely
understood each other, we tried.
And we made it.
 |
| We have matching outfits (thanks to a friend), but he didn't wanna |
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