Welcome to Chapter 8 of my blog-to-book project: Life After High School: Secrets To A Successful Life By Those Who Have Had Twenty Years To Think About It (or) What They Didn’t Teach Us Gen Xers In High School. This chapter is called The Apartment. If you missed the last post, click here, otherwise, you can start at the beginning here.
I decided to get out of the dorm and get my own place. The Apartment was on 43rd and Brooklyn in the University District. It was a fantastic top floor condo with a view of downtown. I lived there for something like thirteen years, with all kinds of roommates on and off. My funniest moments in college all took place at the apartment and could fill another few chapters with stories.
At one point my “sister” (cousin) Stacie was a roommate. She was doing well at the time with a great job but partied a bit hard at night, and by that, I mean all her friends were raging alcoholics. I did what I could to be supportive, but sometimes strangers bumped in the night, leaving me a little uneasy.
At another point, I had five roommates in the one-bedroom apartment. I lived in the closet, all in the name of saving money and helping friends out.
Scott stayed there during our monk years, where he prayed all day, and I measured all my food for the Zone diet and studied. We did not talk and we did not party for a year.
Scott’s brother Jon was a roommate, but we never saw him. He had a pair of shoes that lived in the corner of the room, with jeans and a shirt folded on the top. That represented Jon.
Their younger brother Ryan was our butler, and literally had a list of chores to do every day in exchange for rent. When you have five guys with drunk friends coming over it was an endless job. The toilet alone required a Hazmat suit and a set of three-foot prongs to clean it without being exposed to the nuclear filth.
Luke Pinnow lived there and worked at Trader Joe’s and for a short time the gym I worked in. He graduated high school the year after us. Luke was later a minority partner and employee of the gym I opened up in 2005, which probably ruined our relationship.
One of my friends from the dance department, Michael Bilikas, who also majored in a bunch of science stuff and Greek, and took nearly as long as Scott McKinstry to graduate, used to run big events at the Show Box downtown, and the crazy nightlife kept him on his cell phone late into the night. He used to fall asleep sitting up with the TV blaring. He later went to NYU dental school.
Of all the roommates over the years, 9-Ball was the funniest roommate by far.
Formally John “9-Ball” Angus, who later legally changed his name to “Jawn” Angus, was in a phase of his life that one might call the partying years. To me, he was just full of life and living every moment. Others might call him a drunk. To me, he was a friend and a very interesting roommate.
One day, he invited the homeless man who sat out on University Way Northeast, colloquially known as The Ave. The man went by the name of Bear and had a hook for a hand. He had a cardboard sign he would proudly display next to his can (pun intended) as he sat with the other Ave Rats waiting for a handout. His cheeky sign read, “It’s For Beer.” At least he was an honest bum.
Now, I prefer to view 9-Ball’s invitation as an act of generosity, charity, and as philanthropic humanitarianism. One could also make an argument that he was just doing it for a laugh or as a bizarre social experiment, perhaps to see if the man could out drink him.
Upon arriving back home that day, I was surprised to see 9-Ball and Bear hosting a poker party. I can’t remember for sure, as many of those parties are a little hazy in my memory banks, but I seem to recall cigars and several other gentlemen from our usual crowd.
The apartment had become an episode of Cheers, but Norm sitting at the end of the bar had been replaced by a homeless derelict who indeed could drink everyone else under the table… And he did.
After that, Bear became an honorary member of the Stoddard Tenement House, and his hook became our crest.
It was an amazing time. There were women in the place here and there (I am so sorry for those poor souls), but the primary players were a motley crew of young men somehow loosely connected to one of the tenants. In addition to those formally paying rent, there was a cast of characters that rounded out the mix.
My childhood friend Gary Hunter, a math genius who went to Whitman college, would come over and help organize the poker parties and bring exotic liqueurs, food, and cigars. He was on his way to becoming a successful bond trader and highly sought-after analyst of some kind. He worked for Washington Mutual Capital Corporation before the crash. I would go and visit him when I was performing at the 5th Avenue Theater on our lunch break.
Gary always has at least two computer monitors in front of him at all times. There is a legal statute somewhere that says that whatever is on the monitors must be at least three years ahead of everyone else and at least thirty IQ points above my head. Gary is one of those people who saw the crash coming and warned me, but I bought swamp land in Florida anyway (literally and figuratively) and lost my shirt.
Years later, real estate investment trusts and really smart people in California pay Gary a lot of money to be smarter for them as he sits in his underwear in his living room.
To be honest, no one really knows what Gary did or does. From what I have been able to deduce, Gary creates Excel spreadsheets that other people use to try to figure out other spreadsheets, that analyze things that other people try to figure out using spreadsheets that Gary made. There is then a bunch of smart people who ask Gary when they should jump and how high, and then somehow at the end of it all, some guy in Rhode Island ends up owning twelve apartment buildings for a nickel.
Another friend I met at the gym, Nick Lacy, was an African-American singer and club hopper who I loved dearly and somehow ended up at the club Neighbors with. I did not know what Neighbors was when I went, and it made it that much more interesting.
I grew up very fast in those years. I dated Tania, whose family was from Mexico and was an exceptional Salsa dancer that I met at the University of Washington Ballroom Dance Club. We went out dancing all the time for several years. The culmination of our relationship was a bronze in the Seattle ballroom dance competition. We tried for a while, but it wasn’t meant to be. That was that and she moved to Australia.
Nick’s buddy (who I shall not name to protect the innocent), would come over already high and looking to get more stoned. He had completed a master’s degree in a very competitive program at the UW, and now was doing nothing with it.
One time, at the end of a long drawn-out soirée, he couldn’t find any more beer in my fridge. He looked at a half-empty (which he saw as half-full) glass of beer that someone had put a cigar out in, and with only a brief pause, shrugged his shoulders and chugged it down, ashes and all.
These were lengths to which one would go to keep the party going at the Stoddard Tenement House.
Those years ended abruptly when the owner of the condo, an airline pilot with a stressful life, suddenly passed away from a heart attack. His wife and daughter were in shock and mourning, and I knew they wanted the daughter to be able to stay there, as she was a college student too.
I decided it would be for the best if I just moved out to get out of their way. I had a deposit all wrapped up in a new building up the street that was already past the opening deadline and kept postponing. I had nowhere to put my stuff, so I stored some of it downstairs in the laundry room and some of it out in the alley behind the building in our garage space that was not at all secure.
What seemed like an act of courtesy turned into very bad timing.
A few hours before I was to move out, we were all having one last little get-together. 9-Ball noticed some young punks in the alleyway four stories below who were mouthing off and throwing insults at us through the window. 9-Ball very correctly set the young hooligans straight and they fled the scene, not knowing that they would throw something much worse than insults in a matter of hours.
We left the apartment to finish our work (I literally had to go work at University Fitness) and I came back later that evening to find splattered egg all over the walls of the living room.
Somehow, he had insulted the next pitcher for the Mariners or something, because that kid had an arm like a cannon. Either that or they had some kind of deadly accurate egg gun. I realized we had left the windows open on that hot evening and from four stories below, these kids had managed to launch those eggs through our windows and all over our walls, destroying the paint.
The others were gone, and all I had with me was the newest roommate on the scene, Andrew from the dance department. Andrew had just moved in and never even knew any of the other guys and yet from the goodness of his heart, he stayed with me that evening to paint the entire living room and clean up the mess. He lasted most of the night, and I pulled the rest of the all-nighter and finished the job. I turned the keys in and went to the gym the next morning.
Without a home, the backroom at the gym became my new living space. I worked during the day, and then pleaded with Fahreed, who started at eleven, not to tell the boss that I was sleeping there. I am not sure if the boss would have cared, but I felt ashamed. Fahreed’s shift would end at five in the morning and I would start. It was a strange time.
Years later, after acquiring a well-paying oil refinery job, no doubt with the help of his sheer charisma, 9-Ball began to travel to exotic locales in order to work on the large and expensive process of winding down oil refineries. On location in a tropical setting, he was in a major car accident that should have taken his life. Swearing to become a changed man, he swore off his previous lifestyle, including all drinking, purchased a race bike, and became an avid marathon runner and tri-athlete.
I visited him once when he lived on Alki in Seattle, to see his many ribbons and accolades lining his wall when he was running an average of one marathon per month. He was lean and sinewy and truly embodied a new man.
Farewell 9-Ball, your memory shall forever be cherished and worshiped by the suppliant Ave Rats and Bums of University Way North East.
Thus is the tale told by descendants on the Ave who’s cardboards signs now read, “It’s For 9-Ball,” and who wear pendants and various pieces of flair, all with the image of a hook on them.
In the next post, I will continue with more interesting interviews, like this one with fellow classmate Suzanne Earles.
Are you from Generation X? I want to hear what you think! Please comment below and participate in the conversation about What They Didn’t Teach Us Gen Xers In High School. What do you wish someone told you when you were eighteen?
