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By Root 571 0

fire alarm, an earthquake, or an early morning visit from the Breakfast Burrito truck and everyone had to get outside quickly? It would have been a little inappropriate if Johnny came running out in underwear and nothing else. How would they take him—and his girlish figure—seriously at the office the next day? That could negatively reflect on his capabilities as an employee. Besides, in someone else’s pad, you must be ready for anything. In fact, in this situation, I’d sleep in jeans so I could be prepared for whatever went down. Perhaps a sweatshirt, too. My nipples harden quickly in the cold air.

At every chance I got, I expressed my discomfort with the arrangement, but Chelsea insisted that this was standard operating procedure and made me sound like I was the idiot.

“Brad, it’s not that big a deal. He stays in the guest room, wears boxers and a T-shirt, and, yes, we have dinner together every night.”

I was a little disappointed in Johnny’s choice of sleepwear, but it wasn’t my place to correct him. One morning Chelsea said, “Ted makes breakfast for everyone. Johnny loves Ted’s oatmeal.” That’s stupid. Who has a special oatmeal recipe? (By the way, if someone were to have a special oatmeal recipe, it would be Ted Harbert.)

As days turned into two weeks, any comfort I had with this deal completely subsided. This was not healthy and it couldn’t end well. Johnny was getting too intimate with his bosses.

I began assessing how I would have handled the situation if I had been Johnny. First, I would most likely have tried to get the landlord of my flooded building to pay for a hotel for me, or at least crashed at a buddy’s place. In my obsessive mind, I can’t get comfortable staying in someone’s home unless they are a direct relative or an old friend. I always feel like it’s an imposition and that the person hates me and resents my existence. I even feel like that at home with my wife at times, but that’s another book. I think it’s a reflection on how I would feel if someone I wasn’t close to stayed with me: What the fuck are you doing here? Don’t touch my shit, and did you pick up my dry cleaning? They’d have to earn their room and board.

I constantly asked Johnny how long he planned on staying with Chelsea and Ted, yet he couldn’t give me a straight answer. “I don’t know” was his standard response. I was livid; how could he not know? It’s not like he’d been displaced by Hurricane Katrina and lost all his worldly goods and maybe even a few family members. There’d been a little flood in his shitbox of a studio apartment. This didn’t require FEMA-type relief. For some reason, I needed a timeline for exactly how long Johnny planned on shacking up with his boss. This couldn’t be an open-ended stay; that was just not appropriate. And while Johnny, in my mind, had already done the unthinkable and accepted Chelsea’s invitation, I knew that he was a good kid with good manners and he’d never overstay his welcome.

I pressed him further. Was this stay going to last another week? Another two weeks? A month? When he refused to give me a hard-and-fast date, I became preoccupied with calculating the amount of time—based on Johnny’s description of what had happened to his apartment—it would take for his landlord to fix the flood damage.

As a Jew who never does manual labor, I could have been slightly off in my calculations, but assuming they had stopped the gush of water in Johnny’s crappy studio apartment, I figured the whole process couldn’t take longer than two weeks. Again, I’m not a contractor, but I have certain expectations and know the timeline I would have accepted.

I impressed this upon Johnny, but he couldn’t be bothered. How was he not concerned with how long he was going to be put out? He was effectively homeless. He had some clothes and that was about it. Didn’t he want to go home to his things and his own space? Even if the remodel was going to take a year, he couldn’t realistically think he was going to live with Chelsea and Ted the whole time, could he? What kind of a sick world were we living in?

It wasn’t even