£20 Don't Come For Free

This morning Andy kicked Michael out of the flat. Michael is this guy with a creepy-ass grin, apparently he's from Russia, but I'll believe that's true if you can prove to me that's where bad people come from. He's one of Andy's lackeys, the guy follows him around barely saying much and smiling creepily when spoken to. And he nods WAY too emphatically. I dunno man there's something about that dude that really bums me out. Andy is growing on me though, especially since I started writing about him and thinking about him as a person.

Fuck. Am I a sociopath? Eugh anyway...

So today me and Andy went for a beer down at some sketchy-as-hell “East End Boozer” called The Kingsland, where the bartender was this huge, potbellied loud-mouth I'm assuming had tattoos, not because I remember seeing any, but because it would fit. The guy was slapping glasses down on the bar and shouting, and he got into it with some hunched 70 year old guy, they insulted each other for 30 seconds and then started singing an old British song I've never heard of.

To be honest I do love a filthy pub on its own intriguing merits, even if I'm scarcely brave enough to go in alone, but really the only reason really that I went for a beer with Andy this afternoon at this pub was because I wanted to get £20 off of him. So this guy Michael has been staying at our house for the last few days... maybe it's a week I can't remember. He's been sleeping on a mattress in the kitchen, or sometimes in Andy's room. Often in the mornings I'll see the mattress propped against the kitchen wall with a huge Union Jack draped over it, so I like to imagine Andy makes him sleep underneath that flag to teach him about Proper British Values.

Last Thursday I had a gig in Exeter, and arrived back in London at 8:45am, got off the Megabus and went straight to work, then gigged that night, came home and went to sleep. When I woke up for work the next morning and went to the station I realized I had no money on my Oyster card for the train so had to run back home and grab my last £20 which I'd left in my coin jar. Only it wasn't there. I was in a panicked rush to not be late for work, so I burst into Andy's room where he and Michael were still asleep and begged for any money just so that I could get to work. He woke up with a look of terror in his eyes and started screaming. Hahahaha.
        “AAAAGH! WHAT THE FUCK!?? WHAT THE FUCK?!?!” He looked like he'd just seen a ghost. Also, he looked like a ghost.

I'm laughing now thinking about how ridiculous the whole thing was. Michael just sat in his Union Jack bed, but Andy got up and found me a couple pounds which was actually fantastic of him. I left and they probably went back to sleep.

Then that night Andy came to me and said that since he'd had time to collect his thoughts he realized that he'd found a £20 in the hallway the other day, and after thinking about it, it was the day after I went to Exeter, and seeing as I had no idea where my £20 had gone, I connected the dots and agreed that yeah, it was probably mine. Maybe I'd decided to take it to Exeter (I didn't think I had) and then had fumbled it out of my pockets on the way out of the house... maybe? I had no idea what had happened to my money, but it seemed like Andy was trying to find a way to give me back the £20 that I'd lost, so I accepted the story we'd both just invented together, and that would have been that.

Cut to the shitty East End Boozer, and we're drinking our pints while Andy runs me down on the latest gossip from the agency. He gets around to the subject of Michael and I really start listening; apparently that morning after some sort of factual slip – “oh yeah that... uuh... okay... so I've been meaning to tell you...” – Michael had confessed to him that he stole £400 from a couple of people after telling them they were free to move into a room in another property that wasn't actually available. So he took deposits off them both, and then left them high and dry. Andy was telling me this outraged, which seemed strange because I've heard him talk about blindly inventing reasons to take people's money before, but I guess he never fucked people out of a place to live after taking their money... Justifications, justifications.

So Andy kicked Michael out, and now told me he didn't trust him, and that “Ooooooh maybe it was him who took the money out of my change jar!?” (GASP!) Who the fuck knows man, but after asking him about 3-4 times he finally handed over £20 just as we were leaving the pub. I don't know whether we were going on the “I found it in the hallway” thing, or whether he was offering it as a “sorry for letting a thief stay in our house and probably steal your money”. I'm not sure if he knows either, but either way it was done. Done, done, and done.

I also had a great chat with Matt who lives in the room next to me about his ex, who has recently left him after six years. Apparently she's taking him back. He's 35 (ish) and they met when she was 19. I'm super happy for him. He's been here for like a month tops, and he's already getting out. I don't think I'm ready to leave just yet.

Peace, Taco.

Click here to read the next part - It's Love

Who's the Idiot Here?

So now that I'm here and this thing has actually started, I guess I have to back-pedal a little bit and say that actually I don't hate Andy, and I only pity him sometimes, when he's pretending to be scary... I struggle to understand my feelings towards him I guess, so maybe I'll try and leave that out of it if I can.

Tonight I came home after a few stand-up shows feeling excited after the rush of writing yesterday's blog. I wanted to talk to him to see if he had anything more to contribute today, and we ended up having a really nice conversation. It always takes me a while to get into anything with him though, because the stories he has to tell are always pretty mundane nothings, but I guess the same could be said about the day-to-day stories anyone might tell their housemate in the hour or so catch-up before bed. Today's anecdote was something about a lock not working.

His boss, the owner of the property agency, had called him up asking whether he'd changed the locks on one of the properties, Andy said he hadn't, and suspected the boss was trying to size him up because they have this whole chest-beating, 'who's-fucking-who' thing going on right now where I'm pretty sure they're both trying to rinse the other dry for money or services or... something I'm not quite sure. Bottom line is, they don't trust each other. So Andy blamed two of the other managers in the company, saying they'd changed the locks, but then remembered to himself that actually that lock was just a fiddly one to get open and they'd figured it out when they were drunk and... yeah, riveting stuff I know.

And I'm sitting there half thinking this isn't going anywhere, but then he started talking about his plans for the future and about this girl he met on the weekend, some Mexican girl who he chatted to for a couple of hours. He recounted how he'd met her for the second time after their first drunken chat at a drug-fuelled party, and when they locked eyes the second time they'd both beamed with joy. He told me he'd only felt this way about a girl twice before, one he married, and the other he lived with for a few years. Maybe it's because I'm a little soft from my own heartbreak right now, but hearing someone talk earnestly with honest excitement about love like that really got to me, and I sat down on the rickety chair next to the door without taking the folded jumper off of it.

He tells me he's seriously thinking about leaving to Mexico with this girl: “We'll see how it goes when she gets back in a few days and if she's still there like 'I want to see you', then I guess I'll fookin' head over to Mexico with her.”
        “Do you need a visa to go to Mexico?”
        “I'll just go over on a travel visa and then stay won't I... it's fookin' Mexico innit!” and then he laughed a trademark falsetto chuckle to himself. I'm not sure whether that plan works in real life, like just being in Mexico means you can't get caught for doing illegal shit. But then again, who am I to say it doesn't work, I've never been?

I can't decide whether he's a genius, or an idiot, and I said that to him as I walked out of the room, only to turn around and walk back in, because I didn't feel like we were done, but I stood at the door with my three jackets inside each other all hung over my one tiny shoulder because it's really cold in London sometimes guys and a fella's gotta have OPTIONS! He bent down to do a line of coke off the plate on his bed, and I took a picture of him while he wasn't looking, because it seemed like a very quintessential moment. I guess I'll post that at the bottom of the page. I suddenly feel less like a part of Andy's life, and more like a nature documentarian, and I feel a little bit dirty. But there's no going back now right?

FOR SCIENCE!!

Amidst the pseudo-philosophical ramblings about future plans and love and schemes involving renting properties in London where Andy would make me a live-in property manager in a flat somewhere and we'd run it like an AirBnB hotel and split the profits down the middle. And after he told me the Mexican girl he's known for all of six days has a sixteen-year lease on a flat in Central Paris for 300 Euro a month that she's currently subletting to a friend for 1100 a month. And somewhere around the part where he told me his boss, who he's apparently going to sue for some reason or another, “actually probably owes me about five grand to be fair”. Somewhere in there, with much better context than I'm about to give it, the following words fell out of Andy's mouth:

        “It's all about the book you can write, not how many pages you've got left”

I know, right.

Like all great profundities, it doesn't stand up to close inspection or after-thought, and that's why it's perfect. We both laughed together in surprise at how amazing those words sounded, like they'd sprung up out of thin air into our company, I asked if he'd stolen that from somewhere. He said he wasn't sure, and started Googling them on his tablet (which by the way is a replacement for the old one he bought last month and which he's pretty sure might still be a bit dodgy and he needs to go in tomorrow and talk to the girl because he thinks she might have stitched him up a bit there). Then we started talking about song lyrics, and maybe he was just paraphrasing “You can't judge a book by it's cover.” But that doesn't mean the same thing at all anyway...

It was at this point that I walked out, and said goodnight, and Andy took his third line in the fifteen minutes I'd been in there. He didn't seem wired though. I honestly have no idea whether he'll remember those words in the morning, whenever that might be. But I've got them down here now, written, and attributed.

The search for truth continues, who is the elusive Andy? And what can he tell us about ourselves tomorrow? What mysteries will he unravel? Maybe the name of the weird introverted guy who has been sleeping on a mattress in the kitchen for the past three nights? Although to be fair I could just ask the guy myself, but he seems wack and I'd probably forget his dumb name anyway.

Peace, Taco.

Click here to read the next part - £20 Don't Come For Free

Introduction to Andy

So basically I've decided to keep a blog about all the ridiculous hair-brained schemes my housemate Andy comes at me with almost every single day I see him. I'll try to keep this entry short, as a good intro to this guy's life so you can get an idea of who he is, and then I'll try and update this as often as possible with little snippets or whatever comes up.

Basically this guy moved into my flat about 6 months ago, first as someone another flatmate found on Gumtree to fill his room for a couple weeks while he went away. He decided to stay on, and moved into one of the rooms, immediately starting fights with the agency we all pay rent to, basically every phone conversation I overheard between him and them ended with “this is fookin' England mate and in this country you can't fookin' do that to people you'll get your money when you get it know wot I mean!?” Also during this time his younger brother was living with us, and they fought like brothers do. One day me and my housemate Rosie came home to a cop car waiting outside, and random shit strewn everywhere. The door kicked in and the lock broken. The brothers had had a fight, and we never saw the younger one again.

After that Andy just kept living really... that lasted about three months, in which time he quit whatever job he had (details were VERY light on that one), broke his arm and went on the dole, and lived with his only income other than benefits being from semen donations to a local sperm bank. He also used to tell me he'd get money from banks and phone companies by just calling them up and complaining and yelling at enough people and telling them he'd been on the phone for hours and hours, until they just credited him some money to make him go away. Oh, and he has lines of credit running with half a dozen local businesses – off licenses, chicken shops, and a couple bars.

So one week he's telling us all week he's going down to the property agency to “sort them out”, and I'm thinking he's finally going to be kicked out, which I'm half relieved about, but also a little bit down on, because as stressful as it is, I really do enjoy having someone around who is such a chaotic force of nonsense. Seriously. Absolute fucking nonsense.

Anyway, he comes home with a huge grin plastered over his face, and tells us he's got a job with the agency. The boss loved him, and they seem to have this weird father-son, protegé relationship going on. In the 3-4 months since that happened, everyone who used to live in the house has moved out: my friends Rosie and Leroy left because the place was seriously fucking disgusting around that time, the sink didn't work for about 2 months, and the kitchen would flood whenever you used the washing machine. There was never any gas or electricity, and Andy never liked Rosie so was starting to threaten her with stories about when he was going to have her evicted. As much as I'm drawn to the chaos that he brings into my life, he is a fundamentally sad, and mean person. Mean in his heart, and sad to witness and contemplate.

The fifth housemate, Romy, he kicked out of the flat, trashed her room, put her stuff into storage, and then changed the locks and waited for her to come home before telling her she couldn't come in and she had to find somewhere else to go. She didn't pay her rent and kept lying and saying she would, and to be honest I fucking hated her too. But no one deserves that. I guess that's what happens when two impossibly unpleasant people clash heads, one of those skulls is going to break.

So anyway, that's where I'm at now, Andy has brought new people in to fill the three empty rooms: Yanic from Portugal who is studying music at some local college. Matt is English, probably in his thirties, and just broke up with his girlfriend of six years – he wears a lot of black. And two Italians, brother and sister, the sister's name is Sara, and the brother I don't know, his English isn't great, but he smokes weed and seems pretty cool. Andy tells me they all think he owns the place, so I'm the only one who knows the full extent of the situation here, and he tells me I'm in “a pretty good position” while smiling at me like a serial killer. I always turn down his offers of cocaine.

Look forward to more updates guys. Hopefully this is just the beginning.
Welcome to The Abersham Flat.

Peace, Taco.

Click here to read the next part - Who's the Idiot Here?