There I was, riding in a truck filled with Playboy centerfolds.

No, not the live, fleshly, wriggling, giggling women who pose for Playboy. I mean, the

paper-based results of their work, cut around their generous proportions and plastered on the seat, dashboard and roof of the small rig I was riding in. Numerous other Playmates adorned the exterior sides, bed, hood and fenders, as well - for all of the city of San Francisco to see.

Fortunately, it was an early Saturday morning in September of 1990, when even this

famously overcrowded city had only a modest amount of traffic. Therefore, fewer faces were out to do double takes at this mobile tribute to Hugh Hefner. More importantly, I was saving a great deal of money in having the couch, mattress and assorted other items I possessed moved by a freelance hauler, who charged a fifth of what the major movers did. Being a staff of one, of course, this hauler, a thin, goateed man of 30 in a duck-billed cap and plaid coat, was also proudly driving this truck load of girlie reproductions.

As this man, whom I never met before, ferried me to my new apartment, he became

strangely open about his personal life: “Yeah, it’s weird, I meet these women in the personals section of the newspaper, and they never want to go out with me after the first date! Can you believe it?” As he elaborated on this startling bit of information, I reflected on the most wonderful part of this journey: I was moving away from the site of the most bizarre, frightening and downright cinematic experience I have ever had in all my years of apartment sharing.

---

I had moved to San Francisco from Minneapolis a year earlier, in the fall of 1989, to start the first of two years as a film major at San Francisco State University. Eager to live the bohemian life of Kerouac, Ginsberg and all those bands on the “Nuggets” collections, I was mildly disappointed to find myself living in a spacious one-bedroom apartment that made up the second story of a pleasant house in the city’s fabulous Sunset District. The house was owned by Dick Roarke, a friendly, six-foot-plus bear of an Irishman, and his diminutive American wife, Sally, who lived on the first level with their four-year old twin sons.

When I first hit town, I answered ads placed by other apartment dwellers, in hopes of

finding vacancies at otherwise occupied flats. But, because I arrived only seven days before the month of August would end, most of the openings listed had been snatched up. As I was still a spoiled brat whose schooling was funded by a rich, dearly departed grandfather’s trust fund, I had to “settle” for this fairly expensive apartment, one of the few living spaces of any kind available in the city. I was, nonetheless, determined to get a roommate by the end of September, so as not only to save money but to live like a true inhabitant of “Sodom by the Sea.”

I soon found the dangers of getting what you wish for.

The man who ended up being my chamber fellow, Mike, was the same age as my wild

twenty-five, and first set foot in the apartment in response to an ad I placed in my school’s apartment board. Though I had received several phone calls in response to the classified, he was the only respondent who bothered to show up and look at the place. Mike, whose birth name was actually Mohammed, was from Amman, Jordan. He had moved to the United States a few years earlier to pursue the fruits of capitalism, good education and, most importantly, the insatiably oversexed women waiting to be satisfied in every hill and valley of this great land.

It didn’t come as a great surprise to me that Mike, a slight, handsome man who sported the moustache favored by many a swinging Jordanaire, liked to spend his free time between the two jobs he worked at - one as a Domino’s pizza deliverer and the other as a hotel desk clerk - trying to locate these women at the city’s night spots. Still, he struck me as an amiable fellow who would not impede my own splashes in the flesh pots. He even agreed to pay a larger share of the rent in order to occupy the apartment’s sole bedroom, while I slept on a mattress in the living room.

One other matter he was immediately gracious about was allowing me access to his

television set, the sole luxury item in the otherwise spartan “crib.” About a week after he moved in, I was sitting in the bedroom, on an old, ratty couch, the one piece of furniture besides Mike’s sleeping bag, watching that week’s thrilling installment of L.A. Law. Through the open door I saw Mike walk up the stairs, accompanied by a slightly chubby, disagreeable looking woman in her mid-twenties. Once they were in the room proper, I got up from the couch and said hello to the woman. She did not say anything back, but merely stared at me as if I were an intruder.

The next day, after the woman had left, I asked Mike if the young lady was someone he met at a night club. Raising his eyebrows, he replied, “No, that is my wife!”

Surprised, I shook my shoulder-length hair, which, rather than making me look like Roger Daltrey after a hot night with The Who, instead made me look like Michael Bolton after sticking his finger into a light socket. I blurted out, “Say what?”

Mike explained that he had made an arrangement with his wife, Osha, who was from

Nepal, India and lived in an apartment elsewhere in town. The arrangement was that he would rent a second pad so he could have time “to himself” for a few nights each week. His willingness to cough up more than three hundred dollars a month for this quiet must have meant that he was in desperate need of solitude. And judging from Osha’s initial reaction to me, I wondered if she had really agreed to this “arrangement” - or even knew about it before the previous night.

After that first night, though, whenever this woman called for her husband on the phone, she was generally polite to me. While I found Mike’s set-up a little unorthodox, I didn’t see how it would affect me. In fact, between the nights spent with “the Missus” at his marital digs, the time he spent at his two jobs and the occasional pursuit of women who might help him be a properly unfaithful husband, I had the place to myself.

For a while.

In late January, 1990 I came back from a month-long stay in cold, dark Minnesota, during a break between semesters at SFSU. Returning to warm, dark San Francisco at around midnight, I got out of the airport shuttle and walked toward the mid-section of the Roarke house, where a separate doorway to our upstairs apartment was located. I opened the door and turned on a light over the stairway.

As I walked up the stairs, I became aware of an ungodly smell emanating from the unlit quarters above. Once I arrived at the apartment proper, I saw through the darkness that both Mike’s room and mine were hosts to garbage bags overflowing with Domino’s pizza boxes and assorted perishables. I also saw someone who resembled Mike get out of one of two sleeping bags on the floor. As he approached me with his hand extended, I realized it wasn’t Mike but someone who looked like him after twenty years of hard labor and heavy smoking.

“Me. Mike. Brother.” he said while shaking my hand and coughing non-stop.

Though in my irritation I was tempted to respond with a similarly Tarzan-esque bit of mockery such as, "Me. John. Roommate," I instead replied, still in a slightly irritated voice,“Hi, I’m John. I live here.”

“Me. Tired. Good night,” he said before turning around and shuffling back into the room

I was prepared to halt this guy in his tracks and ask what the hell he and all this garbage was doing in my once clean, unoccupied home. But, as I watched him continue to cough and slide back into his sleeping bag, I figured my roommate was the one I should hassle about this creepy welcome home. Besides, his brother’s obviously limited command of English would have rendered my interrogation useless.

The next morning I woke up on my mattress in the living room, to the sun revealing still more stinking refuse, and to Mike loudly berating his brother in Arabic. I got up and walked over to the bedroom, my face betraying annoyance, weariness and confusion. Mike turned to me, smiled and said, “Hey, John, how you doin’?” Gesturing at our guest, who was buttoning up a a wrinkled plaid shirt to match his brown polyester pants, “This is my brother, Adnan. He’s staying with us for two weeks. That okay?”

“Okay,” I said with a weary sigh, “But we gotta clean up this place right now. It’s a

fucking pig sty!” Both men nodded obediently. I repaired to the bathroom, which, of course, was a repository for grime, mildew, soiled towels and still more Domino’s containers.

Within a few hours, the apartment was free of odors, bags and debris, thanks to the

sweeping and scrubbing I performed with Adnan, who continued to cough incessantly while taking puffs from the cigarettes that he lit up every five minutes. Mike had since gone off to work, advising me before he left that if Adnan did not do as he was bid, I should “kick his ass.” I, of course, had no intention of acting like a boot-camp martinet, and figured there was no harm in this consumptive 40-plus-year-old man enjoying his two weeks in “Babylon by the Bay.”

Well, wouldn’t you know it, those two weeks morphed into four, then six, then eight,

then ... Every so often I would ask Mike when Adnan was planning to go back home to his wife and six children in Amman. I appended these queries with concerns that the Roarkes, our landlords below us, might wonder about seeing three of us going in and out of the apartment on a daily basis. Mike’s standard reply was, “Don’t worry, John, I’m gonna get Adnan out of here soon. But, please, if he bothers you - kick his ass!”

It was Mike’s posterior I really would have preferred giving a thump. But, I figured, since he was still was absent so much of the time, Adnan’s presence was no worse than having one roommate - even if his cut of the rent was paid by his brother and he was becoming less and less inclined to do his share of the cleaning. And, let’s face it, Dick and Sally Roarke probably thought Mike and his sibling were the same man.

However, strange things continued to happen. This was not solely thanks to the new

mounds of crap and dirty dishes that were taking over the apartment, which I put my foot down about cleaning altogether unless I saw an equal amount of work from Mike or his surrogate. Mike’s wife, Osha, would periodically call in search of her husband. Though she was still more or less courteous to me, she used me as an ear piece for her understandable frustration with him living in a second residence and letting his brother freeload off of us.

Convinced Mike was rooming with me so he could pursue amorous affairs, Osha at one point asked if we were gay lovers. That was one of the more levelheaded accusations she made, though, as she was consumed not only by wifely jealousy, but by beer, whiskey and any other spirits she could wash down with breakfast. She would often be soused by the early afternoon, when she phoned me and accused Mike of having orgies with women, men, animals and harems of “filthy whores.”

It turns out she wasn’t completely off her rocker about the harems - it’s just that it was Adnan who was having the orgies. With the seemingly bottomless stash of money he was using to pay for his “vacation”, Adnan had bought himself a rusty white van worthy of any serial killer. It turns out the vehicle wasn’t just for sightseeing, but also as a mobile love shack for tours with San Francisco’s finest working girls.

Only once did he have a “tour” at the apartment, on a night when Mike was with Osha,

and I was at one of the loud, hard rock clubs I was increasingly repairing to for peace and quiet. When I learned of this house call, Mike did not have to remind me to kick his brother’s ass. I told Adnan myself I would do so - all the way back to Jordan - if he ever entertained this kind of company again. Nodding his head, and coughing, he said, “John! Girls! Problem! No!”

And the going only got weirder.

I came home from classes at SFSU one day to find the door to the apartment wide open. Sighing, I figured Adnan must have been so eager to go trolling for trollops that he forgot to lock, or even close, the door when he left. This is not as unlikely as it sounds, as he frequently forgot to flush the turds he deposited in the toilet, or turn off the oven and take out the hot bricks that were once rolls still in it (which, evidently, he had also forgotten to eat and turn into shit).

Hurling my back pack onto my mattress in the living room, I bent down to turn on my boom box, only to find it missing. I went into Mike’s room and found it was not there either. Sighing again, I figured Adnan had taken it with him for orchestral background for that day’s romantic encounters.

I then remembered that I needed to call a friend of mine and went looking for the phone, which spent equal amounts of time in both Mike’s and my sleeping quarters thanks to the telephone jacks in each room. I found that that item was missing, as well.

And in those days before widespread portable and cell phone use, there was only one reason for that.

“Oh, my fucking God!”

Running down the stairs, I raced over to our landlord’s apartment. There, I called the

police and reported the robbery that had most assuredly had happened.

An affable young cop eventually came and took stock of what was missing - which I

found, after making a second search, wasn’t much. Besides the phone and the boom box, the only other item that was burgled was a secret-agent-style briefcase of Mike’s. The case, which held a passport and immigration documents, had been busted open and emptied.

An hour after the police left, my official roommate arrived. When I told him what had happened, he spent the rest of the night in a daze, periodically examining his broken briefcase as if searching for clues. Adnan, who showed up a few hours later, raised his eyebrows and sputtered, “Rob? You!? No! Crazy!”

Osha, who had it in for Adnan and all of Mike’s family, felt it was he who was behind the break-in. I came up with the more likely theory that Mike had made enemies - or, worse, friends - with some unsavory co-workers at one of his jobs, and that they came to the place in search of immigration documents for use on the black market. The phone and the boom box they probably took as souvenirs.

A week later, I realized that the documents weren’t all they came after. I discovered that about three hundred dollars had taken a permanent vacation from my bank account. I had completely forgotten to check a cupboard where I kept a box of unused checks. That box now obviously sharing space with my phone and music machine. The bank where I handled all my transactions, whose tellers demanded two forms of ID whenever I merely deposited money, were so embarrassed about having cleared checks with sloppy reproductions of my signature that they immediately replaced the dough I reported missing.

As for Dick and Sally Roarke, they were the most upset of all about the robbery. They

also privately expressed concern to me about Mike - whom they still thought was the only other person besides myself living upstairs - and those associated with him. Apparently, while I and the roomies were out of the apartment, a drunken Osha was heard by the Roarkes loudly banging on our apartment's front door, and then taking a garden hose attached to a nearby spigot and hurling it across the driveway.

They also overheard the time she arrived at the apartment, with Mike, while on

another bender - and when I had the bad luck of being home. While Mike was taking a number two in the bathroom, she banged on that door and shouted, “Why don’t you shit in your room! You like to live in stink!” If the couple downstairs was still cowering behind their curtains, they must have seen me beating a hasty exit from the place, hoping to get out before Osha decided to resume her accusation that I was her husband’s true love.

Then came Cousin Iman.

I was lying on my mattress one Saturday night in mid-April, enjoying a six pack of beer and some tunes on the newer, cheaper boom box that had replaced the stolen one. I was agreeably inebriated when Adnan arrived with a tall man about my age whom he introduced as his cousin, Iman. Iman, who looked like the lead pilot of the 9-11 wrecking crew, was a well-mannered, well- dressed fellow who spoke exquisitely good English. His English was good enough, in fact, to politely ask, “So, can I stay two weeks, till I get an apartment?”

Unfortunately, my English was good enough to say, “Sure!”

The next day, sober and hangover-cranky, I came back from studying at my school’s
library to find Iman lying in his sleeping bag, which had taken up the free space on the floor between the couch and Mike’s and Adnan’s body bags. As he and I watched that night’s ominous episode of Twin Peaks on the television - the only item of value the robbers did not take - I asked our latest house guest, “Uh, so you guys are gonna be here just two weeks, right?”

“Right,” confirmed Iman, “Adnan and me will find an apartment. No problem.”

“Good, because I’m really worried about the people downstairs finding out about four of us living in this place now!”

My concern was matched by that of Osha, who was enjoying a brief period of sobriety.

Aware that yet another of Mike’s relatives was turning the place into an above-ground railroad, she said I should at long last tell the Roarkes about the squatters. Though her advice made sense, I was so worried about explaining the past several months of Adnan’s illicit shacking that I figured it would be best to trust Cousin Iman’s word about moving. And, Mike, himself, went into hysterics whenever I mentioned spilling the beans to the house owners. “Please, John, let Adnan and Iman find a place!” he would implore, “If my family hears we kicked them out, they will never speak to me again!”

The way his loved ones seemed so far, I wondered if that wasn’t such a bad thing.

Of course, the vacationers didn’t do jack about moving, and the latest “two weeks”

melded into another month. This time, though, I was not so acquiescent, and my nudging of the transients took on a more forceful tone. I also found myself becoming increasingly testy about coming home to a place which - on the nights when Mike was taking a break from Osha and he and his relations would play cards, smoke cigarettes and talk loudly in Arabic - was starting to resemble a gambling den out of an Indiana Jones movie.

Then came the day I dreaded ... and secretly hoped for.

One Sunday morning in late May, I woke up to the sound of many voices yelling in

English in the next room.

“You don’t respect your wife!” screamed a woman who sounded like Osha.

“You treat my sister like a whore!” bellowed a man with a thick Indian accent.

“We ought to kill you guys!” roared another man, also with a thick Indian accent.

Getting out of the bed, I dashed into the small area between the living room, Mike’s room and the stairway. Just inside the doorway to the bedroom, I found Osha and two intense, well- dressed men in their twenties whom I later learned were her brothers. They were standing and shaking their fists at Mike, Adnan and Iman, all of whom were cowering in their zippered coffins and looking up at the intruders like they were government agents.

“What the fuck is going on here!” I yelled, causing Osha and her brothers to look at me.

Both siblings immediately smiled and said, as casually as if we were passing each other on the street, “Hey! How you doing?” They quickly turned around and, their smiles immediately turning back to snarls, resumed shaking their fists at the quivering trio on the floor.

“What kind of man lives in a place away from his wife!” barked one brother.

“We ought to kill you guys!” repeated the other.

Osha nudged both men on the shoulders and said, “Let’s go! I know how to stop this shit right now!” She marched out of the room, her brothers following her. As the visitors stomped down the stairs, I found myself glaring at Mike and the other two as they got up from the floor.

“Don’t worry about this, John!” Mike implored, waving his hands in the air, “This has

nothing to do with you!”

Saying nothing, I swiveled around. My hair - which now made me look like Albert

Einstein after receiving hair care treatment from Michael Bolton - swiveled just as madly. I marched into the bathroom and slammed the door.

Twenty minutes later, preparing to spend the rest of the day studying at school and

wondering what the hell I was going to do about my feckless roommate and his leaches, I stepped out the front door. I immediately stopped as I saw Dick, Sally and their twin sons all marching toward me bearing the glowers of unpaid Riverdancers. Behind them, I saw Osha and her brothers getting into her car.

“John, is this true?” asked Sally in disbelief, “You and Mike have been letting people stay here illegally?”

“I’m really sorry,” I said, sounding as frightened as Mike, “I meant to tell you, but they kept promising they would leave, and I didn’t know what to do and I - I - I - ”

“Okay, John” Dick interrupted in his thick Irish brogue. Turning to his wife, he said, in

the tone of a man about to defuse a bomb left by the IRA,“You and the kids go back inside. I’m gonna have a look upstairs with John.”

I lead Dick up to the apartment, which he had not visited since doing a minor electrical

repair when Mike was the only other resident. Walking into the living room, we found Mike, Adnan and Iman standing with their arms crossed and shit-eating grins on their faces. Looking at all three of these men, Dick zeroed in on the official tenant, whom he had not had a conversation with since the day he moved in, and asked, “You Mike?”

Mike replied, with a nervous laugh, “Yes, I am Mike.”

“So, who are these guys?”

“This is my brother and my cousin. They are staying for two weeks.”

“Bullshit! I’ve seen your brother’s van parked outside for five months now!”

As I barely restrained a laugh of my own at Mike’s automatic - and, as always, worthless - cover-up, I watched Dick walk around the place. His face slowly turned shamrock green as he looked at my unmade bed in the living room, the sleeping bags in Mike’s, the slop in the bathroom, the mountain of dirty dish ware in the kitchen and the garbage all over. Joining us again in my slumber patch, Dick said quietly, “Somebody open a window.” Shaking his head, his voice rising, he repeated, “For God’s sake, somebody open a window! I can barely breath in here!”

As the Three Jordanian Stooges frantically stumbled over to the room’s windows and

opened them, Dick requested my presence alone with him and Sally in their apartment. As he and I walked down the stairs, he growled to me in a low tone, “Why don’t they go back to Iran, or Persia, or wherever the hell they came from?”

In their cleaner, saner environs, Dick and Sally assured me that they didn’t hold me

responsible for the wreckage upstairs, and that they would file an eviction notice against Mike.

Unfortunately, the couple soon learned from their attorney that only way they could finalize the notice was to have all tenants be evicted. Since the document gave us ninety days to vacate, and I wasn’t up for living in a place that might be visited by still more angry relatives or burgling co-workers, I gave my landlords the blessing to go ahead and file it.

Mohammed, Larry and Curly’s exit from the place ended up happening fairly quickly ... and quietly. In early July, several weeks after the Real Housewives of Amman, Jordan rumble, I arrived at the apartment to find the bedroom clean of debris, the couch the only item of my ex-roommate’s left behind. Not surprisingly, no forwarding address was ever left with me or the Roarkes, and Mike never returned, not even to collect his parking tickets that continued to pile up in the mailbox.

The only loose end I was left with was paying an $800 phone bill he and his dear ones

charged up. Mike, Adnan and Iman had, on an almost nightly basis, enjoyed long, lively conversations with relatives and friends back in Jordan, as well as other countries such as Egypt and Iran (though not Persia). They had previously paid the enormous charges they wracked up each month, but I had a strong feeling they weren’t in a mood to honor this last one. Luckily, my grandfather’s estate had enough money to cover the charge in addition to my educational and living needs.

---

“Yeah, it’s weird, ” the freelance mover repeated with a shake of the head as he, I and Hef’s girls bounced toward my new apartment - a single occupancy crib on the other side of the city, where I would enjoy a year free of squatters, wives and whores. “I mean, these women I meet through the personals always seem to have a good time, but they never want to go out after that first date!”

Looking up at Miss December, March, May and June covering the interior of the truck

like so much camouflage, I merely nodded my head and said, “Yeah. Huh. That is weird.”

“Oh, well, I ain’t gonna give up looking for the girl of my dreams,” he concluded with a

chuckle and a contented shrug of the shoulders, “You know , like that one old Brigitte Bardot movie says, ‘And God Created Woman!’”

STARS______GUNS ______DRUGS______DOMS______ROOMIES