Future Stockbrokers of America
Memoirs of a recovering ex-roommate part 4¾
Having one bad roommate is trouble enough. But it’s nothing compared with having two. Simultaneously.
As we learned in the previous chapter, the tyranny of dog excrement drove sensible Cindy out of Walton’s domain. Unfortunately, she was replaced with Brad, a leather-clad, Jim Morrison-esque pretty-boy who proved to be one of the most detestable human beings I’ve known.
If I had to describe Brad in two words, they would be ‘bigoted nutbar.’ If I had to describe him in 947 words, they would be the following:
Brad was a freak. He was a non-stop, dawn-to-dusk hate-spewing machine. He hated virtually everybody on the planet but himself. He hated all non-white races, and most white ethnicities, whom he regarded as genetically inferior. Poor people, queers, women, psychiatrists—you name it, he probably hated it. And he never shut up.
Conversation with Brad bordered on the surreal. Here’s an example of a typical early-morning encounter:
Me: [emerges from bedroom bleary-eyed] “Good morning.”
Brad: [sharply] “Find a woman who’s more intelligent than me.”
Me: “Um, I don’t think that’ll be too hard.”
Brad: “What makes you think that women are as intelligent as men?”
Me: “I’ve known intelligent women all my life. I have no reason to believe that women are less intelligent.”
Brad: [disgustedly] “You’re a fool.”
Me: “So what makes you think that women are less intelligent?”
Brad: “Talking to them.”
Now, I don’t want you to get the idea that Brad was one-dimensional. Here’s another interlude that highlights his softer, sensitive side:
Me: “Good morning.”
Brad: “I can’t believe you’re going out on a date with a Mexican. Why don’t you get yourself a nice white girl?”
Me: “First of all, she’s whiter than me. And second of all, your girlfriend is from Laos! I can’t believe that you can be so racist against Asians and yet go out with one.”
Brad: “I’m not racist about my girlfriend. Just because she looks Asian doesn’t mean she acts like one.”
What a man. I soon realized that this sneering, pouting, childish caricature had no friends other than his dad, his stepmother, and his silicone-titted Laotian girlfriend, who was, oddly, ten years his senior. I once asked him if he had any friends, and he scoffed:
“Friends? Friends?! I’m not a loser. I don’t need friends. I only hang out with people who can help me with my career.”
His career ambition, incidentally, was to be a stockbroker someday. In the meantime he was twenty-two, had no education beyond high school, and was just starting a job as a cashier in a supermarket. He despised his job, partly because he had to join a union and he hated unions, but mostly because his manager and many of his co-workers were Asian women. Ha!
A defining characteristic of Brad was his addiction to television. He spent almost all of his free time in front of the tube, and it was there that he was truly in his element as a conversationalist. Consider this little nugget, which dropped one night during Seinfeld:
Brad: “What do you think of Eliane? I think she’s hot. I’d do her. You’d do her, right?”
Me: “Um, no.”
Brad: “Why not? She’s hot!”
Me: “She’s insane.”
Brad: “She has a job.”
Me: [snorts into drink] “Whatever.”
Brad: “I’d do her. I’d do her up the butt. I’d bend her over.”
Brad was obsessed with anal sex. He was almost mechanical in the way he loudly affirmed that he would do most of the women on TV up the butt, even if he was alone in the room. On an almost daily basis, he took great pleasure in telling me that he fucked his girlfriend up the butt.
“I like to do her up the butt because it puts me in a more dominant position,” he would smugly say. “She really hates it. I only do it to her around once a month.”
Elsewhere in the news, Brad despised welfare-state Canada (the way he talked, you’d think our living standards were on par with Bangladesh), and desperately wanted to become an American citizen. He was terribly excited about the spring 1999 bombings in Kosovo, and was glued to live coverage of the war for hours at a time. I lost track of the number of times we had this conversation:
Brad: “The United States is, like, the conscience of the world. You’ve really got to give them credit for what they’re doing.”
Me: [snorts into drink] “The conscience of the world? You’ve got to be kidding.”
Brad: “I wish I could fight in a war.”
Me: “Well, why don’t you? There are plenty out there to choose from.”
Brad: “No, not that kind of war. I mean if Canada was invaded. Like by China or somebody.”
Me: “I wouldn’t hold my breath for that if I were you.”
[30 seconds of silence]
Brad: [abruptly] “You’d be scared if the Chinese invaded Canada. You’d be scared, wouldn’t you? You’d be scared.”
Me: “If Canada were invaded I think I’d be worried about it, sure.”
Brad: “Ha ha! Told you! You’d be scared.”
When he wasn’t watching war coverage or the stock market channel, he watched and re-watched Wall Street, Oliver Stone’s acclaimed film about the excess and corruption of the stock market in the 1980s. Brad knew all the dialogue by rote, and idolized the film’s villain, the ruthless stock magnate Gordon Gekko, whom he regarded as the film’s protagonist.
Brad openly dreamed of the day he’d become a stockbroker and get hold of the illegal insider tip that would make him forever rich at the expense of others, his logic being that the smart will always find a way to exploit the stupid, and this was the purpose of life.
As time passed, I came to understand that the universe existed solely for Brad to fuck it up the butt, at his discretion. There was seemingly no limit to his malevolence, from his bigoted tirades against minorities to his treatment of his girlfriend to his abuse of Walton’s dog, which he kicked at every opportunity. I have little doubt that, were he analyzed by a professional, Brad would have been diagnosed a sociopath.*
So there we were, Brad and I, comfortably ensconced in our nightly “TV chat” ritual. What could get in the way of our bliss? Enter our other roommate, Walton. One night Brad and I got fed up with Walt smoking in the living room, so we sat down with him as he played video games on the TV. I did all the talking, and the exchange went like this:
Me: “Um, Walt, I don’t want to be an asshole about this, but you told both of us that this is a non-smoking household.”
Walton: [considers for a moment] “Yeah.”
Me: “And we don’t think we’re being unreasonable to ask to you keep your word on that.”
Walton: [silence]
Me: “Okay?”
Walton: “Okay.”
Wow, that went well. We were surprised that Walton had acquiesced so readily, without the slightest attempt at conflict. But when we woke up the next morning, we found that the TV had been moved from the living room into Walt’s bedroom.
Talk about passive aggression!
The loss of the TV didn’t sting me too badly, but Brad was deeply traumatized. I have to admit I enjoyed watching as he sat on the couch, staring at the spot where the TV used to be and muttering to himself: “That Chinaman* took the TV. That chink.”
I could never get over how Brad constantly complained about Walton’s Asianness to his Asian girlfriend. Verily, he had all the contradictions of a great literary figure, but none of the depth.
* * *
Sometimes the greatest acts of heroism occur during times of greatest adversity. Perhaps this is why, before I moved out of that shithole and left Brad and Walt behind, I did something truly heroic.
One of Brad’s great ambitions was to go into politics. Now, I don’t think he is remotely competent enough to pull this off—if he did, it would certainly give the term ‘political asylum’ a whole new meaning—but stranger things have happened. I woke up one night and realized that, for the good of humanity, there was something I had to do.
A few days before I moved out, I sat down with Brad in front of the TV—the new TV that Brad bought three days after the removal of the first one—and had a little chat. It was a conversation like many others we’d had, except this time there was a tape recorder hidden behind my leg.
He played right into my hands. Point by point, I prodded him to express most every bigoted view I’d heard in the three months I lived with him. And I got it all on tape. Every word.
Herein lies my heroism. If that dipshit ever goes into politics, my little tape will be waiting for him. He’ll be finished.
I think there’s a lesson in this about how the random whims of fate can irrevocably alter our lives. He doesn’t know it yet, but Brad has already destroyed his future in politics—simply because, by sheer chance, he ended up as my bad roommate.
In the immortal words of Sophocles, “Bwa ha ha!” •
Originally published in The Peak, June 7 1999. Original title: “J, W and the TV: Bad roommates revisited”
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2007 update:
The last time I looked for Brad’s incriminating tape, I couldn’t find it. But is it truly lost? Watch this space for further Brad’s incriminating tape lost-and-found updates.
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