One morning, I heard a lot of noise downstairs—sounds of furniture being moved, stuff being dropped, dudes living in a dudely way. I shrugged it off, as I have become adept at doing. A few minutes later, though, my phone buzzed. The text message, from Eric, read, In case you’re wondering, Colin has decided to bring his piano to Penn St. Piano movers and all.
Colin, the newest recruit in Eric’s cavalcade of roommates, had just arrived in the house. We hadn’t had a proper conversation yet, though I had tried. He moved in under the guise of a very short sublet, but then decided to stay. I would run into him in the hall or on the driveway, and I’d attempt to welcome him or ask a question, but halfway through the first sentence, I would falter to a stop because he appeared to be absolutely terrified of me. He stared at me, ashen, slack-jawed, eyes locked wide. He answered with a stilted word or two, and we both hurried away. Our relationship having started thusly, I was a bit unsure of his presence, but as usual I figured it would all work out fine. Then: the piano text.
This was one of those rare times when I would have to confront an interpersonal situation in progress. Exploiting my bubbling adrenaline, I took a look down the front stairwell to check out the scene. Colin stood, hands in pockets, watching four grunting gentlemen try to hoist a massive object up the narrow, winding staircase.
Blinking, clearing my throat, I said something like, “Hey, how’s it goin’? What’s going on here?”
Colin explained nervously that he was having his piano moved in. “It’s a baby grand.”
“I can see that, yeah,” I said. “You gonna just . . . put it in your room here?” The open door to Colin’s bedroom revealed that a baby grand-sized space had been cleared.
“Yeah, right here in my room.”
“Okay, huh. Well, I wish you’d mentioned it before the fact,” I said.
“Oh. I’m really sorry, yeah, I probably should have,” Colin said.
At this point I unearthed a little speech that I bring out whenever someone in the house has done something implausible: “Listen, I really want you to enjoy living here. I want all of us to enjoy living here. That sort of means we all have to respect each other, y’know? We’re in close quarters here, and we have to keep in mind how we’re affecting other people.”
“I’m really sorry. I’m so sorry. I should have talked to you,” Colin said.
This conversation went on a little longer, as the four movers continued their brave struggle, one man getting underneath the piano and crawling up the stairs with it balanced on his back, the others guiding and lifting it as much as they could. Colin, who shares his surname with an old-money New England family, seemed totally unfazed by this feat of manual labor, and I started to get the feeling he’d been waited on a lot in his young life. Irritated by Colin’s obstinacy—he just stood there—I went back into my apartment and shut the door. Turned out, they couldn’t get the piano all the way up the stairs after all, though they did leave a few giant gouges in the wall, requiring an additional trip for purposes of patching. I would have gladly accepted the holes in the wall not to have to listen to this guy play the piano all day and night, and then move out in a few months, at which point this hulking thing would have to be borne back out of the house by some further act of heroic strength.
Later, Colin came upstairs to apologize again, and we had something resembling a fruitful conversation. He told me he’d “come from a pretty unconventional living situation” (something about a big, rambling, falling-down house), and as such, he was unfamiliar with the required niceties of living at PennHenge. He mentioned that the baby grand had actually been left outside for the past couple of years, so it was really beat up and warped anyway, and “sounded crazy.” He’d told the movers to “just throw it away.” Of course, he still had to pay hundreds of dollars to the moving company, despite the fact that the object of his affection was on its way to the landfill.
In those first few months after his arrival, I cynically decided that Colin was slumming—just gathering some street cred on his way to bigger and better things. He was only twenty-two, and it was the first time he’d lived on his own. But over the summer, perhaps six months after he moved in, Colin started on a home improvement tear. Not a Neil-style episode involving sledgehammer-based destruction, but a set of positive, well-executed changes that made the place look better and feel more comfortable. First, he painted his own room. It had been a rather awful shade of flat electric blue, sloppily painted by the illustrious Neil and then left that color by several subsequent occupants. Colin could not abide. So he bought some paint in a very dignified old-hotel sort of gray, and he went for it. He didn’t let me know in advance; I was coming home one night and looked up and saw that the room was suddenly a different color. I thought, if I can just impress upon this guy that someone other than him owns this place, and that he needs to inform that person of any changes he wants to make, we are going to work together just fine. A few weeks later, Eric offhandedly mentioned in an email that Colin was “turning his space into a fancy hotel room.” I began to relish my evening walks back to the house, so I could creep around and look up to spy on the latest embellishments surreptitiously being made to my own home. One night, it was a chandelier with a multitude of tiny lampshades on it; another time, a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. I had to admit that the place was looking pretty baller; there’s nothing wrong with milk crates and lumpy Ikea sofas, but Colin’s tastes and resources well exceeded that level. The next time I stopped into the apartment, he had done the kitchen as well, painting the room in multiple shades of a very modern soft purple-gray that somehow also completely fit the look of the house. He’d installed track lighting and it shone on nice pieces of framed art. For a moment I thought, Why would anyone do all this work to a rental? He’s going to extort money from me now, in payment for these interior design services.
But actually, it’s been the opposite. I made the rare move of speaking directly to Colin’s invariable face in order to clearly remind him that I need to approve any changes he wants to make, before they’re in process, and that I, the owner, should be paying for said changes. “What if you fall off a ladder or crush your finger?” I asked him.
He seemed to understand for a few weeks, during which time he put in a dimmer switch for the chandelier, installed more track lighting, and beautifully painted yet another room, all with my prior knowledge. I congratulated myself for facing the problem and Colin for responding in kind. But now the conversation has again slowed. I rarely see him, but I can hear him—hammering, sawing, drilling; working away on something. He has taken the doors off the kitchen cabinets, and though my recon access is limited in that part of the house, I believe he is testing several paint colors to redo them. My nighttime creeper moments (he really should get some curtains) now reveal that he’s created a huge mosaic-like collage of colored plastic or paper squares that covers the entire wall above the mantel. He’s putting in new (supposedly removable?) flooring on top of the old painted wood planks in his room. I shit you not: he has built a squirrel lounge in his window frame, a wood panel with a squirrel-sized round hole on one side and a glass panel on the interior for observing, ant-farm style. Inside the box he has placed batting for the squirrels’ comfort; so far the animals are a no-show.
At this point the room is about 55 percent old hotel, 40 percent tech startup, 5 percent squirrel residence, if you’re keeping score.
The guy’s got a good eye; I admit it. That doesn’t alter the fact that this apartment is home to two young men, with their attendant piles of clothes and dirty dishes and some less-than-appealing smells. But it’s sunny, well-decorated, and feels cared for. I still don’t feel totally recognized by Colin as the actual owner of the house, but I would rather have a tenant who cares about improving his surroundings than one who lives among his own refuse.
Colin is awkward; he is a leisurely, sporadically employed enigma. He is candid about dealing with mental illness. I like Colin, although I cannot claim to know what makes him tick. He’s smart and appears older than he is. He’s curious and introspective and slightly problematic. He has surprised me by turning over a rather outgoing new leaf. We carry on actual conversations now, voluntary ones, good ones, about Trump and the strange, terrible state of America and the brilliance of Samantha Bee. He has adopted a highly sociable black cat he named Joe Biden, but whom everyone else calls Buster. Under Colin’s care, Buster has gone from skinny and sniffling to large and glossy. He greets me in the driveway when I come home, and he visits me in my apartment, napping on the couch like he owns the place.
If I am to present a well-rounded portrait of Colin, though, I must discuss his car, for Colin is the car; the car is Colin. The car is a hulking, green, 2000-era Volvo wagon with various mechanical problems. The car’s metamorphosis began when Colin discovered a way to print custom bumper stickers one at a time, with stark white letters on a black background. His car soon became a tribute to his favorite comedians, authors, and thinkers, whose names reverently graced the bumper: Patrice O’Neal, Bill Hicks, Dave Chappelle, James Baldwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Leo Tolstoy. Later, perhaps having received some flak for his all-male pantheon, he threw a bone to the ladies and added Tina Fey. He topped it off with a Bernie 2016 and a Black Lives Matter. At this point, the car got him some notice around town (I mean, a Leo Tolstoy bumper sticker?), with people leaving him notes and giving him hand salutes of one kind or another. An acquaintance in town spotted his car parked somewhere and found it so ludicrous she posted a photo of it on Instagram. One of the commenters noted that they “saw this narc wagon parked outside the police station.”
So a few months pass, and Colin gets to thinking that this level of ornamentation was a good first step, but the #narcwagon is not confrontational enough. He begins to reimagine the car as a sort of performance art piece, a way to start a conversation that he is not self-possessed enough to have face-to-face. The previous stickers are removed and replaced with a single Black Lives Matter sticker (banner, really) the width of the bumper and twice as tall. Then the same sticker appears on the side of the car; this one is maybe four feet long. And so on and so forth, until no matter from which angle you look at the car, a huge Black Lives Matter banner is visible.
So Colin—who is white, should you need confirmation—begins driving this car around Providence and Rhode Island. He gets plenty of thumbs-up and words of encouragement. But he also gets into angry scrapes with some jacked-up, hate-filled white guys. A couple of dudes in trucks casually try to run him off the road. And, of course, he regularly gets the bird.
A technophile with spare time, Colin has now installed cameras all over his car so that he can park it in various locations and observe people’s reactions. He has put a solar panel on the roof to power the cameras. (He is often to be spotted in the driveway drilling holes in the roof of his car.) He’s installed the least threatening-sounding car alarm ever made—it makes a cute, bumbling blooooop, blooooop sound. Colin is trying to decide what to do with the cam footage. He’s kicking around a few ideas for extending the car-as-political-conversation-starter concept, including—and he admits this needs some work—another banner reading “A Vehicle for Social Change.”
I don’t know how to feel about all of this. On one hand, I can appreciate Colin stepping out of his socially-awkward-white-guy comfort zone to publicly support a crucially important movement. But the very fact that he is able to do this so boldly and ostentatiously, using his suburbanesque Volvo for Christ’s sake, is an effect of his tremendous privilege. I think he knows it and feels he’s pushing boundaries.
I feel uncomfortable just backing this car out of the driveway to park it on the street, and not just because it smells like old burritos and Play-Doh; being inside this moving statement makes a person extremely visible, as if you are representing the movement itself; let me tell you, neither I nor Colin have any business doing that. I’m just not sure that black people, the people in full charge of the movement, really want to see the galvanizing civil rights statement of this decade writ large on some white guy’s car. Does it help anything at all, in even the most miniscule way? Or is he co-opting Black Lives Matter for the hell of it, experimenting with something that doesn’t belong to him?
Colin lives with a fair amount of luxury—enough that he can do pretty much whatever he wants, whenever he wants. He doesn’t need to police his expression, because in our society he is unlikely to be victimized or incriminated for any of what he says. His ongoing comfort is not at issue. But he does try, and he does care. He could sit back, deflect pangs of anger and helplessness, and “avoid politics” like the many similarly privileged people who wait quietly for our societal unrest to blow over. It’s necessary to accept that hate and conflict are, in a sense, America’s default condition. Colin’s method of publicly confronting that may need serious refinement, but at least he’s out there.