For my sophomore year, I wanted to avoid the depressing experience I’d had the year before in the dorms, so I found some off-campus housing. I was going to live by myself, which I figured was for the best, since I had to get my grades up if I didn’t want to lose the scholarship I didn't deserve to have and get kicked out of the honors program I didn’t deserve to be in. When I returned to school, I found that my new building had been destroyed. I tried to find the landlord to complain and demand he come up with some alternative accommodations, but as it happened, he was dead. Apparently, a couple of criminals on the run had broken into the place over the summer to try to lay low, and they had found my would-be landlord fixing the place up. They shot him full of holes, which alerted the neighbors who called the police who engaged in an epic standoff with the outlaws. Although it wasn’t really that epic; each side just took a few potshots every couple of hours, just shooting out windows and windshields, more to annoy the other side than anything. Finally, after five days, the National Guard was called in, and they phoned their buddies at the Air Force who dropped a few cannonballs on the place from planes. The house was destroyed with the bandits inside and they were killed without any civilian casualties outside of the landlord, who was long dead and whose corpse had been dumped onto the front lawn days earlier.
The two most tangible results of this episode were 1) a study was commissioned to examine the role of cannonballs in hostage crises, the results of which led the BPD to make them a major part of their arsenal, and 2) I had no place to live. My parents had just dropped off my bags and left, so I was left to wander the streets of Boston for hours that first night, looking for a suitable place to sleep. The only things separating me from vagrancy were my suitcase, my duffel bag and my backpack, all of which were stuffed to capacity. Lugging them around everywhere was really taking its toll. I wished I had a shopping cart.
I ended up around Faneuil Hall somehow, even though it was miles from campus. I wandered around like a tourist, taking in the scenery. Most of the shops were closed, but I saw a Brookstone at the other end of the plaza with its lights on, so I made my way over there, dragging everything behind me. I looked in the window and saw a kid, about my age with big teeth and longish blond hair parted down the center, who seemed to be closing up.
I tapped on the window. He looked puzzled when he saw me, but he waved me to the door and unlocked it. “We’re closed,” he said, but I shook my head and told him I needed a place to sleep. He thought about it, but only for a second, and he opened the door and let me in.
“I definitely shouldn’t be doing this,” he said, but he waved his arm like to let me know that the store was mine. I was lucky it was a Brookstone I found, rather than a souvenir stand or a book store or something. There were a couple massage chairs and a small bed that was there to display a foam mattress that was supposed to conform to the shape of your body. Plus, if I got bored and couldn’t fall asleep, there were all kinds of toys and gadgets to play with. It was better than a hotel room.
The kid told me that I had to be out of there by 7 AM, before his boss showed up, because he could get fired for letting a stranger (or anyone, for that matter) sleep in the store. I said no problem and assured him that I would be out of there before 6, so he nodded, but you could tell he was nervous. He went to the alarm clock table and set about six of them for 6 AM, so there would be no way I could oversleep. I thanked him sincerely and promised that I wouldn’t get him in trouble, so he nodded again without saying anything and left. I could tell he regretted letting me in, but I was in now, and he couldn’t summon the cruelty to kick me out.
I turned on a white noise generator and plunked down in one of those full-body massage recliners and set it on full blast and fell asleep almost instantly. Well I don’t know if it was the soothing white noise or the motors of the massage chair whirring in my ear or just the fact that I had never been that comfortable in my entire life, but the next thing I knew, an angry man and the kid from last night, looking horrified, were standing over me. I looked at one of the six alarm clocks, all of which were blaring. Most read 8:27; one read 8:26. I had the strangest feeling that I was in a lot of trouble.
The kid ran over and shut off all the alarms, so everything was silent for a second. Then he ran back, next to the boss, and stared at me, like he was pleading with me to say the right thing, whatever that was. I wished I knew.
“Who are you?” the boss asked.
“He let me in,” I said, pointing to the nice kid, who certainly didn’t deserve that and who had suddenly become quite pale. I hadn’t meant to sell the kid down the river. I was still pretty groggy and didn’t know exactly what was going on. I really screwed that one up.
“Get out,” the boss said, looking at me. I sheepishly gathered my belongings and slowly made my way out the door.
I lingered outside the store for a few seconds, but then I figured there was nothing else to do but to make my way back to the train station. A few steps away from the market, I heard someone running after me and all of a sudden I felt a shove and I stumbled to the ground. It was the Brookstone kid. “You got me fired, you asshole,” he yelled. He tried to kick me, but I moved and jumped to my feet.
We both adopted fighting poses and stared each other down.
“You’re an idiot!” he said, his face all scrunched up.
“You are! You are!” I screamed back at him. I guess this pushed him over the edge, because he took a swing at my face. I sidestepped, but he clipped my left shoulder. This pissed me off a lot, so I popped him right in the chin. He dropped like a bag of dirt, and I gave him a couple of extra kicks while he was on the ground for good measure. He looked like he might have been unconscious, but I heard him moaning, so I knew he could feel it. I decided to steal his wallet, so I found it in his back pocket, spit on him and started walking towards the train station.
It wasn’t until I was headed outbound back to campus that I looked inside the wallet. He only had $24 in there. I noticed he had a student ID from BU, and his name, to the left of what was unmistakably his picture, caught my eye. It was Christopher Sartinsky.
At first I was paranoid, and I quickly scanned the train to see if someone was following me—the police or a camera crew or something. It must be a prank, I thought. Maybe my whole life had been a prank, like “The Truman Show,” and this was the big reveal. But I didn’t see anyone suspicious or anyone looking at me, and as I started to really think about what this meant, it all started to make sense. That would explain the scholarship and the honors program despite my mediocre grades, the piles of letters and the inbox full of emails that seemed to be intended for someone else, that would explain the housing mix-up, and the mix-up with the therapist, that would explain almost everything. And then, I thought, I might be able to use this to my advantage.
I got off the train at BU and found my way to the Office of Residence Life. The woman at the front desk asked me what I wanted.
“There’s been a problem with my housing assignment,” I said. “I went to the room I thought I had, but there was already someone living there, so I think I made a mistake and I need a key to my real room.”
“OK, what’s your name?” I gave her my name. “May I see your student ID?”
This presented a problem, and I had to make a decision. If I gave her the other Sartinsky’s ID, then she would probably see that the Chris in the ID and I were different people. If I gave her my ID, the picture would match (more or less—my hair was shorter now), but the ID number might tell her that I wasn’t signed up for student housing. It was a lose-lose proposition, no matter which ID I gave her, so I gave her both.
Working with the two of them, she determined that I was living in a single room in a Brownstone at 152 Bay State Road. “Oh,” I said. “I thought it was 153 Bay State!” I slapped my head, incredulous as to how I could have made such a foolish mistake.
“It’s OK,” the woman at the front desk laughed. She gave me the key to my new room on Bay State Road and wished me a nice day. Great lady, her name was Cindy, I think.
My place on Bay State Road wasn’t huge, but it was pretty beautiful. It was one of the nicer brownstones on campus, having undergone major renovations a couple of years earlier. The room was narrow, but long, and on the third floor, so I had a nice view of a big leafy oak tree with a bird’s nest right outside my window. I felt at home.
Just as I was finished getting settled, there was a knock at my door. It was a girl—and a cute one, with big eyes and dark brown hair, in a moppish cut just short of boyish, as was the style of the time. She looked a little disappointed to see me.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought Chris was living here again.”
“Oh, well, I am Chris.”
“I see. Chris Sartinsky, I meant, he’s a friend of mine.” Short pause before "friend," it was pretty obvious what that meant.
“Well my name is Chris Sartinsky,” I said. I showed her my driver’s license for proof. “You must have gotten mixed up, with two consecutive Chris Sartinskys living in the same room, and all.”
“That’s funny,” she said, not even close to laughing. “It’s just that—we knew each other last year, and he told me he was coming back to this room.” She actually sounded quite upset. She clearly had a little thing for this Chris Sartinsky whose ass I had just kicked and whose room I had just stolen.
“Has it ever occurred to you that he was a liar?” I said, with an evil little emphasis on “liar.” She sagged a little bit where she was standing, like she had been deflated. She hated me at that moment.
“Well, anyway, it’s nice to meet you,” she said. She started walking away, but I wrapped my arm around her hip.
“Two Chrises are better than one, am I right?” I said, whatever that meant. Regardless, I pulled her in, right up against me, and I kissed her, hard, right on the lips. There was nothing in it but force. I was just trying to make a point, and apparently point taken, because we started kissing for real shortly after that.
She left after a couple minutes, looking flushed and confused, but definitely smiling, almost in spite of herself. I smiled back and waved as I shut the door after her. I was feeling pretty good about things at this point.
Just then I heard someone shouting “HEY” outside my window. I opened it and stuck my head outside (there was no screen) and saw the other Chris Sartinsky standing on the sidewalk looking up. I gave him the finger, just for the hell of it.
“GIVE ME MY IDENTITY BACK,” he shouted.
“No.” And I picked up a rock that I had in my room and threw it at him. He didn’t see it coming until it was too late and it hit him right in the teeth, chipping his left incisor. He yelled no real words for a bit and sulked off.
I had won.
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