Sticky Fingers

Someone made a passing comment on Twitter about roommates and porn and it reminded me of an old story. So this is just an anecdote, nothing particularly profound.

When I was an undergrad because in the late 1980s, I was good friends with a whole group of people who lived together in a house. There were 7 of them, and the only reason I wasn’t living with them is that I had been out of the country when they decided to move in together. It was a mixed group of people, and the star of this particular story is a woman I’ll just call V. V was a pretty fun person in most ways, but she was fairly poor, and perhaps to compensate for this, she had gotten into the habit of ‘borrowing’ her roommates’ stuff without permission. She was loud and audacious and quarreled with people as a defensive mechanism. The best defense is a good offense, after all. And if she was accused to taking something, she’d gaslight the person; “you gave that to me, don’t you remember?”

One of the other roommates was T., my best friend at the time and still to this day. I was one of the first people he ever came out to, and he was my first. He liked V–dated her briefly when he was in the closet–but T has always been one to puncture people’s balloons. He’s a Smart Alec and at the time couldn’t resist poking people he thought were full of shit. T and I used to joke about V as ‘The Amazing Ballsy Lass! What new outrageous thing is she going to do on this week’s episode?’

One day, T realizes that his favorite pillow has gone missing. “I’ll bet V has it,” he thinks to himself. He waits until V has gone to work and then he goes into her room. Sure enough, his pillow is lying there on her bed. So he takes it back. A few minutes later, he runs into R., another of the roommates, and tells R about the pillow.

R says, “I wonder if she’s got anything of mine?” So he goes into V’s room too. He spots something that belongs to his girlfriend–a piece of cheap jewelry, if memory serves me–and that pisses him off. So he decides to search a bit more aggressively. He reaches under her mattress and he finds a bunch of his porn magazines, which he promptly repatriates back to his bedroom.

For years, T and I would laugh about the idea of V coming home, feeling in a randy mood and reaching for those skin magazines, only to discover that they’re gone. This must have absolutely infuriated her because she hated people going into her room, but she couldn’t say anything about it because in order to accuse someone of going into her room, she would have had to admit that she had stolen R’s porn.

The moral of this story is buy you own porn.