Sam’s roommates were a pair of trust fund sisters from Evanston—two wisp-thin girls named Darla and Shannon who seemed to exist exclusively on a diet of Dentyne chewing gum and hot tea. For four years they had terrorized our college campus with their pointy, elfin noses and eccentric ways. Darla and Shannon had always looked upon me, on the rare occasions when they looked upon me at all, with vague disdain. They acted as if I’d wandered onto campus straight from the set of the TV show Hee Haw, which featured overalls-wearing hillbillies singing in cornfields and blowing into empty moonshine jugs.

The apartment was a sprawling three bedroom-three bathroom unit located on a tree-lined street in what Sam said was the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. Darla and Shannon gave me weak welcome-to-Chicago hugs with their thin arms. “Javier is staying over tonight, F.Y.I.,” Darla announced. Then the girls retreated into one of the apartment’s bedrooms where they proceeded to whisper. These were two things which Darla and Shannon would never really stop doing for the duration of my unexpectedly brief time living there—retreating and whispering.

“Javier is Darla’s boyfriend,” Sam explained. “He’s a soccer player from South America. You’ll meet him later. Come on, let’s go get your things out of the car.”

The streets of Lakeview had a sooty, sweet smell to them, as if a sugar factory was on fire somewhere. “That’s burned coffee,” Sam said. “It always smells like burned coffee here, because of all the 24-hour diners on Broadway.” The two of us carried the faux steamer trunk along the street together, Sam on one end, me on the other. Up ahead, two men wearing Tina Turner wigs and carrying purses were coming towards us. They both sported impressive mustaches.

One of the men looked us over. “Damn, will you look at that big white boy right there? He new.” The other man, heeding the first man’s advice, stopped. The two of them watched me and Sam struggle along the sidewalk with the trunk. They continued to shout comments at us.

“Hey, white boy! Anytime you like, Mirage and I will take you straight to heaven.”

We kept moving.

“White boy, so you know, you’re leaving two big, black broken hearts back here.”

“Aw, white boy, we’re so sad that you’re walking away from us like this. Hey! You big lily-white mother-fucker!” Then the two men cackled and stalked off on their high heels.

“That will probably happen a lot,” Sam said. “The gays around here get aggressive sometimes. When my brother visited last month, he was hassled constantly. He’s tall like you. On the bright side, Lakeview is very safe.”

From the beginning Sam had maintained that I was welcome to sleep on their living room couch for an indefinite length of time. But within my first few hours of being there, it was obvious that I wasn’t going to be welcome for very long. The primary issue was that Darla and Shannon thoroughly despised me. The secondary issue was that while the apartment was indeed outfitted with three bathrooms, each girl had her own individual private bathroom located inside her respective room. In order to get to any of the bathrooms I had to pass through one of the girls’ rooms to do so.

Sam was obviously OK with me using her bathroom. But she was the one who had to work the earliest in the morning, so she was always the one who went to bed first. To make matters worse, the rusted hinges of her bedroom door squealed like a flock of bats flying out of hell if I so much as even touched her door. Once her bedroom door was closed for the night, I was left with having to choose between Darla and Shannon’s bathrooms, neither of which was really a viable option. During college, Darla and Shannon’s legendary faces had launched thousands of hushed, late-night dorm-room conversations among groups of painfully lonely male students all over campus. The conversations were always filled with the worst kind of gossip and speculation. I heard that Shannon got a love letter from a famous movie actor. I heard that Darla let a guy from Alpha Delta fingerbang her in his Saab. I heard that both Darla and Shannon had a threesome with the quarterback from the Buffalo Bills. Despite the fact that none of these things were likely true, everyone would groan in agony at the mere mention of these ribald tales, then roll over and attempt to go to sleep with their erections.

There were stretches of time at school—weeks, sometimes months—when I’d forget all about Darla and Shannon. My life was simply easier in college without those two girls in it. Then one day I’d be walking through the dining hall, and boom, there they were, sitting together at one of the tables, chewing Dentyne and drinking tea. I’d find myself staggered by the smallest things, like the way a rolled up sleeve would reveal Darla’s pale forearm, or the way a necklace disappeared down the front of Shannon’s shirt. In these moments, everything around the girls—the lunch ladies, the tables and the chairs, the Renaissance paintings that hung on the dining hall’s walls—seemed smaller and dingier.

Once Sam had gone to bed, I watched TV with Darla and Shannon in a semi-paralyzed state, not really believing that I was doing something as prosaic as watching TV with the borderline-mythical Darla and Shannon. It was like watching TV with a pair of unicorns. My roommates from my dorm-room days, including Phillip, would never have believed this. Some nights Darla’s Argentinian soccer player boyfriend, Javier, would join us, sulking on the end of the couch underneath a mop of curly hair. We always watched the girls’ favorite TV show, Northern Exposure, which was about a big-time New York doctor who opened a medical practice in a small town in Alaska. I was always trying to get a read on the two inscrutable girls, always attempting to gauge which of the two of them hated me the least. I’d make my bathroom choice based on this dubious bit of information. For example, if Shannon asked me if I’d like something to drink, what she was really saying to me was, “Of coure it’s OK for you to use my bathroom.” Or, if Darla asked what I wanted to watch on TV—it didn’t matter what answer I gave her; we’d wind up watching Northern Exposure anyway—I figured that she was giving me the green-light to use her bathroom.

No matter which bathroom I chose, it was always without fail the wrong bathroom. I’d finish up in there, flush, and open the door to find Darla—or Shannon—standing outside the door, arms folded and sighing, waiting to begin a detailed inspection of the bathroom once I’d vacated it.

One night after everyone had gone to bed I got the Super Nintendo out of the steamer trunk. I connected it to the living room television and played Super Castlevania IV, a game starring a fearless hero named Simon Belmont who was on a quest to kill Dracula. Was there anything in the world more noble than killing Dracula? If there was, I couldn’t think of what it might be. Super Castlevania IV, as far as I was concerned, was among the greatest video-games ever made. As I played the game, I suddenly had the eerily familiar feeling that my father was once again standing behind me. I turned my head, simply to confirm the fact that nothing was there—my father was more than a thousand miles away sleeping in his bed next to my mother—and was startled to see a figure lurking in the shadows.

It was Javier, the Argentinian soccer player. He was unfortunately dressed only in a pair of miniature black underwear. For the life of me I’ve never understood men who insist on wearing colored underwear. “My apologies if I scared you, amigo,” he said, scratching his pronounced abs. “I only came out to make sure that the front door is locked.” He jiggled the handle on the apartment’s front door a few times until he seemed satisfied. “You see, I have to protect my girls.”

Blood rushed to my ears. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I can protect them.” I realized as I said these words how utterly silly I must have appeared to Javier, sitting there with a video-game controller in my hands in the middle of the night. On the TV screen behind me was the paused 16-bit image of a man engaged in a life-or-death battle with a gigantic horse skeleton. Javier shook his head at me, then disappeared again into the back bedrooms, where he and his miniature black underwear would climb back into bed next to the sleeping Darla.

A few weeks later, once I’d moved into my own place, I would read in the paper that Javier had injured his knee in a match against Chile. It sounded like it was a pretty serious injury, too. I also heard that Darla had broken up with him. I was not unhappy to receive any of this news.

In the name of keeping my bladder and kidneys in check at night, I stopped consuming all liquids after 8 p.m. Once all three girls had gone to bed, and all three bedroom doors at the end of the hall were shut, on the rare occasion when nature decided to call I got in the habit of putting on my shoes and coat and going down to the street to use the toilet at the 24-hour Melrose Diner which was a half-block away.

On what would turn out to be one of my final nights in the apartment, I woke up at 4 a.m. with the overwhelming urge to pee. It seemed too late, too dark, and too cold out to go to the Melrose. I tried to go back to sleep, telling myself that I could wait for dawn, could make it until 7 a.m. when Sam would depart for work, and I could use her bathroom as much as I liked. A few minutes later, I knew that I’d never make it to dawn.

I very briefly considered peeing into the drain in the kitchen sink before realizing that this was not a viable option. I hadn’t come all the way to Chicago to become the kind of person who was OK with peeing into sink drains. So, I got dressed, located my eyeglasses, and walked to the diner in the pre-dawn darkness.

In the distance, with its abundance of red and blue neon, the Melrose appeared like an oasis. Inside, the diner was warm and vaguely claustrophobic, like the inside of a well-lighted mitten. The place was busier than I expected it to be at that hour. A row of delivery truck drivers sat hunched over coffee cups at the counter.

I used the bathroom, and as I made my way towards the exit, the manager, a bald man wearing a bow-tie, stopped me and said, “You there. You can’t just use our bathroom every night and leave. We’re running a business. You have to buy something if you want to come in here.”

I reluctantly ordered a to-go cup of coffee which I would simply empty out in the street when I left. While waiting for the manager to prepare the coffee, I spotted the two men in Tina Turner wigs sitting at a nearby booth. And they, unfortunately, spotted me as well. “Mirage, look who it is,” one of them said.

“Is that the white boy who broke our hearts?” the other one said.

“I believe it is.”

It was late and I was feeling punchy, so I gave it right back to them. “Don’t you two have jobs?” I asked.

They laughed. “Giving you hell is our job,” one of them said. “And we good at it. Hell, we damn good at everything. Including blowjobs. Which we will give you, if you like.”

I thanked them for their kind offer, and then made it painfully clear that I was declining it. “So there’s no misunderstanding whatsoever, I am not interested,” I said.

“Alright, we get it—you don’t have to go on forever explaining it,” one of them said. They both acted hurt in a theatrical way. “Mirage and I can take a hint.”

The manager returned with the coffee. “I’ve already asked you two once tonight not to bother the customers,” the manager said to the Tina Turners. He looked at me. “Are these two giving you a hard time?”

I assured him that everything was fine. Then I reached into my back pocket for my wallet, realizing right away that I didn’t have it with me. I kept checking my pockets again and again, even though I knew full well that my wallet was back at the apartment, sitting on the coffee table. I never brought my wallet with me when I made my middle-of-the-night pee runs. The manager glowered at me over the top of the cash register. I panicked, realizing that I was a thousand miles away from home, standing in a strange diner with no money in my pocket, as vulnerable as I’d ever been in my life. I launched into a convoluted explanation as to why I didn’t have money with me. “I’ve only been here for a couple of days, I’m new, and I’m staying with these three girls, and it’s terrible there, and they live right up the block, and sometimes I have to come down here at night to use your bathroom…”

One of the Tina Turners spoke up. “Put that white boy’s drink on our bill,” he said.

The manager wrote something down on a notepad. I picked up the coffee, feeling grateful that these two strange creatures had come to my rescue in my moment of need. I thanked them. “Mirage and I are always happy to help,” one of them said.  “We were new here once, too.”

“Welcome to Chicago,” the other added. “You seem like a nice kid. I think you’re going to be alright here.” They both raised their coffee cups in my direction.

Back on the street, the sun was starting to rise over Lake Michigan, injecting the sky with a dull, gray light. Instead of dumping out the coffee, I decided to drink it. I drank it too fast, as if I couldn’t get it down my throat quickly enough. It was bitter, and so hot that it burned the back of my throat. I didn’t care. I kept drinking it. As I walked along the streets, the wind swirled around me, hissing through the tree branches overhead. I kept hearing the words “You’re going to be alright here” in my head.

And I was going to be alright. At least, I was fairly certain that I was going to be alright here.

The next step for me was finding my own place to live.