Meet Lance

It’s been more than a month since I pleaded with the Improper–reading public to come live with me, and you may be wondering how that all turned out.

My column generated a bunch of responses, and I think that I would’ve been happy to live with any of the ladies who came to look at the place. However, I was on the hook for December’s rent, so I was more interested in finding the $670 Woman than in finding Ms. January. Hence I sucked it up and registered with an online roommate-finding service, coughing up $60 to get in touch with people looking for rooms. I figured it would be a sound investment if I found someone to pay for December.

It is a testament to the quality of this publication’s readers that I was not actually scared by anyone who responded to my column. But I was immediately a bit skeptical of the convicted-ax-murderer factor of the online service. The first guy who e-mailed directed me to his user profile, which included his picture, sans shirt. Who puts a shirtless picture of himself on a roommate-matching site? Maybe that was my fault. Maybe I spaced out and wrote “must include shirtless picture of self” in my listing. But that eliminated him right away. His pecs were clearly too small.

However, I was soon e-mailed by a guy named Lance who sounded interested. With apologies to all the Lances out there, I had the irrational idea that I wouldn’t like him because I knew a kid named Lance in preschool who always had a runny nose. I immediately conjured up an image of a guy with a constant runny nose, sitting on our couch, sniffling. A sniffly Lance—that would be the worst. Of course, just because someone has an unusual name is no reason to draw conclusions about him based on associations you have with someone else of that name. If you meet a guy named Ezra, you shouldn’t automatically assume that he’s chiseled and nice-smelling and humble, although that will likely be the case.

To get to the point, Lance came, he saw, he moved in Dec. 15. He called back with a yea the morning after he looked at the apartment, narrowly beating out Sara, who had also looked at the apartment and e-mailed later in the afternoon. The fact that two people expressed a desire to live with me on the same day is a sad commentary on the housing situation in this city.

So I didn’t find a scantily clad female buffalo wing chef, but Lance is a solid prospect who brings a lot to the table (such as, I think, a table). He just moved here from Baltimore for a financial job, he’s 23 and he likes to watch football. In fact, he was on his way down the stairs after looking at our place when he returned, knocked on the door, and said, “I forgot to ask...Do you guys like to watch football?” Does a bear wear a hat? I crossed my fingers that Lance’s job didn’t pay very much and he would want to live with us instead of at the much nicer place he’d just looked at around the corner.

Besides a shared interest in football, this is what I know of Lance thus far: He’s pretty tall and thus angles the showerhead almost straight out, as tall people are wont to do. If Scott got in the shower after Lance and didn’t adjust the showerhead, he’d never get wet. And Lance doesn’t switch the valve back to the tub setting when he’s done, which means that the next user gets his arm sprayed by cold water from the shower when he turns it on. I’m hopeful that Lance can be retrained on this issue.

More important, though, Lance has excellent remote control skills, and that’s the sort of thing that just can’t be taught. The big test came during Monday Night Football, when Lance found himself with the remote during most of the approximately 597 commercial breaks. As he flipped from the game to the Ginger Lynn E! True Hollywood Story and back to the game just as the commercials would end, I found myself thinking, “That’s just when I would have changed the channel if I had the remote right now.” This kid has instincts.

And if it’s any consolation to Sara, the day after Lance moved in, the bolts holding the toilet tank to the bowl disintegrated into rust, and the water drained all over the floor. To Lance’s credit, he didn’t so much as sniffle about it. ∂