August 14, 2008 / Brooklyn news / The Search

Keith Richards — my mentor

By Mike McLaughlin

The Brooklyn Paper

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My girlfriend just dumped me and I lost my apartment in one fell swoop last week — and one question keeps running through my weary mind: What would Keith Richards do?

He might alter his diet from uppers to downers or compose some trashy guitar riff, but that’s not me. Still, the infamous Rolling Stoner — who, like the band’s name suggests, never seems to gather any moss, despite the mold — is my perfect role model right now.

It’s not the sex, drugs and rock and roll I admire: it’s the freedom. I’m no Keith Richards (I’m barely even Mike McLaughlin!), but Richards’s reckless abandon, the way he rattles the cage of conformity, the way he bays at the moon of mediocrity, the way he spits in the face of, well, pretty much everyone — that’s the path for me.

That’s right, folks, this lanky, underpaid nerd is on the loose!

(Readers, eligible women and potential roommates should be reminded, however, that unlike Richards, I’ll always remain lucid and mild-mannered, even during this rebel phase.)

The first order of business is finding a new apartment.

There are a lot of housing options, but a man of my means must find like-minded and -moneyed roommates or eke it out in a remote studio where the sun doesn’t shine, literally.

The first listing I checked out — a small room in a newly renovated three-bedroom place on Third Avenue (billed as “Park Slope,” by the way) — dampened any optimism I had about finding a quick cure for my housing blues.

My spirits sank as soon as I found the building, almost directly beneath the elevated F train near Ninth Street. And building was rundown even for Third Avenue, and that’s saying something.

But things started to look up once the tenants buzzed me inside. The apartment itself was clean and bright, and not any smaller than I expected.

Unfortunately, noise from the overhead F line penetrated the available bedroom to drown out conversation. I’m not saying I’d wake up in the middle of the night in sheer terror thinking an oncoming train would run me down, but this place is definitely on the wrong side of the tracks! It made Woody Allen’s childhood home in “Annie Hall” look peaceful.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the two current tenants weren’t so much showing the apartment as they were staging a cattle call to find their next roomie. Instead of hyping themselves as my future pals, they sat me down on the couch and peppered me with checklist questions (“Do you smoke?” “Where do you work?” etc).

That’s fair enough, but I was there for barely four minutes, before the next apartment hunter showed up and I was shooed out the front door like a Midwestern talent show contest winner trying for a role on Broadway. Are nice apartments so rare that I don’t even get a real audition?

Perhaps they are. The last time I went through a housing search, I wasn’t subjected to this trial by Craigslist — a cross between a blind date and a job interview, minus the prospect of a kiss goodnight or a hefty payday.

In this particular case, those two gentlemen who invited me may have turned out to be perfect housemates.

But like all those potential mates out there, I’ll never get a chance to find out.

So I asked myself again, WWKD? Nonchalantly shrug and move on.

And so I did.

©2008 Community Newspaper Group