What to Expect When You’re Couch-Surfing

by Briana Ritz

Disclaimer: I recently spent 15 nights couch-surfing 10 different apartments as I waited for an August 15th lease to begin. I am not homeless and my problems are unabashedly #firstworld.

You will have one night that’s just plain sucky. You surf your friend’s tiny UES living room, where you’re offered a couch shaped like a C. You sleep in what looks from above like a half-assed fetal position. Most nights you give up on sleeping in a C and just lay stupidly on the floor, your thighs sweat-sticking to the hardwood. The window stays open all night because there is no air conditioning.

Accordingly, mosquitos will fly in and suck your blood. You wake at 4 a.m. and almost ask your friend to take you to the ER — you are itchy way down in your bones, in a way that makes you want to peel off your skin and sand down your bones into pulp. The open window lets in the sound of Madison Avenue, full blast: rumbling garbage trucks, backfiring engines that sound like gunshots, ambulances, fights — the loudest you’ve ever heard Manhattan at night. You learn how to work earplugs even though they’re kind of creepy, inflating in your ear.

Of course, to balance the cosmos, you’ll have one night that’s awesome. You house-sit for someone who lends you full reign of his swanky apartment. You sleep sprawled out like an asterisk on a queen-sized bed and pretend the paper lamp in the corner is yours and that the floor-to-ceiling window view is, like, NBD. There is central air and you order pizza delivery from one of the best pizzerias in Williamsburg. You watch Fame and SLC Punk on Netflix and sleep soundly between high thread count sheets.

You will have one night that’s supremely weird. This happens when you’ve been couchsurfing for a week or more, when the truth that you’re homeless has sunk into your skin like lead paint. You house-sit a studio apartment in Bushwick, having never in your entire adult life spent a night in an apartment by yourself (anxiety issues, beb). To curb the rising panic attack, you take a Klonopin and smoke a few bowls, even though you rarely smoke. The only comforting, non-threatening thing on TV is a Disney Channel Original Movie about twins. You watch it, gape-mouthed, and then decide to record a version of yourself singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” in the style of Tori Amos. You spend three full hours singing the same line over and over again, trying to make it sound just right. You laugh a lot. If your couchsurfing experience was a movie, this scene would be included in the montage. The next morning you feel sheepish but also like you’ve accomplished something really great.

You will get really fucking tired of Dunkin Donuts/Baskin Robbins combinations. When you have a home and a job in New York City, you learn that there will always be one DDBR near where you are going. But when you’re at a different place every night, you see at least one new DDBR every day and you start to get annoyed by the curvy pink’n’orange font. You get used to breakfasts that are simultaneously filling and unsatisfying: egg/cheese croissants, strawberry frosted doughnuts, iced coffee that tastes like ice cream.

You will develop Something Wrong with your knee. You don’t know exactly what it is because you can’t afford to see a doctor right now, but you can feel something in your cartilage/meniscus/patella/ACL that is just not right. It hurts to walk on the left knee. This is because you’ve been carrying a 35-pound suitcase up and down probably at least 20 flights of stairs a day, what with all the subway-going and transfer-making and walkup-walking and etc. Every step you take is accompanied by what is probably an exaggerated wince, but you can’t be sure. No one offers to help you with your bags, and at first you feel indignant but then you realize you’ve never in your life offered to help a woman with a bag before.

You will get to know yourself in weird, deep ways. You learn that sometimes in life, like when a belligerent drunk friend kicks you out of his apartment at 3 a.m., 20 minutes from the nearest subway and you have no phone or map, you have no choice but to rely on yourself. You can burst into tears and scratch at your skin out of fear and desperation and fatigue, but no one will swoop down and save you. The man you might have been in love with, once, isn’t going to take the train at 3 a.m. to come to your rescue. Your parents are sound asleep several states away, your friends aren’t telepathic and are probably tired of being asked favors, and there is no god for you. All of this seems PRETTY DARN #BLEAK when it’s happening and even when you write about it in retrospect. And yet. When you move into your new apartment two weeks later, face full of stress pimples and stomach bloated from too many egg/cheese croissants, your clothes all crinkled and smelling like bad breath and Febreeze, your bank account sapped within a penny of its life, you find you’re a little bit better, somehow.

Briana Ritz is an alias used to protect the real Briana from her Google-searching, highly-religious extended family. She writes prose about the South, gay porn, love, fast food and fourth graders. You can contact her via: brianaritz [at] gmail.com, or read her fast food blog at Fast Foodies.