Day I Lost My Home

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By Max Guttman

This was to be the first semester of my graduate education in English. I had just completed 19 winter session credits across five universities in New York State. My friends were still students at Binghamton, but I would enter into a JD law school program elsewhere. Then, the day my friend, Sean, packed up his room and moved back home, I got the email from the graduate school – I was rejected from the Masters program. I still remember printing out my transcript in progress and reviewing it with Sean before he walked out the door to leave for New York City. I was in shock, tired, slightly manic, and very angry.

My apartment-mate had returned to our apartment with the common space in turmoil. I had moved my computer and entire workstation into the living room, where I had been completing my winter session, largely awake and glued to the chair for days on end. There, until the inhuman workload was completed, I was awake and typing for four weeks and nights, to do what SUNY had banned out of concern for students’ health. Most universities have a cap on winter credits and at Binghamton, the number was four. Needing to get into graduate school one semester early, I figured out I could do six courses online and then transfer the grades and credits in electronically via the SUNY system.

But my friend wanted no part of the dysfunction. Most days he spent in his room working. In the evenings he’d join me for television in the common room. As the semester progressed, I was spinning out. By the time I was arrested by the department for loitering, my apartment-mate and I were not communicating. I suspect my behavior was increasingly bizarre and strange; it must have been hard for him to speak with me productively like he had been accustomed to for the past four years.

Paranoid, angry and scared

I was called in for mandatory evaluation by the school. They wanted to determine if I was safe to continue as a student. By then, I was already so paranoid I was afraid of my apartment-mate too. While I passed the exam, my apartment-mate imparted his last words of wisdom on my situation. He spoke to my parents, who came up to support the evaluation process. His words landed on deaf ears. Whatever he told my parents I dismissed out of paranoia and out of anger that our relationship fell apart at the very moment I needed help.

At this time, my mental status was in free fall. I became so paranoid. One night, while I was on my computer, I thought I had discovered that my apartment-mate was on my account impersonating me to my friends. I was furious. I walked into the common room, picked up a chair, and threw it against his wall, yelling, “Coward!”

Given the situation in the apartment had decompensated so much, I went home to visit my parents one last time. This would be the last time I was in my family’s home until after my future discharge from the hospital. I remember being so manic that I took frequent showers and in the process of trying to self-soothe, I broke the hand bar in the shower, getting up. After I got out of the shower, my parents told me my apartment-mate had called them. He told them he was afraid of me. He felt I might poison him or just plainly hurt him in an uncontrolled rage. I was even more furious, and soon, very sad. I listened to music all night about abandonment and loss, and connection, playing Fleetwood Mac, “The Chain” ad infinitum.

Self-referential and manic

When I returned back to the apartment, I hid in my room. Now, seriously afraid of him, I began playing movie clips citing lines from the script I felt applied to the situation in the apartment. He didn’t hear it. Or maybe there was nothing cogent or lucid enough to hear, or that made sense, to someone who wasn’t self-referential and manic.

Either way, I began cleaning out my stuff and packing it in my car. I remember changing the garbage cans and forgetting I’d been peeing in them when I didn’t feel like walking to the bathroom. As I tried cleaning up, streaks of urine covered the floor. I remember looking at my wall of pictures and making the decision to leave them up. I was hurt. I’d get the pictures back later from a friend, who collected them after my departure. I went to bed one last time after packing and woke up to the song “Good Riddance” by Green Day, that my roommate selected for my departure, as I walked out the apartment never to return.