There is, in fact, a follow-up to
the Guy In The Basement story.And that is – that two towns, three jobs, and six years later – a new co-worker came up to me and told me he had been one of the Guys In the Basement.
Really.
I don’t know if that sounds amazing to you, but it was amazing to me.
I didn’t actually remember him, at first. But I should have, because he was the only one of the Guys In The Basement that I actually met. In fact, he fed me spaghetti dinner one time.
Maybe I should back up a bit.
As I mentioned in a post before, I used to live in a house with three other professional women. It was sort of ironic, in a way, that we all rented a house together, because we were two doctors and two lawyers. Don’t get me wrong – it was great to live with those women, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I just remember thinking how odd it was that this was the best we could do. However, to be fair, the doctors were residents – they make barely enough to squeak by – and the other lawyer and myself were both in the throes of finding those “other” things you can supposedly do with a law degree. And in my situation, suffering from a classic case of “women don’t think they’re worth enough and so under-bargain for their salaries.” A symptom I eventually, thank God, got over. (So, really, it mostly is just sad –and completely my own fault - that the most that *I* could afford at the time was a little room. But, clearly, I’ve digressed.)
So anyway, we lived in this big house, which we liked a lot, and which was near a great park. And it had this little apartment in the basement, the stairwell of which was accessed from the backyard.
And, always, there seemed to be a revolving door of slouchy, late teen-ish, dour guys living there, who would each come and go through the alley, head down, shuffling off towards the bus stop. Just saying that makes me wonder what the story was on all those guys. But, nevertheless, we just tended to call each one the same thing: The Guy In The Basement.
One day, the Guy changed. He came and went via the front of the house; he had thick, luxurious blond hair pulled back in a pony tail (not the dark, close cut of the young guys), and big aviator glasses; but mostly, he walked upright, with purpose in his stride. He was not a dour little teen-angst guy. He was a Grownup.
Which, actually, bummed me out more than the other guys. I wasn’t that psyched to be able to afford only a small room in a large house (actually, I *was* psyched to be able to afford it), but I was damn glad I wasn’t renting that dark, dank-smelling, tiny-windows-at-the-ceiling, kind of a basement apartment.
So I kind of didn’t have much to do with the Guy In The Basement, as was my usual stance.
And then one evening, I came home from work and was knocking about in the kitchen, starving per usual, and some wonderful smell wafted up from below.
As opposed to the other Guys, the Grown-up was actually cooking.
I don’t know how – I have absolutely no recollection of this whatsoever – but for the first time ever I made my way through the little back hall that connected our kitchen to his stairway, called down, and started a conversation.
And mentioned how darn good that dinner smelled.
And before I knew it, the two of us were sitting on the front porch – the front porch, mind you, not anywhere in the backyard-domain of the previous Guys – eating a couple plates of pretty delicious pasta and homemade sauce, on a perfectly pleasant spring evening.
And I had a little chat with the Man From The Basement.
Turns out he was, indeed, a grownup. He was a little bit older than we were. He had a real job – a computer programmer. And he was about to buy a house, so for a few months, he was living in our little basement pad to save some money before the closing.
Phew. I felt a lot better for him after that. I was feeling really sorry for a grownup with such purposeful stride living in that dank little place.
He was a nice guy, and we had a nice dinner.
I’d like to say we got to be pals and hung out some more, or that I even managed to reciprocate some evening, but we didn’t and I didn’t.
The summer rolled on, and a few months later we noticed he was gone. Only to be replaced, again, with the usual type of Guy In The Basement.
And eventually I moved on, too – to an incredibly sunny, cheery, whole apartment (not a room!) in a great 1920s complex complete with park – I still love that place – and then on to my own place in another town.
And I changed jobs a couple times, moved up the ladder – learned to negotiate better, thank goodness – and hadn’t given much thought to life in the house in a long time.
When I started my new job – by now I was a manager in software development product management – I was one of only a very few women at the company. And there were something like eighty programmers – we were at the height of spending our VC money to build a very cool product.
And even though I was put upstairs, with the other “suits”, (although I worked closely with the programmers), and a whole opposite-side of the building away from the programmers, I noticed this odd phenomenon. That the first few days I was there, there was a constant parade of programmers walking by our area.
What’s up with that? I finally asked my fellow product manager. And he just kind of raised an eyebrow at me. Oh! I thought. Duh! Eighty programmers, seventy-five of them male; whole company, ten women….new blood! I get it.
Most of them didn’t actually speak to me. And, after about a week or so, the drive-bys stopped – which made sense, because there was no earthly reason, like a purposeful path through the building, for them to be wandering by our area from theirs.
About a week later, another one of them stopped by, but as opposed to the rest, he actually came up to my desk and said hi. And I said, hi!
And he said: Did you used to live in Denver?
And I said: Yeah, I did.
In Wash Park?
Yeah.
On Clarkson?
….Yeah….
At 9xx?
….Um, who are you again?....
And he started chuckling, nicely, and he said: I know you. I’m Bob. I’m the guy in the basement. I fed you spaghetti one time.
And so he had. And that evening began to come back to me. He still had the same long, thick hair pulled back in a ponytail, the same aviator-style glasses, the same grown-up sense about him. And here in this software milieu I really saw him in his element.
And, over time, Bob and I did get to be good friends, and he is a great guy. And I got to know his girlfriend-fiance-wife, who is also great. And heard all about the beautiful, light-filled house they were building – themselves – on some land they bought in the mountains.
And even though now it’s another two cities, a marriage and a couple kids (for me) away from that time, I still think that the fact my old work-friend Bob used to be one of the Guys In the Basement is a pretty cool story.
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