The Old Roommate from London Whom I Hadn’t Heard From in Five Years that I Had a Couple Drinks with Yesterday Afternoon
by Ian F. King
“Hi… Is this a friend of yours?” Back in early February, one of the good people behind the curtain at Slice forwarded me a short email with that note. The email read:
Hi there, I am a good friend of Ian King’s. Does anyone know his contact?
Sincerely,
Tamas
In April of 2004 I moved to London after I had graduated college, armed with a six-month work visa acquired through a collegiate work exchange program that no longer exists. After four days in a massive youth hostel near Regent’s Park, I finally found an ad for a room posted on the bulletin board at the work exchange program’s offices that fit the price range I was looking for, which was “lowest possible.”
Located in the Willesden Green/Dollis Hill area in Zone 3 northwest London, the Deacon Road house, as we called it, crammed seven paying residents into four bedrooms, and we usually had one or two couch surfers (there called “dossers”) on the dilapidated couches at any point in time. Most of the people there were from British Commonwealth nations; I was the token American, and Tamas was the lone continental European, from Budapest. He had come over right as Hungary had joined the EU, and was enrolled in a technical program at a university in the city.
Tamas actually had to go door to door down Deacon Road to introduce himself as a ‘Citizen of Europe’ that May, and over the course of the summer hundreds of thousands of other Eastern Europeans flooded into England in the wake of those EU gates opened up. Neither of us were home at the same time for most of the time we lived together, but I remember when he was home that he liked to go jogging a lot.
The last time I saw Tamas was that August, a couple days before I was set to go back to the US. By this point the Deacon Road house, once a fairly tight group, had completely fallen apart due to a council tax bill dispute, 
and most had moved out. Rent hadn’t been paid in weeks, and the few of us left were technically squatting in our own home. I had just come back on the train from eight days in Amsterdam and Paris one evening, and Tamas was now almost the last one left, along with another Hungarian friend of his who had recently come over. The power had finally been shut off, and Tamas was keeping food in a cooler. As Tamas and I were talking, the second-to-last housemate left, Shirin, came driving up in a friend’s van to pick up the last of her stuff to temporarily move into a friend’s apartment the next neighborhood down. She offered that I could stay with her, and I quickly gathered up my two bags, threw them in the back of the van, and wished Tamas good luck with everything. I later heard from Shirin that he spent another week or two in the house before finding a legitimate place to live.
Yesterday afternoon Tamas and his girlfriend came down to meet me for a few beers in my neighborhood at one o’clock in the afternoon. It was the last day of a week that he had spent in New York before heading down to Florida for another week, before returning home to Budapest, where he’s now back living again. We didn’t spend too much time talking about the Deacon Road house, but I thought about nothing else for the whole rest of the day afterward. Right before leaving to go in to the city to see the Intrepid, Tamas sneaked inside to pay the bill before I could pick it up, saying I could get him back when I come to visit him in Budapest.
