I paused for a second. I looked around for hidden cameras. And then I told Pam no, I wasn’t interested in this beautiful litter box of an apartment, but maybe the next one, and also are you sure your blood pressure isn’t dangerously low today, because that’s the only fucking explanation I can fathom for a woman behaving as strangely as you are, except I didn’t say any of that because I’m too polite, I just said, “No, thank you, ma’am. Now please can we go before you murder me?” And then we left.

The next day I got too drunk at a bar, probably because it had been forty-eight whole hours since I’d started looking for an apartment, and I hadn’t found one yet, and I was ready to die. I was slumped at a table, my friend Jennifer standing fifteen feet away at the bar.

“Bring me water, homo,” I texted her. She didn’t immediately reply, so I texted her again. “DON’T BE A HOMOPHOBE. BRING ME A WATER.” Drunk Matt assumes the worst of people very quickly. Still no response, I texted her a third time. “Why do you hate gays?!” Nothing.

A few minutes later, she walked over to the table and sat down. “Why aren’t you answering my texts?” I slurred.

“Because you didn’t text me,” she said.

And that’s when I realized I hadn’t been calling Jen a raging pro-dehydration homophobe. I was calling Pam the Broker a raging pro-dehydration homophobe. “OH MY GOD!” I screamed. “I THOUGHT I WAS TEXTING YOU!”

“OMG I’M SO SORRY,” I texted Pam the Broker. “I DON’T THINK YOU HATE GAYS.”

But she never replied. And I never heard from Pam the Broker again.

The next week, I found Pam’s replacement, a broker named Mark. He looked suspiciously like Mr. Clean if Mr. Clean had served time in a federal corrections facility for cooking meth. His shiny bald head was punctuated by bulging skull veins and his biceps were kept at a solid 75 percent flex at all times. In truth, I chose him because I was too scared not to choose him. Somehow, I thought, he’d find me and rent me an apartment and make me move there whether I wanted him to or not.

But Mark, like Pam, proved to be a person of many oddities. On our way to view our first apartment, he stopped me midsentence to ogle two women passing us on the sidewalk. “Sorry, buddy,” he said. “I just get so distracted by beautiful women. You understand, though.” I most certainly did not.