Note: This recollection dates to June 2010, when I traveled to Adelaide, Australia for my first IB Theory of Knowledge workshop. At the time our school’s governing body, officially Ritsumeikan, but semi-affectionately known around town as “Keichimeikan,” (the cheap school) had begun investing heavily in International Baccalaureate training, and for a brief but memorable stretch I found myself traveling widely across the Asia-Pacific region attending workshops and conferences. Adelaide happened to be the first stop on that circuit.
The encounter described here took place midway through that week. Like many moments that occur while traveling, it was both ordinary and oddly memorable — a short conversation, a near-comic personal embarrassment narrowly avoided, and then a small gap in memory that I still cannot fully explain.
For privacy I refer to the person involved simply as “M.”, and a few identifying details have been softened. The strange behavior of my phone afterward — messages arriving out of sequence and the device occasionally insisting it was in Adelaide or Nagoya — was quite real, though I have never had a satisfying explanation for it.
In Japanese there is a phrase that captures the mood of such moments perfectly: cho fushigi — very mysterious.
Epigraph
Half hours on earth
What are they worth?
I don’t know.
David Berman
I. Adelaide
I was in Adelaide for my first IB Theory of Knowledge workshop, sometime around June of 2010. In those years our principal had suddenly decided that IB travel was a worthwhile investment, and so for a brief and glorious period I was dispatched all over the Asia-Pacific region like a slightly rumpled educational attaché. Workshops in Singapore, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and, in this case, Adelaide.
The school hosting the workshop was one of those extremely well-appointed Australian private schools — immaculate rugby grounds, manicured lawns, a cafeteria that would have put many universities to shame. The workshop itself was perfectly pleasant. TOK people tend to be reflective types and reasonably good company, though after two days of epistemology everyone is usually ready for a drink.
Which is how, on the second evening, a small group of us ended up at a bar a few minutes from the hotel.
II. M.
At some point the table thinned out until it was just the two of us talking. She was from San Francisco. Let’s call her M.
We were sitting close, leaning in the way people do in bars when the music is slightly too loud and the conversation slightly too interesting to abandon. I told her about my small blog, Classical Sympathies, which at the time was still young and full of ambition. She told me she wrote long travel essays and posted them on Facebook where, she said with a shrug, they had gathered a modest but loyal readership.
Like a complete peon, I offered to host them on my site.
She smiled politely and said she’d probably keep them where they were for now.
Which was entirely reasonable.
The conversation moved on. We started talking about family — fathers, specifically — and the strange emotional weather that tends to gather around that subject. It was one of those unexpectedly intimate bar conversations that sometimes appear between near-strangers and then vanish again.
III. A Minor Emergency
There was, however, a complication.
Let us say that during the course of this conversation Young Mr. Johnson began to make his presence known.
Nothing dramatic. But enough that standing up suddenly would have created a situation. So I employed the classic defensive maneuver familiar to men everywhere: crossed legs, careful posture, strategic angles.
A small but significant crisis was unfolding beneath the table.
Eventually the situation resolved itself through patience and good fortune. When the moment seemed safe, I made my exit with what I hoped was dignity intact. We exchanged Facebook information, said our goodbyes, and I stepped out into the alley behind the bar on the way back to the hotel.
At that moment I felt something close to relief.
By the grace of God, I had narrowly avoided making a spectacular fool of myself.
IV. The Missing Ten Minutes
And then something strange happened.
I remember stepping into the alley.
The next thing I remember is being back in my hotel room.
Fully clothed. Completely sober. The evening still early — maybe ten-thirty, eleven at the latest.
What I did not remember was the ten minutes in between.
No walk back to the hotel. No elevator ride. No keycard in the door.
Just a small, clean gap in the record.
V. The Phone
The truly odd part came later.
For the next year and a half my phone behaved as though it had lost its grip on reality.
Texts appeared months after they had supposedly been sent. Messages from April surfaced in October. Time stamps were wrong. Location data wandered.
Sometimes the phone seemed to believe it was still in Adelaide.
More often it insisted it was in Nagoya, a city I had visited only once for a consulting visit to a school in the hills.
It was never anything dramatic — just enough small glitches to make me raise an eyebrow every now and then.
VI. Cho Fushigi
I never saw M. again.
We remained distant Facebook acquaintances for a while. She became, I believe, an English teacher back in San Francisco. Her essays continued to appear occasionally in the feed, and then eventually they stopped.
The phone eventually sorted itself out as well.
Technology, like memory, tends to repair its own small fractures over time.
Still, every once in a while I think about that short walk down the Adelaide alley and the ten missing minutes afterward.
And the only phrase that really fits is the one the Japanese use for such things.
Cho fushigi.
Very mysterious
Dedication:
For Molly. Thanks for the half hour baby.
Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may enjoy the two essays linked below, both of which take up similar themes or charged, fleeting, and romantic encounters.
Note: This piece uses the figure of George Santos as a kind of cultural parable. The story of Santos—his improbable congressional run on Long Island, the famous unraveling of his résumé (including the legendary and totally outta control Baruch volleyball claim), the rapid collapse of political support from fellow New York Republicans, his eventual expulsion from Congress, and his strange second act as a Cameo celebrity—forms one of the more surreal public morality plays of recent American politics.
The apartment story that frames the essay is not meant as a literal equivalence. Kitara is not Santos, and roommates are not members of Congress. The comparison operates at the level of archetype: the charismatic figure who arrives full of sunshine, quickly becomes central to a small social world, and then—through one small but revealing detail—forces everyone around them to confront the uneasy coexistence of charm and opportunism.
The name “Kitara,” Santos’ drag name from back in Brazil where he if from (Santos is gay of course) is used here in the spirit of narrative shorthand rather than biography. Anyone who has lived with roommates long enough will recognize the basic situation. Shared apartments are small republics built on trust, improvisation, and the quiet hope that everyone involved is playing roughly the same game. Most of the time that hope is justified. Occasionally it is not.
If the tone of the piece drifts toward amusement, and even affection, rather than outrage, that is deliberate. Characters like Santos—and the occasional fabulous roommate—have a peculiar ability to provoke both exasperation and reluctant admiration. The performance can be infuriating. But it can also be oddly entertaining.
Such people rarely disappear completely. They simply move on to the next stage.Sometimes that stage is Congress. Sometimes it is Cameo (get that scratch Georgie baby!). And sometimes it is just the memory of a roommate who once seemed almost too good to be true.
Epigraph
“People seldom do what they believe in. They just do what is convenient, then repent.” — Bob Dylan
I. The Fabulous Roommate
Every apartment has its mythology.
The quiet one who never emerges from his room except to microwave things at strange hours. The earnest one who tries to establish chore charts that everyone pretends to follow for about ten days. The one who adopts pets with a confidence that suggests the rest of the household has already agreed to care for them.
And then, once in a while, there is the fabulous roommate. Kitara was that roommate.
She arrived with the sort of personality that immediately rearranges the emotional furniture of a place. Cheerful without being cloying. Social without being exhausting. Organized without being smug about it. She seemed to understand, instinctively, the delicate social contract of shared living: when to chat, when to disappear, when to clean something quietly so no one felt guilty.
Visitors loved her. Friends who came by would inevitably say some version of the same thing: “Your roommate is amazing.”
And she was. At least at first.
She was the sort of person who made the apartment feel like a small, cheerful republic. There were occasional dinners, occasional drinks, occasional pets that appeared temporarily in the orbit of the household. Nothing dramatic. Just the easy, slightly improvised domestic life that happens when a handful of semi-adults share a roof and try to keep the machinery of living running smoothly.
There are people who move through life like that—people who bring lightness with them. People who make small environments work better simply by being present. You think, when you meet someone like this: what a lucky break.
II. The Sunshine Personality
There is another category of person, however, that resembles the fabulous roommate from a distance. These people also arrive with sunshine. They are charming. They are energetic. They seem to know how to move through rooms with effortless confidence. They shake hands warmly. They remember names. They tell stories. They radiate the sort of friendliness that makes everyone feel briefly like a co-conspirator in something cheerful.
The difference is subtle, and it often takes time to notice. These are not merely charming people.
These are the performers. And, one of the most remarkable recent examples of this type in American public life was George Santos.
Santos appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in the political ecosystem of Long Island. His run for Congress was, at least initially, improbable in the way that many modern political stories can be. The district had long been competitive, but his rise through the local Republican apparatus was unusually smooth. There was little serious opposition within the party. The campaign itself unfolded with the sort of confident momentum that often accompanies candidates who seem, at least on paper, to possess a compelling life story.
And what a life story it was.
Santos presented himself as the son of immigrants who had risen through the financial world, a man with an impressive résumé and a philanthropic sensibility. He spoke of professional success, cultural fluency, and various achievements that painted a portrait of upward mobility and cosmopolitan competence.
The voters of Long Island sent him to Congress. And then, almost immediately, the details began to unravel.
III. The Volleyball Player
The first cracks appeared through the ordinary mechanism of local journalism. Reporters from Long Island newspapers began to do what reporters traditionally do: verify things.
The résumé turned out to be an imaginative document. The professional history did not quite match reality. The educational claims were questionable. Various details that had seemed impressive during the campaign began to dissolve under scrutiny.
One of the most memorable revelations involved an oddly specific athletic claim. Santos had described himself as a standout volleyball player during his time at Baruch College. Not merely a participant, but something close to a star—someone whose record-setting performance had been part of his biography.
There was just one problem. Baruch College had no record of him playing volleyball. None at all. Outta control. The story collapsed on that small detail. It is often the small details that do that.
A résumé can contain many large claims, and those claims can hover in a kind of vague plausibility for a surprisingly long time. But one precise, checkable fact—the volleyball team roster, the game statistics, the athletic department archives—can puncture an entire narrative.
The reporters pulled the thread and the sweater unraveled.
IV. The Grifter Archetype
Once the unraveling began, it accelerated. Claims about employment at major financial firms proved dubious. Educational credentials evaporated. Personal history mutated in various directions depending on which previous statement one examined.
Soon the story had migrated from the political pages into the broader theater of American spectacle. Late-night comedians noticed. Cable news panels convened. Social media filled with the strange, almost baroque details of the saga. Members of his own party began to distance themselves.
Several Republican members of the New York congressional delegation—figures who had initially welcomed a new colleague—publicly called for him to resign as the scope of the fabrications became clear. The situation became untenable. The House of Representatives eventually voted to expel him, a rare and historically notable step.
It was a dramatic fall.
And yet even during the collapse, Santos retained something remarkable.
Charm.
He gave interviews. He sparred with reporters. He adopted, at times, an almost mischievous tone about the entire affair. There was a faint air of theatricality to the proceedings, as though the story had become a kind of performance art about the boundaries of credibility.
The grifter archetype has a peculiar resilience. Even when the illusion collapses, the performer often remains oddly entertaining.
V. The Apartment
Watching the Santos saga unfold, I found myself thinking more about Kitara.
Because the thing about grifters is not simply that they deceive.
It is that they charm.
They charm their way into rooms, into institutions, into social networks. They radiate warmth. They build small communities of goodwill around themselves. And for quite a while, everything feels perfectly normal.
Until one day something small happens. Something missing.
In the apartment it was GM’s silver. Not a vast treasure. Not an heirloom of historic significance. Just a small, familiar object that lived in a particular drawer and had always lived there.
One morning it was gone. The initial reaction in situations like this is always practical. Maybe you moved it. Maybe it fell behind something. Maybe someone borrowed it.
The mind runs through a series of benign explanations, each one slightly less convincing than the last.
And then a thought appears.
Quietly.
Oh shit.
VI. The Knowledge You Don’t Want
Roommate life operates on a fragile form of trust.
You share space. You share kitchens. Sometimes you share pets, groceries, furniture, phone bills, music, stories. The arrangement functions because everyone tacitly agrees not to test the boundaries of that trust too aggressively.
When something disappears, the entire structure trembles.
But there is another complication.
Sometimes you realize what probably happened. And you also realize that confirming it would destroy the social equilibrium of the apartment.
So you do a strange psychological maneuver.
You know. But you decide not to know.
Life continues.
The dishes are washed. Conversations occur. The roommate remains charming. The apartment continues to function as a small republic of semi-functional adults.
But a hairline crack now runs through the arrangement.
VII. The Fall
For Santos the crack widened into a canyon.
The congressional investigation intensified. Ethical questions multiplied. Party support evaporated. Eventually the House voted to expel him, ending one of the most surreal political tenures in recent memory.
Yet even after the fall, Santos demonstrated a familiar trait of the charismatic grifter.
He adapted. He appeared on podcasts. He commented on political scandals involving others. He expressed a certain moral indignation about the ethical lapses of fellow politicians—including members of his own party—sometimes with a tone that was almost hilariously sanctimonious given the circumstances.
The performer remained on stage. And then came the truly modern twist.
Santos joined Cameo. And he’s fucking great on it!
For a fee, he would record personalized video messages: birthday greetings, congratulations, small performances of his peculiar brand of post-scandal celebrity.
The internet, as it often does, embraced the absurdity.
VIII. The Cameo
At some point I watched a few of his videos.
There he was, smiling warmly into the camera, delivering a cheerful greeting to a stranger somewhere in America. The tone was friendly, relaxed, slightly mischievous.
And I laughed.
Because the performance was genuinely funny. The charm, infuriatingly, still worked. It reminded me of the old fable about the scorpion and the frog.
The scorpion asks for a ride across the river. The frog hesitates, noting that scorpions have a reputation for stinging frogs. The scorpion assures him that such a thing would be irrational; if he stung the frog mid-crossing, both of them would drown.
The frog agrees.
Halfway across the river the scorpion stings him.
“Why?” the frog asks as they sink.
“I can’t help it,” the scorpion replies. “It’s my nature.”
The scorpion cannot help himself.
But every now and then the scorpion also sends someone a birthday message on Cameo, smiling warmly and wishing them a fantastic year ahead.
And you find yourself laughing anyway.
The truth about characters like Santos—and perhaps about certain roommates—is that their charm is not an illusion.
It’s real.
The trouble is that it coexists quite comfortably with everything else.
Dedication:
For Kitara. May you make a fucking mint on Cameo and look totally gorgeous while doing it.
Note: If you enjoyed this story, you might also enjoy these other pieces about American grifters.
The Kyoto Kibbitzer 