When I was in my 30s, I lived in a 2-bedroom apartment I couldn’t afford on my own. When I first moved in, I had a friend for a roommate, but when she moved out, I advertised in a local free paper for a roommate. (Now, let me make clear this was all with the full knowledge and agreement of the manager of the complex. I even had potential tenants fill out applications for her.) I ended up with a lovely young woman who remains a friend to this day. From that point on, roommates came and went at a rate of about one every 10 months, and mostly they were decent folk. Minor problems but nothing to worry about.
And then, after about 9 years of inviting strangers to live with me, I got Doug. Doug set off all the same alarms every single unknown roommate had over those 9 years so I ignored the ringing in my head. I didn’t want a roommate but I needed one, so he moved in. With a sleeping bag, a pillow, a phone and eventually a single lamp. Within a few days I knew the alarms had been right, and I gave him a 30-day notice that he’d have to move out because this wasn’t working at all for me. (I won’t tell you the story I made up to explain why he had to go, but believe me it was complex and about 90% true.) He made threats, and my mother, upon hearing about these threats, recommended I contact the Los Angeles hot line for domestic violence because they could give me advice on how to deal with this.
Their first piece of advice was lock my bedroom door (since I could), and then they told me to find a safe place to leave my cat because the law isn’t anywhere near as punitive as it should be for violence perpetrated upon animals. Luckily my dad came rushing in to pick her up, and I set about surviving the next month. (FYI, the manager and I had already agreed to me moving into an available 1-bedroom when this was all over—I was never going to do the roommate thing again.)
Nearing the end of the month, the manager came to me and told me I needed to advise Doug that I was moving out that weekend and he couldn’t stay beyond the 30 days. I hadn’t even begun packing so as not to give it away, but now I’d have to face the man I hadn’t spoken to since his last set of threats. My father came in with the cat on Thursday evening to help me move the next day, and when Doug got home (and with my father standing behind me), I informed him I was moving and he couldn’t stay. Doug got all hissy and nasty, eventually threatening to call a lawyer, and that’s when my dad stepped forward next to me and said, “Go ahead.” After a moment of bluster, Doug went to his room, the next day I was gone with all my stuff and my cat, and on the very last day of the 30 days, Doug was gone, too.
This, my friends, is how you handle a bully. And when Gavin Newsom called Trump out a week ago Thursday, I thought of my dad and this very important lesson.