How A Homeless Dude Broke Into My Empty Apartment And Couldn’t Figure Out How To Steal Anything

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If you were on social media at all this week then I’m positive you’ve gotten your fair share of subpar Valentine’s Day content to last you for a full calendar year. I promised myself that I wouldn’t write some long-winded, sappy garbage that has been written in the same vein over and over and over again on lifestyle blogs and websites across the internet.

But what transpired in my apartment between my roommate (who was half asleep in our two-story apartment alone) and a homeless man during the late hours of Valentine’s Day this year is worth telling you guys about.

I don’t really have an opinion on Valentine’s Day. It’s perfectly fine and I’m happy when I see other people out on dates and posting shit on Instagram and Twitter. It’s nice and all, but I tried not to make V-Day a big thing this year because me and my significant other agreed that it shouldn’t be a big thing.

We went out to a nice dinner, drank some wine, and hung out with one another. All in all, it was a fun night and I’m glad I got to spend the time with her. It was a school night though, which meant that I was fast asleep in her apartment by 11:15 p.m. I was moderately drunk by that time, and when the following text from my roommate showed up I simply didn’t know about it.

As you can see, at 3:49 a.m. I responded to his text message in the only way I knew how. I was coming back from my girlfriend’s bathroom where I had just taken a fat piss, and I checked my phone in the way that one does when they are crawling back into bed and getting ready to get back to sleep.

I had to reread the text message twice before I popped up in bed and told my girlfriend what was going on. I had trouble sleeping the rest of the night, and my mind raced with possibilities about what could have happened.

I wasn’t sure if anything had been stolen, and even though I was tucked away safely I felt uneasy and unable to get back to sleep. Home Alone taught me that burglars like to hit homes and apartments during the Christmas holiday when families are away on vacation, but I never thought this steadfast rule would extend to Valentine’s Day. I guess when you think about there’s a decent chance you’ll catch someone away from their home. Couples go out, stay out for a few drinks, and maybe even get a hotel room for the night but I digress.

Me and three other guys live in a garden unit (the unit is comprised of two floors) of a four-story building on the west side of Chicago. The floor plan is pretty simple – the first floor has two bedrooms, two baths, a large kitchen/dining area, and then a living room.

Downstairs, we have two more rooms separated by a hallway, a living room, and an additional bathroom. In the very back of the basement, a door from our apartment leads into the laundry room, and then there is another door which leads to the outside world.

This outermost door is locked and unlocked using an electronic keypad, and my roommates and I are pretty good about making sure it stays locked. What we’re not so great about doing is keeping the door that leads from our apartment into the laundry room locked. Sometimes you just forget to lock that one, you know?

It should also be mentioned that this laundry room is shared with four other tenants that live in units above us. It just so happens that on this Valentine’s Day, someone had forgotten to lock both the laundry room door as well as the door that lets you into the basement portion of my apartment.

My room is just a few feet from that laundry room, and sometime around 11:00 p.m. a drunk, homeless man wandered into my room (which was uninhabited) and set his sights on my MacBook Pro. The thing of it he would have gotten away with it too, had the bastard not gotten greedy and made his down the hall to my roommate’s room.

I mentioned it before, but my roommate who sleeps down the hall from me was, at this time, around 11:00 p.m. on Valentines Day, the only person inside of the apartment. As his story goes, he was laying in bed, half-asleep and watching the critically acclaimed film Moonlight starring Mahershala Ali.

When he heard footsteps in the hallway and then his door creak open ever so slightly, he thought that I was returning home from my date, drunk and trying to mess with him.

When Brad rolled over to see a drunk man in urine-soaked pants, wobbling around in the doorway of his room and fumbling over his, he did what any of us would do in that situation – he freaked the fuck out.

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING IN HERE! YOU GOTTA LEAVE MAN.”

“Someone uhhhh… someone let me in here,” the vagrant replied.

“Nah, man, you gotta go now.”

Brad would later describe this as a moment in which he felt like Iron Man. I laughed when he told me that because Brad does CrossFit, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, during his encounter with the burglar, he coyly dropped something along the lines of “Hey, by the way…before you leave – have you ever done CrossFit before? I’m a member at a gym down the street. You should check it out sometime when you’re not huffing paint from dumpsters behind our building.”

Before he could be indoctrinated into the brotherhood that is CrossFit, the hobo took off running back down the hallway from which he came, but not before stopping in my room to try and take my MacBook, a pair of wireless beats headphones and the charger for the laptop.

Brad snagged the Macbook, again yelling at the man to leave, and then promptly locked the door which leads into the laundry room. When I walked in this morning, my room smelled vaguely of cigarettes and piss, and my belongings were strewn haphazardly all over the floor.

It was clear that the man had been rummaging through my belongings, and yet he hadn’t taken anything. Had the man not been so greedy – had he not decided to check out Brad’s room – he would have gotten away with my MacBook and a nice pair of headphones scot free. Brad would have never known he was in the apartment, and I’d be out a laptop and headphones, with no explanation as to what happened.

I’m not sure this intruder has access to the internet at the moment. No police report was filed because Brad didn’t get a great look at him during his 30-second pitch for CrossFit but if you, the intruder are reading this, I just want to say thank you.

Thanks for being greedy you stupid bastard. You could have pawned my computer and those headphones for a few hundred dollars worth of Steel Reserve but you just couldn’t resist. Don’t be too ashamed, though, greed has been the downfall of many a man.

Make sure to lock your doors at night, folks. You never know who is going to stumble into your room on an idle Wednesday evening with bad intentions. .

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Johnny D

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• jduda@grandex.co