In my senior year of university, my roommate Hannah got an internship in New York City and kipped off to live her best Sex and The City life during our spring semester. This was, in fact, a fairly common turn of events in my school, where students are encouraged (and sometimes forced by way of credits) to take off a semester from studying for internships. I myself had done something similar the year prior - except I had lived in the dorms at the time, where issues like rent and filling my spot in the dorms were not my problem to deal with. As we lived in a nice apartment in a highly coveted section of Boston, it wasn't much of a problem for her to find a fellow student, returning from a fall semester internship and in desperate need of a place by campus, to sublet her spot. Aside from a few dishwashing related incidents, the sublet, Cami, myself, and our other roommate, Tori, were able to cohabit amicably.
Everything went smoothly, until the semester came to an end and Cami was leaving for the summer, and Hannah panicked and desperately tried to find a sublet to replace her. Predictably, finding a sublet just for the summer months proved more difficult than one for school semesters.
On a related note, this was happening back around 2016, when Airbnb was still catching flack for their rebrand, but nonetheless had just started to become mainstream.
Hannah, being the enterprising young twenty-something she is, immediately put two-and-two together and decided to Airbnb her room during summer to offset her share of the rent.
In hindsight it was deeply naive of Tori and I to agree as enthusiastically as we did. Me more than Tori, to be fair, as I'd spent a great deal of time working in Silicon Valley with the venture capital firm filling Airbnb flush with cash, and knew exactly how nebulous the practices of those disruptive startups could be. I also was moving out in a few weeks myself, so I had little and less reason to care about Hannah's plans.
Anyway the first Airbnb shows up, and it immediately becomes clear that this was, in no way shape or form, going to be sustainable.
A rotating cast of perfectly amicable but still entirely unknown strangers kept going in and out of the apartment. Common spaces became awkward small-talk battle grounds. Guests would knock on our door (now equipped with a lock) asking where the fresh towels were. We didn't even know what the fuck to do with the towels, let alone the sheets. I have no idea what she wrote on the listing or how she even managed it, but a steady stream of shockingly normal people seemed totally okay to camp out in a college apartment for a few days at a time; okay enough to apparently leave decent reviews to keep that steady stream coming. The whole situation became frustrating and untenable very quickly, with Hannah, several hours away by train, constantly needing support for her guests and putting the onus on her roommates still living there.
In fairness to Hannah, the scheme worked for a pretty decent amount of time. I have no idea what she listed it for or how much cost she really recouped, but at the very least she hadn't been eating the cost of rent entirely. And in fairness to us, we didn't let the bizarre circumstances stop us from living our best college lives.
But complicated and extremely illegal profit-schemes inevitably all come to an end.
Tori had taken an evening to throw a 'modest get together' of companions, which quickly barreled closer to 'frat house party' the further into the evening it got. The house was trashed; a random dude had fallen asleep on the porch, where a bunch of other people I'd never met in my life used our balcony as an ashtray; more people kept showing up with various handles of alcohol; someone had commandeered our roomba for beer pong in the middle of the living room; I myself had taken to sitting on top of the stereo system to deny anyone the rights to the aux chord.
Halfway through my third play through of Chaka Khan's I'm Every Woman, the intercom buzzes.
Tori tries to get everyone to shut up long enough for her to hear the speaker; this works about as well as you might have expected. The guard man who normally wanders around the property with his cotton-candy flavored vape, was saying something about coming downstairs, but it was impossible to hear why - not that we really needed much explanation. There was really only one reason tenants got dragged outside by security: the cops were here.
Tori hollered for everyone to stop taking shots and start finding their IDs. At this age, we were all legally allowed to go out drinking but just didn't because we were all poor college students surviving off of Natty Lites, so the worst they could slap us with was a noise violation. She trots downstairs with a showman's smile, expecting to have to play hapless University student well enough to finagle her way out of a hefty fine.
But it was not the police at the door.
It was a Tibetan monk.
With a suitcase.
Ricky the guard man starts passive-aggressively lecturing Tori the moment she opens the door, going on about how she's not the owner of the apartment and can't legally rent the property out, to which Tori has no readily available excuse because she is too busy staring at this buddhist monk, bald head and orange robes and all, on the front stoop. Finally Tori has enough presence of mind to tell Ricky it's her roommate's Airbnb and she'll tell her to knock it off. Ricky is unmoved by her plight, says if it happen again he'll tell building management, then goes on to explain that this monk speaks very little English and also reveals he's their Airbnb guest for the night. The monk, helpfully, shows his phone where he has a reservation with the apartment address on it.
So Tori hauls the monk and his suitcase up to our apartment, where I've turned down the disco and all the party-goers have fished out their IDs and settled down for the cops. There's a moment where we have a tense Western standoff with Tori and the monk on one side and a bunch of drunk college students stunned into silence on the other. Suffice it to say, that broke the party up better than any SWAT team could.
He was also a perfectly nice man who did not - or perhaps could not with his limited English - comment on the pervasive smell of weed all across the apartment, put his towels and sheets in the laundry when he was done with them, and cleaned his coffee mug in the morning before he left for his monk conference. He might have been the best guest we'd ever had. We wanted to take pictures but thought that might be offensive.
Anyway, mercifully enough the monk was Hannah's first and last monk-guest, and on a related note, her last guest ever.
We actually never gave her nearly as much shit for that whole summer as we could have, in hindsight. But I think, in the spirit of our unflappably zen new friend, we'd decided to just live and let monk.