This is Uncomfortable December 7, 2023 Transcript

 

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Reema Khrais: Chris and Jake are two best friends who love a good deal. Especially when they were young and broke, they’d figure out creative ways to get by… like in their 20s they’d hang out at this coffee shop that served food …

 

Jake: And we were so poor that It was not beyond one or eventually both of us to to find the leftover food sitting at the table we’d taken over, and that became dinner for the evening.

 

Reema: Wait… sorry, to be clear, you’re eating the leftovers of the customer’s food?

 

Jake: Yes [Laughter]

 

Chris: It’s more like a customer walks away from a plate, one of us looks at it, and they go, “I dare you.” And so one of us goes, “All right, I’ll take a bite out of it.”

 

Reema Khrais: Back then, they’d happily camp outside the grand opening of a Chick-Fil-A so they could qualify for some promotion to get free food. And at the grocery store, they’d head straight to the clearance bins to dig for soon-to-be-expired meat. 

 

So it makes sense that in 2009, when they were presented the ultimate deal – a way to live together in a big house rent-free… they could hardly believe it. Here’s Chris.

 

Chris: not having to pay rent would represent to me, like, almost a 200% raise. If you think of it that way! I could keep almost any amount of my paycheck that I didn’t want to spend.

 

Reema Khrais: It seemed like the perfect set-up… that is if they could survive it…

 

Jake:  I’m not sure how long it was into living in the house, but it was probably January, we met in the hallway outside of our rooms and I said, “Chris, I literally think this place is killing me.”

 

Reema Khrais: Welcome to This Is Uncomfortable, I’m Reema Khrais. 

 

Chris and Jake are both listeners of the show. And a while back, Chris wrote us an email that after I read, I responded to immediately. I needed to hear more. 

 

He wrote about a time in their early 20s, when they lived in a house that feels like it was stripped from a horror movie… or maybe like a horror-comedy. 

 

Anyway, in his email, Chris wrote that living in this house, quote: “challenged how far I was willing to go in order to save money.”  

 

Their story is about saving money. But it’s also a story about friendship, about when a bond gets tested and whether growing up has to mean growing apart. 

 

Reema: Okay. So can you tell me the story of how you two ended up in the house? Where does it begin?

 

Jake: Oh, this is Reema. Oh my goodness. This is so exciting. 

 

Reema Khrais: The story starts the day Chris Badeker and Jake Dougherty first met each other, back in 2009.  

 

Chris: I remember it specifically because it was such a bad day.

 

Jake: [Laughs]

 

Reema Khrais: That’s Chris, the guy who emailed us. He’d just graduated college. He was working two jobs just outside Baltimore, barely making ends meet. One of those jobs was at an after school program. The day they met, a kid had vomited all over the hallway. And it was Chris’s job to clean it up. 

 

After work, Chris walked to a favorite coffee shop, which had a couple computers for customers to use.

 

Chris: I remember walking there that day to hop on one of the computers, and Jake had been sitting at the computer next to it. And he’s like, “hey man, how was your day?”

 

Jake: And Chris came over and we, I think we both just had that energy, that sense about is that heaviness, that’s like, Oh, this is just not a good one.

 

Reema Khrais: They were both regulars at this coffee shop, but didn’t really know each other. Both of them were going through some hard times, feeling lonely and kinda anxious about the future. 

 

Jake was 24, he’d made a couple attempts at college, but none worked out. He also had a gig at an afterschool program and another job pouring concrete. 

 

That day, sitting at the computer, Jake turned to Chris and very genuinely asked… “Hey, how are you doing?”

 

Chris: I said, “Well it’s been, it’s kind of a day.” I forgot the exact word but he said, “Well, I’m sorry it’s been a hard day. Um, if you’re interested, a couple of us every Wednesday, we go over to Chick-fil-A for dinner, and if you wanna come to that, that would be great.”

 

Reema Khrais: They became fast friends and then roommates. They realized they both loved music and hoped to make a living out of it, so they started a rock band with a couple friends and would play open mic nights at that coffee shop where they first met. 

 

Chris and Jake spent nearly all their free time together, building the kind of close friendship a lot of people dream of having. 

 

They’re so in sync that sometimes I had trouble telling them apart. So I asked them: what do you two not have in common? Here’s Jake.

 

Jake: I love the need to distinguish ourselves. [laughs] “Which one of you is which one of you?” 

 

Chris: Right, it’s good. 

 

Jake: Yeah, so man, this is a really tricky question. I think the ways in which we’re really different are fairly light and fairly nuanced.

 

Reema Khrais: It also doesn’t help that they sound very similar. 

 

Jake is the kinda guy who likes to ask you how you’re really feeling. Conversations with him can get pretty deep. And talking to Chris can definitely be like that too, but he’s a bit more laid-back, the kinda guy who reminds you everything is gonna be alright.

 

Back then, Jake had thousands of dollars of credit card debt… and Chris had $17,000 in student loans. 

 

Chris would try to be on top of his finances. 

 

Chris: I tried to write down everything I was earning. from my two part time jobs. And then on the other side of the piece of paper, I tried to write down everything that it was costing me to, like, to exist, basically. And I remember the number came out to, like, negative 17. [laughter]

 

Reema Khrais: Meanwhile, Jake was a bit more avoidant…

 

Jake: I was so far lost, gone and afraid of money that, uh, the idea of making a budget would have been far too anxiety-inducing to even approach. I can remember scraping $7 worth of change off of my dresser, filling my gas tank with $7 and feeling like that was a lot.

 

Reema Khrais: All the while Chris and Jake were asking bigger questions about their lives. This was 2009, at the height of the recession. Job prospects were gloomy and like a lot of people, Jake and Chris, had lost  trust in the system…

 

Jake: There’s something about the American nature of “this is what you’re supposed to do” that I think Chris and I both respond to fairly adversely. Like if you tell me this is what we are supposed to do, we’re immediately looking around the other corner to see: “Well, what other options are there then? I don’t want to just do what you’re telling me I have to do.” 

 

Reema: Mhm

 

Reema Khrais: They’d always turn to each other and ask…

 

Jake: What is the better story? How can we find an adventure that looks different than what we’re, what we’ve been trying? And also, we can’t really afford what we are doing!

 

Reema: Like, practically, we need to come up with a different story.

 

Jake and Chris: Mm hmm. Yeah, that’s right.

 

Reema Khrais: Eventually, word got around that these guys had a spirit of adventure, and basically no money. And that’s when an employee of the coffee shop approached Jake one day with an appealing offer. She told him…

 

Jake: “Hey, the owner of this coffee shop owns a house that is about a mile away, has been vacant for years, and he’s looking for somebody that will help him clean it, and then help him bring it back to a restorable means. Um. And he wants to know if you think that you and Chris would be interested in living there?”

 

Reema Khrais: Living there rent free.

 

Jake: And I said, we’re in, we’ll take it.

 

Reema: You didn’t hesitate?

 

Jake: No, not at all.

 

Reema: Do you remember what it felt like in your body?

 

Jake: Yeah, it felt, um, it felt like freedom. It felt like liberation. It felt like hope. Um. But it also felt like an adventure.

 

Reema Khrais: Of course, Jake still had to pitch the idea to Chris.

 

Chris: There was not a sense of obligation to, like, go along with it, but I did know how desperate both of our financial situations were, and it felt truly like an answer to that question.

 

Reema Khrais: They were in.

 

Chris and Jake imagined a house with good bones, a little run down, in need of some decluttering…

 

Chris: I think I was thinking like a long weekend, a few of our friends come over, and we’re in tip top shape.

 

Reema: Right. You’re like blasting music and having a good time eating pizza, right. 

 

Jake: Totally!

 

Reema: And then it’s done. 

 

Chris: It’s like a scene from a movie, but like the montage scene.

 

Reema Khrais: And after the house was clean, they’d focus their energy on their band, and use the money they’d usually spend on rent to pay their bills. Chris would get rid of his student loans, and Jake would no longer have credit card debt. 

 

They packed up all their things and drove over to their new home. 

 

Jake: It looks like a Jumanji house.

 

Reema Khrais: A big house surrounded by overgrown bushes and trees. One of their friends told me that if you’re driving down the street and see a house with a lawn that looks like a junkyard, “you’ve reached the right spot.” 

 

Jake: We enter the house and I’m immediately amused and afraid.

 

Reema Khrais: You can tell that the house used to be beautiful. It’s an 1800s farmhouse with large wood planks and thick beams. When you open the front door, the first thing you see is a big living room. 

 

Jake: But this living room is filled with broken furniture and a hot tub. Now the hot tub does not work.

 

Reema: Wait, inside the house?

 

Chris: In the house! 

 

Jake: It’s inside the house!

 

Chris: My initial impression was that there was no way to even enter the living room. The way a jar can be full of marbles, the house was full. In that like, when the door was open, there was not an intuitive way to step necessarily into that room. Almost like, um, a river carves a canyon through a mountain, you had to find a, kind of find these little pathways that had been carved through the house and just kind of find your footing as you kind of stepped through it. 

 

Reema: It’s an obstacle course. 

 

Chris: It’s an obstacle course, yeah!

 

Reema Khrais: There are so many metaphors here because the house was that overwhelming. It kind of defies description. It was a cross between a hoarder house and a haunted house. 

 

And it felt like every room held its own horror. When you walked into the main area, one of the first things you saw was this wicker chair with a life sized G.I. Joe sitting in it. It was very creepy at night. 

 

Then when you walk into the kitchen…

Chris: I remember specifically seeing a basket full of little girls’ rain boots, and it’s also immediately next to a collection of, like, replica Civil War guns, which is also next to a collection of, like, Lion King pillows, which is next to empty pet cages. 

 

Reema Khrais: And then upstairs:

 

Chris: when we finally got to the bedrooms, your bedroom, Jake, was the Beanie Baby room.

 

Jake: It was. 

 

Reema: [Gasp] What? 

 

Jake: It was wall to wall, floor to ceiling Beanie Babies. 

 

Reema: Wow… wow, I feel like that is my 13 year old dream, to be in a room full of Beanie Babies. [laugh]

 

Jake: It was in the thousands.

 

Reema Khrais: It continued like this: rooms full to the brim, rooms so packed you couldn’t open the door. 

 

But there was one room that was remarkably empty. If you went down to the basement, you’d find a lone toilet and a shower stall just sitting there with nothing around them, no real privacy. It was the only bathroom in the house. 

 

That first day, they cleaned as much as they could and tried to make some space in the kitchen so they’d be able to cook. 

 

But the owners of the house wouldn’t let them clean without supervision, and also wouldn’t actually let them throw anything away. 

 

Jake: Goodness, I think within 24 hours, we really had this deep sinking feeling that this is what it’s going to be. We’re never going to see those other rooms.

 

Chris: mhm right

 

Jake: We’re basically going to be confined to the kitchen and our two bedrooms.

 

Reema Khrais: That big cleaning montage they’d imagined wasn’t gonna happen. 

 

But as much as they could, they made it a home. A surreal kind of home, where as soon as you walk in the front door, anything goes. It became a communal space where you could always find a rotating cast of characters. We talked with some people who knew them back then…their now wives, their former bandmates — about what it was like to hang out at The House…

Here’s Jenna, Chris’ girlfriend at the time

 

Jenna: This house is just a tinderbox waiting to go up in flames like I am never sleeping in this house.

 

Reema Khrais: Like no way would she use the bathroom. No one really would, because aside from it being in a creepy basement, the floor was often flooded. Here’s their friend Justin. 

 

Justin: You know how when you were a little kid and you’d play like the floor was lava? It was kind of like that, except the floor was the ocean, and you don’t want to get sunk. So I would have to like, if I had to go to the bathroom and I had to go down and I had to like walk on planks and like tiptoe to get around, because the floor was flooded!

 

Reema: That is so precarious! 

 

Justin: Cause the floor was flooded!

 

Reema Khrais: I asked their friend Luke if he’d ever use the bathroom there:

 

Luke: I would just pee in the woods, it was just gross. It was weird. I don’t know. I couldn’t, I couldn’t, no, I never used the bathroom there, ever. Ha! Never thought about that.

 

Reema Khrais: Okay so the bathroom, not the most inviting. But say you’re craving a hearty meal… Jake and Chris were still pretty broke, so they had a go-to meal: a crockpot of chili that was always running on low heat. Jake’s girlfriend, Lauren, found it horrifying.

 

Lauren: I think Chris and Jake would just add different things to it to keep it going, and it was just like a constant like regenerating chili. 

 

Reema: It sounds like you did not try that chili.

 

Lauren: No, I did not try it. Definitely not.

 

Reema Khrais: And their friends Justin and Tom told me that if you’re in the house alone, well, you’re never really alone.

 

Justin: There was always a bird. There was, there was one time where a bird got into the house, and it just lived in the house.

 

Tom: I mean you would come in some nights, and you would hear like the mice running around and things.

 

Reema: What?

 

Tom: Oh ya.   

 

Reema Khrais: Despite all of this, the house was always full of life. They’d project Mario Kart onto the living room wall and spend evenings on their roof, listening to records and drinking beers. 

 

And they saved money: Chris squirreled away $1200 every two weeks, and Jake began chipping away at his credit card debt.

 

Chris and Jake had been looking for a different way to live, and they found it. 

 

It seemed like maybe the house wasn’t such a bad deal. And then… winter came. That’s after the break. 

 

But real quick, I just want to say if you haven’t already signed up for our This is Uncomfortable newsletter, I definitely recommend you checking it out. You can sign up for it by going to marketplace.org/comfort. 

 

AD BREAK

 

Reema Khrais: This rent-free house Jake and Chris were living in, well it wasn’t totally free. When winter rolled around, the house needed heat. It was an oil heated home… so that meant they’d need to pay a big up front cost of filling up the tank…

 

Chris: Let’s, let’s take some of our money. And we’re gonna pay to have this thing filled up with oil.

 

Jake: Yeah, I think we had about 300 bucks between us, thinking it would at least get us through the incoming winter. 

 

Chris: Yeah

 

Jake: We had really wonderful heat for about 24 hours.

 

Chris: Oh my God, it was good. it was so good.

 

Jake: And it was so luxurious and it felt, it felt like we were at the Marriott or something. 

 

Reema Khrais: And then, a day or two later Jake made a discovery.

 

Jake: The heat stopped working again. And we realized that there was a crack in the bottom of the oil tank. And the $300 worth of oil that we had just put in had completely leaked out.

 

Reema Khrais: They thought: we did the responsible thing, we invested a significant amount of money, and now we’re worse off than when we started: still cold and out $300. Here’s Chris. 

 

Chris: I can’t overstate what felt like a Herculean effort to just simply fill up that oil tank. To be like, “we’re, we’re gonna do it.” I had exactly–

 

Reema: Right.

 

Chris: I had exactly enough energy to try and solve this problem one time.

 

Reema Khrais: They doubted the owners would fix the tank– so far they hadn’t really fixed much. I should say we tried to get in touch with the owners ourselves for this story, but we weren’t able to reach them.

 

At the time, things with the owners were delicate… and Jake and Chris didn’t always see eye-to-eye on how to approach them. Jake felt a lot of pressure to keep the relationship positive. They didn’t have a lease so technically they could get kicked out at any moment.

 

Jake: So I do remember checking in with the owners a lot and feeling the sense of obligation, but it was not obligation to, to the agreement we made, it was being afraid of being seen as somebody that was ungrateful. And Chris, I remember you not sharing that same insecurity.

 

Chris: I think I was a bit more cavalier and a bit more cold towards them, and maybe a bit less connected to the reality of the way our living situation literally hinged upon, um, their opinion and their whim of whether we ought to be there or not. And I don’t think it really sunk in for me, probably to Jake’s frustration in some ways, what that would mean for us if that actually came to pass.

 

Reema Khrais: Jake was like… Chris, aren’t you also afraid we might lose this place? Like all of this progress we’ve made saving money could just fall apart at any moment… we both need to make more of an effort to be on good terms with them.

 

But Jake never actually said any of this to Chris, he didn’t know how. 

 

Jake: I didn’t have a lot of language around what I was feeling. So it would just build up in me, and it would become anxiety or it would become anger. Or most commonly, it would become distance.

 

Chris: Mhm.

 

Reema Khrais: This growing tension in their friendship feels very relatable to me. You know… in your 20s, you’re still figuring out so much about yourself…how to handle conflict, why you react in the ways that you do…No wonder it can be hard to communicate.

 

Like on the surface, Jake was afraid of messing up their relationship with the owners, and was annoyed that Chris didn’t feel the same way. 

 

Jake: But I think the darker part underneath even that is, What does it say about me if we lose this opportunity? 

 

Reema: Mmm

 

Jake: Chris is one of my one of my people, one of my dearest friends in the entire world. If I can’t live in a free place with my best friend in the world, what does that mean about me? And so the way that these, the doubts, the fears, the quiet was materializing was all channeled through this darker, more insidious fear of, “Am I unworthy of love?” And I think I was putting all of that on Chris and even, to an unfair extent, on the folks that owned the house. 

 

Reema Khrais: And so when Jake began distancing himself, Chris started to reciprocate. 

 

Chris: And so it kind of, I think created for a while, this cycle of avoidance, maybe on both of our parts.

 

Jake: Hm, yeah

 

Chris: um, out of fear of different things.

 

Reema Khrais: All that avoiding was hard to do: Chris and Jake lived together and were bandmates. 

 

Chris: I know I’m going to see you every Thursday at 6pm for band practice. Um, but I think that tension manifests in the ways we were, um, willing or not willing to engage with each other. More on a heart level kind of way that it felt like was more indicative of the way our friendship formed. Um, if you take, for instance, that first interaction where you go, “It’s a really hard day.” “Oh, well, tell me about it. What made it hard?” Um, there became, I guess, more, instead of asking and inquiring, more just assumptions of like: It’s feeling like a really hard day. It’s probably because of this.

 

Reema Khrais: It’s hard to believe, given how they talk to each other now, that these two ever had trouble communicating. But making assumptions about what the other person is feeling, avoiding hard conversations– that’ll break down even the strongest friendship. 

 

The house’s charm was wearing off. They were steadily saving up money, but didn’t have enough to rent a place that had luxuries like heat in the wintertime. That winter in Maryland was especially cold. 

 

Jake and Chris remember one January morning, it was seven degrees outside …and inside. The dishes in the sink were frozen. Icicles hung from the faucets. 

 

Jake had reached his limit. 

 

Jake: It hurt my feet tremendously to walk across the floor. We met in the hallway outside of our rooms, and I said, “Chris, I literally think this place is killing me.”

 

Reema Khrais: Chris had things a little easier, thanks to an electric blanket his dad had gifted him for Christmas.

 

Chris I think I slept with it one night. And then the next day is when Jake said, “I think this place is gonna kill me.” And I thought, he’s gotta get what I have.

 

Jake: So that night, Chris comes home with a heated blanket and doesn’t make a show of it, just leaves it on my bed and says, “Hey, there’s something for you.” And I unfurled this heated blanket and the joy of, “Oh my God, I’m not going to be so cold tonight.” And also like that quiet, like, Chris knew and cared for me in this.

 

Reema Khrais: Jake wasn’t the type to ask for gifts, and Chris wasn’t the type to buy things on a whim… which made this even more meaningful.

 

Jake: And that moment became, it became the turning of the for us where this slow deterioration of, you know, physical health, but soul, of community, of each other. The rally around and against that became, We are on our own. And the story turned from, “We are the victims of this experience. Like, we are completely at the whims of even the weather inside the house.” It suddenly turned to, “Now we are a team. And we are against all odds.” And it really became the battle cry. We would just amusingly, lovingly yell, We are– We’re on our own!

 

Chris and Jake: We’re on our own! 

 

Reema Khrais: It was a rallying cry for moments good and bad. A family of mice were making noise in the walls? We’re on our own! 

 

Chris: We’re on our own! 

 

Jake: We’re on our own! 

 

Reema Khrais:

Friends came over to share questionable chili and listen to records? We’re on our own! 

 

Jake: We are going to survive this thing, and not only survive it, we are going to plumb the depths of this thing until we find the joy that is deeper in the soil, because it has to be here.  This is the better story. So until we find the gold in this river, we just keep at it.

 

Chris: We will not let go of this thread until we figure out how it is great. 

 

Reema Khrais: And they did start to figure it out, together with that community they’d built around the house.

 

Chris’ girlfriend Jenna brought over sheets of plastic to insulate the windows. Friends came over to defrost the dishes in the sink. 

 

Winter turned to spring. The House became a space where their friends chose to spend time, a place for those who didn’t feel like they had a home. They created traditions and celebrated holidays together. 

 

But as the months went on, Chris and Jake’s priorities began to slowly shift. 

 

Chris was starting to seriously think about his future with Jenna, this creative, easygoing, person who took her boyfriend’s unheated home in stride. 

 

Chris: God, what have I been doing? I’ve been wasting a lot of time, like, not asking this person to marry me.

 

Reema Khrais: Wanting to start a life with Jenna lit a fire under him to save even more aggressively, to finally get rid of his debt. He’d gotten a job at a private school and was getting paid more than he ever had in his life…. $1300 a paycheck. 

 

Chris: If you’re gonna enter into a partnership with someone else, you need to, like, you’re already gonna bring your emotional baggage into it. Why bring financial baggage into it?

 

Reema Khrais: Meanwhile, Jake was still working as an aide at a public school. While Chris was getting a financial foothold, planning his future, Jake was still paying off his credit card debt. 

 

As Chris was looking ahead, he began to skip band practice and was spending more time on his own projects. 

 

And then one day, he was on a computer at the coffee shop and realized he was just one click away from finally getting rid of his student debt. 

 

Chris: And that was such an exciting feeling. To tie all of that miserable work I’d been doing for the private school, and be like, this is what it has enabled. And this is what some of this chilly shivering with a bunch of mice [laughter] has also enabled, is that I don’t have to have this lingering cloud over my head anymore. I can just click this little “submit” button on this public computer, and it will be like it never happened.  

 

Reema Khrais: It was an exciting milestone for Chris, but there was also this tinge of sadness. The House was supposed to change their lives, but now after almost two years of living there… now that things were actually changing, Chris and Jake had to confront the fact that their relationship would change, too. 

 

They remember standing in the kitchen of the house one day, talking about what might come next. 

 

Chris: I had told Jake well in advance that I was going to propose. Jake, do you remember more about it?

 

Jake: I remember, Chris, you saying, “I have a ring,” and I remember feeling really surprised by that. There was also the willful ignorance of knowing this means the, the closing of this particular chapter, and I would rather pretend that’s not going to be the case and avoid those feelings for as long as I can. And Chris, I’m really curious from your perspective, what was the response?

 

Chris: Hmm. You openly were for it, and that really meant so much to me, to know that my best friend approved of me marrying my best friend. [Laughter]

 

Reema Khrais: Jake was genuinely happy for Chris, but he was also afraid of what the engagement would mean for their friendship.

Jake: I have a very clear sense of this is a good thing for you. And immediately behind that was the, how could you leave me? How could, um, again, what does this say about me? When I came to you with the house there was this sense of I am really excited about this crazy house but I won’t do this without you, and then we fast forward a couple years and you’re saying, I’m going to leave all of this.

 

Chris: Yeah. But especially for a group of friends that had made “We’re On Our Own” our rallying cry to have one of them say, “I’m, I’m no longer on my own.” And that’s what it felt like in some ways, like such a mixed thing where it’s like, I am so overjoyed to be marrying this person, but it also comes with a divorce in a different way, 

 

Jake: And I think the quieter thing that I was, the story I was telling was that, Chris, you no longer love me. And that I couldn’t hold these two, not opposing things, but I couldn’t hold two true things that were counterbalances to each other.

 

Chris: Yeah.

 

Reema: How does it feel, Chris, to hear him say that?

 

Chris:  I don’t think I’ve ever heard it framed to maybe this explicitly. And I just, um, I guess I’m, whew, now I’m starting to feel a little sweaty in the eyes. 

 

Jake: [Laughter]

 

Chris: I think for me now, looking back, I wish I would have had the words to say that just how deeply I value your friendship as someone who It seems like just appeared in a season where I really needed a new friend.

 

Jake: I think if I go back to that conversation in the kitchen where you were telling me that you were getting engaged, I think what I would want to do is go back 12 months before that and kind of lean down and whisper to myself that it’s going to be really scary to have to tell Chris what you’re feeling, but it’s really important that you do because Chris is going to become… Chris is going to become your person, um he will become your best friend, he will become your… something much deeper than a bandmate, he will be somebody that for the next 20 years, your life is going to be built around Chris’s love for you.

 

Reema: This is so beautiful. I’m just like crying over here because it’s just so touching.

 

Jake: Me, too.

 

[all laugh]

 

Reema Khrais: On New Year’s Eve, Chris proposed to Jenna. She said yes. And then Chris proposed something else:

 

Chris: What do you think of living for free? And she looked at me, and she knew what I meant, and she said—

 

Jenna: Under no circumstance is that [laughs]. This is the end of your era, so live it up, and when we are married, I will be living in an actual, actual abode that is not, like, able to be legally condemned.

 

Reema Khrais: Not a huge surprise, given the flooded bathroom and the mice and the lack of heat.

 

He and Jenna moved a few minutes down the road, into a two-bedroom apartment. It was a pretty standard place with basic amenities, but for a while it felt uncomfortably luxurious to Chris. 

 

And Jenna told us that he still had a hard time spending money. Like, why would they buy more than two bath towels when there were just two people living in the apartment? 

 

Meanwhile, Jake spent a couple more months in the house with another friend before he eventually moved out. But the years there changed him: that stable, if messy place gave him the courage to finally call his creditors and face the reality of his debt. By the time he left, he’d paid off most of it. 

 

The day he moved out, Jake took a mental picture of the house.

 

Jake: And I remember the chaos, I remember the overgrown bushes, I remember the house in complete disarray, and I remember a feeling of fresh air. I remember an exhale. And just to breathe out and say, “Oh, that thing is over.“

 

Reema Khrais: It’s been more than a decade since Chris and Jake lived together.

 

And today they’re still pursuing pretty unconventional paths. Jake has multiple jobs: he works at a distillery, a lab and owns a custom furniture company. He lives with his wife Lauren in Maryland. Chris and Jenna now live in Nashville, making music full time.

 

But Chris and Jake aren’t the kind of guys who let distance pull them apart. 

 

They talk all the time, of course. But they also help each other when one of them struggles writing a song. And sometimes one of them will show up unannounced, kidnapping the other for an adventure. 

 

When Chris first told me about the House it sounded like something out of a horror movie. This haunted house with mice in the walls and no real bathroom and rooms you couldn’t enter. You know how haunted house movies usually go: people move in, excited about what the future holds, and then slowly things get darker. The spirits inside the house start to infect the people, straining relationships. 

 

And initially The House was kinda like that. And then it changed, or maybe Chris and Jake, and all their friends, changed it. 

 

Alright that’s all for our show this week. If you have a story about how money has impacted your friendships, or want to tell us about the lengths you went to find cheap housing you can always email us at uncomfortable@marketplace.org 

 

Alice Wilder: This episode was produced by me, Alice Wilder with help from H Conley, and it was hosted by Reema Khrais. Reema and I wrote the script together. 

The episode got additional support from Hannah Harris Green.

Zoë Saunders is our senior producer.

Our editor is Jasmine Romero.

Sound design and audio engineering is by Drew Jostad. 

Bridget Bodnar is Marketplace’s Director of Podcasts.

Francesca Levy is the Executive Director of Digital.

Neal Scarborough is Vice President and general manager of Marketplace.

And our theme music is by Wonderly.

 

Reema Khrais: We’ll be back in your feeds with a new season of episodes early next year… one of the stories we’re working on is about fast fast fashion: why we buy it and what it costs all of us. And we want to hear your stories: what was your last fast fashion purchase, how much did it cost and how long did it last you? Call us at 347-746-4848 to leave a message and you might just hear it on the show.