Roommate Wanted - Snap Classic
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Subject to credit approval, Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Salt Lake City branch, member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com. Oftentimes, in today's urbanized, depersonalized, atomized society, who is it that actually knows you?

Who knows you better than your mama, better than your friends, better than your cousins, your lover? Who sits next to you on the couch for your greatest joy? And who knows your dirty little secret? Who else but your roommate? Because one thing we can all be agreed upon, left or right, city-fied or rural, old or poor, the one thing that unites all of us is the certain knowledge that the rent is too damn high.

This means that living alone all by yourself in some glorious solitude is a luxury reserved for trust fund kids and drug dealers. And if you are neither of these, at some point, you may have to open your life to someone who is more than a stranger.

More than an intimate, a person arriving out of nowhere to pierce your inner sanctum, who can change the very course of your destiny simply by proving to you that on the first of the month, they absolutely, positively will come through with their share of the rent. Today, Snap Probably presents Roommate Wanted. My name is from Washington. We scout the newspapers so you don't have to, because you're listening.

to Snap Judgment. Now, our story begins with struggling writer Brian Boucher, who after breaking up with his girlfriend, scrambles to find a roommate so that he can afford the rent on his tiny New York City apartment. Snap Judgment. Snap Judgment.

I hadn't lived with a random stranger since my freshman year of college. I'm not sure exactly what I was looking for, really, in terms of an ideal roommate. They just needed to be dependable and pay the rent. They didn't even have to be quiet. I advertised on Craigslist for the roommate. I said, looking to share one bedroom. It's a little small. Don Williams, whose full name was John, but he went by Don, came to visit me.

the apartment and you know he was really really low-key he said that he was a ghost writer working on a project I was sort of impressed with him here was the guy making a living as a writer which was what I was sort of hoping for and had not accomplished I just felt very comfortable with him

He moved in within days. We didn't really know whether this was going to be a long-term situation or not. It was kind of month to month. Don was willing to pay a little bit more than half the rent in return for the privacy of the bedroom. So I crashed on the couch in the living room, and he moved into the bedroom. I would be, like, in bed reading The New Yorker.

And door opens and in walks Don and he's going to walk through the living room and we just sort of chuckle at each other like, isn't this awkward? You know, I felt humiliated. Honestly, I felt like, oh, has it come to this? But it had. He didn't have that much stuff. He...

didn't take up any space in the kitchen or the refrigerator. Like, I guess he just had all his meals out or he got takeout or whatever. The only thing that was sort of took up space is that he would take really epic showers.

the man could shower for like an hour, you know, and you could hear the water running. This was not just him like in there plucking his eyebrows. He was like, really, really getting the, getting the hot water into his pores. As time went by,

One thing that did seem a little strange to me was that I would be, you know, doing my thing, watching a movie, whatever, for hours and thinking maybe I was alone in the apartment and then the bedroom door would open and he would come out to use the bathroom. And I had realized, like, he was in there just quiet as a mouse for hours. And then on the other hand...

There would be times when I would realize, like, I haven't seen him in days. I don't think he's around. So it sort of left me feeling a little uneasy, but none of my business, I figured. So in December, I hadn't seen him in some time. Might have been a couple of weeks. I come home one day and find...

The door to his room opened, which was unheard of. Someone had ransacked the bedroom. And my things were untouched, like completely untouched. So it was plainly targeted at him, which was just unbelievably spooky. Whoever wanted to get at his things was so motivated.

that they had torn the door and the frame entirely off the wall. The door and the frame were just like hanging by, I think, the bottom hinges when I walked in.

They had then taken his nice red Swiss Army luggage out of the closet. So they just cut it open and went through all of his things, like his clothes and stuff were kind of scattered around. He has like on the inside of the bedroom door, like a postcard sized piece of paper that says security check, windows locked, keys, phone locked.

So that was a suspicious detail. But also the fact that the night that the break-in happened, it happened on a night that I had ended up staying away from the apartment all night. So it seemed too strange that somebody should break into the apartment just the one night that I happened to be away.

I called the police and the police came by and they said, "Well, what was stolen?" And I said, "I don't know." And they were like, "Well, if we don't know that anything was stolen, there's really not much of a crime here for us to investigate." I filled out like there was some sort of paperwork, like there was an incident report. They were like, "Well, have you been in touch with your roommate?" "No." "Okay, so could have been him as far as we know."

I'm trying to reach him and I'm emailing him and I'm calling him and he's not responding. He wasn't getting back to me. And so the rent hasn't shown up. I thought, okay, he's AWOL. He's gone.

I was out of my mind with anxiety after this. I mean, my imagination just went totally wild. Is this guy CIA? Is he with the government? I thought I have to just change the locks because by now he seems like a suspect. I feel like I have to protect myself from him and just hope that he doesn't ever come back.

By the time Don disappeared, I wasn't quite as desperate financially. I had more steady work. I wasn't financially totally destitute anymore, like the day I was that I placed the Craigslist ad. What little belongings he had, I then go into the room and I pack them up and moved back into the bedroom.

which was a bizarre feeling in itself because I'm like, I've been in this bedroom that is the scene of this like intrusion and sort of violence and violation of his space. I went off to visit my parents at Christmas in New Jersey and I get a call and it was like a voice from the grave. When I heard his voice over the phone at first, I felt just completely distrustful.

But then he says, look, I'm sorry, I haven't been in touch, but my sister was in a car accident and she died. And so I've been in Seattle dealing with that. I felt like, oh, my God, here I am imagining that this guy is a spy or a terrorist or something. And all the while he's been at his sister's deathbed. How could I possibly have thought this about him?

He had shown up and found the door locked, of course, and that his key didn't work anymore. And I said, okay, how about if you meet me at the apartment tomorrow at three? I got on a train from New Jersey the next morning so that I could be at the apartment a couple hours ahead of time.

I feel like I can't possibly tell him that I handled all of his things on the suspicion that he had either skipped town or that he was some sort of shady character. And I was just too embarrassed to say that. And so I felt like I have to recreate the scene of the crime and make it seem like I was never in there. I had to...

make it look like the room had just been broken into. So the clothes that had gone into plastic bins came back out of the bins. I brought the luggage back out of the closet and sort of scattered the clothes around on the floor, trying to make it look like sort of chaotic in the same way that it had been.

He shows up. It's three o'clock on Christmas Day. He just looks completely downtrodden and exhausted. And I greeted him saying, look, I'm so sorry for what you're going through.

And he comes in and he sort of gets himself settled and then goes into the room and is just sort of taking it in, surveying the situation and looks at the closet door that's hanging off the hinges and says, well, that's one way to get into the closet.

and looks at his nice Swiss Army luggage that's been cut open and says, well, that's a shame. So I said, you know, the cops asked what was missing. And of course, because it's not my possessions, I didn't know what to tell them. So, I mean, did they steal anything from you? And he said, well, not much. It looks like some old cell phones, a little cash, a small color printer, some marijuana. And then he said, but...

They won't be able to use the phones. You have to put in a security card before you can use them. And without the right identity card, the phones won't work. Which just struck me as very 007. There had been a video camera that the thieves didn't steal from him. So he was as puzzled...

at some aspects of this robbery as I was. At a certain point, Don said, what we should do is we should set up some webcams in the apartment so that we'll catch him if he comes back again. And I felt like, no, no, actually, I don't want to like extend the surveillance state into my own apartment. I'd rather never know what happened than do that.

He also put a small lock on the bedroom door, which was sort of a joke. It had been several weeks, maybe a month after the break-in, and he was still trying to figure out what happened. So out of nowhere, one day, he says, so I sent some things to my brother-in-law in D.C. from my room, who's a Fed employee.

So if there are any prints on these things, he'll figure it out. And I said, look, there's something I want to tell you. I haven't been honest with you about this, and I can't do that anymore. When the break-in happened, I freaked out. I didn't realize that you had deposited the rent in my account, and then I didn't hear from you for weeks, and I thought you weren't coming back. And then when you called and you told me that your sister had died, I just felt like such an asshole. And I took a deep breath and I said...

So I felt like I couldn't tell you that I had packed up your thing. So I came in and tried to make it look like it looked just after the break-in. Sorry, there it is. Now you have it. And he said, yeah, you handled pretty much everything in there. As if that he was asking for confirmation of something that he already knew. He said, I found your prints too. And I was like,

Well, wait a minute. And he said, oh, well, you know, it's pretty easy. You could just take a bottle out of the recycling bin. Up until this point, I had no idea that he was harboring any suspicions of me. There was no normal anymore after that, you know. It had been just sort of awkward to be sharing such a small space. But now we had the...

elephant in the room of this break-in and neither of us really trusting the other, but we just sort of limped forward in this very thickened tension. I wasn't completely dependent on him for the rent money. And looking back, I don't know why I allowed this to go on.

I honestly just don't know why I didn't say, look, Don, you know, I just don't feel like this is working out. I think you're going to have to find another place to stay. And he didn't seem to want to leave, so we were just stuck together. Things are getting really awkward in the apartment, Snappers. Can these two roommates continue to coexist? Find out when the Roommate Wanted episode continues. Stay tuned.

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Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the roommate wanted episode.

When Lassie left, Brandon and Don's apartment was mysteriously broken into with no answers as to who did it. They've since grown very suspicious of each other. What to do? Snap judgment. A few more months went by and rent time came due and I didn't hear from him. So I couldn't reach him via email. His phone wasn't taking calls and I

This time I was not going to prematurely go into this guy's room. So I gave it two weeks, three weeks beyond rent day. And at this time I was like, okay, now I'm well within my rights to change the locks again and to pack up his things. So this time I'm doing a thorough job of packing up his things and under the futon.

I find a Manila file folder and there were papers sticking out of it. And closer I looked, he had all this information on me. He's got my social security number. He's got bank account numbers. He's got credit card account numbers. He had copied down the names and addresses and phone numbers of my immediate family.

And he had identifying information on a number of other people elsewhere in his records, like a Charles Brown and an Andre Holmes. And, you know, photocopies of their paperwork. So, like, what business is this guy in that he is collecting identifying information on numerous people? So now, of course, like...

my mind is just doing absolute cartwheels. Also among his things, I find your classic composition notebook. And it's a journal, and it revealed some weird, weird information. It's like incredibly long, rambling journal entries. He had imagined...

movie scenarios. He was like, seemed to want to get involved in the movie industry because he was like trying to write screenplays. Smith and Smith versus the state of California. At another point, I talked to Spike Lee. He's really interested in the story and wants me to send him the articles. Okay, what articles? And there were also like notes about seemingly like

continuing education classes he wanted to take, but one of them was knife fighting. And another one of them was repelling mass attacks. Among these just endless journal entries. My babies, my babies, I miss my babies. And how he would never be able to stand for his babies to see him locked in a cage. Just like, who can make sense of this? Why would he be locked in a cage? Why would his babies ever see him locked in a cage?

Or it's all part of an elaborate screenplay where he's writing the journal of the part of the criminal. There was also a laptop among his things. It was password protected. I was at the time writing and editing for this website. So I brought the laptop into the IT guy there. I explained the situation to him and he was like, oh yeah, no problem. Leave it with me overnight. I pick it up from him the next day.

And the sign-in name on the computer, by the way, is yet another slightly generic name. Dino Lauren Smith. This is obviously a fake name, and I googled Dino Lauren Smith, expecting nothing. The first search result was the website for a television show called America's Most Wanted. My roommate was a career criminal.

who had been on the run from the law the entire time that he was rooming with me. He was a big wheel in San Francisco criminal circles. He and his brother, Devin, nicknamed Troy, basically robbed stores, robbed wealthy people's homes,

Dino had a talent for rappelling down the side of buildings to get into people's homes. So, you know, I suppose rappelling mass attacks and knife fighting, not that far off.

He always had a knife with him at all times. He did hold the widow of a Nicaraguan drug lord and her children hostage one time, where basically, like, he broke into her apartment and held them at knife point. I bounced out of my chair, screaming the F word, like,

A hundred times, running around in circles in my apartment, totally terrified. So I call the police and they come over and they come in and they look around and they said, well, if you see him, call us. A little further Googling at this point turned up a press release that thank God he had been arrested by the San Francisco police who had traveled across country to get him.

Because he and his brother and a couple of other accomplices had overnight broken into a jewelry store in San Francisco. And when the employees showed up in the morning, they made them open the safes and they made off with six or so million dollars of jewelry. And they left them tied up in the store. So...

I find this press release put up on the SFPD. It says, please contact Chief Robbery Inspector Daniel Gardner if you have information. And so I called this number. They leave this message saying, look, Dino was my roommate. I have some of this stuff. Maybe you'd be interested in having it. They very quickly got on a plane, Gardner and his partner, and came to my apartment with a search warrant.

And they present the warrant and they say, do we have permission to come in and search the premises? And I'm like, come on in, guys. Yeah. So they go to work. They put on rubber gloves. They unscrew the electrical switch panels. They fondle the futon. They look in the cereal boxes. You know, it was remarkable work.

Alas, they did not turn up any jewels. I did overhear one of them say, Oh, we found the blue and black parka. They found a Manhattan mini storage container of dinos with power tools and a concrete saw. And Gardner says,

Well, with any luck, this guy's not going anywhere anytime soon. And he takes out a wanted poster and gives it to me with Dino and his brother on it, side by side, mugshots from a previous prison stint. On a sunny day, I arrived at the Hall of Justice in San Francisco and...

headed in to testify at trial. To say that it made me anxious to participate in testifying at this trial would certainly be an understatement. I was in the hallway and there were, you know, a dozen or so people who were the jury, of course. But then there was somebody who was sitting a bit apart from the jury. The closer I looked at her, I realized, oh my God, that's Dino's nose.

That's Dino's face. And I realized that this must be Dino's mother. And it made me so unbelievably sad. You know, here is a woman whose son has been in and out of prison for many, many years. And here he's looking at possibly going to prison again for decades, if not for the rest of his life. So this whole other...

sort of human dimension of this thing dawned on me at that moment in a way that it really hadn't before. We all walked into the courtroom, the jury and I, and I'm sitting in the seats for the public, and a doorway opened at the back of the courtroom, and in walked Dino, and the room suddenly went silent. Dino

goes to join the defense attorney at his table, and he's got some papers, and he puts them down and arranges them on the table. And then he turns over his shoulder and looks at me and gives me the funniest look. It was this sort of half-smile greeting, as if to say, like, Hey, roomie, bet you never expected to be in this situation, huh? I was...

Called to the witness stand and sworn in. And there's a microphone that you speak into when you're testifying. And I swear, I was so on edge. I felt like the microphone was going to pick up the sound of my heart pounding.

The defense attorney then said, you advertised on Craigslist and you found a roommate. And is that person in the room? Would you point at him and mention an article of clothing? And so then I pointed at Dino and mentioned his black polo shirt. Dino really just sort of sat there stone-faced watching me and listening to me, but did not show much reaction, really. The computer that I turned over...

ended up being key evidence. And so the defense attorney at a certain point said, did you ever see him using the computer? And I said, I think I saw him watching a movie on his laptop one time. Well, he says, I'm not asking you what you might think or speculate about. I'm asking you if you saw him using the computer. And I felt like...

I'm actually not sure. And so I just said, well, I don't know. I guess I can't be 100% sure. And I thought, oh, no, that's it. That's it. I just ruined it. I just blew my whole testimony. Of course, it didn't turn out that way. It was June 3rd, 2005. Based in part on the evidence found on the computer, the jury convicted him of eight of 11 counts of

Once Dino was gone and I had the apartment to myself, it took a little while to get used to being back in this bedroom that this...

notorious criminal had slept in. It was as though I was never alone in the room, like the sort of ghosts of everything that had happened were in there with me. Ultimately, my

Lease on the apartment came up, and I didn't feel like staying there any longer. So I was working at an art magazine by that time, still not making a great deal of money. So I looked for another apartment share. I went back to Craigslist and ended up moving in with...

a couple who was a financial planner and a dance instructor and their kid. It was a great situation because they weren't at this apartment very often. I had no hesitation to go back to Craigslist because of course, Craigslist isn't the problem. Jewel thieves are the problem. A huge thank you to Brian Boucher for sharing his story with the Snap.

In 2006, Brian wrote an essay in New York Magazine about this experience. It was titled, My Roommate, The Diamond Leaf. And it turns out there is more to this story. Once again, here's Brian to catch us up on what happened years later. In summer of 2017, I was going to visit family in California and...

They live like a half an hour drive from Folsom Prison, which is where he was at the time. And I tried over years to correspond with him. I would write to him and he never answered any of my questions or even really acknowledged them. And so I thought, well, what the heck? Let me just see if I can go and visit him.

I did ultimately go on a hot, hot sunny day to Folsom Prison. I got walked through this like fortress wall to go inside and get to the area where people are actually visiting. And he walks into the room and he's sort of looking from side to side and looking for me. And then he sees me and he actually smiled.

It was so strange to me how sort of casual the conversation was at first, you know? Almost as if he were kind of catching up with a friend or acquaintance that he hadn't talked to in a long time. And he says, you know, you've probably wondered why I chose you as a roommate. Well, I actually thought very carefully about it. You might recall that the day I came to visit you, it was a Saturday.

America's Most Wanted airs on Saturdays. I had to be sure that the person I rented from wouldn't be watching America's Most Wanted. And you thought your roommate experience was wild. You never know who you're going to run into on Craigslist. The original score for that piece by Dirk Schwarzoff was produced by Bo Walsh. Now when Snap returns, a young college student has a chance encounter that changes his life forever. Stay tuned.

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Upfront payment of $45 for three month, five gigabyte plan required. Equivalent to $15 a month. New customer offer for three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Welcome back to Snap Judgment. My name is in Washington. Next up, Snap storyteller extraordinaire, Mr. Don Reed. It's the stage for Snap Judgment Live. I grew up on East 14th in Oakland, California. Woo!

When I was like 20 years old, I got recruited to UCLA on a speech and debate scholarship, a partial scholarship. But nobody told me that partial scholarship, loosely translated, actually stands for not enough money. Yeah, I was suffering bad, bad. I was really excited when I first headed off for UCLA. I hopped on a plane. Landed in L.A.

Starry-eyed and realized I didn't have nowhere to live. I hadn't quite thought that part out yet, right? So what I did was, every day after class, I went to a different dorm room and I partied. Went to a different dorm room and partied every night. Party, party, party. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Dancing white to fit in. Hi, how are you? How are you doing? How are you? How are you? And crashed in a different dorm room every night. But they caught on to me.

So then I slept in the movie theater and they caught on to me. So then I got a brilliant idea to sleep in the girls' restroom at UCLA. They had those little couches, you know those little period couches? Those little, it's my time of the month, you might back up, I might choke you couches. I sleep in those. Now, the building where the speech team met had a lot of those couches. Kinsey Hall, built in 1929 with words of wisdom etched in stone over the doorway.

but I never read it. So I sneak in there and sleep, but I never got good rest, because I didn't want anybody to walk in on me. So I kind of slept with one eye open all night like... I didn't want some girl to walk in and say, "Suzanne, Suzanne, there's a Negroid in the women's restroom." Alert the authorities, right? I knew I needed somewhere to live, I needed a job, so I went to the classifies and I found an excellent opportunity. Seeking neat, clean college students to serve breakfast to the elderly in an upscale environment.

Beverly Hills Hancock Park adjacent the Kipling Hotel for your busy friendly happy retirement I waited tables some up here in the bay. I'm like, I gotta get this I caught the bus over there. It was almost as if Classical music was playing in my head as I passed luscious lawns and stunning mansions This was gonna be the next level of my life. We rode by a golf course people waved at me I was on the bus

But the bus went way, way past all that and I and I ended up in a nasty area with trash on the ground, heard air and gunshots. Police helicopter, a little scroungy dog ran by. Looks like he gave me the finger. He gave me the finger with a paw. I stepped off the bus and there was the Kipling in all its non-fantasticness. I walked into the lobby

And I was immediately met by the scent of urine and log cabin syrup. Kind of nasty, but kind of sweet. I went through the interview. It went well. They told me they'd let me know. They did let me know. I got it. Serving breakfast to the elderly for room and board. Now, every day after you finish your shift, you have to kind of rush through the lobby because the old folks will be camped out in the lobby and they try to capture you with a long-ass boring story. The kind...

The kind that destroys your soul. The kind that, while you're listening, you go, am I dying as I'm listening to this? Did you just reference Custer? How long have you been on the planet? So you had to do this little move where you kind of jog through the lobby and point your watch like, I got things to do. I got things to do. But sometimes I just slowed down and I got to know some of them. I got to know this one old guy named George. One day he was standing in the dining room.

You know, kind of Catskills-type dining room with a green linoleum floor and cheap curtains that wanted to be much nicer. And George, standing there five foot two with his little dead finger.

He's like, Don, Don, hold on just a second. I want to talk to you for a second. Don, I want to talk to you. I have a situation. You're a smart guy. You serve me my breakfast each morning. I want to know if you think what I'm thinking about doing is a good idea. Okay, Don, okay, look over here, okay? Look right there. That's my seat. Every day, breakfast, lunch, dinner, everybody knows that that's my seat. But now there's this new guy, this new guy, old guy. He's just, just,

plops in my seat. He just plops. He plops in my seat. He's giving me the spilkas, this guy. This guy's giving me the spilkas, okay? I'm thinking about doing something. I want to know if you think it's a good idea, okay? I'm thinking of going up behind him and stabbing him in the back of the head with a fork. You think that's a good idea? To stab him in the back of the head with a fork. You think that's... Look at him. Watch him. Watch the sound of... Watch him chew. Watch him chew. Watch him chew.

I hate that guy. I'm too old for this. I'm 92 years old, okay? My wife died 25 years ago. Every night I say my prayers. I say, dear God, when I wake up, please let me be dead. I wake up, damn it, still alive. So how are things going for you?

I said, "It's going pretty good, George, but I'm having a hard time staying in school financially, and I really just want to be a comedian." He said, "You could do that. You could go to school and be a comedian. You know, people can make it through anything. People can do anything. They're resilient. Trust me. I've been through a lot. I've been through a lot." Let me tell you a story, Don, okay? I used to live overseas. And one day, they marched into our area, and they say that we're going to be prisoners of war.

We're like, okay, we're going to be prisoners of war, right? But what they did, Don, is they took us to this camp. And then they tell us that we're just going to be held. Don, you see these numbers on my arm right here? He pointed to some numbers tattooed on his forearm. They put those on me there. And so one day, a soldier walks in dressed in all black. And he says, it's time to take a shower.

Now we knew some folks that headed off to these showers. We don't quite remember seeing them again. Didn't know if they were transferred. Confusing. But we changed clothes. We get in line. It's almost my group's turn to walk inside these showers. And Allied soldiers, British, American, I don't know, they show up and pop, pop, pop. They shoot the guys in the black. They shoot the SS guys in the black. And they freed us.

And that's why you'll never hear me say an ill word about a soldier that's fighting for good. They try to say all soldiers are murderers. They're all killers. But sometimes you got to do that. Sometimes you got to fight. When someone's trying to wipe out your entire culture, you got to fight. You better fight. You got to fight, Don. But you don't have time to listen to all that stuff. You're real busy and you got a lot to do. I said, that's okay, George. He said, no.

Don, did I ever tell you, had a beautiful wife? She was beautiful! She had this song, well I ain't sing it to her. I sing this song to her, it go, da da da da. Hold on, I got it, hold on. Da da da da. You are most beautiful girl in the whole wide world. You are beautiful girl. Da da da da. It's a short song, I made it up. But Don, I tell you,

I've lived a good life. I treat people well. I keep my word. That's a big thing. You got to keep your word. You got to keep your word, Don. But I've lived too damn long. 92 years old. Every night I still say my prayers. Dear God, when I wake up, let me be dead. I wake up, damn it, still here. And you know what, Don? You know what they still give me? I'm 92. You know what they still give me? My driver's license. You better watch out for me. I'll run you right down. I'll run you right down, Don.

I lived and worked at the Kipling for five years, serving breakfast to the elderly and they served me stories. I left the Kipling and things went very, very well for me. Many, many years later, I got a big project, working with a huge star. Her name rhymes with Moprah.

I wanted to remember being hungry because things were going so well. I wanted to remember being really hungry. So what I did, I swear to God, I went back to UCLA to the very building where I used to sleep in the girls' restroom. The very building. While standing outside, I looked up and I finally looked at those words of wisdom that were etched in stone over the doorway. They say, nothing is too wonderful to be true.

It's a quote from a scientist, Faraday. Nothing is too wonderful to be true. And guess what's etched in stone over the doorway of the Kipling Hotel? Not that. I think it's scratched in with a butcher knife and says something like, lick my n****s or something like that. Nothing is too wonderful to be true. It could be my old buddy George, who grew to 92 and beat the Nazis. He beat the Nazis. And finally, happily, woke up dead.

Or you could be me, who grew up in Oakland, headed off to college, was homeless for a while but battled through and ended up here with you on this wonderful night. Or something like that. Out, out, out.

Don Reed. That story was performed at Snap Judgment Live in San Francisco by Don Reed. Music performed by the Snap Judgment players Alex Mandel, David Grant, and Tim Frick. See the full video of this performance in all of its Technicolor glory, along with countless other amazing performances of Snap on our YouTube channel, Snap Judgment Films.

It's happened. It's happened. Now, storytelling, it is powerful. Storytelling can change lives. If you want to change someone's life right now, snatch up their phone from their clammy hands. Teach them how to get the Snap Judgment podcast. Press the buttons for them, because if you don't do it, they simply won't know.

Alternatively, you can hand your phone to a random 10-year-old and tell them you need more life-changing stories. And would they please help you get the Snap Judgment podcast? Each one, save one. That's community. Snap is brought to you by the team that would never, ever, never leave dirty dishes in the sink or, God forbid, leave the toilet seat up. No, this team would never contemplate such madness ever.

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And this is not the news. No way is this the news. In fact, you can invite all your drunken friends to your house for a party when your roommate's out of town. Even invite them to sleep it off in his bed and then act like you don't know what happened. When he comes back from a ski weekend, maybe some robbers broke in and ate up all his cereal and dirtied up all his sheets and drew dirty pictures on his wall. But you didn't notice because you were watching TV.

You could do that. You could do that. And you would still not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is PRX.