Bubbalito, I Am Here!

You know life has taken an unexpected detour when selling plasma starts to sound like a wise financial move. Back in 2009, in my mid-20s, I found myself in an “upscale” little town just outside Charlotte, North Carolina.

Before that, I was in Arizona, living with my stepbrother, just a couple of years after moving back from Canada—a classic “met a Canadian girl online” situation (long story). I’d been working at RadioShack right after the 2008 collapse, trying to figure out my next steps. I had talent in technology, but every job that made sense wanted a decade of experience in languages or practices that had barely existed for three. Minor hurdles.

I figured North Carolina might offer more opportunities. Eric, a guy who’d moved out from Arizona to help start a new car dealership, took one bedroom in the two-bedroom apartment. My dad (who was also there to help start the dealership) took the other, leaving me with the couch. Thankfully, Dad pulled a few strings and got me on board at the dealership as the resident computer monkey. I made $327.68 a week—not exactly a fortune, but enough to keep the Wi-Fi running and the ramen flowing.

Then my dad moved out to live with his new girlfriend, leaving me to take over a lease I couldn’t afford. I scrambled to find myself a one-bedroom place. “Sad” is the most generous description I can offer for it, given that I owned almost nothing. Still, it was an upgrade from the alternative, and that’s where the real story begins.

One afternoon, staring at my bank account and trying to calculate how many packs of ramen I could eat in a week, I decided to ask Tom, the boss, if there was any extra work I could pick up.

“Any chance I could get more hours?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

Tom, with all the wisdom of a seasoned car dealer, peered at me over his glasses. “Why don’t you sell your plasma?”

Ah yes, the pinnacle of career advancement—monetizing bodily fluids. I chuckled nervously. “Not exactly Plan A… Maybe I could clean?”

He scratched his chin. “There’s a new salesman moving into town. Needs a place to stay. You could rent him a room.”

I thought about my sparsely furnished apartment—“sparsely” being generous. I had an Xbox, an old gaming PC, and a chair I’d borrowed from work. “I don’t even have furniture,” I admitted. “Plus, it’s a one-bedroom.”

Tom shrugged like he’d heard worse excuses. “He won’t mind.”

Weeks went by. Then one evening, there was a knock at the door. When I opened it, a man straight out of a 1980s vacation movie stood there. Portly, mid-60s, full mustache, wearing yellow swimming trunks, a tank top, and sandals. Despite the cool autumn air, he was sweating like he’d just run a marathon. In one hand, he held a big brown suitcase. Tucked under his other arm was a neon green salad bowl roughly the size of a truck tire.

“Bubbalito, I am here!” he announced, beaming.

Several thoughts immediately went through my mind:

1. Is he selling Tupperware?
2. What’s a Bubbalito?
3. This is either a Craigslist mistake of the beginning of a Dateline episode

“Uh, I think you’ve got the wrong apartment,” I stammered.

He shook his head, grinning. “No mistake! You are Bubbalito! I’m Bojko!”

Of course his name was Bojko.

Slowly, like that Windows update you can’t cancel, it hit me. This was Tom’s salesman—the one who “wouldn’t mind” my lack of furniture or space. Apparently, declining the roommate offer hadn’t been as final as I thought.

“But I don’t have room,” I protested, panic setting in.

He waved it off like it was nothing. “No problem! I sleep anywhere.”

And with that, Bojko stepped inside, his neon green salad bowl politely pushing me out of the way in the most determined invasion of space possible.

Standing there, watching this man march into my apartment as if he belonged, I wondered how my life had come to this—negotiating living arrangements with someone who looked like he’d wandered out of a Serbian summer camp, wielding a salad bowl like it was his most prized possession.

And somehow—still a mystery to me—I decided to give him the bedroom.

“You can take the bedroom,” I said. “I’ll set up in the living room.”

He beamed at me. “Thank you, Bubbalito!”

And with that, I dragged my air mattress into the living room, which now doubled as my bedroom, dining area, and escape from whatever Bojko was up to in my bedroom.

Over the next few days, I learned several things about my new “roommate”:

• He was a budget vegan. Not the Instagram kind with kale smoothies—he subsisted almost entirely on canned vegetables and pickled foods, consumed straight from the jar. The apartment soon began to smell like someone had exorcised the ghost of a Vlasic pickle factory.
• He paid rent in irregular installments of crumpled bills—mostly fives and ones, like he’d been holding up vending machines across town. The payments were sporadic at best, but rent’s rent, and I appreciated what he could do.
• He was a self-styled “furniture collector.” One evening, he triumphantly dragged in a pleather sofa he’d found by a dumpster. “Look! Furniture!” he exclaimed. I’m still convinced it was part sofa, part crime scene. But it was an upgrade from the floor, and I ended up sleeping on it.

Living with Bojko was like being part of an experimental theater production where I wasn’t sure if I was the lead or an unsuspecting extra. He spent his evenings in the bedroom, blasting unidentifiable music and watching foreign soap operas dubbed in Russian. Meanwhile, I tried to drown out the surreal soundtrack of my life with Guitar Hero. Sometimes, I even won—against the game, not the situation. It was peak bachelorhood, the kind they don’t show in movies anymore. Absurd as it was, Bojko never failed to add a new layer of chaos to my life.

A few days after he’d moved in, I was sitting in my borrowed office chair, working at the tiny built-in desk next to the hallway, deep in thought. The door opened behind me, but I barely noticed—Bojko had returned from the dealership. Without a word or even a preamble, he walked over and, before I could turn around, placed his hands on my shoulders.

What followed was the most unexpectedly expert shoulder massage I’d ever received.

I froze. Not because it wasn’t good—it was phenomenal—but because it was also incredibly frightening. My setup didn’t exactly leave me much room to escape, either. On one side, I had my Rock Band drums; on the other, a precariously balanced TV tray with a half-eaten bowl of ramen (pork). I was boxed in, both physically and emotionally, trying to decide if I should thank him or call the police.

“You know, Bubbalito,” Bojko said, his voice taking on a tone that can only be described as too close. “You are a good-looking young man.”

“Uh… thanks?” I replied, as casually as one can when receiving an unsolicited massage from an Eastern European dressed like middle management.

He leaned in, his breath now uncomfortably close to my ear. “You remind me of my friend, Vuk.”

I’m not sure how to process being compared to a man named Vuk, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it.

“Back in Serbia,” Bojko continued, his fingers working some kind of dark Eastern European massage magic, “Vuk and I would travel up and down the Adriatic Sea, spending summers… very popular with the local women. They paid us for… companionship.”

The rhythm of his story didn’t quite match the rhythm of his hands on my shoulders, which were somehow both kneading out a knot I hadn’t known I had and sending me deeper into a psychological knot I wasn’t sure I could untangle.

“So… what exactly did they pay for?” I asked, regretting the question as soon as it left my mouth.

He grinned, leaning in even closer, as if sharing a state secret. “Friendship, Bubbalito. Very close friendship.”

At this point, I was torn between the sheer absurdity of the situation and the very real question of whether I was about to receive a business proposition or… something else entirely. I was also starting to wonder if he’d ever stop massaging or if this was my life now—trapped forever between ramen and Rock Band, at the mercy of Bojko and his never-ending stories of Eastern European adventure.

Finally, he gave my shoulders a final, surprisingly delicate pat, and straightened up. “You could do something like that, Bubbalito,” he said, winking in a way that was both reassuring and unsettling.

With that, he sauntered off to the kitchen, presumably to make his usual dinner of canned spinach and corn, leaving me to contemplate not only the massage but the strange and winding road that had brought me to this moment in life.

This wasn’t just a weird day. No, this was the beginning of something bigger. My life had officially taken a detour into the kind of surreal territory they make documentaries about—the kind with dramatic voiceovers and slow pans over your confused, unshaven face as you try to explain how you ended up sharing your life with a man who apparently saw furniture as optional and shoulder massages as mandatory.

And there’s still the time he showed me his skull, or the day he revealed where a jalapeño seed had ended up. Those tales, however, will have to wait.

The Chronicles of Bojko will continue.