Spoon Fed

I lived with my very worst roommate when I’d just graduated college and was working my first job. My close friend and I found a beautiful old house in the city that had reasonable rent, but three bedrooms. No one we knew needed a place, so we put up an ad on Craigslist. When we first met the prospective third roommate, she seemed like a reasonable person. She had a part-time job and seemed low-key and responsible. We decided she would be good to live with.

Soon after we moved in, she was fired from her job for not showing up. Her family took care of her rent and bills, so we weren’t at risk of being evicted, but as she was new to town and had few friends and suddenly no job, she was home nearly all the time and we soon found out she was a complete slob. She would use all the clean dishes in the house and leave stacks of dirty dishes in the living room and piled in the sink. She also was a total pack rat and filled the house with IKEA junk and boxes of clothes and giant cheap art reproductions, which dominated communal space for months until we finally pushed her enough to put most of it away.

Worse was when she gave her boyfriend a key to the house without telling us. He would come by the house unannounced even when she wasn’t there. She would volunteer details of their sex life, notably that they always showered after they had sex, so that whenever I heard the shower turning on when they were in her room I would shudder inwardly. One time as I was pulling out her dirty laundry she’d thrown in the washer so that I could use it, I found a jelly cock ring. They were the sort of unhappy couple that was always trying to overcompensate for their relationship problems with wild sexual experiments and overblown public affection.

In addition to being filthy, she was also completely opposed to us having company. We regularly had guests in our homes and she would complain about them stepping on the rugs she put in the living room. She would lock herself in her room whenever we had company and storm out haughtily to the kitchen and glare at us before whirling around back into her room. However, she and her friends would stay at home and drink, then cook a bunch of junk and leave a huge mess.  Memorably, one night they threw one of our Halloween pumpkins off the balcony, where it smashed into the birdfeeder.  She never cleaned it up, and instead let the pumpkin stink up the backyard as it decomposed over the year.

She spent huge amounts of her family’s money on orders from Amazon, groceries from Whole Foods and useless kitchen appliances. When I was in the process of moving out I was not been able to find the vast majority of my spoons. I asked her about them and she denied having any of them in her cesspool of a room. When she was away one day, I gathered my courage and went spoon-hunting in her room. I found quite a number of them, but I remember having a moment of clarity as I was on my hands and knees digging around the piles of clothes and Amazon.com boxes and unexpected sex toys.  The spoons were just not worth it.  I collected my dignity and left.