I actually have two MVWRs. The first was from my freshman year in college. I had told this girl, N, that I would live with her after having the same math tutor. I should have known it was going to be bad when my parents were taking us out to lunch, N was on her phone talking about getting enough bail money to get her boyfriend out of jail (I am probably the most naive, sheltered person — at least I was freshman year — ever, but I don’t know how my parents left knowing who I was living with). We got to know each other and even though we were from very different backgrounds we got along fine. Then after Christmas break, her boyfriend got out of jail. That’s when he decided to live with us, even though we were in a one room dorm and it was against the rules. I was too shy and scared of them to say anything, so he moved in. Because he had just gotten out of jail (for stabbing someone in the neck!) he didn’t sleep well and would often scream in his sleep. That was when they even slept; they often had sex with me in the room.

When he had to go back home, she would call me incessantly because she was lonely and whine about why I wasn’t there to mope with. She even gave me a curfew to come back because she didn’t have any other friends. When her boyfriend was there, they would fight constantly, calling each other horrible names and hitting each other and then have really loud sex with me in the room. I would finally get up and leave. I lasted the whole school year and moved to another dorm the next summer. But that’s not the worst of the worst.

I moved to Australia last year with a friend and I knew one person from the summer camp I worked at. When T said she had two extra rooms in her house, we gladly moved in. My friend and I both immediately got jobs and went about starting a life. T started getting jealous about us honing in on her friends, so she started wild rumors about us, never invited us to their events, even though they specifically asked her to invite us. When we did go to parties where she was, she acted horrible to us. We were there during the awful brushfires and T decided she was going to start a clothing drive. She collected clothes from everyone and said she would drive them to the area affected by the fires. After doing this she ran around the house calling herself “Angelina Jolie” and “an amazing person.” But first she went through the clothes to see if she wanted to keep any of them (which she did) and then never donated them. They sat in our kitchen for months. When my other Australian roommate L finally moved them out of the way, she called him at work at shouted at him for touching “her stuff.” She finally donated it to the Salvation Army five months later.

Her room was disgusting, she kept all her dishes in there so we never had any, she threw temper tantrums constantly and then an hour later would try and hug us and say she loved us. We were going back to the States in July, so we told her at the end of may when we were leaving. And even though she knew we were leaving early from the lease, she acted surprised and expected us to pay our rent through the end of lease even though we wouldn’t be there. She refused to find another roommate and so we had to do it. Finally, she always complained she was broke even though she got paid $500 a week and her parents paid her rent, so when the refrigerator broke a week before we were set to leave, she asked us to help pay for a new one. Wow. Our friends in America don’t believe she actually exists.

I had a housemate that was dating an English professor at the college in our town. He must have made quite an impression with the girls because another friend of mind used to rave about how great he was. He was from Ireland or Wales and had a charming accent, etc. When my housemate called it off, the prof couldn’t take the rejection and started getting all dramatic. He called saying that he was dying, so when she went over to his place he said, “I knew you would come back to me.” When that little ploy didn’t work, he tried showing up on our porch raving drunk in the middle of and demanding to be let in. She ignored this and began entertaining a string of gentlemen callers that I started running into in the mornings in our kitchen. The house was an old wooden one, so it was pretty clear what they were doing late into the night. I moved out as soon as I could.

I found this posting that seemed too good to be true. It was five minutes from my work, allowed pets and it was $100 under my budget. I met the guy who has posted the listing and he seemed pretty decent. He was a student and it sounded like it would be a quiet house, with not much partying going on. The first month went fine, with only minor incidents. However, as time progressed, things got really bad. As I got to know my fellow housemates, the drama just seemed to explode. One of the housemates was a girl who worked as a personal trainer, but turned out to be doing some stripping on the side. I normally wouldn’t be bothered by that, but she was so inconsiderate of everyone else that I lost any respect for her. She had a cat that she took very poor care of. I have two cats of my own and she blamed my cat for peeing all over the place, even though it was her cat. She never cleaned its litter box and it took her several weeks to take it into to vet to get care for a urinary tract infection.

I work with animals for a living and it pained me to see this. She would also be gone for four days out of the week due to her stripping job and the cat would be left in her room, without food or water. I would sneak into her room to take care of it and let it out of her hell-hole of a room. She would repeatedly clog the toilet and wouldn’t unclog it. She wouldn’t buy toilet paper, even though we had made it perfectly clear we would take turns supplying such communal items. She even wiped her ass on my hand towel, denied it and then blamed it on me because I had left it out (hanging on the towel rod). The entire time I lived there, I saw her do dishes once, even though she probably used the most dishes out of anyone.

This same girl also decided to take in another girl she “worked” with, telling us that it would only be a few weeks. This girl would hog the bathroom for hours, blasted awful music at 3am on a Tuesday and she would leave used pregnancy tests on the kitchen counter. After leaving the bathroom, the tub would be filled with brownish water and tons of floating little curly hairs. Yum yum. I left three months into a year lease. The last I heard, the girl who was only supposed to be there for a few weeks had moved into my old room with a guy she’d been dating for three weeks.

My freshman year roomate was an ultra-religious Korean guy named Paul. At first we got along by ignoring each other, but as I spent more time in my dorm room doing work, I was exposed to more of his peculiar tendencies. He only listened to two types of music: Christian rock, which sounded like Third Eye Blind only all the lyrics were about Jesus and hard-core Korean rap, which sounded exactly like American rap, except everything’s in Korean besides the occasional “motherfucker.”  He would watch one of the Rush Hour movies over and over again, but not the whole movie. Just the same 4-minute sequence where Chris Tucker almost falls off a building. Over and over again. Every night.

Then things got weirder. I would come back to my room when the weather was still warm, to find him in nothing but boxers and the thermostat cranked up past 80 degrees. He sang along to his music in a high falsetto. He’d leave his laptop open with pictures of him and other Korean guys hugging, wearing very little clothes. But at the same time, he always had his Bible on his desk, and updated his AIM profile to declare that he “hated fags.” As someone with several gay relatives, I’m fine with homosexuality, but people who have their true nature suppressed and distorted by religion are all but insane. I avoided my dorm as much as I could, but one night, everything collided into a mess.

I came back to my dorm room in a hurry at around 9 PM on a Thursday and finding the door unlocked, walked right inside. Paul was in the sink area, wearing nothing but boxers as usual. As I walked in, I looked ahead and saw a completely naked guy sitting on his bed, feet propped up like he was resting. A moment of utterly awkward silence. I quickly grabbed shoved my stuff into my backpack, as the other guy hopped up and struggled into his pants. As I made a hasty exit, I could hear the other kid say, “So Paul… need uh, any more help with your, uh, Comp Sci?” Comp Sci my ass.

During my freshman year in college, I was assigned a random roommate, B, who had supposedly been matched with me based on a compatibility quiz. We were fine for a while — until B started telling me about her obsession with Peter Pan. She told me that she believed that he would come for her some day, and that she could jump out of the window and be rescued by Tinkerbell. As if this craziness weren’t sufficient, she then began leaving out all sorts of food, which, naturally, began to rot and stink. She left a tub of olives in vinegar on a lamp, which warmed them and sent rotting vinegar fumes into the air. To compound this, B decided to have cyber sex with her boyfriend–during finals. At four o’clock in the morning. While I was in the room, awake, because of her loud and throaty promises to her boyfriend that she would swallow. Mmmmm. But this girl wasn’t even My Very, Very Worst Roommate. That honor goes to another girl.

To be continued…

I was moved into the freshman dorms with a randomly assigned roommate, a quiet blonde girl who had transferred to the school. For a few weeks, nothing of note happened, except she started smoking in the dorm room. I hated it, but other than mention to her once that it bothered me, I was too nice to do anything about it. I became accustomed to coming home every day to my room which reeked of smoke, although I was a non-smoker. Then the pictures started. First it was just a simple pencil drawing of a mushroom above her bed. A few days later, a watercolored painting of the mushroom appeared, in which it had partially melted into the grass. I complimented her on her artistic talent and went about my business. A few days thereafter, a new painting appeared. It was of the same mushroom, but now it had melted into a boiling mass. Then one of a mushroom with people standing around it. Okay. Then a mushroom melting with screaming people standing around it. In the next picture, the people had begun to melt along with the mushroom.

In the next picture, the people were screaming and melted tortured faces were hanging from the mushroom. They kept coming. At first, they were just next to her bed. Within a few weeks, they encompassed all the walls, then the ceiling. Then they were hanging from the dressers, mine as well as hers, the desks, my bed, the door. The entire room, from floor to ceiling was covered in hundreds of pictures of screaming tortured souls, with blood and intestines and brain matter dripping from them, each one somewhere featuring a mushroom. Eventually these pictures were covered with more pictures since there was no wall or ceiling space left. These new pictures featured male genitalia, usually mutilated or on fire. I was 17, a virgin, had never tried drugs of any kind and was a fairly conservative practicing Jew. Having never seen an actual penis, these pictures seriously bothered me. Nowhere in the dorms policy did it say anything about artwork, so I simply ignored it, not knowing how to ask her not to hang pictures of melting penises on my bed.

Near the end of the first semester in a two semester year, I was diligently studying for my finals. I had two finals on Friday morning and went to bed early Thursday night having studied all day and most of the previous week, during which I’d barely had time to sleep. I awoke at 4 a.m. with a naked man’s ass pressed to my faced. As in, my nose was actually inside of his crack and I couldn’t breathe. I kicked and screamed, and the man fell laughing to the floor. I looked over in the darkness to discover my roommate, naked on the floor, involved in a threesome with two other men I’d never seen, while the third I’d thrown off of myself was lying on the floor next to them, naked, laughing like a madman. Always being entirely too nice for my own good, I picked up my pillow and blanket, gingerly stepped around the orgy on the floor of my tiny bedroom and slept in the common hallway that night.

Interestingly enough, I never saw the roommate again. For the following two days, I saw she’d been there, like her stuff had moved, a drawer was opened or closed, but she was never around when I was in the room. On the third day I came home and the room was empty. Her bedding was gone, her dresser was empty, and the hundreds of pictures, as well as the tape that held them to the walls and ceiling were gone. The only thing I had left of her was a simple sketch of a melting mushroom, that had one day appeared on the back of my Calculus notebook when I’d left it sitting on my desk.

I should have known how things would turn out when my roommate stole my alarm clock soon after moving in.

I awoke one morning with a terrible headache and a familiar, unpleasant smell in the air. After going back to sleep for a while I realized that the smell was that of the hallway in my high school where they chemistry labs were housed. It was the smell of the gas from the bunson burners. I then walked out into the kitchen where I promptly tripped over my roommate who, having apparently stumbled into the apartment snot-slinging drunk the night before, had turned on the stove just prior to passing out, face down on the kitchen floor. I immediately turned off the stove, opened every window and kicked my roommate in the leg for good measure while I imagined a number of Backdraft-like scenarios in which I flip a light switch and then I’m consumed by a fucking fireball.

On another occasion my roommate stumbled in at around 3 a.m. with an unfortunate house guest who was about to find herself the victim of the sexual inadequacies of a mustache-bearing, tight pants-wearing, malnourished hipster with a substance abuse problem. They clamored about in next room to a soundtrack of “I’m 17 and I hate my dad” music for another half an hour or so. Just as I thought the worst was over, my roommate kicked my door open, flipped the light on and then jumped in horror to discover that I, the other inhabitant of this house, was in fact home and in my bed. He said to me “Oh, uh, sorry. I was just, uh… I was gonna’ ask you. Do you have a condom?” I paused for a moment to consider the implications of allowing this man-child to possibly pass on his unholy seed to the hapless slut in the next room and then replied “No.” I did not,in fact, have any condoms.

He never paid for his half of the bills, likely because every dollar he earned was either spent on the copious amounts of cocaine he snorted on a regular basis and/or used as a vehicle for said cocaine on its journey to his nasal cavity. After he didn’t pay his half the rent for three months, my landlord decided he would terminate the lease and start a new one in my name in a studio that had just opened up across the hall. I guess that’s a happy ending.

As a nice little parting gift, my roommate left his copy of Titty Fuckers 7 in my DVD player.

I was 19 and living in Arkansas in a great three bedroom duplex. My two other roommates moved out, one graduated and the other was getting married, so I had my best friend move in and another friend, who ended being My Very Worst Roommate. The duplex was laid out so that there was the living room in the front, followed by a kitchen, first room (MVWR’s), bathroom, bedroom, and my bedroom with bathroom in it.

The first night MVWR moves in, he gets into a phone argument with his girlfriend and smashes his phone to bits on the wall. He proceeds to quit his job, and can’t pay rent. That’s fine, it happens, whatever… Well one day, after my girlfriend and I finished getting it on in my room (my bed touched my other roommate’s wall), we were watching TV when my best friend walked in.

“I got home my door was locked and [MVWR] was inside,” he said.

It turned out MVWR was looking at porn on my best friend’s computer while listening to us having sex.

I wanted to keep this short but there was some more details, including him not paying full rent and dropping out of a lease two months into the one-year agreement, plus small claims court, and a threatening voicemail from him…

I have had a long list of MVWRs. I have very bad luck.

It all started at a summer camp when my first MVWD  had sex with her ”camp boyfriend” on my bed.

My first roommate in college spoke mostly Spanish and filled our dorm-sized fridge with wholesale club-sized tabasco sauce and pickles, which she ate with fried pork rinds.

My second roommate was great until she started going out with a bonafide sleazy greaseball of a rat. She was “so Christian” and would ”never have sex before marriage,” which I skeptically believed until I came into the room one day to them making out mostly naked under the covers. My covers.

All my my third roommate’s possessions –  clothes, bedding, book covers, everything – were hot pink. She never left the room and ate stinky frozen dinners all the time. Instead of doing her homework, she would browse yacht websites wondering loudly if she could get her Daddy to buy one for her.

Fourth roommate was an angel. I love her.

Fifth roommate clipped her toenails in the living room and left them there, even after I asked her not to. Her boyfriend drove four hours every weekend to come loudly spend time with her. She called him”BAY-bee,” a word she enunciated with a shriek every time she addressed him. She never cleaned and the kitchen sink was always full of her dirty dishes.

My sixth roommate is my husband. He’s a little messy but my tolerance has increased dramatically since this fail parade started.

We had been happily living with our house mate, a rather conservative Arab guy, for 4 months when we decided to get another housemate in the other spare room. The new one was gay and I talked to them both about acceptance and tolerance, as they were as far from each others views as possible.

The old housemate (who I’ll call “OH”) disliked the new one but put up with him, however the new one promptly fell for OH. Being gay myself I completely understood, but reminded our new housemate about choosing the correct time/place/person, all of which he was failing at. I also speak Arabic and had many chats with OH about not having to like a person in order to accept them. As they both knew I understood their points of view, the house was briefly harmonious.

The new house mate ended up climbing into OH’s bed while he was asleep at night and trying to seduce him. OH was traumatized and got me to install locks on the doors. The new housemate then began prostituting himself, using my house as the brothel. When we kicked him out, he then tried to sue us for not giving him two months notice. After he left, the house atmosphere was weird. There are some experiences a house mate relationship can’t recover from, so OH left us soon after.