My Very Worst Roommate was a girl I met on Craigslist. At first “Liz” seemed super cool and normal. I should have been concerned the first night she asked me to borrow $20 for gas. I said “sure.” The next day she comes home and she has no car. Liz said it won’t start and she thinks it ran out of gas. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to start problems.
Liz told me she had a nephew, who she loved and would be over a lot. I found out after she moved in that this nephew was actually her son, and her ex-boyfriend was keeping her from him and refusing to let her see him. I found out later that MVWR made no effort to see her son in three months. One day Liz decides to go and kidnap her son. This was about a month after she moved in. This resulted in Liz getting 50/50 custody.
About a month and a half later, about seven cops came to our house. Apparently Liz got a DUI a year before and never paid her fines and they were looking for her. Her dad found out, and took back the car he bought her and that’s why she actually had no car.
The entire time we lived together Liz had a hard time paying bills, even though she made more than I did. The solution for her was I would give her my half of the money for bills and she would pay them and give me the receipts. That was working at first. She gave me all the receipts and everything was well documented until about 3 months later when I got a call from the rental agency saying they realized we were three months behind in rent (the last month I paid is the last payment they got there.) Liz admitted she just kept the money and was forging receipts and was just going to move out and get her own place. I sued her and won, but never saw a penny of the money. There are a lot of other things that were awful about this living situation, but that would be a book I’d have to write. She was just bad. I was only 19 at the time. After that, I grew a backbone, which I guess is the good thing that came from it.
When I was young, I shared a house with a few friends. Our worst roommate was a drifter named Todd. He was bone thin and had hair like Jesus. He carried all of his belongings in a bulky backpack. Except for his bongo drums, which he kept tied around his neck with a leather thong. Because he didn’t have a job, he had nothing better to do than get stoned, put on a Yes album, and invite other drifters over for a drum circle. They played the stereo at full volume so they could hear it over the drums. The windows shuddered, the floor vibrated and the room stank of a dozen homeless men. They had drug-induced stamina and could play all night.
Todd was obsessed with the zodiac and mentioned it as often as possible. It was the lens through which he viewed every social interaction, from meeting a woman at a bar to purchasing a soda at Kwik Mart, to having a conversation about paying a little rent once in awhile. The first time he met me, he asked my birthday. When I answered, he sneered, “I hate Libras.” From that moment forward, he viewed me with eyes narrowed in suspicion.
Todd enjoyed dropping acid in the morning. When everyone else was getting ready for work or enjoying a cup of coffee, he’d sit on the living room floor, listlessly petting his bongo drum with his mouth hanging open. During one such trip, my roommate and I made the mistake of trying to speak to him about a housekeeping matter (late bill). He cried that we were sending off bad vibes and insisted that he could see our black, nasty auras swirling all around the room. He pulled frantically at his Jesus hair and said, “Uh oh. Now you’ve done it. I am having a bad trip.” He backed away from us, his dilated eyes shining with terror. “Get away from me, Libra!” He diverted all conversations about rent and utilities in this manner.
Todd was always gone, in one way or another, when conversations about money were afoot. But when a meal was prepared, he could sense it from miles away. He would skulk around the sidelines of the kitchen, rubbing his stomach and discussing his acute case of munchies. If I didn’t offer him a plate, he sulked and complained that Libras were bastards.
Todd also had plenty of homeless, damaged friends that he invited to live in the house. There was a leering, thick-necked giant with a bald head and a foot long beard. He thought I was cute and told me with stories that were geared to impress. For example, he told me that he had acquired some rohypnol (aka the date rape drug) and had gone downtown to the bars. After a few hours of drinking, he got bored and tried to get high off of the rohypnol. He dosed himself, blacked out immediately, and woke up the next morning in a municipal flowerbed. I could only be thankful that he was too dull-witted to follow through with his horrible plan. Because I couldn’t really get away from him, I told him he was a jackass and went upstairs to bed. Later, he scared the crap out of me by breaking into my room and trying to cuddle with my unconscious body.
There was also a young hippie who had a wolf for a pet. Of course he named her Luna. Luna was not a domesticated animal. She was lanky, she was clever, and she had a set of razor sharp fangs set in a jawbone as long as my forearm. She put up with being walked on a hemp leash and tied to a park bench, but Luna was only biding her time. The wolf and her owner started squatting at our house on invitation from Todd. “Why do you have this animal?” I asked. “You don’t even have a home! How are you going to take care of her? Can’t you tell she thinks you’re an asshole and wants to eat you?” Todd rose up, his eyes dilated, his hair swishing around, his skinny finger poking in my face. “How dare you talk to one of my friends like that,” he screamed. “You are so close-minded!” A few days later, he banned Luna from the house himself because she had taken a nice acrid wolf piss on his backpack.
Another awful Todd friend was a popular downtown begger. He could always be found sitting on a bench downtown, strumming random chords and taking handouts. He had a rough mane of red hair, a bushy beard, and a heavy leather jacket. Todd invited him to the house, and he soon became a regular. This one also thought I was cute and would not accept no for an answer. After a particularly frightening encounter with him, I fled the house. For days, I either slept in a booth at the restaurant where I worked or at my boyfriend’s place because I was scared to go home.
At last, I was able to talk to my other roommates. We voted to ban the creep from our house. Todd thought this was highly unfair. He discredited me, saying that I had probably given his friend mixed signals since that was a classic Libra trait. It was all I could do not to strangle him and smash his bongo drums over his head. It was not long after this incident that we jettisoned Todd. He had never paid rent or utilities, and his bongos wore on everybody’s nerves. Nobody cared for his choice of company. I saw him a few summers ago. It had been a decade since we lived together. I was rummaging through a bin of nails in front of a hardware store when he approached me. His Jesus hair was shorter, but his face was unmistakable. He looked at me hard, but he didn’t remember me. “You have great legs,” he said. “I’m a Libra,” I replied.
In first year university, I was paired up with three other girls.
While two were decent, if not a little messy, Mel was a disaster. She
never seemed to have any class or work, and spent most her time
tanning, drinking, partying loudly, watching “Bewitched” on her computer
in the common room, shopping for discount Juicy Couture, eating
McDonalds, playing Britney Spear’s “Womanizer” ad nauseum, and being a
general laze-about.
She never did the dishes, but instead would stash
her dirty cutlery in her room, depriving the other housemates of
dishes and glasses. Her blankets, shoes, hair accesories, hair balls
etc would be left scattered around the common room. Her own bedroom was an
utter disaster, and she would often bring over loud, drunken friends
at odd hours.
She left, mid-semester, to go on a trip to Florida and
returned with a Chihuahua puppy. Our apartment had a strict no pets
policy, and the other roommates were a little appalled she would bring
home a pet without telling anyone. The dog was untrained, scared
stupid by loud noises and she would use our dishes to feed it kibble,
not washing the smell of oily dog food off before dumping them off in
the sink for us to clean.
When we confronted her about the dog and the
lack of responsibilities on her part, she had a fit and said we didn’t
get her, that her dogs were the only creatures who truly loved and
understood her, and her awful childhood left her with such a void in
her life only a bug-eyed Chihuahua could fill it. Also, she wanted to
leave the school so the dog was a ploy to get kicked out of residence
without having to break her contract and pay a fine, although she (and
by she, I mean her parents) would have to pay a fee for having the dog
in the first place. Luckily by second semester she was gone and a nice
french girl had replaced her.
Soon after I moved into a townhouse with My Very Worst Roommate , ‘Rose’ took a second job at a nearby restaurant for some extra money. Her new coworkers were into drugs and Rose had always been keen to fit in. Things went downhill pretty quickly from what had promised to be a good situation.
Because our house was very close to the restaurant, it became the favored post-shift hangout for she and her coworkers, as many were too messed up on drugs or alcohol to drive home. That’s not my thing AT ALL, but they weren’t terribly disruptive and I would rather they hung out at our house for a while than drive intoxicated, so I let them be. Then our house stopped being a sober-up crash pad and developed into the after-party that kept ’Lisa’ (our third roommate) and me up on weekday nights. I woke up in the morning to the smell of weed and sex noises. Two of her friends were having sex on our couch at 6 a.m. I had to shout at them from the stairwell that I was coming downstairs and they needed to pull themselves together. They weren’t even ashamed, and were even nervy enough to mock me for being rude and jealous.
Soon after Rose attempted to send one of her ‘sick’ (too drunk/high to function at work) male coworkers to our house. Lisa and I told her we wouldn’t open the door for this intoxicated stranger when she wasn’t here to watch him. We argued about it for a while, with her getting angrier at us for not caving, and then finally saying ‘Fine, next time I’ll just give him the key!’ I told her that she absolutely would not, and had to stop myself from adding that I wouldn’t hesitate to call the police. After that, I left most of the discussions with her to Lisa because my temper had grown too short.
Not long after, I woke up on a Thursday morning to find a random guy on our couch. It was still early, so I figured the guy would clear out soon enough. I was wrong – when I finished doing schoolwork and went back downstairs at 4 p.m., he was still asleep on the couch. Rose was gone. Lisa came home around that time, and while we were talking about what to do with him, the guy woke up, turned the TV on, and wandered into the kitchen to look for food! He nodded a casual ‘hey’ at us and made way for the fridge. When I asked him, “Are you aware it’s 4 p.m. and you’re in someone else’s house? Do you think that’s OK?” he just shrugged. We immediately kicked him out. When Lisa told her that she absolutely couldn’t leave anyone unattended in the house and had to explain to her friends that our hospitality had a 10 a.m. expiration, she laughed it off, saying ‘That wouldn’t bother me if it was one of your friends,’ which is both patently untrue and completely irrelevant. Lisa and I were livid, but everything we said to Rose rolled off her back or poked her into a rage that made living with her miserable, so we let a lot of things go.
We shared a bathroom and she was a stickler for cleanliness, which was fine. What was odd, though, was her refusal to allow anything on the countertops – even the handsoap. If I left so much as a hairbrush on the counter, I would come home to find it flung into my room. What she left, however, was completely acceptable – she’d fix herself up before going out and leave her things everywhere. If I so much as moved something, she would flip and accuse me of using her expensive toiletries. It got to the point where she took EVERYTHING of hers out of the bathroom and kept it in her room. She was hypocritical like this about everything – would flip over a smudge of flour I’d missed wiping down the counters, but leave the remains of an explosion fossilizing in the microwave for three weeks; lose it over someone leaving a dish in the sink for more than twenty minutes, but spill a glass of milk on the carpet and not clean it up before she left for the weekend, leaving our house reeking while Lisa and I ripped everything apart tried to figure out what smelled so terrible.
Rose’s paranoia that we were stealing her things got worse. She accused me of stealing her hairspray and Keurig coffee cups and demanded I replace them. I don’t drink coffee and had only used her hairspray once or twice (always with her permission) and wasn’t going to replace them – I offered her $5 for my limited use of the hairspray, thinking that would placate her. She called me a thief and a liar and again demanded I replace the things I ‘took’. I think she no longer had the money to finance expensive habits like $25 cans of hairspray and Keurig cups, especially when all her money seemed to be going to drugs, and was trying to wring them out of me. She’d been fired from her day job for showing up clearly messed up on something, and now the ‘extra money’ from waiting tables was her only income. I withdrew my $5 best offer.
The final straw was rent. Lisa approached Rose for her share of the rent and was told she wouldn’t have it until the end of the weekend, and would just deliver it herself and pay the late charge. Two weeks later there’s a notice in our mailbox, we have seven days to pay up or get out. Lisa and I panicked, tried to get a hold of Rose to see what had happened to her rent. Somehow Rose turned it around to Lisa and I being ‘disrespectful’ to her. She threatened to move out, we called her bluff and told her she was welcome to. As a parting gift she left the taps in the house on while Lisa and I were out to run up our water bill.
December 19th,2011
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12 Comments
When one of my housemates had to move interstate, my remaining housemate had a close friend, Bill, who was keen to take his place. I had my reservations, as his tight-arse reputation preceded him. But he seemed preferable to an unknown.
Upon moving in, a number of minor incidents began unfolding, including:
- A complete adversity to cleaning, leading to a stink cloud encompassing his bedroom so thick you could do backstroke through it.
- Rotating between a total of two meals when it was his turn to cook.
- Mysterious white stains found on the couch following a night out (no, he did not have company).
- Leaving a 1kg block of cheese in direct 35°C sunlight for an entire day, which was returned to the fridge for consumption.
- After said block of cheese ended up in his bed overnight to teach him a lesson, the same block found its way back in the fridge the following morning, seemingly ready for consumption once more.
Enough to make you shake your head and laugh, but things you tend to expect having shared with various housemates in the past. This all escalated however when the other housemate moved out, and we found a new fun and attractive girl to move in.
I often found myself waking in the middle of the night to her yelling at him to get out of her room, after he’d crawled into her bed while she was asleep. As creepy and unfair as this was for her, this paled in comparison to the day the household was abruptly disbanded. One Sunday, Bill returned home at about 6 a.m. following a drug fueled bender at a music festival.
That Monday night, we returned home from work to find Bill on the couch having spent the day at home by himself, behaving as though nothing other than his almighty hangover was amiss. Until our new housemate went to her room to find belongings knocked about, picture frames smashed with shattered glass over the floor, her underwear draw strewn across the room and her covers pulled back with a load of white sticky mess sprayed across her mattress. One messed up individual.
