Two years ago, as a singer looking for a new band, I accepted an opportunity to join one two provinces away from me. The drummer of this band, whom we will call B, offered to be my roommate. I had wanted to stay in my hometown to work and save up money before coming, but being impatient to get things with the band rolling, he offered to cover the rent and the bills for the first couple of months until I got adjusted to the new city and had a new job. He failed to mention that his brother J, whom I’ve never met before, would be moving in with us. I trusted his judgement that we would all get along, which I soon realized was a huge mistake. J was uneducated, yet had many rants that he would repeat with little provocation about subjects he had little to no knowledge about and would often state his ill-informed opinions as fact. He was also a gym junkie, prone to outbursts of roid-rage.

B was never at the house, opting to stay at his girlfriend’s place, only coming home to do laundry once a week. J seemed unaware of the arrangement B had made with me about covering bills and constantly harassed me about money, starting on the second day after moving in. I shortly got a job and paid B back for my portion and the harassment ceased. I told him I wouldn’t split the cost of furniture, saying that it made more sense for us each to purchase different pieces, that way there would be no arguments as to who owns what down the road when we cease to be roommates. He told me that was a stupid idea, but proceeded to go to Ikea and just buy it all himself and would occasionally make comments about how I “never paid him back” for it.

I didn’t drive, but J owned a truck, so it was expected that he should take the recyclable items to the recycling centre (there was no pick-up service for this at the time), and he would let bags just sit in the kitchen for months, which made the whole house stink like rotten milk. He would never take the garbage out and I got tired of being the only one to do it, so I just stopped and that piled up as well, until an entire corner of the kitchen was taken over by garbage bags.The house we were renting was a strict non-smoking place, but he still smoked cigars, but did so beside the stove with the fan on. He would have friends over to drink all night on weeknights, blasting terrible hip hop music and smoking cigars with the very loud overhead fan on till about 2 or 3 am, even after I had complained to him that he was keeping me awake and I needed to be up very early for work on weekday mornings.

He would constantly threaten to kick me out if I complained about anything and acted as if he were the “man of the house” simply because only his name was on the lease. When a cousin of his needed a place to stay, he told me I was no longer welcome to live there. That cousin ended up flaking out on him, and I was told “you can still stay here.” Being short on cash and having no other prospects for new roomies, I stayed. Shortly after I noticed that instead of his cheap Ikea butterknives, he was using my expensive cutlery to “hot knife” (a mode of smoking weed, by sticking knives under a hot element on a stove, and pressing a chunk of weed between them, and inhaling the smoke as it burns), thus ruining them. He also had scratched up an expensive copper bottom frying pan by using a fork as a cooking utensil, which I had warned him not to do because it would ruin the Teflon coating. When I confronted him with this he went into roid-rage mode and started saying that because I didnt pay him for furniture, I deserved to have my things ruined. He kicked me out on the spot, and I had to move my things out that very night, despite having paid rent for the month. I moved back to my hometown and have never looked back.