One of my roommates from freshman year decided that she would hole herself up in our room in front of her computer all of first semester, talking to her boyfriend's best friend who, surprise, surprise, she was cheating on him with. She would stay up until 4AM online nearly every night and she had Calculus at 7:30 every morning. Guess how often she made it to class? But of course, when we asked how she did on tests, she "nailed it!" Then she ended up with a D in Calc...and who did she blame it on? Her morally repugnant (yes, she actually used that phrase), party-all-the-time roommates! So she moved out, but apparently her new roommate must have partied even harder because instead of getting a D, she had to drop the class.

She also invited people in groups of threes and fours who had traveled to visit her boyfriend to stay the weekend at our room. And by stay the weekend, I mean stay in our living room watching Celebrity Deathmatch all weekend. You take a train over 300 miles just to watch MTV all weekend in my room? Get a fucking hotel already, they're not that expensive between four people!

All the shit she gave us was almost forgiveable when you look at her mother. Her mom who's pushing 50 if not there already acts like she's 16. She tried to pick a fight with me on the last night that my roommate was in the room. Not just verbally, she was all trying to get in my face even, acting all threatening. Not that it worked, the half a foot height advantage that I have over her made the event comical more than anything.

Here is the story on my roommates:

The Sexual Roommate: She is my roommate who we are constantly trying to drag out of the bar by her hair so she doesn't end up going home with some random guy. Most often, we lose, and she shacks, coming home the next morning sometime around 7:30 am. Quite often, we will either find the door locked or walk in to find her having sex with some guy. We have grown used to hearing the phrase "Oh my god! Hang On!" come out of her mouth. She never went to class, and her schedule consisted of staying up playing on the computer until four AM (when she wasn't shacking) and then sleeping through all of her classes the next day. She is terribly messy. She leaves pizza boxes on the floor three days after she orders them. And they have food still in them!

The Drunk Roommate: Like Achan, I too have a Drunk roommate. Usually, she gets ready to go out at about 8 or 9 in the evening. Regardless of whether she goes to work, which is coincidently at a bar, or goes out to party, she always comes home drunk at about 4 or 5 in the morning. In the course of a year, she has had something slipped into her drink twice, almost been raped in her very bed for letting some asshole that she met that night stay over (luckily, we kicked him out), and another shacker actually pissed in her bed. He just lost control of his bodily functions and pissed. When my drunk roommate felt like she needed to take a nap, at about 1 or 2 in the afternoon, everyone else needed to be quiet. However, when everyone else was trying ot sleep at normal hours, she was so loud. The stereo was on, she was typing with her really loud springy keys on her keyboard, she was gossiping on the phone. AAH. Also, she was a messy messy person. When she got out of the bathroom, it looked like a tornado came through. Makeup spilled everywhere, curling irons and blowdryers all over, wet towels on the floor. Ewww.

The Athletic Roommate: She is on the track team. She throws shot and discus. She is quiet all of the time, and her most rebellious act of the year consisted of running and jumping in puddles while it was raining. She went to bed every night at about 11 pm. Midnight equaled a tired athlete and a cranky roomie. Also, she woke up every day for morning practice at 7 o'clock. She also woke up everyone else with her blowdryer. It was loud, and she insisted on doing it right next to my bed. Grrr.

The StudyBug Roommate: Actually, I got along the best with her. She was quiet, she minded her own business, she understood the fact that sometimes, you just need a little peace and quiet to get some work done. Quite often, she could be found down the hall in the TV lounge, which doubled for studying because it had soundproof windows. Nice and ideal for StudyBugs. Usually, if she stayed up late, it was to finish homework that couldn't be finished due to inconsiderate roommates. She was the conforming roomie. She never had her own opinion and never expresses her own wishes, which made for a bad time with two other very dominant roommates. Quite often, she got shafted. She get the "Bed in the Sky," which was a bed raised and sitting upon two dressers. Usually, the two of us would retreat to the library long enough to get some work done. We had all of the same classes together, whcih made for a fun walk to class.

The Almost Roommate: She lived four doors down. She was always in our room to escape the wrath of her own retched roommates. Sometimes, she had more stuff in our room that we did. On any given day, you could find her rollerblades, several magazines, atleast one textbook, about four shirts, several hair clippies, sandals, shoes, and her pillow in our room. And even her keys on some days. Although she never actually stayed in our room overnight, she would be in there from the time she woke up to the time she went to back, with the exception of her classes and the two hours a day her roommates for sure woudln't be home. She never knocked because we all assumed her to be our sixth roommate. We tried to get her a key, but they "didn't allow that". So, usually, our door was open. Well, with five people living there, someone was almost always home!!!

Sarah..
Wasn't really all that bad, until the (extremely bitter) end. True... she was recovering from being in some religious cult and was obsessed with new age mysticism crap, but she was rarely home and fairly clean. Then she just decided not to go to work (she'd had the job for about two years and was in her early twenties). Suddenly, she was home all the time, bitching about her lack of money, boy problems and, eventually, me and the guy I was living with. She was unable to pay rent for a few months. Things got worse between the three of us. About a month before everything blew up, she stopped coming home and would be gone for days at a time (leaving her new puppy and her dirty dishes). Finally, she comes back and says she wants to talk. She told us to be out in a week. I considerately pointed out that she had to give more notice, but she insisted that we be gone in seven days. We did end up finding a place that week, but still... Bitch.

Erica..
A little raver girl, straight out of high school, supported entirely by her parents, a self-described "artist" (drawing one's pacifier on newsprint twenty times does not an artist make). She actually once said that she couldn't clean up one of her messes because she had to preserve her hands for her art. Lived with us for a quarter and a half before we threw her out. Rarely went to classes, but always complained about her workload. Went to parties all weekend, every weekend, then came home and dumped her dirty crap and her ecstasy-addled friends all over our room. For days afterward, she would do nothing but sit on the couch and watch tv, or nap, or cry on the phone. (She cried about everything. I told her to be quiet once - nicely - and she cried.) She had terrible acetone breath when she was sleeping, but it was worst when she got home from a party. When she had to stand up, or walk, or do anything requiring even a small amount of effort, she would issue this whining, irritating-as-fuck moan and stretch out her arms as though we should be expected to help her. She never cleaned anything in our room. Not once. This weekend, she came back to get the shit she'd been storing at our place... She wanted to take her garbage can. Her reaction, upon seeing that no one had taken her trash out for her in her absence (I just threw the thing behind her old bed) was, "Oh gross! There's still garbage in it! Unnnnggghh..."

Marisa..
Pure nutty evil. That was the last time I ever had female roommates. (Contemplating a roommate? Most people I know are better roommates when sharing with the opposite sex.) She was from a rich suburb, but claimed to have grown up poor. Thankfully, she was kept from poverty by a weird middle-aged sugar mama (both women were straight). Maybe I should call her a groupie. Marisa was gorgeous, and she had a lot of people waiting around to do things for her, including a long string of puppy-dog-eyed boys who I don't think she ever gave anything up to.

She used to do ballet in her underwear in front of our giant street-facing picture window. I assume that was a strategy to attract more groupies. She was very picky about things and berated the sick boyfriend of another roommate for spitting out phlegm in the shower. ("Don't tell me you didn't do it. I could hearrr it! Grrrrross!")

Sort of like above, she decided to move in with one of her groupies a month before the lease was up with a week's notice. That meant everyone had to get out, because we couldn't afford the rent. The weekend before we moved we were supposed to clean the house, to get our deposit back. She spent the whole time visiting friends. I spent the last night and much of final afternoon in that house cleaning up messes she'd left. We got the whole deposit back, but I didn't give her any. I was still getting harassing phone calls from her two years after the fact.

Jill was insane. Jill was insane in so many ways. And we were stuck with her for one whole year.

A few examples, from a fat volume of disaster, skipping the whining tales about body size, and parents, and hellspawn siblings:

The Bathroom
One house. Six people. Six bedrooms. Two bathrooms.
One bathroom for the five of us. and one for Princess Jill. It was her private domain. Locked, always, inside her foofy ensuite territory, and guarded ferociously.

Knock, knock, knock.
Silence.
Palm slap, hammer-thump on the door.
"J-i-i-i-ll..."
"What?"
"Jill, please, pretty please, James is taking a three hour dump and I really need to pee."
"Oh, you can't come in. The bath is dirty. Go away."
Rattle, rattle at the door handle. Handle stops moving. Scritch-scratch key turn.
"Go a-way!"
Run downstairs, knock, knock, knock on the other bathroom door.
"James? Stop eating three eggs for breakfast every damn day!"

When Jill finally deigned to let me into the bathroom one day, I understood her reluctance: the tub was covered with bright orange bath oil grease gunk, and enough body hair to make a hearth rug, and and the room was filled with the rotten stench of bulimia.

The VCR

One house. Six people. One sitting room. One TV. One VCR, belonging to Jill.
One sleek, matte-black VCR, provider of video distraction and joy. We watched Die Hard and The Lost Boys a lot that year. It was a good antidote to Classics and Literature and Law.
One day, the VCR vanishes. Burgled? oh no!
Nope. Jilled.
"You've ruined my VCR!" she howled. "It's ruined! You owe me three hundred pounds!"
"It's broken?" we chorused.
"You've stained it! You've stained it with your filthy cigarette smoke!"
"Um, Jill. Your VCR is black. It's not going to show even the flithiest ickiest nicotine stains."
"I've put it in my room. To recover. You may not use it. Ever again."

The Debts

"I'm so broke! I'm so broke. I have no money. What do I do? Where do I start?"
She waves her bank statement in the air, and pleads for advice.
We look. We gasp. We realise that her monthly allowance is more than each us gets in the year. Her overdraft, though, is even larger and scarier than mine.

We smile politely, and mutter, through gritted teeth and dagger stares, "Perhaps four pairs of shoes in one week is a little excessive? Perhaps you can stop buying clothes from Chanel, for starters. You can skip the trips to flashy London restaurants.

Revenge of the Cat

Poor Cat, so often shoved off sofas, and threatened with kicks.
Simple soltution: Every week or so, one dead bird, left outside Jill's doorway at dawn. Jill stumbles out, without her glasses, steps on the bird and screeches and curses.
Cat sits on the stairs, watching.

Later, Cat throws up on Jill's pristine white eiderdown. Oddly, the door is still locked.

Revenge of the Housemates

"Hey, kitlings, I think I've found the spare key..."
And so we gained access to The Fortress of Solitude. And began the slow process of rearranging her furniture, in tiny, almost unnoticeable stages, around and around the room. Whilst watching videos.
I am ever so grateful that my days of having roommates have long passed! Geez, there's been a lot of them, but these two are the most nodeworthy...

  • Paula had been clean and sober a few years longer than me when we met. She was a single mom who, back then, ran a small daycare from our house. Those were cool times, but the money wasn't enough to satisfy her addiction for flashy clothes and pricey luxury items. So, she started dancing instead. At first it was just topless, but before long she was doing lap dances and worse. Worse? Yeah. She started making friends with some of the lowlife customers she met in the clubs where she worked. Then she got careless and attracted at least two stalkers (that I know of). One night one of these maniacs even tried to break into the house - He cut the main phone wire before smashing my easily accessible window, but was unaware that I had my own seperate line. (Can you say "911"? I knew you could!) She put everyone in our household, including her own daughter, at serious risk.


  • Tristan was a semi-reclusive throwback from the 70's. He was born with mild fetal alcohol syndrome, which gave him his very own distinct style of day-to-day living. I ended up nicknaming him "Captain Caveman" not because he was a superhero, but because he was primitive to the point that eventually the health department condemned his house! It was that bad - I swear on my life! Put it this way... most of my free time that first month was spent cleaning. When I first moved in there was a quarter inch of filth covering a large portion of the bathroom and kitchen surfaces. The living room floor sagged. The basement, where he slept, had mold growing on the walls and floors. So, why did I even move in there? The foremost reason was because Tristan let me bring my black lab and ferret. Plus, it was only a five minute drive to work. Then again, I did feel kind of sorry for him. Even though he was a pig, intellectually he was interesting.

My roommate Joe and I had rented a three-bedroom house. We had an extra bedroom and not enough money to cover rent. I let Joe convince me to let his uncle Paul move in with us. Paul was a really nice fellow. He spent a lot of money on polyester leisure suits in either pale pastels or contrasting patterns like black and white hounds tooth. He believed that these clothes were "Business Casual".

That wasn't the bad part; that just made him eccentric. Paul was filthy. His feet made my eyes water and he insisted on wearing sandals around the house. His toenails were not the correct color. In the mornings he would sit at my computer (the only one with internet access) in the dining room. Dressed only in a bath robe he would download pornography and masturbate until someone else woke up and entered the room, only then would he retreat to his bedroom with his little soldier standing at attention and saluting from his robe.

When he moved out he gave me a check to cover the last months rent that bounced. He also left a dozen boxes worth of smelly clothes and horrifying personal trinkets in the garage. His mattress had to be thrown out. The carpet in his room was permanently stained from the McDonalds Super Size cup he had kicked over after using its half full carcass as an ashtray for weeks. After Paul left another of Joe's family members moved in, he was even worse. I can't talk about him without shuddering.

My sister has had worse roommates than I have. I'll tell both our stories.

Veggie Girl - She was my roommate for a summer in my very first apartment. I knew she was a vegetarian when I moved in, even though I wasn’t. I figured we could work it out, and I didn’t eat that much meat anyway.

I was wrong.

She insisted that if I ate “flesh”, I cook it only when she was not home. I figured that wouldn’t be a big deal and if I wanted a hamburger, I’d eat it for lunch instead of dinner when she wasn’t in the house. Even if I left all the windows open, burned incense, and sprayed air freshener, she would freak out if she could smell cooked meat when she came home. If it was her turn to do the dishes, she would refuse to do any dishes that had any meat on them or were used to cook meat.

The weird thing about her was that she wasn’t a true vegetarian. She ate tuna fish, which I think is one of the most disgusting foods ever. I never complained about washing her tuna plates.

My Sister’s Story - My sister went to University of Oregon in Eugene, which is known for a rather liberal campus and a large population of hippies. My sister is a somewhat conservative girl, not in thinking, but rather in her actions. She isn’t a big party girl, nor a pot smoker. She started looking for a place to live during her third year, and ended up living in a small house off campus with a couple of girls she had met in her old dorm. I don’t know how she couldn’t have known, but she found out after they all moved in that the two other girls happened to be potheads.

My sister is a pretty tolerant person, so it didn’t bother her much if they smoked out on the weekends. Things were fine at first, then they started smoking and having people over late during the week. My sister was a member of the honor society because she was a studyholic, and it was so loud at her own house that she couldn’t even study in her room. She began spending more and more time out of the house and on campus in a quiet corner studying. That gave her roommates license to make things worse.

After about 5 months, my sister had enough, but since she was locked into a 9 month lease with these characters, she didn’t want to abandon her responsibility. So, she and the stoner girls found some hippie guy to move in and take over my sister’s part of the lease. My sister moved into a one bedroom apartment and the hippie guy moved into her room. He agreed to pay her back her part of the deposit and pay rent. My sister let the landlord know the new arrangement, and he agreed, but could not take her name off the lease. My sister didn’t like that, but figured that it was only for another 4 months.

A month and a half later, my sister got a phone call from her old landlord. Her old roomies had been evicted from the house. They had failed to pay the rent, so the landlord started the eviction process. One of the girls was able to get rent money from her grandparents, but it was too late and they were still going to be evicted because the landlord had found out about their stoner ways. So, they used the rent money to throw a keg party and trashed the place. The landlord was calling my sister to let her know that legal action was going to be taken, and her name was involved since she was still on the lease.

My sister consulted legal aid on campus, and was able to get the landlord to agree that if she cleaned up most of the mess, she would not be included in the lawsuit, although her deposit was forfeit. The landlord agreed because he liked my sister and knew that she had nothing to do with the keg party. So, my sister recruited my mom, my dad, and me to come down to Eugene on a Saturday to clean up the house.

It was disgusting. The empty keg was sitting in the middle of the living room floor. My dad and I loaded it into the back of his truck, and he took it back to the distributor stamped on it and got the deposit money for it. The kitchen had a huge stack of dirty dishes piled into the sink, which was clogged and filled with dirty water. There was mold growing on top of the water. The stove was covered in caked on food. There were piles of garbage everywhere, along with random clothes, books, and furniture. We put on the rubber gloves we had brought and opened up the big plastic garbage bags. We ended up taking 2 huge truckloads of garbage and broken furniture to the local dump. The process took the better part of the day.

My sister took both of the stoners to small claims court and won judgements against them. She got back about a third of her money and has since written off the entire ordeal as a bad experience. Currently, she lives alone.

Shawn did coke constantly and wanted people to do it with him. Usually he offered it up freely and carelessly to whomever expressed slight interest; he always had ridiculous amounts lying around because he was, at one time, rich enough to have a seemingly unfaltering supply of it. Of course, it is certainly not hard to find people interested in a free coke binge for a night and he had no trouble finding partners.

Sometimes, if he had random drug fiends over who he didn't respect he would play with them a little. Occasionally they were random kids from off the street outside our place but more often they were pathetic drug-whore girlies. He would devise little games for them to endure, making them actually compete for the next line he would dish out and thus appease his sick controlling and manipulative side.

One of his games was to come up with some ridiculous scavenger-hunt-like object that his drooling guests would have to acquire if they wanted that next line. He would sit back in his gold easy chair like a god damn king and watch his pathetic little minions skerrying around trying to be the first to come across a bullet-proof vest, box of staples or wooden statuette of a goat hidden somewhere in our apartment which was filled with this kind of random crap. Often it would be something he or Chad had been looking for lately and hadn't been able to find. Then Chad would look up from his own plate of white powder to laugh and nod in approval, the two of them watching these stupid people do their work. While their pawns were ransacking the place, Chad and Shawn would openly and loudly discuss and playfully argue about which one of the strung out bitches they were going to fuck that night.

They were both fucking sick.

I can't believe the stupid fiends couldn't hear them, but they seemed unaffected. They were too busy desperately trying to be the lucky one who found that ball bearing or monkey wrench ("not that one with the rubber handle, the one with my initials carved into it, you stupid bitch! ha ha! keep looking!") so they could win one more line.

For some reason, watching these pathetic and stupid drug addict girls filled me with my own sense of disempowerment and shame.

Back in my college days (second attempt), I'm ashamed to admit that I was the worst roommate my friends had.

When I was accepted at the college literally days before the semester started, there were no rooms available. A friend of one of my friends had a single, and we convinced him that the college had to put me in there. The good thing is that he paid for a double, so that's what he got.

For most of that semester he had to knock quietly on the door because I tended to be "busy" with my girlfriend of the week. Once his parents almost walked in on my girlfriend and I when we were performing some acrobatic sex. He'd complain, but he was always interested in how I got my girlfriends into my bed. At least I made it a rule to never have them sleep over without asking well in advance.

The second semester I bought a 400-watt stereo, the biggest in the entire dorm. I tended to blast it while I was "entertaining" my current girlfriend. My new roommate was a devoted Monkees/Beatles fanatic, and he hated my stuff (Blondie, punk, loud metal). Luckily he was a very forgiving sort, and he'd take great pleasure in using my stereo to completely drown out or neighbors when they had noisy parties. My stereo was louder than theirs, even if you were standing in their room near the speakers.

Now that I think about it, I'm sure I'm the worst roomie my wife ever had. I'm a slob, I'm lazy, and I play my stereo loud. At least I don't bring home a new girl every week :)

My last roommate wasn’t as bad as most of these, but I did get decent revenge.

Shortly after high school, my roommate and I decided that parents blew so we’d get an apartment. He found us a house. Excellent I thought, the rent was cheaper than most apartments and we don’t have to put up with our neighbors being on the other side of the wall.

He and I both worked at the same place and went to the same college. Though we rarely saw each other. After a while, of course, the relationship grew sour. He had a fetish for police encounters. We were playing paintball near the river where we lived. He thought it a good idea to shoot a police car. Well being that I was better camouflaged, and had some experience hiding (hunting), I found a well covered spot and hung out there, I knew he would run and that would draw the “Fuzz” away from me, I let him go. He got away from them by swimming across a river just down-stream from a sewage treatment plant and hiding in a junkyard. I have no idea how he got away, as he had to keep shooting a junk yard dog to keep it off him. After the police gave up, I searched him out, shot him in the calf muscle from 6 feet away and helped him hobble back home.

1:30 AM on a Saturday night: The police came looking for me (don’t ask) and he let them in the house and he decided it would be fun to let them in and see what they would do to me (again, his affinity for encounters with the authorities). Much to his dismay, and previously unbeknownst to him, the officer that showed up was a personal friend of mine that played in the same hockey league as me. He was disappointed.

He had a tendency to ignore his girlfriend. She was a friend of mine as well as my sister, so she would talk to me instead of his cranky bitch ass. He used to brag on how he got to see her boobs, which I doubt actually ever occurred.

He had a couple of cats. Cats are usually easy to potty train, but when you don’t change their litter, they tend to do as they please, where they please. This occurred frequently on my couch or in the laundry room. After a period of caring for the cats myself, I decided to let them use his piles of dirty clothing for relief. I stopped doing my laundry there as it began to develop a smell something akin to ammonia. I don’t know what chemical reactions occur when urine is cooked in a sunbathed room, but I’m sure you could clean windows or strip paint with it.

Like other roommates, he routinely ate my food, used my dishes and such. He would never clean the microwave that I purchased and kept in my bedroom. I removed it. I didn’t like stale over-cooked cheddar stench in my sleeping quarters.

Vengeance is mine sayeth the roommate. The final straw was when he bought a brand new car. I finally figured it out. No person paying for college and rent can buy a brand new Saturn on $8.50/hr with only a $500 down payment and no savings. I did a little investigating and found that his parents owned the house we were living in. I went directly there, brought a friend, packed my shit up and left. I took all of my dishes, which he had dirtied, along with his. I took the outside and had my friend shoot them from a small clay pigeon thrower and shot skeet with his dishes until he returned home. He said that what I was doing wasn’t very cool. I responded with my shotgun in hand, fully loaded “Good? Bad? I'm the guy with the gun.

The only roommate I have had since, I married. My former roommate is in the business of dating underage girls and stalking the above mention, and now ex-girlfriend when he is in town.

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