Of all the roommates I’ve ever had, only three sucked ass.
There were two reasons why my first roommate sucked. Firstly, she enrolled in our college simply because some dude who was on Buffy the Vampire Slayer went there; secondly, she was horribly inconvenienced by the events of 9/11 because they interrupted her phone time.
The second roommate sucked because he had a tendency to display behavior I commonly saw portrayed by criminals on Law and Order: SVU.
The third roommate was apprehended by police and physically removed from our shared house.
Other than that, I’ve been pretty lucky. I consider my other former roommates friends; in fact, on a few occasions, I cried when separating from them. However, with the three that sucked the aforementioned ass, the only reminiscing I do is when I'm recounting horror stories — like the following:
The first bad roommate was my first roommate of all time. My freshman year, I opted to live in the “drug and alcohol free” dorm. (Why I thought that was a good idea is beyond me.) My floor mostly consisted of high-strung Long Island girls with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, coupled with society rejects who watched a lot of CW. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that everything about my new roommate freaked me out.
Her greasy hair; her penchant for wearing over-sized Hanes t-shirts featuring images of characters from Veggie Tales; her love for contemporary Christian pop; her 6'5", 350-pound boyfriend who had a gnarly scar of vague origins running down the back of his head.
She was very opinionated and easily annoyed, so I tried to stay clear, but when you live in a 7 by 12-foot pen, it’s kind of difficult. That year, I mostly drove home on the weekends so I didn’t have to deal with her. One September morning, I returned home and received a very alarming message: “Uhhh….your Mom just called and said something about a plane hitting a building, I don’t know, I’m on the phone.”
I tried asking her more questions, but she just silently shooed me away from her. I quickly called my mother, who informed me that a second plane had just hit the World Trade Center. I tried relaying this news to my roommate, who was talking to her boyfriend, but she couldn't care less, so I ran off to the common room where I sat glued to a TV, watching the events unfold.
It wasn’t until a good hour later that my roommate became concerned about what was happened because she thought it would somehow affect her boyfriend (who lived in Pennsylvania). Then she became frantic that he was going to die. She went on to transfer to a school back in West Virginia, and I have no idea what ever happened to her. Aaaaaand I don’t care.
The second roommate that sucked was a 35-year-old wannabe director who got confused about our living arrangements. I had a beautiful two-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood and needed to fill the other half; my boss mentioned that his old NYU roommate was moving to LA to take his shot at directing. Though a pro might have caught the red flag (15 years post-graduation might be a little long to wait to find a job), I still thought, “Hey, this guy has got to be cool!”
And he was — if cool is hanging out in the doorway of the bathroom while you pluck your eyebrows, asking if he can kiss you while drunk on one glass of champagne. Or if cool is shutting off the TV while you’re eating dinner explaining that he’s concerned about your entertainment viewing choices, that you should really take the time to watch Kurosawa’s Ran, and you should probably stop drinking Diet Coke, too. Or if cool is going to Ikea with you two weeks into living together and saying things like, “Our house will now be a home, Lauren!” or “This is what it’s like to be married!”
Shortly into our co-habitation, I realized that second roommate, or “Guy Most Likely To Be Involved in a Hostage Situation,” as I liked to call him, had a few screws loose. Once I finally yelled at him about his leech-like behavior and made him cry, he finally backed off. By which I mean, he holed himself up into his room, surrounded himself with used tissues and obsessed over a conspiracy theorist script that was going to be his “GREAT MASTERPIECE!”
I moved out after a year and Crazy Pants decided to stay in the apartment. Occasionally our paths would cross but, to this day, he won’t talk to me due to a misunderstanding where he thought I was going to jump in the sack with him simply because he was being nice to me.
The most recent unfortunate roommate was nuttier than a Pecan orchard, so I probably don’t have to go into much detail on why she was a terrible roommate. In short, this woman frightened the living shit out of me. I was new to Austin and decided to rent a room in a large house in the fancier part of town. The roommate in question, a wild-eyed, gray-haired lady who had her child taken away from her, began believing that the owner of the house was taking her belongings and hiding them.
She became so convinced that she tried to enlist my partnership in teaming up against him. I ignored her calls for allegiance, but it became progressively difficult to avoid her when she would sit at the kitchen table in the dark, waiting up all night for me to come home. She also enjoyed standing on the staircase staring down at me while I ate dinner. The worst scenario occurred when she barged into my room at 3 a.m. while I was sleeping, screaming, “He stole my figs and my spoon!”
It came as no surprise the next day when the owner of the house called me to say that Gary Busey, as I liked to call her, was being escorted out of the house by police. She had called them because she believed the owner of the house was going to shoot her. The police later told me that she had been coming down to the police station for the past two weeks and telling the police chief that she was “in love with him.”
Busey tried calling me a few times after that, leaving messages where she apologized for her behavior... but explained that she really wanted to find her figs.
Have you ever had a crazy roommate?
