Roommates (In Novel Form)

For various reasons, I have been thinking about roommates. The horror! Don't get me wrong, I don't mind people around and I don't mind sharing the bills, but roommates suck. I've stated it before and I will probably keep repeating it until the day I die, I'll have tenants but I will never have roommates again. I need some sense of control.

The idea of equality in a household like that was a great and novel concept to me at first, no longer though. We'll start with the first roommates, the hubby (at the time, the boyfriend) and... we'll call him Keanu, because at any given time he liked to believe he was out of some typically popular movie like The Matrix or Blade or television show like Buffy or Angel but at heart was just an air head dork. (I may have called him Spike here at one point, who knows.) The hubby? His mama raised that boy right. Maybe it was the lack of a male influence but it was amazing. This boy knew how to clean up after himself, put the toilet seat down, everything. As far as living together, we handled that pretty good, a few adjustments but nothing earth shattering. Keanu... well... no. No, his upbringing was littered by a mother who always did his laundry and dishes, thanks ma.

We had a three bedroom apartment, the hubby and I in one of the small rooms, Keanu in the other small room and the master bedroom was basically supposed to be a second living room, mainly due to it having it's own bathroom and it wasn't fair for one or the other of us to have it. This basically meant that Keanu had two bedrooms due to his hygiene habits.

I am pretty sure I have mentioned him before, so please forgive any revisited stories. We had set up my computer and Keanu's computer up in the dining room. No big deal right? Heh, no. His computer was like four years old, mine was like four months old. Can you guess who's was better? He started using my computer, and seriously I only knew half of what he was doing on it so I password protected the screen saver. Ha! He responded by password protecting his. Honestly, why the hell would I touch his obsolete sticky piece of shit when I had my nice pretty thing that I actually cared enough about to not leave half eaten ramen noodles sitting on top of it for days at a time?

Keanu had a girlfriend. I know, I couldn't believe it either. She was a horsy little thing that thought she was the bee's knees for being in high school and having a boyfriend with his own apartment. We had thin walls. Yeah, ew. Keanu liked it that way. He'd like to brag, not to get into too many details, but he liked to brag about how many condoms he'd use a week. Personally, I didn't need to know about his obsession with balloon animals. (Ha! Burn!)

He'd leave his stuff everywhere. To the extent that we had to start piling it in front of his closed bedroom door in a desperate act to get him to do something about it. I think he may have seen this as an act of warfare. The hubby (again, boyfriend at the time) was working graveyard full time and I was working days just shy of full time and going to college twenty hours a week. Opposing schedules suck by the way. Keanu was on my schedule, and I don't know if it was me or just because I was the one there, but he started treating me like shit. Like screaming at each other, me in tears kind of bull. The hubby would basically have to spend most of the time that he should have been sleeping, defending me from the verbal abuse spewing from Keanu's mouth. We don't know what inspired the vile change in him. Whether it was the strain of living together or something bigger, who knows, it was escalating though.

One day, we had to make our way into the master bedroom, over piles of... god knows what and found the bathroom in a state more typically found in horror movies.

There was six inches of obviously used bath water still lingering in the tub. Perched upon the toilet seat was an open Styrofoam take out container with half a portion of Chinese take out rotting away. The floor, what parts of it that were visible through the mass of dirty clothes and towels, was disgusting. The once white sink was stained with hair dye and stuck with fur that I am not sure where he was shaving it from considering his chin at the time was only able to produce the effects of playing in dirt. I don't even want to know why the mirror was as cloudy as it was. Ugh.

This is basically how he left it when he moved out. We lived with Keanu for exactly twenty two days and have never spoken to him again. It's a little sad. He was one of by best friends for years. I actually met him on the internet. Yeah, I know, sounds creepy. I used to track down people I went to school with online. It was awesome to figure out who they were before they figured out who I was. More then once, once they figured out who I was it was like "oh, okay" and we move on with our lives. Keanu became a really close friend and was the one who helped me leave that bitchy social group that was doing nothing for my emotional health. Keanu actually introduced me to my first boyfriend (and besides getting the whole "first boyfriend" thing out of the way, I really don't thank him for.) I found him on MySpace but still haven't contacted him. He still thinks he is a character from a movie, just a martial arts/rock star movie now. I'm not sure if it's sad or comforting to know he hasn't changed much.

So... that was our first roommate. After that we scrubbed for days and moved into the master bedroom, but it was time to figure something out because we couldn't afford the rent ourselves. Now meet Mr. Fix It. We'll call him this because he used to take everything apart. We later found out this was due to being up for days at a time tweaking but that's beside the point. The hubby worked the graveyard shift with him at one of the many Mart stores littering the area and suddenly Mr. Fix It was in need of a place to stay and we were in urgent need of filling the gap in our rent, it was seemingly perfect. I think we should have known better.

Mr. Fix It was older, by several years, purchaser of our alcohol at the time, seemingly wiser by age and definitely more courteous then Keanu. He was clean, perhaps because he didn't really have all that much to call his own, limited furniture and belongings, something that we probably should have asked about but didn't. This was in the beginning of our stoner days and he was just dandy with that, again, never asked what else he was dandy with.

Somewhere around this time, we added another roommate, another coworker of the hubby's. We'll call him the Jailbird, simply because he only lasted a week, that and honestly until today I had forgotten his name. Why call him Jailbird? He was arrested. Not sure what for, but yeah, I don't think we saw him again. I'm not sure if we ever got any money from him and with barely anything but a backpack of clothes, we weren't even left with anything interesting.

Back to Mr. Fix It. Our first real hint that he may not have been the most wholesome of a fella would be the check incident. He and two friends basically got a hold of a check book. Who's? I don't know. What I do know, is they wrote a twenty five hundred dollar check out to themselves and cashed it. Instead of hearing bells and whistles and seeing red flags, we were appeased by a Christmas gift of a hundred dollars each and the coverage of rent that month. I know, bad us.

With some of that hard earned cash, Mr. Fix-It bought a Dreamcast, new. (Wow, that really dates this story doesn't it?) He had a technologically advanced friend who burned him roughly seventy games for the Dreamcast. We were only allowed to play the thing under his supervision. Odd considering we let him have free reign of our Playstation and whatever else we had at the time, but whatever, he was possessive of his stuff, that's fine I guess.

One night he took apart one of the Dreamcast controllers. Surprise, surprise, he couldn't put it back together in such a way that it would work. He talked the store into letting him exchange it saying it was defective. Did I mention he was a bit of a charmer? The really polite type. Another night, he took apart one of my desk chairs (I had two at the time, oddly enough he did this to the better of the two) and it's funny, even something as simple as an office chair never goes back together right after taking it apart. We ended up with a spinning seat with no back, perfect for a couple years later when we got a cat who loved to be spun but kind of pointless when I was still using it as an actual chair.

Around this time we added yet another roommate, trying to fill that third room and take some of the strain off the burden of rent and bills. We'll call her Sleepy, wanna know why? That's all she did at the apartment. She worked and went to school I think, so seriously, she'd come home to sleep for like twelve hours and then be gone for two days. Her room consisted of blankets and pillows on the floor and some clothes, that's it. She was a friend of Mr. Fix It's so I'd assume her lifestyle was fueled by more then just caffeine. She lasted less then a month before she basically just disappeared. Again, I'm not sure if we actually ever received any financial restitution for housing her.

Another shady moment with Mr. Fix It came when a buddy of his stopped by and decided to plant evidence in our bathroom. I don't know if it was the same situation or a different one, but we found a check book and some other papers hidden there obviously planted by the guy. Fishy as hell but Mr. Fix It said he'd take care of it.

About two days after rent was due (we typically paid a few days late anyway) the hubby and I came home to find most of Mr. Fix It's stuff gone. No warning, no nothing, high and dry as rent is due. By this time we had a pretty decent idea that it was no longer a good idea for him to be living there anyway so we hunted the apartment for every last item belonging to Mr. Fix It, packed it all into a box and set it outside our front door. Since we weren't in a position to change the locks on such short notice, we actually went through the effort of barricading the door. Sure enough, he came by to get the last of his stuff. Yelled a few things through the door about wanting to get in but we didn't budge. He basically said fine and left with his box. He left the keys in the door.

Again, a little sad, he was a decent guy except for the not so decent things he was doing, heh. Last we heard we was doing like seven years in prison for none other then check fraud, go figure.

Wait! Wait! I'm not done yet! I hope you haven't gotten bored because I'm on a roll and it's all downhill from here. We had to move, the eviction notices told us so, ha! We found this great little two bedroom apartment in a wooded area, it was awesome. Our friend, let's call her String Bean, was looking for a place too so we all applied together. Problem? She got accepted, we didn't. Solution? Move in anyway. (Yeah, that's kind of another story.) I even had to borrow three hundred dollars from my mom due to an unexpected move in cost. On a side note, she made me pay her back over five hundred dollars for the inconvenience.

Moving on to String Bean. The hubby and I both worked with her in the drive in restaurant that wasn't a drive in. Picture this girl, will ya? Skinny, like heroin sheik skinny without the sheik part, mousy little thing with either really bad posture or a touch of scoliosis, walled with her hips first, makes me think of Squidward a little, and virtually no chin to speak of. Now picture this girl going from an overbearing mother to an overbearing husband (who took sole custody of their son) to being out on her own with us. Can you imagine that she'd go a little wild? Funny, given her mousy demeanor, we really didn't see it coming.

Our lifestyle of people coming and going had really started before this point, but this is where it solidified. Our upstairs neighbor was our little punk rocker friend, someone who is still to this day one of our closest friends. His buddy who hung out with him all the time? That was our last houseguest, Our Bum, again, one of our closest friends. Couple apartments down? That's where our first houseguest was living with her cousin until we took her in. See? History.

Again, back to String Bean. First off, having not even filed for divorce yet, she got a boyfriend. A buff tattooed guy who struck me as an ass hole from the first meeting, but he was the opposite of her husband so I guess I understood the attraction. With this boyfriend, she was careless, and got pregnant, real quick as a matter of fact. She got an abortion. I will never, ever condone having an abortion as a form of birth control for stupid people. If you can't be smart in the first place, deal with the consequences.

She kept getting more and more wild. What started out as a few people over every few nights, turned into a lot of people over every night. I found myself waking up every morning to the mountainous task of cleaning up spilt ash trays and beers, bowl marks and empty beer bottles. One morning I even awoke to find my console television, once owned by my grandfather, dead beyond repair. With the "party" that ensued the night before, I didn't believe her claim that it just suddenly died. It had been serviced a couple years earlier and was in perfect working order the night before. (Sadly we had our little punk rocker friend and Our Bum give the television a proper burial... they, for my sake, didn't tell me until years later that they pushed it off a cliff. The only memento of a grandfather I never met. I wonder if I would have felt better to watch it go.)

Tensions were getting higher and it was soon becoming clear that we were starting not to like each other anymore. With her new found freedom, she was letting out this inner bitch we didn't know she had and while on the one hand proud to a certain extent of breaking from her shell, on the other hand that shell was shattering all over us in a very unappealing way.

Our lease (or more correctly her lease) was about to be up so we started looking for options. Luckily for us, our option found us. That little drive in restaurant that isn't a drive in? It's right next door to where I now live. Our current landlord left a note for me (we knew each other remember? He's my old piano teacher's dad.) The note said he had an open apartment if we were looking. Hell yes we were looking! We met up with him, viewed the apartment, even made a deal allowing us to move in with no move in costs or anything.

We told String Bean we were moving and packed up all of our stuff. In a way, we kind of screwed her a little when we left. For some reason, we were supposed to be paying rent right before we moved our butts out of there, for one, we were moving, why pay for an apartment we were leaving? And two, to pay rent we had to physically walk up to the landlord's door, a risk considering we were not even supposed to be living there. So, when String Bean gave us her half of the rent to go pay... we only paid her half. We kept our half, not only because we were moving, but as compensation for the three hundred dollar security deposit I had to beg my mom with blood, sweat and tears for and I knew I would never get back. Also, we took her television. She had put her piece of shit little thing on top of my dead console television when it blew, I guess in some sort of compensation for it. So, in the spirit of compensation, we took it, the last thing we packed into the truck before we drove off.

Again, we haven't really talked to her since. From what we have heard, some time after all this she ended up living on the streets with her meth head boyfriend and has had another kid. Some people shouldn't be allowed to reproduce. Her first son, even with an overbearing father, is much better without her then with her. I feel bad for this second child.

We moved into this building and gave up the roommate gig, thank goodness. I think it's a great show of the hubby's and my relationship to have survived all of this. However, since swearing off roommates, we seem to have developed an affinity for houseguest's. It is a better position to be in, but not necessisarily better on all counts.

Poor Me, that's what I'll call our first houseguest, the one who lived with her cousin a few apartments down, because that's presisely the reason we are no longer friends with her, we could no longer handle the "poor me" attitude we either didn't see in the beginning or she developed along the way. The first apartment we had in this building had a spare bedroom, which is where Poor Me made home for about three months after a mix of her cousin kicking her out and not being able to stand her cousin's girlfriend anymore.

Poor Me was trying to get back on her feet after a pretty detrimental fall, having separated from her husband and her mother was at the time caring for her daughter. Her goal was to get a job and eventually her own place so she could bring her daughter to come live with her. All admirable. I even enjoyed the way she spoke of raising and teaching her daughter. Teaching her Spanish as well as English due to her mixed heritage and sign language and classical music. It was inspiring. Looking back, I wonder how much was true, I never saw any of it in action.

Yes, she did end up getting a job, two days a week and it didn't last. It wasn't that she wasn't capable, she just had no drive. She'd rather spend her time with her new boyfriend (Our Bum, don't worry, he's coming up.) I later learned that I probably should have disinfected nearly every surface in that apartment, and the laundry room. Shudder. People have sex lives, I get it, but why do I have to know so much about it?

We were decent friends. I could sit and talk for hours with her, and honestly at the time, there were very few people who knew some of the things I had told her. She wasn't really a horrible roommate, we still had doors at the time, that helped. She cleaned up after herself for the most part, even attempted the dishes a few times, not easy considering at the time the sink drained into a bucket. She once even went down to one of the local churches who give out food to low income families and came back with a box full of rice, pasta and things of the like.

After about three months though, with rockiness in the relationship with Our Bum and prompting from her family, she was going to be moving back home with mother. She left most of her stuff behind, claiming she'd be back for it soon. She swore up and down that she'd write and send money to pay us back for letting her stay with us. We told her the money wasn't recessionary but she insisted, saying she wanted to repay our kindness.

So Poor Me moved. She never came back for her stuff. She never wrote. We found out some time later that she did in fact move back to the area, with her daughter even. She'd call, but only to see if Our Bum was here. She stopped by once, with her daughter, three at the time. My apartment is not child proof, by any means. While Poor Me rattled on and on about her issues with Our Bum, her daughter proceeds to try to go after buttons on the stereo, lighters on the table, even knocks over a bong. What does Poor Me do? Nothing, absolutely nothing besides continue to seek pity. I went about cleaning up the mess that she seemed perfectly oblivious to when her daughter started to rather rudely go after my cats, again apparently going unseen.

I was appalled. I so would have thought she was a better parent then this, but this is the first mother-daughter parenting moment I truly see? I called her out. I told her that she was going to have to leave. She needed to control her child when she was in my home because this was just disrespectful and it was preferable from now on that if she was going to bring her kid then she needed to call ahead so we could prepare a little. It's only fair. She left. She only stopped by one other time after that, to look for Our Bum.

It's not like we never saw her again either. She moved in down the street, with her daughter and Our Bum. She'd still call, still only to talk to Our Bum. She'd let him come over, but then call to yell at him for leaving. Poor Me took to calling in the wee hours of the morning, drunk of course, demanding to speak to Our Bum. One time when he wasn't here when she called, the hubby answered and knew just as well as I what she wanted. After claiming that wasn't the reason she called, then asking for him again. the hubby told her that Our Bum wasn't here and ended the call. Seconds later she called back. I answered, I'm not as polite as the hubby. On the brink of denying her real purpose for calling again, I demanded to know what she wanted. Poor Me said I knew what she wanted. I told her Our Bum was not here, she accused me of lying. Until now, I had never lied nor had a reason to lie to her. Again I told her he wasn't here and hung up. The next day when Our Bum showed up, I told him if he ever wanted me to lie for him, I now would.

This leads us to Our Bum, our second houseguest. He had been bouncing back and forth between Poor Me and his step-dad's place for quite some time until his step-father's was no longer an option and it was one of his "off again" phases with Poor Me due to her getting knocked up with what may or may not have been his kid, which she apparently used the abortion method of birth control over and then blamed him for. I still kind of wonder if she was knocked up in the first place, more on that in a few.

Our Bum needed a place to stay and it's not like our couch was new to him. (We were in our current apartment by this point, no spare room dammit. I never realized how much I'd miss it.) In the year he lived with us, he really didn't have any job to speak of unless you count an odd day here and there working under the table for a buddy. Except for space, weed and cigarettes, he really didn't use up much of our resources. He had plenty of other friends to go visit to encounter food an the opportunity for a shower. He'd show up in the evening and watch my soap operas with me, then play video games with the hubby when he got home. Slept and a majority of the time was out the door before we woke up in the morning.

We joke about him being our adopted child, a stray who followed us home one day and we were still trying to decide whether or not to keep him. Yes, it was an inconvenience of privacy (I mentioned no doors, right?) And yes, an extra drain on weed is never good, but we love this guy, still do, probably always will. I can truly imagine my kids having their uncle ____ to play with and I always want to have a room available for him if he needs it.

After about a year of living with us, close enough that we even got him a stocking to add to our collection for Christmas, Poor Me, who had never really left the picture, was back in the picture. She got knocked up again, and again Our Bum may or may not be the daddy. With her carelessness of her last pregnancy I am curious as to why she decided to keep this one. She even quit smoking, something she hadn't bothered to do when she said she was pregnant before standing there with a home rolled filterless cigarette, which raises by doubts about that whole story. I'm not sure how it happened (considering he already has a son he never sees) but Our Bum stepped up. He moved in with her, got a full time job which he has kept for well over a year and a half now, I think that's a record breaking streak for him. They fight constantly, he drinks constantly and we haven't seen him in over six or seven months. Originally when this arrangement started, we were supposed to have visitation with him. Yes, visitation, we helped raise him dammit, we should at least be able to retain partial custody of him, right? I get that he has a family to take care of, but I also get that he is just miserable. Maybe if he was allowed out of the house every once in a while to see daylight, it wouldn't be so bad.

Our little punk rocker friend sees him often, so at least we get updates. I recently found Poor Me's MySpace page. Oh my god does it piss me off. Self righteous bitch. She claims to be a recovering alcoholic, having been in rehab and done the whole AA thing. Recovering typically means you no longer do the things you are addicted to, right? Don't they also tell you to stay away from other addictions? Like cigarettes and weed? And people who enable the drinking and other addictions? On Poor Me's MySpace she repeatedly states her superior intellect to Our Bum, that and she's always right and he's always wrong. To make it worse, her readers obviously don't know him what so ever so they completely support her.

By coincidence the hubby ran into someone who met up with Our Bum and Poor Me at the river, having never met them before. She could tell that from Poor Me's point of view he could do nothing right with any attempt, and that left Our Bum sitting alone sullen, drinking the whole time. I'd never tell him to abandon his responsibilities but there's no reason he should spend his life miserable. I know they love each other, it doesn't mean it's a healthy relationship.

That brings us to the current houseguest, I think I'll start calling him Ketchup, simply for his love of the stuff. We all know how that's going. He's been sitting here the whole time I have been writing. By the way, the staying up most of the day to sleep during when was most inconvenient to me, yeah, that was on purpose. He'd bitch about sleeping the day away and it was all on purpose. Thanks.

Ketchup currently has no local friends and though he has a job, he went from five days a week, down to four, and now it's only three nights a week. No offense, but I am getting tired of looking at him. I want more alone time, I want more one on one time with the hubby. My Doppelganger suggested withholding sex from the hubby to get what I want, got to say that's kind of hard when the lack of privacy is withholding it from both of us and he's not the only one to have noticed. Shape up or ship out? Ketchup's got no where to go and we aren't the type of people to let that go unnoticed even despite the current living conditions. Damn, huh?

Tomorrow is payday, as I said before, it should be very telling. Tonight, alone with the hubby, I can't wait.

So there is the fabulous history of us and roommates, conviently placed in a babbling, incoherent novel form. I hope you enjoyed the read, that is if you made it all the way to the end of this amazingly long post. It may make you think twice about how easy or difficult it is to live with people, and learn to live with them and perhaps learn that they weren't who you thought they were at all and even that sometimes relationships can't survive the strain. Sad, frustrating, infuriating at times and yet equally eye opening and enjoyable at others. I miss some of the friends I've lost through this whole process, probably Keanu most, but I don't regret the knowledge I've gained from these experiences, the things I'll carry with me, even if all those things aren't worth carrying. I bet the confrontations with Keanu tinted the way I'd rather not confront others since. He taught me that friends don't always make good roommates. Mr. Fix It's other life was screaming at us in a tiny voice, he taught us to pay attention to that voice and make sure you know what you are getting into before getting into it. String Bean taught us that when you put someone in a completely different situation then they are used to, they can become a completely different person then you knew. Poor Me taught me that I'd rather not live with girls, they are high maintenance and I'd rather not be invited to another pity party. Our Bum taught us we can remain friends with someone who leached off us for a year with no reciprocation. Ketchup... I'm still trying to figure out what he's teaching me, except perhaps patience and tolerance, both of which I guess are things I need to work on though I'm not sure obligation is the right way to go about it. It's all knowledge and I soak it up. I guess this is where the phrase "student of the people" works it's way in.

Okay, I think I'm done. Do your eyes burn? Mine do.