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Hipstercrite: A Dwarf, a Lonely Boy, and a Schizophrenic Walk Into My Apartment...

Friday, June 03, 2011

A Dwarf, a Lonely Boy, and a Schizophrenic Walk Into My Apartment...


Of all the roommates I've ever had, only three sucked ass.

The first one had characteristics of a dwarf. This is not what made her suck. What made her suck is that she enrolled in our college simply because someone who was on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (David Boreanaz) went there and separately she was horribly inconvenienced by 9/11 because it interrupted her "phone time". The second one sucked because he had a tendency to display behavior I commonly saw portrayed on Law and Order SVU. The third roommate was deemed "schizophrenic" by police and taken out of the house. Other than that, I've been pretty lucky. All my other former roommates I consider friends. In fact, on a few occasions I cried when separating from some particular roommates. However, with the three that sucked ass, I'm only glad I experienced them for future roommate topic fodder.

The first roommate that sucked ass 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 was beyond me. My floor mostly consisted of high strung Long Island girls with IBS and society rejects who watched a lot of CW. Like my roommate. 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 with images of various characters from Veggie Tales on it, her love for contemporary Christian pop, and her 6'5" 350-pound boyfriend who had a scar running down the back of his head which, I believe, related to a story about him being dropped on his head as a baby. I'd like to also point out that she was from West Virginia but out of fear of alienating any of my West Virginian followers, I will leave this out. Hey, don't worry. Where I'm from in Central New York, we celebrate being the incest capital of the state so I can't really make fun of anyplace.

"Ms. Bodily Abbreviated", let's call her, was very opinionated and easily annoyed. Nobody stood up to her Dawson Creek standards and she bitched about everyone. I tried to stay clear of her, but when you live in a 7 X 12 foot hamster pen, it's kind of difficult. That year I mostly drove home on the weekends just so I didn't have to deal with her. Unfortunately she was the first person to break the news of 9/11 to me after I returned from class, but it came in the form of, "Ummm....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 on my cell 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 Baby Huey of a boyfriend but she could care less. I ran off to the dorm television room where I sat glued 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 effect her boyfriend who lived in Pennsylvania. Then she became frantic that he was going to die.

Abbrevy went on to transfer to a school back in West Virginia and I have no idea what ever happened to her. Aaaaaand I certainly don't care.

The second roommate that sucked ass was 35-year-old wannabe director who got confused about our living arrangements. I had a beautiful two bedroom apartment in West Hollywood and needed a roommate. My boss mentioned that his old NYU roommate was moving to LA to take his shot at directing- 15 years later- and I thought, "Hey, this guy has gotta be cool!" If cool is totally 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 while you eat dinner 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 living together, I realized that second roommate, or "Future Bring a Gun Into A Public Area Guy" as I liked to call him, had a few screws loose. Once I finally yelled at him about his leach-like behavior, and made him cry, he finally backed off. And by backing off 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 third roommate that sucked ass was schizophrenic, so I probably don't have to go into much detail on why she sucked ass. I go into greater detail about the story here, but 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 owner rented out his five rooms to various people which obviously include mentally rabid individuals. The woman, 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 things and hiding them. She became so convinced that she tried to enlist my partnership in teaming up against him. I'd avoid 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 occured when she barged into my room at 3AM 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 that she had to act that way for safety reasons.

As much as I enjoy relaying these stories, I HOPE TO GOD I NEVER HAVE A CRAZY ROOMMATE EVER AGAIN!

Do you have any crazy roommate stories that you would like to share? 

*title suggested by awesome friend Chris!

14 Comments:

At 9:21 AM, Anonymous Skinny Dip said...

The possibility of Roomie #1 is the reason I think I was totally terrified of living in a dorm.

I think all of these top my crazy room-mate stories. The best one I have is my former housemate who had "Seinfeld B.O" - meaning, wherever the B went, the O liked to linger indefinitely. He also lived off of a diet of hot-dogs and chicken curry.

 
At 9:31 AM, Blogger KG said...

I have only had a handful of roommates and most were in College (in Central New York of course - go Southern Tier?). I've had both good and bad experiences, I think my favorite bad experience was when one of my roommates in senior year of college left my best friend and I a death threat in the refrigerator that I'm almost certain he would've gone through with if we had touched his lamb gyro. We also fought all year long with our other roommate about the temperature which resulted in my best friend stealing the refrigerator temperature knob and the roommate retaliating by playing "Jessica" by the Allman brothers for about three days straight on full volume. He and I shared a wall and I thought I was going to have to rip off my ears or shove my fist through his wall.

Oh roommates...yours sound like real winners.

 
At 10:25 AM, Blogger Magda Joyce said...

I had a roommate who would introduce me to her friends with the precedence of "You'll love them! Be best friends!" then constantly scream at me for hanging out with them and being a "sneaky bitch" (I always invited her). She also used to cook at 4 AM on weeknights at a volume that was impossibly loud. Eventually we had a "conversation" about all this and she got violently drunk throughout it, then she moved out without telling me or our other roommates, and left a bunch of her shit behind. Including her turtle. The kicker? She moved 3 floors up.

 
At 10:44 AM, Blogger A said...

I had a roommate who had a penchant for smoking the pot, which is fine by me, but one day, I came home to her dividing up the most pot I'd ever seen and announcing that she'd be selling to make a little extra cash and then proceeded to parade buyers of the creepy male variety in and out of our house at all hours of the night. Also? She and her boyfriend decided to have sex on the kitchen counter and when I came home in the middle, they a) didn't stop and b) never brought it up. So weird.

 
At 12:11 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yikes.

I was young when I left for college and they had a policy about dorms and minors, so I never had a roommate. After college I think I savored my alone time so much (I grew up with a crap load of siblings) that I never wanted to have a roommate again. I've lived with two people in my life - my ex boyfriend and my husband.

Sometimes I wish I had the weird/creepy roommate experience.

 
At 12:21 PM, Anonymous carissajaded said...

Ah man, I've been pretty lucky when it comes to roommates... with the exception of my freshman year. I lived with a girl who liked to bring her nightly conquests back to our shared room for a loud romp. Which I could deal with.. It was the fact that I walked in to find her picking at bumps on her private parts with MY TWEEZERS that really got to me.

Peeee esss.. I'm moving to Austin on Monday WHOO!

 
At 12:48 PM, Blogger Teeny said...

your title reminds me of "The cook, the wife the thief and her lover"; have you seen it? It terrified me...it was a very disturbing movie, but apparently rates high in the arthouse film world. I had the joy of living with a stalker...who used to wait up for me, and sleep in the living room OUTSIDE my bedroom door. I have to read your Gary Busey post now.

 
At 12:56 PM, Blogger Hipstercrite said...

@Skinny Dip- Aww man! I imagine curry seeps out of your pores too! Gross!

@NWIWB- Please tell me you wrote a story about senior year roommate. That sounds hysterical! My Mom inadvertently imposed the same torture upon me when she played Allman Bros when I was a kid.

@Magda- What!? Really?? That is weird! 4AM?! Left turtle behind?! Moved 3 floors away?!?

@Amy- Wow! She sounds like a winner. No respect, I'd say. People are so f'ing weird!

@Smedette- No, no you don't. Though it makes for interesting stories, it's kind of stressful. I lived alone for a year in LA and loved it! Got a little lonely at times, but preferred it.

@Carissa- No. no. no. no. no. no. Please tell me that is not true. God, the mental image in my head right now...

 
At 4:24 PM, Blogger Jazz One said...

When I was in college, my first roommate was horrible. What pushed me over the edge was I got out of the shower one night and started to dry off. Then I notice I had black hairs all over. I'm blond. He used my towel. I jumped back into the shower and air dried afterwards.
When I moved to Austin, I had the passive aggressive note leaver. My door, the sink, the thermostat. Everywhere. A friend stayed on the couch one night. He woke up the next morning with a note infront of his face.

 
At 8:54 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

Wooooow lady. You've really won the creepy roommate awards.

My ex and I had a roommate for a few months while I was pregnant. The only food I could keep down for most of my pregnancy was Yoplait yogurt so I bought it in mass amounts. Every time I left the house the guy would sit around eating my yogurt and then hiding all the empty container in his room so I wouldn't notice the eight missing yogurts. That's all I got.

Other than that the only roommate I've ever had is my brother and he's great.

(By the way, don't steal a pregnant woman's yogurt. Really not fuckin' cool.)

 
At 8:10 AM, Blogger Lenny said...

Your first roommate 9/11 story reminds me of mine as well.I had a killer migraine on 9/11 and skipped class to lay back down in my dorm room. When I woke up, my pea-brained sized roommate (who screwed guys in the bunk above me and left eggs and ketchup for weeks in her trash can) left me a post-it on my desk that read as follows:

"Amyyyyyyy,
Some asian peeps crashed a plane into the world trade center today while you were being a sleepy head! NOT GOOD!!!!!!"

I remember thinking to myself, "No one is really this stupid, right?"

I still have the post-it. And occasionally show it to people when I have parties.

 
At 10:29 AM, Anonymous Julia said...

Gotta be said, this is one of the best things I've ever read. If I have to share a flat when I'm older and get a crazy, I'm cracking skulls. Roommate the third sounds particularly awful. My hypercondriac friend thinks she may have schizophrenia, and I don't know how to stress that she probably doesn't since she's never gone screaming about figs and spoons.

 
At 12:41 PM, Blogger Benny said...

Roommate #1 made me weirdly nostalgic for college dorms (especially in the pre-facebook years), when you end up living more intimately with crazy people than you ever will again, and then years later can think of them as random strangers who you'll never see again.
Roommate #2 must have been terrifying. I've never had an experience like that, but I feel like I can totally imagine what it would be like to have a nice apartment, get yourself a roommate, and then have to be the one to move out, because you can't kick them out.
Roommate #3 actually freaked me out the least. Probably because the system was on your side in that story.

 
At 12:46 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

My first roommate was a co-worker that I wasn't too fond of, but I am pretty good at getting along with people. I still have no proof, but I'm pretty sure she was on something. We worked overnight. There were times when she would stay up 3 days straight and then crash for 24hrs straight. One night I woke up sweating only to find the heat on 80 with her on the couch with a blanket. We lived in Florida and it was April. She took a shower maybe once every 3 days. The white wash clothes she used were black after she used them. I mopped the floor one day and when she walked across it right after she left black footprints the whole way. Her room smelled so bad you could smell it when you walked in the front door. She never washed dishes and when I asked her to clean up after herself she just started hiding the dishes in her room. She would leave these nasty piles of hair in and on the side of the tub. She ate all my food and then denied it when I confronted her. She told the neighbor I ran up all the bills so she never had money. The chick only had half of rent, water, and electric to pay, no car, no gas, no insurance, no phonebill and yet she never had money.I had daycare, car insurance, gas, baby items, and cellphone on top of housebills and had money left over. We had about the same payrate. I moved my tv out of the livingroom since she kept waking me up with it so she took the toilet paper hostage (we took turns buying it so it was "her" toilet paper at that time) when i didn't have the funds to buy more because I was on maternity leave and wouldn't have another check for at least a week. I had another nightmare roommate, but I will leave it at that for now.

 

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