I am the worst roommate in the entire world. I’m serious. They had a contest. I was entered into it by my roommates at the time, four hippies in my college town with whom I shared a three-story house. They weren’t the greatest roommates in the world either, but we managed to get along quite well. The contest was broken down into the following categories:
A. Inability to clean up after oneself.
B. Unawareness of the strange 1)ceramic objects in the kitchen named “dishes” and the fact that they needed to be washed regularly.
C. A complete and utter confusion over concepts such as “rent” and “electric bills.”
D. A habit of bringing strange people home at three in the morning.
E. An even bigger habit of calling one’s friends long-distance at four in the morning.
The hippies thought I would do well in a contest such as this, and they were right. I 2)walkedaway with first place. My prize was a crown made out of a discarded pizza box, and an 3)evictionnotice. I couldn’t have been more proud.
Please take my word for it when I say to you that I am your worst nightmare. I once set my apartment on fire when I fell asleep with a lit cigarette. I once brought four men home in the middle of the night and said to my roommates, “These guys are in a band I saw tonight. They are awesome. I told them they could4)crashhere tonight. I hope you don’t mind.”
Ladies and gentlemen, I once threw a phone through a plate-glass window after having an argument with my girlfriend. Actually, that’s a lie. I’ve done that twice.
In the school year of 1990 to 1991, I moved eleven times in twelve months. Not a single one of them was by choice. I have had roommates throw my belongings in the street. I have had roommates sell my stereo to make up for rent I didn’t pay. I eat all the food in the house, even it’s not mine and even if it’s out of date. I am the worst roommate in the entire, entire world.
That is, until I met my match.
Her name was Kim. I found her through an ad in the newspaper. It said:
Wanted. One roommate to share a two-bedroom apartment in Andersonville. Must like animals, loud music, smoking and having parties.
I gave her a call. Kim was a 28-year-old sculptor of household objects. Her specialty was in making pieces of furniture out of discarded electronic items: chairs made out of burnt-out televisions, a bed fashioned out of 36 Macintosh computers.
When I walked in the apartment, I couldn’t even tell whether the place had carpet because I couldn’t see the floor. Every inch of the floor was covered in 5)debris. It was like a graveyard for computer nerds. In one corner was a 1950’s 6)mannequin, spray-painted orange and covered with bullet holes. Kim said: “Don’t mind that. My boyfriend gets a little crazy sometimes, and the only way to calm him down is to let him shoot off his pistol for a while.”
I moved in the following Saturday.
Kim and I got along great. In fact, living with Kim made me think of starting a new business:
Bad Roommates Placement Services. Always forgetting to change the kitty litter? Fine, here’s another person just like you. Go crazy. Like to get real drunk and play your stereo at top volume in the middle of the night? Hey, Bob here likes heavy metal music just as much as you. And we just found a 7)comfy little couch house you can call your own.
Within weeks, Kim’s and my apartment was an absolute train wreck. My friends would come over and say things like: “Oh my god, how can you live like this?”
And I would just quietly shrug my shoulders, 8)dumbfounded. The conditions seemed fine to me.
The thing that was great about Kim and I as roommates was that we always expected the worst from each other, so we were never disappointed. She would come home one night and I would say something like, “I needed to pay the gas bill today, so I took all your CDs down to the secondhand shop and got 40 dollars for them.”
And this was perfectly fine. We never argued over the dishes because we owned no dishes. We never ate each other’s groceries because Kim had turned the refrigerator into a wardrobe. We received a notice from the landlord every single month because our rent was overdue, and at least 50 percent of our time was spent with our gas and electricity turned off because we didn’t pay the bills. We couldn’t have been happier.
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. One day there was a knock on the door. It was the police. They held a 9)megaphone up to their mouth and shouted: “Attention Kim and Jason! People were never meant to live like this! You are a 10)menace to society! Come out with your hands in plain sight!”
With the police was a priest. They gave the megaphone to him and he said: “Children of God, your home is an 11)abomination. It is a cursed and evil place, where 12)rodents and other tools of Satan tread upon the ground.”
And he was actually right about that part.
“Children of God, please vacate this 13)foulplace, so that the land may be 14)exorcised and brought back into the folds of Heaven.”
But we would not go down without a fight. We knew what a nightmare we were as roommates. We knew that neither of us would ever be able to live with someone else again. This was our home, damn it! I mean, sure, there was that big hole in the wall from that night we saw “Fight Club” and decided we could learn how to make our own explosives. And yes, technically the 15)cockroaches actually had possession of the house and probably brought in more income than us anyway. But this was our HOME, damn it!
Kim and I 16)barricaded the door with a pile of old magazines the size of a small boy. Unfortunately, we forgot about the back door, which we kept unlocked because we couldn’t actually find our keys. The police had us removed, the priest 17)sprinkled the place with holy water, and they burned the whole damn building down to the ground.
I live alone now. People are still horrified when they come by my place, but it’s just not the same. There’s just no way for a studio apartment to truly ever embrace chaos the way a three-story house can. I got a letter from Kim recently. She’s in jail. She says it’s the best living arrangement she’s ever had. Her bathroom can be cleaned with an industrial hose, and her landlord never, ever threatens to kick her out.