1. The Sleepwalker
I recently acquired a new roommate. The entire situation should never have happened we, but I needed someone to help with rent, so a craigslist posting later, he moved in.
His name was Greg, and he disclosures to me that he did have some strange sleeping behaviors (sleep talking, sleep walking, night terrors). Funny thing was, I also had a history of sleep walking, but only on rare occasions.
The first incident occurred about one week later when I heard him screaming in the middle of the night. Since we both slept in desperate rooms on different sides of the house, the screams sounded distant, but enough to scare me so much I ran to check on him. As I’d get closer to his bedroom, he stopped screaming, so I just went back to bed.
For the next month, he had no issues. I noticed he had no friends or family that would visit and I never saw or heard him on the phone or texting. Then another random night, Greg started screaming. Same thing; I got up and started to go to his room but he’d stop.
Then one night, I was awoken by screaming in my bedroom. I couldn’t see anything in the panic, so I turned on the bed side lamp and he was at the foot of my bed wearing some sleeping clothes (athletic shorts and a t-shirt). Scared me, so I started screaming and woke him up. He apologized and went back to bed.
Then the scariest thing happened. About two nights later, I awoke to clanking. Sounded like tools and hammers tapping. I turned on the light to see Greg kneeling down in a corner working on something with his hands. A few seconds after turning the light on, Greg froze, then slowly turned his upper body around and stared blankly at me while I laid in bed.
I was beyond creeped out, so I slowly slid out of bed and left the house. After sleeping in my truck down the road in an empty church parking lot, I returned to the house at about 8 in the morning.
Greg was gone. All of his belongings were gone. No signs of him anywhere. It was like he never lived there. I didn’t know of any of his friends or family so I had no one to call about him. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months.
When I moved out after the lease was up, I was moving furniture out of my bedroom. In the corner of the room where I last saw Greg kneeling down, I realized the floor vent for the air conditioning was loose. Inside the floor vent was an envelope with a ton of pictures of me sleeping. The pictures had handwritten dates and times written on the back of the pictures.
The only other item was a widdled down wooden broom handle brought to a point. I truly believe Greg was preparing to kill me that night, and he realized it. Because it was the sleep walking Greg that was going to do it, he left to save my life. It appears Greg had been coming to my room almost nightly and working on making the broom handle a stabbing weapon and I never heard, until the last night I saw him.
2. Turpentine on the stove because why not, I guess
I’ll start us off: In college, I got an apartment with 3 dudes (I’m a girl). It was art school so some crazy is expected but this went above and beyond. These were nice guys if a little immature. There were some annoying but hardly newsworthy points of contention– they never washed a single dish, filled the house with shit they found at the dump, played insanely loud music, etc. Then one of them, never a poster child for mental health, really began to lose it.
It started with him getting a turtle. He kept the turtle in a tank full of water with an enormous cement block sticking halfway out of it, ostensibly for the purpose of giving the turtle something to climb up on. He claimed the turtle’s tank “cleaned itself” and bought the turtle worms to eat. Turtles don’t eat worms, but roommate didn’t throw worms out. Instead, he kept putting the jars of worms in the kitchen. One day, we woke up to find he’d emptied the jars of worms into the bathtub so they could “live there, with their brethren.” What? I started staying at friends places because this roommate had come home one day with a trumpet and begun playing it at all hours (he didn’t have any actual trumpet-playing skills). One morning I come home to find this roommate has gone into my room, slashed at various possessions with a hunting knife, smeared paint on my walls, put onions in my bed and left open containers of alcohol everywhere. When I confronted him, he said, “Missebean, you can’t stay out all night and then come home and expect me to NOT have gone into your room and done some stuff.” As I planned and executed my escape, my roommate’s shenanigans continued. Among his offenses:
- He left the turpentine on the stove with the stove on on two separate occasions (once in a can sitting directly on the burner, and one in a frying pan.)
- He left every single faucet in the house running full blast, left the front door open and left the apartment unattended
- He laminated live goldfish to the kitchen table
When I talked to my other two roommates about the crazy one, there was some general shifting from foot to foot, some half-hearted agreements that the situation was untenable, but a general unwillingness to deal with the situation with the defense “I mean, he’s our boy. What are we supposed to do?” When they finally got evicted they all went for a semester abroad and I was left with all their insane, coddling mothers calling me and blaming me while I dealt with the landlords and everything else.
3. The Paranoid Delusional
So my buddy’s dad bought him and his brother a house for them to live in during university. I and another of our friends moved into the house, but there was still 2 rooms vacant, so they posted the vacancy online. One random guy took one of the rooms. He moved his stuff in one day at around 5 am, which we thought was pretty strange to begin with. Now he wasn’t a student at our school, he actually moved to the city to be with his girlfriend who was a student. Unfortunately for him, a couple weeks after signing the lease his girlfriend dumped him.
He was a strange guy to begin with. He was the filthiest person I’ve ever met. One time he came home from his factory job and proceeded to make and eat a sandwich with hands pure black from grease. Pretty gross, and strange considering we have sinks and soap in our house. Over time he actually started becoming a lot more normal, probably because he came out and partied with us a lot. When we’d go out, he would stay at the bar until closing and bring home some unattractive girl who was smashed out of her mind. He actually wheeled quite frequently.
Then things started getting a little off. He developed a rash of some sort, which I thought was probably because his room was disgusting and there may have been bugs living in it. However, that’s not what he thought. He told my friend that he thought we had been putting chemicals in his laundry soap to give him a rash, which of course we didn’t. The paranoia continued with him misplacing his driver’s license, which he thought we had stolen and hid so he couldn’t come to the bar with us anymore. Again that wasn’t true. So after a few weeks of him clearly developing paranoia, one morning the shit hit the fan.
I woke up one morning at around 6 am to the sound of someone running up and down the stairs. I was half asleep and didn’t know what time it was so I just assumed one of my roommates was late for class or something. Then I heard more frantic running, followed by my other, normal, roommate screaming. I jumped up and ran out to the kitchen. I see my normal roommate, I’ll call him Steve, standing in the kitchen. Then, I get around the corner and see the crazy one, I’ll call him John, standing in front of my fridge in a bathrobe, sweatpants which were clearly women’s and way too small, and a baseball cap with a wolf on it. All of my and my other friend’s shit had been torn out of the fridge and smashed on the ground. Pickles, milk, chili, you name it, all over the ground. Steve asked him what the hell was going on. John replied, while shivering, shaking, and sweating profusely, “I took 11 Benadryl”. We didn’t know what to do so we took him into the living room, sat him on the couch and tried to calm him down. The whole time he was shaking, shivering, and sweating and had one of the most murderous looks on his face I’ve ever seen.
At this point my other, much slower to react, roommate came out to see what the fuss was about. When he walked into the living room, John looked at him with his death gaze, pointed and said: “That’s my guy!” I’m confident my friend has nightmares about it lol. So after a little while of us trying to figure out what to do while this kid mumbles random things, out of nowhere he jumps to his feet, lets out a war cry, and charges at my roommate Steve. Now Steve was a bouncer at some bars in our city, so when John charged at him, he hip tossed him right through one of our dining room chairs (our dining room and living room were essentially one room). After this he jumped on him and held down his body, then I jumped on his legs and we held him down. He was kicking and punching us, trying to get us off. At this point, he started yelling some crazy things, most of which I forget now. However, one that stuck out to me was “The media always wins!” So after holding him down for a while and no progress on his mental state, we called 911 and waited for police and EMS to come and take him to the hospital.
Now before I explain what happened next, I should explain what happened after he got taken away. We were of course quite shocked and curious, so we went into his room to take a quick look at what the fuck he’d been up to all night. In his room, we found a bunch of our food, a bottle of Tylenol which was missing a substantial amount of pills, and some Benadryl scattered around the floor. We also found a box that had a photo album and some other things in it which we think most likely was all stuff from his relationship with the girl who dumped him after he moved out here to be with her. That being said, we figure the hat was a gift from her, and the sweatpants were probably hers.
So now that ex-girlfriend box is out there, I can continue, and this is where it goes from sad and shocking to just plain creepy and frightening. While we were holding him down, he kept struggling, and in the process, his little sweatpants started coming down. They got down to about the bottom of his ass when we noticed he was wearing little purple woman’s panties. We can only assume they were his ex’s.
So we figure he most likely tried to kill himself with pills, but instead he just ended up tripping the fuck out. We only ever saw him once again when he came to pick up his stuff and move out, but he clearly didn’t want to talk about it
4. Kidnapped
While the dickish things he did to me later in our friendship aren’t crazy, I had one roommate who did something truly bizarre. It began one day while I was at lunch with my girlfriend at the time and her family and got a text from stating: “I owe you a new dresser”.
Junior year I lived with two friends. We had a 2 bedroom apartment and thus I ended up sharing a room with one of them who I’ll call Jeff. In this room, we had a walk in closet. One night, he and the other roommate, who I’ll call Eric, went out partying while I was off at the GF’s place. They come back pretty smashed and Eric passes out on the couch while Jeff drags himself back to our room and onto his bed.
This would normally be the end of the story but Jeff had a strange habit in that when he got really drunk, he would often sleepwalk. Sophomore year he got tons of shit for waking up after a night out, squeezing past a broken door that barely opened into his closet and literally dousing the joint with piss. Needless to say, he began to repeat this process that night.
Now as has been told back to me, Jeff reckons he got up during the night, sleepwalked into our shared walk-in closet that shared my Ikea dresser and closed the door behind him before passing out on the floor. A few hours later Jeff wakes up fully only to find himself in an absolutely pitch black room with unfamiliar objects and no recollection of how he got there. To this day he claims he thought he was kidnapped.
Apparently Jeff, upon realizing he had been “kidnapped” jumped up and started just going ape-shit in an attempt to escape. He started banging on the walls and door and screaming “ERRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIICCCCCC” who was comfortably passed out on the couch still and rather a heavy sleeper. Now Jeff was a rugby player and quite built and so he started to literally tear his way out of the room. He punched a hole in one wall that led to the bathroom and then proceeded to tear a torso sized hole in the opposite wall. With his bare hands, he went through drywall, insulation and another set of drywall. Upon reaching the vinyl siding that adorned the side of our building he tore down the metal hanging rod, bent it Hulk style and started trying to spear through the siding. If we had had wood siding, he would have probably fallen to his death. It was visibly dented from the outside for at least the rest of our time there.
Eventually, after severely denting the vinyl siding and somehow tearing my poor dresser to shreds in the process of all this, Jeff gave up. He really needed to pee and began to cry at the state of his hopelessness. Sitting in defeat on the floor of the closet, he saw light coming in from the bottom of the door. Spurred by this glorious light and the need to urinate he finally managed to locate the door handle and stepped out into our room.
His victorious words?
“Shit.”
Pics of the damage.
5. Shirtless With A Rusty Hatchet
Imagine finding your roommate shirtless, holding a rusty hatchet, in your backyard. When you ask him what’s up, he replies “I am going to find that fucking cat. . .” and then just trails off and starts looking in the bushes.
6. Meet Jed
Housing complex. The units are basically small cottages, made for two roommates, with a common area and attached kitchen, a small storage closet in the common area containing water pipes leading to Suite A’s bathroom. The two private areas of the suite contained a private bedroom, a sliding glass patio door, and a private bathroom. Sounds idyllic.
My roomie, Jed, liked to throw parties. He liked tarantulas, too, and kept six.
For the sake of saving my effort in recounting this story, here is a basic rundown of the chaos:
This run-through of incidents is going to be kind of terse because I’m working off of a check list I made a while ago.
During our stay together, my roomie:
- He brought his motorcycle into our common room because he was “afraid it would be stolen.” This was fine, but then he started it and let it idle for 15 minutes without opening any windows, causing all of our stuff to smell like motor exhaust.
- After his girlfriend left him, he went berserk in his private bathroom with a sledgehammer or a geologist’s hammer and smashed all of his bathroom fixtures. I’m not sure of this but I believe that just before she left him she fucked some guy with pubic lice in my bed during a party.
- His toilet was inoperative at this point, so he used mine for a time, until I refused him access. Later I would find out that he shat in garbage bags and kept them in the common room closet for weeks. More on this later.
- He set fire to our carpet with alcohol during a party. He pissed in the fridge. He shat in the fridge. He shat in the crisper drawer. He shat on the oven top, and instead of cleaning it up, turned on the burner, reasoning that carbon is easier to clean than feces.
- He left a dead cat he found somewhere in our oven for a week and forgot about it. I discovered it later.
- He owned 6 tarantulas and would let one run around free-range. He assured me he had “tamed it.” I assured him he was a stupid fuckhead.
- He never showered.
- He sold drugs from his room. He smoked pot with his friends in the common area. He spilled bong water on two of my text books. He and his friends did cocaine off of the television set in the common area.
- He had a party to which he invited too many people, and they spilled into my room. Strangers had sex in my room at that party. In my bed. One of them had pubic lice. Someone took a dump in my closet. Someone left a used condom in my slipper. I discovered all of these things after it was too late.
- Morning after said party, my mother knocked on the front door, and a stranger from that party answered and immediately threw up on her legs.
- Crackheads would regularly come by our apartment at all hours of the night trying to buy drugs because of his illicit activities. Whenever I answered the door and indicated that there was no crack to be had, they would sometimes get, desperate, belligerent and violent, and refuse to leave.
- He put food products containing milk, meat, and cheese on the heating unit and turned it on for three hours to see what would happen. I could’ve told him what would happen if he asked me.
- He got angry at some video game he and his friends were playing in the common area, so he busted into my room while I was sleeping, and punched me in the face and stomach.
- A few days later he put a tarantula in my bed sheets while I was sleeping. Thankfully I wasn’t bitten, but I was freaked out and still sometimes jump out of bed in the middle of the night for no reason and attack my sheets.
- He shat in a lot of our fixtures. He would put his shit in baggies and leave them in strange places. I was thankful for when he used a baggie. A few words of advice for potential roommates: A light fixture is not a toilet. A heating vent is not a toilet. The sink is not a toilet. The oven is not a toilet. That is all.
I was pissed at this point. He refused to clean or take care of all of the messes listed above, so I ended up cleaning them, but keeping an hourly log and catalog of what work I did and worked out a bill, which I sent to him. I was tired of cleaning feces out of our refrigerator, finding turds in our crisper drawer, shit on the stovetop, vomit on the carpet, vomit in our potted plants, vomit on the grille of our television set, urine on the carpet, urine on the kitchen floor seeping behind the refrigerator, dead animals in our oven and freezer units, and bags of feces hidden in our light fixtures.
Have you ever had to move your refrigerator out of its little nook to get behind it to clean urine mixed with whatever the fuck lurks behind a refrigerator in the first place?
After sending him the cleaning bill and getting a refusal of payment, I took some of his stuff, dumped it in a storage unit across town, and held it until he paid me back. He stole some of my stuff in retaliation, but I called the cops and repossessed my belongings. He was unable to articulate to the cops that I had some of his shit in this exchange, so I ended up basically getting my shit back while he had to be put in their car to cool off.
Upon retrospect, I think maybe he became mentally ill after losing his girlfriend, and not being able to part with his feces was part of his illness. This is purely speculative.
He wasn’t poor. He was from a wealthy family. They don’t come into the picture, though.
This is where the sealing begins. Put a date mark right here, because this is where shit gets crazy.
I had had enough. I bought a mini fridge, a plug-in stove top, two padlocked footlockers, a wooden bar, duct tape, a remote-control car, and an external padlock. My private area had two entrances… Here, I best sum up my little fortress in this post I made in another thread:
quote:
Actually, upon reflection, I really want to share how I kept my room-mate out of my private area. It was dubbed the “Home Alone” security system.
I had two potential entrances to my private area, a sliding glass patio door and a regular door to the common area. I secured the common door with a padlock on the outside which was really just for show. The inside was barricaded. At the bottom, I had a rolled up towel, and I sealed the rest of it with tape to avoid smell or other chemical assaults from the common area. I packed against the door with my king-sized bed, which was in turn secured from being dislodged by a bookshelf full of weights and books. Even if he got through the padlock, he would not have been able to open the door without busting it in two. The top half of the door was unsecured; I was worried he might break the door and gain access, so when I seized his stuff I had it put in public storage across town.
Now the sliding glass door is where the home alone shit comes in. It had a lock, but it was nonfunctional and only accessible from the inside. So in order to secure the door while I was away, I got a remote controlled car, attached it to a string which was secured by a fisheye screw at the top of the door, and tied to a security bar which would drop into the tread of the sliding door, preventing it from being opened.
Anyone who has a sliding glass door would know how this works, but if anyone needs further explanation, I’m happy to furnish it.
So when I came home, I would whip out my little remote control, make the RC car run off and lift the bar, then gain access to the apartment. To prevent this system from being discovered, I papered the inside of the sliding door with butcher paper, and I ran a wire outside of the door in an obvious manner so that the roomie would think that this wire somehow if tugged correctly, would undo the lock. To my knowledge, all of his attempts to get inside my apartment were by messing with this wire, which was attached to the handle of an antique coffee grinder and a paint can. If you tugged it, you’d get a weird uneven resistance as the handle crank turned and the paint can danced, which added to the illusion that this wire was some secret way of ingress.
I heard this account from the neighbors because it occurred while I was away, but apparently he had lost his front door key, had some kind of intestinal problem, and had to take a shit really bad. All of the neighbors he knew he had already hit up for toilet access and been refused by this point. So he’s swearing like crazy and yanking at this wire, and bashing against the door in a frenzied desperation when the neighbors call the cops, reporting a B&E. When the cops show up he’s taking a shit in the bushes just outside my window. I fucking hate him so much.
I think he went crazy and lost all his friends at some point because around the time I barricaded, I stopped hearing parties. In fact, I stopped hearing anything from the common area of the apartment, except for the occasional formless moans and thumping. I don’t know precisely what went on in there because I mentally washed my hands of the whole area. I did, however, start smelling odors. I taped up my door. I know it wasn’t smart to do things like this, but I was just fucking sick of dealing with his shit. I didn’t call the landlord or anything, despite the fact that I knew he was destroying things over there. After cleaning so much of his shit up, I just wanted the universal god of justice to see what a wreck the place would become without my presence.
Forgive me for being a little spotty in my descriptions after this point. What I do know of what transpired over there I can only reconstruct from forensic evidence, what precisely was destroyed, what common friends have told me in their accounts, and two forays over into the waste zone over the next two months. I essentially didn’t even see the front door of our apartment during this time.
7. Guy With A Crazy Tom Cruise Voice
A few years ago, my roommate started to lose his marbles close to graduation and after he had surgery for a deviated septum. He definitely had some odd habits, but it got so bad that he received a letter from his school’s department suggesting he see a psychologist.
He goes to the shrink, tells the guy to “suck and fuck his dick.” Then he came home, told me the story like it was the most normal thing in the world. He steadfastly goes upstairs to his room for about 45 minutes.
Then he comes back down and told me that he was lying in bed watching Sports Center and got the sudden urge to break his nose. But he couldn’t decide which side to smash. So he figured if the Penguins won he would go from the left if the Red Wings won he would go from the right. Just as he was about to smash his face into the pillow he realized it was crazy and came downstairs to tell me all of this in some manic, crazy Tom Cruise voice.
Same guy also wrote an anonymous “story” to his friend that was supposed to condone his partying habits.
In the story, his friend died so at the funeral his other friend gave some speech which concluded with legally changing his name to that of his dead friend.
8. Joe, The Arse
In 2002 I went to uni in Edinburgh. Initially, I was quite anxious as it was quite a way from where I’m from (NW England) and I was the only one I knew going there, but it is a beautiful city and student life is great. Turns out anyway, that Edinburgh uni doesn’t really present much of a cross section of Scotish society, being largely made up as it is of rich English people from Surrey eager to try out the snowy wastelands on Daddy’s tab. Cue the end of 2nd year. My group of friends and I are choosing who lives with who as we move from halls to flats. My course is pretty intensive so 9 times out of 10 I would have to turn down any invitation for a night out/spliff/party. Hence, my name was not too high up on people’s wish list when it came to populating their soon-to-be uberparty-pad. So I got lumbered with 3 other guys. Now, two of these guys are fine, one (Joe – a rather wealthy Surrey boy) was unknown to me and, as you’ll see, turned out to be a bit of a shit.
We got lucky with our flat. Super-close to the new Parliament and with 3 floors for 4 people, the rent was undervalued hugely because it was brand new and we were the first tenants. Everything was gleaming – it was worth £500k apparently. Not bad for £270pm each in Edinburgh. So we got everything signed and went to our prospective homes for summer to work etc. Except for J, who decided to hang around for summer and enjoy the festival. The last I see of him is when I leave for home having just put all my coursework, architecture models, computer stuff etc in my room and locking the bedroom door behind me.
About a month later, I’m heading up to Edinburgh with 2 friends. We decided to celebrate my birthday by having a week in the festival. Why not? I’ve already paid for the rent. On the train up I get a phone call from one of the other flatmates telling me he’s moving out.
‘What?!’ says I, a tad surprised and concerned.
‘It’s the flat, man. It’s fucked up. Joe’s fucked it all up’. Says he.
It doesn’t sound good. So I tell him I’ll check it out for myself and not to tell Joe that I’m coming.
We arrive in Waverly, walk the short distance to the flat and get ready for what awaits us. The plan was set: go quietly straight up to my room on the top floor, leave our stuff then have a look around. Up we go. As I reach the top of the stairs I notice something different about my bedroom door. There seems to be only half of it left on the hinges, the rest splintered across the floor. Shit.
We go into my room. There are three tussled but empty sleeping bags. I step on a used condom. I survey the room. My flatmate’s description was accurate: it’s fucked. The blinds have been torn and snapped off the wall. The en-suite (nice flat as I say) – brand new until now – was a tip. Piss everywhere. Smears of what I can only assume to be shit along the shower walls. The shower head is smashed and hanging like a New York payphone. I open my wardrobe. Coursework: crumpled into a ball. Architecture models: completely destroyed. Computer: side has come off and one of my jumpers has been shoved inside it. On inspection, the insides have been smashed. Time to see Joe.
We go down to the kitchen via the living room. The living room is off the kitchen with double doors, so it’s pretty much one huge space. Walking in, we see about 10 sleeping bags and a mattress (we had no furniture at this stage). In the corner is a comatosed Joe half on the mattress, half on the floor. His head being on the floor, we step over him and enter the kitchen.
What followed was the most breathtaking site I’ve ever seen. Scattered amongst spilled beans and cans of beer were: 1 large pile of coke – the scale of which can only be described as ‘Scarface’, the remnants of about 50 lines, a bag of ketamine, 5 large bags of pills, 2 ounce-bags of weed. Many discarded pieces of foil with burn marks (I presume crack, heroin). The fridge is ajar. It’s full – to the point it won’t close – of mushrooms. And there, in the middle of all this, is one used syringe.
I walk over to Joe to wake him up. His eyes are deep pink. His expression on seeing me standing over him was priceless. Imagine your expression if your dad walked in on you wanking over a picture of your mum. That’s the kind of shock/shame/fear in his eyes right now. He stares at me. I stare at him. Finally, he pipes up with, ‘What the fuck are you doing in my flat?’
Come again?
‘Get out, man. This is my flat now. You can fuck off. Go find yourself another place to stay.’
This went on for a while. Me pointing out the obvious, him still tripping off his tits telling me to get out of his newly-conquered territory. I’ll cut this bit down as this is getting long… Basically, I looked for another flat. Eventually, I realize I’ve got a good one as it is and shouldn’t have to be spending my birthday flat hunting because he decided to fuck up our current flat. I decided I’d better get the landlords involved.
We met the next day outside the flat (we were staying at my mate’s in the meantime). On the way we walked down Princes St. we saw something rather bizarre: some guy leaning forward off a traffic light post in the middle of the road (think Titanic, king of the world scene) staring at oncoming traffic as if wanting a fight. He then lets go and runs straight at the oncoming cars. Cue much beeping, running over bonnets, and narrowly avoiding a bus. All while half naked and screaming ‘Wahoooooo!’ Wierd. But it is festival time.
Anyway, I explain everything to them. They were shocked but, to their credit, understanding. They appreciated the honesty and the chance to save their expensive new property. We say thanks and stand back as they enter the flat…
Now, you know that scene from Ratatouille where the woman’s ceiling falls down and about 10,000 rats come flooding out of the house. Yeah, like that but with Spanish and French people. Some half naked, some fully. All fucked up and running as if Robocop himself had just walked in. I’ve never seen so many bouncing dreadlocks in all my life. After about 5 mins it’s pretty quiet except for a shouting/whimpering exchange. Then, just as things look like they’re coming to a close someone sprints past us heading for the flat, bumping us on the way:
‘Wooohooooooooo!’ The half naked guy pelts straight in ready to join the party. About 3 seconds later he comes running out again, minus the woohoo.
So yeah, the karma is, he got kicked out, he lost many friends and fucked up his degree. The one stand out moment, though was when my friends and I were sitting in my bedroom window a few minutes later. I was enjoying the fact that I no longer had to face flat hunting at the worst time of the year or be homeless, while my mates were happy to be watching the spectacle. As Joe slinked away, pashmina-clad girlfriend in tow, he looked back and we all gave him a wave. The arse.
—deleted
9. Toilet Not Usable
Insanely obese roommate clogs the toilet with her shit, puts “toilet not usable” sign on the door and leaves. One hour later, I have two girls visiting who wanna use the toilet. Guess who had to get the shit out of the toilet with a plastic bag over his hand.
10. The Med Student
Moved into a new house with a few other people. The long-term flatmate was a professional university student, having completed degrees in law, medicine, and fine arts. Found out after about a week he was a heroin addict, after 6 months of long conversations it became clear he was not a ‘normal’ person. He told me how and where he had killed two people on different occasions, and me and another friend moved out after it started to snowball (he bit the head off his pet rat in the middle of an argument and threw the body across the room whilst smiling at us with the head in his mouth). He died a few years after I moved out from an overdose.
—deleted
11. A Love Of Nose Candy
One of my roommates in college sat bolt upright in his bed at about 2 am (I was playing video games) and said, “This is the hill.” I asked, “what hill?” He answered “This is the hill we die on.” and went back to sleep. Never did anything close to sleep-talking the rest of the year.
He also had an enjoyment for the white powder. He walked in once while under the influence of a bunch of stuff and proceeded to try and snort the salt someone had spilled on the carpet.
One time I walked in to find him throwing everything in the kitchen he could reach at the wall. I guess the goal was to see what would stick. Yes: a few knives, a metal spatula, something that went through the wall and left a hole. No: everything else in the drawers, fridge (mostly condiments and bread), and counters. I decided it was a good time to start keeping my knives in my room.
12. “I’ve Got Nothing To Lose!!”
A few years back when I was in college I had an apt with some guys and we figured we should get a house. The downside was that we needed an extra person as we had 4 people and the place was a 5 bedroom. So in my friend’s most brilliant moment, he gets his girlfriend of a year to join us. At first, me and the other 2 didn’t think it was a great idea until we saw that there were 2 separate leases for the house. Great, we thought, us 3 can be downstairs and they can be upstairs.
Cut to the summer and they break up as we kind of expected. It was ok at first but then the guy, who I will call S, starts playing World of Warcraft and acting reclusive. The both started dating other people and the girl who will be called C usually kept away when she was with her new guy. He had an old Bowflex upstairs and would do some weight lifting but seemed to only do 2 reps at a time and ALWAYS let the weight slam down, which just made me wonder how long it’d be til he hurt himself. After his workouts, he would grunt a lot and walk naked past her door. He also had a massive pile of used tissues that just sat on his desk near his monitor. Apart from blowing his nose, and the other…well I don’t want to think about it. His floor was always covered in cans, clothes, books, and whatever else to the point that you couldn’t see the floor anywhere.
We aren’t sure if he showered more than once a month during this period as well. He also played WOW til about 4 every night with vent blasting so loud we could hear voices throughout the entire house. We eventually fixed this by unhooking the cable modem which was located in my other friend’s bedroom. To this day we aren’t sure if he ever figured it out considering we would hear him yelling “oh goddammit insight cable sucks so much it always cuts out at night!”
So more and more time passed and C continued to ignore him and tell us stories of his walking around naked, leaving her notes, starting up painfully awkward conversations with her…etc. He had written her poetry a few times that was incredibly awful, and barely legible most of the time. We would throw quite a few parties and he would come downstairs to the main floor halfway through the party, and then take a few swigs out of a bottle then run back upstairs to play WOW. We tried to even take the party up there by bringing maybe 10 people upstairs to dance in his room while he played so he wouldn’t feel left out. He ended up just ignoring us and possibly getting pissed to we left.
So C started dating a new guy, who she eventually married and spent a lot of time at his place. S had started dating a girl as well, but how he met her or convinced her to date him, we will never know. The difference between the two was the S told C he didn’t want them to bring new girlfriends or boyfriends to the house but he kept bringing his new lady over. Well, one night C came home with her new boyfriend and they tried to be quiet and get up to her room without making a sound. It was about 2 am and apparently shortly after they got back, so did S. Well that wouldn’t have been a problem except he was drunk as hell. So he comes into his room and starts throwing things and making a ton of noise for some reason or another. So C’s new guy walks in there and says “hey man were tired and trying to sleep. Could you please be a little quieter.” That’s when S freaks out and just sucker punches the new boyfriend.
Now I feel I should mention that this guy is about 6 foot 3 maybe 220 or more of all muscle. He apparently played some football during his undergrad and was tough as nails. So he takes the punch and is a bit surprised for a second then grabs S and slams him to the ground. Somehow he stays cool and just holds him there telling S to calm down and he’s not going to hurt him, he just wants to make sure he’s not going to get punched again. So after a few seconds, he lets S get up and bam, S punches him again! So he slams him to the ground and pins him. At this point me and another roommate head upstairs to find S squirming on his chest screaming “I’ve got nothing to lose!!” which is a line that lives on in my group of friends to this day.
So C’s boyfriend decides to pick him up and hand him over to me since I’m not a small guy and I can handle S. There’s still a lot of screaming and threats going around so the boyfriend calls the cops on S while I try to calm him down outside. So the cops get there and he starts mouthing off to them nonstop to the point that they warm him they will cuff him and pop him in the car. So he goes for it, and next thing he is sitting in the back of the car while C’s boyfriend shows the cops his bloody face. So they cart S off to jail for the night while another cop stays to talk to us. We we had been standing outside in February with no coat so were shivering and the cop looks at my friend and says “You tweakin boy?” Great cops in Indiana lemme tell ya.
Cut to the summer and we have to go to court to testify about the night. The lawyer that S’s family found was the worst most disrespectful lawyer ever. Showed up late to court, continued to ask the same question over and over despite the judge telling him to move on, trying to change what we had said during the deposition and so on. Oh, and he was from a Johnny Cochran law firm. C’s boyfriend’s lawyer laughed and laughed nonstop when he found that one out.
