A few weeks ago, Jeremy and I attended Planet Comicon in Kansas City. It was our maiden voyage as Outland Entertainment, and we have a pretty full convention schedule this year. Both of us were on the lookout for ways to improve our con experience and increase our chances of recouping some of the costs of attending.
 

 
Cons aren’t just about selling wares. They are also about networking – something that I have always sucked at because I am shy. They help you reach potential fans and give you opportunities to learn from professionals in the business. For me, it was also useful to meet other artists and writers living in our region. We sometimes feel pretty isolated living out here in Topeka.
 
But given the investment we made to get table space, order prints, buy business cards, and furnish our area with banners, it can’t hurt to try to make a little money as well. Here are some thoughts about how to do that.
 
Character Art
Apparently there has been a raging debate on this subject, but whether or not you agree that it’s okay for artists to sell images of copyrighted characters, there’s no doubt that those sell like hotcakes at conventions. Jeremy really doesn’t do this, except for commissions. He did a nice Red Sonja while we were there.
 
Display
We have two tall banners, which helped. Banners or any background display help draw people in because they set you apart from what’s going on behind you. Our lich king was very popular with children, and a few times the kids were strong enough to muscle their parents over to our table.
 

 
If you can, it’s better to actually hang up some pieces of your art or prints behind you. We had our prints in a box for people to flip through. This meant that only one person could look at a time. We’re going display some prints behind us at our next con.
 
 
Pinups
We sat by Kevin Keil, who is a talented artist, not to mention a very friendly person. He had lots of pinups of naked girls, and these were incredibly popular. This isn’t Jeremy’s typical subject matter, although he has done a few illustrations of topless women. Noting Keil’s success, I placed these prominently on the table, but for whatever reason, the elk-riding warrior woman with the sharp teeth wasn’t getting many buyers. Go figure. Jeremy’s thinking about doing a series of less bloodthirsty nudes to sell at our next convention.
 

Hubba Hubba

I just began the Otherland series by Tad Williams. So far, I am very impressed with it. It’s a meandering narrative that rotates through a half a dozen characters. As a writer, I prefer brevity and minimalism, but sometimes I crave a bloated, trippy slab of genre fiction. I am enjoying the well-developed characters and the amazing array of settings. The writing is great, too. I find myself rereading particularly inventive and vivid passages.

It’s a four book series, and each book is over 700 pages. As busy as I’ve been with freelance work, I won’t be writing a comprehensive review of this series anytime soon. For now, I just want to take a little time to discuss how Tad Williams writes about advanced technology.

The first book (City of Golden Shadow) was published in 1996. It takes place at near the end of the 21st century. As I read, I marvel at Williams’ finesse because he was able to invent absolutely realistic technological advancements. Several elements in the first book make me suspect that he is a little psychic.

Instead of mobile phones, people use all-purpose devices called “pads” that cover visual phone calls, net use, data storage, and more. These are operated via touch screen and come alive with a swipe of the finger. Sound familiar?  How did Tad Williams predict this trend? In 1996, we all thought that this was a pretty hot little piece of technology:

Comes with it's own insulated carrying case!

In subsequent years, the sign of a truly cutting edge phone was how small it was. There were tablets and pads then, but they were clumsy, dopey things that required a pen tool and a special set of characters. Now, with the prevalence of tablets and iPads, it’s easy to see using devices like those pictured in Otherland. In the 90′s? That took some imagination.

Don't let it fall into your ear.

Tad Williams was also ahead of his time in predicting the spectrum crunch. But in 1996, the attitude toward the internet is that it was a force of democracy: Free flow of information, free sharing, free speech. Unfortunately, our reality is shaping up to be “pay more for crummier service.” Availability and quality of service is no longer a given or a priority, and the free lunch appears to have come to an end. Companies do not want to invest in the infrastructure to support new technologies. Jeremy and I blow our data usage allowance every single month since we stream videos and upload giant hi-res files on a frequent basis. In the world of Otherland, the protagonist (who lives in a working class neighborhood in Durban, South Africa) constantly struggles to find a way to get online. Net access is highly stratified. Although everyone has access, data use is costly and the best of the net is only accessible to rich people. Net usage is entirely pay-as-you-go. With all of the Net Neutrality stuff and the premiums being placed on bandwidth, it’s easy to see this stratification happening sooner rather than later.

Otherland also features a very realistic monetezation of internet transactions. Every interaction online is directly linked to a bank account. Every action, no matter how subtle (say turning down the sound on an advertisement) costs. Ca-ching ca-ching ca-ching. It’s easy to see this actually happening given current trends. If I live long enough to visit a VR world, dollars to donuts it’s going to feature the same incessant customer-gouging.

Perhaps most remarkable is Tad Williams’ prediction about World of Warcraft. WoW didn’t come out until 2004, but Tad Williams absolutely nails the MMORPG genre and experience. I’ve done time in WoW (my undead tank warrior is parked somewhere in the ether), so many features of his imagined game rang true to me. For example, he is right about the process of traveling in the virtual world. He correctly assumes that game creators will make players move at the same slow speed as they do in real life until they have earned enough online currency to purchase a better mode of transportation. Even the acquisition of armor is similar to how it actually worked in WoW.

Sorry, but you have to walk until you get 5000 gold.

On a related note, Williams does a great job of profiling online gamers. One particularly fearsome warrior (Thargor, the scourge of Middle Country) is actually a chronically sick teenaged boy who lives with his parents in a gated suburban community. Almost all teenagers in the book spend a great deal of time online, either playing VR versions of point-and-shoot games or simply exploring. Their parents and caretakers constantly nag them to reduce net use.

Moving on, Williams predicts the advent of specialized ads. With Google’s new privacy policy (or rather anti-privacy policy), we’re going to start getting more and more ads designed to target us. In the book, the protagonist visits an online store. She notes that the clerk, a virtual salesperson, takes the form of whoever she is selling to. Since the protagonist is a young black female, the clerk appears as a young black female. Right now, we’re in the rudimentary stages of having ads interact with us personally. But it’s easy to see how this will evolve.

The only thing really missing from Otherland is social networking and the voluntary erosion of personal privacy. Tad Williams predicted that there would be very little left unknown about the people who go online. All of their identifying information becomes public. But it’s not something that people purposefully decide to do; it’s more a cost of doing business.

Not surprisingly, everybody in Otherland uses a wall screen television/computer monitor. But these had been in rotation in the sci-fi genre for years. I think about what my family and I sat in front of back in 1996, when I was 15-16 years old. By today’s standards, that sucker was huge – at least two feet deep and heavy. Back then, we all wished for a sleek wall screen simply because moving the television was a pain in the ass.

More remarkable is the prediction of the data cloud. In 1996, I used cassette tapes (most cars were still equipped with those, and cd’s were kind of pricey). Plus, there was something special about making a mix tape, but I digress. I rarely did homework, but when I did, I didn’t save the file. I just printed it out and handed it in. When I got to college and had to use a public computer lab – around 2000 – I finally came around to the idea of storing data. I used floppy disks to save files. A stubborn Luddite, I always seemed to have problems actually getting the disks to read and print out my goddamned paper in time for class.

This is a functional cure for nostalgia.

This is nothing, though. My father wrote his dissertation on a typewriter. My stepmother’s was stored on a stack of those great big floppy disks! My parents have always been way more tech savvy than me, in part because they are so relieved that white out and these things are obsolete:

I can hold up to 4 pages of your 400 page document!

In the 90′s, it would have been incomprehensible to me that all media files would be out in the ether, storied in a virtual home that could be accessed online. Tad Williams apparently had the foresight to imagine this, and it’s all becoming true. Part of me likes it. No CD’s and tapes rattling around on the floor of my car like beans in a maraca. No more scratching and skipping. No more moving 100+ boxes of heavy, cumbersome paperbacks. Pure portability and ease of access. But I am also wary of any possessions that can so easily disappear or be erased.

In conclusion, I think it’s pretty amazing that a writer in the 90′s could be right about so many technological developments. These books may end up becoming dated, but right now, it’s easy to visualize our current technology evolving into something like what’s pictured in Otherland.

How did he do it? How do you write speculative fiction without dating your work? Williams clearly gave it a lot of consideration. He wisely kept descriptions of actual devices to a minimum, which leaves room for future readers to fill in the blanks with whatever technology is popular at the time. He also had a very good idea of the implications of all the advancements in the mid-90′s – and a knack for predicting their logical progression.

Baby likes black humor.

From Goodreads:

John Farrell is about to get “The Cure.”
Old age can never kill him now.
The only problem is, everything else still can . . .

Imagine a near future where a cure for aging is discovered and-after much political and moral debate-made available to people worldwide. Immortality, however, comes with its own unique problems-including evil green people, government euthanasia programs, a disturbing new religious cult, and other horrors. Witty, eerie, and full of humanity, The Postmortal is an unforgettable thriller that envisions a pre-apocalyptic world so real that it is completely terrifying.

The Postmortal is funny, timely, and imaginative. It’s a collage of media, including blog entries, news stories, link roundups, and official documents. I enjoyed it enough to stay up past 3am finishing it.
 
The book explores what would happen if there was a cure for the aging process. When the cure is first introduced, humanity undergoes a prolonged adolescence.  At first, people just party and party and party. A couple of decades later, repetitive hookups and relentless barhopping begin to stale. Questions about marriage, parenthood, and the meaning of life begin to surface, although many are still resistant to growing up. Each section of the book advances a couple of decades, and each one shows a progressively more depressing, crowded world.
 
The Postmortal thoughtfully explores the ramifications of life without death. Here are some of the questions the author attempts to answer:

• Can marriage exist without the promise of an end?
• How would parenthood change? Parents no longer look (or act) older than their children. Some people have multigenerational families, or just multiple families.
• How do people view their careers? Without the possibility of retirement, everyone remains in the workforce forever.
• What happens to pop culture? Celebrities remain hot for eternity and never get replaced. The same crappy musician is in the Top 40 for centuries.
• How do governments like China’s, who put caps on family size, cope with the burgeoning population? (Not very nicely.)
• How long is the line at the bank when the population reaches 10 billion? How about the Emergency Room?
• What kind of religion do people turn to when they no longer have an afterlife to consider?
• When aging isn’t an option, what kind of death can these “post-mortal” people expect? (Ugly and mean.)
• What happens to the environment? (You can guess.)
• Is there a point when people feel that their lives are complete? (This is the protagonists’ primary concern, and it leads him down some dark avenues.)

Overall, I really enjoyed the author’s black humor and imagination.

This is the story of how I got laid off.

It was such a typical day. I ran through the door of my office building, poured myself a cup of coffee, and talked with some coworkers for a few minutes before turning on my computer. I checked my e-mail, opened the document I was writing, and settled into work. A week before, I had met my boss. He worked from an office in Argentina, so that was the first time I met him in person. We discussed all the projects I would be taking on in the near future and made a few predictions about the latest merger. (These predictions did not include me being canned.)

I got a call requesting that I come up to the conference room. Not unusual. I jogged upstairs, swung the door open, and was surprised. The room was empty except for the person who summoned me – one of my favorite coworkers. The phone in the center of the table was on. I had no idea what was happening. I took a seat, and the phone call commenced.

Let me tell you about our stategy for continued excellence.

The HR lady on the other end of the line wished me good day. My boss joined the call. As soon as he uttered the phrase “continued excellence,” I got the idea. It was like being kicked in the face. My coworker, bless her, left to find me a box of Kleenex. The rest of the call lasted two or three minutes. My boss finished. The HR lady let me know when I would have to clear out my office and when my last severance check would be mailed. By this time, I was lying on the conference table weeping. What would I do for money? How could I support my family? How could I ever get health insurance again in an economy like this? I was free falling.
 
And then the HR lady said that there was help for me. Thank god, because I sure felt like a wreck.
 
She proceeded to read off an 800 number. I could call it and speak to a trained counselor who would help me with my “difficult transition.” I stopped weeping and gave the phone a dirty look. Seriously?
 
I was allowed to leave for the rest of the day, so I did. I drove home in a fugue state. My ears made a sound like wind. I called my husband. He was like, Well, you hated that job! Chin up! Be happy! Now you can do what you really wanted to do and screw technical writing.
 
I agreed with him, but I still felt hurt in a fundamental way. It’s one thing to fantasize about leaving a job that you don’t feel fits you very well. It’s something else entirely to have the choice taken from you with an impersonal rejection.
 
That was in November. The first weeks were rough. I worked hard, diving into a big writing project and doing my best to keep up a routine as if I were still employed. Every few days, I’d be gripped with fear that my family would starve, get sick while uninsured, or sink deep into debt. Then I would peruse job openings. Most of them filled me with dread.
 
I knew what I wanted to do. I have known it all along. I knew that anything else would make me very unhappy. I had never felt right in my old job, and that’s probably why I got canned. My heart wasn’t in it. I was always counting down the minutes to five o’ clock and praying for Fridays. Each time I worked on a new version of a manual, I experienced a deep sense of futility. I knew that I would be rewriting the same document in a few months, the next time a new feature was added. I knew that every day I spent doing something I didn’t care about was a day that I wasted.
 
Around the end of December, my fear started to subside. I opened up to the possibility that my husband and I would be able to support ourselves and our daughter with profits from our company. Jeremy had been running Outland while I was working at Motorola. He did a fine job, too, so we had plenty of work coming in.
 
Being laid off deals a grave amount of hurt and disruption to one’s life. So many people have had to endure this humiliation and deal with the resulting financial damage since this recession began. I don’t think it’s usually a blessing, but in my case, it was.
 
I work hard every day on jobs of my own and jobs that people hire me to do.  If anything, I work much harder than I did when I knew that a fat paycheck would sail into my bank account every two weeks. For the first time, I am doing exactly what I want to be doing. I no longer entertain depressing thoughts about the futility of life or meting out days in coffee spoons. Doing a job that fits you right can bring an incredible amount of peace. I only wish I had figured this out sooner.

This used to be me.

The Bartimaeus Trilogy is an inventive alternate history that reimagines the UK as a bloating empire colonizing unlucky countries all over the world. Magicians control the government and most of the country’s wealth. They have created a police state wherein commoners suffer constant surveillance and harsh reprisals for any sort of rebellious activity.

The books present a unique take on magic. Magicians possess no magical power. Instead, they learn to harness spirits from another dimension (aka “The Other Place”) using pentagrams and detailed incantations. Magicians enslave the spirits, binding them to follow their commands and do their will. This creates tension between magicians and the source of their magic. There is an array of different spirits, from low-level imps used to spy or perform mechanical tasks to gigantic afrits who could level a city if insufficiently bound.

The best part of the trilogy is Bartimaeus, the djinn summoned by the protagonist. He is a pompous windbag who uses extensive footnotes to deliver hilarious commentary and anecdotes. Bartimaeus presents himself as a ruthless, powerful being, but reality slowly emerges. He is actually a third-rate spirit with a soft spot for human beings. He constantly refers to his involvement in major projects, such as building the pyramids and winning famous wars. Because he is thousands of years old, he offers a glib historical perspective about the rise and fall of empires.

The other characters are well done, too. There’s Nathan, the emerging young magician who summons Bartimaeus. They share a love/hate relationship and constantly harass each other, which is very entertaining. Nathan is not an incredibly likeable person, but he is certainly the most upstanding magician we meet. There’s also Kitty, a revolutionary commoner who becomes a very enjoyable character in the second and third books. She is by far the bravest character.

The trilogy stands out for its excellent follow through. The second and third books maintain the same high quality as the first. The more the story goes on, the higher the stakes are for a satisfying ending. Ptolemy’s Gate delivers.

I recently picked up The Ring of Solomon, which is a prelude to this series. It follows Bartimaeus when he serves King Solomon in 950 B.C. I expect that he will offer same style of entertaining, footnote-laden witticisms about this set of royalty as he did in the other books.

Jeremy and I have been very busy lately working some projects for Outland Entertainment. The deadlines all hit at once, so we’ve had to put in a lot of hours this holiday season. We created a series of animated museum exhibits, a sex education booklet for Canadian youth, and a short sports comic. Such variety! The finished products are great, and I look forward to sharing them. In the meantime, I will post some recent Ithaca pages.

Ithaca will be released online in March or April of this year. We’re still getting a nice buffer of finished drawings from the artist (Dean Kotz). We’ll start coloring and lettering sometime next month. The following pages show the protagonist being trafficked and ultimately meeting her caretaker.

These are my favorite books that I read in 2011. Note that many of them have been around for a few years at least.

The Magician and The Magician King by Lev Grossman

Much has been said about the so-called adult Harry Potter books. They feature all of the wonderful things you expect from a fantasy novel: A magical boarding school. A band of geeks. A gateway to another world. A socially awkward but brilliant protagonist who is a goofy looking outcast in this world but (literally) royalty in the other.

These books depart from a typical fantasy in a few spectacular ways. First, the discovery of magic and alternate worlds does not create meaning in the protagonist’s life. He still has to cope with his sense of directionless angst like any other teenaged boy. Second, the author isn’t afraid to confront the questions and conundrums that crop up in fantasy books but are never acknowledged. Such as, where does magic come from? Why can people use it? Is there a theological aspect to all this? Finally, the protagonists drink and screw liberally throughout the books, just like any group of dorm-dwelling teenagers.

Lev Grossman is a great writer.  Anybody who was raised on fantasy books will love these.

Incarceron and Sapphique by Catherine Fisher

The premise is remarkably original. Incarcaron is a living prison. Inmates live, die, and get recycled under the watchful, intelligent eyes of the Prison. Outside of Incarceron, people live by Protocol, a stifling dictum that forces them to stagnate in a pre-industrial era. And then there is Sapphique, the magician/savior who escaped Incarceron generations before. He is legendary, the subject of many songs and works of epic poetry. I was blown away by Catherine Fisher’s imagination, and I found the books very thought-provoking.

Some of the writing is a little crappy. (The words “acrid” and “tinkling” recur with annoying frequency.) But the descriptions, especially those of the synthetic forests within Incarceron, are beautifully vivid.

Name of the Wind and Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

These are amazing, ambitious books. They are the life story of a man named Kvothe, whose dazzling brilliance and faultless ingenuity would be nauseating if he weren’t currently in a somewhat fallen state. Most of the story takes place in grandiose flashback. Present moments reveal a curiously weakened, compromised Kvothe.

These books have all the hallmarks of a Harry Potter type fantasy: The dead parents, the gifted boy left behind, the terrible villain he seeks, the magical boarding school, the tales of life in the dorms. But the world is more dangerous, the protagonist is more likeable, and the writing is full of awesome bravado.

These books won enough awards and garnered enough praise that I don’t need to write anything more about them. Just go read them for gods sake.

Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

This is the prequel to Oryx and Crake, my favorite dystopian futuristic novel of all time. It further embroils  readers in a vivid world that is all too believable. Atwood is a genius, and she has directed her critical gaze at current events. Her story depicts logical outcomes of corporate personhood, concentrated wealth, and a population saturated with meaningless media. Let me tell you, the results are not pretty.

It goes without saying that the writing is flawless and I couldn’t put it down. Atwood always delivers.

Feed by M.T. Anderson

Like Atwood, Anderson captures the present day and the evolution of current trends so well that the story ends up being completely believable in spite of its far-fetched premise. A “feed” is an implanted computer that allows characters to communicate and shop telepathically. It creates the perfect mindless consumers. Privacy does not exist in Anderson’s vision of the future.

This book reminded me so much of George Saunder’s work, specifically Jon. (I love George Saunders.) Anderson uses a similar dialect for his characters and has a similar worldview. He manages to be critical of humanity as a whole while being warm and sympathetic to individual characters.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

I am late to Sedaris fandom, but this book converted me. The essays meander around from topic to topic and time period to time period, but they always wrap up nicely with a perfect final sentence. The author is not afraid to mortify himself for a laugh, and oh how I laughed. Good stuff.

The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare

What can I say? This series is pure fluff. Lots of action, a little incest, and some monsters. I could put my big brain to work discussing its shortcomings, but what a waste of time. I enjoyed reading it thoroughly and would recommend it to anyone who wants a bit of light escapism.

Outland Entertainment – our company! – is involved in the graphic novel rendition of this series. I think it will translate well into the graphic novel format.

See part 1 and part 2 of my Worst Roommate saga.

His name was Wes. He was bone thin and had hair like Jesus. He carried all of his belongings in a bulky backpack. Except for his bongo drums, which he kept tied around his neck with a leather thong.

Our house was less than a mile from a homeless camp by the river. Drifters lived there for most of the year, only packing up to move down to Albuquerque when winter made camping dangerous. I think our worst roommate was one such drifter, although I was never exactly clear on where he came from; he just appeared in our living room one day and lingered there.

Unlike Chuck, he made his substance abuse clear from the beginning. He had no job, but he had money, probably from selling pot or worse. I never knew much about the man except that he was the most annoying person I have encountered before or since.

Let’s start with the bongo drums. Since he didn’t have a job, he had nothing better to do than get stoned, put on a Yes album, and invite other drifters over for a drum circle. They played Yes at full volume so they could hear it over the drums. The windows shuddered, the floor vibrated, and the room stank of a dozen homeless men. They had drug-induced stamina and could play all night. I could often hear these drum circles from blocks away as I walked home from work. Wanting nothing more than to rest my feet and sleep after a long shift, I hated to hear that sound because I knew that neither of those things was likely to happen.

I could try asking him to stop, but that meant turning off Yes, which meant tripping over several leering dudes to reach the stereo and being treated to lectures about how I was such a Libra. Yes, among his other absurd traits, Wes was obsessed with the zodiac and mentioned it as often as possible. It was the lens through which he viewed ever social interaction, from meeting a woman at a bar to purchasing a soda at Kwik Mart, to having a conversation about paying a little rent once in awhile. The first time he met me, he immediately asked my birthday. When I answered, he sneered, “I hate Libras.” I laughed, but he was serious. From that moment forward, he viewed me with eyes narrowed in suspicion.

A frequent LSD user, Wes enjoyed dropping acid in the morning. When everyone else was getting ready for work or enjoying a cup of coffee, he’d be tripping. He would sit on the living room floor, listlessly petting his bongo drum with his mouth hanging open. During one such trip, my roommate and I made the mistake of trying to speak to him about a housekeeping matter (late bill). He cried that we were sending off bad vibes and insisted that he could see our black, nasty auras swirling all around the room. He pulled frantically at his Jesus hair and said, “Uh oh. Now you’ve done it. I am having a bad trip.” He backed away from us, his dilated eyes shining with terror. “Get away from me, Libra!” He diverted all conversations about rent and utilities in this manner.

Perhaps it was the effect of working constantly and struggling to save up a little money, but I was becoming less amenable to all the lazy drifters who showed up to eat up our food, congregate in our space, and disturb our sleep. Wes was always gone, in one way or another, when conversations about money were afoot. But when a meal was prepared, he could sense it from miles away. He would skulk around the sidelines of the kitchen, rubbing his stomach and discussing his acute case of munchies. If I didn’t offer him a plate, he sulked and complained that Libras were bastards.

What catapults Wes to VERY WORST ROOMMATE status is the company he kept. He invited many drifters into the house. Most of them were of the same cut as Wes: Rank young men with long, musty beards, greasy backpacks, and big black boots.

There was his leering, thick-necked friend with a bald head and a foot long beard. He was easily six and a half feet tall and incredibly stupid. He thought I was cute and went into flirtation mode, regaling me with stories that were geared to impress. For example, he told me that he had acquired some rohypnol (aka the date rape drug) and had gone downtown to the bars. After a few hours of drinking, he got bored and tried to get high off of the rohypnol. He dosed himself, blacked out immediately, and woke the next morning in a municipal flowerbed. I could only be thankful that he was too dull-witted to follow through with his horrible plan. Since I couldn’t really get away from him, I told him he was a jackass and went upstairs to my room.

I woke from a deep sleep to the putrid smell of rotting socks. I felt the weight of another person in the bed. My heart froze in my chest. When I felt a heavy arm wrap around me, I screamed out in terror. I was sleep-addled and it was dark. I had no idea who it was, only that there was an intruder and I thought he was trying to hurt me. In a fit of pure adrenaline, I kicked. My foot connected, and he flew backward, hitting the wall. I ran across the hall and shook my roommate awake. I hid in his room while he investigated. It was Mr. Date Rape. He first denied that he had been in my room at all, but recanted and said I’d invited him when my roommate discovered his foul boots sitting next to my bed.

Wes had other crappy friends who made us feel unsafe. One specimen was a young hippie who had a wolf for a pet. Of course he named her Luna. Luna was not a domesticated animal. She was lanky, she was clever, and she had a set of razor sharp fangs set in a jawbone as long as my forearm. She put up with being walked on a hemp leash and tied to a park bench, but Luna was only biding her time. The wolf and her owner started squatting at our house on invitation from Wes. I am usually passive, but I couldn’t let that slide. “Why do you have this animal?” I asked. “You don’t even have a home! How are you going to take care of her? Can’t you tell she thinks you’re an asshole and wants to eat you?” Wes rose up, his eyes dilated, his hair swishing around, his skinny finger poking in my face. “How dare you talk to one of my friends like that,” he screamed. “You are so close-minded!” A few days later, he banned Luna from the house himself because she had taken a nice acrid wolf piss on his backpack.

Another awful Wes friend was a popular downtown beggar. He could always be found sitting on a bench downtown, strumming random chords and taking handouts. He had a rough mane of red hair, a bushy beard, and a heavy leather jacket.  Wes invited him to the house, and he soon became a regular. This one also thought I was cute and would not accept no for an answer. After a particularly frightening encounter with him, I fled the house. For days, I either slept in a booth at my restaurant or at my boyfriend’s place because I was scared to go home.

At last, I was able to talk to my other roommates. We voted to ban the creep from our house. Wes thought this was highly unfair. Wes discredited me, saying that I had probably given his friend mixed signals since that was a classic Libra trait. It was all I could do not to strangle him and smash his bongo drums over his head.

It was not long after this incident that we jettisoned Wes. He had never paid rent or utilities, and his bongos wore on everybody’s nerves. His guests were dangerous and had made us all feel uncomfortable. I never felt safe at the house again. I took a few trips around the country and moved to Iowa for awhile. When I came back to town, I rented a nice apartment and enrolled in college. Life moved on, and I rarely thought about Wes, or the house, or any of it.

I saw him a few summers ago. I was walking around downtown during a sidewalk sale. I was rummaging through a bin of nails in front of a hardware store when he approached me. His Jesus hair was shorn, but his face was unmistakable. He still had the same wide, superstitious eyes. He looked at me hard, but he didn’t remember me. “You have great legs,” he said.

“I’m a Libra,” I told him as I walked away.

The End

See Part 1 of the Worst Roommate saga here.

There were four of us to begin with, but when one of us moved away, we needed a subletter. The room in question was one of the small ones, which only cost $120 per month plus utilities. We cleaned the house to the best of our ability. We had no cleaning supplies or vacuum, but the floor was so filthy that it responded positively to being swept with a broom. We placed an ad in the paper and scheduled an evening to interview prospective tenants.

The first applicant was a manic teenager with greasy hair, pallid skin, and a complete inability to stop talking. From the moment he crossed the threshold, he began a one sided monologue, pausing only to gasp for air. He was full of bravado and fabulous tales. He said he was a renown recording artist for many famous bands. He also claimed to have dated Alanis Morissette. “Why keep looking?” I asked. Listening to his absurd diatribes had been the most entertaining thing I had experienced in weeks.

The others did not share my enthusiasm. Next.

The second applicant was the most put together of them all, and her timing couldn’t have been worse. In order to secure his place as our next roommate, Mr. Conversation had shared a bottle of liquor with us, which we drank quickly. So when a middle-aged woman wearing a pert business suit, sensible shoes, and pantyhose arrived at the door, we were in no condition to interview her. I saw the look of horror on her face as she surveyed the area. She covered her nose with her hand. She only stayed a few minutes. During that time, she explained that she owned several show dogs, which she intended to board in the six by six room. Next.

Then came a Marxist with a hemp fanny pack. He was looking for a commune, and he wasn’t impressed with the house. None of us blamed him. Next.

Finally, there was Chuck. Chuck was easily forty five years old, but he claimed to be twenty one, or nineteen, or twenty five; the number changed every time we asked. He was a short, penguin-like person who had no discernible personality. The reason we chose him is that he (unlike the other applicants) had a job. Being employed, he would have no problems coming up with his share of rent and bills.

He moved into the room, bringing with him only a nice wool blanket and a bunch of Social Distortion tapes. I was rarely home, so I didn’t see him often. He seemed to fit into the culture of our house well enough, and everything was going well. Until we discovered that he was an alcoholic.

He must have been clean when we met, but perhaps the constant partying at our house was too enticing. No sooner had he started to drink again than he would disappear for days at a time. We never knew when he would show up or in what condition. Usually he was drunk – pants peed, blacking out, and stumbling around barfing on things. He kept irregular hours, so we often came across his comatose body in various locations on the premises. I found him on the floor of my room with his head buried in a pile of laundry. I found him on the porch on one cold fall night, shoeless and covered with frost. I found him slumped against the refrigerator with his pants soiled. I began to think he was extremely creepy.

The worst Chuck moment was the night I came home after working a bar rush at my restaurant to find him sprawled in the living room with his penis in one hand and a bar of cream cheese in the other. Not knowing how to act in this situation, I greeted him cheerfully and tried to ignore everything that was going on from his neck down. He didn’t respond. He just looked at me with glazed eyes and took another bite of cream cheese. I ran upstairs to my room without further comment.

Even more disturbing, another side of Chuck began to emerge. He was prone to savage displays of anger, screaming at us for eating his food or listening to his tapes. When he drank, his passive facade would dissolve into a monstrous rage. Then he would sober up and become easygoing again, usually not recalling the way he had acted under the influence. After just one of these episodes, I feared him.

It also became clear that whatever job he had was gone, and that we would never see so much as a dime from him for his share of the rent.

Thankfully, he disappeared again. This absence was longer than any of the others. We couldn’t get in touch with him at any of his contact numbers. We ended up speaking to his dad, who had no knowledge of Chuck’s whereabouts. He claimed that Chuck had never moved out of his house or even mentioned leasing a room, which was puzzling. Since the only possessions that he left behind were the blanket and the tapes, we thought he had simply ditched them and moved on. We had the vacant room on our hands, so we often allowed guests to crash there.

The last time he came to the house, we had long given up on ever seeing him again. He showed up unannounced in the middle of the night and explained that he had been in jail. He went to his room, found a guest sleeping on his blanket, and flew into a rage. He beat up the guest and passed out. A few days later, he was gone again, never to return.

The last time I saw him, he was begging for change on a street corner. I still have his blanket.

Sadly, Chuck was the better of our two worst roommates.

Continue to Part 3.

What follows is something I began to write for My Very Worst Roommate. Several pages into it, I realized that I would have to drastically pare down the final submission. This is the unedited version.

I lived in a house with three friends. The rent was marginal, possibly because the house only had a single bathroom. The landlord probably regretted pricing it so that four delinquent teenagers could afford it.

The house was in a run down but charming part of town. It had two stories, a sloping front porch, and a yard where no grass could ever grow. Next door, there was a dilapidated stone building that was being moved, brick by brick, to a historical site miles away. In the meantime, a homeless man threw a blue tarp over the deconstructed parts and lived there.

There were two small bedrooms and two large ones; the occupants of the small rooms paid a lesser portion of the rent. For $120 per month, I wasn’t complaining about the size of my room. I just kind of tacoed my folding bed in there. It would soon deteriorate into a foul nest of laundry, books, and papers anyway. The only remarkable thing about the room was that my bed’s spring-loaded frame couldn’t unfold completely to latch. It clapped shut like a bear trap if I rolled the wrong way during the night. SMACK!

Any one of us could have qualified for worst roommate. In a matter of weeks, the house degraded into a cesspool, a party pit, an ashtray. Strangers wandered in and out, including homeless people that peed on our only chair. (See below.) Once I found a job, I worked around the clock and was only home from 4am to 9am each day. On days off, which were rare, I sat in the living room listening to the same Hole album on repeat. Somehow I never made it around to cleaning the floors, emptying rotten food from the refrigerator, or taking out the garbage.

Laundry quickly became a problem for all of us. The nearest laundromat (a roach-infested building pocked with bullet holes) was located over a mile away. Having no vehicle, we had to carry our clothes to and from this place. Motivation ran low, so we soon readjusted our standards for what constituted acceptably clean. To sum it up, if you didn’t actually vomit when you sniffed your shirt, it was okay for another day. It was the nineties and grunge was still in, but I took it to new heights with my blackening blue jeans and fetid tank tops.

None of us could afford to purchase furniture, let alone furnish the common areas, so we had a weird assortment:

1. A pink skateboard, often used as a seat.
2. An orange velour chair that started out as the coveted sitting spot and ended up so soiled that it just sat there unused by anyone who knew better.
3. A weird lamp that looked like a crystal ball stuck to a Greek statue.
4. A giant boom box.

These items were placed in a field of beer bottles, which we used as ashtrays. Tripping over one would create a sloshing domino effect of malodorous liquid splashing on the carpet.

We didn’t have any framed art or posters. Someone (unfortunately I think it was me) had the terrible idea to paint the walls with water color. With our fingers. So for most of our time at the house, the walls were splotched with hand prints and smears of colorful paint. These slowly yellowed under a thickening patina of nicotine tar, as all of the residents and visitors were heavy smokers.

The bathroom was a blight. We tried cleaning it periodically, but being young, busy, broke, and unconcerned with purchasing toilet paper on a regular basis, it dissolved into a crusty mess. The sink was matted with filth. The mirror was covered in mysterious splotches. The toilet was a monument to uncleanliness. I was away so often that I usually opted to use the bathroom at work or the shower at the community center where I exercised. At one point, I came home after a grueling 12 hour shift and wanted badly to bathe. I gathered a towel, a beer, and a novel and entered the bath. I dropped my beer in the water, and when I emerged, I could not drain the tub. I fished one greasy dreadlock from the drain, but it wasn’t enough. The soapy stew of beer and bathwater stagnated for months before we had no option but to call our landlord and have him enter the house.

Oh, there are more little stories. Most of which I shouldn’t tell for the sake of protecting the innocent. There were cats, some of them strays. There were gaseous explosions of aged milk. There was tempeh left to mutate into something with tentacles. There were parties. There were strange encounters. There were visits from angry wives, policemen, and naked men wearing plastic teeth.

So, as I have hopefully illustrated, none of us had any standards whatsoever. Which makes it kind of shocking that I have the nerve to submit a worst roommate story.

Continue to Part 2.