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.

Pennsylvania St. Lawrence, KS

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.