This is the first of the guest blog posts that will be happening throughout spring break due to the absence of Fatass. The blog will return to its regular schedule next Monday. First up is Lewie, with a story I've chosen to divide into two parts. Enjoy!
Let me paint a picture for you (for a picture does not come with odors…unless it’s scratch-and-sniff… this picture is not, thankfully).
It was a simpler time, the fall of 2005. Britney had not yet gone coo-coo bananas and pop-punk bands ruled the radio. I, at age 20, had just transferred from my community college to a four-year institution. I would no longer be living at home. I would, for the first time in my life, have a roommate.
My college sent out letters to all roommates about two weeks before the start of the semester so we could call or email each other to try to get to know one another before we were suddenly sleeping in the same cramped quarters every night. A good idea in theory, I suppose. I called up the roomie (let’s call her Heifer) one gorgeous, sunny August afternoon, sitting on the stone wall in my backyard and chatted with her for about an hour. She seemed nice enough – we laughed, we discovered common interests, all seemed well. Unfortunately, that idyllic setting I was in proved to be much like a scene in a movie – everything was too perfect.
Move in day: I’m with my parents, she’s with her entire extended family. Okay, whatever. They linger a bit longer than they should in the room, but my parents linger a little too long on campus but I suppose that’s what family does. We lived in a townhouse, so we had 1.5 bathrooms and a kitchen and a living room and everything, so of course we needed some additional things we didn’t bring with us. Heifer and I took a road trip to Walmart. Everything seemed to be starting off well.
I managed to find a boyfriend within a week of classes, which, even though he turned out to be the Douchebag of the Decade, was ultimately a good thing for me, because if I hadn’t spent so much time at his place I might have stabbed Heifer. It started innocently enough with her – she would nap all day and then stay up all night. I got used to the light from her computer screen … but once she started having long, schmaltzy phone conversations with her boyfriend at the other end of the state starting at 1 a.m. and listening to dance music sans headphones, I started to become irked. I like it dark and quiet when I sleep, as I’m sure many people do.
Not a month into the semester, she apparently falls gravely ill and asks me to take her to the hospital, since I have a car and she does not. She looks like she’s in pretty severe pain, so I take her and wait in the emergency room lounge for four hours for her. She finally comes out, sobbing. She has a disease that rhymes with Burpee’s but she has no idea how she got it, since she definitely would never cheat on her boyfriend. I am now afraid to touch anything in our room.
This is where things start to fall apart, a mere three weeks into our cohabitation. I have a mini-fridge under my bed I brought from home – she apparently thinks it’s a shared item and not only puts her food in it but also eats my food, without asking. Because I spend so little time in the room, between classes, work and time with Regrettable Boyfriend, she starts to spread her stuff onto my furniture – meaning books on my desk, clothes on my bed; she even used my laptop once because she was too lazy to sit in her chair and use her desktop. I confront her on this stuff and her reply was “Well, you’re not here so it’s like it’s just my room.” No. No, that’s not how it works. I’m still paying for this room. That is my computer, my comforter on that bed and my goddamn fridge.
October comes. Yes, it’s only been a month. There is a hint of an odor in our room. I’m guessing it’s from her Chinese leftovers in my fridge and the laundry she never washes. And, despite the fact that our bedroom is right next to the full bathroom, I’ve never once seen her shower. A quick poll reveals no one else in the house has witnessed this either. We have a house meeting to talk about cleaning, since the rest of us sweep, mop, wash dishes, etc., and the reason Heifer can’t help? “I don’t know how.” This does not surprise me.
At this point, if I remember correctly, she has pretty much given up on going to classes altogether. She literally sleeps all day and is up all night, eating, talking, typing, being a waste of space. Again, most of the time I am not there but when I am, Jesus, I wish I could get a little decency out of her. By the end of October, still not a single report of a shower.
Heifer asked to “borrow” a pair of my black underwear for her Halloween costume, which was a fat, smelly pirate hooker (I added the “fat,” “smelly,” and “hooker” to that description). When she asked when she should return them I said, “No, it’s cool, you keep them.” Erpes-hay!
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