I
can’t imagine ever having a roommate again. (Roommate as opposed to choosing to
live with someone, that is.) I’ve had terrible luck with roommates of
convenience, whom I like to describe with nicknames in the pattern [mental
state] [ethnicity] – the Simple-Minded Yankee, the Furious Jew, and the Mad
Samoan.
My
relationship with the Simple-Minded Yankee was doomed from the start:
My
grandmother: “Do you know your roommate yet?”
Not-yet-Tulane
Chris: “We’ve exchanged emails. He’s from Chicago…”
My
grandmother: “Oh, Chris. A yankee.”
………
My
mother: “Did you find out about your roommate?”
Me:
“Yes, he’s from Chicago. I think he…”
My
mother: “Oh, a yankee. Well, you can
probably change at the semester.”
………
My
aunt: “I hear your roommate’s from Chicago.”
Me:
“Yes, Mom and Grandmother both said…”
My
aunt: “A yankee. Bring plastic wrap,
you know how they are.”
They
were right to be cautious. “Todd” was the ugliest person I’ve ever met in real
life, by a substantial margin – whatever you’re imaging, it’s not bad enough;
my normally unflappable father noticeably recoiled when he came into the room.
I try not to judge people by their looks, much preferring to judge them by
their stationery and TV-watching habits, but homeboy was busted like a
six-dollar watch. Todd brought exactly one book to college: Awesome Abs. His primary word was “dude,” pronounced “d00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000d,”
like a dying wildebeest hoping to mate one last time before the lions close in.
He was an enormous prude and a general nightmare to be around. I used to
pretend to be asleep when I heard him come in so I wouldn’t have to talk to
him; this often resulted in my actually falling asleep and waking up hours
later, completely disoriented. He referred to getting drunk as “getting
shitty,” which disgusted me. He pronounced it “ssshhhhitty,” which made it, of course, infinitely worse. Once, when I was
terribly sick with mono and half dozing, he thought I was more asleep than I
was – and sprayed me with a cloud of Lysol. I waited until he was gone for the
evening and licked every possession of his I could stand to have near my face,
but his illiterate cold-weather immune system would not succumb.
The
next year, I roomed with a friend, which started out just fine: we were both
messy, nocturnal, and didn’t like having people over. Over the summer, “Adam”
had had a religious awakening. Most people experiment with drugs and sex in
college, and for once I swam with the tide; Adam had decided to experiment with
Lubavitch Judaism. He was technically Jewish, but had been raised as a
Christmas agnostic as a compromise between his occasionally devout Baptist
father and Soviet-atheist but ethnically Jewish mother, who has the distinction
of being the most interesting person I have ever met. I’ll tell you about her
in a future post.
So,
as our sophomore year of college wore on, Adam got more and more... aggressively Jewish. IT was all very
educational and novel at first, but then, as with many conversions, the initial
excitement gave way to an obsession with rules. I got In Trouble for Ham Day,
despite keeping the entire ham on my side of the room. He started rigging the
door not to lock so he wouldn’t be using a tool on the Sabbath. (My suggestion
that he stop being a tool the rest of
the week didn’t go over well.) He started observing all the holidays, including the little-known drinking holiday
Simchat Torah. He’d been so staid recently that it took me a while to
understand:
Adam
(entering): Heeeeeeeeeeeee hee hee.
Me:
Are you all right?
Adam
(lying in the center of the floor): HEEEEEEEEEEE hee hee.
Me:
Did you… do you have meningitis? Try to move your neck.
Adam:
Heee. No. Drunk. Torah.
Me:
That could mean anything.
Adam:
Simchat Torah. It commemorates G-d giving us the Torah, so we might… HEE hee
hee. Grace in His eyes. We celebrate with drinking.
Me:
“We,” Jews, or “we,” you and a family-size bottle of Turning Leaf?
Adam:
Turning Leaf isn’t kosher. Manischewitz Triple Berry Trouble. With a straw.
Hee.
Matters
drew to a head the day before Passover, when we had a “discussion” about what
behaviors were reasonable at 2 A.M.
Me:
I’m going to sleep.
Adam:
I’m going to vacuum.
Me:
Nope.
Adam:
It’s Passover. I have to vacuum.
Me:
I don’t think you’ve ever vacuumed before in your life. Try experimenting with
some nice, quiet dusting.
Adam:
No, but there are bread crumbs.
Me:
They’ll be there in the morning.
Adam:
Right, but Passover… I’m vacuuming.
Me:
THE ANGEL OF DEATH DOES NOT HAVE A MONOPOLY ON KILLING FIRSTBORN SONS, AS YOU
WILL DISCOVER IF YOU TURN ON THAT VACUUM.
Adam:
Infidel.
Me:
Sleepy infidel.
(Yes,
I know Passover begins at sundown and I assume he did too. I don’t know why he
wanted to vacuum at two.) I tried to paper over the misunderstanding the next
day with a light-hearted prank:
Adam:
Did you put blood on the doorposts and lintel?
Me:
Well, ketchup. You didn’t have any Passover decorations up, and I thought…
Adam:
That’s not funny.
Me:
I’m afraid it is.
Adam:
I respect your religious heritage.
Me:
You ran a betting pool on the Papal election called “White Smoke, Green Cash!”
Adam:
Are you still pissed about losing? I told you, you had to beat the spread.
After
this interlude, I managed to live alone until I finished college and moved to
New Zealand for a few months. I stayed in a hostel for a while, but then some
Argentineans moved in and started having all-night drum-and-sings, so I looked
for apartments. The first one I looked at was old, isolated, grubby, and had
several posters of German castles Scotch-taped to the wall, so I was sold. The
landlady was a kind of odd Samoan woman in her late forties named Teresa
Burnside, who, as I discovered, lived
there.
She
was crazy as a shithouse rat.
She
was paranoid, largely about the water company. According to her, the water
company “pushed water through the pipes” so that our water heater overflowed
and raised our bill, which she combatted by strictly rationing the hot water.
The third roommate, a very nice Canadian girl, and I had to tell her when we
planned to shower in advance so she could know how long to have the water on.
Later, when the washing machine “broke” (it worked fine for me but she thought
it was broken) she couldn’t decide whether to blame me or the water company, so
she yelled at us both. Then when she bought a new washing machine, she asked me
if I knew anyone with a van I could borrow. I said I didn’t, which was true, and she accused me of
lying and shouted at me for five minutes. She also shouted at me for:
- coming in the back door,
which I hadn’t done
- being annoyed when she
rented out the living room to a stranger
- accidentally using her bowl
- not doing my laundry by
dissolving the detergent in a little cup of hot water I had heated in the
electric kettle
- not remembering to unplug
the microwave, turn off the outlet switch, and prop the microwave door open
- because there were ants in
the compost
She
saved all her eggshells in a plastic bag in the pantry, and decorated the
kitchen with a government-issued illustrated guide to the food groups for
Pacific Islanders, complete with boiled pig’s head. I had a bottle of gin in
the freezer which she referred to as “whiskey,” which she thought was very exotic. She offered to ask her
family on Samoa if I could stay with them, “they would probably even let you
borrow a lavalava, but they might not, because they’re still mad at me for
missing the last family reunion. I don’t care. I’ve been to Samoa. I want to go
somewhere else if I’m going anywhere.” Like a pecan log, she had an odd
sweetness under the nuts. She made delicious
pumpkin soup to share, and we watched an eclipse together. Since I’ll never see
her again this side of the veil, I have the freedom to remember her almost
fondly.
Now
that I have my own apartment, I’m free of roommate drama. All I know about my
neighbors, moving from my end of the hall toward the elevator, is:
The
Russian girl occasionally gets laid
The
girl on her other side slams the door all the time
The
Chinese guy on her other side is a
reasonably talented jazz trumpet player.
They
may not give me material for a post, but at least they don’t talk to me.
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