I was reading Chunklet this morning, and there was a piece about roommate horror stories. I read the ones they had, and then realized that I could top many of them with one fell swoop. Ready? Try to stay awake.

Let me set the scene. It was 1993. I was nineteen, still living in Kansas City. I had just left a very, very, very bad relationship where I was living with the guy, so I needed a new place to live. This relationship had been so bad, it made my father angry enough with me that he would not let me move back home (Longer story, some other time). Anyway, I was looking for a new place to live, and two of my nineteen-year-old school buddies (let's call them Geek and Bestfriend) were looking to move out of their parents' houses. My former seventh grade teacher, in an effort to help me out of my bad relationship, had offered to rent me a three-bedroom house, way south of the city, for $550/month. It was in a sleepy, suburban-type neighborhood, surrounded by old people and families with small kids. The house had a fireplace, a good basement, laundry, dishwasher, and it even came with couches. It was carpeted (yuck) and had a crazy-colored paint job, but we figured it was a small price to pay for such a great place. Score! The only problem was, we were all so broke we needed a 4th roommate. Bestfriend knew someone--a 26-year-old (let's call her Lady) she had worked with who seemed really cool. We met with Lady, and everything seemed great. We even let her have the big upstairs bedroom with the extra bathroom because she asked. She said it would be good because she was bringing her three cats (Yeah, I don't get it now either, but at the time it made sense).

For months, everything was great. We decorated in the finest immature just-out-of-high-school style, complete with stupid posters and plenty of lawn ornaments. We had a rotating clean-up schedule, and it seemed to work out okay...although I do remember the first time Bestfriend's turn came to clean the bathroom and she honestly claimed that she didn't know how. Huh???

But it wasn't long before things started to break down. I think it might have begun with the sheer amount of pot we were smoking. We smoked day and night. We smoked and smoked. And we scraped resin when there was no pot. Then there was the first time we took acid together. 1/2 of a tab for each of us. I don't think we felt a thing, but we all did a good job of acting weird so that the others thought we were really messed up. Heh. And eventually we were 'shroomin' quite a bit too.

With all the drugs came a lot of laziness. The trash never got taken out, only relegated to the carport, where it drove the old lady next door wild with anger. She used to ring our doorbell at 8AM each trash day to remind us to take it to the curb. We gave her sleepy, irritated looks and then defiantly ignored her. And the dishes! No one wanted to do them, and no one did. I admit I was one of the worst culprits. There was never a time in the year we lived there when there wasn't a mountain of crusty dishes to be washed. And we even had a dishwasher!

Sometime around the five month mark was when Lady lost her job. We didn't know when we moved in with Lady that she was completely incapable of keeping a job for more than a few months before she got fired. Lady then fell into the worst depression I've ever had the misfortune to witness. She spent entire days in bed, smoking and writing in her journal. And that's all she did. She wasn't paying her part of the rent, and she never did any cleaning up. In fact, during this time the house got very messy. Lady's stuff was strewn everywhere. The ashtrays were full of her butts, and they were constantly being knocked off the couch arms (where she left them) by her cats. Bestfriend, Geek, and I grumbled a lot and cleaned up her messes, since trying to get her to do any cleaning was impossible. The most amazing part was when we would bitch at her, and all she could say was, "When you're an adult you'll understand what it's like. You're too young at 19 to understand life." Riiight.

As winter really set in, around the six/seven month mark, things got worse. Geek met a girl and fell in love. The girl (we'll call her Caress) was certifiably crazy. She was bipolar and on lithium, but it didn't seem to be helping. And it also seemed to be contagious, because while Geek was a little weird to start with, he just got insane when he met up with Caress. Bestfriend, Lady, and I all disliked Caress, but there was nothing we could do. She became a fifth roommate who paid no rent. Geek and Caress would go into his basement "bachelor pad" and have explosive-sounding sex around the clock. It was annoying and embarassing, and there was no place to go because it was the dead of winter. We were trapped with Geek and his love, and Lady and her crushing depression.

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned this: A. Lady, Bestfriend, and Geek were convinced that they were psychic, B. They were quite sure they "could see dead people" around our house, C. At one point Lady and Geek started talking crazy talk that she was about to be invaded by an evil spirit and subsequently posessed, and, D. They tried to convince me that I was psychic as well. This is a testament to just how much pot was being smoked in our house. I consider myself a pretty smart girl, and I was even somewhat sucked in by their antics. It was hard not to be.

So somehow we survived winter, and soon it was spring. Lady got a new job, and things looked a bit brighter. But then, more trouble: I had been dating a very Nice Boy who was friends with all of us. During the winter, Nice Boy went out of town for college and broke it off with me. I was so hurt by the breakup that I went out and found me someone to mess around with. Then Nice Boy decided he wanted me back. He didn't know about the other boy I'd been "entertaining" and I didn't tell him. Nice Boy eventually told me he loved me (a very big deal), and I said I loved him back. But here's where I went wrong: I didn't stop seeing the other boy (I never said I was innocent, did I? We all have our not-so-proud moments). My lovely roommates took me aside one night and told me that if I didn't tell Nice Boy about the other boy, they would do it for me. I didn't tell him, so they did. Nice Boy came back from college and was very pissed at me. I broke his heart, and he broke mine. I don't know about him, but I was a wreck.

Geek began disappearing for weeks at a time with Caress at this point, often leaving us to pay his parts of the bills and rent. Fun.

Then one of Lady's cats decided to start peeing on everything. The cat especially liked to pee in Bestfriend's room, and sometimes my room. Later, we found out that probably the reason kitty was peeing so much was that Lady hadn't changed the cat litter in many, many, many months. She made the tiny upstairs bathroom into one giant litter box, and man, did it reek! My old teacher, the owner of the house, said that the smell never came out.

We also started to be hounded by bill collectors around this time, because Bestfriend and Lady had both gone into credit card debt and had both started writing bad checks just to get some groceries. We all became experts at thwarting angry bill collectors, which was fun because at least we could direct our anger towards "the man" instead of each other.

This is when I decided to quit smoking pot. Unfortunately, I was the only one who did.

By this time, it's going on Summer and almost the end of our one-year lease. I knew that my old teacher did not want us back, especially not Lady, since she still owed her some rent. But we weren't out of the woods yet! And here is where we entered the Time Of The Fleas.

Lady offered to dog-sit for a friend for a week, and that dog brought the most amazing flea problem with it. Long after the dog was gone, we had fleas. Legions of Fleas. Fleas in our beds, in our couches, in our food, in our clothes, in our carpet. A short walk to the bathroom would find you with a pair of flea-socks. The three cats spent a month or more living in the bathroom sink and bathtub, since they were the only places where there were no fleas. We tried bug-bombing at least twice, and still they survived. Oh, the itchy horror.

All this plague served to do was drive us all farther apart. We bitched at each other or didn't speak at all. Worst of all, I was fingered as the bad guy by Lady. She took me aside one day and told me I was a slut and what a hateful person I was. I was so beaten down by the heartbreak of losing Nice Boy, and the whole terrible mess of the house, that I just took it. I know I had been a bitch and a bad housemate, but I wasn't the only one. In fact, when we finally all parted ways, no one was speaking to anyone. Geek owed me some money (and eventually paid me). Lady still owed me over $100.00 for bills. She wouldn't take my phone calls, so I had to go to her work and confront her. It was horrible! I never got a cent more from her. Adult, my ass.

Here is the punchline. Bestfriend and Geek were the last to move out. They came back one last time to pick up some things, and found a note written by my old teacher, held down in the center of the living room floor by a foot-tall blue and purple bong. All it said was, "Get this bong out of my house. Now."

Bestfriend still has that note.

Ah, memories.