The Roommates

by Stephanie Wu

  One day he came home and called an apartment meeting, and told Dave and me that he’d been getting tests done to figure out why he was feeling so bad. The doctor had told him that he had some sort of extremely rare degenerative muscle disease—and that he’d be dead within the year. Needless to say, we were shocked and said we’d do anything we could to help out. He told us he was still going for more tests, and he started making pot brownies all the time, because marijuana was the one thing that made him feel better. And when he made the brownies, he baked like he was mad at the stove. He was a terrible baker who angrily stirred saucepans full of butter and never cleaned it up afterward. It was like he was disgusted by the whole operation but was doing it anyway because he’d convinced himself it was for its medical properties. Meanwhile, he was still doing a lot of coke. He told us that it was important for him to get sleep, and that the heat was debilitating for him. His main symptom was that he couldn’t move for hours on end, because he was so afflicted by lethargy that he could barely get out of bed unless he was stoned or on cocaine.

  Jimmy kept getting worse and worse, and we had no idea what was going on. We were absolutely terrified and trying to be nice to him, but Dave and I were privately asking ourselves, Why aren’t his parents coming out here and taking him home? If he was dying, shouldn’t he be with his parents instead of living in New York? He’d gotten a job but quit because he was so tired all the time, so he was spending his parents’ money lying around in bed getting stoned—which actually is not different from many others who have recently graduated from college and are living in New York.

  But he stuck around, and finally he told us, good news—he wasn’t dying. He just had a horrible crippling muscular disease that meant he would never feel good again. But after the whole “I’m dying” thing, we were like, that’s great! We were still trying to be supportive and offered to pick up his medication for him. I’ve known several people who are sick, like teenagers with severe arthritis who are in pain all the time but are still the sunniest, friendliest people in the world. I’ve never met anyone who was crueler or nastier than Jimmy. The worse he felt, the meaner he was. He had a passive-aggressive way of leaving a voice mail yelling at us about something we’d done wrong—such as grinding coffee in the morning and waking him up—but only after we were out of the house and on the subway. For a while, these angry voice mails were the only way he communicated.

  He also screamed at my then girlfriend, now wife, because she once finished his orange juice. He made a huge deal about how difficult it was for him to get out of bed, and that buying the orange juice took all of the energy he had for the day. He absolutely hated our girlfriends.

  The worst part was Dave and Jimmy actually lived together in college. I found out afterward that they’d lived in a big group for several years, six or seven guys in a suite, so they didn’t notice each other’s weirdness as much. But before the three of us moved in together, every one of Dave’s friends had told him not to move in with Jimmy because he was crazy.

  I finally went out of town for a week, and was so relieved to be away from Jimmy. My younger brother was coming to stay with us for five days after I went out of town, and to put it nicely, my brother is not a sensitive guy. He’s hilarious and a lot of fun, but can be incredibly rude.

  Without asking anyone, my brother decided to have a party at our apartment and invite his college friends via Facebook. It was pretty inconsiderate, so this was actually a reasonable thing for Jimmy to be mad about. He called me while I was on vacation, and you know that feeling where you’re fighting with someone, and you see their name come up on your phone, and your stomach immediately contracts? I felt this way about Jimmy all the time. He called and ranted about my brother, and I said I’d solve the problem, that the party wouldn’t happen at our house, but he kept sending me angry texts all weekend.

  I came back from my vacation, and Jimmy was already pissed off that my brother was there. In addition to being insensitive, my brother is also a terrible houseguest. He wasn’t bathing a lot, and left his stuff everywhere. Dave and I had spent a summer dancing around Jimmy, trying to be sweet and nonconfrontational. But my brother was loud, smelly, and messy, and gave Jimmy a lot of shit. He knew the whole backstory of Jimmy being sick, but didn’t care at all. Jimmy sent me another one of those angry voice mails, with a long litany of complaints, ranging from the reasonable (your brother left his crap everywhere) to slightly paranoid (he was so smelly that he stunk up the sofa, so I had to pay to dry clean it). He said the smell was making him physically sick, and he did what he often did and stayed in a hotel for two days without telling us. Once he came back, he told us that he couldn’t handle it anymore and was moving home. I’d never been happier that my brother was an asshole.

  Dave and I were ecstatic. We knew what date he was moving out, and so we purposefully tried to avoid being there while his parents were there. But I ended up in the house as his family was coming in, and when I said hi to his mom to be friendly, she gave me this horrible look, as if I were a war criminal who had tortured her baby.

  We later found out that Jimmy was never sick—he never had anything physically wrong with him and it was completely psychosomatic. He was essentially hungover for about four months, but told us he was dying! Dave and I both had nightmares about him for months afterward, where we dreamed he’d come back to the apartment and we offended him somehow, and he was creeping up on us like a vampire. It was like a bad breakup, except I never liked him.

  After Jimmy moved out, we had a “house-falling” party. That was my idea, because it had been a Cold War for those four months and felt like the Berlin Wall had come down. We stayed in the apartment, and another good friend of ours from high school moved into that room. The thing is, he became depressed too—maybe the room itself was cursed.

  —W, 26 (M)

  THE PERSISTENT PESTS

  WHEN I FIRST MOVED to Philadelphia for a job, I lived in an apartment with three others. The lease was up that summer, and two of them, who were dating, decided it was time to find their own spot, as did the third roommate, who had been there for three years and was ready to leave. I wanted to keep the place, because it was nice, huge, in a good area, and priced way cheaper than anything else. I looked at other apartments as alternatives, but they were about three hundred dollars more a month—it would have been an expensive move.

  All of a sudden, I had to find three normal strangers to live with (and fast, because if I didn’t have roommates locked down, my landlord was going to start showing the place, and I knew it’d go quickly). Luckily, my sister goes to school in Philadelphia, and she had a friend who was looking for a place with two others. They came and saw the place, liked it, and said they wanted to move in. Given the alternative—recruiting three non–serial killers off the Internet in a couple days—I said it was fine.

  At the beginning of September, all three of them moved in and were living in the apartment part-time. My sister’s friend Jill was doing a clinical rotation in Delaware and wasn’t around much. The two others, Tasha and Dana, worked part-time at home and were looking for full-time work in the city. They went home for weekends because they worked there, and then came back during the week for a couple of days. Because they were only at the apartment part-time, they didn’t sign the lease on time. The three girls paid the first month’s rent, but were late on the security deposit and last month’s rent.

  The first thing that happened after they moved in was that we started noticing fleas, which may have been left over from a previous roommate’s cat. I had little bite marks on my arms, and the fleas were hard to get rid of. We had an exterminator come in and bomb the place, but the fleas didn’t all die immediately. There were some leftover ones hopping around for a couple days after the exterminator came.

  I did some research on what fleas and bedbugs look like to figure out which they were—I did not want them to be bedbugs. The flea infestation had finally died down when, all of a sudden, one Monday night,
I saw what I identified as a bedbug on my wall. I had been telling my friends, “Thank god these were fleas and not bedbugs.” One of the Web sites even said, count your lucky stars if you have fleas and not bedbugs because they’re a lot easier to get rid of. As soon as we got rid of the fleas, I saw a bedbug.

  I went upstairs that night and slept on the couch. The next morning, I called the same exterminator and he said, “Yeah, you’ve got them.” He had all these guidelines on what we had to do to get rid of them, and I was totally demoralized. We’d just had one bug issue and now we had another that was infinitely worse. None of my roommates were there at the time, on Tuesday morning, but I texted them to say, “So you know, we have bedbugs, the exterminator came, and he’ll be coming back later this week. Let me know what day would be best next week because we can’t be in the apartment when they’re treating it.”

  Tasha texted me back immediately and said something like, “Take my name off the lease, I’m moving out.” I called her back and said, “That’s not how it works. If you want to move out, that’s fine, but you need to find someone to replace you and take over your portion of the lease—you can’t break a twelve-month lease three weeks in.”

  Two minutes later, she texted again: “I’m moving out, and my dad’s getting a lawyer.” I didn’t know her very well at this point, and I didn’t know if this was a temper tantrum that would boil over. I was too busy dealing with getting our apartment ready for the exterminator. There are all these things you have to do, including taking every picture off the wall, throwing out box springs, removing mattresses from frames, washing every piece of clothing in hot water, and dousing all suitcases in Lysol. And every single thing had to go in a trash bag—there were bags all over the apartment with all my stuff. I was starting the process in my room downstairs, and suddenly I heard movement upstairs, though I was the only person at home. Tasha had barged into the apartment with her parents—they’d essentially left home as soon as she’d sent me that text—and started moving her stuff out.

  The first thing I said to her parents was, “Are you sure you want to move this stuff out now? We’re getting treated for bedbugs on Friday, and you could be taking the bedbugs home with you.” I even suggested that if Tasha wanted to move out, she could leave her things here, get them exterminated, and then take them. I figured that was a rational thing to say. But that opened the floodgates for her parents to start screaming at me and blaming me for everything from fleas to bedbugs to the apartment’s general state of cleanliness.

  Meanwhile, I wasn’t even the landlord—I was a tenant, like their daughter, and dealing with the problem too. It was bad enough I had bedbugs to deal with, but now I also had these crazy angry parents yelling at me. They went as far as to accuse me of knowing about the bedbugs beforehand, and only revealing them the day after their daughter had signed the lease—as if it was a choice of mine to lie in a pool of blood-sucking insects for any longer than necessary. That’s what really blew me away.

  Her dad kept screaming at me and saying, “If we have to see you again, we’ll see you in court.” I don’t know what they would have sued me for, but he said the bedbugs were cause for termination of the lease. And then he followed up with, “But it doesn’t matter because she’s not on the lease.” Which was not true, since she’d signed it the day before. I finally got tired of the yelling and went back downstairs, and when they left, her dad took the lease with them—probably to destroy it so there was no proof his daughter’s name was ever on it.

  During that week, I was the only person in the apartment getting it ready for the bedbug treatments. One of the things you have to do is buy a mattress encaser, and I offered to purchase them for Jill and Dana if they paid me back. Dana, who had previously hinted that she wanted to buy a new mattress, wouldn’t give me a straight answer. I wanted to call her and say, “Listen, I know it’s annoying that you have to make one multiple-choice decision here, but I’ve taken two days off of work to get ready for the exterminator.” Eventually she told me to throw her mattress away. She didn’t have many clothes or other stuff, but I also had to empty all the drawers and bookcases because the bugs can get into wooden drawers. There wasn’t much in the other rooms, but Dana did have a bong, which I didn’t want the exterminator seeing. I finally found a shoebox to put it in, but that was the extent of what I had to do to get her room ready—throw her mattress away and hide her bong.

  Dana and Tasha were very close, so I figured that after the whole Tasha blowup Dana was probably out too. I talked to Jill that night, and she said she would stay. She too had called her dad to ask what to do, and he said, “Well, you get rid of the bedbugs and pay the next month’s rent.” It reassured my faith in humanity a bit that there was a parent out there who knew what a contract was.

  The next day, Dana texted me to say she was also moving out. She and her mom arrived Monday to pack up, and it wasn’t quite the tornado that the first incident was. Her mom said there was a big upholstered chair in the room they didn’t want to take, and asked if I’d take care of it. I basically said, “No, if you want to take it out to the Dumpster or the curb, go ahead.” I went out for a jog, and when I got back, they were standing by the car looking like they were done. I wished them good luck, and said, “Did you take care of the chair?” And they hadn’t. First they said they didn’t have room for it, to which I replied, “That’s not my issue, you’re moving out and it’s your responsibility to take your stuff with you.” Then she said it might have bedbugs on it. “Yes, so does everything else in your car,” I said. Finally she turned to her daughter, said, “Let’s go,” and got in the car and drove away.

  After the two of them left, I put the apartment on Craigslist to find new roommates. Someone moved in less than a week later. I told him we’d recently been exterminated for bedbugs, because he deserved to know. The biggest endorsement of the apartment’s buglessness was that I was still living there. My exterminator told me everyone in Philadelphia knows someone who’s had bedbugs—it’s one of the most bedbug-infested cities in the country. But no one talks about it.

  While the ordeal was happening, I alternated between sleeping on the couch and staying with a girl I’d just started seeing. I had debated whether to tell her about the fleas, and then a week later, had to tell her about the bedbugs. We’d only been on a few dates at that point, but I had to swear I wasn’t sprouting bugs out of my armpits. She very graciously put me up for a few nights that first week. And on top of that, there was insane drama at work—my boss was fired. I kept waiting for a cameraman to pop his head up somewhere and tell me I was on some type of reality show.

  —C, 27 (M)

  THE ROOMMATES WITH BENEFITS

  AFTER THREE MONTHS of subletting an apartment in Austin, I started looking on Craigslist for a place to rent. I’d seen a couple of places I didn’t love when I met Diane, a twenty-eight-year-old who owned a house. The day I went to visit, Jake, who had already been living in the house for about a year, was there too, and the three of us got along pretty well. It was a three-bedroom ranch house with a pool in the backyard and was in a nice neighborhood—or so I thought at the time.

  My room was empty because the girl who had lived there had moved to Europe. I thought it was a good sign that the last tenant hadn’t left because she was sick of the roommates. Since my sublet was ending, I moved in within the week. At the time, I was working as a nanny and had weird hours. Jake was an ex-marine taking classes and Diane was a quiet girl with a nine-to-five job, so our schedules were all different. We saw one another at night sometimes, but once in a while days went by without us seeing each other. There was never any fighting over the bathroom, and we were social—Jake and I hung out by the pool and the three of us had dinner together if we were all home at the same time.

  One day, at eight in the morning, I woke up to the sound of glass breaking. I thought one of my housemates had dropped a glass until I heard stumbling around. I didn’t think either of them would be drunkenly breakin
g glasses on the floor in the morning and I sensed something wasn’t right, so I went to investigate.

  As soon as I walked out of my room, I saw a guy standing there covered in blood. He’d used his forearm to break the window above our kitchen sink and had probably hoisted himself up through it using our patio furniture. Since this was a ranch house, there was only one floor. The intruder was a total crackhead, and as I was screaming at him and chasing him out of the house, he grabbed my DVD player and cable box and walked out. I think he was planning to take more, but I scared him away. I don’t know if he was armed—he never showed me a weapon. It sounds braver than it was, but I was the only one home.

  I called 911 and told them my house had been broken into. “I can see the guy walking down the street with my DVD player in one arm and cable box in the other,” I said. The dispatcher asked if anyone else was in the house and told me to wait outside in my front yard. I was standing there waiting when the dispatcher said, “Ma’am, do you mind if we apprehend him first? We see him down the block from you.”

  After they caught him, the cops came back to my house and were talking to me when Jake rode up on his bicycle. Something was clearly wrong, because there were six cop cars outside, a CSI team fingerprinting everything in the house, and blood everywhere in the kitchen. I was telling Jake about the break-in and how the police were bringing our things back when the cops asked us if we had any weapons in the house. “Kitchen knives?” I replied. And Jake casually said, “Yes, I have six guns in the house, do you want to see my permit?” I had no idea there were guns in the house. The cops turned to him and said, “I wish you had been home so you could have shot this guy.” I couldn’t believe I was living in this crazy state. Diane was still at work, so Jake and I cleaned up the fingerprint powder and blood, which took forever.