Touchscreen T.V.

I go out to a party with my freshman roommate and some of our friends and my roommate get completely shitfaced while the rest of us are just tipsy. So we head back to the dorm, all the while keeping him from pissing on or flagging down every car he sees. Our dorm was made up of three buildings in a U arrangement with a courtyard in the middle that had a koi pond with a gazebo on a ledge about 5 feet above it. We get back and chill in the courtyard for a little bit, sitting on the ledge above the koi pond. My roommate looks down and says “I see Nemo! Imma go swim with Nemo” and starts to lean forward so he can fall into the pond. Please note, this man was well over 300 lbs. Two of my friends and I jump up, grab him and throw him backwards, all the while he’s giggling like a 5 yeard old. We then go back to my dorm to watch Zach and Miri Make a Porno on the 52 inch flat screen in my room (my roommate was loaded). As we’re watching, my roommate announces, “Did you guys know that it’s actually A TOUCHSCREEN?!?!!?” He then approaches the screen and tries to pull Elizabeth Banks across the screen towards him muttering “she will come to me, then we will have sex, because it’s a touchscreen”. After a few minutes of us laughing our asses off and him getting frustrated, he passes out.

I never saw him that drunk ever again, and that makes me sad.

Animal Shelter

I had two terrible roommates, Ashley stole things from me and my closet, Rebekah broke several of my shot glasses my family had brought me from around the world (and she wasn’t even drunk…), Rebekah also kept a TON of animals even though I have really bad asthma and that year I was rushed to the ER at least once a month and she also was really bad about cleaning their cages and such. I’m talking in a smallish apartment with no patio or balcony she had 2 adult bunnies, usually around 16 baby bunnies, a cat, some fish, a frog, some turtles, two snakes, two obnoxious birds, and would sometimes dog sit. I’m surprised I didn’t die, even though I blacked out twice from lack of oxygen while I waited for the ambulance to come. About a year and a half later the lease ended and we all moved out, with me going to my sisters house and them moving in with Rebekah’s parents. Another 3 months after that they both contacted me, individually, and actually apoligized for being bad roommates. They realized after they no longer had me around as a scapegoat that their living conditions were still a mess, while I was now happy with my sister, living in a clean enviorment where both of us cleaned. Lesson learned: don’t live with close friends if you expect them to stay close friends, especially if you are easy going because you will just end being walked all over.

The 400 Blows

My first year doing an MA, I lived in my MA institution housing complex. It was an apartment with 4 bedrooms, and a shared living room and kitchen. They placed you randomly with other roommates (either grad students and/or international students). My second semester, one of my roommates was a very religious Jamaican woman in her mid-30s, doing her Bachelors degree in the United States because “in Jamaica, it gives a man status to have a wife with a degree from the United States”. One day, I rented from Blockbuster the classic François Truffaut movie “The 400 Blows”.

I left the box on the dining table. I was in my room, and my Jamaican roommate knocks on the door. When I opened the door, I saw her holding the DVD box. She was obviously angry, and said to me: “Why don’t you have some respect for your roommates? Why are you leaving all your stuff in plain view?”. I thought she was over-reacting to me being messy, so I apologized and put the DVD box in a bookshelf in the living room. She came after me ever angrier than before, grabbed the box from the bookshelf and yelled at me: “I don’t care what you do in your personal life, but I shouldn’t have to be exposed to it. How dare you leave your porn in plain view for everybody to see it?” I was stunned for about half a minute, until I realized that she had misunderstood the title of the movie. Then, I couldn’t stop laughing for a while.

It took me a few minutes to finally be able to explain to her that it The 400 Blows was a French classic and not an “adult” movie. She didn’t know whether to believe me or not. She only fully accepted my explanation when I told her that Blockbuster didn’t rent “adult” movies (which was true). It was a funny and weird roommate story. In my next post, I’ll tell you of the day I discovered she was cheating on her husband (who was in Jamaica) with her pastor. She was one of a kind.

Shocks And Crusty Socks

My friend Mike and I were living in this apartment on Gardner Street in Hollywood.  Mike was an electrician and what he did was he wired up my bed, underneath my sheets. He ran this very thin wire, from his room into mine. He had a little push button setup under his bed. He would push this button and give me a little shock. I remember that I would be dreaming and in my dream I felt this little shock and I thought there was something wrong with me and my body. I would wake up and open up my eyes and was basically staring at the ceiling. I would feel this jolt wake me up. Then I felt the wire going through my sheets, right underneath them. It drove me nuts. So I decided to do something to get him back. Now I have really really bad smelly feet. My family is known for having really cheesy, crusty disgusting socks. So I thought to myself, ‘what could I do, to fuck with Mike?’

I searched and found the crustiest socks I could find of mine.  Mike had these zippers that his girlfriend bought him for his dubay cover, and he had these matching pillow cases, with these cute little zippers. So I unzipped those suckers and I put a dirty crusty sock in each one of the pillowcases.  He’s sleeping there with his girlfriend one night. He walks into my room, and say’s, ‘alright asshole, where the fuck are those socks?’ I never told him where they were, until finally she just happened to clean the pillow cases and she pulls out the crusty socks, which were even crustier than when I first put them in there.

Mad Dog Goggles

One night we were drinking very heavily. We had decided to drink Mad Dog 20/20.  I didn’t really know what it was. We just drank it. It was in a flask like bottle, but we got ripped on it. So that night, we ended up going out to some party, and unfortunately my memory got a little foggy by the end of the night. Basically what happened was, at the end of the night, one of my roommates, Adam, was gone when we came back home. However, at the time we didn’t really care since we’re still pretty loaded. We continue the party back at our apartment, playing Sega or whatever it was we did, and end up having a great time. Adam walks in a little later and says, ‘Dude, I just hooked up with the hottest girl ever!’ He starts telling us all about this girl.

How beautiful she is, how perfect, everything. We were really happy for him and said, ‘that’s great man, very cool.’ The following day, we get a knock at the door. My other roommate David is standing behind me. I open the door and there’s this girl standing there, and she really isn’t that pretty, but asks for Adam. Turns out that he was so loaded that he thought this girl was hot, but she really wasn’t. It as a typical beer goggles situation. In fact she was kind of homely looking. She wasn’t fat, just ugly to us. Our roommate Adam felt really bad about it. We started calling her Mad Dog because we were drinking Mad Dog the night before. Well, it turns out that since he felt so bad for her, he ends up dating her. The next thing we know they end up getting married. Later, I even wrote a song about them called Mad Dog 20/20. As far as I know they are still married.

Open House

Three friends and myself were renting a house a few years ago. all of us were between the ages of 19-21 and we’re recently done with boot camp and all our medical training for the military. one day i came home from work and my room mate zach told me the lease was up the next day and i had to find a new place to live. in a scramble, i called my friend ben and moved in with him temporarily. 3 days later i discovered that the lease wasnt up and zach just wanted to freeload off the rent that we (the other house mates) had already paid. zach was the only one on the lease, he had a pitbull that pissed on my bed just about everyday, shit on the kitchen floor if we were lucky, if not, living room floor. he was a terrible room mate in every way shape or form. he took two weeks of leave to go home, so myself and one of the other guys that lived there, and was also evicted prematurely, decided a party was in order. i broke in the bathroom window and we threw a very large party.
I told all the males that attended that bathroom use was to be confined to zachs bedroom, and no trash goes in the trash can, it goes in zachs closet. then we played a few drinking games, a few games of “who can get the most knives to stick in the wall” and last but not least, cut the power the next morning and left the fridge open. we returned one week later and could actually smell the house when we pulled in the driveway…perhaps it was a little extreme what we did, but i also forgot to mention that zach used to drink my rum all the time, justified? i think so.

Setting The Mood

I thought I had seen it all by the time I turned 21. I was wrong. One summer night when I was sleeping I was woken up by some strange noise from the front room of my apartment. I wasn’t too surprised because I was used to waking up in the middle of the night from strange noises since I had a noisy roommate who would always have people over. Well, nothing could prepare me for the sight I was about to see next.

I opened the door, walked down the hall into the front room. What I saw was my couch, turned upside down and on fire. And next to it was one of my roommates friends on top of a very ugly girl having sex. They turned around and just gave me a blank stare. I started yelling at them and patted down the couch. I didn’t want to sit and have a discussion with my roommate’s drunken friend and his very ugly object of desire. I went back to bed, and decided to talk to them in the morning.

When I woke up the next morning the couch was where it was supposed to be (with a nice new burn mark) and the house was cleaned up. I called my roommate’s friend and asked him what the hell happened. He said he had met the girl at this little bar in Fullerton and brought her to our place because he wanted to get a little action. He couldn’t do that at home because he still lived with his parents. He was having a few beers hanging out on the couch smoking some cigarettes, when he decided the best way to get the action going was to play wrestle with this girl.

Well, she was a big girl, and he was a big guy so when they went at it things got kooky. They knocked the couch over along with the lit cigarette. When they landed on the floor they started getting amorous and didn’t notice the flames a few feet away. Well, that is when I walked out and found the couch in flames. At least they cleaned up after. I teased that guy for years after that.

Five O’Clock Shadow

After I graduated from college, I lived with two friends of mine, D.J. and Bailey, in Hermosa Beach, California. One day I had to go to work and Bailey had a job interview. We realized that morning that neither of us had razor blades to shave, and both of us were kind of in a hurry. Our other roommate DJ liked to use an electric razor and since he wasn’t home at the time, Bailey said ‘come on, lets just use DJ’s electric razor.’ So Bailey goes in the bathroom and grabs the electric razor and starts to shave all over his face. Unfortunately, he didn’t realize that one of the little blades in the razor was broken and it cut nicks all over his face. It was the funniest thing I ever saw. Bailey had these little cuts all over his face with little pieces of tissue paper on them, and he still had to go to his job interview. He was so pissed at DJ because he didn’t tell him it was broken, but it wasn’t DJ’s fault. He had no idea we would used it. Good thing that I didn’t go first.