Jezebel
An acquaintance of mine has gone through roommate after roommate, and man, it just sucks for her. She’s nice, responsible and completely normal, and yet she continues to get shafted with one insane roommate after another. One was a depressive alcoholic who tried to kill himself, another was obsessed with repeatedly washing her dog, and yet another up and left in the middle of the night with no explanation, taking some of her belongings with him.
Hearing her stories of woe, I’ve never been so freaking thankful that time of my life is over, because good God, it really sucked. I mean, please don’t get me wrong – I’ve had great roommates and lived with some of my dearest friends. Yes yes, there was that horrible time that Eve and I were so broke and so…God, I don’t know what we were thinking, but we shared a two-room studio apartment in the North End of Boston that was so freaking small that our two beds were smooshed together so close that we had no choice but to sleep together every night due to space limitations.
But gads, today I was thinking about my senior year in college, when four of us decided to rent a house off campus with two other girls we didn’t know well and holy shit, that was bad. Eve decided to head to London for the first part of the year, and lo, we ended up with a substitute roommate (chosen by the other two girls) from motherfucking hell, and yea, it was truly hellish. Janelle* was a tall, buxom blonde with a penchant for slutty clothes, too much perfume and a raging eating disorder. Loud, brash and brazen, she was Anna Nicole Smith after too many cigarettes and about four gallons of rum. She had a husky deep voice and was Amazonian in stature and she fancied herself to be “tough” and demonstrated it at every turn by screaming at all of us whenever she got the chance, whether it was about who took the garbage out last (never her), who ate her Rice A Roni or why, for the love of GOD, we were angry at her for having sex on the living room floor when we were supposed to be sleeping? (Um, maybe because she was banging against my bedroom door, which was actually IN THE LIVING ROOM, and I didn’t like waking up to the sounds of someone else’s orgasm? Could that be it?)
I’m not normally one to judge another’s sexual escapades, glass houses and all, but I saw that woman’s bare ass more than I’ve seen my own that semester. She brought home every guy I knew, some I dated, and some I’d only heard of by reputation. One evening, around 3 a.m., I heard a scuffle upstairs in the bathroom. Convinced she’d passed out on the floor after locking herself in for the frillionth time, I wandered up the stairs and attempted to rescue her. It wasn’t until I’d knocked on the door for a full three minutes that I heard the moaning that would indicate she was in there with her third guy of the night. I knew this because I’d caught the other two on their way out as I sat in the living room. Twice, I bumped into my ex-boyfriends on their way out as they sneaked their way down the stairs in their boxers and clutching their pants, hoping to make their escape before she woke up and figured out they were gone. Instead they found me downstairs by the door, the picture of grace and poise as I sat in the living room with a bowl of cereal watching Real World marathons and looking awkward in my plaid pajamas and wild hair.
I got into a conversation with her once about how many guys she’d slept with, and as she counted on her fingers and chewed her lip, she finally admitted that she’d lost count after 123, which was a few months back (!!). I’ve always wondered if it was for that semester, or her entire life. Both seemed possible, but sadly, the former seemed more likely. And can I just say ‘ew,’ without sounding all judgy and awful, given that at the time of this conversation, she was only 21, and thus, not THAT far out of puberty? Because: Ew.
She was a vegetarian, so she claimed, but would lapse late at night after a hard night of drinking. It wasn’t unusual the rest of us to wake up and find the entire contents of the refrigerator decimated – including one terrifying evening where the nine (9!) chicken breasts I’d had in the freezer had been turned into what looked like a very messy chicken salad and devoured in front of the television overnight. A rogue chunk drenched in mayonnaise and raisins (?!) tucked in the couch cushions was all that remained of my stash. And that morning, like every morning throughout the entire year, she denied all of it, crowing, “I AM A VEGETARIAN! MEAT DISGUSTS ME!”
It wasn’t until my other roommate caught her at 4 a.m. with half of a pilfered deli bag of sliced ham dangling out of her mouth that it all came together. Wrong as it may be, I’ve been suspicious of most vegetarians ever since.
I think about her sometimes. I often wonder how the christ she ended up so irreparably damaged that she had to fill her life with alcohol, food and sex in order to function. Sadly, I still haven’t been able to muster much pity for her, for she made my life as miserable as she possibly could that year, screaming at me – at all of us – for demanding she pick up her clothes and dishes (she left such disaster in her wake that we discovered a colony of maggots living behind her stash of shit on the kitchen counter). But mostly we demanded, for the love of God, that she stop having sex all over the house every minute and maybe take care of herself a little more, so as not to die a painful, violent death of rape, murder and destruction?
One of my fondest memories of college is hearing my friend Mike recount the time he saw her light her face on fire while extremely drunk at Harry’s Bar. Apparently she’d overdone the hair product that night, and when she the hand holding her lighter slipped, the flame caught hold of the flammable hairspray and quickly grew around her like a blazing halo. Too drunk to realize what happened, she tried to blow it out in concentric circles with her meager little lips, and she came home later that night with a singed head and eyebrows. She never did tell me what happened. Thank God for Mike. Dear God, just thinking about it, I’m seriously laughing so hard I had to collect myself to type it.
Ugh, what a waste. I can’t even feel sorry for her, even though part of me believes she’s probably dead by now, self-destructed into a ball of flames.
In other news, while taking Sunny out for her late-night walk, a frog jumped on my head in his desperate escape to make it off of the moving front door. A frog jumped on my head. It touched my hair. I grabbed with my hand, threw it, and screamed like someone was stabbing me with a bloody knife, and Adam yelled at me for terrifying the neighborhood and “crying wolf,” when what if there was a real emergency?
Seriously dude, if a frog on your head isn’t an emergency, then I don’t know what is.
*Not her real name. But does anyone watch Big Brother? She looks like a way – WAY – sluttier and trashier version of Janelle. Hence the name. But Eve totally knows who I’m talking about, don’t you?
**10,000 Maniacs.
15 comments August 15th, 2006