A history of the world’s worst room mates.

It’s a rite of passage- room mates. Some of us have been fortunate to have room mates whom they have become the best of friends, I on the other hand haven’t always had that experience. If anything I have had the interesting dilemma of having to deal with room mates that most people would have had cardiac arrests dealing with and the occasional mental breakdown. What types of room mates you wonder? The worst kind of course- from room mates that suddenly turned out to be heroin dealers, crack cocaine users and there was even Jerome whom at first I thought was a lovable kid down on his luck only to return one day from a weekend away to find his extended family (and by that I mean his 5 year old, 3 year old and newly born daughter) crying like banshees down the hallway. At first I tolerated it but after the 5th fist fight with the children’s estranged mother I knew I had to move out.

Looking for a room mate or a new place to live is an open invitation to heaven or hell. In a city like New York where anything goes one learns after a while to be both equally open and dismissive about who they run into, let alone whom they live with. For most people it is enough of a compelling reason to spend upwards of three quarters of their income just to know that when they return home it will be them and their own madness. But what about other people’s madness, other people’s foibles and eccentricities? The writer in me has always perceived it as a way of obtaining life affirming experiences from which to draw from and document but then again how many of those life affirming experiences do you really want when the kid knocking on the front door at 4 am in the morning is after Freddy your room mate- the resident heroin dealer?

If you must know one of the most mesmerizing and eerie experiences was coming home to find Jack my then room mate standing over the kitchen stove mixing a quart of baking soda, cocaine into a test tube and carefully swishing it above toxic flames. At first incredulous and later prone to indifference ( I countered that worst case scenario Jack would be frying his own brain in the comfort of his own bedroom) the horror of what was actually going in my house only intensified when I went to use the bathroom. If Jack had given me pause and discomfort then the sight of a homeless man beating off and hitting the pipe while Jack’s dealer Marcie was standing there in front of him fornicating herself was indeed the last straw. I can only remember when Jack was kindly(sort of) asked to move out him retorting that he didn’t think it was such a big deal and anyway he was prepared to share his ‘batch’ with me that night…