I have a lot of ground to cover here:


- Crusty’s personal hygiene was atrocious. In the five months she lived with me she never once did laundry. She showered only once or twice a week. She took it upon herself to inform me that she never wore underwear. When my boyfriend of the time heard this he dubbed her “Crusty”. Inspired by this, I promptly hit upon the name “Crud” for Crusty’s boyfriend.

- Crusty’s housekeeping habits reflected her personal hygiene. In five months she never got around to setting up her bed or making it up properly with sheets and blankets. She slept on the bare mattress with her duvet over her. She never put anything away in her room, just left it lying around in piles. By the time she had lived there a month, the entire apartment reeked because of the state of her room. I would come in the door and this sweetish, gamey stench would hit me in the face. She claimed the smell was not coming from her room. Well, the apartment never smelled before she got there and it stopped smelling the day she left, so the math seems pretty clear to me. I would hint that she needed to clean her room to no effect, and finally I just plain ordered her to clean it. All she did was open the windows to air it out, which at least helped. Crusty routinely left a trail of stuff lying around the apartment and would soon have had the entire place looking like her room, but this I did not have to tolerate. A couple of times a week I would gather it all up (clothes, her duvet, magazines, cosmetics, her Lee Press-On nails which she would leave attractively scattered over the coffee table) and dump it all in the doorway of her room. She started a grease fire in the kitchen. Of course I didn’t blame her for this, but she left the mess for a week (the fire had blackened a cupboard door and all the dishes in it), kept saying she’d clean it up “later”, and I ended up cleaning it up myself.

- In five months there was about two weeks in which she did not owe me money. I had to keep at her and at her to pay her share of the bills. She’d finally pay one and another would be due and she would claim she didn’t have the money “but would give it to me Tuesday”. I didn’t like dunning her anymore than she liked being dunned. I was unemployed at the time and as you can imagine I didn’t appreciate being out hundreds of dollars for weeks at a time.

- She was the bone laziest person I’ve ever known. Whenever she was home she spent her entire time lying on the couch in front of the television, arising only to make frequent trips to the fridge. She often spent the night on the couch because the trip down the hall to her room was apparently too arduous. She’d complain that I’d woken her up doing the dishes in the kitchen while she was napping on the couch. Yes, how unreasonable of me to wash dishes in the middle of the day.

- By the age of 21, she’d been expelled from one college program and left another without graduating. She’d been evicted several times. She’d been fired several times.

- Her relationship with Crud is almost worthy of a post in itself. I got a good preview of their dynamic when he was helping her move in and she screamed at him for tracking mud on the floor. Normally I would never interfere in anyone’s relationship but there was no way I was going to stand for having to watch such abuse, so I said something to her about it. She acted very taken aback. (“It sounded bad? Really?”) She told me herself that she used to hit him, first playfully and then with increasing force, despite him repeated telling her not to. Then one day he lost it and belted her back. After that she never did it again. Crud was as lazy as she and also spent every available moment in a horizontal position on the couch. They used to fight over who would get to lie on the couch.

- Crusty invited a friend for a “visit”. When “Karen” showed up with a huge amount of stuff, it soon became clear that she thought Crusty had gotten my permission for her to stay indefinitely while she looked for a job in Toronto and then got on her feet financially to be able to afford her own place. No, Crusty had not even mentioned such a plan to me. I liked Karen, didn’t mind helping her, and the situation was not at all her fault, so I ended up letting her stay. She picked up after Crusty and did some laundry for her occasionally, so that was a help.

- Crusty lied. Constantly. About everything. Even when it was obvious that she was lying, even when I was only making a very minor request of her. This bothered me more than anything else. She would break or use up something of mine and when I asked her to replace it, she would say she didn’t know what had happened to it and let me think that Karen had done it. She also did a lot of self-aggrandizing. She would talk about how she “used to dance” and make it sound as though she had studied dance very seriously. Karen told me that Crusty had only taken a year of jazz. She would talk about her singing, and say how hard she had worked on developing her voice. She did indeed have a terrific voice, but it wasn’t trained and she couldn’t read music at all.

- Crusty had pet rats named Baby and Mouse. She would let them run all over her and in and out of her clothes while she lay on the couch. They would reach into her mouth to take out the food she was chewing. When I found rat droppings behind the couch I said to her that she should either clean up really carefully after her pets or not let them run around so freely. She swore up and down that those droppings could not be from her pets – we must have mice. Uh, no we didn’t. Baby was ailing for awhile and one night she died. Crusty sat on the couch with that dead rat cupped in her hands and rocked back and forth wailing that she couldn’t taaaaaake this aaaaagony. Karen took the rat away from her, wrapped it up and put in a shoebox and put it out on the balcony. Where the box remained for over a week. It was March and beginning to thaw. Crusty’s mother and aunt came down to take her home for a visit and as they were leaving they said to Crusty that they should take Baby with them so they could bury her. Crusty said, oh no, just leave it, but they convinced her that it was too warm outside and it was best to take her now. Good, because I would have thrown the thing in the dumpster in about another day. That probably sounds callous, but I couldn’t bear those rats when they were alive and it was just too much to have a rotting dead one sitting on my balcony indefinitely. Crusty and her mother and aunt took the shoebox containing Baby’s remains home with them, and because the ground was too hard to permit a burial, they put the shoebox coffin in Crusty’s family’s freezer.

- Crusty’s family was also deserving of its own thread. Karen told me that their house was an indescribable pigsty despite the fact that they had a maid service come in for several hours four times a week. Crusty’s one sibling, a younger sister, was the one exception in that family of sloths. She kept her own room spotlessly neat, was slim (the rest of the family was seriously overweight) and was an A student.

- After Crusty got fired from the job she had when she came to live with me and had no way to pay her share of the expenses, I took the opportunity to tell her she had to move out. She said she couldn’t believe I was kicking her out of “her” apartment. Er, the apartment was in my name and all the furniture, including everything in her room except for her bed was mine. She thought she should just be able to live there for free and Karen (who had gotten a job by this time) and I should pay the bills. I said no way. She threatened to sue me. I laughed at her. Out she went, and Karen became my roommate. We disinfected the entire apartment and had an eviction party where we joked about sending Crusty a “hope you find a new place to live soon” card.

Oh those crazy days of my early twenties, when I'd stupidly get myself into these kinds of situations. I needed a new roommate pronto because my former one was moving to Newfoundland on two week's notice and I was unemployed and desperately poor. I never asked Crusty for any references and there were plenty of warning signs when she came to interview. She said, for instance, that she was in a bad situation with her landlord. He complained because she didn't wash dishes and she said she thought she should be able to leave them for "a few hours". No landlord would get after a tenant for leaving dishes around for a few hours. She announced that she was moving in a week early. She should have asked if that was okay, not assumed that she could.

That's hilarious. And gross.

And I'm going to go clean my bedroom now.

How did Karen work out?

I'm itching all over after reading this.

In the event that you're concerned about Crusty, she did not join the ranks of the homeless. She moved back to her parents' place, and Karen and I later heard that Crusty had been diagnosed as and treated for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. This didn't excuse everything, but it explained a LOT. My mother, a teacher of over 45 years experience, told me that Crusty sounds like an atypical case to her. Usually ADHDs are skinny and can't sit still and they get treated early on because no one can cope with them. But once in awhile you find ADHD in someone who's overweight and lethargic and in those cases it can take longer to isolate the problem. Mum told me a girl a few grades behind me in the school where she taught (and where I attended) had been such a case, and had really seemed to wake up and take hold of life much better after being put on medication. I remember that girl, and there definitely was a similarity between her and Crusty.

Oh, and Crud had dumped Crusty soon after I evicted her. Good, because they were horrendously bad for each other.

This is the most interesting story yet! I love it. I think it's because right this second I'm unleashing all of my anger and annoyance on Crusty and Crud. How cool would a sitcom or a cartoon starring these two be? They would sort of be like Ren and Stimpy, only always unlikable, pretty much like all of the characters on Seinfeld ;P

You really need to team up with an illustrator, a la Harvey Pekar, and turn these into comics. Great stories, all of them.

great story

Awesome post--it reminded me of why I'm happy to pay a few hundred dollars more in rent per month to live alone.

Great, entertaining story.

Awesome! Nice to know that I'm not the only one with shitty room mate stories.

Not anymore though, I married my room mate and made the other two with her so there won't be any evictions.

But I might try to put some of my room mate horror stories into the blog, some of the episodes are just bizarre!

If I ever get on your bad side, I am going to quit reading Metachat!

Maybe you and fenriq could write a book? I always look forward to your stories!!