The Roommate from Hell

WARNING: The following blog post contains disgusting details that may give you nightmares, or, at best, destroy your appetite. The situation to be described is nowhere near as sexy as the article photo may lead you to believe!

For the past two months, I have been living with a Spanish girl of similar age. I needed a roommate, so I posted an ad on Craigslist to rent a room in my apartment. She responded enthusiastically, saying that she needed a room urgently and she was willing to move in the same day. Because I was pressured for money, I accepted, before even having a  meeting with her to see if we would be compatible. Big, big, big mistake!

She brought her stuff in that very evening, telling me that her previous roommates had kicked her out. She was quite an attractive girl – tall, athletic, with delicate features, sporting a black bob that gave her physique a note of French chic. Attractive until she opens her mouth, that is. I instantly disliked her way of speaking and acting – fast, aggressive and loud, with a hoarse masculine voice, but I thought that maybe the long period of living alone had made me intolerant. Also, I thought that her bad English might have been skewing my perspective and making me less patient, and I really didn’t want to be that kind of person. So I took her in and hoped for the best. After all, I wasn’t looking for a  friend; I just wanted someone with whom to share the rent and cohabitate peacefully.

Now, because of the sheer number of outrageous things I have witnessed, I have decided to write them in the form of a bulleted list, to make for an easier read.

• The first shock came when, the same night she moved in, she shared the full list of her physical ailments. The words “mucus” and “fungus” were mentioned a lot, suffice it to say. Also, she expressed an unusual level of comfort in my presence, by casually belching and hawking loogies (see the aforementioned mucus), which she still does, all the time. I didn’t think that I would ever be in a situation where I had to google for the expression “to hawk a loogie”, but I guess I should thank her for helping me enrich my English vocabulary.
• The second shock was when I realized that she has little use for the bathroom door. This mind-blowing realization happened one day when I was in the kitchen, making my lunch, and she was talking to me about something. I see her walk to the bathroom, lift her skirt, let down her panties and sit on the throne, all while continuing her sentence. And we’re not even talking about a no.1 here… really. At a certain point, she even elicited my thoughts regarding her intestinal processes: ” I don’t know what is this, only water come out of my butt, no es normal, ay?”. Accompanied by demonstrative noises. I warned you it would be gross.
• In the same heart-warming vignette, I remember her wiping, getting up and NOT washing her hands. Shaken, I could only whimper: “Wh… what are you doing? Please keep the door closed… and wash your hands.” She just shrugged and laughed. And this was not a one-time thing, no sir! It even happened this very morning.
• Onto to the fungus. Toenail fungus, that is. An annoying condition that can happen to anyone and is not always an indicator of how clean or dirty a person is. But: please don’t describe it to me, and, for Heaven’s sakes, DO NOT wipe off your toenail polish with my tea towel!!! Actually, do not put my tea towel anywhere near your feet, even if you are a foot model for Dr. Scholl’s! Needless to say that the towel was immediately discarded; now, if only I could erase that memory from my brain, it would all be fine.
• Back to the bathroom issues. I am taking a nice shower after a long day of work, when I hear an anxious knock on the door: ‘Ana-Mariaaaaa (that would be me)! I have pipi! I come in!” I don’t care where you’re from, but that is not acceptable; if you’re older than 5, you can hold it for 10 damn minutes. Should I even bother mentioning that she didn’t wash her hands after?
• After several such incidents, I had enough and told her to wait for me to come out. I rush through my shower and then I tell her she could go in. “No problem, I use the balcony, I had much pipi!”. At 9 in the morning. I hope to God no neighbours saw her.
• Flushing the toilet is not mandatory, as I have learned, if it’s only a no.1, or a really small no.2.
• I know there are people out there who think that farting and/or burping is cute. I am not one of them. Not even when a person I love does it, let alone a virtual stranger. Not even when children do it – well, except the baby farting a cloud of talcum powder in that viral Youtube video. My roommate seems to disagree though, and she even told me: “A mi, me encanta la naturaleza (I like natural behavior)”. One evening, she went out in the balcony and started farting loudly and laughing, enchanted probably by her own naturaleza. Then she started screaming : “Soy una pedorra, soy una pedorra!”, which would translate approximately as “I am a farting bitch, I am a farting bitch”. I apologize to any Hispanic neighbours I might have, and I deeply sympathize with their trauma.
• A true free spirit in her manifestations of both anger and joy, she once expressed her excitement upon hearing a  piece of good news by… dry-humping me. I was lying on my bed, and she just jumped on top of me and rubbed against me. Again, please disregard the article photo; I swear to you that it was not sexy! I’m not gay, but even if I were, I’d aim higher than a crass stink-bomb like her.
• My kitchen is a biohazard. The floor is sticky, dishes are put back in cabinets only half-washed, with food scraps on them, the meat grill is covered in stinky, hardened chicken gunk (after a while, it smells like manure, evocative of idyllic countryside scenes), and the pot-pourri of aromas is further complemented by hints of steamed broccoli, garlic, marijuana and garbage. Which she never takes out; that is, apparently, my job, even though I have hardly cooked in there since she moved in.
• Expanding on the garbage topic for a bit: I don’t know how in the world she does it, but she generates an impressive amount of the nastiest garbage I have ever seen; it’s as though it’s oozing out of her pores. We are talking about that kind of pungent, soggy trash that leaves a sticky drip trail behind when you take it out. Am I crazy for wanting even someone’s trash to be clean? I probably am. One day I took it out of the can, tied the bag in a knot and just left it in the kitchen, to see if she takes it out. Three days later, it was still there. Finally, I took it out myself, praying to catch an empty elevator and not subject any neighbours to the incredible funk rising out of that bag.
• There’s more to say, but I will end the list of the hygiene transgressions with this particularly painful confession. One day, I brushed my teeth at 3pm, before going to work. Around midnight, I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth again, before going to bed. Only to see that my toothbrush was wet. Wet. After more than 8 hours. Wet. The she-beast had used my toothbrush!!! That did it for me; I just started crying and talking to myself. I could not believe that she had done the unspeakable and broken a tabu that people hold even when it comes to their most loved ones. I didn’t confront her, because I was afraid I would get violent, and there’s no stopping me if I get that far. I found a spare toothbrush that I now keep safely in my room. The other day, I saw she had put her hair comb in the jar that still holds my old toothbrush.
• On one of our rare trips together to buy groceries, she was looking to buy some depilatory wax. We stop in front of the cosmetic aisle at Wal-Mart and look for it, but she couldn’t see her brand of choice on display. She starts explaining to me that she was looking for a special type of bikini wax and, probably fearing that I was too slow to understand her, she squats in the middle of the aisle, spreads her legs and starts mimicking how she does the waxing process, by rubbing her hand against her lady bits: “like this, Ana-Maria, I do like this, I take all hair out”. People were staring at us, and I just wanted to dig a hole and crawl in it.
• She fancies herself an amateur psychotherapist/medium/artist. While I do agree with the “psycho” part, the rest is a bit of a stretch. Not that I care, be delusional all you want, if it makes you happy. But she is hell-bent on diagnosing the myriad of mental health issues that she believes I suffer from. Every week, I get a new diagnosis: anxiety, depression, sociopathy, various neuroses, paranoia; you name it, I have it. And the irony is that she is probably right, I probably do suffer from many of those now, because of her. So she decided that I needed to cleanse my aura through yoga, and insisted that I do some exercises with her, because she felt attacked by my negative energies. After 20 minutes of breathing on dopey music, I couldn’t take it anymore and I shared my skepticism regarding everything New Age. But she hasn’t stopped trying, God bless her, she won’t rest until she has me all sorted out.
• Despite my obviously fragile mental health, she was generous enough to extend me her friendship, and I was callous enough to reject it (that was probably my sociopathy at work). Not that she took it calmly: my refusal to accompany her to parties and other events was met with screams and slammed doors. Apparently, I owe her my friendship and my time. I know rejection hurts. So does living with Satan’s spawn for two months.
• Hell hath no fury like a woman… like this woman. One day she threw a fit because she didn’t like the way I had said “hi”. Come to think of it, most of her communication is done by yelling, gesticulating aggressively and throwing accusations. Reading the accounts above, one might wonder why I didn’t stand up to her. I tried, but all I got were temper tantrums.

The language barrier did make things more difficult. Her English is quite poor and, while I understand Spanish well and even speak a bit, I cannot express complex ideas. I would not go that way again. You cannot have a rational discussion, or even an argument, without a common language. And don’t come to my country if you can’t speak the language! Just kidding, but a few more months with her could turn me into one of those people.

Before you even ask: yes, I told her she had to leave, and she is moving out next week. I found another roommate, a very nice Mexican guy with whom I had the chance to talk at length and share the rules and expectations I have. I am counting the days (eight!) until she is out of my life for good. And no, I do not hate her. She is not a bad person at all, just very messed up by years of drug abuse and by the fact that her parents, though financially very well-off, didn’t bother to teach her basic decency. Typical wealthy brat who got out of control, but still thinks the world owes her reverence. I don’t have a closet full of designer clothes like her, but at least my parents cared enough to educate me.

Have I brought this upon myself by not meeting with her prior to taking her in? Definitely. Am I a bit uptight, a bit intolerant? Maybe. But what I wrote above has not been exaggerated in any way, and I still believe, out of the two of us, I’m the one easier to live with. I shared this story partly to vent, partly to serve as a cautionary tale. Read it and weep or laugh, but learn from my mistake. Your home should be a safe space where you unwind and recharge, so take special care when selecting a roommate. No cohabitation is perfect, but from imperfect to downright nightmarish there’s a long way.

For as long as I live, I will not forget the two-month inferno that I experienced with Imma. In a twist of irony that only real life is capable of, my roommate’s name is Imma. Short for Immaculada. The Immaculate.