Roommate Stories

Roommate from Hell

When I was in college, I had the worst. roommate. ever. We’ll call him C. C was a heavy-metal redneck cowboy. This meant he only wore black, but wore cowboy boots. He was a big Pantera fan, too.

C smoked non-stop, and he drank Coke non-stop. He’d constantly hawk up snot and spit it in half-empty Coke cans that he’d also use for ash trays.

C never cleaned, because cleaning was ‘women’s work’.

The worst habit was that C never flushed the toilet, if he peed in it.

I came back to school one Sunday night after being gone all weekend, and opened the door to a terrible stink: C had peed in the toilet and left it to sit, unflushed, for a long three-day weekend.

“C, what the hell is wrong with you? Why can’t you flush the toilet like a human?”

“If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Back home we have a septic tank, and you’re supposed to let pee sit for a while before you flush it.”

“C, you idiot, we’re on city sewage lines here. Flush the damn toilet.”

I knew this wasn’t going to sink in, since nothing else did, so I waited. Until Thursday, when C went home. I ate a footlong Subway steak ‘n cheese sandwich, then waited for the demons to brew in my bowels.

I filled the dorm toilet with a roiling brown soup of stinking death, opened the bathroom door and shut all the windows. Then I turned the AC off, and left quickly.

I returned Sunday night to find the dorm room door open, the windows open, and two new box fans in the windows. The stink, though faint, was horrible.

“Dear holy Christ, what did you /do/ in there?! And why didn’t you flush the toilet?!”

“Well, C, if it’s brown, let it mellow, right?”

“NO! If it’s brown, flush it DOWN!”

“Oh, sorry, I have a bad memory for that kind of thing. Tell you what, if you can remember to flush, maybe I’ll remember to flush.”

Toothpaste

Even after I’d potty-trained C, he was still a filthy pig. He had long wispy black hair (so metal) that he’d leave everywhere, especially in the bathroom. He resolutely refused to clean up after himself, and would leave blobs of white toothpaste with black hairs encrusted in them all over the sink and counter.

I started the training with a few tales of scary bugs in the bathroom. “Man, I saw the biggest freakin’ bug in the bathroom. I think it was a roach, but it was 3″ long. Damn thing looked pregnant too.”

C just grunted, and continued smoking his cigarettes and reading his R. A. Salvatore book.

At the grocery store, I picked up a little box of raisins. Once C was gone, I grabbed his toothpaste, and shoved the boxful of raisins, one at a time, down into the tube. I mashed the tube around so the raisins were well-mixed.

A few days later, I heard a very concerned “What the hell?” coming from the bathroom. “Dude, come look at this!”

C held up his toothbrush, and on it, surrounded by white toothpaste, perched a small, blackened, wrinkled, shriveled .. thing.

“It looks like an egg case,” I said. “Maybe from one of those bugs I saw in here.”

C’s face paled. “Oh.. crap..”

“Yeah, it looks like those things like toothpaste, and this bathroom’s not the cleanest place in the world. Check for more of ’em.”

He squeezed the tube into the sink, and blop! blop! squirted dozens more of the ‘egg cases’. “Oh God, I’m gonna be sick!”

I left to the happy sound of him horking his guts out.

When I came back, the bathroom had been fully sanitized and roach-sprayed.

From then on, C kept his toiletry items safely interred in airtight (and bug-proof) plastic containers.