Two More Bad Roommates

Dear Friends, Apologies for the late post (usually I send this on Wednesdays). I am at the Northern California Writers’ Retreat, working on a long-dormant project that I’ve recently been inspired to finish. I tend to do that when I am procrastinating on a newer project. In this case, the newer project is a TV show idea, including a pilot that I wrote. I’ve been sheepish to mention this because who the hell just writes a TV pilot for no reason? Anyway, my TV series is a finalist in a screenwriting competition. This was pleasantly surprising news to me, as my submission had been, if not whimsical then, impulsive. No high hopes, just fun. I hit a creative wall there so now I am working on a novel. We’ll see how it goes.

The writing retreat is lovely. It’s at a music retreat center in Carmel Valley, which is a beautiful place east of Carmel-by-the-Sea. The rooms are rustic, the food is probably Cysco but the time is a luxury and the people are nice. It’s a bit like being at a summer camp for writers.

And since my life is a Russian nesting doll of projects, I am setting that project aside to write this blog post. I wanted to continue with the subject of roommates and talk about two bad ones in particular.

I was hoping for the tomato in the microwave...

This was a comment on my last post by my post-college roommate. K and I had a dark little apartment in the McKinley Park neighborhood of Chicago that was steps from the Wrigley Gum Factory. The apartment had mice but they were truly the superior neighbors. The couple upstairs fought constantly and loudly. Two key memories: a few days after we moved there, the woman threw a package of frozen hamburger meat through the giant front window. On Christmas Day, she screamed, “Merry fucking Christmas, you fucking asshole!” and peeled away in her car. Years after we moved away, the massage parlor across the street was busted for sex trafficking. Good ol’ McKinley Park.

K and I then housesat for friends who were spending part of the year in France and then moved into a huge apartment back in Hyde Park. It was a truly palatial apartment - 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a sun porch, a butler’s pantry that I would sell a toe for now. It was great. Brook moved in with us, leaving the fourth room available for another carousel of troubadours and hoboes. One visitor was our old friend from Notre Dame, fresh off a bad break-up. He stayed for a period of time we call “Three boxes of Franzia.” It’s like a Scaramucci, but longer. A few months after he left, my former boss at WBEZ asked if a new intern coming to Chicago from DC could rent the room. We should have known the young woman was unreliable when her father insisted on sending K money for rent, not trusting his daughter to pass along the payments in time or at all. K will set the record straight (she is a reader after all) but I believe this involved K getting FedEx packages of cash.

Anyhooooo, I had a plot in a community garden and would put our food scraps in the freezer between visits to the compost pile there. One day I put a moldy tomato in the freezer bag of scraps and forgot all about it. How much time should a person even spend thinking about their frozen compost project? None, I think.

Fast forward 3 boxes of Franzia. The intern has moved out after her boss called me to ask why she was sleeping on the beach at Lake Michigan at night instead of going home and we’d let her dad know that she had disappeared. Brook and I were in the kitchen making dinner. I don’t remember if we smelled something or just got suddenly curious about our unused microwave, but he opened it. Behold, there was a melted tomato in a carpet of mold. And by carpeted, I mean the mold covered the whole interior of the microwave. I gagged repeatedly until Brook pushed the door shut with his foot. In fact I just gagged again writing about it. Because I was too busy dry-heaving to do anything about this problem, Brook carried the microwave out to the dumpster. When the woman showed up to get her stuff, I asked her about the tomato and she said, “I found it in the freezer and thought I could eat it so I microwaved it but then I forgot about it.”

I don’t know if I should be grateful I was an innocuous roommate or now sadly reflect back on a youth that was too vanilla.

This was a note from one of the sophomore-year roommates that I glossed over because they were truly wonderful and non-problematic people to share space with. After I got this, I reconsidered that year. Were they “innocuous” or “vanilla”? Or was I the bad roommate? Upon reflection, I realized that I was not the easiest person to live with that year. I remember being depressed a lot. I got my navel pierced and had several shady boyfriends, including one who is currently in prison for stalking Uma Thurman. I’m not kidding about that. Another ex whom I started dating then broke up with me several times that year, so for my roommates, it was probably a Groundhog’s Day of emotional support. I had a pet frog named Bivouac that eventually went missing and I accused a friend of stealing it (sorry Jamison) but when I was moving out, I found its carcass in my sock drawer. I kept insane hours because I had a radio show from 1-3 am, and then 3-5 am, and also I was the radio station manager so I was coming and going and on the (landline) phone all the time.

Anyway, sorry to M and L for being the bad roommate from September 1993 until June 1994. I like to think that was a low point for me, but I invite my other roommates to weigh in on the question.