Roommate from Hell

I once had a roommate who I truly believe was the most disgusting human being ever to walk the earth.

I could write a book or three on the psychic trauma of this experience, but for now I will give you just a taste of the horror that was the Bigfoot.

Bigfoot was nearly 6'5" tall and towered more than a foot above me. We had been friends for a few years and I had just come back from living abroad and needed a place to live right away. We decided to move in together because that's what friends stupidly do. By the way, if you want to end a friendship with someone, just move in together.

Bigfoot had always been a HORRIFIC slob but we chalked that up to him being what he called "a bachelor." No dude, your house is disgusting, you spend all day in your robe, and women don't like the smell of you. That's not a bachelor... that's something else. How great would it be if that show The Bachelor was about this kind of bachelor? You could watch hot girls simultaneously say "oh hell no!" 

Bigfoot's previous house had been so disgusting we usually refused to visit. One night after a long session at the bar another slob of a friend puked in Bigfoot's sink. The sink was already so disgusting, they just shrugged and left it til the next morning. I lived with both of them for a time in Ireland, and they would sit in our living room eating junk food and toss all the bags and containers somewhat in the direction of the kitchen. When they didn't want to do dishes they just put the dishes in the microwave. Because they also didn't like taking out the trash they either stacked trash on top of the trash can or on the floor beside it.

I should have known what it would be like to live with Bigfoot. But he begged me to live with him. He felt he had been depressed before and living with a woman friend would really help him to stop being such a slob. So I moved in. When I arrived with my U-Haul he stood on the porch in his robe watching, not helping, and said his back was hurting. I would later find out that his back always hurt when he didn't want to do something.

The first thing I noticed about living with Bigfoot was the smell. The only way I can describe it is wet, warm, moldy pork fart. It wafted from his room. It lingered in his car. It emanated through the house like a disease. My boyfriend at the time took to sending me lilies so I could hide the smell. I was constantly lighting candles and burning incense so that it ended up smelling like vanilla and patchouli flavored moldy pig fart. My god I can almost smell it now.

After a long night of drinking and shooting his Bigfoot into his Big Mouth, he'd make onions and sauerkraut for breakfast at 7 o'clock in the morning. You see, he felt that not only was he an eligible bachelor but evidence of this manliness was that he ate a manwich for breakfast. I don't know what is in this horrible concoction but I do know it smells like ass and his method of "cleaning" dishes was to stick them in the sink, fill the sink with water, and leave them in the sink for DAYS!! The sink was always full of 3 day old water and floating asshole-onions.

Bigfoot enjoyed relieving his body of his manwich in the upstairs bathroom next to my bedroom. We had two bathrooms in the house. But nope, he'd force me to hear to his horrible godawful putrid man sounds while I tried to cover my ears with pillows and hum to myself like a lunatic, and then lumber off to bed and pass out (which meant I had to tiptoe all day of course). God forbid I should wake sleeping beauty.


Waking up with a rank smell violating my every sense and then listening to him defecate was not the worst thing. The worst thing was when it came time for me to use the bathroom, there was almost ALWAYS an un-flushed present for me in the toilet. And I don't mean a lemonade, I mean a snickers bar, except it was more like the size of a meatloaf. So my morning began with the smell of manwich and then became me chopping the manwich remains into flushable pieces with the handle of the plunger. How do you NOT know when you consistently plug up the toilet?! He seemed proud of his "manliness" in clogging the toilet. 

One summer day I came home to find him eating cereal in his boxers with his legs wide open. He talked to me for a while until I couldn't stand it. I asked him to kindly put the escaped testicle back into his boxer shorts. *Man down! Man down!*  I cried. So his mother bought him a man-gown, a night-gown for men she had seen while making her travels around the world. However, this was a flannel Bigfoot man-gown so I would frequently come home to him sprawled out on the couch in his man-gown with a fan between his legs. No woman has ever done this.

But Bigfoot, besides being filthy, poopy, stinky and sweaty, was also a Scrooge. This was a guy who would always forget his wallet in the car when a group of us went out to eat - or if he did bother to pay he would only pay his bill and leave nothing for the sizable group tip. We paid the same rent but he got a bedroom and another bedroom for an office. I got the smallest bedroom and he took a little side dining room and put some sheets (he decorated the house by putting his boyhood sheets over the windows) over the door-less doorway. Yeah that's just as good as my own private office thanks. 

Sometimes I'd wake up - having smelled the onions and chopped the poop - to find my car keys missing. We both had working cars: I paid for mine with a job and his was given to him by his mother, and was actually nicer than mine. But he would take my car on errands - without asking me - driving around town with my parking brake on, because... wait for it... he didn't want to have to fill up the gas in his own car. I would yell at him WTF BIGFOOT? and he would act like I was just too uptight. 

By winter, I was nearly homicidal. Apparently, his sweaty-balls were not just a summer problem. When I was at work, he would crank the heater up to 82 degrees. But that made him too hot so with the heater at 82 or higher he OPENED THE WINDOWS. I would come home to stifling hot onion pork fart smell with a freezing breeze (it often got down to -20F). Since I had to pay for the gas that he used in my car (I bought all the groceries that he ate too, and cooked them, and did the dishes) so the money on the gas bill was outrageous. I yelled at him and he shook his fist at me. That was one of my breaking points. 

The final straw was the Filthy Lie of Filthy McFilthyfuck. His disgusting habit of leaving food everywhere and the fact that we lived in a ghetto shithole meant: rodents. And I have an absolutely terrifying freak out lose my mind fear of rodents. And he knew this and still left food lying about here there and everywhere. Open jars of peanut butter, half eaten steaks... banana peels, just piled up in his room. But of course the rodents didn't go in his room... they went in my room. And they were everywhere. It got so bad I went crazy, walking on my tip-toes, thinking I saw them out of the corner of my eye, not able to fall asleep. I called the slumlord over to deal with them and I was at work when he came. Bigfoot, knowing I cried myself to sleep every night, told the slumlord that we hadn't really had any rodents it was just one (we both literally saw seven) and it had been gotten rid of. Why this horrible lie? Because Bigfoot didn't want his rent to go up. No, it doesn't make sense to me either.

Oh so many other things... Thanks for the memories, Bigfoot..

• One scary night, his racism led a thug to follow us home and almost into our house at gunpoint. In the daytime, he would always have two different talk radios blasting through the house all day long because he thought he was a political genius.
  
  
• His strategy of getting through college was to literally cover his bedroom walls in post-it notes about his homework because he thought that was a sign that he was actually a mad genius.
  
  
• I'll never forget the time he took my pepper spray out of my purse to prove he was so manly he could squirt it on his tongue. It's just pepper. We were in a bar and two squirts of my pepper spray cleared the entire room. Everyone stood outside for five minutes. As soon as he realized what he'd done he put the pepper spray in my hands and said very loudly that it was mine, so I got all the dirty looks.
   
• To prove his manliness, when he got drunk he would pick me up and carry me around. Against my will, obviously. He was so obsessed with being macho he drank 12 too many whiskeys one night and picked up two shorter men, one in each arm, to show how strong he was. He blew out his knee.
  
  
• Another time he sat in his bedroom window and watched someone back into our friend's car and did nothing. I had to call the cops and file a report myself.

But that moment, when he stood on the filthy stairs with his stained and sweaty man-gown on and a red bandanna on his head, and told me he had lied to the landlord, that was the final straw.

And so it is that I will never, under any circumstances, have a roommate again.
 
What's your roommate horror story?