One semester in college I roomed with a guy who went to bed early and woke up early. I was considerate enough to keep quiet after he’d crashed, or go somewhere else. But I did not get the same courtesy from him; he would be up at the crack of dawn and not only hum or sing to himself while he did his homework, he would sometimes get up and drum a pencil on the edge of my bed. I actually reported him to the RA a few times, but it didn’t do any good.
The only saving grace was that he went home every weekend (he apparently lived only a few hours away). I’d get to the room after my Friday classes and he’d be gone. So I had the room to myself until Monday morning. All I had to do was make sure that I picked up all the stuff I’d been throwing on his bed before I went to bed on Sunday.
I won’t spoiler my story, but I had something similarly sad, and I’ll touch on it lightly. I moved into a house as a third roommate where the owner’s son was a tenant who had recently moved out of psychiatric care (I didn’t know that at the time). It was an unnerving experience for many reasons, and eventually after waving a knife around he cut open his waterbed, and we called his parents and he moved out again. I’m 100% sure we added to his stress, just a bad situation all around.
I’m replying separately to talk about a different roommate, who was the king of chronic liars (or at least up there), both in high school and later in college (most of us went to the same U). Everything to his grades (he was cutting class and failing), his romantic successes (though a couple of times those turned to be insanely true), to his short stories being short-listed, to the time he dunked over NBA player Johnny Moore in a pick-up game, to…everything.
Just one story about how crazy it got, and an attempt at revenge - one day at college one of our old high school friends was visiting. The lying guy - we’ll call him Ted - was going on and on about how a teacher had cursed him out and intentionally failed him for some reason, and the visitor, really tired of this, said, “you know what, Ted? You don’t have to take this - we’re going to the ombudsman right now!” And despite Ted’s protestations, the other guys (I wasn’t there for this) basically bullied him into a march across campus to the ombudsman, who was available, and Ted went in and talked to him about…something…for twenty minutes.
When he came out, he said that absent proof, the ombudsman said he couldn’t help, sorry (what did they talk about? who knows).But that gets to the other point about liars like that…it’s very hard to pin them down.
The guy had won scholarships both with the departments of comp sci and music, who apparently did not care he just showed up for exams. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and introduced me to plenty of great music.
I owned a condo and rented out one of the bedrooms to an acquaintance. One night, while dead asleep, I heard a blood curdling screaming and something smashing or breaking. It sounded like someone was being killed. I thought “WTF?!” and the hair stood up on the back of my neck. I went down the hall and opened his door. He was standing there with blood streaming down his arm and one of the windows and blinds pretty well destroyed. It turns out he had night terrors and had somehow gotten tangled up in the window blind while sleep walking. He freaked out, thinking he was being attacked and put his hand and arm right through the glass. I called the cops, figuring one of the neighbors already had. Sure enough, they were on the way. I let them in to check things out and they were soon gone. It took a while for the adrenaline to go away and my heart rate to come down. I’m telling you, there is nothing quite like waking to that kind of chaos.
When I was just starting my work life (ie, 9-5, office job) I had a roommate who was still chasing his dream of rock and roll stardom, and working part-time jobs to make rent - so his hours were misaligned with mine. He would often get home at 1AM after his restaurant shifts and decide to practice his bass.
One day I came home from work in the late afternoon and found a stranger passed out in my bed, with broken glass and blood from his cut hand all over my pillows. I roused this guy and sent him away (I always regret having him drive but to my knowledge there was he made it home without incident), and called my roommate to see what was going on. It turned out that the guy in my bed had a major crush on my roommate and made a drunken pass at him that afternoon. My roommate, also a straight man, declined and but left the guy to sleep it off. He found my bed instead of my roommate’s, and in his sadness punched out a pane in the window over my bed before passing out.
My other roommate and I asked him to find another place soon afterwards.
While not specifically MY roommate story, years later I was showing my neighbors pictures of the house we were planning to buy, which had been a rental to that point.
One of the pics showed my wife holding up the bandanna that was tacked up to cover a hole in the wall. My neighbor recognized the house from his college days and told us he lived there when Joe so-and-so was pushed into that wall, making the still-unfixed hole. My neighbor was in his late 30s by then, so the landlord hadn’t fixed the hole (other than the bandanna) in almost 20 years.
As long as we’re talking about people bleeding from breaking windows…
I had some roommates. One of them had been dating a girl for a year or two. She broke up with that roommate, and then married one of the other roommates. The time from breakup up to marriage was only 2-3 months. As part of the fallout, the spurned roommate managed to put an arm through a window. Banging on the window was deliberate, but the breaking it, requiring a late night trip to the ER for stitches, was just a (foreseeable) accident.
You roommate wasn’t comedian Mike Birbiglia, who famously jumped through the window of a second floor hotel room while sleepwalking, was he? (Famously, because he’s told that story on stage). But seriously, I hope your roommate talked to a doctor about his sleepwalking, because doing stuff like that in your sleep can be dangerous.
My apartment-mate, senior-year, was developing into a pathological liar. The problem was, her tales were generally fairly believable. She seemed to think that why tell the truth when a falsehood would do and might be more entertaining.
While I lived with her, this was not a huge problem - but after I moved out, she and our other roommate continued living together and I gather it began to get a lot worse - to the point where you couldn’t believe anything she said. She was developing other issues as well - kind of sad, really.
My first college roommate was quite an education for me. PA-bred, from sheltered background at a Catholic school, going to school in the South - I was definitely an oddball. As fortune would have it, my roommate was as much of an oddball as I: she was from the same town as the college, but was NOT your typical Southern Belle. She was very much into recreational pharmaceuticals and had slept with more than a few guys before and during our tenure.
I didn’t try any of the pharmaceuticals, but learned a lot from what she told me. She and her boyfriend got two hits of LSD one weekend, took them, and I remember them in the other side of the room, arguing: “You’re GLOWING!” “I am NOT glowing!”. She “entertained” the boyfriend once while I was in the room (the desks / dressers were placed so that each half actually had a bit of privacy). I saw nothing but there were sound effects.
My first college dorm roommate was a compulsive liar. For example, the dining halls were open for a range of hours to accomodate everyone’s schedules. You could eat supper any time from 4:30 to 7:00. I asked him one day if he wanted to eat or wait. He said, “Let’s wait an hour.” Fine. A minute later he laughed, “I’m just bullshitting you. Let’s go now.” There was this weird game in his head—see if he could make me go along with something, like it was a great trick. He’d play a song he wrote on guitar, then laugh and admit it was just an obscure song I didn’t know. Then he said he had to go to class. No, not really: the library, just bullshitting.
One day he came home with a black eye. He claimed some guy came up, asked if he was my roommate, and punched him. I looked over my shoulder for a week…nothing. So was he lying again? I’ll never know. Probably.
He was also a narcisisst. I woke up some mornings and he’d be smiling at himself in the mirror, like he was flirting with a girl. Practicing, posing, never tired of looking at himself.
How about the shortest-duration roommate ever? One of my coworkers told this story: As a freshman in college he walked into his assigned dorm room which he would share with two others. The two others were already there. Both were sprawled out in overalls, one was chewing tobacco and spitting into a can, the other was tossing a stiletto into the air and catching it by the blade as it came down. He saw four eyeballs giving him the stink eye.
He spun around on the threshold and got his room reassigned. He later found out that the college had started a program of granting scholarships at random to a certain number of students. As he explained it, there were a lot of students in that program who were washed out early.
Was that perhaps in Louisiana? It may have been changed by now but 30-odd years ago the policy was, if you had at least a C average, Louisiana high school graduates were guaranteed admittance to one of the public universities. Hordes of freshmen would attend the first quarter then get washed out because of grades, just about the time football season was ending.
I was in Baton Rough and there were several high-rise dorms standing empty with absolutely on one around – it was eerie. The local I was with told me the above.
I was the embarrassing roommate during college and 5 years after due to active addiction. I borrowed clothes, came in late, random partners, didn’t clean common areas, cried when I was depressed. There were good times too and we had fun as roomies, I paid my bills, I showered daily and did laundry. I’m not proud of my destructive behaviors but I own them.
My freshman year I was “in love” with this guy who lived in a dorm. There were 4 rooms (2 guys per room), connected by a large bathroom. Years later I found out that when we were hooking up in his room, the roommates were all watching. Luckily it was before social media…
A friend and I got a place together shortly after I graduated college. Turns out, he preferred living at home with his parents in the suburbs. He’d stop by maybe once a week but I doubt he spent more that 5 or 6 nights there. He always paid the rent on time so no problem there. I jokingly argued with him when the lease was up and tried to persuade him to re-sign. I’m still using the couch he bought for the place.
Once got a knock at the door at 9pm, opened it and found a Domino’s pizza guy with $60 in pizza and wings. Turns out, my stupid roommate ordered a TON of food for just him and his girlfriend, but he did it in advance and left to go pick up his girlfriend and didn’t tell me ANYTHING. So I answered the door and we figured out the mess, and I was willing to pay the $60 just to not be an ass but turns out the driver only accepted cash and he told me that my friend could have just prepaid for the pizza with a credit card and I could have accepted it without needing him around. But no, instead my stupid friend orders pizza without paying in advance, then knowingly leaves the house, and even better he arrived back at the house with his girlfriend a full hour after he left, which means unless it was the slowest pizza day ever odds are he would have missed it regardless.
I really REALLY hated having to tell the pizza guy to go back with the food because I know that puts me on a delivery black-list, but holy shit how stupid can you be to order a pizza in advance and NOT pay for it in advance too?