I mean strange in a benign way, not dangerous (except to themselves) or literally crazy. I had one named John who I went to college with who was a TOTAL pot freak. His birthday was April 20 (no kidding!) and he took it as a sign from God. He talked about financing a house with the profits from selling three kilos, and smoked at least one joint almost every day.
The weird thing was, he had been the valedictorian of his high school. He had a free ride to the college (a different school than where I met him) where his parents worked, both because they worked there and because with his grades he could’ve gone to school anywhere he wanted. But he got into drugs there, fried his brain on heroin, and dropped out. When I knew him he always seemed a little spacey, and his hands shook most of the time. He would joke aobut going to raves and doing bags of crystal meth. This while he was still in rehab for heroin addiction! He was also on every mood stabilizing drug made.
The weird thing was, he really was a nice guy, although it could’ve been the mood drugs. I liked him a lot more than the two girls who lived upstairs. I could just never figure out his thought processes, or why he did certain things. I’m not sure he knew, either.
I once had a very strange roomie who was into real-life role- playing vamp games…except she wasn’t nearly cool enough to pull it off. She wanted to be goth, but she was so incredibly lame that all she could muster were white pantyhose with black shoes and deep red lipstick. She was the most unhip person I’ve ever known. She was homely, unattractive, and a shitty dresser. She had really long hair that used to drag over the clean dishes in the dishwasher when she would bend over ( :shudder: ).
She always wanted to hang out with my friends and me, and she was very protective of her decorative pillows. One time, she pissed off my good friend by insisting we get half the pizza with cheese only for her, but we hadn’t invited her to eat with us, so he picked up one of her pillows and threw it on the floor. She screamed in horror and left.
Plus, she talked about her boyfriend all the time. When I finally met him, he said he wasn’t her boyfriend, but rather that she was obsessed with him, and that he was only hanging out with her out of pity.
My very first roommate was my freshman year of college. Room the size of a breadbox, two beds, one long desk, and zero ventilation. My roommate
*smelled of some incredibly foul but to this day unidentified funk
*would invite all of her friends over for Voyager and sit around repeating the lines of dialogue. I shit you not.
*had a boyfriend who looked like Lyle Lovett after a crack binge
*would eat my food and drink all my juice, and then deny it.
*completely freaked out when my best guy friend came to stay the night and we slept in the same bed. She couldn’t fathom that I wasn’t “afraid he’d try something”. :rolleyes:
In short, she was a total freak, and I got a single the next year and never spoke to her again.
bella–feeling the sudden need to shower the bad memories away…
My first year in college, down at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC I found out via letter that my roommate was one “Frederick William Broughnah III but call me Fred.”
Oh yeah, how could it get any worse.
Well, Fred didn’t bathe.
For 59 days in a row.
It was horrible.
One time I went down to the bathroom to take a shower and in the time that it took me to hang up my bathrobe and towel Fred had come into the shower area, taken off his robe and hung it and his towel up, gotten in the shower, showered, and then gotten his robe on and was outta there.
40 seconds tops.
I was in the choir and we were going to give our Christmas concert, which meant getting into the penguin suits.
Fine. I looked damn good in that tuxedo. It even got me laid 18 months later.
Twice.
But I digress…
So, the afternoon of the concert, which was at 7:30, I went back to my room at about 6:00 after dinner to get ready. Shave, shower, the whole bit.
One problem—my tux was gone.
GONE, D’ya hear!!!
Now, I wouldn;t have gotten panicked or upset except thatI was going to be one of two tenors, as the other two had come down with the flu and laryngitis respectively.
Oh yeah, the same night of the Christmas concert there was also a formal dance which Fred was going to go to, stag of course. Realizing that, but then thinking to myself, “No, even Fred couldn’t be THAT much of an idiot/asshole/cocknostril,” I opened the door to his closet and there it was, Fred’s light blue tuxedo, complete with ruffled shirt.
Now I would have worn Fred’s tux except for 3 teeny-tiny problems.
-
It was light blue and the choir tux’s were the classic black and our beloved choir director would have run up and strangled me to death in front of the audience if I had worn it.
-
It smelled like Fred which meant that it smelled like 40+ days of unwashed BO.
-
It was 3 sizes too big for me.
When Fred got back from the dance I had a little “discussion” with him, which almost involved me hanging him outside our 3rd floor window.
But just to show that God is watching everything all the time and that he has a REALLY twisted sense of humor, fred was elected Vice-president of the dorm, which he tried to use to lord over me at narly every opportunity.
I moved in with someone else a little after 1/2 through the year.
WORST ROOMMATE EVER.
had a drug dealer room mate first semester of college. all of a sudden his girlfreind used to stay over alot… then all of a sudden… he said “I gotta go, you can have whatever I left” so I got a free refrigerator and some speggeti Os and a bunch of videos and CDs.
I have NO idea where he went… never heard from him again
I had the exact opposite of the pot head roommate from the OP.
Mine had led the most sheltered life possible: I remember once some friends of mine were visiting the dorm and someonetold a story about being pulled over by a cop, when the cop left they noticed a roach in the ashtray of the truck. Roomie’s response: “Ooh, I hate bugs!” 
My boss. He was divorcing his wife, and I let him stay with me. He lived there for a couple months. He was an okay guy, and I had liked working for him for a long time, but he’d somehow gone, er, odd. Like he left his wife and child for some woman in California(who he called a lot, on my dime!!!) He poured his pricey flavored coffee on my new carpet, set fire to the drapes in the kitchen, and often left for days without locking doors or closing windows, not like I had anything worth stealing.
I now get along with his ex better than I ever did with him. Either way, an odd duck.
b.
My first semester in college…I had a senior as a roommate. Now, this struck me as odd for two reasons. She was a senior still living on campus and had no friends she could room with and had to get stuck with a freshman.
Anyway, I stayed out all night working on a homecoming float and came in around 6a. I guess she took this to mean I was slutting around town because she started leaving nasty notes, like “This is war, you will NOT watch my tv and stay off my side of the room.” She used to go home every weekend, unplug her tv and stick it in the closet.
I got her back. One weekend she was gone I moved out into an apt, left her a note about how sad she was, and unplugged her refrigerator which was STUFFED full of food.
Not a roommate, but a housemate. Does that count? Um, extremely fundamentalist sheltered person. You know those people to whom you absolutely cannot relate, no matter how hard you try? She was like that for me. We had big, big, fights about whether or not my other housemate and I could have our boyfriends in our bedrooms with the doors open. This was such a serious problem for her that she moved out halfway through the school year. I’m such an evil slut, obviously. :rolleyes:
We also couldn’t mention Catholicism, any drugs, sex, dating, drinking, or dancing in front of her, because she’d flip. Never, never want to live with anyone like that ever again.
And she didn’t rinse the dishes.
When I was a senior in college I had a roommate (off campus apartment) who was also a senior, except I was 21 and she was 32.
We lived in a two bedroom apartment, with her great dane and her boyfriend. Her boyfriend did not pay rent, and I didn’t realize he was living with us until I asked him one day where he lived. He had given up his own apartment about two months earlier, and neither of them bothered to tell me. I confronted her about the situation, and suggested that we work out a more equitable rent solution. Her response? “Your parents pay your rent, what do you care?” My parents were not pleased.
Oh, did I mention she did phone sex for a living, from our shared phone line?!!! She looked like the frightening phone sex goddess from that Aerosmith video, but had a lovely voice. She was quite creative as well, but I won’t go into details. Supposedly the calls were only supposed to come in to our apartment during a set time of the evening, when I would know not to answer the phone. Apparently she started giving out our home number to her regulars, who began calling at all hours of the day and night. It got to the point where I couldn’t answer the phone at all without being verbally accosted by sicko men. (I was a very innocent 21 year old. I might not mind it so much now.)
Oh, her dog used to lick her feet for hours at a time. And once she got so lazy that rather than walk her dog, she let him into my room to take a shit. In the middle of my bedroom floor, on my copy of The Tommyknockers. Nice.
Then she accused me of being paranoid when I started locking my bedroom door when I left for school in the morning.
(OK, I am sort of paranoid - check out the “How screwed up are you thread” - I’m not thinking about that, though.)
And the oddest thing about her and her boyfriend? If you’ve read Stephen King’s book The Tommyknockers then you’ve read his depiction of her and her boyfriend. The characters Joe Paulson and Nancy Voss are actually meant to be them. (Their real names are Joe Paulson and Nancy B…, but he didn’t know Nancy’s last name so he made something else up.) Stephen King met them and hated them both, so killed them off in particularly nasty ways in that book.
“His birthday was April 20 (no kidding!) and he took it as a sign from God”
Ummm… okay… what is the significance of April 20?
No one else asked, so I guess I am missing something.
That is friggin’ hilarious.
simple homer, from the way my stoner friends have explained it to me, 420 is the police code for “marijuana possession” or some such lameass allusion as that. 4/20, or April 20th, or even 4:20 either A.M. or P.M., takes on new meaning.
For example, I have a friend who lights a bowl everyday at 4:20 P.M. He’s a sad individual.
There may be more to it than that, but that’s what I’ve pieced together.
I’ve had a couple of room mates from hell, but this one was one of the most interesting. I was asked to take him in from a friend of mine who was a counselor at the local AA Detox chapter, so I knew what I was walking into, sort of, but I needed a roomer to help me pay for the rent on my house.
He came with a good pedigree; college graduate, once a highly sought after and well paid medical laboratory tech, highly educated in drugs, medical things and highly intelligent. A quiet guy, not prone to get into fights, pull knives or guns or have riotous parties. His problem: he drinks. He needed a nondrinking companion and friend (me), to help him stay sober while he went to AA. He lived out of a really ragged old Ford van.
He was quiet and modest, pleasant to talk to and intelligent but he could not stay sober more than a day or two. He would not listen to me when I urged him not to drink. Drinking to him, I came to understand, was like a cup of water is to the ocean.
I never knew of anyone who could pound down so much booze and still walk, let alone live. Vodka by the quart! What money he got went to booze, though he scraped up $50 to pay me partial rent. When he ran out of booze, he drank anything with alcohol in it, like my mouthwash, the baking flavors I had in with my seasonings, and my rubbing alcohol.
Once he asked me to call the ambulance to have him shipped to the hospital to sober up and I did so, happily. They took him away and shipped him from ER to the detox unit, where they drugged him up and pumped him full of IV fluids and vitamins until he was at last sober. I went in his room and cleaned out a ton of empty bottles. Did I mention that he slept in the empty room on a small sofa bed I owned? No TV and no radio.
His sobriety lasted him all of a day and a half because when they released him, he walked over to a liquor store and downed a bottle of booze before making his way home. He never had any money and I rarely saw him eat anything, but he would vanish for hours out in his van or come home and stay locked up in his room.
He occasionally would emerge in a talkative mood, promise me my money and go into a great dissertation about what undrinkable alcohol’s were actually drinkable, if you did not mind the shits that might or might not come. (WARNING! CERTAIN TYPES OF UNDRINKABLE ALCOHOL’S ARE POISON!!) Told me how much alcohol was in things like liquid vanilla flavoring, mouth wash, and various over the counter medications. Sometimes he would tell me of his career, or what had been his career and from what I know of medicine, which is a lot, I knew he had once been damn good at what he had done.
When he vanished into his room for two days and drank himself broke after drinking up my cupboard baking supplies, he was broke and I decided to teach him tough love. I bought a bottle of vodka and rationed him to an ounce every hour, hiding the bottle when done, because he wanted to sober up.
See, you ration an alcoholic to one ounce every hour for about 6 hours, then drop it to every 4 hours and then to every 6 hours to wean them off of the sauce without them going into DTs or having convulsions. By the time you hit every 8 hours, you can stop and let them learn to do without the sauce without fear of any physical manifestations. You do this for a 48 hour period.
He had been sobering up the easy way, by going to DETOX, where he would be put to sleep for 12 to 24 hours, have IVs bypass his roiling stomach and infuse him with the proper amount of fluids needed and wake up without a hangover, without the shakes, the sweats or a stomach that feels like it has ingested gasoline. Cheap gasoline.
That lasted about 4 hours, when he said he was feeling better (HA! He must have felt like hell)! and he took off in his van, a mistake I knew he was making. He must have pawned something from it for he was gone most of the day and came back when I was asleep and locked himself in his room. Two days later, I was pounding on his door to check on him and when he did not answer, I picked his lock and went in.
He was on the floor, on the carpet, plastered, with empty bottles all over the place. He was in an alcoholic coma. He also had pissed all over himself, my carpet and the floor. I sent him to the hospital again via ambulance, only this time they had to scrape him up off of the floor. (My neighbors were getting entertained by all of the ambulance arrivals in that quiet neighborhood.) After he left, I found bottles hidden in the couch, in the closet, and on the floor, many empty but a few still held some booze but not much. One bottle had been used as a urinal.
I threw it all out. Then I had to vent the room and steam clean the pissy carpet thoroughly, then vented it again, turned on the A/C and splashed liquid potpourri fragrance around. (Mulberry, as I recall. Purple colored water.) I used up a whole bottle of the stuff which was about a pint. Then I closed up the room and let the a/c recirculate the fragrance for a day and dry things out.
A week later, while I was at work, they released him from detox and he returned to my home, got in his van and left. I don’t know where he went, but he still owes me $150 in rent and that was about 8 years ago.
I never have met anyone since who could drink like that and still walk! He did not drink to get buzzed, he drank to get blotto! Most alcoholics that I know drink to feel good, but he drank to pass out!
Let me tell you about Alex.
Alex was my ex-husband’s best friend. He was a nice guy, smart, slightly off-beat, the artsy type.
Not too long after my divorce, Alex showed up, offering to help me out on my bills by renting a room. He’d just come into town, but assured me he’d find a job quick.
Everything was great for the first few days. He kept odd hours but he was out looking for a job at least in the afternoons.
Then he decided to show me his writings. Okay, odd stuff, but not anything to worry about.
Then one day he insisted that a neighbor was watching him. Allrighty, maybe they were curious about the new guy…
Then he confided that the FBI was after him because he knew a secret. Hmmm…
One night I woke up to find him talking to a mirror over my fireplace mantle. I didn’t say anything.
The next day he left a message attached to the mirror. Backwards, so whoever was back there could see it.
I tried to be patient. I needed the money.
About two weeks into this journey through insanity, he confessed his love for me. Not making excuses, but he told me this on the day I found out I had cancer. I was weak, I was vulnerable. To tell the sick truth, I had a feeling he was nuts, but every day I’d come home to a new adventure. Eh, it was only a few kisses. He didn’t seem particularly sexual.
One day he insisted that a dog gave him ‘a sign’ that the FBI was closing in. His writings started to sound more like wild rants.
The next night he woke me up, out of his mind, whispering that someone was in the house. I assured him that nobody was there, but he went from attic to basement, searching every corner. He wanted me to pack a bag and run off with him.
Hmmm. No, I don’t THINK SO…
So Alex left, with the FBI hot on his trail, ya know. He swore to me he’d bring back a cure for my cancer. (cervical stage 1, easily treatable) I haven’t heard from him since that day, but one time I googled his name and found one of those websites where people post LOST messages. His mom hasn’t seen him since he lived with me.
Now that I’ve read my post I am embarrassed.
Don’t be embarrassed Rushgeekgirl So many of us have been there done that, to one degree or another
WSLer Did you miss your concert? Just idle curiosity
My worst roommate also decided he’d slowly go around the bend in our dorm room, odder behavior, escalating fights and much weirder (& I mean scary weird) “friends” began to show up. Finally he (or one of his new pals) was seen urinating publicly from our room. Because it was obvious to the RA that it was someone in our room, & because Roomie didn’t own up to it, it went on my housing record (my “permanent record” as my Mom would put it to you to this day) too & I was forever after a low priority in the housing lottery, meaning many more years of bad roommates in bad rooms (really 1 more year until I went off campus).
April 20 written as a date is 4/20, and the number 420 does have significance to stoners, as shrew mentioned. It’s kind of a fad thing, the way you’d see “13” or “05” in gangsta rap videos. I’ve heard 4:20 p.m. described as “universal toke time” by stoner friends I’ve had in the past, and I knew another guy in college who was in a band called Trick 420. I asked him the significance of the number and he clued me in.
After reading yours. Omnivore. mine seems less than trivial.
I had a college roomie who, every night in his sleep, would sleepwalk over to the heating element and urinate into it. He would never recall doing so- he would always complain of the stench when it heated up. I thried to awaken him, to no avail. Yet he would never believe that he was responsible. Finally one night I got so sick of it, that I kicked him right in the balls while he somnamulated. He doubled over on the floor, and wet himself. When he woke up, he had no idea what happened. Oddly enough, he never sleepwalked again while I was living with him. Problem solved!
The guy I live with is an SDMB Moderator.
How strange is that?
I think the weirdest roommate I ever had was really a good guy, just a little crazy.
He used to keep scorpions in an aquarium. One of them was dead. He was convinced that the live one would eat it eventually. This was back in my days of having 6 people living in a two-bedroom apartment. He slept on a mattress on the floor of my bedroom. I made him keep the scorpions in the other bedroom. He also wore the same pair of leather pants, day in and day out. I don’t think he ever had them cleaned, because they stunk to high heaven.
He was a really sweet guy, regardless of his quirks. He passed away a year and a half ago, a la Michael Hutchence style.