Ghosts of Roommates Past Part 7

Trying to get far and fast away from miss crazy in crazytown is the reason I ended up with the lazy worthless alcoholic fraudulent roommate who worked on average one day a week, yeah I moved and everything but I was still living in crazytown. I moved somewhere that I shouldn’t have moved to, to get away from an intolerable situation, only to find the worst roommate of all time.

So for the second half of that winter I had the awful alcoholic lying fraudulent roommate and my bedroom faced the awful, ugly, and derelict back parking lot, and it really was a winter because it was cold and horrid, snowing even into early May.

I despised her and everything to do with her and tried to stay in my bedroom most of the time, so that I did not have to have anything to do with her, unless absolutely necessary. She blasted her tv and her music and her three geriatric cats stunk up our shared space, so I much preferred being away from that or in my room with the door shut and the fan blowing towards the door so that it didn’t stink and to hopefully cover up some of the noise.

I realize that the smell would have been tolerable if she only changed their litter box more than every three or four days. Three cats should have meant more than one box and changing them at least once a day. When we had to deal with the bug spray, she decided that she needed to move the litter box and even suggested moving it very near my bedroom door, in the hallway. I refused and told her she could put it in the kitchen or in the bathroom or in her bedroom. She picked the kitchen. Amazingly she did not decide to change it more often. I was just marking time and looking for a way out of them. I had much bigger battles with her, over much more important issues, than her elderly cats and their stink, so I never addressed an obvious issue.

There were so many awful atrocious despicable things about her, the apartment, the apartment manager, the situation that I went to live in a women’s shelter for a month, out of desperation to get away from her crazy ass. I really had nowhere else to go and no finances to move into something that would cost more.

I’m sure that you can see all the same patterns repeating themselves over and over. I knew that I had to find a place were I could live alone and afford. I was so determined to get away from everyone and to finally be alone, the only way that I knew I could trust someone, me, and be safe and happy.

Ghosts of Roommates Past Part 6

Living in Crazytown:

More than two years ago I had a bedroom that didn’t have windows in my bedroom at a good height when I sat at my computer. It was a small space, even smaller than what I have now. It sucked. I would have to stand up to get a good outside view or go downstairs and stand at the sliding door with a view to the backyard.

I didn’t like to be in any other part of the house, but my bedroom, because the crazy narcissist who lived there made it abundantly clear that while she wanted my money for rent, she did not and/or was not capable of being a decent human being and/or making others feel wanted and welcome in her home as renters, and instead did the exact opposite.

Actually she was explicit in not wanting people in her home. She was paranoid about her teenage children, saying that I could not have anyone else in her house, because they may sexually assault her teenage children, saying that I should not have conversations with them, but only speak to her and if she is not home to not speak to them. OOOkkaayy! Okay crazy.

This after living with someone who became my friend, who trusted me with her dogs, who trusted me with her grandchild. I kept telling myself I just needed a place to stay for as long as I could tolerate it, and find something else when I couldn’t.

Well I didn’t speak to any of them, for the most part, and stayed in my bedroom or went out on my bike as much as possible, as often as possible. That was much easier the first few months of living there, because I moved in the beginning of October and out towards the end of February.

She got jealous when I petted the family cat and he acted like he liked it, a few days after I moved in. She yelled at the cat, calling him a traitor. OOkkaay, crazy, I will try to avoid interacting with you crazy, your crazy children, and crazytown. I sure tried hard to be as unobtrusive as possible.

When I was in the kitchen one day when she and her teenage daughter were in there discussing something, I mistakenly agreed with the mother on a factual point only to have a visit from crazytown. The mother laughed at loud, jumped up and down, and taunted the daughter in a sing-song voice, singing she’s my friend and not yours, she’s my friend and not yours! Freaking crazytown.

Well I wasn’t in the running for either of their friends. Her treatment of me, her insistence on bizarre and inappropriate boundaries, some of which I have not shared here, which applied to me but never to them, and her being someone that I could not respect or like seemed to take her out of the running of being my friend and especially my being hers.

The daughter was not someone I could ever like or respect. I once tried to give her something of mine, she took it to the kitchen and ranted and raved about it to her mother, leaving it on the kitchen counter, wet, for some bizarre reason. At seventeen years old you should have more respect for others not to conduct yourself in this manner.

The son was no treat either. He was worthless, lazy, rude, and always lying about. I never once saw him lift a hand to do anything in the house. The sidewalk and garage area were always frozen over, with lots of frozen snow, making it difficult for me, potentially causing me an injury. Then he’d get on his gi and go to his karate lessons.

Before Christmas day she managed to make me ashamed of existing and having to have a place to be on Christmas day. She made me feel uncomfortable and uneasy about my existence because I didn’t have somewhere to be all day long so that they could have the day at the house without my living there. But I did live there, and I did pay rent to live there. I was gone part of the afternoon, going out to eat with one of my brothers.

The day after Christmas I was home alone and found a fifty dollar bill in the trash, I assumed it was his gift, and that he had mistakenly thrown it out with the trash associated with his action hero dolls and seriously what kind of thirteen year old still asks for, wants, and gets action hero dolls for gifts? I know, the rudeness and shunning was really beginning to get to me by then.

I picked it up, put it in my room and immediately called her and left her a message about it. The next day they were home and I brought the bill down to her in the kitchen. He was sitting around doing nothing and did not acknowledge me. His mother said come here and get your money. He got up and took it. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t smile at me. He never said thanks. Yeah, really classy, all the way, that’s class.

I now lived three-and-a-half miles from a grocery store, the library, and mostly everything. In the middle of winter, when it was freezing cold outside, with lots of snow, she would leave the house to go to the grocery store after knowing I was in the house, without once asking me if I would like to go along. I know some people just don’t think, she knew I had a bike, she knew it was how I grocery shopped and everything, she saw me biking in the middle of the winter, with sleety snow coming down, but never once thought to extend a ride to me. Okay, I thought, fine and dandy and tried really hard to keep up all my boundaries no matter what.

Well, fine, I see a boundary when I see it, I never asked for help when I needed something normal. I did ask for help the two times I was very sick and was glad that she did help me those two times. Still she demanded that I get out of bed and talk to her when I had a horrid sinus infection, after having biked to the pharmacy to get my medicine and only a few hours after taking the first dose. She demanded that I move all of my belongings back into my bedroom after it had been painted. I had had to move all my things into another room and stay in there for two weeks while my bedroom was being painted, imagine two weeks to paint a small bedroom and small bathroom.

She had brought crazy to a whole new level when she decided to have her interior painted, starting at the beginning of January, and tried to poison me over a period of two months of house painting in the middle of winter, without proper ventilation and with very dangerous paint fumes, The first day of painting, they painted the ceilings with a spray machine, they had forgotten to turn off the furnace and forgotten to cover the vent in the room they were spraying, getting the paint spray and fumes throughout the house. I got very sick.

I lived there less than five months all-together. She was worse than intestinal flu.

Trying to get far and fast away from miss crazy is the reason I ended up with the lazy worthless alcoholic fraudulent roommate, the one who made me willing to embrace homelessness fully, happily, just to get away from her.

Ghosts of Roommates Past Part 4

I next lived in a house with two pathological lying narcissists who lied to me about everything. They tried to blame me because I had problems with the other roommate, guess who, a lying narcissist alcoholic druggie out of work for two years.

He would have all night long druggie drinking parties with up to three adult men, men he would invite to come over, in the bedroom that shared a wall with my bedroom. He was shocked and amazed and denied that three drunk druggie men in a bedroom overnight made any disturbances, noise, etc. Seriously what kind of man has two other men spend the night to have a movie drinking party with a giant bed, a table and three men, and barely enough room for one of them to navigate to the bathroom? Who thinks that is normal? Who thinks that is acceptable?

He made fun of me when I introduced myself to him, telling him of my college degrees and my majors, because he was making nasty comments about my being on disability, acting as though I was unworthy of life, liberty, etc. Apparently he just had to say that most people who have psychology degrees are mentally challenged and a bunch of freaks. Well so are a portion of the population and almost all of my roommates.

Well the two guys who also lived there and who were in “charge” were also lying manipulative, narcissists, beer swilling drunks, and, druggies too. I would never have moved in there if they had told me the truth. Seriously we are two lame guys, boyfriends who are not working much, who drink and do drugs, who smoke all the time, who don’t own the house and really have no legal right to rent out the rooms, since the real owner was the mother of one of the guys who posed as the owners before I moved in and I discovered that they were even refusing to pay rent or heat or electricity to the mother and true owner and were stealing the rent money from the renters by lying and pretending that they were the owners or had any legal right to rent out any space in the place, home, and were making almost $1500 a month while committing fraud to disability claiming there were not making income, even going to the food shelf and to getting other assistance while making lots of money, and a mother that they were abusing and exploiting.

They were classic abusers, trying to throw blame on anyone else rather than take any responsibility for their own life, their own choices, their own actions. I was blamed for having issues with the smoking, the loudness, the disturbances, the overnight partying by another tenant. They threatened to have me evicted if I did not stop telling them of the issues I had. So I pretended and as much as possible talked to none of them.

The paranoid tenant accused me, to the two guys, of listening at his door, when his bedroom door was less than a foot from my bedroom door and on the way to the bathroom. I hated him and his friends and at no time did I want to hear even one word from any of them.

After that I put my portable dvd player’s headphones on and listened to music whenever I was outside my bedroom, even when going to the bathroom. Late one night he threw open his bedroom door with an ah-ha look on his face and another accusation on his lips only for him to stop dead when he saw that I had headphones on and could hear that I was listening to music.

He even threatened to file a complaint with the police against me and when one was finally called by the two guys for a drunk party after ten pm, right before I moved out, he actually asked a police officer what he could do if someone was listening at his bedroom door. The police officer told him that since it was a shared hallway with two bedrooms close together anyone who lived there had a legal right to be in the hallway any time that they wanted to and that he had no cause to file a complaint. Forgetting the fact that the accusation was complete bullshit.

I would have gotten out of there sooner, but they had wanted a very high deposit, being on a fixed income, and as well as moving across country I was pretty broke and had to stay there.

I was pretty punchy through lack of sleep the whole time I lived there. It took me about a month of a lot of sleep to even attempt to catch up after five months with them and five months with my brother.

A month after moving in another guy moved in there, making it four guys who smoked like chimneys, even though I had been told that there would not be smoking in the house which was very important to me due to my health issues, and two dogs that got very little supervision, often left in the backyard to bark viciously and repeatedly at every little thing. My fan was often on high to try to cover up some of the noise. Still I didn’t get much sleep and no peace.

The guy with the dogs was a great guy and very nice to me, but we had few interactions and that was fine with me. I wasn’t there to make friend or have a party. I was there to live, have peace, watch my own tv, listen to music, have my own safe space, and to find another place to move to.I was an ideal quite, often gone, roommate and that was how I am when living with someone else.

I soon grew to love the dogs but refused to be used, abused, or exploited by the two guys when they tried to get me to take care of them. They were profiting by the rent of the owner of the two dogs by charging him more for the dogs, not me, and I would not give them my free labor by taking care of them, picking up the backyard of poop, or keeping them in my bedroom overnight when they tried to get me to. I wasn’t their slave and I wasn’t going to do anything for the two guys.

They were despicable people and they probably haven’t changed much since then. When I think of them, I have to admit, that I still feel a sense of seething hatred towards them. One I know for sure he is still doing his evil ways, manipulating, using, and exploiting his mommy and her sense of personal responsibility to him, and the other I am glad to say I know nothing about for several years. That fills my heart with joy.

I was lucky and so happy to be able to move out of there after five months. It was through this house that I met my future roommate and present friend, a sister of one of the guys from the other house.

Ghosts of Roommates Past Part 3

I hated living with my brother, five years ago. He too had lied to me and just wanted my money. He didn’t want to give me a place to live, he didn’t want me there, he couldn’t be nice to me, he refused to be loving to me or kind to me. It hurt so bad, it was like being punched in the chest. I stayed primarily in my bedroom and got out as much as possible.

Even if I went into the kitchen for three or four minutes he would try to start an argument with me about religion and politics, yelling, belligerent, mean, hateful, vengeful, raging.

He tried to kick me out of the house, twice, the first time happened when I had only been living there three days. He became enraged at me.

I had moved there, across half the country, spending all the money that I had on his promises, taking two and a half days to get there by bus, without any sleep and he refused to heat the house the first night I was there or to take me to a store to buy a space heater that evening, even though it was not far from the bus station, so that I got sick, a cold, he kept the house unheated and cold, yeah that again, but at least it was southern California but still got cold overnight, usually 50 or lower and colder as time went on, even many times going below zero, so that I had one warm and comfortable tiny room to live in.

He was mad that I got a cold, not my fault. He was mad that I was not happy and upbeat. Yeah sorry I just had to move across country in order to get away from abusive freaks that I had trusted. Yeah sorry I am disabled, and poor, and not happy and not doing so well. Sorry that is harshing your buzz dude. He was mad that I had anxiety, something I had been dealing with the reality of all of my life, but okay since my anxiety is bothering you and you want me to shut up and pretend to be happy while I am sick and can hardly breathe and talk, okay dude, whatever.

He got enraged because I did not want to stay in his freaking cold tv room and watch the second half of a Larry the Cable Guy special and said something that he took to be derogatory about white southern racists. Cause according to him many of them are wonderful people, though I don’t agree, racists by definition are not wonderful people.

But what really teared it, according to him, was that I refused to thank him and his on-again, off-again girlfriend for Thanksgiving dinner. Which I don’t think that I forgot to do. So apparently I am an ingrate, an accusation that I have had from my family of origin all of my life, but I don’t believe that I am ungrateful, just humiliated over their grandiose concept of how much they do for me and how little appreciative I am. I am appreciative, it is just that they seem to expect and demand that I put on a dog and pony show for them, and they are not satisfied until I do so. But they naturally seem to accept that everyone else is appreciative without all the bells and whistles.

But after traveling across country for 60 hours on bus without any sleep, being forced to sleep in the cold, getting a cold my first night in a new place, the rude awakening of how he was treating me and the fact that his secret plan, which I found out the second day that I was there, which made me burst into tears when I was in my bedroom alone, was to coerce me into working for him for free, doing things that I was not trained to do nor capable of doing basically and especially due to being disabled, I might have forgotten to say thank you, but I think that I did. I tried to explain to him over and over the definition of disabled and unable to work. He harassed me over and over until I broke down and called his son asking him to intervene for me.

So when he told me I was getting all my stuff and taking it outside, I told him that I couldn’t move out and live on the streets, I had no money and no check for another ten days, I was disabled, I needed somewhere to stay and there wasn’t a homeless shelter in the town where we lived. When he relented I told him that I would rather go home once my check was deposited into my checking account in ten days and live in the streets, in the middle of winter, rather than stay and live with him. He said that he would rather I stay with him than live in the streets in the middle of winter. I think that was all about and only about how the family would feel about him and treat him if he didn’t try to reconcile in some way with me.

He was loud and played his music and tv shows loudly.The second day that I was there he did take me to the store and borrowed me money to buy some food and a space heater. I had trouble sleeping due to his loudness and tried to avoid him. I would sit in my room as long as possible before leaving it, after waking up. I would stay up as late as possible and sleep as late as possible to avoid him, because he was a morning person.

The second time he insisted that I move out and live in the streets I decided that I had to limit all my money spending in order to get the fuck away from him. He got into a rage with me and was jumping up and down and rushing towards me and shouting. He made me fear for my safety, that he was going to attack me, and perhaps even rape me in a rage. I had never feared rape from him before, but his rage was out of control and I could not feel safe near him, in any way, after that. Seeing someone that out of control shattered me and my confidence that he was a human being, he looked and acted like an animal. I was not safe and I wanted to get as far away from him as soon as possible.

The argument he escalated over his rage at me and his deciding to take computer access away from me, the only access I had to anything in the outside world. I had a crappy unsmart phone with limited minutes, based on cards I had to buy. I insisted that he allow me to keep using the computer, since I was paying for half of the internet fees. He took the keyboard and locked it away in a cabinet in his bedroom, and kept his bedroom door locked as well. It took him a couple of days to leave me a note in my bathroom, saying that i could use the computer once again. I had already cancelled my internet company so had to pay again for a re-connection.

After two months of living there I finally bought a bike from Target, which was a huge money compromise, but necessary to get away from him and that house, and used it to get away from him, as much as possible, which was difficult and challenging because I did not have extra money to spend out in public, so most of the time I was at the library or as an extravagance a cup of coffee somewhere.

All I wanted was to save up enough money to get away from him.I was there five months. Everything revolved around saving enough money to get away from him and to find a place to move to once I got home. Again, none of my family, offered to help me financially or to have an emergency place to stay. Still, no matter what I wanted to go home and as far away from him as soon as possible.

He lied to me about the house being sold, it hadn’t, insisting that I had to move out in a month, but he lived there for another year after I moved across country to once again be in my home state. He was shocked and amazed that I wanted to go home.

Ghosts of Roommates Past Part 2

I moved to live with an online friend, in another state, which unsurprisingly went bad, because she proved to be a pathological liar and manipulator, lying about absolutely everything, and apparently thought she was going to get some money out of me. A concept which is hilarious to me, because she knew that I was on disability.

Bizarrely I came to believe based on evidence, that she thought I had thousands of dollars from my disability settlement squirreled away and that I was the sort of victim who would be easy to victimize, though I never implied that and I don’t think that I acted in a way that showed that I was an easy victim. They were all shocked and amazed to find that I was not an easy victim.My money was my money and none of her business. I was mind blown at the things her and her roommate, ex-girlfriend believed about me.

We had been online and phone friends over five years, though I soon came to realize only close for about a year, and that that is something I should have taken into account before making any kind of decision about her. I thought that I knew her, but I did not know that everything she ever told me was a lie.

The decrepit house that we lived in should have been condemned. They did not want to heat the house in the winter, and I had moved there in late September, something that they had not thought was an important thing to tell me, even though they knew that I was disabled and had fibromyalgia. So I had to hunker down in the bedroom or go downstairs where the computer access was to sit in the cold, being bitten by fleas.

Her ex-girlfriend accused me of being in love with my online friend and that was hilarious and outrageous. She was much younger than me, being in her early twenties, and very naive and mistaken about the world. She was unattractive to me physically, a victim, and what I thought of as a friend, no this was not someone that I would cross boundaries to take advantage of. Her ex, not surprisingly was a boundary jumper, being almost ten years older, starting out, posing, I believe, as a friend and ally.

I didn’t and still don’t believe that I would become sexual with someone that I was survivor friends with, so for me, that was an outrageous and horrific accusation. I’ve had others try to step over that line and found it horrific and immensely damaging to myself. I told her I love her, as a friend, nothing more. When I said it I realized that it was probably not true any longer, as I was assimilating all the lies that she had told me and realized that I was not a friend to her, but a potential victim to be exploited.

Another online friend told me that she would have been lucky to have me as a girlfriend, if I had wanted to do that, if I had loved her and that I had nothing to be ashamed of in the accusation. Yeah, she was right, my “friend” would have been bizarrely lucky to find me as a friend or potential date or potential girlfriend. But I was not interested in her like that. I don’t boundary jump with friends, I don’t groom future partners with friendship, unlike her previous girlfriend.

The ex told me that she was also a victim of mother-daughter sexual abuse. What she had not told me was that she was exploiting and abusing her lover, having actually physically abused her in the past, emotionally and verbally abusing her on demand, and physically assaulting other, including an assault that resulted in her having to go through anger management. It did not work.

But if either of them had told me any of the things that any normal person would have had issues with, I never would have moved there and I never would have had anything to do with them. But how many abusers tell you, hey I’m abuser, stay out of my life?

They had two dogs and three cats and the whole house was infested with fleas. I was being bitten horribly and I get a really bad reaction to bites. I really think that after seven weeks I was suffering from blood loss, I was attacked so much.

They would refuse to buy flea bombs. Finally I had to spend over $100 of my own money in trying to cope and deal with the infestation. I had to clean the filthy house, front porch, and constantly try to address issues over and over in order to get anything that I needed done. As a disabled woman I believed that a healthy bodied person should take out the trash,sweep the floor, wash and clean, etc. Yeah right.

The other roommate, the ex-girlfriend was lazy, worthless, rageful, argumentative, evil, vicious, unlearned, violent. I wasn’t even told that there relationship was on the rocks, that the one was developing a new relationship online and via phone and had done this two other times, lying, cheating, etc, and that she had been physically, emotionally, and verbally abusive to “my friend.” I did not know and trusted them. Boy was that a wrong thing to do.

Having to trust someone else, put up with all their shit and all their noise soon proved to me that I had to get away from having a roommate and to get my own precious living space. Unfortunately I could not afford my own place and trusted all the wrong people for several more years. I was there about seven weeks and went to live with a brother, the only person who offered to help me. None of my other siblings that I was in contact with at that time would assist me, not even with an offer to stay for a few weeks or even days.

I believe now that I should have just gotten a bus ticket to go back to my hometown and stay in a shelter. After living there for three days I knew that it was wrong of me to trust my brother. However I did not want to put myself in a position where I moved back to a town on a Friday afternoon with nowhere to stay and no one to help me, not one little bit.

I would not put myself into a position to be exploited and abused by someone like this ever again. Living alone is pleasure all the live long day by comparison. I’m glad that I have my own space now and would not give it up willingly for anything right now, except if I became very rich and could afford a bigger place of my own. I’m happy to live alone now.

I Saved Three People’s Lives

When I was nineteen I saved three people’s lives. I had a roommate, we lived in the upstairs of a house.

She had her cousin staying over for the weekend from out of town. Her cousin was the kind of woman who would throw herself at any guy she saw. She was throwing herself at the guy who lived downstairs that weekend.

The three of them were up very late that night, drinking, talking, laughing, etc. They were making a lot of noise and kept me up late that night. I sat up in the bedroom reading. All of a sudden I started smelling that horrible smell that you smell when there has been a natural gas leak.

I went out into the kitchen and noticed that the gas had gone out on the stove, though the fixture was still turned on. I turned it off. I went and woke the three of them up. They were all dopey. I opened the front door, though it was late in the Autumn and very cold outside, because it was necessary. The stink was awful.

I read recently that our sense of smell turns off when we are sleeping. The horrible smell never would have woken them up. If I had not been there and not been awake, they could easily have all died from poisoning. If I had been sleeping I might have ended up dead. Their drunken behavior could have killed me.

The next day they acted like nothing had happened, even after I told them explicitly what would have happened if I had not been awake to turn off the fixture. None of them apologized for endangering my life.

While living with her, she emotionally and verbally abused and threatened me. She made me feel like a hostage in that place, none of it was my place. I had one half of a very tiny bedroom and she occupied the rest of the space, though I paid for half of the rent and bills. She was an ungrateful bully.

As horrific and ungrateful as she was, then and during the few months that I lived with her and knew her, still she is not the worst roommate I have ever had. But she is definitely clumped up at the top of my worst roommates list.

I saved their lives. None of them told me thank you. Their ungratefulness was horrific. They even refused to acknowledge that it happened. They stared at me and refused to say anything. They acted like it was no big deal, but I know that they knew how dangerous it had been and that it could easily had ended in death, because I told them.

I saved three people’s lives. I think that is a very big deal. I made the world different for them and for everyone in their life and their futures. I think that is one of the biggest things that one human being can do for another. I do value and treasure human life, but the way that they treated me when I knew them, it makes me never want to see or know them ever again. I am well rid of the three of them.

Actually, I saved four people’s lives that night, including my own. I’m proud that I saved my own life.