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Lucy’s Roommates

I mentioned briefly several months ago that Lucy had some trouble with her new roommate. I thought, since I can’t think of anything else to write about and I had promised somebody at one point that I would tell the tale, I’ll go ahead and share the details now.

First things first: Lucy hated her previous roommate. Here was a girl she’d discovered by answering an ad, they teamed up, she (ever the poor judge of character) thought she’d be set with a super-cool roommate for the next year or more. One month after she moved into the apartment, her roommate started dating some “artist” (I use quotations because, after seeing a couple of samples, I can’t bend the definition of the word artist to include him) and quickly became infatuated. Artist was over all the time, and as a result the harmony of the apartment was destroyed: he was big on Eastern culture, so they’d constantly be preparing stank-ass Indian food or doing tai chi on the living room floor.

Did I mention Artist was also a big-time Iowa City pot dealer? So since, after a couple of months, he was basically living in the apartment, he started bringing over bricks — literally, bricks of marijuana — and while he wouldn’t deal directly in the apartment, they’d smoke it on a regular basis. And Lucy, who strangely wanted no part in being arrested for possession with intent to sell roughly 400 pounds of marijuana, didn’t quite know what to do.

She had been seeing a fellow Lowe’s employee for several months, and she decided to take the next logical step: staying over so much that before he realized it, they were living together. She’d go back to her own apartment once in awhile, usually to pick up things she needed, but often just to say, “Hi, I still exist, don’t touch my stuff.” She’d try to be in and out as quickly as she could, because she’s apparently become as paranoid as I am and as such believed that if she stayed there for more than five minutes, the cops would bust in and she’d be implicated.*

But then came a major lapse. She let four months go by. Four months, no shit. Just disappeared. Never called the roommate, never stopped by — nothing. By the end of the four months, the end of Lucy’s lease was approaching. She had agreed to simply move in with her boyfriend, Bob, since they were getting along quite well together and it, therefore, would be a perfect arrangement.

Shortly after they made this agreement, her friend Krissy announced that she desperately needed a roommate, and would Lucy please please please move in with her? Lucy reluctantly agreed, with one condition: they’d move into one of the available apartments in Bob’s building. Krissy agreed, and they were on their way to a new lease.

So back to the four-month lapse in visiting her old apartment. When she stopped by to take stock of what, exactly, would be required to move all her shit out, she came to a startling realization: roughly half of her shit was gone, Artist was now using her bedroom as his “space” with what remained of Lucy’s shit shoved haphazardly against the wall, and what hadn’t outright disappeared or wasn’t in boxes shoved on the wall was being used by Roommate and Artist as if they owned it.

Personally, I think this is horribly invasive, but not totally unreasonable. They had no reason to think she was coming back, so in their minds there was no harm in — for example — using her pots and pans, even though they never cleaned them so there was all this disgusting, crusted shit all over sides and bottom. I would never do that, but if I felt in any way compelled, I would at least call the person and ask if it’s cool. If they said “no, I’m coming in a few weeks for that shit,” I’d respect that. If they didn’t care, I’d do whatever the hell I wanted.

Which brings me to the even bigger disrespect: the stuff that Lucy didn’t find? They sold it to Goodwill. A whole lot of her stuff — art supplies that Artist hadn’t glommed onto, clothes (including the purple fur coat I told her to buy as a joke that had since become the cornerstone of her fashion), small pieces of furniture. Some stuff they just threw out, including a whole bunch of pictures Lucy had taken since she’d been out in Iowa, but it seems like they sold whatever they thought they couldn’t use that could make them a few bucks.

Lucy didn’t know this at first. She crept through the empty apartment, searching for the stuff — perhaps, for example, her clothes had somehow made it into Roommate’s rotation — and finding nothing. Anywhere. She went to the storage unit in the building’s basement and didn’t find any of the missing stuff — in fact, she found more missing stuff, since a lot of what she had put down there when they had initially moved in was now gone.

Finally, she called Roommate…whose cell phone had been disconnected. So she wrote a rather impolite, profanity-laced note to Roommate and left it on the TV screen. Roommate called her that night, faux-apologetically, and told her about selling the stuff to Goodwill because they “didn’t think she was coming back.” I thought that was somewhat reasonable, since they needed to move out within a week and they couldn’t just leave a room full of stuff — although, again, I would have at least called before selling somebody else’s possessions — but here’s when it becomes unreasonable: after Roommate’s apology and explanation, Lucy announced, “I’m coming over to get the rest of my stuff tomorrow. I don’t want to see you or Artist there.” Roommate agreed.

Since Roommate had said they’d only sold the stuff to Goodwill a day or two earlier, she and Bob went down to see if they could buy her stuff back. Some of it was too expensive — even after explaining to the typically discompassionate clerks that the stuff had been stolen and sold — but they reclaimed some of it. The purple fur coat was long gone, unfortunately. I spent most of the holiday season trying to track down another one that was within my gift price range; no luck.

After the bad experience at the Goodwill Store, Lucy changed her mind; she decided to go to the apartment that evening, whether Roommate and Artist were there or not, just so she could get it over with. When she arrived, she saw Artist and Roommate loading his pickup truck — with more of Lucy’s shit. This didn’t end well. Caught, they relented and gave Lucy everything she could cram into her smallish car, with the agreement that they would not touch any of her stuff until they could come back later with Bob’s pickup.

As insurance, Lucy called a couple of neighbors who lived in the building and told them to watch Roommate and Artist like hawks; they agreed to do that.

Here’s where I, briefly, enter the picture. A few days after this, they still hadn’t come back with the pickup. Rather than doing that immediately, they were waiting for a few concurrent days off to rent a U-Haul, so they could be sure they’d pick everything up in one trip, then drive it straight to the new apartment. I didn’t exactly want to drive 250 miles to help her move, but I hadn’t seen Lucy since I’d come back from California, and she doesn’t usually have many days off (not in a row, anyway). Plus, it’d only be for one day, followed by four days of fun!

Well, the day I came in, I got to see the carnage that used to be an apartment for myself. Actually, when she and I pulled into (Bob had a class to attend, but he would be around that afternoon) the parking lot, we noticed something strange: with the exception of her bed, all the furniture (i.e., living room and kitchen stuff) had been put outside, in front of their apartment door. Fortunately, it hadn’t rained at all (though it was supposed to the following day), so nothing was damaged. It was just an odd sight, to see furniture sitting out on a tiny strip of grass in front of the sidewalk in front of the door. They didn’t even put it on the sidewalk — I assume so that passersby could still walk — even though there was an awning over it that would have protected it from the rain. Whatever, at least everything that was supposed to be there was there.

The inside looked like a war zone, minus the corpses. The place was grimy, walls full of dirt and (I assume) food-related muck. Same with the carpeting, which was stained to hell (cigarette burned, too). Roommate and Artist hadn’t finished moving their stuff out, so there was shit strewn all over the place. The worst was the kitchen, which not only had Lucy’s food-encrusted pots — they had used them (I assume) the night before, and there were remnants of food floating in the water (they had filled them in a pathetic attempt to soak the scuzz). The less said about the refrigerator, the better.

We mostly avoided the living room and kitchen and concentrated on the bedroom, where most of her stuff was. It didn’t take long to move all her shit out, and we did a once-over of the living room to make sure they weren’t trying to take any of Lucy’s shit. We decided to leave the pots — they were pretty much useless anyway. And that was pretty much the end of the Roommate/Artist debacle, as far as I know.

We moved all her shit into the new apartment, and later that night I met Krissy and her boyfriend, as they started hauling stuff into the apartment. At the time, because I was bored and fairly depressed (for unrelated reasons, though the condition of her previous apartment was cause for dismay), Lucy set me up on her couch with some kind of electric massaging mattress. I’m not exaggerating when I call this the greatest invention of all time. So I spent a few hours on that, reading, while she arranged all the stuff she had moved in thus far.

In the evening, she got a call from Krissy, saying they were approaching with the U-Haul, which they had picked up earlier so she could move her stuff. After she got the call, she announced, “I have to go downstairs and get Krissy. Oh, and don’t help them move anything.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“For one thing, you don’t even know her — you shouldn’t have to,” Lucy said. “But mainly, I can’t stand this guy she’s with.” Lucy: class act.

So I got massaged for three hours while reading a book and, for the most part, ignoring Krissy and her boyfriend. Which is why it came to a surprise when they, loudly and hilariously, broke up with each other halfway through the moving process, after which he agreed to help her finish moving, but then he was “fucking out!”

A few hours after he was gone and they were done with the move-in, I started to have my doubts about Krissy as a decent roommate. We all sat down to watch Chinatown (incidentally, you don’t want to watch Chinatown with people who have short attention spans; lesson learned), and about an hour into it, she started pissing and moaning about how she had to call him. Lucy calmed her down, reminded her of what a failure he is, wouldn’t let her call him, et cetera. So Krissy didn’t call him…

…for 20 minutes, at which point she excused herself from the awesome conclusion of the movie, closed the door to her new bedroom, and called the boyfriend. They talked out all their problems, and he agreed to come over the next day to help them arrange the furniture.

What’s sad about this story, other than everything about it? This happened once a goddamn week. I mean, really, have some dignity. But according to Lucy, that was the whole problem: she needed to feel like he wanted her, so she’d pick fights so he’d dump her, then she’d make him beg for her to come back. And yes, even though she called him, he did all the begging. How fucked up is that?

Hearing all that made me uncomfortable, but what do I care? Lucy knew what she was getting into, so even though I knew I’d be hearing about it for the next year, I didn’t have much sympathy for her.

One week later: “Krissy dumped her boyfriend again.”

The week after that: “Krissy decided to just stop going to her job. Didn’t give notice or quit or get fired — she’s just sitting around the apartment.” Huh…that was a strange deviation from the planet.

Two weeks after that: “I don’t think Krissy’s going to pay any rent or anything. She doesn’t have any money, and she says her parents are tired of her bailing out.”

One week later: “Krissy disappeared. I think she went to her parents’ house. She sent me a message on MySpace apologizing and saying it’s no big deal — I can just pay half of everything and explain that she left. Is she fucking insane? You can’t do that!” No shit, Lucy. No shit.

The week after that: “Apparently there’s still a warrant out for her arrest. She never showed up to court.” Perhaps I should explain: I don’t know how long ago, Krissy got a series of reckless driving tickets, followed by a suspension of her license, followed by an actual forced court appearance (e.g., not like a normal speeding ticket or something where if you don’t show up, you’re guilty), followed by her not showing up, followed by Johnson County issuing an arrest warrant, followed by her begging them to give her another court date, followed by her not showing up for that court date, followed by the arrest not exactly going away…for months and months and months. Arresting daddy’s-girls who can’t figure out how not to speed isn’t high on the Johnson County Sheriff Department’s to-do list (“fishing on duty” ranks higher), but the warrant still loomed over her head. She didn’t do anything about it, though. This was back in September, and I still don’t think she’s done a thing about it. Maybe she drives more carefully, but that’s it.

Anyway, Lucy continued: “And I talked to her old roommate. He says she still owes him $1200 in back rent and utilities. I’m not gonna get anything — she’s trying to fuck me!”

It’s so weird. On the one hand, Roommate was doing some weird-ass shit that ran Lucy off, and then she was basically stealing and selling her stuff. In the meantime, one of Lucy’s closest friends begged her to rent with her, then disappeared before she had to pay any rent with a half-assed apology and really no rationale for her behavior. She just decided one day that she didn’t want to work and decided one day that she didn’t want an apartment. And fucked Lucy way harder and way longer — with worse repercussions — than Roommate or Artist could have dreamed. I mean, at least they paid rent. With drug money, but still — it got paid, right?

In the end, the issue got resolved. Her lease had some kind of clause where she could opt-out after three months, pay a pretty huge penalty, but it wouldn’t reflect badly on her credit and she could just give up the apartment she couldn’t afford. The problem, of course, was paying the other half of the rent/utilities and paying for the penalty. She talked her parents into fronting the money for the penalty charge, and she could just barely afford the rest of it on her salary, if she gave up perks like, um…food and stuff. But Bob was happy to provide that.

That’s the end of the story as I know it. Lucy said she tried to contact the police down in North Carolina (where she assumes Krissy fled to), but that was the last I heard of it, so I assume it either didn’t go well or she got the money back quietly and peaceably. I don’t dare bring it up, for fear of a six-hour tirade that will numb both my brain and my butt. But seriously…I’d say she’s had a run of bad luck, but we all know she’s just a terrible judge of character.

*I don’t know much about cops or police work, but for some reason I’m under the impression that if he got busted with that much weed, the investigation would invariably lead to Lucy, being that her shit occupied one full room in the apartment. I’m sure she could try to deny her way out of it, and they might let her go, but since she knew about it and refused to do anything, wouldn’t that make her an accessory of some sort?

Posted by Stan on February 28, 2006 11:21 AM  | Permalink | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em | Digg It