FROM DECEMBER 2009
"In case you couldn't tell, I'm daddy's girl and I ALWAYS get what I want." Said my new roommie as she unpacked box after box of her wardrobe, what can only be described as the Abercrombie catalogue.
Admittedly, that didn't bother me a lot since I'm kind of a spoiled brat, too. And unfortunately, my curiosity for other people's mental pathology often overshadows the warning bells, resounding a shrill, "RUN AWAY!" So, maybe it was all my fault...
My ex-wife, we'll get to that alias later, also had a puppy. Not just any puppy, no, it was the BEST puppy in the whole WORLD. She had obtained it on the cusp of August, under her parents radar. Puppy turned out to be merely a cog in roommie dearest's plan not have to live in the dorms again, with the, "mean girls."
The puppy was an annoying lab that was incredibly spoiled and if someone didn't like that, well, they were blacklisted, myself included.
"She doesn't like licks, puppy... she doesn't like you..." She is very logical, you know.
Forgive me if I'd rather not indulge in the germ orgy that is a dog's mouth. So sorry, my apologies oh Queen of the Universe... and her little dog, too.
After two weeks of semi-normalcy, as much normalcy as two-English majors co-habitation with a puppy can have, things began to get weird.
"I found this thing in my ear while I was on my run!" Ex-wifey said, bounding through the door, puppy in tow. She held up what looked like a rubber stopper of some sort, far too big to be in someones ear.
"My ear hurts... and my door doesn't lock. Someone must have come into our apartment in the middle of the night and done this!"
Sure. Ok. Let's calm down and think about this.
A few days later, I awoke to find roomie gone on a walk, and the kitchen completely trashed. We were both kind of neat-freakish, so this was disconcerting.
Later that afternoon, I confronted roomie about it.
"Left in a hurry this morning, eh?"
"Why?"
"Well the kitchen was in shambles... I cleaned it up though."
"OH MY GOD! You heard all those noises last night, like someone going through all the pots and pans!!"
"Uh, sure..."
"Wait, the kitchen wasn't a mess when I left at 5:30 this morning."
No puppy is THAT cute, 5:30 am walks?
"Weird, so I got up at 7:45, and in the two some hours you've been absent, someone broke into our place, in daylight, and messed up our kitchen?"
She didn't respond, just looked really creeped out and kept touching her ear.
Were we robbed, I ribbed myself, did they take my fiber bars and the good soups!?!
Actually, I was missing one fiber bar.
Anyway, my mind went to two places; one, our place is haunted and; two, my roommate is batshit crazy.
I went with Option One for about an hour, until I began to reminisce about the three weeks I spent at the apartment prior to my ex-wifey moving in.
The apartment had been peaceful. It had been a very quiet third-floor room with an amazing mountain-view, bereft of dog smells and still lending me the freedom to invite friends over, drink some wine and play my cello.
Logically, option two was the only thing left. Not to allow myself to look too hard for signs of crazy, I remained incredibly objective about roomies behavior and her jealous-possessive baptist boyfriend, Chris.
After a few more, "someone is breaking into our apartment at night! They have cameras everywhere!" outbursts from ex-wifey, as well as ducktaping over all of the crevices that could harbor a Radio-Shack caliber mini-camera and dismissing my suspicions that the FBI wanted me for some reason, I gave in and we went to Home Depot to get a new door-knob.
After several failed attempts at self-installing the apparatus, and wifey, thinking the landlord had purposefully drilled the doorknob hole too skewed for someone to change the locks, ended up getting a chain, and screwing it DIRECTLY into the door-frame. Goodbye security deposit. Ironic?
One night, she "accidentally" locked me out, thinking I had been asleep in my room, at 9pm... on a Friday... I had really been at a coffee place studying for mid-terms. Really.
I finally wrangled one of my guy friends—actually I was his date to a wedding that night—into installing the new doorknob for us. We had just enough time between the ceremony and reception to do some minor home-improvement... and have beers.
So, now roomie and I had absolutely no doubt in our pretty blonde heads that someone could come into our apartment, eat my fiber bars and shove rubber into wifey's ears. Right? Wrong.
The omnipresent, controlling and manipulative father-boyfriend-figure Chris, decided to make a dramatic (probably romantic in his mind) move to buy wifey a rape stick. It was kind that holds the door shut from the inside. He did this instead of, you know, fixing her door lock.
Things began to escalate interpersonally when I wouldn't succumb to wifey's premature need to agree to a new living arrangement. In retro-spect I should've been a wee more decisive, but staying in another state or moving home was a big decision.
So, instead of further talking to me about the issue, we'd only had one chat, mind you, wifey took things into her own gnarled hands.
Roping a mutual friend into living with her, she decided to move out into the apartment directly below our current room, without telling me.
The Monday of finals week, I'd invited a guy friend to sleep on our couch, because he'd been locked out of his temporary residence and it was middle of December in Montana with a balmy wind-chill of 40 below.
I didn't think anything of it. We weren't drunk. He is a decent guy. But I received a knock on my door at about 2am...
I opened the door to find wifey standing there looking like she'd seen a ghost.
"Yes?"
"There's a boy in our living room!" She scream-whispered.
There was almost always a boy in our living room. Her boyfriend would stay over almost every weekend... use our toilet paper, electricity and no doubt eat my fiber bars.
"I know, " I replied smartly, "I put him there."
"Is he drunk?"
"Nooo." I said, fearing that the pink fuzzy rock she grew up under was whispering to her that she was about to be murdered and raped. In that order.
Chris showed up four hours later, coming from about 400 miles away. I discovered this on my way to the bathroom to find a tampon.
He never said a word to me, and wifey was presumably already gone to campus for finals.
My friend, Doug, sat on the couch, playing on his iBook. I facebook chatted him from my bedroom to find out what in tarnation had happened.
"Her boyfriend showed up about an hour ago... he walked up to the couch and forcibly introduced himself. It wasn't what he said, it was how he said it. She didn't say a word to me. He also told me I had to be off the couch by 2, because they are moving your roommate out."
I grabbed my bag, car keys and Doug and we galloped off to a coffee shop near campus for some java and conversation to make sense of everything.
I then spent a few more hours in the library frantically trying to finish my play about unicorns. Really.
My phone suddenly began to vibrate in my sweatshirt pocket. I looked at the caller ID, it was the boy I'd been kinda-sorta-seeing-made-out-with two days ago yet hadn't really heard from.
"Hey." I mustered, typing with my right hand about ontological questioning and unicorn etiquette.
"Hi, so I need to talk to you..."
Yep, REJECTED. He blamed his youthful horny indiscretion on adrenaline. Points for creativity!
Needing some down-time and a whisky, I listened to the message Adrenaline Boy had left before he mustered up the balls, to actually call me in person and drove back to the apartment only to discover that everything had been moved out, everything except for Chris, who only smiled at me and continued to move boxes and the little dog, too.
Fuck this, I thought and promptly drove to Doug's, where he fed me Evan Williams lower-shelf bourbon, string cheese and let me watch, "Die Hard," on the big screen.
We listened to Adrenaline Boy's voicemail about 20 times, laughed, cried and then forwarded it to everyone we'd ever met.
I soon discovered that my now ex-wife, had moved into a hotel for a few days, because she couldn't live with me until Thursday, when she had actually planned on moving out.
She still lives with our mutual friend, and guess what, they both have puppies! (The best puppies in the world!)
As I think about those two days sitting on the living room floor—she took the couch, TV, dog and half the kitchen suppluies—eating a fiber bar and drinking whisky, I find myself humming the Wicked-witch theme from,"The Wizard of Oz," da-du-da-du da-da-DA...
