In The Trenches

I came into the room and sat down on the couch and the cat looked at me and said, "Don't get comfortable, there's a show I want to watch at nine."
"Not likely. My t.v., my apartment." That was what started it and now he won't talk to me at all.

Roommates can be a tricky thing. I mean having them, the division of chores, the responsibilities for the bills, taking out the recycle box, that stuff. I've had them all: the stink machine, the compulsive talker, the hour shower, the naked guy, the screamers, the pukers, the eat from the box guy, the never wash the dishes girl. I once had a roommate who kept a Polaroid diary of his morning evacuations, to put a friendly term to it, in a row along the wall of his bedroom. Then there was the guy who would repeat my phone conversations back to me, doing a terrible impersonation of me, to boot. The late with the rent guy was better than that girl who smoked pot from the second she woke up, and she was way better than the internet computer sex guy. It wouldn't have been so bad if the computer hadn't been in the living room.
The funniest are the compulsives. The neat freak who had to line up the remote perpendicular to the t.v., or the one who complained to me that the towels were folded wrong. That's just asking for it. The hours I spent moving the cutlery drawer around are some of the best I've spent torturing a roommate. I once spent a week re-arranging a roommates stuffed animals after she told me she thought the house was haunted. I even headed up the call for a seance to find out why the animals couldn't stay where she'd put them.
After another one started celebrating Bob Dylan's birthday a week early by playing his albums night and day I began to leave cut-out pictures of Bob with his teeth blacked out lying around for her to find. Good times.
It hasn't been all bad, either. I really liked the roommate who wandered around in her bra and panties, and the one who cooked these outrageous meals for me. The best was Richard, who made his own beer, and if I helped him bottle it, I could drink as much as I wanted. Couldn't get the smell of hops out for awhile, though.
I have to admit that I'm probably not the best roommate, either. Impromptu parties, twenty drunks strong, have a tendency to materialize on payday. The band has been known to inspire some of my roommates to pull fuses and then pretend we blew a circuit. And I do like some pretty crappy music.

The cat just murmured his approval from my shoulder, which is where he sits when I write, and come to think of it, is pretty much the strangest roommate behavior I've seen. Now he's on the couch watching his show. I can afford to be generous, I suppose. I don't want to show up in his blog.