Tonight I had a date with myself. I picked up the best burrito in all of the East Bay and headed to Treasure Island to watch Ka Boom! Brilliantly synchronized fireworks exploding in harmony with radio broadcast? (They even played The Polyphonic Spree- YEA!) Sign me up! Sometimes I forget how much I like spending time alone and it takes a little reminding. I had one of those reminders with my last roommate.
Maggots – Reason #1 to be thankful for living alone
I had been living alone for about a year. A tiny studio apartment with a lake view. Walk to shopping, restaurants, bars, movie theaters and museum. It was a basement apartment, no heat, mold issues and on a busy road in Oakland. I loved my colorful neighborhood but had to start sleeping with earplugs to drown out the noisy traffic and became fearful the mold was slowly killing me. I decided I might try having a roommate again. Bad idea.
A friend mentioned she knew of someone who was searching for a roommate. It happened to be less than one mile from my current studio! I met this girl, I’ll call her Grody Pants for purposes of this story. I stopped by to see the apartment one afternoon. It was a 1920’s building, at one time it was two very large town houses, now divided into twenty apartments. Grody Pants showed me the apartment and made tea. Another day we went shopping and out for coffee to see if we meshed. Grody Pants seemed okay, she was a bit younger than me, I started to think of her like a little sister. I decided to move in.
The day I moved in I noticed some flies in the apartment. I asked Grody Pants about them and she thought they were from the lack of window screens . She had looked up fly removal methods online. A high shelf in the kitchen was lined with pint glasses filled with vinegar and funnel shaped paper poking out of them. The flies got better for a bit. Then they got worse. Much, much WORSE. They were everywhere. It was disgusting. They collected dead inside of our refrigerator. They were not only in the kitchen but the living room, hallway and bathroom. It was bad. Grody Pants seemed indifferent and unable to take initiative. So when the flies started showing up in my bedroom I called the apartment manager. He thought perhaps they were coming from under the refrigerator since they were showing up dead inside of it. The tray underneath was removed and cleaned. No luck, still flies. After much yuckiness he finally said the only other thing he could think to do would be having the apartment sprayed for bugs. I agreed. The flies needed to go.
Have you ever had the inside of your home sprayed for bugs? It’s disgusting. Grody Pants came home just long enough to open all the windows and leave. Not only did it smell like nasty bug spray but there was a sticky, chemical film on every surface. Did Grody Pants help clean any of this up? Of course not. I did because I’m an overly responsible sucker. I came home from work and scrubbed every surface of the kitchen and mopped the entire apartment. It was a huge pain in the ass and I was bitter that Grody Pants had skipped out but I was happy the flies would be gone.
Well folks, the flies were not gone. In fact, they were worse than ever. I couldn’t figure out where they were coming from, or why. The nasty little flies were wearing on my nerves.
One weekend when Grody Pants was out of town I came home from a morning walk and decided to clean the kitchen. After doing the dishes I took out the garbage and realized we were out of kitchen garbage bags so I reached into a low cupboard next to the refrigerator for a plastic bag. As I pulled the bag out I noticed something brown and sticky on it. Weird. I crouched down to take a closer look and saw a molasses thick foul smelling mess behind the plastic bags. There was a smell. A really bad, terrible, awful, wretched smell. The kind of smell you never want to smell in your home. The smell of DEATH. There was what appeared at one time to be a plastic brown potato bag in the back of the cupboard. Only there were no potatoes inside of it, just a giant heap of putrid moving maggots. For all I know it wasn’t even potatoes, it couldn’ve once been something alive. Gag reflex starts to kick in. I was nauseated but knew I had to dispose of it. I pulled the garbage closer and went for it. As I pulled what was left of the plastic brown bag out of the cupboard it spilt everywhere, gag reflex starts to get stronger. Before I knew it I was throwing up on top of the nasty mess in the garbage. The maggoty mess had been there for so long it ate through many layers of paint on the shelf and into the wood. I had the circle of life going on in my kitchen. It was revolting but after many paper towels and a bottle of bleach laced cleanser I had the cupboard clean.
I took the longest shower of my life afterwards. I couldn’t scrub hard enough. Then I chain smoked in front of my apartment, sharing the horrific details with a friend on the phone. A neighbor walked by as I was yelling “Maggots! Fucking maggots! I had maggots in my kitchen! I think it was a potato bag but it was so deteriorated it could have been a baby for all I know! FUCKING MAGGOTS!”
When Grody Pants got home there was much squealing and ewwing on her part about the maggots. I asked her how long ago she purchased the potatoes in the cupboard. She claimed never to have purchased potatoes, or even to have used the cupboard. According to Grody Pants the potatoes must have been from the previous tenants. She’d lived there for six months before I moved in and admitted to never cleaning or inspecting the cupboards (what? EW!).
Pubic hair – Reason #2 to be thankful for living alone
Pubic hair. Everybody has it and there is no reason for anyone else to see it.
Grody Pants and I shared a bathroom. This is the first time I had to share a bathroom in ten years. Our schedules were different enough we didn’t have to fight over shower time. I noticed she kept some old rickety scissors in the shower. Um, okay. I’m not opposed to trimming (in fact I’m all for it) but no one else should know about it. I personally wouldn’t use rusty cutting implements on my oh so precious private parts. But we are talking about nasty Grody Pants; she who doesn’t clean or inspect anything when moving into an 80 year old apartment in Oakland.
There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just gonna bust out with it: a lot of pubic hair started appearing in the shower. I was really grossed out. It’s so personal and nasty I wasn’t sure how to approach the subject with her, so I ignored it. Maybe if I pretend cupfuls of her thick nasty pubic hair aren’t in the shower drain everyday it will go away? No such luck. In fact MORE pubic hair started to show up. It was as if she was harvesting the shit for money. Or collecting it from friends with the intent to torment me. Was she part of some hair loss product being tested on nether regions? Maybe she was a sasquatch? I don’t understand how this bitch had this much hair down there, I mean really. Everyday there was more and MORE. Until eventually I moved and no longer had to deal with her nasty, hairy, dirty ass.
Living alone in oh so nice.
