Okay. Where to begin...
I’ve had roommates off and on during my life, always actual friends though… who just moved back into town, got a divorce, were buying a house, stuff like that. I never lived with a “stranger” until 2002, when I moved to Reno with Rasta from S3. The place was a 4-bedroom house, 2 car garage, big deck overlooking Reno, and a huge upstairs area perfect for gaming out and for putting in the WSBN studio, which was why I moved to begin with. It was cool and all. Wasn’t a palace or anything, but it had that “beach house” kinda feel to it. Me, Rasta, and BigDawg lived there for a coupla years, and then Rasta took the manager slot of the Sacramento office of his company and moved. In his place r00st moved in, a guy we all knew. After that Mike took a job on the other side of town and decided to cut his commute down so he moved down the street from work. Mac moved in to replace BigDawg, and then r00st bought a house, so r00st moved out. Musical roommates, basically. So here was Mac and I splitting a 4-bedroom place. Everything was cool. People would come over and game out all the time, we'd barbecue on the deck, it was a chill setup.
Around this time I wound up in the situation where I had to actually go to work for someone else. I’ve been self-employed since I was 25, and here I was at like 33 starting over again. (Sucked.) Money was very tight, but neither me nor Mac wanted to just let “anyone” live in our place, so I paid 3/4ths of the rent and we were waiting to see if anyone we knew needed a place to stay.
Also around this time, during the course of conversation with MadCat (who was in California), I noticed she was always complaining about where she lived, work she had to do, bringing up her kid in a lousy place, her neighbors, etc etc. And during the course of conversation I (stupidly) suggested “Man why don’t you fuggin move… start over some place else?” The conversation (which spanned like… weeks) wound up with me suggesting moving to Reno. It’s a cool place, nice seasons, decent rent, decent job market, etc. To me it was just a friendly suggestion, looking out for the better interests of a friend. But she was worried about covering the costs of everything, so I (again, just as a friendly suggestion) I told her, “Well… if you want, we have a 4-bedroom place here, you and your daughter can have their own rooms, rent is cheap, and we have a two-car garage so you can store your stuff until you find a place of your own. You can stay here for two months.”
Not a bad offer, no? I thought it was as good an offer you can get from a friend. I told her there were only three stipulations for her living in our house. 1) Pay your bills ON TIME. I told her that unlike normal, money was extremely tight and I couldn’t support her in any way, shape, or form. Usually I had a good bit of money to spare and I’ve always helped friends out in a jam and so on, but at that time it wasn’t happening at all. In fact, it was impossible. So I made sure I got that point across to her, and I mean to the point of being annoying about it. I told her she had to hit the ground running and get a job immediately because neither me nor Mac could carry her. Did I mention that I drove home the fact that she had to pay her bills? And did I mention the fact that I really, really drove home the fact that she had to pay her bills? (Yea… you get the idea.)
#2 was a simple one – no smoking in the house. Smoke outside or in the garage. It sucks, but cope.
#3 was her dogs – I didn’t have a pet deposit on the house, and regardless of that, Mac and I both didn’t want to live with animals. Two big hairy stinky farting dogs wasn’t our idea of good houseguests, so I told her the dogs had to stay outside and in the garage. The garage had one of those big doggy doors and a section perfect for like a kennel type thing, and I even told her I would build her the kennel part. All she needed to do was two things – buy the piece of plywood for the kennel, and buy some 2x4 so I could extend the gate up higher so the dogs wouldn’t jump over it. Maybe 20-30 bucks in materials. Hell, I even told her I’d do the work for her, just buy the stuff.
Anyway, I let her mull it over while I talked about it with Mac, and he initially was like no fucking way! She had two dogs AND a kid. I agreed with him… it wasn’t really our thing, but I told him look, it’s only for two months til she gets her own place, you and I are upstairs ALL the time, they can have the downstairs to do their thing, the dogs will be out in the yard which we never go in, and it will cut a third off the rent, so what the fuck huh? He mulled it over, she mulled it over, eventually he said what the hell and she decided to do it.
And ya know… the whole thing started off so uhm… positively? Prosperously? In my mind I was doing a friend a favor while helping out ourselves on a 3rd of the rent, and it was something I had done maybe a billion times before with no problems whatsoever.
So she packs all her stuff up and puts it in a U-haul, and drives out to Reno. She comes pulling up to the house on the scheduled day, and she had brought some guy along with her to drive the U-haul while she drove her truck. (Why she didn’t rent a fucking car trailer, I have no idea.) I didn’t think anything of the guy, I figured they‘d made the appropriate arrangements for him to get back to California, and him, Mac, and myself went about unloading her stuff. We carted all her stuff into the house, put stuff in their rooms, and put the leftover stuff in the garage all nice and neat. Nice guys, huh?
Initially, since the gate was too low and the dogs could jump over it, and since the garage didn’t have the kennel part in place, I agreed to TEMPORARILY allow the dogs in the house until she went to Home Depot. Temporarily, in my universe, means uhm… not permanent. I learned later that my universe and her universe weren’t quite the same.
After we moved all her stuff, the guy she brought with her stayed that night, and the next day (after cooking breakfast for everyone) I was kind of wondering what the plan with the guy was. Turns out… there was no plan? They didn’t arrange a plane ticket, rental car, or anything. He just got in the truck and went to Reno, with no discernable way to get home. So I was like… Uhhhh… well maybe it’s a good time to come up with a plan, no? Well they couldn’t even get a plan together, so I suggested a car rental. Well it turns out that neither of them could rent a car cuz they had no credit cards, and in the middle of all of this Meadow (another friend, ex-WSBN too) she was over at the house and she wound up offering to rent the car for them. MadCat and Meadow made the arrangements, and it was all done with the understanding that MadCat would, ya know… pay her back for the car rental once she got herself situated. (She never did pay her back.) Meadow rents the car, numbnuts guy leaves.
Over the next month, the chick never goes to Home Depot and we are stuck with her nastyassed dogs in the house, who are steadily annoying the shit out of us and tracking dirt all over the house, etc. Even worse, one of the dogs was like fucking brain damaged. He hated everyone but MadCat, he barked like a retard every time someone came in the room, and once he barked, then he like ran in fear slinking across the floor as if you were chasing him with a frying pan. Okay, maybe that doesn’t sound so terrible, but the fact that they stunk, were annoying, barked, tracked dirt everywhere, and generally annoyed the shit out of us began to add up as the weeks went by. And ya know, the whole thing could have been avoided if she just went to Home Depot and got the stuff like she agreed to do before she even moved in. It started off with friendly talks of, “Hey ya know… these dogs have got to go outside… are you going to Home Depot so we can get this done?”, which then escalated to “MadCat, listen, we can’t take these dogs anymore… you GOTTA go to Home Depot and get that stuff. They are trashing the house and making this suck, PLEASE get the lumber.” Until finally it got to the point where I got pissed off and said, “STOP PLAYING FUCKING TRIBES AND GO TO HOME DEPOT AND GET THESE FUCKING DOGS OUT OF MY HOUSE.” Finally, after like two episodes of me being pissed, she got the lumber, fixed the fence, I put up the kennel, and I threw those nasty motherfuckers out into the yard.
Around this time bills were due, and she paid up on her rent, but then a week later when the actual bills were due, she backpedaled and shifted around saying that she needed checks to clear, and this that and the other. Amazingly enough though, she managed to throw a birthday party for her kid, buying a coupla hundred dollars worth of stuff for her. Interesting, I thought… she welched on the agreement we made about her dogs, then turned around right afterwards and welched on the agreement we made about her bills. And you know… if the chick would have said, ”Fuck, my kid’s birthday is coming up… any way we can delay bills for a paycheck period so I can throw her a little party or something?”, Mac and I might have been able to help her out. But instead she didn’t say anything, bills are due, and she was flaking.
Great.
Welp time goes on a little bit, and the chick… she like… she just won’t compromise or stick to our original arrangement. Even though I built the damned kennel for them and she extended the fence, and even though my back yard was HUGE, she kept bringing those stinkyfuck dogs into the house, and we hated them. One of the dogs wasn’t a bad dog, but… he was a dog. Panting, drooling, tracking dirt everywhere, and it was just like “Dog, I like you, but get the fuck out of my house.” The other dog though, my god… I have never seen such a retard of an animal in my entire life. He was a fucking complete spazz, so much that even the Dog Whisperer would have a hard time with him. I dunno about anyone else, but waking up first thing in the morning, stumbling in the kitchen to get a cup of coffee or juice or something… and all of a sudden this fucking giant dog starts barking at you at the top of his lungs… ugh. It sucked. And again, it started with “MadCat… what the fuck? These dogs gotta go outside.” which over time escalated to “GET THESE FUCKING DOGS OUT OF HERE.” But every time she would come up with some weakassed excuse for why she had them in the house. Every day began to suck just having her there, it was like living with a fuckin troll. Blech.
So around this time tension is getting pretty bad. Mac ain’t diggin the arrangement any more than I am, and we’re both counting the days for the chick to disappear. We didn’t have much longer to go, and I began to address the subject of “So uhm… when are you movin?” But you know what she’d do? She’d avoid the question, and even better, she would avoid the question with the same tactic every time something touchy came up, like “why are you not paying your bills” or “why do you keep bringing the dogs in the house” or “when are you moving”. What she would do is use her daughter as a shield, and she would go “I don’t want to talk about this in front of my daughter.” That actually worked a coupla times, okay, I guess no sense in throwing any stress on the kid, but after the fourth and fifth time of her using the same excuse to not address an issue, it became obvious what she was doing. I called it “The Sammantha Shield”. (Her kid’s name was actually spelled wrong like that because she actually misspelled her own daughter’s name on the birth certificate! Trivia.) Finally it got to the point of “Well then you better send your kid off to her room or we need to go upstairs cuz this needs to be addressed right now.” At which point she would turn hostile, flip out, and avoid the subject another way.
It got pretty much steadily uglier as the days went by. It was probably the bleakest Christmas I have ever had, and to add to the bleakness, when bill time rolled around, hey guess what? She once again didn’t have any money cuz this time she spent her money on Christmas presents for her kid! So now she is two months behind in bills, plus she owes Meadow money for the car rental, and here I am barely scraping by myself (I was so broke I wanted to throw myself off a bridge, BUT I had enough to support myself), and this fucking idiot bitch is still letting her stinky dogs in all over the house… it was just awful. At this point, right after New Years, it reached the point of “Okay, you need to go, when are you leaving”, and she did her absolute best to avoid the subject, until eventually around January 7th the whole thing exploded.
She was already past the two-month mark, she had welched on every agreement we had made, she was two months behind in her bills, and it was time to go. But the chick wouldn’t address the issue. She would actually run out of the room and go lock herself in a bedroom to avoid the subject.
Then I found out that she did an end-around on me and called up my landlord, trying to get the lease put into her name. Since Rasta had moved like a year before the lease disappeared, and I didn’t think much of it and neither did the landlord. He was cool, laid back about it, so was I, and we didn’t pay it much mind. When I found out the conniving little cunt had tried to get the lease put in her name, I went ballistic. I spoke to the landlord and told him the whole situation and told him that I was going to have to evict this deadbeat retard and needed a lease to do it. That night I was giving her one last chance to MOVE, take your kid, take your dogs, and GO, but of course she did the usual run-around, and what wound up happening is I told her to get the hell out of the studio. I couldn’t even look at her haggard fucking face anymore without wanting to choke her with my bare hands. Well, she wouldn’t leave. She stood there with her arms crossed. So needless to say, I’m fucking steaming. I really, really, like really really really want to smash her fucking face to pieces. But I decide to walk out of the room instead of doing it, and I go to walk past her and she doesn’t move. She’s basically blocking the stairs, so I stick my arm out and move her dumb ass to the side, and what happens is, since she was standing there by the couch, the back of her legs hit the couch and she plops down onto her ass. I keep walking and go down the stairs, and she goes racing into her bedroom, then runs out and goes downstairs and gets on the phone, and I hear her on the phone with the police telling them that I just “tried to kill her” and that I “was choking her”.
I hear this, and I’m like Oh… my… fuckin… god… this is really getting rich. But I don’t say a fucking word. I let her make her phone call, wait til she hangs up, and I go “Ahem, pardon me” and take the phone and call the cops myself. I tell the operator, “Welp… this chick who lives here just called you with every lie imaginable, and so I’m calling you also cuz I know how these things work… if we both call the police I have a better leg to stand on.” Operator says yadda yadda, and I go outside, sit in the front of the house, and light up a cigarette.
About ten minutes later a cop car drives up, two guys get out and come sauntering over, and the older cop gives me the usual, “Good evening… what’s going on?” So I look at the guy and I’m kinda numbed out as to what to say, and I just go, “Welp… you guys came all the way out here… and there’s no way for me to give you the Cliff Notes version or the Reader’s Digest version… so I’m going to have to tell this whole story from the start.” And I did. And it took me damn near twenty minutes to do it. I told him everything, starting from the point where I offered to let her stay in my place when she was still living in California.
The cop listens to me, says okay, he’s gonna go inside and talk to the scumbag, and I wait outside. He goes inside and then he and his partner have a talk, then he comes out. And now I’m like “Arg… here it goes… I’m either going to jail or getting off the hook”, and the cop says, “Well… she says you tried to kill her and tried to choke her. And her neck is all red.” I look at the cop, and I think for a second, and I tell him this, “Okay… it took you ten minutes to get here, and you and I have been outside talking for another twenty. If her neck is STILL red from me choking her so badly, why didn’t she run screaming for her life from the house? I mean if someone was trying to kill me or had choked me that badly, that’s what I’d do?” The cops stop a second and go, “Yea I see your point.” We talk a few minutes more and I tell the cops point blank – what she’s doing is she’s panicking because she wore out her welcome so badly that now she’s shitting her pants because she is getting thrown out into the street in the middle of winter.” The cop tells me this – “Well… I’m not taking anyone to jail, but I have to tell her the same thing I’m going to tell you. What you need to do is go down and get a protection order against her and have her removed from the house by the court. I’m going to have to tell her the same thing because it’s my job, so I suggest you go down there at 8am as soon as the office opens and beat her to it.”
Welp… roger that says I, and I do what he says. I go down there at 8am sharp, (feeling like a complete idiot too by the way) and I start talking to the ladies there, and I tell them the entire story just like I told the cop. The girls all make me write out a statement, and then a few minutes later, in comes the scumbag. The ladies move me over to another room to keep us separated, and about a half hour later one of them come back to where I am and she goes, “Well she was here… and she didn’t play very nice with us.” I asked something like “WTF does that mean?” and the lady tells me, “She has a very bad attitude, but… we do have a job to do and have to take her statement, and we will put you in for an emergency hearing so this can get resolved today.” I say “okay cool” thinking I got the thing locked up, and after waiting for what seemed like forever we get in before a judge. The judge asks what is going on, and I tell her the whole story too (3rd time!). Then she asks scumbag what her deal was, and she basically piled on the crocodile tears, made her lip quiver, and went on about how I tried to choke her to death, and how horrible I was, and how scared she was for her daughter, the whole victim story. Meanwhile I’m sitting there going damn, this bitch has no bottom, ya know? So she says her thing, and I tell the judge, “Your honor, my roommate is sitting outside in the hall, and he was in the room when all of this happened, and he will tell you that she is making up that entire story.” Well the judge wants to know what the deal with the house is, who is on the lease, bills, etc. I tell her I don’t have a lease but I can EASILY return to court with a lease in my name, and all the bills are in my name, and uhm… IT’S MY PLACE, all she was is a guest! And this is where things went off into the twilight zone.
After much quibbling back and forth between me, the judge, and the scumbag, the judge finally goes, ”Mr. Acevedo, are you in fear of this woman?”, and I go something like…. Uhhhh…. Well… I don’t know, I mean I’m a grown man… I’m in fear of grizzly bears and sharks and stuff… I’m afraid of what she’s going to do NEXT, yeah?” Then she turns to the Scumbag and goes, ”Ms. Scumbag, are you afraid of this man?” and she breaks out the quivering lip and the crocodile tears again and goes, ”Yes! I’m in fear for my life, he is going to kill me and my daughter!” At this point I actually laughed out loud cuz… well damn man… it was ridiculous! Then the judge goes, ”Mr. Acevedo, until you show the court that you are the legal resident of the house by providing a lease, you are ordered to vacate the premises and….” and that point her voice basically turned into a blur of words cuz I couldn’t believe what the fuck I was hearing. Not only did I have to leave my own place, but I could only take specific things from it, I couldn’t disconnect any utilities, and I was only being allowed back in one time under police escort in my own house. At this point, I laughed again, because… well… it was fucking ridiculous. I could not believe that it was even possible for something so fucked up and retarded to occur. The judge didn’t take to me laughing though, and she threatened me with contempt of court. I shrugged and walked out the courtroom, telling Mac, “Dude, you aint gonna fuckin believe this one…”
Welp, I walked out the courtroom over to the office where the ladies who took my statement were, and I asked them basically, “Hey uh… what in the fuck just happened?” and they are tripping too. One of the girls says “I’ll be right back” and goes off, and apparently she went to talk to the judge. When she gets back she says, “The judge is concerned about the little girl being homeless. If you come back with a lease she will reverse the order.” Okay fucking fine, I say. And I march out of the place and over to my landlords, where we draw up a lease. Then after that, I had to call the police just to get back into my own fucking house, and I collect my stuff and head over to BigDawg’s new place.
The next day, I go down to the courthouse and file an “appeal”, thinking that I will be heard that day, new lease and all. Well, turns out, they wont hear my appeal for a fucking WEEK. So for a week I’m stuck on BigDawg’s couch, getting daily phone updates from Mac. Finally like a week and a half goes by, I go in with my lease, and the scumbag is there too (cuz they served her a subpoena to appear), and I tell the judge I have the lease in my name. Well, the lying sack of shit of a judge (who said she would reverse the order if I showed up with a lease) she looks the lease over, and instead of reversing the order on the spot, she goes, “Ms. Scumbag, how long do you need to vacate the house?” I went WHAT?!?!? How long does she NEED? WHO GIVES A FUCK HOW LONG SHE NEEDS?? GET THE FUCK OUTTA MY HOUSE!! But the scumbag of course piles on the sob stories about how she doesn’t have any money, and blah blah. So the judge gives her like two weeks to leave, but I’m not having it. I storm out of the courtroom, march downstairs, walk up to the administration desk, and file for eviction on the spot. The whole eviction process took a day or two, and then once she was served eviction papers, she had five days to vacate the premises. She gets served, and her “omg Im so broke Im helpless judge please don’t do this to me” ass manages to vacate the house in three days, put her stuff into a mini storage, and go live in a trailer. (Yes, I said a trailer.)
And of course, on the way out, she stole a bunch of my stuff, including a tool chest full of stuff, my wrought iron bench, etc. Cuz hey, it was all my fault, and of course I deserved to get robbed on top of it all too.
So once the scumbag was out of the house, and Mac stopped saying ”I told you I didn’t wanna live with that bitch!”, we tried settling down to normal life again. And that’s when the real bomb came.
Since I had been gone the whole time (almost the whole month of January), the scumbag of course was hiding all the bills that came to the house, so I didn’t know what was past due or anything else. Combined with the fact that I was juggling bills cuz SHE WASN’T PAYING ANY OF THEM the whole time she was there, some were already overdue. My own stupid fault for not checking the status of them all, but what wound up happening is that one day the water was off. Arrgg, says I, okay, need to go pay water bill I guess, heh. So I go to pay the water bill, which should have been like a hundred bucks max, and the bill is FOURTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS. That’s right, $1400.
I’m freaking out. How is that possible, I ask?? They tell me, “well, you must have a leak”. So I get a plumber out there and they tell me, “nope, no leaks.” I go back to the water company and Im like dude, your meter is broken or something, 1400 is INSANE. But they wont budge. I actually sat down and calculated how much water they claimed we used, and I forget the gallon amount, but it would have filled a pool 120 feet long, 40 feet wide, and ten feet deep. I asked the water company… so… do ya think we might notice a leak like that?? “Maybe it’s underground” they say.
So, in absolute panic mode, I bailed on the house. I told the landlord fuckit, the place is cursed, and it’s time to move on. He said okay and let me go on my way.
Moral to the story:
I’m too good-hearted for my own good sometimes.
Cliffs:
Yea right.
