After last week’s post highlighting the altogether pleasant reality of my family life, something that is in no small way heightened by the fact that we all currently live under one roof together (albeit in self contained abodes separated by a sturdy door and a long hallway) I got to thinking about how my folks actually measure up against some of my other previous, non blood related, flatmates.
These recollections may have also been subconsciously inspired by reading Scott’s mooch musings the other day, because, like him, I have lived in some special places in my time, and with special places, comes Special People.
If this were an awards ceremony the judges would be hard pressed to name who would take the prize of the Most Special Flatmate, but lets have a look who is in the running anyway.
The Nominees are:
Lady Berko – so named due to her well known tendency to be, well, off her fuckin’ rocker, enters the race on account of two stand out flatmate performances.
The first was when Berko, a self declared political lesbian and general all round hardcore radical activist, once came home, burst through our other flatmate’s bedroom door – an upstairs bedroom in which we all sheltered to escape the rising tide of the filth from the rooms below, reasoning that we could always hurl ourselves out of the top window if it ever came time to ‘jump ship’ – and declared, with no small amount of incredulity, that her mother didn’t agree with her claim that “all heterosexual sex is rape”.
As her frame filled the doorway and a heavy silence descended on the room, her face broke open in a cackle and with crazed eyes twirling around in concentric circles, she demanded to know if “we could, like, fucking believe it?”
The answer, obviously, was, no, no we couldn’t believe it. But we were mostly answering in relation to could we believe that just as we were all lounging around on beds and cushions, smoking joints and having inconsequential discussions about how best to clamber out the window come the high filth tide, that someone would burst through the door and lay claims that, for the straight ones amongst us, our sex lives amounted to nothing more than filthy violations.
Lady Berko’s other famous flatmate moment came from the stroke of genius she had in building a ‘compost’ directly outside our kitchen window.
“Its great!” she exclaimed, while demonstrating by lobbing food straight out the window onto a pile of exposed and rotting garbage below, “it means we don’t even have to go outside to empty the compost”, she beamed.
Lady Berko was the Environment Officer of our University Student Council in those days, so she really knew a thing or two about the beauty of waste reduction. Strangely, she never could get the same practice to take off on campus, despite threatening to ‘lock on’ to a garbage bin in protest….
Boy Dazzler – is a stand out nominee if only for being the sole flatmate I ever lived with to do sex work, inside the house.
Boy Dazzler would bring his seedy Sugar Daddy home, to what was yet another dogmatic, radical, politicised house with the kind of righteous and authoritarian air that discouraged you from ever wanting to point out the psychologically disturbing nature of a relationship between a sleazy older man cuming around to pay for sex with a gorgeous young Asian boy in a room decorated with a large floor-to-ceiling jungle themed motif featuring a huge lion face as the central image (a left over feature from the previous tenants, and one that Boy Dazzler agreed to live with on the condition that he pay cheaper rent for his room) for fear that you would be labelled, ‘conservative’, or worse, ‘a sexist, racist, disempowering sellout…’
In a reversal of the situation outlined in Lady Berko’s house, Boy Dazzler also had to bail out to escape the overflowing rot of a room, but in this case it was his bedroom that he had to flee from, causing him to take up permanent residence in the loungeroom. By this point, thankfully for the comfort of our (strictly non commercial) TV viewing lives, the sex work had stopped.
Dopey Dave – would probably be bringing up the tail end of the nomination race, not because he was any better than the rest, but just because we was slow in general.
Dopey Dave was the kind of flatmate that just became a permanent fixture of the house, you could return home day or night, and find him exactly how you left him, which was usually draped over a couch looking like a stroke victim.
Bleary eyed and bearded, when not clinging to the couch like a rotting crust of pizza, he could be seen drifting around from one room to another, his body huddled under an old blanket he had fashioned into a poncho and his head huddled under a thick plume of pot smoke.
But his place in the race has been earned by his famed understanding of ‘polygamy’ to be that of a wonderfully, radical, philosophical idea that perfectly excused his tendency to sleep around with numerous women at the same time, and not tell any of them.
And additionally, for his laughable but loveable tendency to whip out his old acoustic guitar, no matter what the occasion, so long as it involved the usual mob of radical-pinko-lefties, and start crooning, eyes closed and forehead creased: Don’t ya know, we’re talkin bout a revolution…
The Glitterati Priestess – would no doubt be spiritually opposed to the notion of competition, but finds herself in the running anyway on account of making me so uncomfortable in her presence that I would opt to join Boy Dazzler and his Sugar Daddy in the jungle room, if forced to choose.
The Glitterati Priestess lived in a house that I moved into after travelling around the hippie heartland of Tasmania. I was lured in by the huge block of land and the wonderful permaculture garden out back, which in hindsight, given it occupied the entire space of the backyard leaving not so much as a square inch to sit down in, should have been my first clue that this puritan household had no place for pleasure.
When I turned up with my things, I discovered my room had been covered in glitter and the tiny little shiny stars that children use to decorate drawings with. Noticing my surprise, GP stopped by my doorway and cheerfully explained that she had cleansed my room for me. Given I had always thought cleansed was derived from the word clean, and my room looked like a clown had spewed in it, I remained confused, thus earning my first strike from the GP.
The second came when I stood around in the kitchen picking at food (post early morning chiming of meditation bells) and the GP accosted me and asked, ‘if I had any problems being around her?’ because, as she had astutely noticed, I tend to fidget a lot. ‘Even now’, she went on, ‘I can just tell from your body language that you are so uncomfortable….’
It wasn’t long before my discomfort really got in the way of things, because while I was more than understanding about the request to smoke my joints outside rather than inside this puritan house, when it was hinted at that I should do the same when drinking a beer of an evening, I couldn’t pack my bags fast enough…
Blues Band Bad Boys – stand for this nomination collectively, which may seem unfair against the other individual competitors, and it is. The other thing working in the favour is that they were all 20 years old, which is a huge advantage when it comes to being a Special Person.
We were in our 30s by the time we lived with these boys, but still liked to ‘keep in real’ and dabble in living on the wild side with the hip young’s things, which is just another way of saying we were aimless and poor.
We were living out of our van in Manchester at the time and desperate to find at house as we headed into a bitterly cold winter. The sprawling old mansion on the outskirts of town seemed perfect, if by perfect you mean awful but affordable, and it even had the added bonus of coming complete with its own blues band! It was a shock, to say the least, that our van would prove to be not only the cleaner of the two ‘houses’, but also the warmer.
The boys are obvious front runners in this race for all the predictable 20 year old flatmate reasons of not knowing how to wash a dish, pay a bill or remove any rubbish, but their stellar performance was the huge house party they threw, on a Wednesday night, at 2am in the morning.
In somewhat of a twist on the usual take of having a house party, this party didn’t start at the house, and didn’t really involve anyone else that lived in the house. So as the rest of the house lay quietly sleeping the BBBB stormed home with the entire pub’s patrons in tow, and a few other hundred people they dragged along the way, and ‘got busy with it’.
When I had to get up to go to the toilet I was forced to clamber over people’s sprawling bodies just to make my way down the stairs, I started huffing and puffing and hurling expletives left, right and centre, which earned me the attention of one of the BBBB, who then followed me back up to my bedroom, bursting through the door into our darkened room, E’ing off his face and brandishing a Freddo Frog as a ‘peace offering’. You might be able to guess where that ended up….
*
Which brings us to the end of the nominations, but before we leave, I would just like to add, that for all of these shockers, I have had double the number of good and loving flatmate experiences, and it is in fact how I met The Yang, in one of the most awesome communal houses I have ever lived in….
*snort* that’s some fun reading, and makes most of my university-years flatmates seem tame. except Lady Berko reminds me a lot of Rhonda, the short, library-science major, who was a whip brandishing lesbian. on a whim she went out one weekend and bought a sousaphone from a pawn shop…. she liked me a bunch. i moved the next year.
Thanks daisyfae, it was fun to reminisce about these ‘characters’. I like the sound of this Rhonda character too, so long as I dont have to live with her!
A reminder once again why i never want to live in share housing ever again… Thankyou Ruby Two Shoes.
I am glad to be of assistance JJ, not that it sounds like you need much reminding. Would love to hear of some of the special people you lived with one day!
As a lifelong heterosexual rapist and an occasional 2 am partier, I too have had some experience with less than desirable roommates, none of which would top the incredibly horrifying stories found here, all of which I laughed at.
There have always been those who can’t pay the bills, despite postive parental divorce settlements or quickly evaporating trust funds.
There are those who tend to think that paying 1/3 of the rent allows them to invite everyone they know (+ 1 or 2 guests apiece) back to your shared place to make loud noises and do drugs, despite your pointing out that you share a common wall with the apartment management.
And then there are the roommates who burn you out on music you used to like by being 1.) reprehensible human beings and 2.) playing the same stuff all the goddamn time.
Goodbye, Sugar/Bob Mould/Husker Du and Smashing Pumpkins. I’ll never enjoy your work again, thanks to Asshole #1.
Haha its true, there is some music from those days I could easily never hear again, even Dopey Dave tested my Tracy Chapman limits. Luckily I can still appreciate the fine woman, albeit never without the strong visual overtones of DD’s renditions…
I’m happy to hear you had a laugh with these, it was a little lengthy, but I was enjoying the recollections far to much to cut it back, but knowing I kept an ‘occasional 2am partier’ entertained without any artificial stimulants makes me feel proud. Thanks CLT
a reminder that with old age comes the joy of NOT having to share your house! Thanks Ruby, you gave me a few giggles and brought back a few memories with this witty blog.
Thanks Kirsty, it was a fun trip down memory lane for me too. Surprisingly, even after experiences like this, I still like the idea of sharehousing. I hope to return to it one day (outside my current familial sharehouse) although I admit i daydream about this happening in a way that involves fairly self contained dwellings somehow sharing a few communal spaces, that would be ideal to me….
Is Berko another word for crazy in Oz? I would have to concede the point to Lady Berko that all heterosexual animal sex is rape. This is the first time I’ve ever seen animals going at it this much and even though the females do at times seem to be asking for it, in the end I’d have to side with the prosecution. If it came to that I mean. And who could believe that the compost heap idea wouldn’t catch on? Or bring a gaggle of hungry carrion feeders to campus?
I’ve enjoyed this post tremendously Ruby, both for the remarkably entertaining content and for the amazing(ly real) characters themselves. Other than Berka, and I guess Boy Dazzler, I have known and perhaps even loved most of these people, although in other incarnations. But especially Dopey Dave. Dave has had many names and many faces, and I’ve loved them all.
And thanks for the shout out!
Hey Scott I dont think the shout out is really going to extend out to anyone that doesn’t already read your blog anyway – but you are most welcome!
Yes, berko is an Aussie word for crazy, I love it. Its kind of onomatopoeic don’t ya reckon?!
I think we all have so many colourful characters in our history, so I can understand you knowing, and loving, some incantation of a few of these – in particular the Dopey Daves of the world. In fact when The Yang read this post, one of the first things he said was ‘everyone knows a Dopey Dave’. The other was that I was shit-hot awesome, obviously.
Many thanks for the kind comment Scott (prosecution siding aside!) I am happy to know you were entertained
After Lord Google kindly directed me to wiki dici, I can confidently agree that yes, berko is in fact an onomatopoeic word. Now you have expanded my vocabulary as well as entertaining me today!
I could probably stomach them all on a short term basis except for the Glitterati Priestess. Was she a smudging crystal owning aura reader as well?
Haha yes, yes she was! I forgot to include the part about where, perhaps in a bid to help me overcome my twitchy discomfort, she invited me to ‘come view her crystal collection’….
Thanks to you, “Berko” is my new safeword!
IMHO, all of these flatmates deserve an award. Each of them special in their own way. I think the Glitterati Priestess would have driven me over the edge, though. I mean, at least the other ones had enough crazy in them to be somewhat interesting. But when your only talent is preaching and “being sparkly”, you’re pretty much screwed.
Haha, in a way I think that too Bschooled, because while I remember the GP and penchant for spraying me with glitter and causing me general discomfort, she is otherwise largely forgettable, whereas all the others have a soft spot somewhere in my heart, and in most cases I still have some degree of contact or knowledge of where they are at today. That said, they are still Special People, and having a soft spot for Special People is one thing – living with them is another!
.. I am glad we were never flatties RTS… I rekon we would have punched on.. thats how i like to settle things with dodgey flatties… a nice knuckle sandwich.. problem solved…
Thats funny s-wise. Very funny. I did in fact think of you and yr knuckle sandwich solutions when writing this one. But I’d like to think that we would have resolved any flatmate differences – say, for example, a disagreement about certain *fumes* I could smell in my bedroom that started to make me too sick to attend to my library duties the next day – by sitting down and smoking a big fat one from the killer harvest you cultivated under the house
[…] in the sort of situations the rest of us are glad to be only reading about. Whether it’s dealing with a “revolutionary” roommate who’s declared that “all heterosexual sex is rape,” or warring with various […]