In August of 1989 a Sigma Alpha Mu little sister named Andrea and I signed a one-year
lease to an apartment on the corner of Coventry and Euclid Heights, namely apartment number one on the first floor should
you live near Cleveland and happen to drive by. We'd been looking for a place to live together since March or so after
she caught me in a moment of weekness, or should I say, "weedness".
I was at the the Sigma Alpha Mu house one night during a party and had come up the
steps with my boyfriend Joe when we ran into this thin, drawn-out pale chick hugging onto a cute blond dude with a ruddy complexion
and funny teeth.
"Hey! I know you! You're Joe's girlfriend......" she slathered. As beer
slopped out of the cup to her right, she continued with the conversation, and being the pushover I was at the time, I listened.
Her name was Andrea, she was a junior, her boyfriend Dan was a freshman, and she knew who I was. Yes, that's my name,
no, I wasn't here last last semester, yes, I was excited about the summer, etcetera. Her bangs bobbled up and down as
she shook her head to my answers, smacking against a sallow complexion that was either the result of heritage
or not enough sun, which is possible in Cleveland in the spring. A bunch of us were night owls.
Over the next couple of weeks Andrea talked to me more and more and it couldn't have
pissed Joe off to a greater degree. "She's a bitch. Don't bother with her. Besides, she drives me nuts.
What the hell is Dan thinking?"
"Joe, he's a freshman, and she's a junior and I bet they're having lots of sex.
And she doesn't seem all that bad. What the hell's your problem?" Boy, was I stupid.
We hung out from time to time during the summer; she would pop in during our smoking
sessions and routinely killed the buzz that we had paid about 40 bucks a quarter ounce to achieve. Still, this didn't
seem like such a big deal to me. If the other brothers (we were living at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house as I was an
SAE little sister) didn't like her, it didn't mean we couldn't be friends. I mean, they were a pretty tough crowd in
ways. Basically at the SAE house, if you were cute then you could be a bit of a bitch and still be invited in to smokey
a little dopey from the house bong, Lucy Patty, at which point Ari or Rich would carve a little nick into her base to
signify you were one more of the ranks Lucy had entertained. I loved that bong.
I think she ended
up falling out a window one night. I cannot remember (irony) the exacts of her demise, but I do remember that
she was a grand yellow lady, duel carbed and chambered and was the perfect hostess while she was alive.
Andrea wasn't exactly pretty. OK, she was homely, but she had a great rack and was thin, so I'm sure Dan didn't mind.
We ended up renting the apartment by a stroke of luck; 2 SAE brothers were moving
out and we just happened to run into them a week or so before they moved. The timing was ideal and the location was
even better. Our new digs were located right across the street from Arabica coffee house, the most popular
place for hippies on Coventry to frequent, and was within walking distance of all the good thing on the street. However,
it was a rather long walk to my job at the hospital. This sadly didn't last to be a problem as I lost that job in an
error of judgment that will forever haunt me and was one of the main reasons that I am an animal rights activist, but that's
another story. This story is basically about what a shit Andrea must have been to hurt my cat and that racial stereotypes
are awful things to encounter.
I moved in at the end of August, thus missing the first month of our lease.
She wasted no time in asserting her dominance in the apartment, which should have been a huge red flag to me.
Huge. She took the biggest room, demanded that I pay for half the utilities for August even though I hadn't been there,
and horded her groceries with the grace of a starving rabid water buffalo. But when I brought Replay into the apartment,
the red flag turned into a circus tent, one that covered the entire building.
"That cat needs to stay in your room, and I'm sick of you smoking in here.
I'm allergic to smoke."
"That's stupid. Why should she stay in my room?"
"Because I don't want cat hair on all my things."
"Well, that'll be easy to fix. All the furniture is mine, so just close your
door."
This did not sit well with her, as it made sense and solved the problem without her
getting her way. I began to see a pattern.
Every time she wanted something, she got it.
As the first months dragged on, our friendship crumbled into a deep-seated resentment,
seething and breathing like a living thing unto itself that manifested every time Andrea might actually be inconvenienced.
Well, she must not have been so concerned with animal hair because she immediately
brought home 2 black cats after Replay showed up. I would come home from work to find Replay locked in my room while
her cats wandered all over the apartment.
This culminated into a rather big blow out the night I came home and caught her kicking
Replay across the length of the hall.
Leading up to it were a few incidences that show how spoiled she really
was. When she had her cats declawed, I found them locked in our bathroom laying on my towels. Bleeding
on my towels while hers were hung up on the towel rack, far from the Jackson Pollock homage being drawn out by Yin and Yang
below. Can you believe that?
When she came home, I got in her face about it. "What the hell, Andrea?
Do you have one reason that you couldn't use your own towels?" She just gave me that blank look that I was beginning
to hate, really really hate. Her mouth hung open a bit while I could almost see her trying to think of a good reason
why she had used my towels, the cogs and wheels in her big head turning, only to kick out something like 'why not? why
shouldn't I be able to do what I want?'.
"You can wash them now." Then, I threw them in her room.
We didn't speak for a few days.
When we found fleas in the apartment, she immediately blamed them on Replay, who,
I remind you, was born in a lab. She never had a single microbe on her in her life. When I reminded Andrea of
this, she again gave me that blank stare as if to say "that's true and you're right of course, but I cannot be inconvenienced
with fleas or having to clean up my own messes so therefore I am going to blame you anyway".
Over the fall, Dan broke up with her (smart boy) and the fleas got worse. She
continued to bitch about smoke even though I caught her smoking dope in her room with a new boyfriend, Jeremy. Jeremy
looked like Matthew Lambortheaux from Little House on the Prairie, a physical step up from Dan but four to five steps down
on the evolutionary scale and lacking in the testicles department, just how Andrea liked them. Let's just say
he was pretty and be done with it. She bought forty dollars of groceries once and tried to make me pay for half
of them even though I didn't want them. Uh, no. She refused to give Joe a key to the apartment because he didn't
pay rent, but she gave Dan one. We found this out one Sunday morning that Joe and I stayed over at his SAM room.
The phone rang....."Hello?"
"It's Andie. I need you to come and let me out of my room. I locked myself
in and can't get the windows open. Come now."
"Andrea, that's a 2 mile walk and it's drizzling. If you want me to come get
you, send a cab. I"m not walking 2 miles in the rain and I told you to make copies of the keys."
"Wait, don't worry, I forgot Dan has one."
This is when the 2 ton lead ball thudded into the conversation.
"What did you just say?"
"Uh, never mind...."*click* and the phone went dead.
What a bitch. Dan wasn't paying rent, but she went out and gave him a key anyway.
Of course, this only lead up to the flea incident.
After she tried to get me to buy groceries that I didn't want, the atmosphere in
the house deteriorated into one of her nit-picking every price, every single thing purchased for the house, to the point that
she didn't want me cleaning the bathroom so much because she bought the cleaner. So you can imagine how she balked when
I put my foot down about whose cats brought the fleas into our home.
"Look, goddamit," I can imagine I was slurring quite a bit. I remember this
particular conversation happening shortly after I discovered Yukon Jack...."Reply couldn't have brought fleas into
the fucking apartment because she came FROM A FUCKING LAB YOU ASSHOLE. Tell me how she brough home fleas from
a lab, especially since they didn't show up until you brought THEM home?" I pointed to her black cats curled up on her
bed. Those little shits. Have you ever seen The Lady and the Tramp? Those cats, oh, I'll tell you, they
might have been black but they were Siamese-if-you-please in spirit. I swear.
They were as mean as their owner. They ganged up on Replay until she got bigger,
and then Replay beat the shit out of them, which might be why I caught fucking Andrea kicking her one night. This cat,
after all, is the same one who my dad would have to take off the van top sometimes over 50 yards down the street because she
was fearless. If a one ton moving object didn't scare her or the fact that she was lying on it as it picked up speed,
do you think 2 gangly black cats did? Hell no.
Replay rectified the abuse of power as soon as she got big enough.
Until then, though, they tormented her, just like Andrea. Oh, I digress.
The fleas.
I continued, "You brought them here, so you're going to clean them up, or I'm going
to tell Ken." Ken was our landlord, a quite, married man with a nice wife and a little boy. Ken looked like every
short, dark-haired guy with extreme Myopia you've ever seen. That magnified goggle look dominated his appearance as
it did to so many people in the age of "big ass Andy Warhol glasses". I wasn't sad to see that look go by the wayside,
were you?
"Fine" she caved, "I'll get flea bombs this weekend." Yeah, my ass.
I came home that weekend after a work shift, kicked off my shoes, and had a smoke
just to irritate her. She came into the livingroom and said, "You owe me 15 dollars. The bombs were 30 bucks."
"What the hell are you talking about? You brought the fleas here, why should
I kick in for them?"
"We share the expenses."
"Bullshit, we share the expenses when it happens to be your bill."
She regarded me for a moment, and then I think it hit her I wasn't budging.
Her chest puffed out, Jeremy hung around the corner of the hallway, afraid to step out (the only smart thing I ever saw him
do was stay out of our arguements), and then I pulled out my ace card. "OK, whatever, just show me the bombs you threw
out and the receipt and we'll talk." I leaned back and grinned because we both knew she never threw out the trash.
(Here was her idea of throwing out the trash. When it was her turn, she'd wait
until it was time for her to leave for class or to some other bullshit errand of which she was desperately late, and then
she'd call to me at the last moment, "I don't have enough hands to get the trash...." and I would find the trash in a bag
by the front door. If she came home, there were times she wouldn't even take it out but instead leave it by the door
or move it back to the kitchen, of course until I started putting it in her room. Then she'd throw it out and tell me
how wrong it was that I had the nerve to put trash in her room when she couldn't take everything out at once. "Did taking
two trips ever occur to you?" I asked her one night after a particularly-nasty garbage arguement, "Or would that be too simple
of a solution?")
"I threw the bombs out."
"OK, then just go get them out of the trash."
"I took the trash out."
"You're lying. You never take the trash out" I declared and went to the kitchen
where I found a can of Raid, one 12-ounce can of Raid spray, not a few flea bombs, not even one bomb, and more than that,
a receipt for a can of Raid priced at sometime like $1.87 from the Phar More down the street. I reached into my waiter's
apron and pulled out a dollar in quarters, handed it to her with the cannister and the receipt and said, "Keep the change."
That was the last attempt she made to do shit about the fleas. They got worse.
Her response was to move out. For a month or so, she harrangued me about finding a roomate and that she shouldn't have
to pay any bills because she was spending all her time at Jeremy's. You notice that her "we split the utilities if you're
here or not" went by the wayside. When I reminded her that she had to give me a 30 day notice before she was off the
hook for any bills at the address, she showed her true, true self. "I'm not paying anything because I shouldn't have
to."
So, she moved out leaving me with bills and no roommate and fleas. I could
consider the fleas roommates, but they didn't pay rent.
I almost killed Replay trying to fix the flea situation. I used powders, collars,
caustic dips, and flea bombs, but we never could get rid of them. She tore out a small patch of hair at the base of
her tail out of nervousnous. Poor girl. She foamed at the mouth when I tried to dip her, and the powders had the
same affect. The bombs didn't work. It never occurred to me how bad fleas could get.
Weeks after I moved to Pennsylvania the following September, I came into my new apartment
and was attacked by a new batch that had hatched from eggs apparently laid in my couch and chair. I powdered the shit
out of the furniture and spent the next week at my parents, and never saw another flea. Replay got a big bath from my
parents, moved in with them, and they disappeared altogether. I think my dad sprayed the lawn or something. Maybe
it was the damp atmosphere in Cleveland that allowed them to survive so many chemical attacks, because when we moved to Pennsylvania
in the dry fall, they could not survive. I'll never know for sure.
What I do know is that these fleas brought out my roommate's true nature, being that
she was a selfish, money-oriented brat who used people and was immoral enough to leave others with her debts and messes.
The way she handled having to be responsible for the mess she brought into our apartment was to first attempt to decieve me
into giving her money and then to move. And when she moved, it only got weirder.
Andrea stopped living in the apartment around the beginning of November, spending
more time at Jeremy's until she only came home to get clothes and shower. She gave me the 30 day notice around the beginning
of December that she would not be paying the January rent and expected to be off the utilities then, which was fine because
Joe took her bedroom and began to pay rent at that point. However, she stopped paying utilities in November, and our
gas got turned off.
Newsflash, Cleveland is cold in the winter. Real cold. Our gas got turned
off in December because she refused to pay her half of it. She also refused to pay her half of the phone and the electricity.
The phone and the electricty were in my name, the gas was in hers. The first morning I took a freezing cold shower and
had to use a hair dryer to warm up the bathroom was the last straw. That bitch, I steamed. If she isn't paying
the last 2 months of the bills, fuck it. I'm not paying the gas bill at all.
I sat down and added up her half of the bills and deducted it from the gas bill. That
not only nullified the gas bill but left her still owing me something like 37 dollars. Therefore, I left the gas bill to
sit unpaid while it accrued late fee after late fee, and never had hot water in the apartment again. She never
bothered to take the gas out of her name.
Sometime in February Andrea came into Turkey Ridge with Jeremy and the information
that her daddy was getting involved because the gas bill had affected her credit and the ability for her to rent
her own apartment. I think Daddy was a lawyer, and in my opinion, a cheesy white boy.
I'd met him the preceding summer when I accompanied Andrea during a trip to her home
town.
He had left Andrea's mom, a bitter, older, and grumpier version of Andrea, right
down to Chinese take out in her fridge, and had married a pretty, trophy-wife sort of person. When
we visited them, Dan, Andrea, and myself, during a trip to his home in the burbs while were in New Jersey, I was
lucky enough to sit with him and his new wife while they played Bette Midler's "Wind Beneath My Wings" over and over and OVER
on his new cd player while they cuddled on the couch looking every inch like the sickeningly-sweet, cloying duo they were.
For over an hour I got to listen to Bette croon about her goddamned appendages until mercifully we left. Daddy
was your usual 40-something "I'm having a midlife crisis so I'm upgrading EVERYTHING!" kind of guy. Gives a nice
feel to thumbscrews.
Well, Daddy apparently was going to come into town to talk with me.
"Outstanding!" I announced while I counted some tips, "Then we can finally talk about the money you owe me"
"I don't owe you anything. You never paid the gas bill and since he was the
co-signer on our apartment, he got a notice from a collection agency."
It was then that my diligence paid off. Since October I'd been keeping track
of the bills and her unpaid halves of them in a notebook that I just so happened to have in my backpack at that specific
moment. With a great deal of internal satisfaction, I handed it over and told her "Call Daddy and make
sure to tell him that you still owe me 37 dollars (or something like it) after I took all these unpaid bills out of the gas
bill total, the only thing left in your name, and the only thing that you seem to want to discuss, interestingly enough."
She looked over the numbers with Jeremy while I delivered a drink to a local. When I returned, she started some stupid
arguement about her not being there, and I reminded her about August when I wasn't there. I told her that Daddy
could call me at any time and I'd gladly explain how she left me with fleas, too. And that I had caught her
kicking a 6 pound cat when she wasn't expecting me to come through the door.
It was the last time I heard from her.
I never did get the 37 dollars, but it was worth it nonetheless to watch her stammer
and falter while trying to explain why she didn't have pay any of the utilities for November and December even though the
law said otherwise. Of course it wasn't my greatest moment either, because it was at this point I called her a "Jewish
American Princess" and asked her what pennies sounded like when they scream from being pinched so hard. She gave me
that usual pinched face of disgust and left shaking her head.
It was the first time I'd seen her since the cat-kicking incident and she was lucky
I didn't beat the shit out of her after she left the bar. She was officially out of the apartment in January, but she
still came around and wouldn't give her spare key back. I had talked to Ken about changing the locks, and he refused
because we weren't supposed to make copies. My mom changed that in one phone call.
I had opened the door quietly one evening to a sickening fleshy sound of something
hard hitting something soft, and as I peered around the door, I caught her, that hurtful bitch, with her foot out and
with Replay cowering about 3 feet away from her. If you've ever seen a case of cruelty to animals and love them, then
I don't to have to explain the anger I felt. But if you've never seen one of your pets injured, then I can't
explain the frustration, the helplessness, and the complete rage that surged within my chest, quickly filling me up to the
top of my head at the sight of my cat terrified and hurt because I hadn't been there.
I outweighed Andrea by about 30 pounds and was not as slight in build. I have
a booty, and when it's motivated, it's not to be taken lightly. She must have immediately sensed this because
the look on her face spoke volumes of shock and fear; I took after her in a long, angry strides yelling as I did so, "What
the fuck?! What's wrong with you? I ought to kick your ass right now!" She was such a despicable hag that
she tried to deny what I'd caught her doing.
"If I catch you in here ever again, or if I suspect that you've hurt her, I will
call the Cleveland ASPCA and press charges. I'll make sure they take your cats away and what you did is printed in the
newspaper." I was so mad I can't explain how mad I was. I was shaking. And so was she. She backed
into her room to get the last things she had and left.
At that point I burst into tears and called my parents. The next day my mom
called Ken and told him if anything happened to my cat that she would call HER lawyer, so he better change the locks NOW.
I guess even nice guys like Ken took whatever lazy liberties they could with college kids, such as not changing a lock.
The lock was changed the very next day. I took the rest of whatever she left and tossed it in the trash.
Looking back on this experience, I realize that I wasn't the best roommate either.
I nibbled on her Chinese take out from time to time and Joe ate her Cup o' Noodles without guilt (while I did not approve
of his unapproved grazing, it was Joe's doing and not mine, and she should have taken up matters with him). I stayed
up late and had guests. Even though we rarely got loud, the walls were thin and I'm sure it bothered her from time to
time.
But, I took responsibility for my half of the lease and never left her holding the
check for anything. I didn't have the type of lax morality that allowed me to attempt to decieve her into giving me
cash. I was nice to her cats. I didn't lock them in her room. I sifted the litter and didn't mind feeding
them (she fed them absolute shit because she was a cheap bitch) because they were living creatures.
All in all, it never occurred to me to stiff her on any level. How she could
be so obsessed with money and her rights above everyone else's and how she seemed to hold different expectations of everyone
else but herself was and still is beyond me. But what made this experience so bizarre to me wasn't these things, it
was the remarks that I received from the people around me, the regulars at the bar, my co-workers....."what a fucking jew"
or "that JAP" and other remarks like it of which I had no idea as to how they were appropriate until they were explained to
me.
And, even then, I had a hard time referring to her as a stereotypical "JAP".
I find that so offensive now. Yeah, I sure as hell called her one the last time I saw her, but I'm not sure if I would
have come up with that on my own.
During my childhood I'd heard racist statements from my grandfathers and sometimes
my dad about black people, Jewish people, even women (more than I'm comfortable talking about now), and I never really thought
about them. As I grew up, I would see people who exemplified these racist stereotypes, and these people always seemed
to intrigue me, especially Andrea. Where there's smoke, there's fire? I sure hope not. But still.
She caused a great deal of my innocence to come crashing down around me by being the perfect embodiment of a Jewish American
Princess, because I had to admit to myself that these people do exist, and it's not accurate to deny stereotyping in totale.
Stereotypes exist. They are real, and they cannot be denied, and they make
life more confusing. Having to deal with her cheapness and "me first" attitude left me less able to argue the concept
that we are all the same. We aren't.
So how do we get through life holding onto our ability to look into someone
and not at what they shallowly reflect, if they end up being what they one-dimensionally represent? How do we
not acknowledge that a stereotype might have some truth behind it, not as a marker of the whole, but as an undeniable
entity? Can we deny them? I don't think we can. And, I don't think it makes one a bad person
or a racist to acknowledge that stereotypes have their basis in fact. I think what makes us racists is to expect
them.
Andrea tested the limits of my decency, and I failed because of what I
called her during our last meeting. But she also succeeded in teaching me that there are few things that make one feel
greasier than sinking to such levels. I should have called her a cheap, manipulative, self-involved animal abuser.
That she wouldn't have been able to deny.
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