Roommates

This is a halo brace.

The only roommates I ever had were in college, both in my freshman year. After that year, I did everything in my power to ensure that I would never have another roommate again as long as I lived. I would endure tiny spaces, apartments without air conditioning, and apartments in questionable areas, all to make sure that I could live alone. Being able to live alone became more important to me than storage, body temperature, or even personal safety, and it was all because of what happened in my freshman year of college. 

The main reason I even went to college was because my boyfriend was going. He was going and I didn’t want to lose him. He was my first real boyfriend and I was head over heels, stupid in love. It’s not the dumbest thing I’ve ever done for love, and in fact, it turned out pretty well in the end. 

The second reason I went was my oldest brother. My parents didn’t want me to go, as I had been an out of control teen. They hadn’t gone to college and knew nothing about it. I also knew nothing about it except this boy, the Modern Dancer,  was going. They wanted me to stay home and go to the local college, but my big brother stepped up and said they were going  to have to let me go sometime. He must have made a compelling argument. 

The third reason I went was my father’s second bankruptcy. It was the early 90s and thanks to being able to put zeros in all the boxes on the financial aid form, I got a hell of a lot of money in the form of Pell Grants and other things. 

So, at 18, with a terrible high school GPA  and no idea what I was doing, I went to a large state university three hours from home. I was a little scared, but mostly excited about this new chapter of my life, Freedom would be mine.

Freshmen were required to live on campus and I was no exception. Most people chose their roommate, but not knowing anyone going to this school other than said boyfriend, I entered the roommate lottery. 

Back in those days, the university would mail you your assigned roommate’s contact information, which was just a phone number and a mailing address. I remember being so excited upon receiving this letter that I immediately made a long distance phone call (Google it, kids)  to Kansas, where  my future roommate, Stephanie, was living. 

She sounded so interesting. She had grown up abroad and her father had recently retired from the Army. He was last stationed in India (so exotic!) and that’s where she had gone to a private school for expats (so fancy!). After chatting a little while, she told me she needed me to know that she had been in a jeep wreck after senior graduation and as a result, was in something called a halo brace, as she had broken her neck. She asked me if that was going to be a problem, and having no idea what a halo brace was, I said it would not. 

I now know what a halo brace is. It is a horrible looking device that rests on your shoulders and has a halo of sorts that goes all around your head. What holds the halo in place, you ask? That would be the screws that are screwed into the wearer’s head. Their skull. The flesh and the bone and everything. 

This was, of course, the first thing I noticed when I first met Stephanie. I tried to play it cool, because she was my new roomie. The second thing I noticed is that she weighed about 300 lb. This was not something I had expected. I was no supermodel, but based on things she had told me about her life, I had somehow assumed she was (Note on the 90s: Supermodels in the 90s were, by definition, always very skinny. Body acceptance would not come into being for a few more decades. We judged ourselves by Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, and Linda Evangelista, no matter what Naomi Wolf said. You can cancel me for this, but I will cancel you first) . The third thing is that she was a very light skinned woman of color. I will tell you that I grew up in the suburbs and led a very sheltered life and had very little experience with people who were not white up until this point. I would soon find out that my dorm was the most popular dorm for African-American women on campus and had the nickname “No Limit Clement.”  In other words, I was about to learn a lot of things about life that had nothing to do with my classes or professors.

In the space of about two seconds, I decided Stephanie and I were going to overcome her halo brace and whatever else we had to in order to have an amazing college experience. She was my roommate! I had seen the movies and I knew this was a big deal. Plus, after being watched like a hawk during my senior year of high school, I was giddy with excitement at the freedom I had. Stephanie and I would revel in that freedom together. 

The good news was we both smoked, so we could do that in the room, which was half of a suite, a full bath separating us from our suite mates. So we smoked and talked. We went to the University Center poster sale and bought what we thought were cool and obscure posters with which to decorate our concrete block walls. In addition to posters, Stephanie also hung up a lot of pictures of supermodels ( knew I got the supermodel thing from somewhere. She was obsessed with them).  We went to eat in the cafeteria across the courtyard. We met the other “freaks” (normal, non-Greek students) who hung out under the ginkgo tree and smoked and drank.

At night in our room, she started telling me about her life abroad. She had met my boyfriend and once, as she was hanging up yet another picture of a supermodel on her wall, she asked me quite out of the blue if I had ever had a vaginal orgasm. 

Caught off guard, I think I said something like, “Whaaa,? '' to which she promptly replied, in her strange clipped non-accent, that anyone could have a clitoral orgasm. Those were for girls. It took a real woman to have a vaginal orgasm and they were much more fulfilling. Turning all the way around, as she couldn’t turn her neck in her halo brace, she looked me in the eye and again asked me if I had ever had one. 

As I was now in college and a woman of the world, I said that I had and she retorted, “I seriously doubt THAT.”

She continued talking about things that honestly made little sense to me, but I was too caught up in being an adult to say so. 

Stephanie would go on over the following few weeks to tell me about her very adventurous sex life, which included regular threesomes, sometimes orgies, and a long time affair with a female ambassador, the country of which I was never to know. 

I was skeptical, but she had the confidence to pull off what she was saying and I was inexperienced enough to think that maybe people did things a whole lot differently overseas. That’s what Stephanie led me to believe. Her upbringing had been sophisticated and daring. Mine had been basic and boring. 

To understand how I was so taken in by these stories, coming as they were from a woman of just 18, you have to understand that I had grown up believing far more outlandish things that my mother told me, I, in fact, and still believed them all at that time. This made me, at first anyway, a great roommate for Stephanie. 

I learned a little about the racial divide in the dorm through hanging out with Stephanie. One day in the elevator, a dark skinned girl yelled something about “high yella” to Stephanie as we got off at our floor. She was obviously upset and I asked what that was all about. That’s when she explained that lighter skinned and darker skinned black women didn’t always get along. It’s complicated and not my place to explain, but we had a lot of dark skinned girls in our dorm and they did not like Stephanie’s light skin. 

This is why, one evening while I was helping her put a relaxer on her hair, our darker skinned suitemates locked us out of the bathroom. We pounded and yelled, but they wouldn’t let us in. Relaxer is a strong chemical and I could see it starting to turn the skin at her hairline bright red with chemical burn. By the time we could get a key to the community kitchen in the basement, she had scabs on her head. 

There are other examples of petty injustices she suffered, but this one was the most dramatic and the one that would make us wait until one of our suite mates was getting “it” on (you would know the minute the Luther Vandross and the rhythmic squeaking started), to call the giant old wall mounted phone in their room. Without fail, she would get up to answer it and without fail, we would hang up.  We would wait 5 minutes and call again, and again she would answer. I guess “it” wasn’t good enough to miss a call (we did not have any kind of answering machines in the dorms in 1991).

Sometime early in the first semester, Stephanie found an ad in the back of a Rolling Stone magazine for Wicca, a modern day pagan group of witches. This was before you could just get on YouTube and be a witch. You had to work for that shit.  She wrote to the address and they sent back a Wicca starter kit. I never saw the actual kit, but I imagine it was a manual with some sage attached or something. They also sent her the contact information for the local coven, which she promptly joined. 

I was into all kinds of things then: I was 18, on my own for the first time and the world was my oyster. I went to talks about freeing Tibet, crazy modern dance recitals, any and all foreign movies playing at the University Center for a dollar, talks about the evidence of the founding fathers being gay. I was not, however, into any kind of organized religion or spiritualism and I thought anything you had to write away from the back of a magazine for was suspect. If only we still had that as a discerning criteria instead of the whole fucking internet. 

Around this same time, we also met Patty, soon to become known as Crazy Patty. In retrospect, something was really wrong with Patty, maybe bi-polar or schizophrenia, but when we first met her she was quirky, but probably still on her meds. At this time, she dressed normally, meaning as normally as any of us: not preppy, but not overly goth or hippie or anything else. She told very tall tales of being a UCLA cheerleader and lots of other things that even I should have known couldn’t be true. Mostly we saw her outside the dorm, where she would do poorly executed cartwheels while talking about her past cheerleading fame. 

Before Stephanie officially started going to her coven meetings, she disappeared. She just didn’t come back to our dorm room for two whole nights. I guess in college this may not be that abnormal, but we both knew the same people and I couldn’t imagine where she could be sleeping. Finally on the third day, I broke down and called campus police to report her missing. There wasn’t much they could do, but I found out later they called her father. 

So it was when Stephanie came back that third night, she was royally pissed off. Where had she been? It was none of my business, but she had been with Patty. Doing what? Also none of my business and how dare I get involved in her private life by doing something as intrusive as calling the police. She had not been missing. She was never in any danger. I was ridiculous. She spent the rest of the night listening to “Kiss Them for Me” by Siouxsie and the Banshees on her CD player over and over and over again. 

I never found out what she and Patty had done for those three days and honestly, I’m kind of glad. I do know that our relationship cooled off after that, although we still hung out and talked. 

Coven meetings started just before Halloween and those she definitely wanted to tell me all about. I heard about how the coven was matriarchal and the men were subservient to the woman. About how her initiation ceremony involved her getting naked  in the woods (where in the woods, I have no idea) and being “metaphorically” ridden by a male member while he was “symbolically” killed with a knife. 

As mentioned, although well read, I had led a sheltered life and this seemed batshit crazy to me. I think I said something about being careful and she did not like that. I once again got the “it’s none of your business, Suzy” and “I knew you wouldn’t understand, Suzy” lecture. 

Around Halloween, Stephanie went and did the Patty thing again, although this time, she very sarcastically told me she was going “if it was OK with me.” By this point, I was pretty tired of her playing the same three songs on repeat, talking about what had to be, I now knew, a fantasy sex life, and genreally being as changeable as a Siamese cat. It was a nice three days alone. 

Between Halloween and Thanksgiving, I started noticing small bowls with herbs and liquid placed throughout our dorm room, always on my side: my desk, my bureau, my bedside table. I would ask her about them and she would tell me they were spells. Just white magic, she added. Wiccans only practiced black magic when they had no other choice. 

I wasn’t necessarily freaked out because I thought these potions were magic, but because I felt like there was an intent behind them. I had a 300 lb witch roommate casting spells on me. I was understandably uncomfortable. However, I didn’t want to incur any further wrath from her by throwing them out, so I let them be. 

A girl we had met in the courtyard, Alice, started spending a lot of time with Stephanie around this time. Alice was tall and skinny and fancied herself a model, even though she wasn’t. I had never been very fond of her, as she, too, had a habit of telling stories about herself that couldn’t possibly be true. She and Stephanie would sit on Stephanie’s bed and write notes back and forth, giggling, while I was right there sitting at my desk. Sometimes they would write one, look over at me, and die laughing. Things were getting a lot more uncomfortable. 

Stephanie got her halo brace off just before Thanksgiving. She didn’t tell me this was happening, so when I walked in the room and saw her, I must have done a double take. She just stared at me as I asked how she felt. She didn’t answer, just staring at me until I finally gave up and went to do homework. 

This was when she finally stopped talking to me altogether and spent very little time in the room. She would occasionally leave passive aggressive notes for me and the “spell bowls” got bigger and a little more ominous. I never looked at the ingredients too closely, but I did start sliding them over to her side of the desk, just to be safe.

I went out of town with my brother for Thanksgiving and I think she was given permission to stay in the dorm as her family lived too far away for her to easily travel. 

She was all but invisible when I got back, but I had finals for about six classes and didn’t have a lot of time to worry about it. 

I did start to worry a little bit in the week before I was set to go home  for Christmas, as I knew she was going to be staying later than me due to our finals schedule. The mini-fridge in our room was mine and dorm rules were that you had to unplug it before you went home for Christmas break. I finally decided to leave her a note about when I was leaving and asking if she could take care of locking the room down for Christmas break. 

Even though we weren’t really talking and things were uncomfortable, I didn’t ever think

 about changing rooms. Stephanie was hardly there and when she was, it wasn’t like I was afraid of her. There were plenty of other things happening in my life at the time and lots of other things to be worried about, my boyfriend and class load included. 

The day of my last final, my boyfriend and I were both planning on packing up that night to drive home together. I was surprised when I came into the room and saw Stephanie standing by her desk, smoking, tapping her foot, and staring straight ahead. I asked if she’d gotten my note and she just continued to smoke, tap, and stare. This was new and I hurried to get my things packed and get out of there. 

For thirty minutes or so, I packed and occasionally looked over at her, where she was still smoking, tapping, and staring. It was completely unnerving. 

On my way out the door, unable to walk out without saying anything, I told her to have a good holiday break and to please not forget to unplug the refrigerator. Smoke, tap, stare. I gave up and headed to the elevator. Halfway down the hall, I jumped as someone started screaming, “BITCH! YOU FUCKING BITCH! I WILL KILL YOU, YOU FUCKING BITCH!” It took me half a second to realize it was coming from my room and it was Stephanie. I picked up my suitcase with both hands and ran down the stairwell, too scared to wait for the elevator to come. 

It was a long holiday break. All I could think about the whole time was having to go back to school and possibly be killed by my deranged Wiccan roommate. I talked to my parents and to other people and everyone seemed to think that I should have no problem getting a new roommate or requesting to be moved. I also don’t think they took my fears of her actually killing me seriously, but I was well and truly freaked out.

When I finally got back to the dorm, I dropped my stuff in a still empty room and  went straight to Student Housing and asked for a transfer. Without looking up, the woman behind the glass said, “Two week minimum waiting period.”  She said this was because a lot of people got into petty fights and decided not to move in those two weeks. I tried to explain to her that my roommate had threatened to kill me and I was pretty sure we weren’t going to make up, but she didn’t seem concerned. Cool. 

Without knowing what else to do, I went back to the room I shared with my soon to be killer. She wasn’t there. Over the next few days, I realized that she was coming and going, but how she was missing me every time was pretty amazing. She also continued to leave spell bowls out, which I now promptly threw out or used as ashtrays. 

My boyfriend at the time, the  Modern Dancer, didn’t think it was “appropriate” for me to stay in his room, even though his roommate had moved out and he now had the double to himself. Girls staying overnight in the dorm was against the rules and someone might see me in the bathroom. I should have dumped him then and there. My kingdom for a time machine. 

When my two weeks were up, I was assigned a new room two floors below where I was. My roommate was quiet, extremely messy, and almost never there. I could live with all of this. Our suitemates were sorority girls who were fun to eavesdrop on when they were drunk, especially when they were trying to steal each others’ boyfriends. 

Stephanie found other people to hang out with and apparently started going to church. She dumped Crazy Patty when she got really crazy and started collecting cigarette butts and talking about how she was going to put them all in nuclear reactors and then use helicopters to seal the reactors off with concrete. When she wasn’t doing that, she was sitting up in the ginkgo tree in the courtyard, filthy, screaming, “John Paul Jones is alive!” which he certainly still was. 

Somehow I never ran into Stephanie in the dorm again, which was fine with me. I did see her across the courtyard one day and was shocked to see that she had bleached her hair platinum blonde and had it done up in a bouffant style. I remembered putting on her relaxer and guessed she’d had this done at a salon. 

I heard through the grapevine that she didn’t come back to school after that first year. Maybe she went the way of Crazy Patty. Maybe her dad pulled the plug on her funds. Maybe she got back together with that ambassador and got it on. I don’t lose sleep over it. 

What I do lose sleep over sometimes, is the one time I had to tighten the screws of her halo brace into her head. INTO. HER. HEAD. I still wonder if that’s where the phrase “having a screw loose” comes from.

I also sometimes wonder if having those screws taken out did something to her head, but I also wonder if her head had always been messed up and/or if things weren’t really all that great at home. I never heard her call her parents or talk about them much. I was still very attached to my parents and called them weekly, so this was odd to me. 

At the end of that year, I made a beeline for sophomore year dorm room sign ups and managed to get one of the only single rooms on campus.

I have had a lot of great friends, people I love dearly and who I would never, in a million years, share a living space with. It is a testament to my love for my husband that we do not have houses next door to each other, although I don’t think that’s such a horrible idea. 

 Today I live with my husband, a dog, and two cats. These “roommates” are all by choice and none of them have ever threatened to kill me, although one of them may have felt like doing it a time or two. They certainly have not tried to put spells on me, except my dog who has certainly cast a love spell on me. This is the kind of witchcraft I can live with.