Tristan's blog This blog is used to post personal random stuff

Got dildoes in your bathtub? Read this.

One of the motives as to why I started my blog (www.drystan.com), apart from record­ing my dives, was to doc­u­ment some of the events that hap­pened in my life.  I started to real­ize that after a cou­ple of years I slowly start to for­get many of the details of my expe­ri­ences so I started writ­ing them down.  One exam­ple of doc­u­ment­ing an even that occurred in my life was my arti­cle “Three years since my major Weight Loss” http://www.drystan.com/?p=616.  How­ever, the main rai­son d’être as to why I cre­ated my blog was to doc­u­ment this expe­ri­ence I had three years ago.  My expe­ri­ence is not as crazy as Thompson’s novel “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Sav­age Jour­ney to the Heart of the Amer­i­can Dream”, nor am I try­ing to say this is the cra­zi­est story that I know of, but nev­er­the­less it’s a per­sonal expe­ri­ence that I would like to share because even though it’s bizarre and creepy it is also enter­tain­ing and it high­lights a small period in my life that had a effect on me per­son­ally even though most might not relate to my story.  So here it goes.

Part I: Find­ing a flat­mate to move in with.

It was Novem­ber 2006 and I was 25 years old and a few months back my long term rela­tion­ship that started back in 2000 at Wash­ing­ton Col­lege ended.  I was not in a happy place at the time.  My ex-girlfriend moved out of our flat/apartment and back with her mother and I was left with a $4,000 King size tem­per­pu­dic bed along with the loan that she and I were sup­posed to pay together, two cats, a futon and other stuff.  I’m not try­ing to make a moun­tain out of a mole­hill, I’m a just stat­ing the expen­sive­ness of the bed, the cats, the futon since they are part of my story.   My ex-girlfriend and I broke up Sep­tem­ber 2006, but she was nice enough to keep pay­ing her half of the rent until Novem­ber while the lease ended and I found a flat­mate to move in with.   From Octo­ber to the end of Novem­ber I was look­ing every­where for a flat­mate I could move in with in Decem­ber, but I found it very dif­fi­cult to find a flat­mate when you are a male with two cats.  I met with poten­tial flat­mates near and far from where I worked and they were inter­ested, but with­out more ado lost inter­est the moment I men­tioned that I had cats.  I looked at roommates.com and craigslist.com, but I had no suc­cess.  I was start­ing to get very fran­tic and des­per­ate because Novem­ber was about to end and my lease about to expire, and I had no idea where I was going to live and I did not know what to do with the cats.  I con­sid­ered liv­ing in a hos­tel and giv­ing the cats to the ani­mal shel­ter, but I wanted to leave plan B as a last resort espe­cially know­ing what hap­pens to unwanted ani­mals in ani­mal shelters.

It was the last days of Novem­ber and I was about to exe­cut­ing plan B when some­body on Roommates.com sent me an email stat­ing that they were look­ing for a flat­mate and that he had a cat so it was ok if I brought my two cats.  The house was in Alexan­dria, VA so it was a long com­mute to work with the traf­fic (approx­i­mate. 1 hour there and 1 hour back).  Any­how, at this point I didn’t have too many choices so I went to talk to the chap and he seemed decent enough, the cat that he had was a friendly kit­ten, the place looked cleaned and well taken care of, the rent price was stu­pen­dous since it was $500 a month with all util­i­ties included, it is near impos­si­ble to beat that price in the Wash­ing­ton DC area.   We agreed on the spot that we’ll be flat­mates and I started to move my stuff in shortly after he gave me a copy of the key, just in a nick of time since I had to move out of my old flat.  I have been saved!!!  I looked at this chap as a sav­ior.  Fair enough, I did find it weird when he showed me his swords and mil­i­tary grade rifles with a down­graded bar­rel to make them legal in the civil­ian world, but he was in the mil­i­tary and I have seen worse.  Nev­er­the­less, if I only knew how the next months were going to play out prob­a­bly Plan B would have been a bet­ter idea.

Part II:  Get­ting to know the new flatmate.

The day I moved in I gave him $1,000 dol­lars on the spot, $500 for the deposit and $500 for the month of Decem­ber.   It is a lot of money to give to a stranger you just met, but I saw it fair since I was also a stranger to him and he didn’t know who he just allowed to live in his abode so I thought to myself that I would have also done the same if I was in his sit­u­a­tion plus con­sid­er­ing that this was not a legal deal since sub-leasing was not allowed where he lived so I did not com­plain.  At the time I did not think much of what he did with the money I gave him, nev­er­the­less it was a sus­pi­cious and yet curi­ous when the day after I gave him $1,000 a big 52 or 54 inch flat panel tele­vi­sion arrived.   I didn’t think much of it since it’s his money now and he can do what­ever he wants with the money I give him plus he told me that the U.S. Army was pay­ing for the flat and also the util­i­ties.   After hav­ing a chat flat­mate to flat­mate, it turns out that the rea­son why he was ille­gally sub-leasing me an empty room in a two bed­room flat was because he just recently got divorced (he was 21 or 22 years old at the time), his wife took their one year old child away, and he was left with a big bill from the divorce process.  I don’t know much of the divorce, but it looked like his ex-wife screwed him over pretty bad finan­cially so he needed the extra cash to help pay some of those bills.  Fair enough.  Any­how, I had to feel a bit sorry for the lad con­sid­er­ing his finan­cial state, his botched mar­riage, him being as sharp as a beach ball, and as mature as two red­necks fight­ing over a chair.

Part III:  Com­par­ing to pre­vi­ous flatmates.

Christ­mas 2006 was approach­ing and it has been about 3 weeks since I moved in with this new bloke and I started to notice that he is not very clean, has bad eat­ing habits (too much fast food), his lit­tle kit­ten has fleas and now my two cats have fleas (took me weeks to get rid of them all), he does not wash his dishes (even after I men­tioned it to him), he does not help feed the cats nor change the lit­ter box, has weird work­ing hours with the army so he’ll make noise at 6 in the morn­ing when he got back from work.   Also, if one did not under­stand his work sched­ule one would find it dis­turb­ing see­ing a per­son start­ing to drink at 6am in the morn­ing in the front lawn.  I didn’t care since tech­ni­cally he is just get­ting back from work plus he never got very drunk, but he did tell me that it dis­turbed the older lady across our place.

Even though now I know he is not the per­fect flat­mate, I can’t com­plain much con­sid­er­ing I have lived with worse.  Back in col­lege I lived in a house with sev­eral high school red-neck drop outs where one guy (that seemed like a gen­tle giant) walked around the house with a hand gun, just got out of prison, and had to take med­ica­tion to con­trol his anger.  Even though I don’t play video games that much, I do get really good at games I have never played before rather fast so I really had to try to con­trol myself and let this poten­tially dan­ger­ous bloke wins a cou­ple times when both of us where play­ing Xbox.  Also, there was a Labrador dog that lived inside the house that will piss and crap in the liv­ing room, a 19 year old girl that would get high and drunk and sleep around with every­body that was in the house while her 16 year old babysit­ter did the same and my ex-girlfriend and I were left with pity and took care of the unat­tended 3 year old baby girl that was eat­ing bacon bits by her­self that she found in the kitchen because she was hun­gry.   From this house, the most respectable per­son was a 50 some­thing year old man that got kicked out by his wife and had to find a place to live.  Lucky for him his wife for­gave him or they worked out their dif­fer­ences after two months and he moved back with her.  Lucky bastard.

Part IV: The cats almost died of star­va­tion … twice.

So it’s time to fly to Texas and spend Christ­mas with my fam­ily.  I told my flat­mate to make sure the cats had their lit­ter cleaned and their food/water bowl filled up before he went back to his town of ori­gin for Christ­mas and New Years, not a daunt­ing task.  Any­how, after a nice time with my fam­ily and every­body being sur­prised that I have lost 22 pounds (10 Kg) so far in my weight loss plan since they last saw me I returned to my new home in Alexan­dria, VA to find my cats starv­ing, thirsty and the house smelling like cat shit and piss.  The lit­ter boxes were filled to the top and the cats were start­ing to use the car­pet around the lit­ter boxes.  I was very incensed with my flat­mate at the time because he could not per­form a sim­ple favor I asked him and almost caused three cats to die of hunger and thirst or pos­si­bil­ity them become can­ni­bals.  He came back from his vaca­tions and I had a talk with him and he gave me excuses, excuses, excuses.  I thought to myself … what a load of BOLLOCKS!!!  The cats almost died over his incom­pe­tence!!! No excuses!!

Two weeks after arriv­ing from Texas I then had to fly to San Fran­cisco, Cal­i­for­nia and then drive south to Moun­tain View to work on a secu­rity project at Google Head­quar­ter within the Google­plex for a week and a half and also go to a com­pany con­fer­ence at the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada for three days, which by the way also had mem­o­rable sto­ries that have already cir­cled the globe within my com­pa­nies off-shore offices, but that’s another story to tell another time (how­ever, not as good as this one ).     Since I already know that my flat­mate is incom­pe­tent, lazy, as dense as bot­tled shite, and not very thought­ful of the poor cats I went ahead and put more food/water and lit­ter boxes for the cats since I was expect­ing him not to do any­thing.  Any­how, I told him to please make sure the cats have food and that their lit­ter was clean, but I was not expect­ing much from him at this point.  After return­ing from my west-coast busi­ness trip, I came back to a house smelling like cat shit and piss, very aggres­sive cats fight­ing for any scraps of food, and over­all a very dirty house.  I remem­ber the cats try­ing to get what­ever was left from a McDonald’s French fries red car­ton, drink­ing what­ever water they can lick off the moldy pile of dirty dishes in the kitchen that my flat­mate has not washed.  I was very angry at his lazi­ness and also frus­trated because even when I told him mul­ti­ple times to wash his dishes he would not.  I con­sid­ered mov­ing out, but also I remem­bered that find­ing a flat­mate that accepted cats was dif­fi­cult to find so I decided to bear it out for a bit longer because there was a pos­si­bil­ity that my friend would be trans­fer­ring from the Lon­don office to head­quar­ters around April/May so we could prob­a­bly move in together.   Any­ways, I could not get my hopes up at the time.

Part V: Secrets and sex­ual paraphernalia.

It is Feb­ru­ary and I have been liv­ing in my flat for 2 months now and things are get­ting worse.  My flat­mate was start­ing to behave rather weird.  At first I didn’t make much of it, but I noticed that he would sleep on “MY” futon almost every night and pick lock his own room when­ever he had to go in.   At first I asked him if he needed help open­ing the door because I thought he locked him­self out, but then I real­ized that this was hap­pen­ing almost every day so I didn’t want to ask questions.

One day I went to pick up the mail and I noticed a let­ter sent to him by the local gov­ern­ment that looked rather impor­tant.  I don’t know, but I sensed that it was an evic­tion warn­ing so I put the let­ter up against the light to see if I could read some of it, but I could not read much.  How­ever, I did man­age to read some words where it was a warn­ing that if rent was not paid then he’ll have to leave.   When he arrived from work I told him that he received a let­ter that looked rather impor­tant.  Later on I asked him if every­thing was ok and he said that every­thing was fine, which is a lie because I had a strong feel­ing things were not fine.   I was start­ing to get scared that one day I’ll come home from work and all my stuff would be out­side and I did not have a house any­more so what I did was I went to the leas­ing office and pre­tend I was him and find out more about the sta­tus of the rent.  As it turned out, he was 2 months behind in rent so I was not very pleased.   I already wanted out, but I had to bear with my cur­rent sit­u­a­tion until mid-April when I can move in with my friend arriv­ing from Lon­don, I just hope I don’t get thrown out in the street by then.

Things took a turn to the creepy side when one morn­ing I was watch­ing TV when my flat­mate came out of his room with a lit­tle of hys­te­ria ask­ing me if any­thing was miss­ing from the house.  I found the ques­tion to be very eccen­tric con­sid­er­ing both of us stayed in the flat that night.  I looked around and didn’t notice any­thing miss­ing and I reas­sured him that every­thing looks fine and then he calmed down and said that it’s because he had a girl over that night.  I don’t know what kind of girl one brings where you have to be ner­vous that she will take some­thing.  My best guess is that he brought over a pros­ti­tute that night since I have never seen him with a girl, but who knows.    Later that day when I went to take a shower I found a big pink dil­doe in the tub.  I hon­estly didn’t know what to do because I was never con­fronted with this prob­lem before.  He was not in the house at the time and I was not going to pick it up so I drove to the gym to shower.  I didn’t see him for a cou­ple days after­wards because of his odd work­ing sched­ule so I show­ered in the gym for the next cou­ple of days.  A few days later when I went to check the bath­tub, the dil­doe was gone.  How embar­rass­ing!!.  I don’t know if that’s what he used with the pros­ti­tute or what, but I didn’t want to think too much about it.  Any­how, what­ever hap­pens in his room is his pri­vacy; just don’t leave sex toys in the com­mon liv­ing space.

Part VI: Feces

I had my mind end up; I would be leav­ing will at the end of March.  I just had to sur­vive the months of Feb­ru­ary and March in this shit-hole.  His bed­room was next to mine and we shared the same toi­let so every time I went to the toi­let I had to pass the door of his strange and mys­te­ri­ous dwelling so and to make things weirder I started to notice that as the days of Feb­ru­ary passed a smell of baby dia­pers got stronger and stronger out­side his room.  At first it was very faint so I sus­pected that one of the cats had defe­cated in a closet next to the toi­let, but soon I real­ized while try­ing to clean up the sus­pected cat mess that the smell was com­ing from his door.  I knew that he had a child, but I didn’t know his child was stay­ing with us plus I haven’t heard any cry­ing so I really don’t know what that smell was.  All I know is that it smelled like some type of fra­grance try­ing to cover up the smell of feces.

Part VII:  Vagi­nas, Dil­does, Human Feces, swords, and rifles

The last 10 or so days of the month of Feb­ru­ary were very excit­ing for me.  Let me give a lit­tle reminder.  It has been 5 months since my breakup so I was start­ing to recover from it phys­i­o­log­i­cally, in other words I was start­ing to see the light. I have also lost 32 pounds (14.5 kg) in a very healthy steady diet, my self-esteem pretty much had recov­ered and prob­a­bly was higher than it has been in years, just met a girl which brought me lots of hap­pi­ness at the time, spring was arriv­ing (which is always a boost), just received my annual bonus from my com­pany so I also felt finan­cially secure, and shortly I was going to move in with friend arriv­ing from Lon­don (he did man­age to trans­fer) which I was look­ing for­ward to con­sid­er­ing it was the first friend other that my past girl­friend I that I moved in with and with my cur­rent sit­u­a­tion I was really des­per­ate to move in with some­one I could trust.  The months fol­low­ing April were very happy times for me, prob­a­bly some of the best con­sid­er­ing how I felt, and are days I will never for­get.  By coin­ci­dence, the same month five years prior when I lived in Ire­land also had a pro­found effect on me, but that’s another story.   Any­how, I still need to put up with the remain­ing days of Feb­ru­ary and March before I can be free.

Going back to the story (Feb­ru­ary 2007), my fear of get­ting evicted was get­ting big­ger and big­ger and since I’m not legally on the lease I don’t have any rights and I felt help­less.  I had to read that let­ter that was sent ear­lier that looked like an evic­tion warn­ing so I could be aware of what is going on at my place of res­i­dence.  To real­ize that objec­tive I needed to go into his room and hope that it was some­where vis­i­ble in his room because I really didn’t want to be going through my flatmate’s pri­vate stuff.   Since his room was locked I pick­lock his door and got in and for the life in me I can­not describe to you exactly what I felt that moment.  When I opened the door and before I could see any­thing, a big unimag­in­able stench of human shit … no … let me cor­rect it so express what I felt… fuck­ing grisly stench of human shit hit me hard on the face.  I remem­ber feel­ing a bit faint at the unimag­in­able strong stench that was trapped in there for who knows how long.  Once I got my senses back every­thing I saw and smelt started to explain his strange behav­ior with pick lock­ing his door, sleep­ing on the sofa, etc.  The first thing I saw after recov­er­ing from the smell was a big rub­ber vagina mounted on what seemed to be tow­els or some­thing so he could hump it and get his wicked way with that sil­i­cone or rub­ber self-pleasing para­pher­na­lia.   About a foot and half to the right were his mil­i­tary trousers were I man­aged to see inside of them, even though I truly wish I hadn’t, and what I saw were dirty dia­pers. That would explain the dia­per smell on the hall­way.  I was com­pletely star­tled, but I still had my head focus on find­ing that let­ter so I scanned the room to see if I could see it so I could grab it and step out of that dis­gust­ing and ghastly room.  My eyes were mov­ing to the dresser two feet to the right of the trousers with the dia­pers when I saw three Safe­way gro­cery bags filled up with more dia­pers.  This min­gin bloke could not even take out his own trash out of his room.   Mov­ing on … while scan­ning his room I saw the down­graded mil­i­tary rifles at the back of the room along with those Sky­Mall Harry Pot­ter type swords they sell you on air flights.  I also saw his punc­tured air bed which would explained why he slept on my futon, and as I scanned the room I saw mul­ti­ple minia­ture pocket-size sex toys and plas­tic vagi­nas through­out the room and the same big pink dil­doe that I sur­pris­ingly encoun­tered in the bath­tub ear­lier on.  So I did see a let­ter on top of one of the fur­ni­ture, but at this moment I could give a rat’s arse to what the let­ter con­tained.  I had to get out of there before Feb­ru­ary ended because even if he behaved like a sloth I could not pre­dict how he’ll be next month con­sid­er­ing things have been going down­hill for him for a while already.  The only thing he was pre­dictable of was col­lect­ing my $500 dol­lars on the first two days of the month.  Regard­less of the taunt­ing task of find­ing a place in short notice I was con­vinced that I could not stay the month of March there.  I had no clue where I was going to stay for the month of March, but I had to jump over board and hope for the best.   By casual talk I told this story to my man­ager at work and she felt very bad for me so she offered me her spare room at her house and I could bring one cat with me.  I was sur­prised because I was not try­ing to get help, but I took the help with­out thought because I really didn’t have many choices.    Hon­estly, I didn’t have any choices.  I then gather three friends to help me move every­thing out of my flat on Tues­day Feb­ru­ary 27, 2007 because I had a date the fol­low­ing night with girl whom would later become my sec­ond longest last­ing rela­tion­ship.   A few days before the move out date, I started to sneak packed boxes out of my room while my soon to be for­mer flat­mate watched a movie.  I didn’t want him get­ting sus­pi­cious because I knew he was in a des­per­ate need of money and I could not risk the notion of him find­ing out he was not going to get his expected $500 dol­lars in a cou­ple of day.   I moved every­thing except my huge and mon­strously heavy king size tem­purpedic bed which my friends and future flat­mate hate with all their might.  I was mov­ing every­thing I could so when my friends arrive to help me move out we could move the rest quickly con­sid­er­ing I had a 3 hour win­dow when he was not going to be there.  I could not risk him show­ing up ear­lier than expected so I tried to make the move as quick as pos­si­ble so that all four of us could get every­thing out in one hour.   When my friends arrive to the flat they were appalled at the stench my flat had and could not believe how I could live in that sit­u­a­tion for so long.  After mov­ing every­thing out, one of my friends wanted to see the leg­endary and iniq­ui­tous rub­ber vagina so he con­vinced me and I picked lock the door so he could peak inside my flatmate’s room.  He could not step in and was just in hor­ror at the sights and tried to film it with his mobile phone so he could upload it to youtube, but with the ner­vous­ness he acci­dently deleted it and didn’t real­ize it until we were already on the mov­ing trunk scram­ming from that grim and filthy place.  Also, before we left, we saw the same pink dil­doe as before in the bath­room again, but this time in the shower holder where I keep my tooth­brush.  Dis­gust­ing, is as if he wanted to scare me out of his place or really didn’t give a rat’s arse any­more about what peo­ple think.  Also, to make mat­ters worse, there were some drops of blood on it.  A the­ory that my friends and I have up to this day is that he used the dil­doe on him­self and dam­aged some anus mus­cle hence he had to use dia­pers due to anal leak­age, but it’s just a theory.

Part VIII: The after math and moral of the story.

After mov­ing out of that ghastly place, I never heard from him again.  I lived with my man­ager for a month and half before mov­ing in with my friend whom trans­ferred from our Lon­don office.  The date with the girl went well and after a few weeks dat­ing we built a strong rela­tion­ship and later moved in together.   How­ever, we ended the rela­tion­ship before I ever planned writ­ing this story.  Con­tin­u­ing …  I also fin­ished my first 10 mile race, which was a big feat for me at the time.  My new flat­mate was ideal and we had really good times.  As of now he bought a house and moved in with his girl­friend and I moved in with another friend which is also going fan­tas­tic.  Sub­se­quently, life went up-hill after mov­ing out of that hor­rid place and I was start­ing a new chap­ter in my life hence life was good I was very happy.  How­ever, I was sad that I could not help his lit­tle cat and I had to take one of the cats to the shel­ter.  How­ever, on the pos­i­tive side, the one cat that moved in with me when I lived with my man­ager is still alive and happy liv­ing with a mar­ried cou­ple from my com­pany in Dupont Cir­cle, Wash­ing­ton DC.  As for the futon, I left it behind because I could not imag­ine bring­ing that to my new place con­sid­er­ing he slept on it every night and who knows what he has done on it.  As for my bed, I still have it and it’s com­fort­able as hell; I just don’t want to move it again.  And the moral of the story … don’t judge a book by it’s cover and be per­cep­ti­ble to other people’s actions.  At the begin­ning of this story I saw the guy as my sav­ior and then I was proved wrong.