My First Thirteen Roommates

During my adventures between the ages of 18 and 33 or so, I lived in a bunch of different places—roughly one different apartment each year.

Because I was on a pretty severe budget, I nearly always had roommates. This meant getting to know a lot of different types of people, and I got to experience the tragedy of the commons up close:

In having roommates, I noticed that the shared resources were pretty much always a source of contention for us. I’m talking about how much water or electricity is used, along with whose turn it is to do the dishes.

and

At some point, you start playing a little game with one another, where you see how much you can get away with not doing. It’s definitely in your best interest to just wash those dishes and not think about how your roommate was supposed to do them for the next four hours, but that’s not what ends up happening.

I got into how frugal my first roommate and I were in The Totality of Frugality, where we did things like find gallons of milk for a quarter (rare, but not impossible if you kept your eyes peeled in the Kroger milk section), but I didn’t adequately describe how petty we ultimately got with one another.

Here’s something I wrote three or four years after living with Jay, for one of those punk zines I was involved in creating:

And then there were the arguments. Jay and I would argue bitterly about whose turn it was to carry the groceries back to the house from the store, or how much gas money was owed, or whose turn it was to do the dishes, or buy stamps, or clean the living room, or take out the trash, or, at the end of the year, when we finally moved out of our hellhole at 220 Beerwood, who had to scrub the walls in order to get our security deposit back. Arguing for the sake of arguing. You get the picture. The moral of the story is this: don’t live with your best friend. You will hate them after a while.

Jay and I had this schismogenetic relationship where we were really close and similar, so we decided to show just how different we were by being absurd about petty things. Ever had a roommate like this?

After Jay, I moved up to Richmond with Robin to live with James and his two roommates. James had AOL, and I had my first exposure to the internet while living with Jay (before the move) during a visit to Richmond, where we stayed with James for a few days.

James was a gay punk who was way older than us, but we shared a common bond that was rare for us at the time: we hated the way the system worked, and we viewed human rights as wildly deficient. This was my first exposure to LGBTQ activism and I was very much into this idea that everyone deserved a seat at the table, and whatever people did with their time (much less their own bodies) was their business alone in the first place.

I’m pretty confident that Robin and I caused a lot of friction with our one shared bathroom and five humans, but James was patient with us as we looked for a permanent place to live. Instead, we jumped into a bigger house with Nate and Katie, who had their own room upstairs, and with Grant (who had a drum kit downstairs in his room) and maybe one other person whose memory utterly escapes me at the moment.

We were only here for a few months, but getting to know Nate proved useful later on when we worked together, and then eventually when we lived together—but I’m skipping ahead. After Robin and I moved out of the house with all the roommates, we settled on a place on Grace Street near the university, where we’d both be headed in January of 1996.

If you were alive back then and living on the east coast, you probably heard a lot about the Blizzard of 96. I clearly remember my car being literally snowed in, with the door not only frozen shut, but with a few feet of snow in front of it. I’ve certainly never seen a snow like that in Richmond since then, and it seems like we get less and less snow each year now.

Here’s a peek inside that Grace St apartment from 1996. On the right are friends Robin had from Germany—I think maybe it started as a student exchange where these dudes visited the US, but it has been an awful long time and I’m just not sure of the details, but this was where the magic happened that I’ve been describing.

I didn’t want to live with Robin, though. It wasn’t because I didn’t like her per se; it was that she was my first girlfriend ever and I knew that it shouldn’t last forever. I felt like the bad guy in making that clear early on, but I was very glad I found the courage to do it. I’ll have plenty more to say about my first relationship.

After Robin, I moved in with Mike, and Robin moved next door. We had a little more space to ourselves, and both of us embraced it that year. Mike turned out to be just the right roommate for me at the time, for he introduced me to Warcraft II: Orcs and Humans, Civilization II, and neat bourbon. Mike was a fellow nerd, and we got along well.

This is probably where I want to end this today, just because I’ve got another dozen or so roommates to share with you, each of them leaving their own imprint on who I would become.

Meantime: please share at least one wild roommate story, if you have one!