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I am the worst roommate in the entire world. I’m serious. They had a contest. I was entered into it by my roommates at the time, four hippies in my collegetown with whom I shared a three story house. They weren’t the greatest roommates in the world either, but the free pot went a long way towards making up for that. The contest was broken down into the following categories:

A. Inability to clean up after oneself.

B. Unawareness of the strange ceramic objects in the kitchen named "dishes" and the fact that they needed to be washed periodically.

C. A complete and utter confusion over such esoteric concepts as "rent" and "electric bills."

D. A propensity for bringing strange people home at three in morning.

E. An even bigger propensity for calling one’s friends long-distance at four in the morning.

The hippies thought I would do well in a contest such as this, and they were right. I walked away with first place. My prize was a crown made out of a discarded pizza box, and an eviction notice. I couldn’t have been more proud.

Please take my word for it when I say to you that I am your worst nightmare. I once set my apartment on fire when I fell asleep with a lit cigarette. I once brought four men home in the middle of the night and said to my female roommate, "These guys are in a band I saw tonight that kicked ass. I told them they could crash here tonight. I hope you don’t mind." Ladies and gentlemen, I once threw a phone through a plate-glass window after having an argument with my girlfriend. Actually, that’s a lie. I’ve done that twice. XXX In the school year of 1990 to 1991, I moved eleven times in twelve months. Not a single one of them was by choice. I have had roommates throw my belongings in the street. I have had roommates sell my stereo to pay for my back rent. I once stole a Polaroid of my roommate giving her boyfriend a blowjob, which I found by rummaging through her things for an hour, masturbated to it, in her bed, made a xerox for my own amusement, and then ate an entire box of Pop-Tarts she had bought the night before. I am the worst roommate in the entire, entire world.

That is, until I met my match.

Her name was Kim. I found her through an ad in the Chicago Reader. It said, "Wanted. One roommate to share a two-bedroom apartment in Andersonville. Must like animals, loud music, smoking and anarchy." I gave her a call. Kim was a 28-year-old sculptor of functional objects. Her specialty was in making pieces of furniture out of discarded electronic items: chairs made out of burnt-out televisions, a bed fashioned out of 36 Macintosh LCIII’s. When I walked in the apartment, I couldn’t even tell whether the place had carpeting. Every inch of the floor was covered in debris. It was like a graveyard for computer nerds. In one corner was a 1950’s mannequin, spray-pained orange and riddled with bullet holes. Kim said:

"Don’t mind that. My boyfriend gets a little crazy when he’s on heroin, and the only way to calm him down is to let him shoot off his pistol for awhile."

Then she said:

"Well, he’s not really my boyfriend. He’s actually my dealer, but I sleep with him when I’m broke and I need to score. He’s actually a really nice guy. Just make sure never to bring up Randy Rhodes around him."

Randy Rhodes? I said. The former guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne?

"Yeah, that’s the guy. He’s got some weird, fucked-up thing about it. Let’s just say I learned about it the hard way."

I moved in the following Saturday.

Kim and I got along great. In fact, living with Kim made me think of a new business venture. "Bad Roommates Placement Services, Incorporated." Always forgetting to change the kitty litter? Fine, here’s another person just like yourself. Go crazy. Like to get real drunk and play your stereo at top volume in the middle of the night? Hey, Bob here likes Van Halen just as much as you. And we just found a comfy little couch house you can call your own.

Within weeks, Kim’s and my apartment was an absolute train wreck. My friends would come over and say things like:

"How the fuck can you live in a shithole like this, Pettus?"

Or:

"I hope to God you’re having sex with her, at least."

And I would just quietly shrug my shoulders, dumbfounded to the ways of the good half of the roommate world.

The thing that was great about Kim and I as roommates was that we always expected the worst from each other, so we were never disappointed. She would come home one night and I would say something like, "I needed to pay the gas bill today, so I took all your old Plasmatics albums down to Restless and got 40 bucks for them." I would come home one night and Kim would say something like:

"I was really horny this afternoon so I used that dildo your ex-girlfriend left over here before the break-up."

And this was perfectly fine. We never argued over the dishes because we owned no dishes. We never ate each other’s groceries because Kim had turned the refrigerator into an armoire. We received a five-day notice from the landlord every single month, and at least 50 percent of our time was spent with our utilities turned off. We couldn’t have been happier.

But eventually, just like Xanadu or Babylon or Twin Peaks, our little utopia also came to an end. One day there was a knock on the door. It was the police. They held a megaphone up to their lips and shouted:

"Attention Kim and Jason! People were never meant to live like this! You are a menace to society! Come out with your hands in plain sight!"

With the police was a priest. They gave the megaphone to him and he said:

"Children of God, your home is an abomination. It is a cursed and evil place, where rodents and other tools of Satan tread upon the ground."

And he was actually right about that part.

"Children of God, please vacate this foul place, so that the land may be exorcised and brought back into the folds of Heaven."

But we were having none of it. Kim and I had no illusions. We knew what a nightmare we were as roommates. We knew that neither of us would ever be able to live with someone else again. This was our home, damnit. I mean, sure, there was that big hole in the wall from that night we saw "Fight Club" and decided we could learn how to make our own explosives. And yes, technically the cockroaches actually had possession of the house and probably brought in more income than us anyway. But this was our HOME, damnit.

Kim and I barricaded the door with a pile of old Tribunes the size of a small boy. Unfortunately, we forgot about the back door, which we kept unlocked because we had lost the keys one night at Rainbo Club when we were really trashed. The police had us removed, the priest sprinkled the place with holy water, and they burned the whole damn building down to the ground.

I live alone now. People are still horrified when they come by my place, but it’s just not the same. There’s just no way for a studio apartment to truly ever embrace chaos the way a three-story house can. I got a letter from Kim recently. She’s in jail. She says it’s the best living arrangement she’s ever had. Everyone picks up after her, her bathroom can be cleaned with an industrial hose, and her landlord never, ever threatens to kick her out.