Letter to Roommate #1
Dear Roommate #1 (aka the Jihadist): Everyone knows leaving hostile sticky notes
is just bad form. So, don’t take this
the wrong way, but when you wonder why you’re floating up to heaven, the answer
is that you didn’t belong on the planet.
The mere existence of your person is just completely wrecking my
universe. I’m sorry you have a lot of
periods, but (a) I’m not sure why you want to share that with me and (b) there
are things you can take for that (for fuck’s sake). And why, mother of God, is every light in the
fucking house on? I swear to God if it’s
the last thing I do on this earth, I’m going to disconnect the fucking awful
florescent lights that you insist on keeping on 24/7 in the kitchen. But let’s get on with the real issue.
I know you’re European and everything (so you think tight jeans
and boots is a great look, but I’m here to tell you, they don’t have rodeos in
Queens. Also walking around the kitchen
back and forth in said thick-heeled, slut boots at 9:00 a.m. is weird and kind
of rude. You do this early in the
morning on a Saturday when people are trying to sleep. You do it in the middle of the afternoon on a
Tuesday. Does it make you feel thin, or
more horse-like? I just want to get a
sense of why, particularly because I’m trying to get some god forsaken sleep,
but I can’t, because I’m bewildered by your strange domestic patterns. That, and what’s with you and the fucking
kitchen. Get a life. You shouldn’t stay holed up in the house all
day it’s not healthy, and your hair is greasy and there is an odor coming from
your Etruscan cave of a bedroom.
You’re crashing dishes and whatever around too – my dishes, incidentally, because you
don’t own anything. You leave them in
the sink until things are growing from them.
God forbid anyone make a request that the dishes be done more frequently,
because then you blow up like a PMS-ridden-guerilla-psychopath. It felt very satisfying to block you on my
phone, by the way, because I refuse to read text rants, which until I saw them,
I didn’t believe they existed. Your
generation doesn’t know how to do anything unless it’s on an app, so I get it,
but it doesn’t make it valid. My
generation doesn’t text. We want a face
to face where I will break your nose.
I don’t even want to be writing this shit, but I am so exasperated,
I’m about to buy firearms. I suspect
that is the nature of the roommate situation, but that is giving you too much
credit. To act like a cunt over a
cabinet shelf and leaving bitchy notes around the apartment means you have
mental issues. I doubt you are in
therapy considering you seldom buy anything that resembles a paper product, and
you don’t seem to be getting any relief from that meditation class. I’m trying to keep this light because really
I’m praying that you get captured by ICE on your trip back from the motherland,
because you’ve been nothing short of a tyrannical nazi whore. PS – I don’t want any fucking Turkish coffee. Americans don’t like that shit. PS2 – no one will ever marry you.
* * *
Letter to Roommate #2
This is a sincere continuance of the roommate letter, but to the
other, more pterodactyl-like one who has, and whom I will now refer to as, No Tits.
Dear No Tits: I know you
like to come home and talk on the phone really
loud to whoever is on the other end, which, I find astounding that anyone would
actually listen to you, because your voice makes me want to scratch my own eyes
out. I’ve never before felt the urge to
run across a room and dive out a window than after I’ve heard a diatribe coming
from your trachea. And loud, loquacious
vocalizations in the living room the way neurotic cats tend to do at 3:00 a.m.
probably makes sense to your rather pigeon-like brain, I’m sure, because although
you have a room you could go into to do such things, why not make sure the whole
house is disturbed? You laugh a lot, but
it’s like a nervous, right before you lose touch with reality type laugh, and you
have weird frizzy hair and seem somewhat dim-witted. In my act I refer to you as Pennsylvania
barnyard stupid. But, since it creates a
furrow in my being, I have stopped talking about you on stage, except to say
the part where I believe you sleep upside down in your closet.
I know this probably seems somewhat hostile, especially
considering I smile and try to be pleasant, because that is, in fact, my
nature. But really it’s because I’m
imagining your untimely and fairly brutal demise. It’s the only way I can get through this
phase of living in New York affordably, which clearly, I should have thought
out better. My hostility started when
you began making comments about my furniture.
You wanted to organize my
belongings which frankly are none of your business. You made comments about my armoire. The irony is that when you moved in, you didn’t
own anything. Not even a lamp. You threw a fit because of a table cloth and
then minutes later offered me some salmon.
Maybe your medication is off. I
can’t even list it all because I feel more gray hair coming in as I type.
And although I usually cringe at your stories that disclose
personal information about your dumb life, when you told me that you had celiac
and couldn’t shit, I nearly wept with joy.
I must admit, however fleeting, I was almost grateful for the debacle of
my artist-led existence in this over-tiled Greek fortress of a house in stupid Queens. I found myself almost faint. Even though living with you has overshadowed
other unfortunate living situations, such as the alcoholic who made puppets or
the Hawaiian violinist who was in Cabaret on Broadway and referred to its star
as “Al” (Alan Cumming) because they were buddies, your having an issue with
your dairy air made me almost feel guilty for calling you NTBN – (which is
short for No Tits Big Nose). I would feel
guilty except it’s caught on with all of my friends and it provides humor that
clearly this household lacks. And P.S.
fuck you too.
