Wart
Memoirs of a recovering ex-roommate part 4½
“I’m tired of you and your shit,” snarled my roommate Walton. “I want you out by the end of the month.”
I stared at him angrily, feeling the narcotic rush of adrenalin and testosterone pumping into my bloodstream.
“My shit?” I thought. “My shit?” That bastard might be trying to evict me, but if I played my cards right, I might be able to evict him first.
* * *
I’d moved in with Walton six months before, and things had gone poorly from the night I arrived:
“That’s it. I’m all moved in,” I said, taking a seat in the living room.
“Cool,” Walt replied, and lit up a cigarette. I stared.
“Um, didn’t you say this is a non-smoking apartment?”
“Yeah yeah, sure. Don’t worry, I usually only smoke in my room.”
Fucker.
Right on cue, I looked down and saw Walton’s little black Shih Tzu, Lenny, squatting next to the sofa. The dog wandered off, leaving a small, dark puddle of fresh urine in the carpet. I stared. Walt had assured me that his dog was house trained and would not be a problem.
“Hey, your dog just took a whiz on the carpet.”
“Oh, shit,” he said disinterestedly, not even pausing his video game to take a look. “Don’t worry about it. It’ll dry off really fast.”
And it only went downhill from there. Walton continued to smoke in the living room, and his dog continued to piss on the floor. As an added bonus, Lenny crapped on the carpet every week or two, which never failed to send our other roommate, Cindy, into paroxysms of rage.
Cindy was a nice, quiet, studious graduate student who moved in at the same time as me. She had delusions of keeping a clean and tidy apartment, but found her efforts continually thwarted by Lenny, whose excretory contributions to the floor vexed her at every turn.
Worse, Walt’s efforts at cleaning up after his dog were pathetic in the extreme. All he did was pick up the solid feces, leaving the stains behind. Everywhere one looked, there were urine stains and fecal residue. It was absolutely disgusting.
For Cindy, the death blow came when she left her bedroom door open for a couple of minutes, and returned to discover Lenny pissing on her bed.
After that, she wasn’t the same woman. Her eyes permanently narrowed, she almost never spoke, and she stalked, rather than walked, around the apartment.
She moved out shortly afterward, and was replaced by Brad, who was without a doubt the most bigoted person I’ve ever known.
With the advent of a three-guy household, the apartment’s downward spiral into filth and decay was hideously accelerated. Three young men have never been a recipe for domestic hygiene, but with Lenny the shitting Shih Tzu thrown into the mix, the results were catastrophic.
It’s amazing how the constant sight and smell of dog excrement saps one’s will to keep a place tidy. And Walton wasn’t cleaning up after himself, either—he would leave pots of leftovers in the fridge until they decayed into furry kaleidoscopes of colours and shapes, and instead of washing them up, he would put them out on the balcony.
But Walton was more than just filthy and irresponsible. For him, life was a game where he did his best to lie to everyone and take advantage of others whenever he could.
For example, he had three girlfriends, none of whom knew about the other two. His primary girlfriend, which is to say the one he took home to his conservative Chinese parents, was Penny, a really nice girl from Hong Kong. Because of her accent, she called me “Gren” and Walt “Wart.”
One night I was gripped by terror when I heard them having sex in his room and she moaned, I swear to God, “Oh, Wart! Wart! Yes!”
His secondary squeeze was a fashionable young blond who smoked constantly. I liked her less than Penny because she smoked more.
And finally, there was a fat, unattractive brunette that Brad and I rarely saw because Walt tried to conceal her existence from us out of embarrassment—sometimes we caught him quickly shuttling her from the front door to his room, and the look on his face was just priceless.
We questioned him about her one night in front of the TV, and he confessed that he was only dating her because she was letting him fuck her in the ass.
“I knew it,” said Brad when Walton was out of earshot. “He’s doing her up the butt. He’s doing her up the butt. I bet his dick’s so small she doesn’t even feel it. Asian men have small cocks, Glen. They have small cocks.”*
However, his girlfriends weren’t the only women Walton was playing. He would habitually borrow his mother’s car and then not return it, avoiding her calls for weeks at a time so he wouldn’t have to give it back.
This would send her into paroxysms of rage, and when she was on the warpath, she would call more than a dozen times a day and leave hilarious messages on our voice mail:
“Watt! Wheh ah you? You steal da cah! You steal da cah! I calling police! You ah no longah my son!” That’s right, she would actually disown him, right there on our voice mail.
Eventually he would give back her car, but he would always get hold of it again within a few weeks, and the cycle would repeat.
Walton’s mother and girlfriends would call for him on a regular basis, and Brad and I were expected to cover his ass by saying that he wasn’t home. And this is where we start to comprehend the essential stupidity of the man. You see, much like his dog, Walton didn’t follow that most fundamental of life’s rules:
Don’t shit where you eat.
Considering how badly Walt needed Brad and I to shill for him on the phone, it should have occurred to him that he might want to be on our good sides. Instead, he fucked us over as vigorously as the rest, and the perpetual presence of dog crap kept the flames of inter-roommate anger bright.
Things fell apart for Walton not long before he asked me to leave. He mysteriously lost his job as a casino card dealer—I say “mysteriously” because it involved cryptic calls from casino security and the police. (For all we knew, he was charged with something, but we never found out about it.)
Then his girlfriends dumped him. Word on the street was that Penny high-tailed it when she found blond hairs in Wart’s bed, and the blonde took off shortly after Brad stepped in a pool of fresh dog piss as he went to answer the phone, and in a paroxysm of rage, said:
“I’m sorry, he can’t come to the phone because he’s doing some fat ugly slut up the butt, can I take a message?”
The blonde promptly showed up uninvited, and that was the last we saw of both women. I only wish I’d been home to witness the carnage.
My eviction notice came when I made an obvious deduction. Walton, Brad and I were supposedly each paying an even third of the rent, but Brad and I had never actually seen the lease, so we had only Walt’s word on what the rent actually was. Walt being Wart, chances were that he was tricking Brad and I into paying more than our fair share.
And so, during our next argument, I railroaded Walt into swearing that he wasn’t a liar. “Okay then,” I said. “If you’re not a liar, then show me the fucking lease. I want to see how much the rent on this place really is.”
Walt stared at me. His mouth opened and shut. I had him. That’s when he announced that he was tired of my shit and he wanted me out.
This, of course, sent me into a paroxysm of rage, and in a fit of righteous bloodlust I teamed up with Brad to get Walton evicted. But then sanity prevailed, and it dawned on me that if I got rid of Walton, I’d still be living with Brad.
Clearly, Walt was doing me a favour with this eviction. It was time for me to go.
As you know, I strive to be positive in my portrayals of the people I’ve known, but people like Walton make the job difficult. Looking back, there are only two positive things I can say about him:
He was more adept at infuriating others than anyone I’ve ever known.
As amazing as this might sound, he wasn’t half the asshole that Brad was.
Gentle reader, we have only begun our descent into the household of horror that was the apartment of Walton, Glen and Brad. Stay tuned for the next thrilling episode of Memoirs of a recovering ex-roommate, which, for your convenience, starts on the next page. •
Completed in 2004 for inclusion in the Wasting My Youth manuscript, based on unused material from 1999.
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