After last week’s post highlighting the altogether pleasant reality of my family life, something that is in no small way heightened by the fact that we all currently live under one roof together (albeit in self contained abodes separated by a sturdy door and a long hallway) I got to thinking about how my folks actually measure up against some of my other previous, non blood related, flatmates.
These recollections may have also been subconsciously inspired by reading Scott’s mooch musings the other day, because, like him, I have lived in some special places in my time, and with special places, comes Special People.
If this were an awards ceremony the judges would be hard pressed to name who would take the prize of the Most Special Flatmate, but lets have a look who is in the running anyway.
The Nominees are:
Lady Berko – so named due to her well known tendency to be, well, off her fuckin’ rocker, enters the race on account of two stand out flatmate performances.
The first was when Berko, a self declared political lesbian and general all round hardcore radical activist, once came home, burst through our other flatmate’s bedroom door – an upstairs bedroom in which we all sheltered to escape the rising tide of the filth from the rooms below, reasoning that we could always hurl ourselves out of the top window if it ever came time to ‘jump ship’ – and declared, with no small amount of incredulity, that her mother didn’t agree with her claim that “all heterosexual sex is rape”.
As her frame filled the doorway and a heavy silence descended on the room, her face broke open in a cackle and with crazed eyes twirling around in concentric circles, she demanded to know if “we could, like, fucking believe it?”
The answer, obviously, was, no, no we couldn’t believe it. But we were mostly answering in relation to could we believe that just as we were all lounging around on beds and cushions, smoking joints and having inconsequential discussions about how best to clamber out the window come the high filth tide, that someone would burst through the door and lay claims that, for the straight ones amongst us, our sex lives amounted to nothing more than filthy violations.
Lady Berko’s other famous flatmate moment came from the stroke of genius she had in building a ‘compost’ directly outside our kitchen window.
“Its great!” she exclaimed, while demonstrating by lobbing food straight out the window onto a pile of exposed and rotting garbage below, “it means we don’t even have to go outside to empty the compost”, she beamed.
Lady Berko was the Environment Officer of our University Student Council in those days, so she really knew a thing or two about the beauty of waste reduction. Strangely, she never could get the same practice to take off on campus, despite threatening to ‘lock on’ to a garbage bin in protest….
Boy Dazzler – is a stand out nominee if only for being the sole flatmate I ever lived with to do sex work, inside the house.
Boy Dazzler would bring his seedy Sugar Daddy home, to what was yet another dogmatic, radical, politicised house with the kind of righteous and authoritarian air that discouraged you from ever wanting to point out the psychologically disturbing nature of a relationship between a sleazy older man cuming around to pay for sex with a gorgeous young Asian boy in a room decorated with a large floor-to-ceiling jungle themed motif featuring a huge lion face as the central image (a left over feature from the previous tenants, and one that Boy Dazzler agreed to live with on the condition that he pay cheaper rent for his room) for fear that you would be labelled, ‘conservative’, or worse, ‘a sexist, racist, disempowering sellout…’
In a reversal of the situation outlined in Lady Berko’s house, Boy Dazzler also had to bail out to escape the overflowing rot of a room, but in this case it was his bedroom that he had to flee from, causing him to take up permanent residence in the loungeroom. By this point, thankfully for the comfort of our (strictly non commercial) TV viewing lives, the sex work had stopped.
Dopey Dave – would probably be bringing up the tail end of the nomination race, not because he was any better than the rest, but just because we was slow in general.
Dopey Dave was the kind of flatmate that just became a permanent fixture of the house, you could return home day or night, and find him exactly how you left him, which was usually draped over a couch looking like a stroke victim.
Bleary eyed and bearded, when not clinging to the couch like a rotting crust of pizza, he could be seen drifting around from one room to another, his body huddled under an old blanket he had fashioned into a poncho and his head huddled under a thick plume of pot smoke.
But his place in the race has been earned by his famed understanding of ‘polygamy’ to be that of a wonderfully, radical, philosophical idea that perfectly excused his tendency to sleep around with numerous women at the same time, and not tell any of them.
And additionally, for his laughable but loveable tendency to whip out his old acoustic guitar, no matter what the occasion, so long as it involved the usual mob of radical-pinko-lefties, and start crooning, eyes closed and forehead creased: Don’t ya know, we’re talkin bout a revolution…
The Glitterati Priestess – would no doubt be spiritually opposed to the notion of competition, but finds herself in the running anyway on account of making me so uncomfortable in her presence that I would opt to join Boy Dazzler and his Sugar Daddy in the jungle room, if forced to choose.
The Glitterati Priestess lived in a house that I moved into after travelling around the hippie heartland of Tasmania. I was lured in by the huge block of land and the wonderful permaculture garden out back, which in hindsight, given it occupied the entire space of the backyard leaving not so much as a square inch to sit down in, should have been my first clue that this puritan household had no place for pleasure.
When I turned up with my things, I discovered my room had been covered in glitter and the tiny little shiny stars that children use to decorate drawings with. Noticing my surprise, GP stopped by my doorway and cheerfully explained that she had cleansed my room for me. Given I had always thought cleansed was derived from the word clean, and my room looked like a clown had spewed in it, I remained confused, thus earning my first strike from the GP.
The second came when I stood around in the kitchen picking at food (post early morning chiming of meditation bells) and the GP accosted me and asked, ‘if I had any problems being around her?’ because, as she had astutely noticed, I tend to fidget a lot. ‘Even now’, she went on, ‘I can just tell from your body language that you are so uncomfortable….’
It wasn’t long before my discomfort really got in the way of things, because while I was more than understanding about the request to smoke my joints outside rather than inside this puritan house, when it was hinted at that I should do the same when drinking a beer of an evening, I couldn’t pack my bags fast enough…
Blues Band Bad Boys – stand for this nomination collectively, which may seem unfair against the other individual competitors, and it is. The other thing working in the favour is that they were all 20 years old, which is a huge advantage when it comes to being a Special Person.
We were in our 30s by the time we lived with these boys, but still liked to ‘keep in real’ and dabble in living on the wild side with the hip young’s things, which is just another way of saying we were aimless and poor.
We were living out of our van in Manchester at the time and desperate to find at house as we headed into a bitterly cold winter. The sprawling old mansion on the outskirts of town seemed perfect, if by perfect you mean awful but affordable, and it even had the added bonus of coming complete with its own blues band! It was a shock, to say the least, that our van would prove to be not only the cleaner of the two ‘houses’, but also the warmer.
The boys are obvious front runners in this race for all the predictable 20 year old flatmate reasons of not knowing how to wash a dish, pay a bill or remove any rubbish, but their stellar performance was the huge house party they threw, on a Wednesday night, at 2am in the morning.
In somewhat of a twist on the usual take of having a house party, this party didn’t start at the house, and didn’t really involve anyone else that lived in the house. So as the rest of the house lay quietly sleeping the BBBB stormed home with the entire pub’s patrons in tow, and a few other hundred people they dragged along the way, and ‘got busy with it’.
When I had to get up to go to the toilet I was forced to clamber over people’s sprawling bodies just to make my way down the stairs, I started huffing and puffing and hurling expletives left, right and centre, which earned me the attention of one of the BBBB, who then followed me back up to my bedroom, bursting through the door into our darkened room, E’ing off his face and brandishing a Freddo Frog as a ‘peace offering’. You might be able to guess where that ended up….
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Which brings us to the end of the nominations, but before we leave, I would just like to add, that for all of these shockers, I have had double the number of good and loving flatmate experiences, and it is in fact how I met The Yang, in one of the most awesome communal houses I have ever lived in….
RubyTwoShoes 