Battle with the anti-Semitic roommate from hell
I had no idea what I was in for.
The apartment was nice, for Allston. It had hardwood floors, two bathrooms, a working dishwasher, a porch and quite a bit of floor space, all for $600 dollars a month. Plus, laundry in the basement. I moved in three days after Irene didn’t hit and had my mezuzot up by the second day. The first week there was cool. Then the problems started.
Let me introduce you to my fifth roommate—let’s call her Tiffani. Pink blotches in her hair, stomach bulging out from under her crop-top, omnipresent smell of stale cigarette smoke. Straight out of the trailer park, you feel me? I let her sign the lease thinking I shouldn’t be a snob, people need to co-exist, there’s enough room for everyone, blah, blah, blah.
When we moved in, everyone was rushing to get the biggest room, Jersey Shore-style. Tiffani was yelling at me that she better not get the smallest room. I told her that wasn’t my problem; if she moved in before other people, she wouldn’t. She was bringing a dog with her. She told me the dog would stay in her room. In retrospect that was a pretty obvious lie.
The first problem was the people she was bringing back. A lot of them were in and out in five minutes. It looked pretty suspicious, and I wasn’t doing anything, but I didn’t want to be caught up in the story if something happened. I talked to her about it and she told me, “Fuck you! I can have people over when I want.” This was true, I guess.
One time she brought back a homeless guy who was calling himself Eleven. White dreads, Aus-Rotten t-shirt. Apparently she’d met him a few minutes ago and bought him a Big Mac. At first I was going to trip that he was even in my place, but he turned out to be pretty cool. He kept asking me what books he should read to study Jewish mysticism; he was into Crowley and Kabbalah and all that occult stuff.
I asked him if he could fix the lock on my door.
“Like take it off?”
“Nah, install it. I can’t get it to work.”
He couldn’t help with that.
So no lock on my door. I spent a lot of time in my room, and had to keep the shades down all the time. See, my room was right next to the porch, and without the shades you could look straight in the window and see my HDTV and my speakers and my recording equipment.
The second problem was the kitchen. Tiffani just took over the kitchen, she filled all the cabinets with her diet food, she let the sink pile up with her dirty pots and pans and bongs. She didn’t clean it, because not everything in there was hers.
That was our first fight. I told her to clean the fucking kitchen. She told me I was going to get robbed sometime in the next month.
We had almost 12 months left on the lease.
The third problem was the dog. It kept running into my room any time I left the door open for a minute, getting its hair on my fly sneakers and vests and other ill gear.
“No one else cares, Max! They all like the dog! Stop whining!”
“You said you were going to keep it in your room! Take care of the dog or get out!”
“I’m on the lease now, you can’t do shit! Stop whining with your fucking Jew-voice!”
“Jew-voice? Word? Just die!”
Yeah, she said Jew-voice. I wasn’t offended by the idea of a “Jew-voice” as much as that she’d throw the J-word around like that. You can have a fight without getting racial.
The fourth problem was the porch. Every night she’d have people there smoking and drinking and shouting. Tuesdays too. Until 4 or 5 in the morning. If I told them to shut up so I could sleep they’d bang on my window for minutes on end. Could I call in a noise complaint on my own roommate? If it was just weekends I wouldn’t have cared, but it was every single night. I had work at 10 a.m. some days.
The fifth, and final, problem was the dog. Again. One day it peed on the floor. I’m not going to lie; I was heated about that. I knocked on her door and told her to clean up the fucking piss.
“Fuck off, I’m sleeping.”
I’m not defending what I did next. I shoved it in a closet. (By this time it had crapped on the floor too.) If it was going to just piss wherever, it could do it on her bongs, not my floor.
Tiffani woke up a few hours later and started yelling at me for putting her dog in a closet.
“Your dog pissed and shat all over the fucking floor, and you didn’t even clean it up! Start taking care of your dog or we’re getting rid of it!”
“Fuck you Max!”
“Fuck your dog!”
And then, with two witnesses, she shouted, “FUCK THE JEWS!”
“Fuck you! Just kill yourself!”
Later on I asked the roommates to condemn her remarks. None of them cared. “She said ‘fuck the Jews! How can you defend that?”
“I’m not defending it dude; I just don’t care. You told her to kill herself.”
“I didn’t go racial! And her dog pissed all over the fucking floor and she didn’t clean it up for hours!”
“Yeah, it’s a puppy; dogs do that.
“You’re not going to condemn her remarks?”
“No, I’m not going to condemn her remarks.”
The day after that, Tiffani’s ex-con boyfriend came around to tell me if I ever did anything to the dog, he’d put my head through a wall. Awesome.
Finally, one morning Tiffani and her friends were being idiots on the porch. I yelled, “Shut up!” She yelled, “You can just move out if you don’t like it!”
“I’m on the lease. Get someone to take the lease, pay me the security deposits, pay me last month’s rent, and I’ll gladly move out.”
“OK, I have a lot of friends who need a place.”
“Great! I need last month’s and security deposit in a bank check or a money order, and I’m out.”
So that’s how it ended, unilateral withdrawal. I wasn’t even pissed at Tiffani, white trash are going to be white trash, and just looking at her I should have known she wasn’t roommate material. But I was pissed at my friends who didn’t take my side when she trashed the apartment and got hateful.
Like what I said to Brian: “If she called you a nigger I wouldn’t be telling you to get over it. I’d be telling her to go find a new place.” That’s not what happened though.
I’m done living in Allston.
Max Elstein Keisler is a third-year journalism major at Harvard Extension School. He’s involved in the local music scene in Boston and the coverage of Jewish music worldwide. Max interviewed Jewish rapper Kosha Dillz in September.
