Let's Just All Sit Around and Cry About Top Gun

 

Let's face it, I had a MULTITUDE of scary roommates in college.  The ones I chose, for the most part, (Sophia, Lauren...thank you for both being hilarious and slightly normal) were great.  However, one roommate I chose turned out to be, well...interesting to say the least.  

Like most of my fellow students, her parents were filthy rich.  Actually, her step-dad was filthy rich.  Her biological father passed away tragically when she was just a baby, so when her mom re-married she decided a software engineer might be an upgrade from a drunken, abusive military man.  This choice benefited her already existing three children, as they moved up from the slums to a new house that didn't have an address, it just had a NAME.

In no way am I making light of the loss of a parent, or the painful troubles it can bring emotionally.  I lost someone very close to me, someone I looked at as a parental figure, so I know what it's like.  It's the worst feeling in the world, so let me make that disclaimer before you all call me a bitch.

This girl needed therapy and lots of it.  She refused counseling.  Her schooling was entirely paid for, yet, she would not go.  She would rather drive her new car to Taco Bell and eat, even though we had a meal program that was built-in to our tuition.  MARRIOTT MADE OUR FOOD FOR GOD'S SAKE.  It's not like the cafeteria from Orange is the New Black, okay?  We had a waffle bar and burgers to order.  Yeah, let's go to Taco Bell.

If we weren't ditching class to eat garbage, I was drug along to watch her spend money.  We lived dangerously close to Santa Monica, so Third Street Promenade's Urban Outfitters saw a lot of us.  Well, they saw a lot of me browsing, and her buying.  She would tear through that plaza, doing some serious damage.  I saved my money for important things, like drugs.  I have no idea how she got so much spending cash.  She did not pay her car insurance, car payment or rent.  Yes, and this was not the first girl at Pepperdine I lived with who had the same hook-up.  In my next life, I will be Princess of Monaco. 

She never understood the concept of me (or anyone) working.  I got her a job at the flower shop where I worked, and I'm pretty sure my boss almost killed me.  They way he looked at her pick up plants made me double over with laughter.  He was appalled by her laziness, and this kid was raised in Malibu, surrounded by laziness.  After he determined she could not even use a broom properly, she never returned.  She got a job at a pet shop, holding kittens.  I did not realize that was a job, but I am still trolling Craigslist to find it locally.

I made the mistake of introducing her to a friend from high-school.  They dated, they got down, they broke up.  It was all my fault.  I let him stay at our place one night (when she was out of town, months after they had broken up) and she had a conniption because she said she could "smell him on the pillows".  Um, okay.  Does that mean you can smell my farts, too?

Then, she proceeded to partake in her favorite activity, which was to watch Top Gun.  Over, and over and over.  Then she would take turns crying in the bathroom, the hallway, her bed and perhaps her car, for all I know.  My friends would call randomly, and as soon as I saw that VHS coming out of it's sleeve, I would tell them it was a "Code TG" and that I'd be crashing on their couch for an extended amount of time.  The one time I tried to help her and talk about it, she almost punched me in the face from under her comforter. 

The "emotional stress" of school proved to be to much for her.  She needed to be off-campus to be able to "think and be in my own space."  Cool, no more fucking Top Gun.  Now I can move off campus too, and finally smoke pot without her breathing down my neck to blow it in some stupid tube filled with dryer sheets. 

The kicker for me was the fact that she once got angry with me because I told a mutual friend I was tired of letting her use my meal points at the cafeteria.  She had moved off-campus, she was rich, and the last time I saw her she was smoking heroin in her new living room, in her brand new apartment, in the heart of Venice Beach.  Get your own meal points.  

This argument of meal points was so important that she decided not to speak to me during the entirety of an Elliott Smith show at the Wiltern in Los Angeles.  We didn't know it at the time, but this was just after Figure Eight was released, and this was one of his last, BIG shows with a full band.  He played an acoustic set at the end, and during some of our FAVORITE songs we had loved for years, she would not even look at me.  Real mature.  I'm sure you can imagine the ride home.

She finally had enough of me when I would not write her resume for her.  I was working full time, she was "working" for some crazy Scientology art house in LA, and (big surprise) hated her job, and wanted my help finding a new one.  Since I was balancing crazy hours at work and a drug addiction, I told her it would have to be some other time.  She never called me again and has never answered any message I have sent her on FB.  

I notice now she lives in New York City, of course in Brooklyn (shocker) and still seems to enjoy taking pictures of herself in various emo filters and re-telling the story about how she made out with Norman Reedus.  That was ten years ago.  I don't think he remembers you. 

Oh yeah, and D said having sex with you was like sleeping with a dead grandma.  Maybe that's why he broke up with you?