Single Mixed Female: Untenable Tenants and Raunchy Roommates
What's it like to have an awful roommate in prison? I'll tell you, but first: My last newsletter detailing my search for a new roommate generated a lot of questions about how my living situation shook out, so I'll share what transpired after I published it.
Not long afterward, I settled in with Mary, the woman I wrote about in last March's newsletter, "My Quest for the Perfect Imperfect Roommate." She was a nonsmoking, full-time worker who wanted to house with me, too. But within two weeks of living with her, she quit her full-time job, and all the blessed alone time I saw stretching out before me like an introvert's dream evaporated.
She stopped attending her daily aerobics sessions because the weather grew too hot. She stopped going to visits because her family took an extended trip out of state. She rarely left the room, not even to eat in the kitchen. Bit by bit, I descended into madness. OK, not quite that, but I grew terribly unhappy.
Each morning while I was getting ready for work, she would get up and move about the tiny room, often commencing exercises or taking over the sink area. This made getting out the door on time for my job a chaotic undertaking. I started many shifts in a state of frazzled frustration.
I would remind her of the uninterrupted alone time she was about to have. "Just give me thirty minutes to run around this little room and get ready, then I'll disappear for eight solid hours."
She refused to give me this courtesy. So I started getting up earlier. Then, she did, too. So I got up even earlier -- and so did she. I said, "I'm getting up earlier and earlier so I can get ready without bumping into you and I feel like you're chasing me around the clock."
Despite all this, she was kind, even a little meek. I could have been more forceful and insistent about her disruptive habits, but I knew that despite everything that drove me nuts about her, my housing situation could have been much worse.
In fact, things have been much worse. Here are a few of the worst roommates I've ever housed with:
The Racist
I lived with a woman who set her shrill alarm to go off at the ungodly hour of 3:30 in the morning so she could get up and meditate at the same time as her white supremacist prison boyfriend in another Arizona facility. This outrageous habit consistently disrupted my sleep in the dark hours before dawn, ratcheting up my resentment.
One of these times I thought, screw it. I turned on my small lamp and grabbed the book I was reading (Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, which I recommend for all creatives). She sat on her top bunk letting out frustrated sighs to signal her annoyance that I had dared to wake up with her at the noise of her alarm. This was her and her prison boyfriend's time.
As I lay there reading, I was not "quiet as a mouse," as the saying goes. A mouse makes noises. I was soundless. You couldn't hear me breathe or even turn a page. She disturbed my sleep, but I wouldn't let her accuse me of disturbing her "meditation," if that's even what she was up there doing.
During the day, she rapped out loud to Hip Hop music, making it difficult for me to read, watch TV, or listen to my own music. When I asked her to stop, she called my request "mean" and said that if I wanted to rap out loud in the room, she would never ask me not to.
She was a study in contradiction, and by that I mean she was a total hypocrite. Besides expecting me to stay asleep while she got up to her noisy alarm in the dark, she made fun of gays but then got a girlfriend, and was a self-professed racist who cracked jokes about blacks and Jews but admitted to crushing on black rap artist Lil Wayne.
The Tantrum Thrower
On a lockdown yard, I lived with a woman who flirted with a certain officer to get her door open in the dead of summer. She would come in and go out, leaving the door wide open and letting the 115° breeze roll in.
I just wanted to chill in the already-hot room, try not to overheat, and read Crazy Rich Asians. I would get up and close the door. She would exit, then return a while later, leaving the door wide open again. And again. And again.
Meanwhile, the little swamp cooler that couldn't was no match for the repeated assault of hot air. I felt like I was being preheated in an oven.
It was harder for her to get our door opened on the officer's days off, and I hoped these days would be peaceful and cooler. Instead, she would kick the door and scream, demanding to be let out. If that didn't work, she covered the door's window so the cops on duty were unable to check if we were alive during their security walks. Keeping us alive is part of their job. If they can't see us, they have to open the door to check on us.
When we were finally in for the day, she would yell out the cell's back window, which was sealed shut, loud enough for her girlfriend on a neighboring yard to hear. For about an hour every evening, I was subjected to one half of a screaming conversation. I would turn up the volume on my TV, but even with The Big Bang Theory blaring in my headphones, the yelling was much louder.
Her rude immaturity persisted until the tension grew too thick to endure. Eventually, she moved out and in moved a woman I'll call The Hellion.
The Hellion
For the record, I tend to like hellions. Along with other rascals, roughnecks, and agitators, they make the world an interesting place. Living with one, however, is a ride too wild for my quiet sensibilities.
When she wasn't occupying herself with expanding the diameters of her ear gauges or finding new places on her body to pierce or tattoo, she was lighting things on fire. Our room often smelled like it was off-gassing -- and not in that new-car-smell kind of way.
One moment, I would be chilling on my bunk watching TV or reading, and then the next I was choking on the toxic smell of melting plastic. Sometimes, ash fluttered down on me. I worried her little fires would grow out of control.
She also had extreme arguments with her girlfriend through our locked cell door. Her girlfriend would stand on the other side of the door, engaging with her. After particularly bad blowups, my roommate would scream, cry, kick the metal door, and scream some more before sliding down the wall and collapsing into a sobbing heap of snot and tears.
These episodes happened every few weeks and lasted about a half hour. I empathized, but there was nothing I could do to help her. When she became like this, I became a ghost to her: my presence invisible, my encouraging words unheard. All I could do was let these loud fits run their course.
I took to sitting silently on my bed, dumbfounded and at a loss, waiting for her to expend her rage. Reading, listening to music, or watching TV was impossible. I would never have told her to shut up. I'm not that insensitive.
As histrionic as she appeared, her pain was real. I had tasted its bitterness before, or some flavor thereof. I recognized it. She was, in some ways, a mirror of my own past psychic pain -- an outward manifestation of the raw emotional pit into which I had more than once plummeted.
One weekend, I went to a visit and when I returned, I noticed the level of my lotion was much lower in the clear bottle. I asked her about it, not really thinking she had taken it, and she feigned ignorance. A few days later, I checked through some other things of mine and discovered she had been robbing me by filling up her own bottles with my best fundraiser toiletries, which were irreplaceable one-time-only purchases.
Soon afterward, a better housing opportunity came my way and I moved in with a woman who was straight (no girlfriend drama) and who didn't steal from me.
The Contagious Cougher
One woman moved into my room flush with the flu virus. She had what she called a "dropped bladder" (also called a prolapsed bladder), a condition befalling some women after pushing out a baby in which the muscles down south, particularly the ones involved with the urethra's stop-and-flow function, become strained or weakened. Each time she coughed -- which was a lot with the flu -- she peed, and the room began to smell of urine. At one point the reek was so strong, like that of ammonia, that my eyes burned.
I don't fault this woman for her dropped bladder. We can all agree that giving birth is fraught with physical challenges. I fault her for how liberal she was with her spreading her germs around. She hacked all over the phones and around people without covering her mouth.
One night, her loud coughing woke me up. I opened my eyes and saw that she was standing a mere eighteen inches from my face, hacking in my direction with her mouth uncovered. I had just gotten over the flu a month earlier, but within days of her moving in, I lay sick again on my bunk, her ammonia-laden urine smell wafting up to me.
The above scenarios all fall somewhere on the spectrum of misery. But whenever I'm in a bad living situation -- which I don't have the authority to change -- I remember Viktor Frankl, a man who was hauled to Auschwitz and survived, then published an account of his horrific experiences in his book Man's Search for Meaning. Each time I remember him, my problems seem so small.
Last Earth Day on April 22nd, Mary and I moved to another yard where my old roommate L lived. I had lived with L the year before when, without warning, I was uprooted and moved to a more secure yard because a stalker was lurking beyond the fence line, trying to figure out his next move in his ill-conceived grand plan to rescue me from prison.
Like me, L was working full-time and had similar challenges with an unemployed roommate who stayed awake late and camped in the room all day. L and I submitted requests to house together again now that we were back on the same yard.
We each saw the advantages of housing together: early bedtimes with nights of sacred, uninterrupted sleep; and differing days off work, which meant alternating days of solitude in the room.
As usual, it took a long time for us to get moved, but it finally happened. And then this: After about a month of housing with L, she, too, quit her full-time job. (The universe is laughing at me, I just know it.)
L has a social life outside the room, however. It's not the same as being gone all day for work, but she's not a constant fixture in my living space. Besides, I can't really say anything bad about her because her niece subscribes to my newsletter. (Shout out to Yaya!)
Seriously, though, we are grateful to house together again. In an ideal prison setting, we would choose to house alone, but solo housing is not an option. We know how rare it is to find a compatible roommate, one whose habits don't jar you awake at night and whose routines don't rob you of peace and quiet -- and sanity.
The first time I lived with L, I moved into the cell she was occupying. This time, she moved into mine. That first night when we were back under the same concrete ceiling, she fell asleep at 8:30 and I thought, hell yeah. I'm getting a full night's sleep tonight.