This was the summer of 1991. I had been living at home after I dropped out of college. I had lost my drivers license because of so many tickets, so I needed to move into town. Plus, I really didn't want to be living with my parents again. I had already signed a lease for the fall, but I needed to find a place to live for the summer. So Jack, a friend of mine, said he had a cool 1 bedroom apartment that he was going to rent for the summer. He wanted to know if I wanted to stay there. And just for the record, Jack and I were never very close friends. We just knew each other and he often hung around my circle of friends. This was a small town and most of the gay men knew each other.
The living arrangements started off good. He worked at the restaurant/nightclub next door. The restaurant I worked for was about 6 blocks away and easily walkable. Our schedules were different with me working mornings and him working evenings, so we rarely saw each other. And for most nights, he wouldn't sleep in his bed, he slept on the couch. Life was pretty good.
Soon enough, the problems began. He never once bought anything for the apartment. He was eating my food and drinking my drinks. And he would go through toilet paper like crazy! I stopped bring food and drinks into the apartment unless I was going to eat them right then. I also never bought any more toilet paper. I was very good at holding it until I would go to work or a friend's house.
It was a very hot and humid summer that year. I walked in and the apartment was very warm. I checked the thermostat thinking he had turned the a/c off, but no, he had turned the thermostat down to below 50°! If you have never tried this before, our a/c unit was in a closet. When he cranked the thermostat down to below 50°, it froze the pipes in the a/c unit. By the time I had found it, the a/c unit was a solid block of ice. This same even happened at least 3 or 4 times that I remember. And each time, I would bitch him out and tell him that you cannot turn the temperature down that low. We would be without a/c for a few hours each time.
And then I started to notice stuff disappearing. First I couldn't find a few shirts of mine. And honestly, I thought I had probably left them at the laundromat. But then other things started to disappear. A music CD. Some food. A skillet. Some books. When I would confront him, he said he had no idea where they were. So I packed up everything I owned except for essential clothes, and stored it all at a friend's house. Jack never once said anything about how all of my stuff had disappeared.
Fast forward to the end of the 3 month lease. Jack is moving out a week before the lease is over and he was moving to his mom's house in Oklahoma. The night before he was leaving, he had to work had left all of his belongings packed in garbage bags. So I untied the bags and started going through them. Sure enough, there was all of my shirts that had disappeared. I also found my skillet, music CDs and books. I also found some of my underwear (with shit tracks in them, DISGUSTING!). UGH! I removed all of my belongings (except for the shit covered underwear, he can keep those) and tied the bags back shut. I was at work when he left town. He never once left a note or tried to contact me again. Of course, I had the last laugh. It was his name on the lease, not mine. I never bothered to clean when I moved out. After all, in the 3 months we had lived there, he never once bothered to clean anything. And he sure didn't bother to clean when he left. A few years later, my best friend Jeff ran into Jack in a St. Louis bar. Jack told Jeff how upset he was because I left the apartment such a mess. Honestly, I didn't leave it any messier than he had left it. I just never cleaned anything. He was upset of course because he never got his security deposit back. I should have been nicer I suppose, he could have used that money to buy some toilet paper to wipe his ass properly. That would have kept somebody else's underwear from being so nasty!
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