An Incident of Cluelessness

Adding a little Joy to our Lives: an Incident of Cluelessness

      Almost everyone has roommate stories, good and bad. At some point in our lives we have shared our homes in a manner that rewarded or punished us. My husband Mike and I have been together over twenty years and have shared our home with many friends along the way. Friends starting over after a bad relationship or bad job, friends in transition or distress, friends down on their luck or lucky enough to travel and couch surf have all been welcomed to our home. We received many gifts from these relationships; new recipes, new songs, new games and new interests that all found their way into our lives from roommates. We are fortunate to still call them all friends…except one. Having her as a roommate nearly lost us our home, our pets, our car, my job and of course our sanity. It did however lead to me learning, a little too late in life, something that I should have learned in kindergarten. It got me thinking about all the things we just assume that everyone else must know.  Turns out, we don’t always know it at all.

                  The whole situation started typically and innocently. Our friend Joy called from Minneapolis for help.  Joy had worked with Mike and me at Clean Water Action a decade earlier and had been a good friend when we lived in Minneapolis. We had kept in touch and knew she was still a committed activist working mostly on issues of social justice and human rights. She was a good person, but a bit flaky. She had failed at her third business attempt in as many years and was broke. The mutual friend she was living with had, according to Joy, become really aggressive toward her and Joy was frightened to stay. As shocked as I was to hear this about our mutual friend, as difficult as it was for me to even imagine her behaving in any of the manners Joy assured me she had; eventually I accepted Joy’s version of the story because…well, who would lie about such a thing?  So, we made arrangements to get her to Tucson and get her back on her feet.

                  At the time we were renting an old converted Fort on Geronimo. An awesome space that we took over when friends left to go back to Iowa and turned over to another friend when we bought our  own home. La Fortuna, or the Fort, plays a role in over a decade of our lives.  It had a huge Arizona room that doubled as my studio and had room left over for a large bed, dresser and two cupboards of storage. We offered this space and of course the use of all common spaces to Joy. The first problem began within minutes of her arrival. She wanted to smoke…in the house…and not just tobacco. We are more than a little supportive of this type of smoking, but we have never smoked anything inside any of our homes. Also we were renting, our landlord was great, but not lenient about drug use. Smoking “not tobacco” in the house could get us evicted. Just off the Arizona room we had enclosed the portico with screens and a security door. It was filled with plants and a charming little wrap-around corner couch, two other chairs, a French mirrored glass table; it was shaded and cool and smelled of the gardenia, hibiscus and citrus plants that grew there. Via a shutter style window, the cats had access to this room all day, but it was a great place for morning tea or evening wine. Not being smokers, we generously offered to let Joy smoke in the portico (it was technically outside) with the understanding she be extremely careful. We thought that would be the worst of our adjustments, again having never had a bad roommate relationship before this.

                  We set to work helping Joy find a job or source of income. She applied at several places and I also invested in beeswax candle making supplies for her. I spent over 200 dollars on her supplies, but much more on the two dozen pots and pans she “borrowed” from my cupboards and then scorched and destroyed during her candle-making “process”. When she did finally have a product she set them all out to “dry” on our patio. In Arizona. In the summer. That’s right—a giant stain of pigmented beeswax melted into the patio. Her second attempt, also funded by me, had much the same result in the trunk of my car. She was transporting them to a booth I had rented her at a Farmer’s Market and claimed that she thought the trunk was air conditioned like the rest of the car.

                  Maybe entrepreneurship wasn’t going to work out for Joy. I talked to my employer. I was working as a retail manager at a neighborhood bead store. I did purchasing, created and taught classes, managed the schedule and worked with the wholesale manager to coordinate advertising. We sometimes hired people with no bead experience to run the cash register, process inventory into stock, restock and clean the store. Joy got hired. So far, so good. A regular job, no more destruction of our property, Joy was earning money and saving for her own place, great!!

                  The situation turned sour slowly and in a variety of ways. Like something going rotten in a jar undetected at the back of the fridge and then one day exploding so vilely and putridly that no amount of cleaning can save the fridge. You just have to chuck it out.

                  My jewelry was often missing and Joy would say she borrowed it and lost it. She seemed earnestly upset to have lost my things and I didn’t want her to feel worse. I knew her to be flaky and absentminded so, of course I believed she had lost my things. Again because… who would lie about such a thing?   Money, liquor, and household items were often missing. We started being more careful with where we put our money and we quit stocking the liquor cupboard. At work she would fail to show up, fail to learn or fulfill her job responsibilities. She communicated misinformation to co-workers. I gave her easier and easier jobs at the bead store. She also told us that we were oppressing her religion and her race because she was a Rastafarian and had the right to be allowed to smoke (not tobacco) in HER home. We assured her that no religion afforded anyone the right to break the law in OUR home. Let alone the fact that she was a Caucasian Scandinavian American Lutheran from Minnesota trying to pull the racism card.

                  She often borrowed my car and twice brought it back with small scratches and dents. Both times she said that it had happened while she was parked, someone else had done it. That does happen and… who would lie about such a thing?  

She owed money to her former roommate, to all of her siblings and to her parents. They called often to try to collect. We had paid her transportation to Arizona and had been fully supporting her since she arrived and she had never offered to contribute or pay us back, but she assured us she was saving for her own place. I believed her. I knew her recent failed flower shop had been a costly mistake and it takes time to recover from financial disasters. Mostly I believed her because…well… who would lie about such a thing? 

                  Joy was also mean to my cats. In her defense, she said she was afraid of cats. Since she had been living with us she had habitually been locking them out of their portico and worse, locking them up in our bedroom. She was constantly shrieking at them and chasing them around the house. I know, some people are genuinely afraid of cats. However, it is worth mentioning that one of my cats was…what is the politically correct term now?...mentally challenged. Her name was Yeats, but she was so kind, docile, meek, loving, trusting, cuddly and happy that she had always been called Buddha, which was short for Wittle Baby Buddha Bear. She purred every single moment of her life and I know because she slept under my head and purred in her sleep. She hid from dogs by closing her eyes while they sniffed her. She was actually bullied by sparrows when we lived on the farm. NO ONE was afraid of Buddha. Yet every time I came home and found my cats locked up, Joy would claim they had been terrifying her.

                  The rotten food was starting to swell inside that jar at the back of the fridge. My boss called me into his office one day and said he was going to have to fire Joy. He was sure she was stealing, but the worst part was that she had blamed me when she got caught; she claimed I authorized her “use” of store materials. (Lots of people who work in a bead store do so because they love beads. Our store was very liberal about keeping our employee’s bead habits well fed; employees got a great discount and all you had to do was write it on your purchase sheet before you took it. We hadn’t had any problems with this system; people were good about paying off their purchases.) Luckily, my boss was a good friend of mine long before being my boss. He knew me very well and disclosed that she had been complaining to him since she was hired that I cruelly gave her all the worst jobs to do: sorting, pricing and cleaning. He was a savvy fella’ and had been running his business for a long time. He knew she was incompetent and that I had tried to utilize her complete lack of skills and motivation to have her get anything done, but he drew the line at theft. He suggested, as a friend, that I do the same.

                  I just could not reconcile my opinion of Joy as a kind, compassionate albeit flaky individual with all the events of untruthfulness. I wasn’t completely naïve, I knew Joy’s perception was extremely skewed and misguided. Now she had accused me of treating her cruelly and of authorizing her to take materials from the store!! If my boss hadn’t known me as well as he did, this could have jeopardized my job!

                  My husband Mike is a patient and kind man, but he had gotten fed up long ago. He argued she was bleeding money out of us, lying, laying around doing drugs, using an entire roll of toilet paper inexplicably every day (which I think secretly upset him more than any of the other problems) and that I was being taken. He called in reinforcements in an intervention-like style; a group of half a dozen trusted friends, who had known me for years, all sitting in the living room calmly inviting me to pull up a chair one evening when I arrived home from work. I knew I wasn’t drunk or on drugs, but it was obvious I needed some sort of help. I sat down with Mike and my friends to review the evidence. They said Joy was intentionally using me. I said she was mistaken and confused. They said Joy was stealing from us and I said she was losing things.  They said Joy was mistreating my cats and claiming to be afraid of BUDDHA and I said I did think that was delusional. They said Joy stole from the store and I said I had no explanation for how she could have misunderstood the purchase policy. They said she didn’t misunderstand, she was a thief!! Then Mike handed me my mail for the day and in it was a fine for not paying a ticket I had received for rear-ending someone. Joy had apparently used my car and my license and gotten into an accident and never said anything about it.

Ed has been my friend since college and knows me to be a very intelligent person, but he has on more than one occasion in my life had to point out the obvious. Or to be clear, he had to point out the giant pink elephant standing in the middle of the room that everybody except me could see. I sat quietly shaking my head and then Ed said, “Cas, you do know that people lie on purpose, right?” I said of course I knew that, people lie all the time, they believe all kinds of things that aren’t true. Everyone in the room shook their heads at me with that look that says, “Oh, you poor sorry sap.” Then Ed said, “No Cas, that is not what I mean. I mean there are people who know what the truth is and tell you something else on purpose. People lie on purpose, they aren’t just confused or misinformed, they are dishonest.” I said okay, yeah, I knew that that happened. Mike said, “Not just in books as a plot catalyst, but actually, in real life.” In my mind I might have heard the sound of glass breaking, it might have been the jar of metaphorically rotten food in at the back of the fridge. She was lying. She was LYING!!! People lied to their friends and to people who trusted them. I agreed she had to go. The next day we told her so.

The following day was catastrophic.  A friend of Joy’s, friend - drug dealer – whatever, had agreed to let her rent a room from her. We were at the house packing Joy’s things when I heard a sickening cat shriek from the kitchen. I ran in to find my sweet baby Buddha trapped on the stove between two lit burners and Joy just standing there staring at her. I ran to Buddha and pulled her off the stove, patted out her burning whiskers and tail fur, turned off the stove and wrapped her in a cold wet dish towel all the time screaming, “Why would you do this, what is wrong with you?” Joy claimed that she had been terrified by Buddha sitting on the counter and had tried to shoo her away. Then, in frightened desperation, she had turned on the stove burners hoping that the fire would scare Buddha down off the counter. Unfortunately, Buddha had run onto the stove instead of off of the counter. It was a lie. She was a lying liar and she was lying right at me!! Her scraggly little “cigarette” was right there on the counter! Out of oblivion to Buddha’s whereabouts or with sick animal cruelty, she started those burners, (two burners!!) and trapped Buddha in terror just to light her “cigarette”. Then stood there doing nothing to save Buddha. Then she LIED about it.

“Get out.” I said. “What? What are you talking about?” she stammered at me. “I said get out of my house now!” I shoved her out the door. “Get out!! We’ll bring your things over tonight, don’t ever come back.” We drove her things over to her new apartment that night. Her new roommate blissfully unaware said Joy had agreed to pay half the rent as soon as she paid off a few other bills of course. I laughed and told her that she should get paid up front. Then I went home to nurse my wounded cat and wonder really how you could possibly use an entire roll of toilet paper everyday.