The Luv Doc: A Disgusting Pig

Dear Luv Doc,

In August I became roommates with my best friend from high school, and she is a disgusting pig. She leaves dirty dishes in the sink, her dirty clothes are always scattered everywhere, her dirty bath towels/washcloths are all over the bathroom (which by the way I don't think she has ever cleaned once). She is constantly leaving trash on the coffee table, her bed, and even the floor. I opened the door to her room this morning to give her some mail and it smelled horrible. I don't think I could ever invite anyone over because the place is such a mess. We signed a year lease. What do I do?

–Roach-Ridden off Riverside

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First of all, don't blame yourself. If you're living in any apartment in the Riverside area, roaches are pretty much in the lease agreement. Check the fine print. There are families of roaches in that area that probably date back to the Dark Ages. I don't know what the roach equivalent of the Habsburg jaw is, but those roaches definitely have it. They're probably hemophiliacs as well, with cleft palates and scoliosis and whatnot. I lived in that area back in the Eighties, and on the day my roommate Joe Bob and I moved in I swear we saw a roach that looked just like that banjo-playing kid from Deliverance.

Keep in mind, this was back when I considered myself to be a bit of an intellectual and a ruthless skeptic. I didn't fully trust my instincts. My gut was telling me that we had unwittingly moved into some sort of inbred, hillbilly cockroach meth lab situation, but my mind was telling me we might have just been residually tripping on Joe Bob's hand-picked Ziploc bag of cowshit mushrooms. Of course, now that I have been around the block a time or two, I know that gut instinct is usually spot-on and should always be trusted. OK, maybe not if you're the 45th president or an astrophysicist or something, but if you find yourself in a situation where the hair on the back of your neck starts to stand up for some inexplicable reason, rest assured that a rotten-toothed hillbilly is about to ask you to squeal like a pig.

What my gut was telling me is that we were moving into a space that cockroaches had clearly occupied for thousands of years. Yes, the apartment complex cleaning crew had run them out shortly before that adorable leasing agent got us to sign the lease right on top of the newly installed linoleum kitchen countertop, but that was just a charade – an infinitely repeated ritual that was deeply etched into the true inhabitants' DNA. The minute the last piece of furniture was moved in, the all-night, all-month, all-year cockroach rave began. That was also the year I learned to sleep with a T-shirt draped over my face – a habit which continues to this day. Also, side note: I have never since woken up with a cockroach on my face, so don't get all judgy.

Fortunately, Joe Bob and I had a common enemy to unite us. Were it not for our daily/nightly skirmishes against seemingly endless legions of inbred long-jawed cockroaches, we might have at some point realized that we were both disgusting pigs. Years later that would be pointed out by my first female roommate ... and also for the first 30 or so years of my marriage.

Here is the deal: You are learning a valuable lesson. Sometimes good friends are really shitty roommates. Sometimes they start selling coke and then move to California to avoid the wrath of their supplier, leaving you solely responsible for the remainder of the lease. The point is, you're probably not going to be able to change your roommate's behavior overnight or, sadly, ever. What you can do is sit down and talk to her calmly and find some middle ground on what level of cleanliness is acceptable to both of you, then try to come up with a plan to achieve it. Do it now while you're still good friends. Keep in mind that it probably won't work and you should just hire a cleaning crew, but you're still young and full of optimism and I don't want to rob you of that, so bonne chance!