Well, I just had the worst night of my life.
For the last few weeks we’ve sped up work on the house to get it ready in time for when my roommate’s girlfriend came up from Georgia. She arrived in the early afternoon and things were going grand, and in the evening the two of them went out to go clubbing and see the sights. I went to bed at around midnight and at 1:30 in the morning the police rang my doorbell. Outside was another officer with my roommate’s girlfriend, who was in the midst of an angry tirade. Apparently my roommate got a DUI and as a passenger she was pushed out of the police station. Since she was from out-of-state, they didn’t have another place to send her so she came my way. They actually warned me to give them a call if she started getting belligerent, which in hindsight should’ve been a huge warning sign…
Now, this lady didn’t just come in angry – she came inside in a drunken fury and demanded that we go back out there and do everything possible to break my roommate out of the station. Since I certainly wasn’t going to war with the police, I told her we’d pick up my roommate in the morning and the earlier we got to bed the earlier we could wake up. She did not agree to this and…to make a long story short….my various attempts to calm her down, talk this through, and buy time for the alcohol to wear off failed. I later learned that she also took several medications, and that this likely interacted with the alcohol badly.
While I didn’t like getting shouted at, I really started getting nervous when she showed me the jackknife that she bought my roommate for his birthday. There’s nothing like suddenly discovering that there is a weapon in your house, and that the weapon is in the hands of an emotionally unstable women only a foot or two away for you, to make you wake the fuck up. Luckily she let me hold the knife, which I swiftly pocketed to keep it out of her grips. This proved to be a good thing because she started screaming how she needed more wine, taking off her clothes all the while.
Y’know, when they have drunks on TV bang on about getting more wine, its generally in some humorous fashion that makes the situation seem a-okay. In life it’s not amusing in the slightest.
Things then went downhill from there and after an hour of trying to talk her down I had to call the cops. She started lunging at me, sending punches at my head, and tried choking me with both hands several times. I nearly spent the last three minutes of the encounter fighting for my life in my living room, holding an arm out to push her off as she started attacking me relentlessly. I’ve never been so happy to see a cop my whole life! They tried to taser her but to no avail, and it eventually took three of them to haul her out to the squad car, clad in nothing but boots and a scarf, fighting and cursing all the way.
I won’t even start talking about the racial slurs and sexual harassment coming from her mouth. It’s a sign of how bad the situation was that being called a racist and put-on upon was the least of my worries. I feel horrible for my roommate, who sacrificed a lot to get the place ready for this women, and who had avoided getting in trouble with the law for years until he spent just one night with her. This isn’t his first DUI either, so tonight will haunt him for months to come.
So now the key question is: do I keep the assault charges against her or not? Since she’s from out-of-town, it might get her out of my hair if I drop the charges and she’s able to get out-of-state faster by avoiding the court system here. At the same time, I want it on her record to prevent her from coming back to my place out of some sense of crazed vengeance. *sigh* This is not what I was expecting to be worried about on a Sunday morning 🙁 I have a much better understanding now of what life is like for those with alcoholic family members, or who are the victims of domestic abuse, and I have no idea how they can stand it. On hour was enough for me.
So what are the lessons for the future? (and I’m throwing up these ideas without running them past a lawyer first, FYI)
- Do not let new people move in before you’ve done a background check, even if they’re girfriends, fiances, etc. of the current tenant.
- When doing a background check, look up a record of drug abuse and assault.
- Ban weapons (duh!)
- Limit alcohol storage. It was a major problem to sober her up when she wanted to drink and my roommate had dozens of wine bottles lying around in plain sight.
- Have emergency contact information logged in your phone. There’s no need to handle an awkward situation yourself when their relatives can do it for you.
- When renting, rent out another building and not your own personal living space.
Anyways, that’s the most I can come up with absolutely zero sleep. It’s 7:15 AM and I need to catch some ZZZ’s. I’ll have to go apologize to the neighbors for the noise later.
