Years ago I had a roommate who was a total lunatic and slob. Like beyond the pale kind of slob: she bathed about twice a week (on good weeks) and everything in the house aside from the bathroom and me and the sane roomie’s rooms (which the other roomie and I kept clean because, seriously) was a total mess. Stank like BO and used tampons, every corner of most of the house was knee-deep in trash, the whole nine yards. I stuck it out because I didn’t have anywhere else to go at the time and I was good friends with my other roommate. I used to sit around at night and compare horror stories of what the crazy roomie had been up to that day with the good roomie.
She considered herself some kind of good cook, though nobody in their right mind would eat anything she’d touched - the food itself looked and smelled horrifying, and the state of the kitchen was such that you could get salmonella from just looking at it.
I avoided the kitchen entirely, as fast food was within walking distance. But what kept me out of the kitchen even more than her complete lack of hygiene standards was the fact that she was really aggressive about food. When I first moved in I attempted to use the refrigerator for a while, but she’d eat all my groceries and then accuse me and my other roommate (who was a normal, clean, considerate human being) of eating her food when she ran out of her own stuff. So yeah, I spent a couple years eating fast food and staying in a small area of the house. I didn’t do anything to fix the horrible mess, but I didn’t contribute to it either. My other (sane) roomie lived off of potato chips and beer most of the time. I still can’t figure out how she kept in such good shape with a diet like that.
Now I told you all that so I could tell you about the salad.
See, on one of her shopping trips I guess she decided that she was going to attempt to eat healthy for a change. Normally her diet was gross stuff she cooked up that was swimming in weird orange grease. I guess it’s how she kept her girlish ~350 pound figure. Well one day she decided that making salads was going to make her healthy or something. I’m not sure how a soup bowl full of ranch dressing with a few sad scraps of lettuce floating in it is supposed to be healthy, but I digress.
So she gets a bunch of vegetables and bags of that pre-made salad you can get at the grocery store and fills our (hers, really) nasty refrigerator with all of this stuff. Then after three days she decides she can’t survive without her freaky meat-casserole stuff and promptly forgets about the salad stuff once she’s tossed a few of the vegetables in the trash bin. After about a week the trash bin is smelling so bad that I had to break my vow and enter the kitchen for long enough to bag it all up and dispose of it in the dumpster down the block - it smelled so rank that I wasn’t even going to ditch it in the waste bin out front.
Fast forward a couple months and she’s finally going to move out. She packs up her stuff, by which I mean her computer and bed and such, no cleaning at all. Then she gets all of our utilities shut down so she can get the deposits on them (which she hadn’t paid in the first place, no idea how she managed that one) and skips town.
So while the sane roomie and I are sorting out all the stuff with getting our utilities back on (middle of winter in Illinois, super cold) and cleaning up the house (yay! no more having to live in a garbage dump with a lunatic!) we come to the kitchen. There’s a mummified mouse in a glue trap behind the (untouched) cleaning supplies under the sink (the least of her crimes against hygiene) and in the fridge we found the salad.
I call it the salad because that’s what the bag said on it. We couldn’t really be sure that’s what was in there, since it had long since turned into this lumpy black goo in the bottom of the bag. Since the bag was unopened, we figured ‘salad’ it must be.
We sorta set it aside (still sealed, no leaks and no smell) by the door (outside!) until we got finished cleaning up for the day. We still had about half the house left to clean, since our rooms and the bathroom were the only parts of the house that had been clean prior to this, so we decided to get some vodka and celebrate how much better the house smelled already.
Once we were good and liquored up we decided to clean a bit more before we crashed and in the process she came back inside from dumping a bag with the bag of black pudding in her hand and started daring me to drink what was inside. No, I wasn’t drunk enough to do something that crazy, but we did eventually open the bag and dare each other to sniff it.
Did you know that months-old bagged salad that turns into black porridge smells exactly like poo when you open the bag? Well I do now, and at the time it made both of us puke. Total hilarity ensued as we raced out front to barf off the porch like a couple of college kids, and danged near got stuck trying to go through the door at the same time. So we’re giggling and puking and I’m trying to hold her hair back while she ralphs (I wear my hair short so it’s a non-issue) and she’s still got the bag of black goo in her hand. At some point she drops it and it goes splat! all over the sidewalk leading up to the porch. Eventually we get ourselves together and go back inside, figuring we’ll clean up all the mess out front when we’re not too drunk to see.
The next morning we go out front with our biohazard faces on and lo and behold, some random neighborhood critter has come by during the night and ‘cleaned up’ our puke off the grass (poor critter probably got drunk as all heck eating that) but has left the black stain untouched. Oddly enough, when we hosed down the sidewalk it left a weird clean patch where the black stuff had landed.
And that’s how I learned that drunk girl vomitus is more appetizing than months-old salad paste.
edited for clarity