Moving from the US to Canada I found a roommate to 'share a house' with from the newspaper (this was pre-Craigslist days and I was no longer a student). She was second generation Armenian-Canadian by way of Montreal, seemed a bit 'witchy' but sane enough and had a steady job, a good record collection and I needed a place to live.
After a month or so she starts complaining about the quality of my dish-washing, garbage toting, grocery shopping, skills. It seemed like a stretch at the time but when she insisted that we rearrange the household chores so that I do all of Arnold's old tasks, and she'll take care of the rest. Huh?
Here I deduce that she needed a roommate because she had just broken up with her sleazy photographer BF, and couldn't afford the rent by herself. maybe she had fontasies of her and Arnold getting back together and was just biding her time. As reality/depression began to sink in, I started to become this weird surrogate BF replacement around the house.
She would corner me in the bathroom while I was shaving and confess all kinds of horrible drepessing shit about Arnold's abusive behavior. Ask me why men are like that and other unanswerable questions. I told her I was her roommate not her soulmate, and that she REALLY needed to get professional help (I don't think it was that harsh but I was firm)
I came home once to her laying on her bed with candles listening to the Velvet Underground talking about how she had just taken all the pills in the house (she didn't).
So I spent less and less time there which turned me into an enemy. I'd come home to my stuff obviously riffled through. She'd call me at work and ask why I was 'against her'. I began to hide the knives.
After about a weeks absence I went 'home' to get some things and found the house surrounded by RCMP cars. The door is broken off the lock. There is a strange man's voice coming from inside. He lets me in and I discover about eight cops in the house... OH, did I mention that my roommate has been screaming her lungs out, "I'm going to killlll YOUUUUU!!!" over and over this whole time.
Turns out she called in her last goodbye/death threat against Arnold TO the cops, but they traced it to our house. The cops show up at the house, force their way in and then mace her to get her to drop a scissors she's brandishing (thank god I hid the knives). This is when the screaming begins. Granted those events were relayed to me by the cops on the scene, i can attest to the screaming and a scissors on the floor. After the fallout* they wheeled her out in plastic cuffs on a gurney and told me that she was being arrested under some law that required her to be under surveillance for three days.
I thought that would give me some time to pack and move. But later that night she came home barefoot with no visible ride (I still think she may have escaped).
*At one point the cops are asking me for some identification for her because she's not coherent much less cooperating, so I'm opening her desk drawers and lo and behold there's a big bag o' God's green herb. The cop says, "don't worry about that, we have more important things to worry about right now."
As they were leaving the same cop said, "She's not coming back for a few days, so if I were you I'd roll up some of what's in that bag there and relax." I know that sounds made up, but it is not. Maybe it will give you a clue as to which Canadian city this happened in.
Roommates no more. For life.
