Bad Credit

I’ve never been very good at choosing the people I get involved with; from lovers to roommates, I’ve managed to snag myself some real losers.  While I can trace my bad choices in men to my Daddy issues (thank you, 25 years of therapy!), I’m still trying to figure out how I can blame him for some of the truly terrible roommates I’ve chosen over the years.  I’ve lived with a raging coke addict, a girl with OCD, the hooker fondly remembered here and sticky fingers Suzy. 

My co-habitation with Suzy started out well enough.  We met in the incredibly stupid, unbelievably boring English 101 class all NYU students are required to take during their freshman year.  Suzy and I bonded over the fact that our fellow students were idiots who didn’t know how to write a paper and that we were pretty sure our scores on the English portion of the SATs were higher than the Professor’s.  So basically, our friendship was forged on the fact that we felt ourselves to be intellectually superior to, well, everyone.  We began to hang out together all the time, and found we had quite a lot in common, such as preferring to spend our afternoons at Happy Hour rather than in class.  Naturally, when the school sent out a notice that it was time to choose roommates for sophomore year housing, Suzy and I jumped at the chance to live together.  We envisioned hours of fun decorating our glamorous dorm room on the corner of 26^th Street and Ghetto Ave., and spending our weekends at all the hot clubs willing to let us in if we gave the doormen blow jobs.  

Our rooming together worked out well at first, mainly because I was happy to be living with someone who wasn’t charging the men she brought home.  Then one afternoon, while I was enjoying a nap (AKA sleeping off a hangover), the phone rang.  In my half-awake state it took me a minute to understand who was on the other end, but slowly I started to come to consciousness and figure out that it was MasterCard calling to tell me that someone had used my credit card and charged $7560.00 at Rampage.  They thought this seemed out of the ordinary because most of my debt was racked up at bars, nightclubs, and the bodega where my dealer dropped off my blow (what can I say, I am a creature of habit.  Bad habit, but still…).  They wanted to know if I had recently gone on a shopping spree.  Now, if I were going to go shopping for clothing and spend $7560, it sure as Hell would not be at Rampage.  I may not have good taste in men, but I have excellent taste in clothing.  For that kind of cash I would’ve at least gone to Miu Miu or bought myself a couple pairs of Manolos.  I started reading Vogue magazine at the age of nine so, no, MasterCard, I did not recently spend over $7000 on tacky clothing made of synthetic material assembled by some malnourished 10 year old girl in a Malaysian sweat shop.  Give me a little credit here (no pun intended).  I filed a fraud claim with MasterCard and hung up the phone, perplexed.  I didn’t remember losing my card recently.  Sure, I suppose I could’ve been so drunk that I left it at one of the bars I frequented, but I only went to places where the bartenders were hot dudes, and I couldn’t imagine any of them stealing my card and buying clothing at Rampage.  When I checked my wallet the stolen card was there, sitting in its well-worn little pocket, just as it should be. 

That’s when I started to put the pieces together.  I’d noticed Suzy had been sporting quite a few new outfits in the past week or so.  While my drinking schedule had kept me so busy I hadn’t had a chance to check them out/ borrow any of them, they looked as though they could’ve been purchased from Rampage.  So I started sleuthing in her half of our dorm room.  Sure enough, she had a whole closet full of cheap clothing with Rampage tags still attached.  A little further digging in her desk unearthed the receipt for said purchases with my credit card number and my forged signature.  Talk about a bad friend!  Not only was Suzy stealing from me, but she also didn’t even know me well enough to realize that I would never, ever, spend that much money on clothing made out of rayon. 

I never spent another night in the same room with Suzy.  I packed my stuff, filed a report with the campus police after showing them the receipts with my obviously forged signature, and they arrested her.  For the rest of the year I spent my nights sleeping at random guys’ apartments, always with my wallet tucked safely under my pillow.  Somehow I eventually snagged myself a really great roommate; a lovely and talented girl who enjoyed very dry martinis, jazz music, and Vogue magazine.  As for Suzy, last I heard she became a lawyer; which I guess just means that she figured out a way to steal from people legally.