With the benefit of hindsight, I am not proud of my behaviour. Frankly, I could have been more compassionate, more sympathetic. But in your late teens and early twenties, ‘nuance’ is something of a stranger and every emotion is extreme. I was no different in this regard. It was these traits together whether a lack of guile that can only be described as ‘spectacular’ that made me a truly lousy housemate.
With the benefit of hindsight, I am not proud of my behaviour. Frankly, I could have been more compassionate, more sympathetic. But in your late teens and early twenties, ‘nuance’ is something of a stranger and every emotion is extreme. I was no different in this regard. It was these traits together whether a lack of guile that can only be described as ‘spectacular’ that made me a truly lousy housemate.
Share house living is an experience best enjoyed as nostalgia. As wonderful as it is, it’s a time in your life that you spend the rest of your days trying never to repeat. I remember it as a shock to the system. One day, you’re living at home with your parents and in danger of being grounded if you so much as leave a pair of socks on the ground. The next you’re in squalor, surrounded by anarchy and setting secondhand furniture on fire in an attempt to keep warm.
I lived with all kinds of people. From artists to religious zealots to new age hippies and engineers. There were insomniacs and those who hibernated until well after noon. Left wing, right wing, chicken wing: I cohabitated with them all. As for me, a reasonable description might be ‘steadfastly uptight’. But as uptight as I was, it was nothing compared to one guy I lived with.
I shouldn’t use his real name. For all I know, he’s mellowed out and is now the nicest guy in the world. For the sake of anonymity, let’s call him ‘Winston Churchill’. No, wait – I can do better. Perhaps ‘Captain Tightpants’ is a more suitable name. Me and the Captain lived with another guy who, although entirely reasonable and normal should also be awarded the cloak of anonymity so I’m going to call him ‘Chuck D’. The three of us lived in a share house in Clayton.
We were all quite different; the Captain, Chuck and I. What we had in common was our domestic ineptitude. None of us could cook or had any idea how to run a household. Wide-eyed and witless, we simply did the best we could. Back then, the cornerstone of my culinary repertoire was a dish I now refer to as ‘cheese glue with tuna’. Frankly, I was a hopeless cook. The Captain, on the other hand, was not quite as good as I was.
I’m not sure what its official title was. Perhaps ‘the slab’. Consisting of mixed vegetables doused in an anonymous syrup, crowned with a layer of burnt chops as some kind of carnivorous canopy; all poured into a glass casserole dish and frozen solid. When Captain Tightpants produced this solidified chunk of yuck from the deep freeze of the Kelvinator, I had my doubts. These doubts quickly transformed to outright suspicion as the Captain proceeded to cook his frozen-solid monstrosity by plonking it on the stovetop and cranking up the heat way, way up.
The coil turned a bright, sulfuric red. The slab groaned as the heat and deep-freeze wrestled with each other. When it gave way, it sounded like thunder. With a ‘crack’, the glass casserole dish exploded, sending vegetable remnants and the chop covering in all directions across the kitchen. I’ll admit, I found it somewhat amusing. That, or so I thought, was the last I’d see of the slab.
But I was so very wrong. When dinner was served, it looked a lot like post-explosion vegetable casserole. Granted, as a result of the force of the blast, it was hard to recognize anything much. Demanding an explanation, I was told by Captain Tightpants that he’d saved the meal by scraping off the blast debris into a saucepan and reheating it. Lifting the first forkful, I could see shards of glass sticking out. I instantly declared I would eat not one mouthful on occupational health and safety grounds. Chuck D needed little persuading and joined my boycott. We quickly let the table; electing, instead, to get fish and chips. The Captain ate every last morsel.
A more mature person might have steered clear and avoided conflict. Or maybe even found a new place to live. I, however, was not a mature person. I decided that the best way to deal with such a delicate situation was to write a story about it and submit it to a radio station. It was, apparently, read out with some fanfare. Frankly, I spilled my guts more than I ought to have. I wrote about the time the Captain tore down a picture of musician Paul Kelly on the grounds that he ‘looked Satanic’, choosing to omit that I had then put it up again after defacing it through the addition of horns and a tail. I recounted his violin playing that, to me at least, sounded like a mosquito death-spiral, leaving out the fact that I an acoustic guitar and was prone to caterwauling of my own.
I didn’t hear them read it out. But I knew I’d crossed a line when parishioners from Captain Tightpant’s church turned up at the house to stage an intervention. At the time, I was predictably unrepentant. But now, with the benefit of hindsight, I have come to regret my actions. As is the way with share houses, we each drifted in our own direction and I have no idea what became of the Captain. Maybe he mellowed out. Part of me likes to think he became a chef. But wherever you may be, dear Captain Tightpants, I wish you well.