For a time in the 1980s I was forced to live in a room-mate situation while the apartment I was waiting for was completed. I used a professional service and they set me up with a woman about my own age. Naturally there was the thought that there might be some extra-curricular activity and we were heading down that track with some degree of certainty. In the mornings while I was drinking my tea on the couch she would come in wearing a flannel nighty and the zipper would mysteriously drop inch by inch as she bent over in front of me to do something, but I was never sure what. Her intent was clear.

But it turned that she was something of a passive-aggressive woman. Although we paid the same amount of bills and rent she assumed she was the leader and made chore lists and had refrigerator authority, meaning she could eat whatever I put in there but I had to beg her for anything she put in there including common items like milk and butter. This soured any possibility of any kind of hooking up. She was a martinet and no amount of cleaning or chores that I did measured up to her standards, not that she was a paragon.

But the killer was one night when she went out with her girlfriends to go clubbing. I had told her that I needed to get up early because I was driving to Canada for a revolutionary war battle re-enactment and that I needed my sleep. But she came in at 2AM with her high heels and pounded back and forth on the floor for over an hour listening to dance music on the stereo, clearly very drunk. I couldn’t get any sleep. And she wouldn’t take off her high heels so it was clop clop clop all night. It was miserable.

Finally, around 3AM she went to bed. I had to get up at six. I had already packed all my gear, my musket, my canteen and camping equipment but when I got up at six I made certain to unpack everything, dropping all the metal items noisily on the floor then repacking them. I knew she had a raging hangover — she always did. I made lots and lots of packing noise and anyone who knows anything about a marching army knows how much noise their equipment makes on the march. I must have “accidentally” dropped my clanking metal bayonet at least three times. As I walked out the door she yelled, “Asshole!” from her bedroom to which I yelled back, “Bitch!” and went off to fight the British. God, that was a miserable apartment.