How to deal with a crack head

[TaraJo]

I don't post here as often as I'd like, but I thought I'd check in to tell y'all a true horror story that happened to me.

So, a little over a year ago, my boyfriend Lee and I oved back to my hometown of Tulsa.  To facilitate that move, we moved in with a friend of mine, Violet.  Violet has some other minor issues here or there, but the only one that's important for this story is that she's a terrible judge of character.  She's nice enough, but she has the unfortunate habit of surrounding herself with some scummy people and having blinders on about the things these scummy people do.  Which brings us to Nikki.

See, Violet had an apartment she was sharing with someone else and that someone else was planning on moving out.  That's where Lee and I stepped in and said, yeah, we can move in there.  Well, once we had made most of our plans based on the idea that we'd be sharing the apartment with Violet, she dropped more news on us: Nikki would be moving in, too.  So the plan is my boyfriend, Nikki, myself and Violet would all be living in a 2 bedroom apartment together with Violet sleeping on the living room couch, Lee and I get a bedroom and Nikki sleeps in the other bedroom; and we didn't have enough time to back out when we heard this, but, hey, we can deal with things, right?  Well, it gets worse.

Nikki, to put things lightly, is an unholy nightmare for a roommate.  I don't even know where to start on this, but I'll go with cigarettes.  Anyone who knows me knows I don't like cigarettes, but I can tolerate them as long as it's not in my home.  I didn't get that lucky here.  She's a chain smoker and she smokes indoors.  I was lucky to get her to limit her smoking to her room and the bathroom, but since my rooms door is right next to her door, we still get a good amount of fumes from her room going out into the hall and even into our bedroom and we couldn't pee or shower without havin to breath in that stink.  On rare occasion she would smoke outside, but when she did that she always threw cigarette butts into Lee's garden and Lee works very hard on that thing.

For the first few months here, she had a bad habit of leaving some kind of weird looking brown gunk all over the bathroom.  Lee was afraid it was some kind of fecal matter.  I'm hoping it was makeup.  Either way, she made no attempt to clean it and Lee and I usually had to be the ones to do that.

She's also a thief.  We've lost several towels with her around.  Usually, we would find them in Nikki's room.  Just before she moved out she "found" two more in her room that she gave back to us, but they had big holes torn into them.  Once we found a bunch of our little nick nacks in her room like a phone charger and a hair brush and stuff like that, but she objected to us going into her room.  That was when she started leaving her door closed most of the time.... which is a mixed blessing, really.  Her stealing got really bad with food, though: Lee and I couldnt keep certain foods in the kitchen because she would eat them before we got to touch them.  Cereal, ice cream, instant meals, anything that doesn't require much effort to make, she would devour.  This was a problem because we relied on those instant meals for lunch at work.  We started keeping some of those foods in our rooms, things like granola bars and snack cakes and crackers and cereal, but we couldn't keep very much cold stuff unless we hid it or got something with more vegitables than she'll eat.  However, even putting things in our room didn't help much because they would turn up missing.  I don't have concrete evidence that Nikki was the food thief, but Viole is diabetic and the sugary food was always the first to go, so that really narrows down the suspect list.

But a few months in, things got really "strange."  She had guests coming over a lot.  Most of these guests were men, and I rarely saw the same guy come by twice.  They would go straight back to her room and shut the door.  Some would stay for no more than a few minutes and others would stay for a few hours.  Lee had looked through the text messages on her phone when she left it in the bathroom one day and it turns out she was having sex with lots of different men.  She didn't have a job, so we assumed she was turning tricks in her room.  The only piece to that puzzle that didn't fit was the time frame: a lot of these guys were in there for an extremely short period of time and it's kinda difficult to turn tricks when you spend a minute or two with your client.  But I knew something sketchy was going on.  They guys rarely even knocked and often just walked in like they owned the place.  If Lee or I ever objected to strangers coming over in the middle of the night, Nikki threw a fit.

Anyway, fast forward to a month or so ago.  Violet is getting moved out and everybody can read the writing on the wall: no way in hell Lee and I are going to share the apartment with Nikki, so she works on moving out.  Problem is, when she leaves, her room is completely trashed.  I can provide pics, but to say it stinks would be an understatement.  However, now that we can go in there freely, I can say the problem was a lot worse than we had anticipated.  We found cigarette butts EVERYWHERE, half eaten food thrown all over the room along with half our silverware, cups and dishes in there.  And even though the room stank, it was a smell I wasn't exactly familiar with.  Cigarettes stink, but this was cigarettes and something else.  Part of that "something else" was the fact that she was putting dryer sheets on the vent in her room, probably to mask the smell of what she was doing.  Didn't work because we still knew she was smoking something other than tobacco.  Also, remember those strange men she had coming over all the time?  They continued to come over.  Lee and I got woke up in the middle of the night by strangers, one knocking on the door and the other walking through our living room.

One Sunday night, after she had left, everything came to a head.  Lee and I were looking through her room, finding half the crap from our apartment in there and we were pretty disgusted.  Violet was the only reason I was willing to tolerate Nikki, but now that Violet had moved out, I could let Nikki know exactly what I thought of her.  Well, she came over to get some of her stuff out of there.  While she was here, I made it clear that I'm keeping an extremely close eye on her she isn't going to steal any more of our stuff while she's cleaning her crap out.  I also made it clear I didn't appreciate the hell hole she had turned her room into.  She objected to this and pulled a gun on me.  I wound up wrestling her to the ground, Lee got the gun away from her, and then we called the police while she left the apartment (she demanded the gun back before she left, which was laughably stupid).  The police came over, we pressed charges, gave them the gun and we haven't seen Nikki since.  Good riddance.  Still, having a gun pulled on me leaves me scared

Since she's left, we've found even more crap in her room since we've cleaned it:  Countless used up lighters, two or three crack pipes, tiny ziploc baggies with tiny white residue in them, burnt up oven mitts, and generally everything you would expect to find in a crackhouse.  In hindsight, it looks like the sketchy men that were coming over were her customers and she was selling drugs to them (fortunately, the police were understanding and believed me when I explained this situation to them.  I just wish Nikki had been here to arrest).  That also explains the stink coming from her room: it was a mix of cigarettes, dryer sheets and crack.  Not a fun smell to deal with.  I'm going to upload some pics now just to show you how bad it got.  Enjoy.

[Losty]

That's so nasty. I'm especially creeped out by the bucket.

Sorry you had to go through that. I'm glad she's out now though. Hopefully the police will track her down and toss her in jail.

[brewer]

Do you have to stay in that rental?

If it were me I'd get the hell out if possible. Who knows what funky residuals/residents (i.e. bed bugs) will remain. And what visitors will continue to return.

[TaraJo]

Do you have to stay in that rental?

If it were me I'd get the hell out if possible. Who knows what funky residuals/residents (i.e. bed bugs) will remain. And what visitors will continue to return.

The visitors have already stopped coming.  After the gun incident, Lee put a note on the door specifically saying that she's not there, we don't know where she is and not to wake us up.  We then locked the door at night.  

As for bugs, we already have problems there and, yeah, because of that, I want to get out of here, but I also want to save up enough money that we can make sure we're able to move without bringing the bugs with us.

[Jackalope]

Wow, I've had bad roommates in the past, but not like that. BTW, welcome back.

[vorlon13]

The vacuum cleaner put me in hysterics.

Sorry, it just hit me funny considering the rest of the squalor . . .

[Losty]

I'm assuming it was for decorative purposes only. No way you could vaccuum with all that shit on the floor.

[The Industrial Atheist]

Wow that's terrible. Sorry you went through that and glad that it's over.

[brewer]

I'm assuming it was for decorative purposes only. No way you could vaccuum with all that shit on the floor.

Oh ca'mon, she used it to suck up spilled crack.

[TaraJo]

I'm assuming it was for decorative purposes only. No way you could vaccuum with all that shit on the floor.

She kinda/sorta kept things clean.  Clearn in her own way, anyway.  She just shoved most of that junk under her couch or her bed or in the closet or somewhere.  When she moved out, though, she pulled it all out, probably collecting something of value that she shoved in there with it.

Either that or she was doing something weird with the drugs with it.  And as much as this seems really off the wall, it looks like damn near everything else that was in there was used for her drugs, so why not the vaccuum?

Serious.  Don't do crack.  Don't put up with crack heads or crack dealers, both of which I'm pretty certain she is.