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Roast Beef would probably have a living room a lot like Todd's, were it not for the network of other people who keep him from filtering his coffee through a sock and using grocery handlebags as curtains. (The curtain rod goes through the handles; he can open and close them in a crude facsimile of actual curtains.)

In my own Beginner Apartment times, I moved in with a roommate whose living room had: (1) an inexpensive folding chair, and (2) a four-inch stack of unused paper plates. In his room, however, he had 400 laser discs and speakers which cost as much as his car. What is your classic detail from Depraved Early Habitats?

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Comments

Bob the Fish Productions

The evangelical real estate equivalent of those warnings they put on the box of KY Jelly one lawsuit at a time

Achewood

My KY Jelly boxes don't have any warnings! Must be cheap Chinese knock-offs.

Daniel Burt

It's been a while since I've 'done a drug', eternally thankful to Achewood for keeping me current - don't want the dealer to think I'm of low mind.

Bruce Wright

I knew a guy who had actual stalactites of melted cheese hanging from the ceiling of his microwave. And they weren’t fresh, either.

Matt Mitchell

Whoa, haha! Also, Defonte’s in Red Hook (Brooklyn) has a condiment they make called hot salad that they put on their hoagies (I call them hoagies). I figured it was just a matter of time before “this” happened. Edit: just noticed “saxphone”. On brand for Todd to have a poster with a misspelling like that.

Christopher Malone

My theory on how this strip came to be: Onstad wrote the line, "The Lord without the sinner is like the rag and baggie without the turpentine", and then worked backwards from there.

Condorito

Things have been rough for Philippe since he turned six.

Daniel M Ford

The most abominable story of early apartment times all have to do with the basement we played D&D in. Our table was literally just a pile of pizza boxes (some fossilized slices still present). The real gross part was the ashtray on the floor that eventually was simply a pile of ash. No one who saw it would've guessed there was originally an ashtray under there. On Wednesday of this week I will be sharing a house in the Poconos with the other gentlemen responsible for that basement mess, where we will not smoke cigarettes at all, not smoke anything indoors, and drink fancy cocktails rather than Yuengling. The bonds forged in the most disgusting fires do not break.

Josh Egbert

My early holes-in-which-I-lived has ingrained in me an impulse to inspect every piece of furniture left out on a curb, though such rat-like scavenging has long been unnecessary.

Matthew Klovski

My girlfriend (now fiancée) had an absolutely raunchy gray carpet student apartment sublet in East Lansing for a summer. It was in such disrepair when we took over from the previous tenant we were able to halve the rent. The only items left behind were a heavily stained mattress, an enormous poster of a Ferrari in front of mansion entitled “Goals”, and a package of vagina novelty straws. We did not have a mattress frame or any furniture. What a time.

Achewood

What are you dropping for an eighth of turpentine these days

Achewood

I wonder how that even chemically happens. Must be a specific kind of cheese...and probably not a fancy kind.

Achewood

I assume everyone knows the prison term "toss my salad," but perhaps I ask too much of people at times.

Michael G.

A bong, several bong water stains, and the worst couch known to man.

Achewood

Actually, it began when I realized I had an old illustration of a treehouse that hadn't been overused. But I appreciate you giving me a higher form of credit. That line was actually the very last thing, and it was "marine epoxy" instead of turpentine for a few hours.

Achewood

Wow. That's some horror jazz right there. Like, SVU finds rooms like this.

Achewood

ALWAYS sniff the furniture. But NEVER consider taking furniture that requires sniffing. It's like that schrodinger cat thing.

Achewood

If they moved out, I would imagine it was because they met their goals! Good for them. Describe these...novelty straws.

Achewood

That last one is going to face some tough competition in this discussion thread. Let's get some details. I once had a Dude House couch that was basically 2x4's with egg crate foam and zebra strip sheets stapled over it. It wasn't even made in a country.

Jay Y

Haven't lived with too many depraved roommates but was formerly friends with a guy who would basically use the (shared) bathroom floor as the hamper for his undergarments and when called out for it, treated another roommate as if he were perfectly insane for asking him to do otherwise. Also have a friend who discovered a can of clam juice atop the fridge in his first apartment, left by a previous resident, and the clam juice has followed him to each new apartment.

Josh Egbert

Yeah there's no chance Todd is getting his hands on marine epoxy.

Mina Roller

My first alone place had a small fridge inhabited by thousands (well,maybe hundreds) of moths.

Achewood

A systems thinker is forced to wonder what kind of mother that unfortunate boy had.

Daniel Burt

I've got a guy in Screwfix that can get me a can for £5.40. I'll usually peruse the sealants and lacquer section first - real casual like - before grabbing that sweet, sweet distilled pine.

Matt Mitchell

I assume the same thing but sometimes wonder if it’s a “generational” thing, which is a funny concept when considering “toss my salad”

Travis O.

First apartment was a haphazardly designed space that we made worse by me punching a hole in the wall and my roommate spilling a bunch of uncooled Jell-O shots into the freezer and then leaving it there. The blue raspberry gelatin made it look like an ice cave from a cartoon adventure show.

Achewood

I once shook an attic rug that released a swarm, horde, plague of infant moths. I am still disgusted by this, which is why I cannot smile

Bruce Wright

I believe it originated from those 99 cent frozen pizzas that are, what, probably six bucks now

kdusjjdhxksj

Once, the landlord announced he would be coming by. The living room was cleaned of detritus with the customary snow shovel, the porch was de-maggoted, the landlord left, I went looking for the gravity bong to celebrate, but it was nowhere to be found. After a good bit of searching, I came upon a conspicuous looking sombrero leaning against a wall, and found our beloved fuck-it bucket underneath, further disguised with a pair of sunglasses balanced just so on the milk jug

DKB

I've lived in two unfinished basements. Once while living in one at the tender age of 20, my roommate's boyfriend spilled a glass of milk in the living room and apparently didn't clean it up too quickly. My bed was covered in milk because it leaked thru the hardwood floor. After that I put a sheet on my "ceiling" because I realized shreds of wood were raining down on my sleeping space from the wood above.

Achewood

fantastic details,. I had a friend whose roommate would not flush the pee toilet (they had a different #2 toilet). over time the water darkened and thickened. One of them wrote "How Long Can You Take The Pain" in sharpie on a piece of toilet paper and gently laid it across the congealing urine. The paper disappeared, leaving only the ink, in perfect clarity.

Travis O.

After that nothing fit in the freezer except a single bottle of vodka. Tombstone pizzas were purchased only to be put straight into the oven. The hole in the wall was covered by a map of Morrowind from the computer game Morrowind, only to be spackled directly before moving out

Achewood

I weep that my child will also rent places like this when I am not watching

GruntyGinMan

When I got out of the Navy I resolved to never, ever, have a roommate again. Ended up in a place that juuuust barely I could afford. A battalion of Sikhs lived in several buildings in the apartment complex and kept things nice and quiet. My brother tried to get me to be his roommate when he got out of college(alluding to my crappy beginner apartment )and was very much put out when I told him I would rather nail my dick to a pine casket than live with him.

GruntyGinMan

Anyway I'm married and live with people now.

Achewood

Okay everybody I have to drive a car to Seattle for a couple hours but I will jump back in here and smother all your comments with my ideas this afternoon! Chatting with everyone here is a high point of my week and I appreciate all you chiming in.

Douglas Wykstra

"Living" room? That is an "Existing Room."

b.zap

God has met his match

Achewood

A place I lived in college rented its front porch to a Sikh religion group. I was playing the guitar on the steps one day and one of the guys pantomimed (with fingers wiggling gently skyward) that I would go to heaven for playing music. I thought that was nice.

DKB

The hilarious part is that I found the place and chose to sleep in the basement because it was "big" and I didn't want someone to have to walk thru my bedroom to go to the bathroom (yes the two actual bedrooms were the only access points to the only single bathroom).

Lisa Taylor

Because I am a lady of taste, my early decor game was pretty solid. My ex, though: when he and I met, he was 25 and living with two other guys. His bedroom furniture consisted of: a mattress on the floor, a selection of LIME GREEN plastic crates that were his bedside table/bookcase/TV stand, and about 5,000 comic books.

Michael G.

A couch like that is at least honest in its terribleness. This was a simulacra of a couch. A complete lie. It looked like it should be comfortable, but in reality it was all one piece with built in cushions that compressed and flattened to cardboard thickness and couldn't be coaxed back to any level of comfort. The springs failed shortly after the cushions letting one's ass sink down into the edges of what ever cheap wood frame the thing was built on. It was like sitting on the edge of a pine 1x4. The liner underneath was too low and sagged so that it would drag whatever weed was on the tray off into the carpet and I'd be picking it out of the shag carpet. That couch was bullshit. My only regret is that it was too large to throw out of the 3rd story window when I moved.

Achewood

Perhaps now he should light one

Achewood

Wasn't the Hulk's bedroom like that? Or am I thinking of Alan Moore. I'm just saying, it might have been a deliberate homage.

Lisa Taylor

that is a very generous thought

Achewood

Sometimes architects need to get strangled

Achewood

Spackling over the poster is incredible

Achewood

Vivid, hellacious, infuriating. Thank you!

GruntyGinMan

One of my key recollections is that whenever someone played loud music in his car in the parking lot he would find himself surrounded by a group of Sikhs reminding them this is a quiet neighborhood and people are trying to sleep. At the time I was working midnight shift so I appreciated this effort in their part.

Jay Y

Floor mattress is so common it might as well be considered a contemporary rite of passage for a young man to ascend in standing so much as to acquire a boxspring or a bed frame.

kdusjjdhxksj

Another time this guy came around who was too into Rome, and he had a lot to say about how centurions would get crucified to prove they were tough or something. Through the course of the night, and I suspect the course of a bag, he worked his way around to having somebody pull a rusty nail out of the porch and hammer it through his jeans and into his thigh, and by morning he felt very differently about that course of action. Fortunately he had a rich dad, so there were no consequences.

Lisa Taylor

Absolutely. I was familiar with floor mattresses: it was the plastic crates that got me. It's been almost 30 years, and I still rib him about those monstrosities.

Jay Y

His mom was mostly blameless. She was a nurse who subsequently made a killing picking up random knickknacks at garage sales and selling them on eBay. I'd be more inclined to blame the dad, a chemical engineer who was known to show up to the dinner table without pants even when company was over (I witnessed this). They once found him in his office painting army miniatures while Pet Benatar's "Love is a Battlefield" played on repeat. Incredible being, but a poor father no doubt. Also some dudes just suck independent of any sort of genetic fallacy. They even excel at it.

Pubdoggy

We had a mushroom growing at the foot of the hand basin in the ‘bathroom’. It was this fungi that caused untold spilling of bodily contents through the wrong holes.

Jay Y

You gotta do the cool bougie thing that a girl I knew in college did and tear apart old wooden wine crates and refashion them as furniture (bookshelves mostly).

b.zap

Todd all doing cocaine looking Baby Jesus right in the eye

Isaac Guysaac

My current college apartment is pretty bad, my roommates were the type who decorated with stolen stop signs and empty liquor bottles. Luckily I'm about to move into my girlfriend's place which has such amenities as "bookshelves" and "a futon couch"

Zen Window

obsolete minicomputers (anything but "mini" im talking furniture sized stuff) that we used as end tables and cabinets an analog oscilloscope we hooked up to the rear speaker outputs from my roommates mysteriously expensive amp for green squiggles under the tv. we figured we should do something with that signal since we didnt have rear speakers you know a pantry stocked with bottles including multiple partials of sloe gin like seriously who drinks sloe gin and why are the bottles apparently capable of reproducing in a cool dark space a giant whiteboard in the upstairs space that one party used to create a giant diagram of who had ever hooked up with whom. free advice? never do this no matter how fun it sounds because people passing it on the way to the bathroom are going to learn things about their current partners that they shouldnt be learning from a whiteboard

Anthony Thompson

You sure he wasn’t saying “Up for the Downstroke”?

Linus Mixson

My favorite Achewood panels are the ones on black backgrounds. Always striking.

Bungus Bronbo

My first apartment had one window facing a building with a desk that I had to lean forward on to see the sky. All things considered though I may well count myself lucky to have had a window.

Sedric and Charlie

To be clear I did not share this space, but I did once stay over at a friend's place for a weekend, not knowing how they actually lived. In the living room, where I was to sleep on a rickety fold-out bed, they had an open garbage bag next to their chair so that they could throw away the various coke cans, wrappers and other detritus that they generated over a day. They came in the next morning and were completely puzzled as to where it had gone until I explained I had moved it into the kitchen next to the actual dustbin. They apparently never considered at any point that I wouldn't want to sleep next to an open sack of rubbish

Miles McMahon

Roast Beef can't even bite through toast some mornings. He would not have the druthers to put up Safeway curtains.

Theo Freedom

The apartment where I did not live, but spent most of my time, in college was run by two men who drank Steel Reserve, papered their kitchen walls with Jack’s Pizza labels, and threw all garbage into a big stack in front of the oven referred to simply as “The Trash Pile.” The rug underneath (shaped like an old-fashioned Coca-Cola bottle) had to be destroyed when the maggots arrived. A friend of ours had the apartment after we graduated. One year, he needed help from campus maintenance. The handyman showed up, took a look around, and asked “…this may sound crazy, but did this place used to be absolutely covered in pizza wrappers?” The legend, such that it was, continued. (At my own college house, our kitchen island had a spare door for a top rather than an actual counter. )

Distant Egg Song

My friends and I's first apartment in college didn't have separate bedrooms; all three of us spent the first 6 months or so living in what we lovingly dubbed "The Barracks." This was also the year that 2 of us started dating in earnest since coming to college, and the third of us continued to have an active love life. To address this situation, one of us bought a second bedsheet to hang around his bunk, where he and his then-girlfriend had quiet sex and loud arguments. I had cleared out a poorly-ventilated walk-in closet of the myriad cardboard boxes we stored in there (don't ask) and had intended to claim it for myself, when the third person decided to move in, because his then-girlfriend lived in the dorms and this was basically the one source of privacy he could get. I then moved my mattress to the far side of the Barracks, where I had to swap it for the chair at my desk, so that when I wasn't spending the night over at my girlfriend's apartment, I'd have something resembling privacy. I do not know where I put that chair. It is still not the worst place I've lived, if only because it had functioning wi-fi and lacked a downstairs neighbor who would fly into a rage whenever she heard footsteps upstairs (traits that were not shared by my senior year apartment and the apartment I lived in during the first year of my first job, respectively). I'm still friends with the guy who lived in the closet, and my girlfriend is now my fiancee. The other two people had a massive falling out and sorta jettisoned themselves from the friend group. I miss parts of that year.

Julie (HiDeeHoGal)

I'm glad to see Philippe be an old school fear-of-GOD style preacher rather than some of these newfangled multi-millionaire "prosperity gospel" fuckwits. My early decor can be summed up in 2 words - blue glass.

Matthew Klovski

More boring than likely imagined. Mostly regular straw, and then a quarter of the way down the top, bulged out in an ovoid shape. This ovoid shape was moulded on one side to be ah, anatomically accurate

Stavro

You just reminded me of the college party technique of putting pants and a hoodie on the keg, and placing the whole facsimile in a wheelchair. Beer too warm? Roll him outside. Tap freezing up? Back in he comes. Cops? Our buddy needs help in the bathroom: it is a shame

Thomas Ellis

Love the nicknames that people give their horrible but beloved shithole apartments- I lived in a grimy houseshare with some old uni pals. We took to calling the house "The Bastards". It was above a liquor store overlooking a square populated by elderly and angry street drinkers. Most of the chairs were broken in the first few months and we used an old psychadelic-print towel as a curtain in the designated non weed-smoking room. A rotating cast of friends and acquaintances lived there over the next 6 years- the final configuration had none of the original housemates- but the nickname had stuck. I still feel an intense kinship with all those who passed through The Bastards and lived to tell the tale.

C C

Yeah, the stink is getting pretty bad around here.

Paul Kim

What does "rag and baggie without the turpentine" mean?

Ruxine

Poker house was shared by 4 professional card players and one guy who worked at staples. There were playing cards on the floor of every room, which we'd throw at eachother like gambit. One of the roommates actually lived somewhere else, but slept on our couch every single night.

Clench and Cheese

I once got a pro tip from Speedway Randy, the denizen of Tucson drifters: After somebody fills their tank there's usually enough gas left in the hose to soak your rag go or a quick buzz!" He demonstrated this technique with a paper bag and a dirty athletic sock. Then he turned his head and casually vomited.

Jonathan

My college apartment had actual mushrooms growing from the floor of the shower, and a fruit fly infestation formed in the rotten walls. Also came with roommates who stacked so many unwashed dishes and glasses in the sink that the ones at the bottom shattered.

C C

When I first moved out, I rented a basement from a nice old dude who was a regular at the restaurant I worked at. I had the whole basement except for one side where he kept his stuff and the furnace and the washer and dryer, which I could use whenever I wanted unless he didn't want me to. It was an old school stone walled unfinished basement. I nailed some thrift store sheets and blankets to the rafters to wall off my room. I had a full-size mattress with a box spring on a frame, three milk crates and two folding chairs, also stereos, turntables, cassette players, cd players, tv's, VHS players, laser disc players, and a giant desktop pc with a 25 pound monitor. It was my freshman year in college and I primarily made my living by robbing Radio Shacks. By far the worst part was trying to sell that stuff, even back then nobody wanted a 'Tandy' computer or those dot matrix printers that used that green and white striped paper like a receipt from O'Rileys. So, in my neighborhood, the weed dealers all had 'Tandy" computers and those shitty dot matrix printers that used the green and white striped paper like a receipt from O'Rileys.

Distant Egg Song

I'm pretty sure the idea is that you soak the rag in turpentine and store it in the baggie. Huffing from that would give you a more concentrated dose and would let you keep the stuff on hand for longer, particularly if you don't have the money to buy turpentine and have to instead mop up spills or steal half- empty bottles. I don't have first-hand experience with the stuff, but there was a rumor from when I was in middle school that a kid a couple towns over accidentally killed himself trying a similar trick with compressed air.

Achewood

Like, through airborne spores entering all the wrong holes while you slept? We may have a 1950s horror flick on our hands here.

Achewood

The woman is like Jesus to receive you from such humble circs my guy

Achewood

It’s how huffers inhale their inhalant of choice: soak rag, place in bag to concentrate.

Achewood

Philippe knows because he’s seen Todd in action for nearly a quarter century, during his fifth year.

cody

Wasn’t so much where I lived in college (a dorm, another dorm, then a distant and traditionally messy apartment), but my then-girlfriend’s car hits a lot of these beats. It accumulated discarded half-eaten fast food containers and mostly-empty Vitamin Water bottles at such a pace as to fill up all non-driver footwells and the whole back seat, and did so in an only-in-never-out black-holesque fashion. A friend of ours threw up in the back seat after drinking too much Four, and it lived among the debris for nearly a year before we got the courage to defy physics and actually remove the garbage. For whatever reason it was our primary mode of transportation.

cody

This is an incomplete picture; she was downright brilliant and very talented, but her shit was a mess.

ladiesbane

I think your roommate was my starter husband, except that he not only had 400 laserdiscs, he was an early adopter of DVD. This led to boilerplate "what the fuck, I paid my half of the utilities" conversations, misuse of a corporate credit card, and eventual divorce. Different sort of mess, but when a roommate argues that we can go without power for a month to bring home an otherwise unaffordable item returned to Circuit City, there is no budget for pizza box and beer label decor.

Alexander Rediger

Philipe is a wonderful kid that's had terrible informational inputs.

Matthew Miller

My bachelor dream was a 400 square foot room with a folding chair, a small desk for the laptop, and a $35,000 stereo. Steve Jobs had his Tiffany lamp; I would instead fall asleep to German symphonies on vinyl, awash in the blue glow of McIntosh monoblocks refracted through an acrylic plinth the size of a Camaro wheel. In my evolution I have far more sophisticated furniture, but can’t have the stereo due to precise requirements of Klipschorns (e.g. you need a symmetrical room with two corners).

Jeff

My freshman dorm was one of four single-story converted army barracks. Each room had a bare lightbulb dangling from the center of the ceiling. The heat was always on, even when it was 85 degrees outside. Even when an important pipe burst and the four dorm buildings were without running water in May, during finals. We were pulling all-nighters, studying for finals while drinking nothing but hard cider. Absolutely no water whatsoever.

Jeff

I would like to hear more details about this $35k stereo if you want to share!

Tim Melody Pratt

I had a housemate who brought a whole tv-with-surround-sound system to the house when he moved in but who slept, literally, on a pile of dirty clothes and old newspapers. When he left (he never told us he was leaving, he just... failed to return one day and it turned out he'd moved away to avoid some check forging charges) and we eventually cleaned out his room we found he'd been storing his dirty dishes in a chest of drawers, to the delight of local ants. The kitchen was six steps from his door

David Mandeix

Rockford Fosgate has begun following this account

Tom Morris

Wot, no millenial 'cheese' house-plant?

FactWino

I slept on a mattress on the floor for entirely too long. I also lived in a double-wide with several other people in a room that I made by erecting a temporary wall dividing the living room in half. Two-by-fours and sheetrock, sheetrock only on the side facing the rest of the living room.

2scrogz

Me in my early 20s: subletting a shitty room without a real window, mattress on the floor (but at least it had sheets), my "dresser" was a modular steel-wire shelving unit, no other furniture. Stealing food from work to survive on my entry-level salary at a start-up in SF. But buying the absolute top-shelf pot from the dispensary, and getting completely blazed out of my skull nightly. Priorities.

Datura

always welcome more todd

Datura

the stereo only works in an almond-shaped room?

Datura

mine was similar with the mushrooms (were yours jet-black, too, like light couldn't escape them if it tried, and gazing upon them brought you immeasurable despair?) and walls completely full of flies but instead of dishes my roommates used to stack indescribable objects in the sink. i'm serious, if i even tried to describe them, we would both go completely insane. the sink seemed to be endlessly deep, and from the drain, you swore you could faintly hear God crying. please never think about this

rickward

the last panel has big dysfunctional twelve-step energy