and then what happened?

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June 14, 2006

the queen of Lysol

This morning I was here, reading her tips about moving into a rental property. Since, we are moving in a few short months and last night we got word that we can move into a rental house only one block away from Grumpy’s parents, I figured I should read up and get a little refresher course on being a renter again. I was perusing just fine until I came upon section 3. and one word, a word that sets me off on the crazy train.

Lysol.

Gah!

I can’t even hear that word. It makes me go postal, even after all this time. And God help anyone who sprays that stuff around me. They will come away missing their spraying digit, at the very least.

So here is my tale about the Queen of Lysol.

The summer before my senior year of college I lived in my parent’s house. They had moved away and the house was for empty and for sale so I spent the summer bumming around the beach, partying and having a grand old time with no responsibilities. When school started I was supposed to rent another apartment with my best friend, Kool Mo D, like we had done the year before. But during the summer her parents decided that she should live at home. I spent a few weeks trying to find a place to live. But with only two weeks before school started, the roommate I arranged ending up screwing me over for a friend of hers.

I had to scramble to find a place. Mind you, this was before the internet and cell phones were so handy and affordable so I spent lots of time driving from St. Joe to Kalamazoo and back, reading the paper, and checking posting boards on campus. Finally, I found the perfect roommate. Her name was Shawn. She had a newer two bedroom, 1 bath, with parking, in a quite area, close to campus. We arranged to meet and she seemed perfectly fine, if a tad on the nervous side. I knew we wouldn’t be friends or anything since I didn’t spend much time at home anyway, social butterfly that I was. So I moved in.

From the first moment I should have known something was very, very wrong.

She always, always kept her bedroom door closed.
She avoided human contact, no touching of any kind. I don’t mean anything pervy but an example would be that I tried to hand her the mail and she wouldn’t take it. I had to set it down on the counter and then she would pick it up.
She had rotten food in the fridge – very rotten. I thought there was an eggplant in there but it was really a rotten yellow squash.

Then the real weirdness started. I would be asleep in the morning when she left for work but shortly after I moved in I started to be awakened by strange noises. A hissing sound in a mixture of short spurts and long, long whistling streams would echo through my door.

One morning I got out of bed and opened my door to discover Shawn spraying Lysol all over the place. When she saw me she kind of jumped and ran into her room and closed the door.

I heard it every morning in the same sound pattern without fail. Then it progressively got worse and worse. I spent less and less time at home.

One day I realized that all my plants had died.
I noticed you could smell the Lysol in the hallways outside of our apartment.
Then I realized the pervasive smell of Lysol was making me sick.
Then I realized that you could taste the Lysol in the air.
Then I met my next door neighbor, who was in one of my classes and she mentioned the weird smell and then I noticed that the linoleum in their apartment was white, while ours was a strange yellow color.
I heard the sound of the spray more and more.
One day I found a stream of ants coming into my bedroom and I followed them out into the hall. They were coming our from under her bedroom door. She wasn’t home so I opened her door to try to figure out what the hell was going on in there.

It was like a dumping ground.

There was no furniture. Only an air mattress with no air and a small tv sitting on top of a BOX – yes, a whole “I got it at Costco” box of Lysol. There were piles and piles of clothes and garbage and plates, and food, and used feminine hygiene products. There wasn’t a spot in the whole room that was free of garbage and mess. I almost threw up from the smell and the overwhelming anxiety and panic that came over me. I couldn’t fathom what could possible be wrong with this girl. I sat and waited for her to get home from work.

I about jumped on her the moment she walked in the door. I was screaming and hysterical. It when then that I first heard the term OCD. Untreated OCD.

She was all messed up. As a child, Shawn’s drug addicted mother beat her and her sister if they didn’t wash the dishes the right way and that’s how it started. She would get so nervous that she didn’t scrub around the bowl the required number of times that she would just keep going and not be able to stop.

As an adult she worked as an occupational therapist and she worked with Ryan White. This was before they knew as much about how AIDS is transmitted. Afraid that she might get AIDS she started washing her hands compulsively and scrubbing them until she bled. She was eventually fired and her OCD went out of control.

After I confronted her she let her guard down and didn’t even try to hide her crazy OCD from me. So I witnessed the madness first hand.

She had a thing about being dirty so she couldn’t touch anything clean if she hadn’t showered yet and she couldn’t touch anything dirty if she had showered. Think about that one for a minute and see if you don’t go nuts. Seriously, think about getting out of bed and getting ready in the morning, and cooking and going to work, and at what point even after you have showered do you consider yourself dirty again?

She sprayed everything she touched with Lysol. Everything, the phone, the tub and shower, the sink, mail, the refrigerator and kitchen counters, clothes she was wearing not to mention her laundry, which was amazing to watch. She had to put the dirty laundry in the wash before she showered then she had to shower before it went in the dryer. She sprayed the whole pile down with Lysol before heading to the laundry room she sprayed the door knobs, the hallway the inside and outside of the washer and dryer, then she sprayed the whole thing down again once she was down.

In response to her craziness, I developed my own form of OCD. I became a perpetual scrubber. I constantly scrubbed everything down to get the taste, smell and sticky Lysol residue off of everything. I was whacked out and I started getting irrationally angry when I heard the sound of any type of spray can and the smell of Lysol made me so angry and sick that I would throw up. I started referring to her as Sssssssshawn – like the sound of the spray can. I finally was able to break my lease and move out before I went completely mental.

But as you can see, even now, 14 years later the mere mention of the “L Word” set me off. God, my head is pounding just from reliving that again.

The moral of this whole story - Lysol bad, make Bugg crazy.

Posted by bugg at June 14, 2006 02:47 PM

Comments

Posted by: mona buonanotte at June 15, 2006 08:35 AM

Posted by: Kassi at June 22, 2006 10:27 AM