Fucking Asshole #5: Juan Gratten

Fucking Assholes, cont.

5. Juan Gratten~ This ex-housemate from hell was the first of two notables that I’ve had while doing the housemate thing. He rented a room from me in a 2 bedroom apartment near Fairfax that was more like a house than an apartment. He was a college student majoring in music. He said he practiced piano as much as 6 hours a day. There were no problems that I recall while living in that apartment, outside of a mysterious missing goldfish that was never found. Shortly after he moved in, the new owners of the building served notice that all residents were to move out in 30 days in order for renovations to begin. It was an extremely tight rental market at the time. Since he seemed to be normal, I decided to look for a three bedroom house and a third housemate, as a three bedroom home would be cheaper per bedroom than a two bedroom home. I found a home and another housemate and moved in. The very first day I came home from work to the new home, I discovered a trail of soy sauce on the brand new carpet from the kitchen through the living room to the front door. I don’t know what happened to this guy. He started leaving dirty dishes all over the kitchen. He would leave for school and not turn the stove off. One night I came home about 2 am to find the garage door open. I walked into the garage and into the utility room, but decided to leave just in case there was someone in the house that ought not be there. I started to look for a phone booth to call 911, but figured that if there was someone there, they probably heard me close the garage door and left. Since I had some ganja in the house, I decided not to call the police. Well it turned out that the idiot had come home drunk and high as a kite to get something but had forgotten to bring his keys with him, so he pried open the garage door, turned on all the lights, got what he came for, and left without tending to the minor details of lights and doors. He broke my turntable. He would come home midweek to a totally dark house, as Lisa and I both had jobs to get up early for, slam doors, bang pots and pans, talk loudly with his friends, and wake us both up. The house was a no-tobacco house. His friends smoked the unkind and used my morning vitamin cup as an ashtray. He began to smoke a lot of pot. A *lot*. The list goes on and on and on. It got to the point that Lisa and I told him that he would have to move out at the end of the lease, so he decided to throw a party before he left. He told me he was only inviting 30 to 40 of his best friends. I thought, “Why not invite all your best friends?” It turned out that he had cards printed up with the address on them and was handing them out to total strangers all over campus. Why I allowed him to throw this soiree, I don’t know, but I did, so I felt I needed to stay and be the policeman, as I had a notion that trouble was quite possible. I left for about an hour and came back to find smokers in the house, and strangers making phone calls on the house phone after I specifically told him not to have revelers in the living room area. They found my drum set which I had put behind a curtain. Soon there were well over 50 strangers in the house and yard with more constantly showing up, so I decided to walk into town as I couldn’t deal with this shit any longer. As I was leaving, I saw Lisa’s bedroom light go on. She was out of town for the weekend and he was bringing another woman into her bed! GTFO!!! I kicked them out of the upstairs living room and bedrooms, secured the area as best I could, and walked into town. I stopped at a pay phone and called 911 on my own house. I drank a beer at 19 Broadway and then returned home only to find police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances outside of my home. Apparently I wasn’t the only one to call the cops, as this was their third trip there. The officers saw me walk up the street. I innocently asked what all the commotion was when they told me about the many visits this night. “Three times? Really?” I walked into the house and saw a disaster. There had been a fight in the music studio. At least two of his friends passed out and needed to be taken away by ambulance. The kitchen and back yard looked like war zones. He had been dealing with the peace officers on one side of the house. I had to take a ½ hour walk to cool down as I surely would have killed the bastard that night. How dare he trash my home like that?! I did not see him that night. He made a half assed attempt at cleaning that night and finished the next day. A week or so later, he moved out without cleaning his bedroom, nor did he do any deep cleaning in the kitchen. Lisa and I did not use the kitchen nearly as much as he did over the course of the year. I waited a week for him to come back and clean, but he never showed up. I called a cleaning agency, had them clean the two rooms in question, secured an invoice for the work, and deducted that amount from his deposit. I can’t believe that he had the audacity to complain about it! He never apologized for the misery he caused, the party disaster, or leaving without cleaning.

A couple of years after he moved out, the Pacific Sun free weekly newspaper ran a story about a rehab program in the San Geronimo Valley and specifically mentioned Juan Gratten as one of their success stories. WTF?! JG?! No FN way! He was NOT sober at all, as they referenced the time period he was my housemate. I called the facility and informed them of the con he pulled on them, but I have no idea what happened after the call.

Several years later, he approached me at the Fairfax Festival. The first thing I said was, “Do I know you?” That should have been a huge clue that I had no desire to speak with him. He continued to badger me about holding a grudge that long, so I just walked away. I had done a pretty good job of forgetting about him. I had absolutely no good memories of him, so why would I want to speak with him. He made no apologies then, nor on this day. I forgot about him once, I’ll forget about him again.