One Sorry Blog

One Sorry Blog News Service

Buenos Aires – With their sixth houseguest in three months having come and gone, one young couple is telling anyone who will listen that living in someone else’s space is no joke.

“Call it etiquette, good manners, coming correct, keeping it real, whatever,” said Paul Rivas, “there are rules to being a houseguest.”

Nevermind that, as the erstwhile host’s girlfriend, Clare Nisbet, is quick to say, Rivas is “not much of a host.” With the eye of one who is always trying to tighten up his own houseguest game, Rivas has been studying houseguest behavior closely for the last 15 months. The young Californians living in Buenos Aires have had six houseguests and two housemates since January, some with tighter game than others.

A friend of Nisbet’s who came with a boyfriend presented Nisbet with New York’s finest chocolate and Tetley tea upon arrival, but her boyfriend broke part of a bed by standing on it while trying to help Clare’s friend lower the blinds. Two women visiting separately left stacks of celebrity magazines behind when they left, the houseguest exit gift equivalent of a complementary mint from the jar on the way out after paying the bill at Carrow’s.

“I was ready to name Little Julie (Nisbet) the best houseguest when I got the Cadbury’s Mini-Eggs she sent in another recent houseguest’s luggage,” Nisbet said, “but Paul and I discussed it and since she’s family she wasn’t really eligible.”

Clare explained that if for some reason Julie hadn’t been a good houseguest, Clare would have been pissed off, and would not have written off Julie’s unacceptable behavior as the foibles of being a houseguest, like she and Paul been forced to do on more than one occasion. For example, one three-peat houseguest was a liability as a houseguest and an absolute disaster on nights he just crashed on account of drunkenness.

Then who’s the best houseguest? Rivas believes it’s the Life Artist Bubba Ray Robison, who never arrives at anyone’s house without two bottles of $100 tequila, a carton of cigarettes, corn tortillas and hot sauce.

“Are you kidding?” said Nisbet, making a face. “Bubba’s room looked like something you’d see at the dump, he shed enough chest hair to carpet the place, and when he snored it sounded like a rhinoceros fart. He slept from 4 a.m. to 4 p.m. and he broke part of a bed humping. I disagree. Though he did make me a purse.”

In fact, Rivas agreed with his betrothed’s summary of Robison’s residency, but maintained that a litany of unfortunate circumstances was a small price to pay for the company of a bona fide life artist and insisted that gift-giving trumped hygiene.

Rivas recalls a few houseguests at his old house on the Mesa, The Piece, who would have been in the running for worst all-time had they been invited by Rivas and not one of his many housemates. A stone-cold psycho water polo chick from Lompoc once borrowed Rivas’s housemate Yogurt’s truck without permission, got a parking ticket in I.V. and didn’t tell him about it. The younger brother of Rivas’s cousin’s ex-boyfriend, The Golden Do-rag, and two of his friends lived like squatters for a three-day weekend before taking two Chumash Casino buses to get home. And another of Bonnie’s associates rolled some chick back and left a condom wrapper on the floor beside the living room couch, which Rivas discovered while eating dinner.

The worst houseguest ever? Rivas would only say that it was a surprising tie between the traveling/homeless guy that Rivas had to kick out of The Piece for kissing Nisbet without permission, and a guy he and Nisbet thought would be solid but turned out to be a niggard.

“The traveling/homeless guy was older, and he had a knack for never failing to show up with a single tall boy can of Ice House in a paper bag just as the tri-tip was coming off the grill,” Rivas recalled with his head cocked and eyebrows raised, “but at least he managed to stay clean without locking himself in the bathroom for 45 minutes every morning. ”

Rivas is referring to the freeloader who, in addition to never offering to pay for his share of anything, ever, not groceries, not a restaurant meal, not a taxi fare, nothing, routinely bogarted the only bathroom in the four-person apartment every morning without offering so much as a head’s up, a situation which once drove Nisbet to go to a remote corner of the house and pee in a bucket.

“He was something else,” remembered Rivas. “One time five of us went out for dessert, and having seen that we all split the check evenly at dinner, and he ordered a Johnny Walker Blue, double!”

Even after being told that the foregoing was a bold statement, Rivas remained firm in his allegations. How does he know that’s what the undercover tightwad was thinking?

“Because the night before, when we sent him up to the bar to order his own drink and let him get a little Spanish practice in,” Rivas said, becoming animated, “the bastard ordered Old Smuggler, the cheapest whiskey in Argentina!”

Although Nisbet still cringes at the unwanted contact with the traveling/homeless guy, she raves that the other former lousy guest has been exceedingly helpful since he returned home. Rivas remains unimpressed, however, stating that the fact that the guy who had been a shitty houseguest had been cool once he’d gone back home only proved what they knew when the guy left their house: that he was a cool guy but a shitty houseguest.

Could it be that there really are rules to being a houseguest?

“Now that I think about it”, Rivas said, not having thought about anything, “there’s really only one rule of being a houseguest: Have tight game.”