And Now for a Column Filled Entirely With Roomers

Every month the Pennysavers publications throughout Orange County run hundreds of ads for roommates. Imagine the carnage that ensues when many of those people actually hook up with each other. I do; that’s why I live alone.

Not Sylvia Bergthold, however. With 20 years of renting out rooms in her four-bedroom Fountain Valley house to total strangers, she had an idea.

Hadn’t she had roughly 40 roommates over the years? Hadn’t she once left a tenant’s dirty dishes on her bedspread to deliver a message about cleanliness? Hadn’t she once been drinking coffee in the morning when a man she’d never seen walked from the hallway into the kitchen and introduced himself? And, most important, hadn’t she survived the “Roommate From Hell”?

And yet, when she reflected on things, hadn’t she loved the experience and felt she’s a better person for having converted her home into a perennial hotel?

Because all these things are true, Bergthold thought she might as well write a booklet on picking a roommate. Entitled, “Sorry, the Boa Has Gotta Go” (another true story), Bergthold is trying to market her booklet in the Orange County area.

Her quiet house in a cul-de-sac doesn’t look like the scene for such adventures, and as Bergthold, now 56, tells it, her roommate career began for rather mundane reasons. When her marriage ended 20 years ago and with two young children in tow, the only way they could stay in the house was if she got financial support from renting out a room.

“I agonized about it, I really did,” she says about placing that first ad. “We’re talking about a person who was very conservative. I was raised in New Hampshire. You didn’t move around. You didn’t have strangers living in your house. My mother didn’t allow us to have friends sleep over.”

She accepted the first person who answered, a 27-year-old man who wound up staying two years. He was the first of an unbroken string of people who have rented from her and lived in her house.

Taking no backseat to the United Nations, among the nationalities represented in her hallway over the years were Australian, Korean, Greek, Argentine and Polish. One of her two current roommates is from Bosnia.

“It’s no longer business,” she says, now that she’s financially secure. “I love learning about people. I tend to be a loner, kind of introverted, so I need to be forcibly exposed to other people. And having foreigners in the house, I’ve learned such a great deal about politics, religion and cultures of other countries.”

Many of us have trouble entertaining company for three days, let alone 9 1/2 years, which is the longevity record at Bergthold’s house. I asked for the secret.

“You don’t stay strangers for long,” she says. “Generally speaking, someone who moves into your home is carrying baggage themselves. Some kind of trauma, maybe. I feel this is a very good support system. Most people are very good and need to be put in comforting, loving situations to bring out the best in them.”

Who shouldn’t be a roommate? “If you’re a very finicky type, if bread crumbs on the breadboard send you into apoplexy, this is not for you,” she says. “If you need to be a very private person, obviously, that’s not good, either. But I don’t think most of us want to be like that. I think most of us want to communicate.”

Bergthold has evicted three people in 20 years. She stays in touch with more than half of the people who have passed through her doors. Even the woman we’ll call Molly.

“She was here a long time ago and we’re still very good friends,” Bergthold says. “But she had this habit of cooking herself dinner and then going out on a date and leaving the dishes and thinking that when she came back at two in morning, she’d be doing the dishes. Well, she wouldn’t and they’d still be there in the morning. I told her several times, ‘If you keep doing this, I’m putting them on your bed.’ One night she came home at two in the morning and there they were, on her white eyelet bedspread.”

Or the roommate we’ll call Sally, who caused a rules change about overnight guests.

“I woke up one morning, I’m having breakfast, drinking coffee in the chair,” Bergthold says, “when this strange guy walks down the hall, sits down at the table and says, ‘Hi, my name is Mike.’ I’m thinking, who the hell is this guy? I said, ‘How long have you known Sally?’ and he said, ‘We just met last night.’ She had met him in a bar, picked him up and brought him home. I was incensed.”

Those were small potatoes when the Roommate From Hell arrived a couple years ago. Bergthold says her instincts failed her when she agreed to rent a room to the woman, who, Bergthold says, created chaos with her behavior. For starters, she wanted a lock on her bedroom door. She refused to pay rent. She tried to punch Bergthold. She pulled out the cable and phone lines and vandalized the washer and dryer. Eventually, Bergthold and the other two renters in the house were locking their bedroom doors, thinking the new roommate was stealing from them.

“She was in a category by herself,” Bergthold says. “I never believed in evil until I met her.”

Unable to quickly evict the woman, Bergthold concocted a plan: she had her daughter and son-in-law and their two boys, 3 and 5, move in to the house, hoping to drive the woman out.

That worked, but it took a toll. “I wanted to move out desperately,” Bergthold says of the ordeal. “I thought I was going to go out of my mind.”

That’s her only real horror story. Almost all the other ones, she says, have had happy endings.

Oh, yeah, there was also the renter years ago who, according to Bergthold, was levitated above his bed in the middle of the night.

But, as she points out, that’s another story.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.