Freshman year, I arrived in my college dorm before my roommate did, and I saw this as an opportunity to make a great first impression. On her empty bed I placed my blender, and when she said, “What is this doing here?” I said, “Sorry, I ran out of space for myself. We have to keep the blender on your bed.” Instead of laughing she looked horrified and I specifically remember an eavesdropping girl from down the hall earnestly saying, “The blade will get in her face!”
This anecdote could be the spawn of several kind of stories. Nobody Thinks You’re Funny stories, Your Genius Is Underappreciated stories, The Moment That Defined Your College Experience stories, A Bad Sign That Someone Hates You And Probably Will Forever stories, A Telling First Experience That Could Sum Up The Next Four Years Of Your Life stories or a round-up of inappropriate uses for kitchen appliances. (Eureka! That last one is good—would anyone care to submit an Inappropriate Uses of Kitchen Appliances story? I will only accept one that involves masterbating.) But instead this anecdote introduces Roommate stories and I would just like to say, given the disgraceful behavior in the stories below, I realize my roommate, Conrad Caperton*, was pretty lucky.
I also just realized that the blender was symbolic of not just my college experience (awkwardly placed, hazardous, not funny, shunned by my peers) but of roommates in general. I just tried to blend the shit out of some oil and water and they just would not blend. The water started being a bitch to the oil and got boys to be mean to her and ripped her name off the hallway resident poster outside and refused to talk to her for the last semester. Oh wait, we’re talking about me again. Wait, what were we talking about?
Whatever,
Lauren
*to protect said roommate’s identity, her real name has been replaced by one I found in this shitty newsletter I read one time.
Breaking the Ice
by Danny Corey
How does one break the ice? In the literal sense, you’d pick up a heavy tool. Withone quick swing, you’d smash the frozen sheet and feel the crush and separation of the atoms—it’s really quite pleasurable. Now, in a metaphorical context, please break the ice.
It’s the autumn of 2009. My brother and I are settling into our new apartment in Philadelphia with a stranger. It’s another night on the couch; one week of being new roommates has passed uneventfully. At this point, my brother and I are pros at living together (going on 25 years), while the spark between stranger and the two of us has yet to ignite.
Lights out and two-thirds of the roommates have retired to their bedrooms. Kodi (the dog) and I sit guard by the door watching Pineapple Express for the thirteenth time that week, courtesy of our overpriced premium deluxe cable package. Then, a knock at the door?! I’m alarmed, and I think Kodi is too; he’s shrieking. I open it slowly.
“I’m the plumber.”
“But it’s 11:30 p.m.”
“Your landlord said you’re having an issue with your pipes.”
“Wait here…”
I call to my brother who shuffles, half asleep, down the stairs to my rescue. I’d be happy to die beside my brother at the hands of the plumber/serial killer doing house calls at midnight. (I suppose he’s early if his appointment is for the following day? I’ll make sure we applaud his punctuality on his feedback survey.)
My brother knows just what to do, and that’s why I live with him. Dad #2. He races up the stairs to stranger’s room where the pipes reside. With a polite knock he opens the bedroom door.
But maybe, to this very day, he regrets how polite he was. Maybe a louder, more abrasive knock would have saved him from what he saw next. Besides, how was stranger to hear a light knock at his door with DJ headphones on? And how do you expect him to divert his focus during an activity that requires truly intense concentration? He can’t even remember to lock the door.
My brother shut the door, quick like a reflex. We all knew. Crank town.
We both empathized with stranger and offered up details about our personal habits and self-gratifying schedules. Things got weird. But I am thankful for that revealing moment. After that night, all of us became very close. To this day I wonder if stranger had staged the whole event. Had he hired the conveniently timed plumber? Chosen the room with the pipes? All so that he could connect with us?
Well, it worked. It broke the ice. And it was quite pleasurable.
The Real Ken Achs
by Dave K.
Living by yourself is seriously the best possible set-up. If you think otherwise, it’s because you’re some kind of weird mutant extrovert who should be biting the heads off chickens in the circus.
When I was a sophomore in college, my roommate was a transfer from Trinity named Ken Achs* who left bags of his garbage out in the hall. Was he waiting for the maid he clearly grew up with to come collect them? Our RA thought they were mine and nearly fined me $25 over it, which was absurd. All my garbage was on my floor in plain sight. The nerve.
Ol’ Ken also…uh…well, let me paint the picture. It’s 2 in the morning. I am awake playing Grand Theft Auto and microwaving 7-11 food because I am cool and popular. Ken stumbles in like a Robert Crumb illustration with a random girl hanging on his arm. We exchange curt pleasantries and he retires for the night. Our rooms are separated by a door, and thank sunny Jesus for that, because without fail I will hear the sounds of giggling, mostly his, and flesh slapping flesh. Every night this happened.
The girl in this scenario rotated weekly, and when they all found out about each other and (I assume) confronted him, he punched out every hallway light on our floor and then cried when the Public Safety officer wrote him up.
But enough about the past. I’m going to stop typing now so I can go pee with the bathroom door open because fuck roommates forever the end.
*to protect said roommate’s identity, his real name has been replaced by one chosen at random from the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame.
Delicate Little Flower-Boys*
by Corey Tobias
The politics of selecting a boarding school roommate is a sensitive and complicated business. The double-talk, secret negotiations, backstabbing and betrayals of the decision process are sure to hurt feelings and friendships. But in the freshman year, this decision is no concern for most incoming students, because almost everyone knows no one else in his class. Instead, the new student’s fear is the unknown—namely, not knowing whether he will be matched with someone unbearable, criminal, or just plain filthy. Will the boy in the next bed cry himself to sleep every night? Will that boy masturbate himself to sleep every night, just as soon as he thinks his roommate is asleep? Will that boy—as at least one disturbed Clevelander once did—masturbate (and ejaculate) on his roommate’s pillowcase when the roommate isn’t there?
Ignoring all the possible difficulties that adolescent boys might experience after moving away from home for the first time, people working in admissions offices like to believe that pairing boys of wildly different personalities (and what we might call radically different ‘lifestyle habits’) as roommates is just the strong medicine those boys need in order to learn how to live with other humans outside their family. What these admissions people never consider, year after year, is that the incompatibility between two roommates may very well turn to aggression, either outright or covert.
Such was the case a little less than thirteen years ago for my friend Justin and his assigned roommate, Gerald Flamm, a.k.a. Baxter. Justin hadn’t thought much of the name when he first read it in the admissions letter earlier that summer. When he met Baxter, however, he became worried. It wasn’t just the grease glistening on Baxter’s forehead, his pungent body odor, his blatant nose-picking-and-eating-it, or the other, very questionable hygienic habits that bothered Justin. Above all, it was Baxter’s mouth, in all its functions, that tormented Justin the most. Baxter had the habits of whining, complaining, nitpicking, teasing, insulting, bragging, declaiming, and generally just “shooting his mouth off”, as some Ohio parents called it. When words weren’t coming out of it, his mouth was often busy chewing the oily microwavable macaroni that his mother sent him in regular, monthly shipments. When he wasn’t eating, and sometimes even while he was eating, Baxter was likely to be spotted with a big lump of Skoal tucked into his lower lip. He often grinned, revealing the dirt-brown clump nestled under his yellowish teeth and the fibers of black tobacco caught between them. Flamm deposited the excess phlegm and saliva produced from his dipping in old Coke cans and water bottles, which were arranged around the head of his upper-bunk mattress like little organ pipes.
But it was Baxter’s grin that stuck in everyone’s mind. This grin neatly summed up every dirty aspect of his person that wasn’t apparent on the surface of his body or from its emanations. It hinted at the harmless mischief as well as the more-than-harmless deceit that Baxter had become known for among the freshman class. It supplied all the things Baxter meant but didn’t say with words, and it often worked against him, revealing his frequent boasts as little lies and his occasional promises as bigger lies. And, most aggravating of all, this grin often turned to an insolent smirk, a prideful challenge to whomever it met. Most of us in the dorm were lucky: we could turn our backs to this insolence whenever it flashed across Baxter’s face. But there was one of us who could neither ignore Baxter’s smirk nor escape it; and for this unlucky guy, the smirk demanded an answer.
We suspect it was meant as an answer that, one night that freshman year, Baxter found himself in a sticky situation. He had spent most of the evening in our room, chatting with my roommate Michael and sitting in our grubby recliner, his hand cupping a bowl of macaroni. When it came near eleven, the hour when we were all supposed to go to bed, Baxter wished us “gentlemen” a grandiose good-night and squeaked back down the hallway to his and Justin’s room in his flip-flops, which were still filled with shower water. Moments later we heard a cry, and nearly everyone on the floor rushed to Baxter’s room to see what had caused it. For once, he was at a loss for words: he could only stand next to his upper bunk and point in disbelief at the great, slimy, black stain that had swollen on the sheet. If its color didn’t reveal the identity of the substance, the little black grains of chewing tobacco in the stain’s middle did. This gooey puddle was the emptied content of one of Baxter’s spit bottles.
The location of the spill—directly in the middle of the bed—indicated that this was no accident. But this was the only certainty in the situation, because the motivations for the spill, as well as the number of potential spillers, were many. Jack, Andrew and Adam made no effort to conceal their delight and could barely contain their laughter, whereas Conrad and Jeremy tried hard to control their smiles in an effort to console Baxter. Michael, too, did his best to console him while he snuck glances at the others in the room. Justin seemed occupied at his computer. James, Curtis, Steve and DaJuan stood at the door shaking their heads. We in the room lingered for a while, partially to comfort Baxter, but mostly because we were just as curious as he about the mystery spiller. Everyone present claimed to be out of the room at the time, and each person in his turn muttered something about an alibi.
Later, a few of the guys from the floor collected in my room. My roommate Michael, who at first had seemed occupied at his computer, could no longer hide his smile or his excitement. “Don’t you guys see who did it?” he asked. “Think about it. Who’s had to put up with Baxter’s shit the most?” He paused. “I think I know,” he said, while we stood there, as clueless as before. “I think it’s pretty clear.”
*title was a last-minute editorial decision and was not developed by “Corey Tobias”, whoever that is. Where are you guys getting these noms de plume?