SharpNose's Journal: Roommate Torture

I've already shown that I am capable of less-than-noble things, like trying to pick up one girlfriend (I still need to tell that story) before dusting another. Turns out that my first two roommates in my dorm in college also brought out the worst in me.

Barry the Vitamin Man was in the same major as me, electrical engineering, but every millimeter of him had "jock" written on it. I don't think he was a "dumb jock" but everything else about him was 100% consistent with that appellation.

First year of college. First time living away from home. First time having to deal with [non-family] people that I couldn't just escape. I got paired up with Barry and the fact that he was older and bigger than me made me nervous. There was none of this "hey, I'm new here too" comraderie. Barry was okay, I guess, even though he had dozens of bottles of vitamins and Lord only knows what all other jock bullshit lying around the dorm room, but he did two things that pissed me off. One, he had some dippy girlfriend out of town somewhere - he'd send her notes with little cartoons of hearts with feet drawn on them - and whenever they would talk on the phone, Barry would ask me to leave the room. His "negotiation" was that he'd do the same for me.

If you've read this far, you'd know that my having Barry clear out so I could sex-talk a girl over the phone or bring a girl over for some knockin' boots would be a little like my asking to borrow Christopher Reeve's tennis racket with the provision that he could borrow mine anytime he liked. A few weeks into my Twisted Wreck career, the phone rang, Barry picked up, and it was his girlfriend. Barry looked at me with his face screwed up and waved one hand around inscrutably - his indication to me to get out. I ignored him and stayed in my chair. I could tell he was pissed off, but he was still trying to make kissy-face with his LDR bimbette. He cut the conversation short and jumped my case for not leaving. I told him that it wasn't fair to expect me to leave the room on his command because his "agreement" was one-sided. Granted, I should have told him to fuck himself when he suggested the arrangement in the first place, but I guess I had to be in a bad enough mood to stand up to some dude who could kick my ass. But, this wasn't what I did that besmirched my image of myself.

The other thing Barry did that bugged me was to bring in this goddamned house plant that had to be over three feet tall. It looked like something that would grow next to your mailbox unless you hit the spot with Roundup regularly.

This dorm room was not very big and something over three feet tall and over two feet wide is just unwelcome. So, I decided to kill his plant. Every so often, I'd squirt some saline solution for my contacts into the plant's dirt. Eventually, there was this yellowish-white crust forming and the plant started to turn brown. However, it was not my saline that did the job; Vitamin Man was putting some of his Jock Dumbshit Asshole yeast powder into the dirt, thinking he was "feeding" it, whereas it was probably making the dirt toxic.

Next quarter, Barry went off to co-op and his replacement, John the Peruvian Peckerhead, was even worse. He had a rather miscalibrated sense of humor, probably through not being a native English speaker - Tom and Jerry cartoons were hilarious to him, whereas a Johnny Carson monologue would leave him just sitting there, staring blankly.

We had rotary-dial phones in our rooms in those days. In the middle of the night, during the week, John would drag the phone out into the hall, prop the door open by about an inch, and sit out there and dial these 25-digit phone numbers to call his folks in Peru. Calls to Peru wouldn't always make it, so he'd dial and dial and dial. I'm sure this was frustrating to him, but it's also frustrating when you're trying to get to sleep with this going on ten feet away from your head. So, after a while, I figured, what the hell, I'm not getting any sleep anyway...and I'd wait until he was at about digit 20 and then I'd sit up, reach past the foot of my bed, and yank the phone cord out of the socket and stick it back in right away. I had great fun with this, because he'd keep on dialing the number and it would take him a minute to figure out that the phone had gone dead on him.

He had friends that would come by. That was actually amusing, because he had friends that I would never have had in a million years, like Fernando. He was this disconcertingly happy Peruvian guy, greasy-looking black hair, with glasses. He didn't have the English language down too well, so when he'd make an entrance, I'd say "FERNANDO!!! You shitkickingcocksuckerdipwad, how the hell are ya??" Went right by him; I think he thought that was how Americans greeted each other, and that was fine with me. I wish I could have been there when he had his first job interview.

One day, John bought this little Pioneer stereo. He set it up on his desk and while he was studying, he'd fire up the radio and "La cucaraaa-chaaaa, la cucaraaa-chaaaa" or whatever would come out. This bugged the living piss out of me, but Mr. Conflict Avoidance (it was easier slicing shit with Vitaman Man somehow) would say nothing. One day, I'd had enough.

I used to build electronic shit on my desk, so I had a little power supply that I'd rigged up to give me a clean five volts for my little circuits. I ran some wires from it over to his desk, turned on John's stereo, and started probing the wires around inside the stereo, through the ventilation slots on the top. So, I'd touch a wire here...nothing. Touch a wire there...nothing. Touch a wire over there..."THUNK"...then, silence. Ahhhh.

I rolled up my wires and waited for John's return. A while later, he came in, dropped his book bag on his chair. My heart was pounding and my breathing quickened. He reached to the stereo and hit the power button.

"La cucaraaa-chaaaa, la cucaraaa-chaaaa..."