My First Roommate

Cody was a timid boy, and I think he was asthmatic.  Two bad things to be.  He was rat-like, secretly coveted all things homosexual, and hated my stinking guts.  I think he hated me because he secretly wanted to fuck me, but deep down he knew this would never work out.  He was Mormon, I was the antichrist.  He was short, I was tallish.  He was a sneaky little queer, I was (and am) straight as an arrow.

It is curious then that in the moment we met, I made a wisecrack about being a gay predator.  It was how I tried to break the ice, and it had worked in similar situations before.  But not with good ol' Cody--or his mother.

(Before I explain, let me just say that I had no idea she was in the room.)

I moved in to our dorm room on a Friday.  School started the following week, and I didn't want to spend the weekend unpacking my meager possessions.  Instead, I had plans with a good friend to head to a neighboring city and take in a concert.  I was extremely excited to be starting school, and even more excited to be immersing myself in the marijuana-smoke cloud that was sure to envelope the outdoor venue where the show would take place.

I unpacked and headed to the local Wal-Mart to buy some shaving supplies.  I had spent the previous year washing dishes at the best (and only) bar and grill in my hometown, and because of the nature of this work I had little need to pay attention to hygiene.  Washing my clothes was a waste of time because they were covered in filth at the end of each shift.  No matter how hard I could have tried to stay clean it would have been futile, and because it's kind of silly to be clean-shaven when all you have to wear is putrid clothing, I just decided not to bathe, shave or wear any kind of deodorant.  The effect was pleasing to me.  I could detect the many different tones to my pheromonal potential, and after awhile the stench just became part of the scenery.  I grew a massive, gnarly beard, which in turn grew a beak and feathers of its own.

But college is no place to be fucking around with social experiments--at least not in your first semester--and I was convinced that if I were to screw anything female that year I would have to shave and take a shower.

When I returned to the room, Cody was in the process of unpacking.  I could hear him (or at least the person I thought was him) rummaging around in the drawers and cabinet that I had left him.  As I approached the open door to the room, he came walking out.  I stopped him with a firm handshake.  "You must be Cody?" I asked.  I could sense the fear in his heart as he smelled my dog-like musk, and took in the visual feast of my hair and beard.  He was observing someone who looked like a roadie for Foghat.  I was observing a miniature Ryan Seacrest.  He was as obscenely clean as I was obscenely unkempt and foul-smelling.  He had on a skin-tight boy toy shirt--presumably from the GAP--and I had on my dishwashing uniform: a thrift store ensemble with a t-shirt that proudly proclaimed The West Wasn't Won with a Registered Gun!

There was an extremely awkward moment of silence which I could no longer bear.  So I took the first step with my aforementioned anecdote.  It went something like this:

"Don't worry little buddy.  I'll knock you out with ether before I ever fuck you in your ass.  You won't feel a thing."

If I thought he was giving me strange looks prior to this, I was instantly aware of the impression I was making now.  But nothing--and I do mean nothing--would compare to the look that his mother would give me about ten seconds after I said it.  Being unaware that she was inside the room, busily unpacking young Cody's collection of high school memories, I had let go with possibly the most crude assertion that she had ever heard.  Because it was so outlandish, it was slightly easier to assure her that she did not hear what she thought she heard.

Maybe she figured it out in the car on the way home because the Parent's Weekend was kind of tense.