Roommates

When I moved to Denver for college, the dorms I would soon be occupying asked me if I had a roommate preference. Since I knew no one, save for my girlfriend, who lived on the other side of town, I said no. I figured I would leave my chances to fate. I was starting a new life and well, really I had no choice.

I showed up on my first day and the front desk sent me up to the second floor, room 211. I entered and the first thing I noticed, besides the room looking next to nothing like the brochure, was that there was no refrigerator, as advertised. I called the front desk like I'd just moved to The Hamptons and asked where it was at. They let me know that only certain rooms got refrigerators and it was just sort of random, like my roommate. I hang up and can sort of feel how this place is going to go. I immediately begin to feel an animosity towards this "front desk" and begin to recognize them as "the man", as the enemy.

The walls are white and barren and I start to hang things up. I stick a nail in the wall and my dad practically knocks the stapler I'm using as a hammer from my hands. "WHAT ARE YOU DOOOOING??" he shouts, "YOU'RE NOT GONNA GET YOUR $200 DEPOSIT BACK IF YOU MAKE A HOLE!!!" I take a slow look around the dead white room with it's one prison style window and try to imagine living here for two years with nothing to look at. I look at the place where my refrigerator should be. I think about the "Front Desk", which has now earned itself the tyrannical capital letters. I look at my dad, sweat beading out on his bald forehead. Had I lost my mind?, he must have been thinking. I take the stapler and knock the nail into the wall and hang up a picture of Jade. My dad shakes his head and sits down. DId I have no idea what I was doing? The repercussions this would mean?

My parents leave the next day and, that night, I lie in my dorm room, alone, listening to people walking around in the halls. I wonder if I will get to know them and if they already know one another. I feel like a complete stranger in a strange land. I shut my eyes and wonder when I'll meet my roommate. It was the last day of the first part of my life.

When I awoke the next morning I met Kevin, my roommate. He has short black hair, a tight frame and wild eyes that were shielded by silver glasses. The dorms were set up in such a way that your roommate was really more of your toilet mate than anything. We each had our own 8x8 ft room which was connected by a joint bathroom. I met Kevin in the bathroom and shook his hand. He mumbled something about Star Wars and never made eye contact. He invited me into his room and I saw that the little bastard had a refrigerator. Rather than seeing this as an asset, I immediately identified him as the enemy. His room was covered in pictures of video game posters and famous actors that he really liked. He mumbles something and I just say, "right, right, well, cool" and then get out as soon as I can. For some reason it feels like Buffalo Bill's dorm room.

I would later discover that Kevin had an identical twin brother named Doug that lived down the hall. Doug liked to mumble and not look you in the eyes as well. If Kevin was Buffalo Bill, then Doug was definitely Hannibal Lecter. I imagined myself waking up one night and the two of them hovering over my bed, gazing down at me, but not making eye contact. In my dreams they had put down each other as preferential roommates but had not gotten it. In my dreams they would skin me alive and Doug would suddenly disappear from the premises, taking up residence in my skin and the two of them could live happily ever after for the next two years.

Late at night I'd lie in bed and I'd listen to them through the walls. They seemed to be speaking their own language, a tongue I would later begin to refer to as Polton, which was the planet I assumed them to be from. I fell asleep as they watched, rewatched and rewatched the new Pirates of the Caribbean trailer on full blast. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. They laughed at the same parts. They made the same jokes. Their commentary played on loop, just like Boot Strap Bill's line. I wondered if they were each sitting in the dark, dressed up as their favorite pirate and, furthermore, who each of them would've chosen.

I wake up. It's not the next morning, but just another morning and the bathroom door is locked. I hear someone speaking Polton and I sit down on the floor to listen. Someone is unraveling toilet paper, but rather than just a little piece to fold and wipe, I hear a whoosh-whoosh-whoosh like they're ripping it out of the dispenser by the yard just as fast as they can. Next I hear a scrubbing noise like TP on skin and I'm wondering if he wipes like he's cleaning the kitchen counter. More Polton speak. It's closer now, just on the other side of the door. The shower turns on and I hear him get undressed and step inside. To this day I can't tell you what was truly happening behind that door next. I hear Polton 1 and then I hear Polton 2. I hear a conversation happening in the shower. I can't tell you if one was sitting on the toilet and talking to his brother while he showered. I can't tell you if it was just Kevin Polton imitating two voices, having a back and forth by himself or if they were actually showering together. I never asked and they never told.

One day I found myself sitting in my friend Steve's room. Steve had no fridge and was therefore considered a trustworthy friend to me. He liked to dig through the ashtrays outside for refries and could sometimes be found passed out from a nightlong binge of drinking Scope, but I found these traits more colorful than detestable. I sat on his popposon chair and gazed out the window, across the courtyard to all the opposing dorm windows and wondered what was happening in each of them. I decided to just check it out.

Steve had a digital camera he had acquired from somewhere or the other and, while I never saw him use it, I found that it had quite an impressive zoom lens that doubled quite nicely as a telescope. I gazed through the viewfinder and saw a kid feeding a squirrel. I saw a girl watching TV. I saw a guy sitting on his bed doing his homework. My room was empty and next door, Kevin was wielding a giant plastic sabre, leaping back and forth in his room, having a sword fight with an invisible opponent, all alone. I wondered if he was imitating Jack Sparrow or Luke Skywalker. Steve takes the camera from me, takes a look, laughs, pulls a three quarter smoked cigarette out of his cargo pocket and lights it up for the two drags that it's worth.

Summer came and Kevin and Doug left. In fact, 80% of the dorms vacated and the few out-of-staters that lived there were the only ones left behind to fend for themselves. As soon as ol' Buffalo Bill was gone I snuck into his room and stole his refrigerator. Rob the rich to feed the poor. It was nice for a while, being alone, but it got to be, understandably, a bit lonely. When the kids all came back, we all got new roommates and I was assigned to a black guy named Reggie, who had a lisp. Not the kind of lisp that was caused by a speech impediment but the kind of lisp that was caused by shaking your wrist around limply, being attracted to boys and just being pretty much all around gay. He seemed enjoyable enough and was always found with a shining white smile on his face. One Saturday afternoon, while I sat in my room, on my bed, playing Tetris, I heard a quick and polite knock on my bathroom door. "Come in" I gayly shouted. In walks Reggie, wearing a red Echo shirt, expensive name brand pants and carrying a Big Gulp filled with what smells like pure rum mixed with a capful of soda. He asks if he can play Tetris with me and I tell him sure, to have a seat. He sits down next to me and I wonder if this gay, drunk black man wants to have sex with me. I scoot a few inches away from him and hand him a controller. I begin asking him where he's from, if he has any siblings, does he have a job? He tells me, with a smile, that his home life was pretty rough and once his sister made him really mad and he stabbed her in the shoulder with a kitchen knife. I beat him at Tetris and he says, "Dang it!". I become afraid and begin looking around my room for anything I can use to protect myself with or, even worse, anything that could be used to harm me. The stapler that I use as a hammer is in my drawer. I wonder if I can grab it before he tries to choke me with the Nintendo cable. He asks if I want to play again and I hesitantly agree. I try to let him win but he's just too bad. Even trying to lose I still win. He says, "GOSH DARNIT!" and slams the rest of his drink. I wonder if instead of hurting me physically he's just thinking about out and out raping me. Would he at least allow me to run next door and ask my friend for a condom? He asks if I want to play again. I yawn and stretch and tell him that I really need to be getting to class. Before he can respond I click off the Nintendo and begin rapping up the controllers. "Cool", he says and disappears into the bathroom.

Summer comes and everyone disappears again. I enjoy the silence for a bit and decide to read a few books before starting the longing process for my friends like young lovers. I decide that the fates can eat it and figure this time I'll put in for a roommate. I choose a kid named Brett who has sideburns the size and shape of California. When he came back from Colorado Springs the following semester, he brought his hamster, Marla, with him and together the three os us lived above the room where some kid had hung himself a year before I moved in. I needed to make some extra money and so, beings that I went to film school, I ended up purchasing mini dv tapes off of ebay in bulk and selling them at the school for twice the cost I purchased them at. This technique afforded me extra beer money for the weekend and Brett quickly became envious, deciding he too would taste the sweetness of being an entrepreneur. He too wanted the freedom to be his own boss, to set his own schedule, to do what he wanted.

His first step was to gather his product. He went to the pet store and purchased another hamster, a male named Rerun and then set to work breeding the newly introduced couple. A few months later Marla was missing and the cage was filled with little pink creatures. Brett searched our dorms from top to bottom but never found her, never even found a trace of her. No poop, no hamster food scraps, no hair, nothing. I explained to him that, sometimes, in business, there are losses. Setbacks.

In true professional form, he pushed forward with phase 2 - marketing.

He began stapling posters up at the film school, "HAMSTERS FOR SALE". When this didn't catch on, we tried becoming partners. "BUY 2 MINI-DV TAPES, GET A FREE HAMSTER!" If people weren't going to buy them, we were just going to give them away. This too was a complete failure as hamsters weren't on the hot to have list that year. The hamsters were multiplying at an alarming rate and we weren't able to move the product. They were eating all the money that was coming in from his parents and it was becoming harder and harder to get booze on the weekend. Eventually, he made his first big sale. A girl down the hall from him asked if she could buy two of them - a guy and a girl. She thought she'd try selling them as well. Apparently we had quite a few FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America) members running around our place.

Brett escorts the young woman into his room and begins his spiel like some used car salesman. "This one's great, he'll just sit in your lap and smile at you. OH! This little girl is fantastic! Lots of energy and is just so cute while she runs on that little wheel - you buy em both and I'll toss in the wheel for free - heck, I'll even give ya some pellets. They love pellets. You'll figure it out - don't worry - you look nervous. New parents are always nervous. You'll be fine". He digs his hand into the cage to find the two chosen ones and stumbles upon a stiff object under some hamster chips. He clears them away and discovers Marla, her glassy eyes staring out at nothing, her cheeks filled with those delicious pellets.

We assume that Marla had died giving birth or had just finally kicked the bucket of old age. Truthfully we had no idea. We had no way of knowing. We were just a couple of Fortune 500s up and comers, not veterinarians. The story we told, however, was a bit different. We explained to people who asked about Marla that she had died giving birth and the infant hamsters had devoured her from the inside out, eating their way through her uterus and abdomen. When we found them, Marla was broken in two, a look of terror spread across her blood stained face. We tell everyone that's not a potential customer that the baby hamsters all bite.

The year passes and Brett has only sold two hamsters. He's going back home and can't take them all with him. The girl down the hall has bred a horde and nobodies buying. In her desperation she had even hit the street but with no luck. Brett decided that this is not what he expected and the business isn't earning the profit he thought it would. It's going belly-up and he decides to bail. One night, after most of the dorms had fallen asleep and when no one but the unmonitored security cameras were watching, he snuck the cage down the hall with the girl and they took each hamster out, one by one and fed them through a small hole in the wall. Roughly sixteen hamsters all together, one at a time, being fed into this black gap. They each disappeared down the narrow corridor, following each other's scent. Brett and the girl dumped in all the food they had behind the little fuzzy army to get them started on their new life as feral animals. The hamsters disappeared for good and none of us ever saw them again, but sometimes, late at night, you could hear a light scurrying within the walls.