I moved in a day before (and in a hurricane, mind you) my three roommates sophomore year. So, on what should have been move-in night…I was free to get inebriated ten different ways with my friends over on the other side of Powhatan while my new roommates, along with one of their Christian fundamentalist mothers who was staying over on the couch, divvied up remaining closet space and stacked their packages of ramen in perfect geometric form. Which brings us to the first of many, many downright zany situations that this foursome would star in, like some crazy double Laverne & Shirley.
After sufficient carousing and debauching on the other side of Powhatan, Ed, always the good citizen, escorted my drunk ass back to the new apartment. I knew that new roommate Heather’s bible-thumpin’ momma was staying over, and informed Ed that I would be making a bee-line for my bedroom once we got upstairs. Except when I opened there door, we were greeted with a scene not unlike something out of an old Godzilla movie. There was screaming. Flitting about. I could have sworn there were sirens. My drunk brain ascertained through the shrieks that there was a bug. Ed was recruited to get it, ambling over the cumbersome Powhatan furniture, and generally creating enough ruckus that I couldn’t have made a scene if I wanted to. I safely made it to my room, where roommate Morgan was. We commiserated over our fear of Heather’s holy mom and the wrath she might dispense at our sinning ways (me being drunk, how earlier she had given me the Spanish inquisition over the Hot Topic-begotten sticker reading “My god can beat up your god.” plastered on my computer monitor, when Morgan laid a jewel of a line on me that will dwell in the First Impression Hall of Fame long after that stupid bug’s descendents have met their doom. She said, “Yeah, I know what you mean. I’m bi, I prefer women, but I have a boyfriend.” But after she laid that on me she went and got me some Pepsi, so I let it slide.
The fourth, and if I do say so, greatest roommate of all time was Kristin. She brought no drama, and was always up for farting on roommates-who-weren’t home’s pillows. She would stick her head into my room at random intervals and quote that one commercial with all the animal crackers, “He’s gonna eat monkey!” (complete with voice). (PS…anyone who can remember what that commercial was, I’ll send you a present). I think the secret to roommate success with Kristin, besides the fact that we didn’t share an actual bedroom, was that we didn’t front like just because we were roommates, we had to be best friends. As a transfer student, she went the sorority route to make friends. I already had my ragtag tableau of a social scene. We’d go out and do our own thing, but when in the apartment, we were bros. I got along with her friends when they came over, and she got along with mine. My favorite Kristin memory, besides the aforementioned Freshman Fucker admonishment phone call, was Saint Patrick’s Day (or rather the wee hours of the morning after Saint Patrick’s Day). We’d both returned from our respective green-draped festivities and were topping off the evening with a little drunken heckling of passersby way down below (we were on the fourth floor). One young fella found our heckling downright charming, and decided that he was head over heels in love with me. He cried that I was his angel (our only guess was that the wire shamrock novelty headband had since free-formed itself into a circle, bearing a shocking resemblance to a halo). Kristin barked that if he loved me, he’d get down on his knees and express it in song. Which he did. This went on for a bit, when a girl downstairs flung her window open and bellowed that if he loved me so much, he needs to go upstairs and tell me, or she’s gonna get the RA. At which point, my suitor and his friend booked towards the stairwell. We turned off all the lights, locked the door and ran to bed.
As for Morgan, who I shared a room with, she was pretty alright. Sure, she had a gigantic Xena: Warrior Princess Poster that I had to wake up to every morning, but she was fun while she lasted. Besides having crushes on all of my friends and being a magnet for weird friends herself, that is. The end of the Morgan story is for another blog, though.
Heather, as I mentioned before, came to ODU (another transfer) fresh from an extremely religious upbringing. Homegirl was seriously repressed. First of all, at that time she was 22 years old, but was still holding on to her collage of Tigerbeat clippings of all the dreamy guys from music and tv. For Heather, ODU was like the fast-track to damnation. She joined the sorority with Kristin, and before she knew it she was knocking back the amaretto sours and slurping it up with any marine that belched in her direction. Last I heard, she had a venereal disease and joined the Navy.
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