Awesome story. Salut, roomie!

Chris

A very weird and private guy. We live together two years.

-His mom died our junior year, but he never said a word about it. He just disappeared for a weekend and then for the rest of the semester he played video games instead of going to class.

-For some reason I bought a pet turtle my junior year. This prompted Chris to start buying cans of turtle soup at the grocery store. He is the only person in the world who looked at a turtle and thought... "That looks tasty".

Willie. Really passive-aggressive, sullen, made it clear within the first few days that he had no interest in ever becoming friends with me, and never left the room. Chemistry was against us, I guess. I also once tried to open the locked door while he was trying to sex up his girlfriend and forgot that he told me not to come back for a long while. He probably didn't forgive me for that for a long time, as he didn't get laid that night. Still, I couldn't have given a rat's ass, especially since he managed to bone her after that and still held it against me. Crap.

Then again, I was probably a terrible roommate to have. Still, he could have been a lot nicer to me than he was.

My Freshman year of college I lived off-campus, but I decided that for my second year I'd do Dormitory Living just to experience it. I had Pell Grants, so it was all to be paid for thanks to Jimmy Carter.

Also, "Flour" was going to live in this particular dorm, and we had started to try and form some sort of band. This was fall of 1978. I chose the room next to his corner room, with foosball table.

When I moved in, the first thing I put in the room was my Fender Bassman 100 with matching "Pyramid" 4x12 cabinet.
When I rolled it into the room, I noticed that my new and unknown roomie had already moved in, evidenced by, and I'm not joking, a green plastic portable record player, a couple of stuffed animals, and other horrors.

I looked through his small stack of LPs. The "hippest album I found was The Association's Greatest Hits. I need not remind you that this was 1978. This was not irony or retro or even nostalgia for the soon-to-be called Wild Jim.

Math major, tall, skinny, glasses square short hair, nerd clothes. The whole package. I was aghast.

Fortunately, I met a guy who had excellent long hair and who turned me on to Lucifer's Friend, Judas Priest, UFO, Scorpions. I in turn got him into Sex Pistols, DEVO, The Clash, The Cars and Blondie. He moved in and Wild Jim moved in with his former roomate Randy. They were made for each other.

Wild Jim had never had a drink of alcohol or a bong. The president of the Ski Club had the other corner room, and the window was painted with a Yes album cover art, I can't remember which one because we smoked so much weed in that room. He built an exhaust fan in a frame to suck the smoke out. There was a bar with a full-size refrigerator full of beer, and a switch panel to control various lights and the fan. Excellent Marantz stereo as well. We partied in that room frequently. It was cool.

So one Friday party night, Wild Jim decided that he would hang out with us. We always welcomed him to. He wasn't like, a pain in the ass or anything, just quiet and nerdy.

He seemed to notice that the weed and beer seemed to make us happy, and without forcing him, he requested a bottle of beer. He had another, and another until he asked to try the bong. We did not object or question his needs. He did a bong.

Long story short, and this is absolutely all true, you can ask Flour about it, he wound up skipping classes and tests, and he and Randy and a couple of other nerds would stay up all night playing poker in their Nerd-Den drinking beers and smoking cigars. The Resident Attendant even had to shut them up several times during the week in the wee hours.

He flunked out, and never came back to the UWEC.

wow

<a href="http://www.adamblackstone.com/">blackstone productions</a> was the star of the bass class, now he plays for jay-z and pharell and ll cool j. i remember i auditioned the same day as him and i walked in thinking i was ahead of the game and then i saw him audition and realized i was complete chicken shit. he was a prodigy and he had an ego to match. dishonest and sleazy, he and a neighboring macho bass jock would stash gay porn under my pillow and held a mock trial for a phone message from an effeminate-voiced dude. women were "bitches" or "hos" once they were out of earshot, but he would chastise me for cursing, because of his religious upbringing.

i also had two suitemates.

one was a surfer dude who really believed in the overdog -- a zealous fan of the most generic #1 stuff: michael jordan, star wars, teenage mutant ninja turtles and dave matthews band. he played sax.

the other was a guitarist who had a peculiar, interesting sense of humor. he was completely straightfaced and serious for weeks and the first time he made a joke it was so deadpan it totally threw us off. he watched movies while practicing guitar all night, sometimes sleeping through the day and missing class. he claims to have watched back to the future once a week since it came out, which would be hundreds and hundreds of times. he does know every single frame of that movie. he said he ate cheez-its the way i ate cookies and i didn't believe him until i found him stashing them under his bed. he had a more serious determination to get good at jazz than the rest of us, but years later (after i'd left the school) he had totally burnt out on jazz school, he and his girlfriend broke up, and he moved back to new hampshire where he started making incredibly conservative pop music under the name <a href="http://cdbaby.com/cd/conservativeman">conservative man</a>.

one really funny moment was when my roommates found out that i had kissed a guy they asked me

-- what it was like (like kissing a girl with stubble)
-- if i was attracted to any of them (obviously, no)
-- if i had to pick one as the most attractive, who would i pick (wtf?)