My college roommate, the pants-pooper, was a deeply religious guy.  If he wasn't busy pooping his pants or yelling at me for breaking his stuff and letting harlots sit on his bed, he was praying or at church or something god-related. 

There were numerous and varied regulations to dorm life that nobody adhered to.  If you were having any sort of 'fun', chances are you were, at that very moment, breaking at least 8 of them.  Not even the resident advisors gave a crap about most of them, they were mainly concerned with hanging up anti-drinking posters and cartoons against date rape.  My roommate the pants-pooper, however, was very concerned with the regulations.  He actually owned the book they were written in and he studied it.  He had the whole thing memorized, but he'd bring it out and recite passages, word for word, to emphasize the fact that somebody was breaking a rule.    Now, am I saying he didn't have a genuine reason to complain about me?  Of course not, to be fair, I made it my mission in life to torment the pants-pooping bastard.  But does that mean he was justified in ruining everyone else's fun?  I think not.  And by my own circular (and therefore correct) logic, was I not justified, at least retroactively, in engaging in my own unique brand of madcap fun and zany shenanigans?  As John Belushi is my witness, I believe I was!

            One night, like so many others, my friends and I were relaxing in the broom closet-sized room my school called a 'lounge', sitting on the crappy couches, trying to think of something fun to do.  According to section 5-a of the chapter on dorm etiquette, we were illegally congregating in a public area during the assigned study hours.  It was old poopypants himself, come to chastise us for our wicked ways.  I threw an empty beer can at him while my friends coughed out the word "asshole" repeatedly.  Nothing too original, I know.  "Don't make me get the RA," warned Capt. FecalTrousers, "some of us are actually trying to study."

            Every once in a while, I broke with protocol and tried to reason with the guy.  "Dude, relax, it's Friday.  Why don't you put on your fancy diaper and trip the light fantastic with that mousy broad you're always reading the Bible with?"  Seemed fair to me, but he went and got the RA anyway. 

            By now, it's probably clear to you that I'm trying to set up some sort of parallel between his adherence to the word of god and his adherence to the word of the jackanapes who decided college students weren't yet adults but rather some sort of semi-retarded child breed forced to live in a minimum security prison and pay 30 grand a year for it.  When I'd come home at 3 am and some girl would stumble and fall onto his bed, waking him from his dream of perfectly folded sweater vests and hospital corner sheets, his tirades often took on a pleading quality.  It's as if he didn't want to seem like too much of a jerk in front of a woman.  I can't imagine him actually 'lusting' after someone, but I did find it touching that he betrayed his usual robot-like veneer during these times.  When he would protest that guests had to be signed in, and then could only stay over with the roommates' express, written consent, he would always conclude, with just a touch of a whine, that "it was in The Book."

            He said that alot, it was "in The Book".  Most of the time I wasn't sure which book he actually meant.  There seemed to be a lot of overlap between the two, anyway.  If his words took the form of a cartoon bubble, or an affidavit saying he wasn't of sound mind when he hacked my body to pieces, he'd capitalize it either way. 

            Tonight was slow, not much happening, so my buds and I were hunched over a table in a dark bar that didn't mind if you were 6'4" and the guy on your license was 5'4".  Or 65 years old.  In these situations we often thought of one thing: terrorizing Johnny DooDoo Slacks.  Several months earlier, we had put on an interpretive mulitmedia song & dance routine in which we attempted to break all 102 "guidelines of being a good roommate" in the span of seven minutes.  I remember spinning around in an attempted pirouette to the sounds of the Titanic themesong thinking it didn't get much better than this, but shortly thereafter the routine came to a calamitous end.  It wasn't due to lack of rehearsal, it's just that we were too ambitious.  We just believed in what we were doing too strongly.  Plus we were drunk. 

            Now, before any plan of debauchery was approved, it had to pass the "My heart will go on fiasco" test.  My friend Slappy put forth a proposal, as was his way, it involved putting on a puppet show.  Fat Alex conceptualized setting up a situation in which Ol' Poopy Bastard would seem to be engaging in a homosexual relationship just as his Bible-thumping parents entered the room.  "Kudos to you, my portly friend, but alas, his parents are all the way down in Amish country and they don't let you ride horses on the Mass Pike."  His parents weren't actually Amish, I don't think.  I had never seen them visit once, in the six months we had been at school.  A more compassionate person might have taken pity at this boy's plight, and not deliberately gone out of his way to make the poor kid's life even worse, but this is not that story.  Joe & Nick suggested a near lethal dose of the military strength, vomit-inducing concoction they had ordered from the back of "Soldier of Fortune."  This plan had worked well enough on their own roommate, but didn't really fit the situation here.  "Guys, what we're looking for here is something simple in execution and poetically judicial in it's message."  They seemed to be getting carried away.

            "I know!" exclaimed Slappy, "we can put on a puppet show!"

            What eventually came to me via my usual drunken epiphany, was to enlist one of our Neo-hippie pothead friends in the role of the Savior, adorned with a crown of thorns and a dirty bathrobe, to preach to Uncle Brown Jeans about his constant casting of aspersions.  I penned a short script while my friends sought out the help of someone who smoked a lot of pot and had a beard.  They returned summarily with a bio major named John.  He was dirty and had a long, brown beard.  As a bonus, he was wearing sandals.  In the bathrobe and the makeshift crown of stolen rose stems, he looked pretty convincing, to me at least.  I gave him the script to go over.  He read it intently.  It was only later, when I found it crumpled up in my pocket, that I realized I had written nothing but illegible gibberish.  Nevertheless, he recited something appropriately Jesus-y in a loud booming voice.  It was just everyone's assumption that Jesus would have great projection. 

            As we rode the elevator up to my floor, it really hit Fat Alex that if he wasn't going to hell before, he was surely doomed now.  I was too caught up in marvelling at how entwined those thorns were in John's knotted hair.  The only way he was getting those out of his hair was by shaving his head.  I wonder if people would recognize they were roses from the chancellor's garden and he would be expelled.  As we got out of the elevator, I assured myself I was just being paranoid.  We gathered around my door, waiting for our moment of truth.  It was 1:30 am, he was bound to be sleeping.  This would be our greatest triumph.  We were storming the beaches of Normandy.  We were mere boys about to become men.

            I slipped my key silently into its hole.  I paused.  A sound was barely audible through the door.  Something low and muted.  Maybe he was praying, I thought.  I pushed open the door as I retreated to my station, just out of sight to the left of the door.  John held his arms wide open as he entered the room.  "Holy fucking shit!" he exclaimed in a chilling, girly shriek.  I reached down to check my notes and see if that was part of the script but I stopped as John bumped into me in his rush to run down the hall towards the elevator.  We all peered in to see someone with a giant pentagram tattooed on his back, quickly trying to extricate himself from the posterior of a medium-sized farm animal.  As my eyes adjusted to the light, I perceived it was a sheep with a gag over its mouth and this satan worshipper was none other than my roommate.  My friends were shocked, horrified even.  They stood there, mouths agape, unable to move.  Strangely, my only thought was that he must be violating more than a few of his precious rules.  My friends ran out of the room, I backed out slowly, never breaking contact with the eyes of the depraved little pants pooper.

            I joined my friends who had moved into the lounge.  "What the fuck was that???" yelled Fat Alex, speaking for the group.  I told them I had no idea. 

            We sat there in a daze for a while.  Finally, Slappy broke the silence.  "We can't even sneak a keg in this place and that fucker's got a sheep?  Where the hell do you even get a fucking sheep in the middle of the city???"  It was a good question.  Nick and Joe suddenly perked up and looked at each other, simultaneously saying the one word that should have come to mind when we made our little discovery: pictures.  Joe had been taking pictures  of John in his Jesus garb, but he had a few shots left and we ran back into my room as fast as possible.  By now, my roommate the sheep-fucker had pulled his pants up and put his shirt back on.  The black candles had been blown out, the lights were back on.  However, the sheep was still there.  The fact that it was in a dorm room was enough.  The muzzle and the general look of dishevelment just furthered the incriminating nature of it all.  As my roommate tried to tidy up while hiding his face from the camera, I'm sure I'm not the only one who was amused at how sheepish he looked.  When Joe had no more film, my roommate quickly looked up at me, his face red with embarrassment.  He turned away and put a leash on the sheep, securing the other end of it to his bed.  Realizing we weren't going anywhere any time soon.  He turned to face us, assembled in a semi-circle around him.  If I was anything like the other guys, I was shaking my head with a stupid grin, occasionally letting out short gasps of laughter.  I knew when I thought about it, I'd be disgusted, but right now I just couldn't believe what I was seeing.  I also couldn't believe our luck at not only discovering it, but having a camera on hand to document it.  When he said quietly, "You're back early" we all lost it.

 

            To be sure, there were many questions remaining.  We never figured out how he got the sheep in there.  I don't know if this was a one-time thing or if he had an ongoing relationship with that particular animal.  When I returned in the morning, he was back to his usual self.  The sheep was gone.  He stammered some sort of explanation but I didn't want to hear it.  For the next few days, I didn't hear a peep of a complaint out of him.  No one did.  The RA even came by to see if he was feeling ok.  I moved out a few days later, when my room transfer request came through.  We had many good nights, recounting the story, showing people the pictures, but something was different now.  I often wondered if there was some connection between the pants-pooping and the sheep-fucking that I was missing.  But mostly, I just thought about how you can go through life, thinking you're one kind of person, so sure of your own self-perception, only to have all that shattered in an instant of clarity.  I had experienced that clarity, and it was depressing.  My friends continued on, oblivious to what I saw and what I was going through, still confident that they could cause mayhem with the best of them.  Only I was left to wander the world, painfully aware of  the knowledge that we were truly just a bunch of amateurs.