I want to make it perfectly clear that I am a laid-back sort of person. I don't react with any real degree of emotion to much of anything. Those who know me well will tell you that the difference between a regular Eddie and an excited one can usually be discerned only by my use of the phrase "I am excited," or the equivalent thereof. I have my pet peeves, sure, and many of them may seem bizarre to normal people, but in general you would not hear this said of me: "That Barnes kid needs to loosen up. He's too high-strung."
With that in mind, let me tell you one thing that bothers me to no end: bad roommates. Everyone spends some part of their lives sharing their living space with someone else, so you'd think we as human beings would have certain not-irritating-the-crap-out-of-each-other instincts bred into us by now. Sadly, this logical conclusion falls somewhat short of reality. Any time two or more human beings live together, at least one of them seems to lose touch with his humanity and become as a wild beast, stealing food where he can find it and marking his territory with musky scents.
The most common roommate situation, and the one with the most potential for catastrophe, arises in college. Apparently someone, somewhere along the line, decided it would be a good idea to take moody, willful almost-adults and force them to cohabitate in tiny rooms for months at a time, and as if it weren't bad enough, the problem gets exacerbated when (thinking to avoid roommate-related theatrics) a pair of friends decides to live in the same room. The ensuing drama makes Sophocles seem almost light-hearted. I lived with my friend Ace during my second year at Western Kentucky University, and I know after some of the things I experienced, poking my eyes out and wandering the countryside seemed like a really good idea. Allow me to elaborate.
The room Ace and I shared was, as I have hinted at, miniscule. You could have taken a veal calf and moved it into our room, and it would have mooed plaintively at the reduction in living space. What little space was not taken up by bed or desk amounted to about four feet by eight feet--the most hotly contested thirty-two square feet in human history. Every day, I valiantly fought back the encroaching tide of socks, magazines, and t-shirts of indeterminate washedness (sic) as it threatened to engulf my half of the room like the creeping vines that used to swallow ancient jungle temples whole . Very early on in that year, I learned I would have to repel the occasional invading horde of dirty laundry and snack-food wrappers, and I fairly quickly made my peace with that fact. I learned not to ask why Ace bothered to own a trash can or clothes hamper. I learned to come up with creative solutions for the problem of Ace's sprawl (at one point, for example, I designed a lovely mosaic for our window, made of empty Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper cans).
The days became weeks. The weeks became months. My early victories in the almost-impenetrable miasma of hot, reeking air seemed promising. However, as Ace became more comfortable with our living arrangement, more disturbing problems surfaced. I began to feel like the steamer captain who successfully fends off an angry hippo only to find that a monkey has absconded with his hat. I had bought flatware for our room, and yet I could never find a fork when I needed one (to eat a bowl of ramen, or frighten back an unruly pair of Ace's pants, for instance). A bit of investigation provided me with the whereabouts of my missing silverware: it had taken up residence in the bottom of one of Ace's cooking pots, concealing itself from detection by hiding beneath a semi-solid layer of what I dearly hoped was pasta sauce. "Well, crap," I thought to myself. "There go several perfectly good forks." The forks seemed to eye me warily as I returned to my side of the room. I kicked a pile of Ace's clothes for good measure, then instantly wished I hadn't, as I discovered a cleverly-camouflaged box of something heavy (doubtless a trap laid by those savage utensils to slow my escape to the relative safety of my side of the room).
So there I was, under constant attack by an amorphous mass of malevolent miscellany, the erstwhile owner of a now-feral tribe of silverware, cursing to myself about this new and unexpected foot pain. I had long since stopped noticing the weird smell of our mutual domain, or feeling anything but grim resignation when he woke me up at 6:00 a.m. by baby-talking to his sister on the phone. I looked wistfully at the calendar on my desk, counting the days until summer. "At least," I said to no one in particular, "it can't possibly get worse."
Here's a piece of free advice. Never, under any circumstances, should you say things like "it can't possibly get worse." The universe can hear you when you say that sort of thing, and it invariably replies with the following question: "Oh, is that so, puny mortal?"
It was almost time for Ace to leave our tiny dark continent and go home for the summer. Our friendship had cooled considerably over the course of the year, so the fact that we were almost never home at the same time didn't really bother us (and by "us," I mean "me" --Ace didn't understand what had been wearing on my nerves all this time). One night, however, we both happened to be eating dinner in the room. I was having my customary bowl of ramen, as prescribed by the Eddie Barnes "Too Poor to Buy Real Food" diet, when he opened a can of Sam's American Choice beef ravioli in meat sauce. To this day, I have nightmares about what happened next.
He ate the ravioli.
Before you ask me what the big deal is, I want you to re-read those last few sentences. I want you to notice that I said nothing at all about him taking the ravioli out of the can. Note that equally absent is any mention of Ace heating the ravioli. He just stuck a fork (one of mine, I might add) into the can and proceeded to eat. I was horror-struck.
"Aren't you going to, you know, heat that up?" I asked, hoping that he would correct me by saying that he had heated it up, but I had inexplicably blacked out and thus missed it.
My hopes were quickly dashed when he replied, "Nah, I'm in a hurry, it's fine like this."
"But... but it's cold! And... not heated! And cold!" came my incredulous reply.
"Yeah, but it's pre-cooked, see?" He then pointed out those very words on the can.
I would later come to wonder where the hell he had gotten another fork, or how his pots got dirty if he ate his pasta cold, but at the moment I was a little too shell-shocked to think of those things. I blinked almost audibly a couple of times and went back to eating my soup. What do you say to that? Yes, I guess it is pre-cooked? No, it won't kill you to eat cold pasta straight out of a can? Sweet Jesus, Ace, you're a freak? No matter the phrase, the words would not come.
I could tell you many more stories about the strange little savage called Ace. These would only serve to frighten you, though, and that is not the purpose of this writing. My point is that I would probably still like Ace if I'd never lived with him. Chances are you won't be able to avoid having a roommate at some point in your life, but what you can avoid is sacrificing a friendship upon the altar of convenience.
If you find yourself in need of a roommate, don't ask your friends. If you have nowhere else to turn, then please try to maintain a certain level of decency. Rein in your laundry and your trash. Keep early-morning phone conversations to a minimum. Wash something every now and then. And if your roommate seems horrified by something you're doing, at least let him finish his ramen before you continue, you freak.