It was the Fall of 1998, cell phones were bigger, computers were slower, and I had yet to discover the panoply of joys which may be indulged in through the art of computer piracy. It was a simpler time, and I was a simpler man. A mere stripling of eighteen, I was off to JMU for my first semester of college. Now, a lot of folks choose to room with a friend from high school for Freshman year, but all the other people from Meadowbrook were at least a coolness lever higher than me, and I somehow had a premonition that I was destined to have a long succession of dysfunctional and borderline psychotic roommate about whom I would one day write a series of wildly popular blogs. I turned out to be right, by the way.
I lived in a suite that year, with three rooms off of the common room, and five other guys, at least at first. Across from my room was where Squeaky Mike and his roommate who never talked, so I’ll just call him Klaang the Voiceless. Nextdoor is where Farhad lived with his roommate, who moved out about a month into the school year. This particular development made me altogether envious because it in fact took about 3.5 yattoseconds for me to realize that my roommate was an unnatural abomination, a mix of beast and man, with table manners and hygienic practices worse than the worst of either, though I shall go into greater detail later. The other thing that made me rather jealous of Farhad was the way that he was always having girls over. For hours at a time, he’d be in there with the door closed, sometimes tow or three of them. In time though, I realized that they were all in there listening to Elton John all the time and painting each others toenails. At this point I became decidedly less jealous. My roommate however, was Chuck, and this is his tale.
Chuck hailed from
He smelled. Not like, say, someone who always goes to the gym and then doesn’t do their laundry smells. Or even how someone who cannot bring himself to throw out any trash smells. He smelled so bad that if I ever made an RPG, and one of the classes you could choose was the Stankomancer, “Stench of Chuck®” would be his most powerful attack by far. Seriously, if you opened the door, an almost palpable wave of noisomeness would push you back into the hallway. I’m sure that so many people probably tried to break into my room that year, but never made it through the door because upon opening it they became convinced that a very flatulent and unwashed yak had perished in the room some two weeks prior. You know that scene in Se7en, where there’s that drug dude in the room and there’s about a billion of those little pine tree air fresheners? It was like that, only I used Glade Plug-ins™. Really, I had like, an entire power strip full of them just hanging on the wall. And it still didn’t cover the loathsome fetor of decay which hung o’er the room like a burning pall of butt. He never did any laundry either, and would lounge around all day on the ever browner sheets of his bed, wearing the same exact sweatpants (regular pants not being manufactured in his size, apparently) looking like some late and decadent Roman emperor.
He was the laziest man ever. Sometimes, for up to two or three days in a row, I’d never come back to the room and find him out of bed. Class was a thing completely foreign to him, It seemed, as were most other activities involving exertion of any kind. There is a passage in the Bible, in the Book of Proverbs or something, where some wise old prophet is describing at length all the sins of the world, and one of them runs thusly “A lazy man will not even move his hand from his shirt to feed himself.” I never believed that anyone could be that lazy. I was wrong. Now, JMU had a pretty good dining plan, and really, pretty much anytime during the day, you could just head on out to any of the 78 different little eateries on campus and get something to eat. This was too much work for Chuck. Sometimes he’d wake up in the afternoon and lie in bed for hours, and now and then lament his hunger, “God, I’m so hungry!” he would say, as if he was chained to a rock in the desert somewhere instead of 100 yards away from a place that made tolerably good submarine sandwiches. And he’d do this, for like, three hours. It was surreal. Eventually he’d usually order a pizza and then eat it all in one sitting while making sounds as if someone was trying to dispose of a walrus by putting it through a garbage disposal.
He snored. Not just like normal people snore. He was so loud that nearby airports complained about all the noise that he made. I was so sleep deprived that year it wasn’t even funny. I’d go out to the library and catch a nap a couple of times a week just to get enough rest to stay awake.
He was a connoisseur. He was, you see, a film major, which apparently meant he ought to spend sixteen hours a day watching really bad movies. But he never called them movies, he said “films.” “Zombie Hacksaw Nightmare Horror 5 is a wonderful film, isn’t it?” he would say, as if we were busy talking about Citizen Kane or something. Also, when most people see something funny, they laugh. This is the natural human response to humor, and is one of the best ways to pick out the space aliens who walk among us. When Chuck saw something funny though, he’d just chuckle airily, and with a worldly tone in his voice say, “Ah, this amuses me.”
Near the end of the year at least, he was around less, probably because I left a message on my computer which implied that the radiation shield in my monitor had failed and prompt evacuation was recommended. He was, in short, a combination of the worst attributes of Comic Book Guy and Jabba the Hutt. On the bright side, it made all my other bad roommates after that seem ever so much better by comparison.
