beach sloth — you don't have to go to college

You don’t have to go to College (An Excerpt from a forthcoming novel)

by Beach Sloth


College hadn’t been that long ago. Most of my suitemates were out of control. One time in an alcoholic rage one of them had thrown a TV. It didn’t belong to him. My ex-roommate came out and asked

“What the fuck. Why did you destroy my TV?”

The answer was something along the lines of

“I don’t give a fuck.”

Or that might have been the verbatim answer. They were asked politely to leave. They refused. They spent the night on the couch sleeping off their alcoholism though there was no amount of sleep that would have helped them. Later that wonderful guest spent the night vomiting into our toilet and drunk-dialing ex-girlfriends. Halo playing became a major thing too. What they’d do would be to play really well one game. The next they’d deliberately suck to piss off the other team. Headphones made the smack talk even funnier. Fictional instructions were given. They knew what they were doing.

My immediate roommate was better. He jerked off all the time. I wish he didn’t. I really wanted him to get a girlfriend or something. As a result every time I was about to go into the room I made a lot of noise before unlocking the door. I knew he was stroking it, stroking it hard. Once or twice I woke up in the middle of the night to him stroking it. I pretended to go back to sleep. Discussions with my roommate’s ex-roommate confirmed that this had always been a thing with him. My roommate had spent nearly all the free time he had masturbating. I figured my roommate went through about two Kleenex boxes a week given his masturbation addiction. It could’ve have been more if he didn’t have any classes that day. Sometimes he used tissues from my tissue box. I disliked this habit. I figured if he was going to be putting his cum stained hands all over my tissues he could have the box. I didn’t need it anymore. Respect to me meant that somebody bought their own tissue boxes for masturbatory purposes.

His ex-roommate stated they never saw him outside of the room. They accused him of almost being a total shut-in hence why they were no longer roommates. The ex-roommate’s friends confirmed this fact. One of those friends was adorable. I really thought she was cute. So when she said he was totally creepy I knew I was never going to get anywhere with her. Also she had a boyfriend. Together those two things just weren’t going to work out for me. Besides I sort of sucked and was kind of a loser. So that was working against me either. At least I was better than my roommate. I left the room on a fairly regular basis. Sometimes I’d hook up with people. Mostly I failed. At least I knew what fresh air smelled like unlike him. Honestly I never knew when he left the room. Sometimes I’d see he had food that he could only get by leaving the room. The TV remained on at all time. He kept Comedy Central on even when it was just the afternoon and MAD TV repeats would be airing in all their painful awfulness. I knew he took classes. I knew he had friends. But I never really met either of them.

Actually I did occasionally see a small extremely nerdy kid who would hang out. He’d play games on one of the countless number of video games my roommate had. My roommate mostly played Maple Story though. Every person I told this to accused him of being a nine year old Asian girl. I found this to be an unfair accusation. Just because he played some shitty weird game on the computer didn’t mean he was an Asian girl. He did love a lot of Kawaii though. And he also dug Nirvana pretty hard. Most of his musical tastes came from the early to mid-nineties. He felt completely uninterested in evolving his musical taste beyond that point. No band did anything interesting outside of Grunge music. He was convinced of this fact. He was not ironic. That worked against him. We were living in the age of irony. We overcome irony. I’m glad civilization is starting to grow out of it. If the New York Times mentions we’re living in an age of irony that probably means we’re growing out of it. At least my roommate never got infected with the ironic sensibilities.

We ended up becoming friends. The first semester I had no distinct impression of him. He was an atheist. He was extremely liberal. He jerked off incessantly. Other than that he seemed to be an alright enough sort of guy. I never saw him at any parties. I never saw him outside period. So I figured he was an okay enough sort of guy, the sort of guy who was a respectful roommate, nothing more, nothing less. Only in the second semester did things begin to get fairly interesting. We began to talk.


—
read more by beach sloth on blogger dot com