After graduating from college early, I was kicked off campus by embittered university administration and had to find a place to live really fast.  I’d like to stress that I was (and probably still am) one of the cheapest people on the planet when it comes to housing, and when one is not prepared to shell out the jack for a nice place to live, one must be prepared to accept the consequences of living with the odder characters who fill the bottom drawer of the American housing market. 

I wound up booking a room in a ramshackle house on the edge of a nearby town that was appropriately named Pittsboro.  It was the best place $200 a month (cash only) could buy.  Suffice to say, it was a pretty wild scene.  Our coffee table had a communal-use bowl of pot and was covered with various porn magazines (courtesy of one roommate’s untreated porn addiction).  Filth was rampant; no one bothered to clean anything, and it was an unspoken assumption that we would all just move out and drift to the next place when the house became unlivably disgusting. 

There were a total of five bedrooms in this den of iniquity, each of which was occupied by a mighty sketchy dude (present company included).  The den mother for the house was an asexual physical therapist who lived in the basement with a longhair Siamese cat named Mena.  On the upper floor of the sausage factory, there were four bedrooms.  At the end of the hall was a super-buff dude who (I am not making this up) worked as a male prostitute1.  I didn’t see him very much, but he took a lot of showers when he was home.  Across the hall from the gigolo was a rail-thin late twentysomething who had made a good living as a carpet cleaner until the government seized his business for failure to pay seven years of back taxes.  After finding Jesus at the bottom of Chapter 11, the carpet cleaner was putting the pieces of his life back together with the help of our lord and a great deal of marijuana.  In fact, our carpet-cleaning prophet (along with the other house members) smoked so much weed that there was an optional monthly bill for purchasing in bulk.  On the other side of the single rotting bathroom was my abode, easily the smallest room of the four, and by far the tidiest, which isn’t saying much.  Next door to me was Tim.  Tim had no discernable source of income, at least one that he admitted to publicly.  Unofficially, it was understood that he was a low-grade drug dealer, mostly pot, and I suspected he pocketed a great deal of our household’s marijuana-related expenditures.  Six months after I arrived, Tim would go on to score at the 98th percentile on the LSATs and wound up attempting a prestigious law school. 

Tim was one of the horniest men I’ve ever met.  Often, he would combine his hedged position in recreational drug distribution with his affinity for members of the opposite sex by bringing over a lady on the pretense of getting baked that would ‘organically’ morph into a sexcapade.  This was not as grand as it might sound.  Tim set a low bar; the women he brought over were hardly the cream of the crop.  One evening, I returned home to find that a very drunk and very stoned Tim had thrown a cannabis-themed barbeque in our front yard.  In light of the open flaunting of narcotics law, I retreated to my room to ensure maximum plausible deniability in case the almost inevitable police raid occurred.  An hour later, I was in bed when Tim stumbled back to his room, accompanied by one of the sea donkeys he had invited.  Soon thereafter, they began to get frisky.

This was not the first time Tim had done something like this2.  Normally, I could sleep through it by imagining someone had left the TV tuned to the Spice Network.  This time though, emotional avoidance proved impossible: Tim’s companion turned out to be an enthusiastic sex talker.  Like an overstimulated soccer announcer, the lass would loudly describe the scene in horrific detail, occasionally providing guidance or encouragement for additional services.  It did not help that I’d seen the lass (whom I recalled as being neither dainty or highly placed on the 1-10 scale of attractiveness) that now bellowed “find the clit, Timmy!  Find the clit!” 

There seemed to be no choice but to wait things out.  I laid back and stared at the ceiling of my darkened room, feeling the shiver of floorboards produced by the impact of Tim’s headboard against the thin layer of plaster that separated us.  For the umpteenth time, I reminded myself that this wasn’t my fault.

At long last, things began to – pardon the pun – reach a climax.  The chick had abandoned her more elegant commentary, and had now resorted to a combination of profanity and blasphemy.  I am not making fun of this; all of us say stupid things in the heat of the moment, but her wind-up apparently consisted of saying “Oh my Jesus… oh my Jesus… oh my JESUS!!!… OH MY JESUS!!!  - OH MY-”

Suddenly everything went silent.  I sat up in bed, cocking my ear, now very interested as to why all had been silent.  Certainly, it sounded like one or two more “oh my Jesuses” were needed to (pun again) get over the hump. 

The silence stretched to two seconds.  Three seconds.  Four seconds.  Finally, an annoyed female voice blurted out “What, that’s it?”  What’s it?  I wondered. 

Another layer was added to the onion: from the sexual abattoir came a rustle, followed by a dull thud of something heavy hitting the floor.  Then there were the sounds of motion, interspersed with muffled cursing.  Tim hadn’t made a sound since the encounter had begun.  I began to imagine some sort of Basic Instinct scenario, in which sea donkey had murdered my kind, overly horny roommate.  But Tim was no Michael Douglas, and I didn’t care enough to get involved and run the risk of putting an image with the soundtrack.  Before I could unearth a moral quibble on the matter, Tim’s door opened with a resounding boom, and heavy footsteps boomed down the hall and became fainter as they clomped down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out the side door.  Sea donkey’s departure was marked by a final epithet and the bang of her slamming the door hard enough to crack a pane of glass.  Tim’s room remained silent.

Eventually, I drifted off to sleep, questions abounding in my head.  What had Tim done to upset her so quickly?  Why had she left in anger?  And why had he made no move to stop her?   

The next morning, I found Tim sitting at the kitchen table.  He looked like death warmed over.  Dark pockets had formed under his bloodshot eyes, the effects of the previous evening.  He sat hunched over the table, listlessly shoving spoonfuls of Lucky Charms into his maw.  As I entered, Tim looked at me, and we exchanged a look that fell somewhere between survivors of an epic battle and the shameful contrition of men who’ve done someone they’re not proud of. 

“Dude… last night?” was all I had to say.

“I passed out,” Tim replied.

“After, right?”

“No.  During.” 

“Dude, she didn’t seem happy when she left,” I said, gesturing to the broken pane of glass in our door. 

“I know.  Look at this.”  Tim pulled up his shirt.  On his back, someone had scrawled “Asshol” (sic) in blue sharpie. 

“She spelled it wrong,” I noted.

“Yeah, she did,” said Tim, sighing.  “Maybe it’s for the best.  I want someone who can spell ‘asshole’ and she deserves someone who can stay conscious the entire time.”

“At least you didn’t have to cuddle,” I said, and poured myself a bowl of cereal.

1 I once asked this fellow what sort of women go for male prostitutes, what with men being fairly willing to indulge them for free.  “Old women and fat women, mostly,” he said, gritting his teeth as a thousand ill memories seemed to flood his brain. 

2 Once, I came down the stairs for a midnight snack, only to find Tim receiving oral sex on the couch in our living room.  There was no way to access the fridge without walking through the room.  I wanted a muffin more than I wanted to avoid embarrassing anyone, so I strolled through with a casual “Hey Tim.”  At this, the girl let out a little scream and sat up quickly.  “Hey Noah,” said a very mellow Tim and, without missing a beat, redirected his friend back to his nether regions with a soothing “don’t worry about him, he’s cool.”  Sadly, this ploy worked, and I never sat on that particular couch again.