As we all know, I have a set routine when it comes to the social life that I lead. Friday evening, surprise surprise, I was at the Red with the same crew as usual. Aside from some odd encounters like two men in the bathroom discussing how it is okay to take steroids (or ‘roids as they said) as long as they keep a decent protein diet going, I had an interaction that I wasn’t ready for: I ran into my first roommate from college.
His name is unique (he’s of Persian and Pakistani background), so I will refrain from actually typing his name due to the power of Google, but his name is pronounced like Honest but without the t. However, as I write this entry I am going to call him Meat-head.
Last night I was at the counter trying to get a couple of drinks and then I heard, “Yo, Pete Dog!” I turned around and there was Meat-head, my freshmen year roommate from the fourth floor of building B. The last time I saw him was sometime from senior year.
“Hey, Meat-head,” I politely greeted him “why are you wearing sunglasses inside?” For anyone who has been to the Red, it’s a barely lit room with red lights coming from the other side of the bar (also it was 10pm). Meat-head did not really answer my question about the sunglasses. He did introduce me to his friend who was probably twenty years older than both of us. What he was doing with Meat-head, I still wonder.
Living with Meat-head was quite the experience for someone who just moved away from home and was living his first year of college. He was very much about his image, especially his body. Many of the conversations he conducted revolved around enhancing his pecks, making his arms look like melons, and that he will have little wings connecting his triceps to his chest. Of course, the timeline kept extending.
“Yeah, by December I’ll have these giant melons on my arms.”
“Yeah, by March, I’ll have little basketballs… no, big basketballs on my arms.”
“Oh yeah, by May, you’ll see my arms become so huge. Like a basketball that ate a melon.”
When he wasn’t at the gym making melons grow on his arms, he also obsessed over the world of protein; mainly protein shakes. Of course, he thought that just having protein shakes, and not a sensible diet, would be good enough to make his spherical arms happen and create wings to connect all his muscle together. Keep in mind, that he made these protein shakes at about 2am (note that a blender is involved and there are people on the floor asleep).
Besides the body, his own face was something that he admired as well. He pretty much declared that he was God’s gift to the world, and if a woman wasn’t interested in him then that woman was probably a man.
I was always amused by the superficial world he lived in. Transportation was one thing. It drove him crazy that he didn’t have a car here (freshmen are not permitted to have cars on campus), but riding a bus was something bums and old people do (and he wasn’t either of those). So, he spent time on the Internet trying to network with people who had cars. He found himself talking to some seventeen-year-old girl who went to the local high school. I remember one weekend my friends Ryan and Ben were visiting me and we came back to my room and the door was locked. Please note that our door was never locked because Meat-head thought it wasn’t fashionable to carry keys. So, I knocked because I thought, maybe, Meat-head was up to something. No response, so I began unlocking the door, and then I heard, “Pete-dog!” As I opened it, there he was, in bed, with the seventeen-year old girl.
He managed to get a chauffer out of this “deal.”
Meat-head also came up with some of the most random thoughts. It might’ve been the same weekend that my friends and I walked in on him, but Meat-head came back from a party and was pretty wasted. As we were all in our room, he asked, “Hey, Peter. Have you ever wanted to just piss on a bitch?” I think I responded with that I could not even possibly think of such an action.
Ramadan was a great time to live with him. Most of you may know, but during this week, Muslims fast during daylight. So, Meat-head would eat massive amounts of food early in the morning. However, his non-English speaking mother would call every morning at 4:55am to make sure Meat-head was eating his food.
When his mother called was also another pleasurable experience.
“Hello?”
“Meat-head?” his mother asked in a thick accent.
“No, Meat-head isn’t here,” I hated being the bearer of bad news.
“…” silence from the other end “where… is… Meat-head?”
“He’s not here.”
“Meat-head?”
“NOT HERE!” then I heard some commotion.
“Hello? Hi, I’m Meat-head’s sister. Is Meat-head around?” this was something I had to constantly deal with whenever he wasn’t present.
Another factor was the computer. For a high school graduation present, my grandparents bought me a computer to take to college. Well, Meat-head did not come to college with a computer (but he came with a small set of weights to lift). I was nice enough to let him have access to the computer, along with the printer and my scanner. I regretted that decision. I constantly found new software on it, all kinds of downloads, and AOL. I am not the biggest fan of America Online and I sure as hell did not want it on my computer. Every so often, I had to “cleanup” my computer. The worst part was that Meat-head was a pretty sociable guy and made many friends (I don’t know if friends is the right word). I would be in my room and then some random individual would come by and say something like, “Hi, Meat-head said I could use his computer to print something.”
“Oh did he?” my computer became a technological whore; everyone had a ride with it at some point.
The next factor that made up his life was marijuana. He obsessed over this. It came to points where he would smoke out just to get an appetite (with the door open too). He would sometimes go off on his "pro-weed" arguments and describe how marijuana cures cancer. There were times where I was writing a research paper and he would walk in with maybe seven to eight people, and then announce that they were all going to smoke out.
“Fuck, Meat-head! I’m in the middle of writing my paper!”
“When’s it due?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Doesn’t matter. Go do that somewhere else!”
“Where? Besides, there’s a majority here. And this is my room too!” so, the loser I am, I end up saving my document and emailed it to myself and went to the computer lab while my room became a habitat for Cheech and Chong fans.
I was so baffled by how he managed to make friends with so many people (although, these friends weren’t the best of society either). Plus, he somehow managed to attract so many women. “Ohhh, Meat-head is so cute,” I would sometimes hear in the dining hall. One time, he told me a story of when he was in high school, he was having sex with a woman in the back of his car, and during the whole time, he was eating a Burger King fish sandwich. And I’m the one with women trouble.
By the end of winter quarter, my friend Darren (who lived on the other side of the dorm hall) put a proposition in front of me. Darren and his roommate weren’t getting along, and he knew my situation. The funny thing was that Darren’s roommate and Meat-head actually hung out, so this would be an ideal switch. The beginning of spring quarter, we did the swap, I moved in with Darren and his roommate moved in with Meat-head. However, Meat-head did not tell about my moving out. I was the one who paid for the phone line so I took that with me. His mother would still call, and it took numerous times to get it through that I did not live with Meat-head anymore.
Meat-head definitely became a legend around the university. When ever his name was dropped, somebody would always have a story about him.
“That guy?! He tried selling me weed once.”
“He just showed up in my room one time and wanted to watch TV with my roommate and I.”
“All he did was try to hit on my sister.”
“He just opened my door one day and wanted to know if I wanted to go swimming with him.”
“That guy was ridiculous!”
Then when I revealed that he and I were roommates, I always received laughter.
“Talk about true opposites!”
When freshmen year ended, I moved back to Sacramento for the summer. I was using my portable stereo and noticed there was a cassette in the tape deck. I pressed play due to my curiosity. I heard a bunch of rapping or flowing (if that’s the appropriate word). I recognized Meat-head’s voice and there were some other voices involved too. It was typical shitty rap.
“We be boozin’ and drinkin’… tearing up things that have the face of Lincoln!”
“We doin’ nothin’ but fuckin’ honies… robbing banks and stealing their monies!”
Wow, I was glad to see the beginning of a college education come into effect. I still let the tape play due to my pure amusement. However, as the songs progressed, I heard one that mentioned Pete-dog.
“Yo, Pete-dog! All your friends are fools… you got a big nose… and you don’t get the hoes,” then there were the backup vocals.
“Yeah, fuck you, faggot! Yeah, fuck you, Pete-dog!”
I was slightly dumbfounded. I figured I was the ideal roommate for him since I vacated whenever he smoked out, I pretty much gave him my computer, and I listened to his thoughts and rants (and never objected). I was the biggest pushover, yet somehow he still needed to rap a song about me.
So, last night, Meat-head decided that we had to be friends. He wanted to know what I was up to. He mentioned that he was back home in Fresno. I asked him what he is doing now and he said he was a marketing director for a large advertising firm. I knew this was pure bullshit. He asked the same to me. I said I was working as a digital text engineer (I figured this was comfortable territory for me). Two can play this game. He then asked me if “I was fucking anyone these days?” I was so glad to see that he has matured over the years. Thank god my drinks came; that was my exit cue.
His name is unique (he’s of Persian and Pakistani background), so I will refrain from actually typing his name due to the power of Google, but his name is pronounced like Honest but without the t. However, as I write this entry I am going to call him Meat-head.
Last night I was at the counter trying to get a couple of drinks and then I heard, “Yo, Pete Dog!” I turned around and there was Meat-head, my freshmen year roommate from the fourth floor of building B. The last time I saw him was sometime from senior year.
“Hey, Meat-head,” I politely greeted him “why are you wearing sunglasses inside?” For anyone who has been to the Red, it’s a barely lit room with red lights coming from the other side of the bar (also it was 10pm). Meat-head did not really answer my question about the sunglasses. He did introduce me to his friend who was probably twenty years older than both of us. What he was doing with Meat-head, I still wonder.
Living with Meat-head was quite the experience for someone who just moved away from home and was living his first year of college. He was very much about his image, especially his body. Many of the conversations he conducted revolved around enhancing his pecks, making his arms look like melons, and that he will have little wings connecting his triceps to his chest. Of course, the timeline kept extending.
“Yeah, by December I’ll have these giant melons on my arms.”
“Yeah, by March, I’ll have little basketballs… no, big basketballs on my arms.”
“Oh yeah, by May, you’ll see my arms become so huge. Like a basketball that ate a melon.”
When he wasn’t at the gym making melons grow on his arms, he also obsessed over the world of protein; mainly protein shakes. Of course, he thought that just having protein shakes, and not a sensible diet, would be good enough to make his spherical arms happen and create wings to connect all his muscle together. Keep in mind, that he made these protein shakes at about 2am (note that a blender is involved and there are people on the floor asleep).
Besides the body, his own face was something that he admired as well. He pretty much declared that he was God’s gift to the world, and if a woman wasn’t interested in him then that woman was probably a man.
I was always amused by the superficial world he lived in. Transportation was one thing. It drove him crazy that he didn’t have a car here (freshmen are not permitted to have cars on campus), but riding a bus was something bums and old people do (and he wasn’t either of those). So, he spent time on the Internet trying to network with people who had cars. He found himself talking to some seventeen-year-old girl who went to the local high school. I remember one weekend my friends Ryan and Ben were visiting me and we came back to my room and the door was locked. Please note that our door was never locked because Meat-head thought it wasn’t fashionable to carry keys. So, I knocked because I thought, maybe, Meat-head was up to something. No response, so I began unlocking the door, and then I heard, “Pete-dog!” As I opened it, there he was, in bed, with the seventeen-year old girl.
He managed to get a chauffer out of this “deal.”
Meat-head also came up with some of the most random thoughts. It might’ve been the same weekend that my friends and I walked in on him, but Meat-head came back from a party and was pretty wasted. As we were all in our room, he asked, “Hey, Peter. Have you ever wanted to just piss on a bitch?” I think I responded with that I could not even possibly think of such an action.
Ramadan was a great time to live with him. Most of you may know, but during this week, Muslims fast during daylight. So, Meat-head would eat massive amounts of food early in the morning. However, his non-English speaking mother would call every morning at 4:55am to make sure Meat-head was eating his food.
When his mother called was also another pleasurable experience.
“Hello?”
“Meat-head?” his mother asked in a thick accent.
“No, Meat-head isn’t here,” I hated being the bearer of bad news.
“…” silence from the other end “where… is… Meat-head?”
“He’s not here.”
“Meat-head?”
“NOT HERE!” then I heard some commotion.
“Hello? Hi, I’m Meat-head’s sister. Is Meat-head around?” this was something I had to constantly deal with whenever he wasn’t present.
Another factor was the computer. For a high school graduation present, my grandparents bought me a computer to take to college. Well, Meat-head did not come to college with a computer (but he came with a small set of weights to lift). I was nice enough to let him have access to the computer, along with the printer and my scanner. I regretted that decision. I constantly found new software on it, all kinds of downloads, and AOL. I am not the biggest fan of America Online and I sure as hell did not want it on my computer. Every so often, I had to “cleanup” my computer. The worst part was that Meat-head was a pretty sociable guy and made many friends (I don’t know if friends is the right word). I would be in my room and then some random individual would come by and say something like, “Hi, Meat-head said I could use his computer to print something.”
“Oh did he?” my computer became a technological whore; everyone had a ride with it at some point.
The next factor that made up his life was marijuana. He obsessed over this. It came to points where he would smoke out just to get an appetite (with the door open too). He would sometimes go off on his "pro-weed" arguments and describe how marijuana cures cancer. There were times where I was writing a research paper and he would walk in with maybe seven to eight people, and then announce that they were all going to smoke out.
“Fuck, Meat-head! I’m in the middle of writing my paper!”
“When’s it due?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Doesn’t matter. Go do that somewhere else!”
“Where? Besides, there’s a majority here. And this is my room too!” so, the loser I am, I end up saving my document and emailed it to myself and went to the computer lab while my room became a habitat for Cheech and Chong fans.
I was so baffled by how he managed to make friends with so many people (although, these friends weren’t the best of society either). Plus, he somehow managed to attract so many women. “Ohhh, Meat-head is so cute,” I would sometimes hear in the dining hall. One time, he told me a story of when he was in high school, he was having sex with a woman in the back of his car, and during the whole time, he was eating a Burger King fish sandwich. And I’m the one with women trouble.
By the end of winter quarter, my friend Darren (who lived on the other side of the dorm hall) put a proposition in front of me. Darren and his roommate weren’t getting along, and he knew my situation. The funny thing was that Darren’s roommate and Meat-head actually hung out, so this would be an ideal switch. The beginning of spring quarter, we did the swap, I moved in with Darren and his roommate moved in with Meat-head. However, Meat-head did not tell about my moving out. I was the one who paid for the phone line so I took that with me. His mother would still call, and it took numerous times to get it through that I did not live with Meat-head anymore.
Meat-head definitely became a legend around the university. When ever his name was dropped, somebody would always have a story about him.
“That guy?! He tried selling me weed once.”
“He just showed up in my room one time and wanted to watch TV with my roommate and I.”
“All he did was try to hit on my sister.”
“He just opened my door one day and wanted to know if I wanted to go swimming with him.”
“That guy was ridiculous!”
Then when I revealed that he and I were roommates, I always received laughter.
“Talk about true opposites!”
When freshmen year ended, I moved back to Sacramento for the summer. I was using my portable stereo and noticed there was a cassette in the tape deck. I pressed play due to my curiosity. I heard a bunch of rapping or flowing (if that’s the appropriate word). I recognized Meat-head’s voice and there were some other voices involved too. It was typical shitty rap.
“We be boozin’ and drinkin’… tearing up things that have the face of Lincoln!”
“We doin’ nothin’ but fuckin’ honies… robbing banks and stealing their monies!”
Wow, I was glad to see the beginning of a college education come into effect. I still let the tape play due to my pure amusement. However, as the songs progressed, I heard one that mentioned Pete-dog.
“Yo, Pete-dog! All your friends are fools… you got a big nose… and you don’t get the hoes,” then there were the backup vocals.
“Yeah, fuck you, faggot! Yeah, fuck you, Pete-dog!”
I was slightly dumbfounded. I figured I was the ideal roommate for him since I vacated whenever he smoked out, I pretty much gave him my computer, and I listened to his thoughts and rants (and never objected). I was the biggest pushover, yet somehow he still needed to rap a song about me.
So, last night, Meat-head decided that we had to be friends. He wanted to know what I was up to. He mentioned that he was back home in Fresno. I asked him what he is doing now and he said he was a marketing director for a large advertising firm. I knew this was pure bullshit. He asked the same to me. I said I was working as a digital text engineer (I figured this was comfortable territory for me). Two can play this game. He then asked me if “I was fucking anyone these days?” I was so glad to see that he has matured over the years. Thank god my drinks came; that was my exit cue.
4 comments:
This guy cannot be real! And I'm about ready to beat him up for talking (and flowing) smack! Oh hells no!
OK I'm calm now, it's just the coffee talking. But seriously... I thought I had it bad living with the uber-Christian girl who would hang out with her church group buddies til 4 AM, wake me up when she came in, fall asleep before I could reenter that blissful world once more, and proceed to snore so loudly that any hope of sleep was lost.
That's about when I started sleeping with earplugs.
But jeez... you take the cake, my friend.
Ha! You living with a crazy uber Christian girl! Did she ever want to do spontanenous praying or try to encourage you to go to her youth group?
I feel when it comes to people's college roommates, they fall into three categories: you become best friends with them, you never see them (due to a relationship or they live really close to home) or you absolutely despise them. You and I fit into the ladder.
I'd just like to verify that the "piss-on-a-bitch" conversation was indeed the same weekend as the "sex=with-a=seventeen-year-old."
Hey...*I* should write a song about *him*...
The next Mr. Stitches track:
"Meathead Blues"
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