Or, it’s a guest post from my friend old friend Tara of Two Hands and a Roadmap!
Long before Tracy hated her messageboard, I hated my roommate. Lucky for me, this was only for two months. Unlucky for me, the scars will last a lifetime.
I thought of this roommate today for two reasons: First, Tracy wrote a guest post for my blog, which will run tomorrow, in which she mentions inadvertently seeing a guy’s junk. You’ll see why this is relevant in a minute. Second, the roommate’s name was Tracy too.
I was attending Ohio University in the 1990s when I met her, so let’s call her “OU Tracy” to differentiate her from the Tracy who writes here. Funny how it sounds like “Oh, you ____ Tracy.” Oh, you whore. Oh, you drunken slut. Oh, you check bouncer who still owes me for our phone bill to this day, plus $20 in banking fees. Oh, you!
During the summer between my sophomore and junior years, I stayed at school and worked cleaning the campus dorm rooms. Finding an apartment for a few months was easy. I wanted a place to stay for cheap; another girl wanted someone to rent her place for the summer so she could go home without going broke.I paid her upfront, assuming the place was mine. Just mine. We were cool.
When I moved in after Memorial Day, though, I met OU Tracy. My roommate. (Why does someone not tell you that you’re going to have a roommate for the summer, when you’ve already made arrangements to rent from her? I still don’t get it.)
Looking back, I see so many things about that summer that were weird: The surprise roommate. The graduate student from India who introduced himself to me and almost immediately told me in halting English that he had a problem with thinking too much about sex with college girls, and hey, would I like to take a walk along the river with him sometime? Becoming friends with two students who seemed to make a hobby out of cheating on their boyfriends throughout the summer. None of these stories topped the one of OU Tracy, though, and The Night of the Naked Man.
It was really late on a Sunday. I woke from a dead sleep confused, not knowing what had jarred me awake. I figured it out quickly, though. Oh yes. It’s that strange naked man who is climbing onto my futon next to me.
Wait, what?
I’d never seen this guy before. My roommate met him at a bar, I guess, and brought him home for some recreation. He fell asleep, got up to go to the bathroom, and somehow wandered into my room instead of hers. In his defense, he probably hadn’t known OU Tracy long enough to even realize that he was with the wrong person until it was too late. Poor guy. Poor slutty guy.
So naturally I was all, “Hey! Get out of here, naked guy!” And he leaned forward, as if to be charming, and said something like, “Hey, baby. Don’t be like that.” Surreal. After arguing mildly with me for maybe 20 seconds, he ambled out of my room for friendlier territory. And he certainly found it. (Let’s face it: friendlier territory has rarely been plowed than my friend OU Tracy.)
The next morning I woke up and walked downstairs. The two of them were sprawled on the pull-out sofa, fast asleep. There was a pair of men’s underwear lying on the floor. (I’m assuming they were his, but I think we both know they could just as easily have belonged to Mr. Last Tuesday.) With one last furtive glance at the couple, I grabbed the briefs and left. With only the tiniest twinge of conscience, I dropped them in a dumpster on the way to work.
As far as revenge goes, it maybe isn’t quite as good as making a blog in his honor. (I Hate That Drunken Guy Who Banged My Broke-Ass Roommate doesn’t have much of a ring to it anyway.) Still, it was all I could think of at the time.
Creative commons photo courtesy of profstewartrk
You can read more of Tara’s hilarious writing at her humor blog, Two Hands and a Roadmap. Don’t miss If Keyser Sose Were a Substitute Teacher and Boundaries, Schmoundaries Just Let Me Watch TV.
