Before arriving at Georgetown I had dreams of lengthy conversations into the night with an erudite community of committed students. What I got instead was a kinky sexcapade. I wasn’t involved in this act of Caucasian gratification personally, and I never expected this sort of degenerate behavior to hit so close to home. I had instead fallen prey to my roommate’s carnal desires, banished to the barren lands of our distant, spartanly furnished lounge in the name of love. But better a lumpy sofa than a bunk bed roller coaster.
This dreadful event took place soon after classes had started and kindergarten-like NSO had mercifully come to an end. I was returning to my room after having slaved away for the tyrannical Voice staff, when I noticed that something was not right. The room was dark, the air infused with a musty smell, clothes strewn about the floor, and two sets of glittering eyes stared at me from the bottom bunk. I coughed and pretended that I had to get a book. Grabbing some papers, I ran from the room, still unsure as to what the hell was going on.
“It can’t be! They wouldn’t,” I thought. My roommate and I had gotten along pretty well from the start, though I had heard horror stories from friends at other schools about how their roommates were inconsiderate hell-raisers. After half an hour, I had to go to bed. I figured they must have had time to get their passionate affair over and done with.
I came back in and the room became eerily silent. I got my pajamas and shut myself in the bathroom, hoping they would get the hint that it was time to wrap it up. I must have sat on the toilet seat staring at the magnificent mildew formations on our ceiling for 10 minutes. When I’m alone I can usually distract myself by recounting events from history, and I think that night I must have gone over the Holocaust and Hitler’s Final Solution. I was trying really hard to ignore what was going on outside of my 4-by-4 bathroom. I opened the door, the room was absorbed in darkness, and I hopped on top of my bed.
“I really should not have done this,” I remember thinking. I wondered if this was my roommate’s way of asserting his masculinity?some primal demonstration of his virility.
For convenience and space efficiency my roommate and I had decided to bunk beds. I laid three feet in the air from a threesome, as the bed swung and moaned back and forth for over an hour! If I thought they were going to be done soon, I was wrong. Like the Energizer Bunny they kept on going and going and going. James Taylor played in the background and the words “going to Carolina in my mind” will forever disturb me. In a futile attempt to drown out the noise of the bed, I covered my ears with my pillow, but I could still feel it rocking.
“Damn,” I thought. “I wish they would hurry up!”
The next day I told my roommate, “No more making out while I’m in the room!” The ultimatum has been obeyed, to a certain extent. Nowadays, the lovebirds just say they’re going to be watching a movie. This is the code word for: “You can’t work now, so you might as well leave, because we’ll be doing our thing.” So off to the lounge I go. I have been given a range of advice, most of which involves me being on top of the bed making obscene sexual noises, or in the bathroom, mimicking obscene rectal noises, which both would supposedly interrupt the process. But, since I have no chutzpah, I have not carried out any of my friends’ advice.
I guess what I got out of this experience was the knowledge that anything can happen in college. I certainly didn’t even think of discussing this when it came to our roommate agreement. I would never have expected someone to be so disrespectful toward me. So let’s just think of this piece as my revenge, a very public form of revenge.
