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So, Did You GET SOME?

Roommates are curious things. During my time in Texas, I had a whole string of dysfunctional human beings to share space with. Some I loved, some I hated, but regardless of my affection, I watched as each one that moved in was freakier than the one before.

When I moved to Texas, I didn�t know a soul in the entire state. And that�s a big ass state not to know anyone in. Actually, wait a minute, I did know someone. BaylorBrat was a great friend of mine in high school. In fact, she�ll deny it today but she had a bit of a crush on me back then. It was the very beginning of her long and disappointing gay period where she just couldn�t fall in love with a straight man to save herself. She moved to Waco two years before I moved to Lubbock, but there�s a good seven hours of driving through dusty nothingness to get between the two, so it was pretty analogous to not knowing anyone in the state. Let�s say I didn�t know anyone within a normal-sized state�s distance away.

I certainly didn�t know anyone well enough to live with, so I allowed the university to set me up with a complete stranger as my dorm roommate, Beastie. I knew I was in for trouble living with this one from the second we met. Just as soon as I was moved in and settled into my room, I went on a road trip to see BaylorBrat, which consisted of a long weekend of uncomfortable sex jokes, body piercings, and having policemen shining lights in my eyes and lecturing me about �underage possession bla, blablabla.� As an aside, Texas judges have absolutely no sense of humor. But BaylorBrat and I were strictly friends � more like sisters than anything else.

When I returned, Beastie punched me on the shoulder and said, �So, did you GET SOME this weekend??� I was an uptight Christian virgin at the time still pretending to be straight, and Beastie was already on my nerves. He would have actually been impressed by my debauchery, albeit non-sexual, but I didn�t want to encourage his physical abuse and inquiries for details of sexual conquests, so instead I rubbed my shoulder and pretended to be offended as I said, �Uhhhh, no,� and left it at that.

Funny thing, Beastie and I didn�t talk much after that. I spent the semester studying in the library, and he spent the semester masturbating in our room. I prayed that he would flunk out and leave me with a single room, but little did I know that you couldn�t fail at Texas Tech as long as you paid your tuition. When he showed me his straight D report card, I found a new roommate down the hall.

I moved in with this awkward boy whose first name was the same as his last, believe it or not. Must have been some Texas thing, �We liked the little critter so much, we named him twice.� Richard Richard was scrawny like me, funny looking like me, and as it turned out, gay like me. Unlike me, he was fastidiously clean. He was actually severely obsessive-compulsive and would take 40 minute showers and brush his teeth and wash his hands about a dozen times an hour. I�d even wake up in the middle of the night to find that he had woken up and felt dirty and decided to cleanse himself before going back to bed. We had to draw an imaginary line down the center of the room, a la any number of inane sitcoms. That way, I could keep my half littered with dirty clothes and empty packs of cigarettes, and he could regularly scrub his side down with ammonia-based cleaning products, and never the two sides should meet.

He had this thing about locking himself in the closet when he needed to change his clothes, which I politely ignored while thinking, �he�s never going to get laid.� We had come out to each other after about two months, but nothing much changed as a result of it. I think he might have wanted to hit on me given the fact that we studied on our beds at night and every time I looked up from my book I�d catch him staring up the leg of my boxer shorts. Of course, even if he was able to overcome his aversion to dirty things and people seeing him out of his clothing, he would never have hit on me for fear that it might lead to actual touching.

At the end of the semester, I moved into a house with SweetTits (the nickname was her choice, but well chosen). She was wonderfully beautiful and hilarious. We would keep each other up nights howling to Simpson�s episodes that we already knew by heart and playing Tetris on the old Nintendo until our eyes were so dry we couldn�t blink. She was a manic depressive ex-Mormon who would wake up every morning to the sound of my coffee brewing and run over to sniff the steam coming out of the pot as she popped a Prozac in her mouth. She loved the smell of coffee so much that she used to read books at Starbucks just for the aroma, but her leftover Mormon guilt wouldn�t allow her to ever taste it, no matter how many times I taunted her with it.

SweetTits and I rented this house from a good old Southern couple in their 50�s. The wife explained to us that the house belonged to her mother, but she�d recently passed. Her sister, as she explained with a hint of disappointment in her voice, was still living. She was living in the back yard. In Texas they have these curious things called backhouses, which are actually smaller versions of the main house built in the back yard. In other places around the country, they call them tool sheds. The sister had grown up in the main house and was forced to move 10 feet into the backhouse when the time came for her to leave home. She remained there to that day as a 50 year old woman with a countless harem of cats and a 20 year old, lime green Lincoln Continental with a personalized license plate reading �TOTSIE�.

As soon as we�d left that initial meeting with the landlords, I turned to SweetTits and said, �This is going to be great! Even the mother made her live in the backyard. We are going to have stories to make our friends pee in their pants for years to come.�

I�ll tell you some of those stories, but Totsie deserves her own diary entry. A few paragraphs here just wouldn�t do her justice.