Frank Zappa

I was so excited. My mom tells the story about how I slept on my packed bags by the door the night before school opened that year and, though it wasn’t quite like that, I was eagerly looking forward to it. Morning came and I dragged my stuff over to Thor Johnson, the boy’s dorm, and reported in for duty, eager to meet my roommate and get the year started. I checked in at the desk, eyeing all the other boys milling uneasily about, wondering which ones would become my friends. I introduced myself to the RA and he looked up my name on his clipboard and gave me my room number, pointing out that it was on the second floor off to the left. Then he brightened up and said, “hey, guess what?” I looked at him expectantly. “You’ve got a single!” He ran his finger down the sheet of paper, “Yep, you’re the only one who doesn’t have a roommate. Lucky you!”

Lucky me.

I couldn’t believe it. The other boys at the desk looked at me jealously. I may have been the only one in the dorm without a roommate, but I was also probably the only one in the dorm that really wanted a roommate. I sighed, and slung my bag up over my shoulder, took the key, and made my way upstairs to my new room.

I spent the afternoon unpacking and decorating, my spirits brightening as I turned up the stereo and realized my mom wasn’t going to be knocking on the door in three minutes asking me to turn it down. Although I was alone in the room, at least I was in the dorm, and was sure to have a better shot at making friends here than across the street at my house. And, if things ever got too hairy and I really needed a home-cooked meal and a maternal shoulder to lean on, it was within easy walking distance.

The first week was a whirlwind of activity. I auditioned for the Level 3 dance class and, to my gratification and my mom’s dismay, got in. I built my schedule around that morning block of dance and stood in the endless line at the bookstore, buying my textbooks and chatting with the other students. Most importantly, I met Eric, another dancer, and we hit it off immediately. We quickly became inseparable and made plans to become roommates after the mandatory one-month waiting period.

Doing so, however, was an incredibly complicated maneuver, involving dozens of people and convoluted plans whereby this person goes there and that person goes over there but in order to get Jeff to be roommates with Charley, then Charley’s roommate has to move in with Scott, but Scott’s roommate wants to live with Alex and so on ad nauseum. But, eventually, thanks to a long series of negotiations, we finally had a plan all worked out. We just needed to wait until moving day in a couple of weeks and everybody would get to go where they wanted. And then disaster struck.

I was sitting in my room on a Sunday afternoon, listening to Gary Numan and leafing through my algebra homework, when there was a knock on the door. I answered it and there was an RA standing next to a tough-looking kid I hadn’t seen before. “Good news, Chris,” he said, “here’s your new roommate, um,” he looked down at his clipboard, “Allen. Allen, meet Chris.”

We shook hands and I smiled, welcoming him into the room, but my heart sank. Now our plans were all messed up. Being a total jerk, I told him right away that I was planning on moving in with somebody else. And nice to meet you too, he must have thought. But I started moving my stuff around to make room for him, clearing off half of the desk and consolidating my books and records onto one half of the long shelf that ran the length of the room.

Allen was a tuba player from Detroit, and was one mean-looking son of a bitch. He was big, and he had a giant scar running down one side of his face. This, plus the fact that he had just fucked up my plans, instantly put me off of him. For his part, he found out I was a dancer and immediately assumed I was gay and was going to try to jump his bones the second he let his guard down. It was a tense couple of days.