He'd been an undergrad student for 7 years--4 as a freshman...

This story proves that sometimes your bad roommate really is the result of somebody in Residence Life and Housing making a conscious decision to target your ass.

At the end of junior year, two of my friends and I were planning our housing situation for the upcoming year. We decided to take a suite in Luter and join the rest of our friends in the theme housing there at the time. Only problem was, we needed a fourth. Stonehenge, Mackin, and Donny had already secured roommates and everyone else was out in Polo.

Eventually, Felix, Ernesto and I found one, I forget his name, but that’s okay since he didn’t last the summer. Too bad nobody thought to tell us. It wasn’t until after we got back for the start of senior year that we discovered he’d dropped us in order to work as a R.A. in Babcock, which gave him a single and a place to keep his live-in girlfriend without being noticed.

Unfortunately, since this guy was supposed to be my roommate in the suite, this put me in the cross-hairs of Mrs. Edith Martz, the lady in charge of room assignments at RLH. Although the year had already started and everyone technically had a room, Martz refused to let us occupy a 4-person suite with only 3 people and vehemently objected to my being without a roommate.

Therefore she assigned me a new roommate, a freshman. Not a bad guy; he basically slept all the time and didn’t make any noise. We invited him out with us a few times to introduce him to college life, but he was more into his PlayStation. He’d been there a month when I entered the room and found him packing up. Turns out Mrs. Martz had found him a bunk in a freshman dorm the previous week and he’d decided to take it, but not tell us about it at Mrs. Martz’s insistence. Annoying, yes, but we saw the big picture: one less person living in our suite. Things were looking up.

The same day I found out the Freshman was leaving, Martz calls letting me know that she’d already found, and assigned, me a new roommate. I pointed out that we were closing in on the end of September and that she couldn’t expect me to believe that someone didn’t already have a room, since classes had started back in mid-/late-August. Since Martz and I had some bad blood from a prior encounter(s), I knew she was just trying to screw me over. When I asked if she was enjoying screwing me over, her response was simply to tell me that my roommate was returning late to school and that I could expect him to arrive soon. Of course she did so in a tone of voice that made it quite apparent that she was enjoying herself immensely.

And that’s how Howie came into our lives. Howie was a freshman and in his four years as a freshman, Howie had only avoided flunking out because his father was the owner of a big construction firm in Florida and had a willingness to spend whatever it took to keep his idiot son off the streets. We all figured he’d be gone in a couple of weeks, like the last guy, or at worst, flunk out after grades were released in December.

At first, Howie wasn’t a bad guy. He didn’t talk, used his headphones to listen to his music and spent his time either playing on his laptop or sleeping. We tried to get to know him, but our efforts failed. I believe this was because Howie didn’t speak; rather, he communicated by grunting. When singing along to his music, rather than repeat the words, Howie preferred to use variations of ‘uh.’ But, in the interest of being good suite-mates, we invited him to join us for dinner a few times. We stopped inviting him after one big outing during which he said, and grunted, nothing the entire night.

We almost established a betting pool as to when he’d leave. We had spent weeks attempting to help Howie adjust to dorm life, all to no avail. Personally, I spent three weeks trying to teach him how to use Wake’s voice-mail service. Why did it take three weeks? Because Howie was the only student on campus who didn’t know what button the automated system was referring to when it said to press the pound key. I won’t even go into why he didn’t understand why people who slept on the top bunks or in lofts near the ceiling got pissed at him when he’d turn on the overhead lights or his floor lamp while they were asleep. Suffice it to say, there was much about this modern world that Howie didn’t comprehend. If you’d told us he was mentally handicapped, we’d have believed it.

It was only once Howie got comfortable that I realized what Martz had done to me and my suitemates. At first, we noticed small things, like the fact that he didn’t know how to flush a toilet or that he went through our things, taking food and drink but never chipping in for groceries, or that he left his wet clothes on other people’s beds to dry. That really pissed off Felix. But then, Howie didn’t use Felix’s bed sheets to staunch the blood flowing from the Total Recall-esque growth jutting out from the back of his head because he picked at it constantly.

The situation quickly got worse when we discovered that the reason our suite had developed a nasty funk, was because Howie left uneaten food under his bed, where it was rotting away. That and he hadn’t washed his sheets since he’d moved in, and didn’t the entire time he was in our suite.

After sitting on the toilet after a late night partying, Ernesto discovered that Howie had pissed on the toilet seat. Unfortunately, Howie’s bad aim would mar our toilet, and the surrounding area, for the rest of the year. Hygiene was just a big problem for Howie. We all knew he didn’t wash his hands after using the bathroom, but it was a month before I noticed that he was wiping his hands on my towels as he left the can.

We tried talking to him individually and as a group about his behavior in the hope that he was just socially and hygienically inept in addition to being mentally deficient. Even Donny and Stonehenge tried to talk to Howie. Nothing anyone said ever penetrated his thick head, nor fazed his blank stare. He would simply look at us, mouth agape, and then go back to his computer games, grunting along to the song playing over his headphones. When words had no effect, we used signs, hoping that maybe he’d understand the pictures. But he just ignored them or used them to complain to our R.A. We tried pranks for awhile, but gave up because he either just bought replacement books and clothes or wasn’t aware that he had been pranked.

Our living situation worsened once Howie discovered porn. He’d sit in front of his laptop for hours with his right hand on his mouse and his left hand jammed down the front of his ever-present sweat pants, slowly jerking himself off. As he did this whether we were in the room or not, we all got pretty uncomfortable being around him.

Howie’s sexual dysfunctions became increasingly apparent during Parent’s Weekend near the end of October. We’d successfully ‘parent-proofed’ the suite, ready to receive our families. Everybody’s family showed up, except for Howie’s. So while we went out, he stayed in with his online porn. But when we got back from dinner, before the parents came in, I did one final check of the suite for objectionable material. I figured all was clear, because the lights were out and it was about the time Howie would go to Benson for dinner. Instead, I found something that was universally held to be objectionable: Howie, sitting in front of his computer, sweat pants and tighty whiteys down around his ankles...and a glob of something white and shiny on the carpet near his chair.

Turns out that while left alone at his computer, Howie had been playing with himself, as usual, but this time instead of using a tissue or sock, he’d just removed his sweat pants and shot his load onto the suite’s floor. When asked “What the fuck is that?!” he calmly rubbed his spent spunk into the carpet with his foot. When he refused to replace or clean the carpet, Ernesto lost it. He may have ‘borrowed’ one of Howie’s credit cards, but I wouldn’t know. However, the carpet was replaced in a week. But it was never the same; nobody ever went barefoot in our suite again.

One by one, our friends became increasingly more uncomfortable spending time in our suite. My girlfriend refused to be in the room alone with him because he would touch himself as he looked at her. Allison and Danielle stopped visiting me once they saw Howie playing with himself while we were getting ready to go out. Stonehenge had asked to if he and his girlfriend could watch a movie on the t.v. in our suite, which was cool. He later complained that Howie had sneaked into the room to leer at him and his girlfriend as they ‘cuddled’ while watching their show.

Suddenly suite and room security became an issue. I was in a coma after spending a week of late nights finishing my thesis, when the cleaning lady woke me up. Turns out Howie had gone to class, leaving the door to our suite not just unlocked, but wide open. We talked with him about it, but that didn’t work. Fortunately, he got slightly better as the year went on when some of his items mysteriously disappeared each time the suite was left unlocked. Our friends on the hall kept an eye on the suite for us, otherwise we would’ve been robbed for sure.

Of course, we locked doors to protect our privacy, too. A lesson Felix learned the hard way after Howie moseyed into his room looking for free grub and put the interruptus in Felix’ coitus with his woman. After that Felix started to lock the connecting door between our rooms at night and whenever he had a girl over. Ernesto took it one step further: he stopped bringing his boyfriends by altogether, going to their places instead.

While all of these instances were alone enough to warrant severe punishment, we gave up because nothing we did ever seemed to faze Howie. So we just acclimated to his behavior. But it was just a matter of time before he crossed the line. The final straw for me was when I got a call from Annette about her encounter with Howie. She’d come by earlier in the afternoon looking to spend some quality time with me but when she opened the door, which was already ajar, she found Howie instead.

Dancing to the radio.
Naked.
Masturbating.

She angrily told me she was never coming to my room again!

I tried to be mature. I tried to talk to Howie about why he acted like such an ass one final time. No good. So I got Felix and Ernesto and the three of us tried one last intervention. His response was to call the three of us ‘White Cracker,’ ‘Fat Cracker’ and ‘Queer Cracker’ in addition to other unimaginative curses and racial slurs. He also accused Felix, Ernesto, our friends and women, of being ‘freaks,’ ‘unreasonable,’ ‘racists’... you get the idea. Even Mackin, who is black, got offended by that. I pointed out that we didn’t give a damn about his race; no matter your race, color, or creed, pounding your meat off onto the floor is just wrong. Besides, if we were racists, why did Mackin and Cal hang out with us? Howie’s response was to look confused and lock himself in the bathroom.

At this point, but most likely even before it, a reasonable person would’ve simply kicked Howie’s ass or left him in pieces scattered around Winston-Salem, secure in the knowledge that no jury would convict them. But we knew that the punishment for fighting if we were caught was either going to be suspension or expulsion and that Howie would report us for sure, just like he had every other time we’d talked with him. Also, because Howie’s parents were loaded and connected, and ours weren’t, we’d get no leniency whatsoever. Since graduation was just a couple of months away, we gritted our teeth and focused on letting nothing interfere with obtaining our diplomas.

So began the Cold War. We were pissed at Howie because of his actions and he claimed that we were assholes for objecting to the urine, semen and blood he spilled everywhere, the food and drinks he stole, and his actions that had caused our friends and women to stop coming by. In fact, Howie would make a habit of, whenever he saw us with our friends or with a girl, occasionally coming up to us and making various insulting comments or vague nonsensical threats. His behavior didn’t affect us; we refused to leave our suite because it was our suite. Unfortunately, Howie also refused to leave. This made no sense to us, considering how much we disliked each other and that he claimed we were racists. His dad had enough money to provide Howie with a nice apartment near campus. Or the guy could’ve gone off to room with someone else in another room on campus, but that was less likely since he had no friends.

To prove this point, a brief digression. The three of us had noticed at the outset of our experiences with Howie that, unlike the three of us, he never seemed to have any visitors of his own, nor did he ever go out to meet with anyone. This is one of the reasons why we had initially tried to include him in our games of basketball, cards or Counter-Strike. Donny and his roommate had the most success at getting Howie to socialize on the basketball court, but even then they couldn’t get him to engage in a substantial conversation above the sixth grade level.

Although he was an astounding ass, I found myself unintentionally pitying him. He was this deficient person forced by his old man to attend a college he couldn’t manage. He was homesick, had no friends, could barely care for himself, and was probably starting to chafe. The only phone calls he got were the rare ones from his sister or mother down in Florida. Whenever I spoke to them, they were polite, coherent, and intelligent. In fact, his sister was very nice, asking me how the guys in the suite were doing and if we were making sure that Howie wasn’t out partying all the time because he’d told her about all the fun he was having. Obviously, he was lying to his own family, which, while not unusual, was still pretty pathetic.

One night a young woman came to visit him. This event lead to rampant speculation on our hall. Did Howie have friends? If so, did he just hide them really well? And because this woman was attractive, we wondered if she could be his girlfriend, and if so, what could she see in him? It turned out that she was his partner for a lab assignment and once it was over, we never saw her again.

As you can imagine, Felix, Ernesto and I were thrilled when he left the suite at the end of the year. All it cost us to get to that point was our friendship, the damage done to our relationships, and having to replace the things he’d taken or ruined. Revenge would’ve been justified, but what could we do? We’d pranked Howie before, but he never noticed or modified his behavior and eventually we gave up. What good does it do to prank someone who is completely oblivious to all but online porn and the hand down his pants? He didn’t even notice when we started using his clothes to clean up his bodily fluids or dumped his rotting food in his backpack. So, we turned our frustrations towards the lady who shackled us with Howie in the first place, Edith Martz. She was due for a nuclear attack, but God beat us to the punch.

We weren’t sure what to do to her, until a friend of mine who worked with Edith in the Residence Life and Housing Office joined us. Rebecca was willing to help us out because not only was she disgusted by Howie, but she also had her own personal axe to grind with Mrs. Martz. So Rebecca told us about Edith’s ‘lunches.’ Turned out that a couple times a semester Edith took the female student-employees in her office out to lunch, where she would impart some sage motherly advice. And after her third martini, when she was feeling good and loose, she’d share stories about cheating on her husband, and her tips on how to cheat and not get caught. Rebecca offered to take a look at Edith’s office computer, where Edith claimed she kept e-mails detailing her most recent extramarital affair with some guy in maintenance. But before we could get them to mail to her husband and her boss, it was announced that she had been diagnosed with cancer.

It’s one thing to get back at a healthy devil woman, but it’s another thing entirely when that woman is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Our desire for revenge quickly abated. Even my friend who worked in Edith’s office, who’d never had a good word to say about Edith during the three years they’d worked together, was now singing her praises. Sadly, Edith passed away a year or two later. According to the grapevine, she came clean to her husband and they mended things before she died.

Since then, we’ve all graduated and moved on to post-graduate schools and jobs. While Felix, Ernesto, and I were never able to rebuild our friendship in the post-Howie era, and some hostility remains to this day, the rest of us were able to put it all behind us and it’s become something for us to joke about late at night during our rare get-togethers.

A couple of years after we’d graduated, while back at Wake for an alumni event, Donny, Stonehenge and I were reminiscing about our time in Luter, which eventually led to stories about Howie. Since nobody had heard from him, we decided to check out the alumni database. Howie wasn’t listed. So we moved on to the graduate/professional school student database. Still no Howie. Donny suggested that we check the undergrad directory, while I suggested that Howie had finally dropped out or been suspended. But we looked up the undergrads anyway. We found out that Howie was still a student at Wake. At the time we checked, he’d been in undergrad for 7 academic years, 4 of those as a freshman, and looked to be working on 8. One can only wonder what he’s done since we knew him. But it’s probably best not to think about it.