Piano Man

My sophomore year I moved into a dorm room with a stranger, reasoning that no one could be worse than my prior roommate, an amateur gigolo. I was wrong. My Very Worst Roommate was a 5’2” 250-pound cave troll with complete apathy for social interaction, respect and personal hygiene. From day one, MVWR never spoke to me, despite our proximity within the room, which he almost never left. My empathy for his apparent case of chronic sociophobia soon turned to a white-hot hatred when I saw his singular outlet for human interaction: donning a headset with a microphone and logging into Yahoo! Chat, where he either pretended to be a Russian Neo-Nazi and talked at great length about burning down ‘n____’ churches or sang Billy Joel at the top of his lungs, falsetto, to god knows who would listen. I recorded the latter on my computer microphone and played it to all my friends who didn’t believe me.

MVWR rarely showered and washed his extremely limited wardrobe even less often – maybe once a month. He smelled horrendous and would not respond to me asking him to clean up after himself, so I eventually resorted to spraying his clothes-pile (no bureau; on his bed by day, on the floor at night) with Febreze in front of him, to no response. On hot days I would spray his shirt while he was wearing it, which also earned no response. A steady 85% of the time I entered the room, despite knocking loudly, waiting 15 seconds and then opening the door, I interrupted MVWR masturbating to anime porn. I moved into the first available room for the second semester and roomed with a jock colloquially known as Long Schlong, famous for the webcam videos he recorded of himself masturbating, then placed in the university shared folder. At least he showered.