Oh, The Places I Went!

That is what I am calling this little writing exercise project of mine.

So here we go. I am calling this first one #2 because it is the second place I lived after leaving home.

#2

I lived in the dorms my freshman year of college and part of my sophomore year as well. Being in a big city like San Francisco during the "dot com" era was tricky, and dorm living was the only way to insure you were not forced to sell off your organs in order to afford rent at the time. Plus, I was a freshman, eager to make friends and get to know the college. What better way to do so than to cram myself into a tiny prison-cell sized room on campus?

My roommate was named Ruth and she smelled like rotten food most of the time. Or maybe it was her mini-fridge she brought along and stuffed full of strange food left to rot in our room while she went home to San Jose on the weekends. I think it was actually a blend of both the rotting food and the fact that she thought the dorm showers were "unsanitary," which was her excuse not to bathe all week until she could go home to her own shower. Unsanitary, my ass. Week-old roommate funk permeated my dorm room until I had a chance to air it out when she left for home on Friday afternoons.

We lived on the second floor and our window was often open and I am pretty sure she must have heard me complaining about her stench to anyone who would listen while we were sitting out in front of the dorm entrance. I believe this because I sure as hell could hear her from outside whenever she got a call from her Estonian mother. Her voice would raise about 10 octaves higher and every call began with "EH MA?" and then was followed by a shrill stream of Estonian at full volume into the phone receiver. It was one of the most grating sounds I have ever heard to this day, right up there with sirens, yappy dogs and babies crying. And it happened at least once a day. Ruth was quite close with her mother. Which explains her trips home every weekend all year long.

Ruth had a tiny TV/VCR that she used to record her special TV shows during the day while she was in class. Her special shows were the following--Kung Fu, The Legend Continues, Lois and Clark, and some soap opera I had never heard of. She would tape these shows every day while she was in class, then come back to our room and play them in the background while she played solitaire on her laptop computer for hours instead of studying.

Ruth loved TV so much that she also could not sleep unless it was blaring loudly next to her head. I would come home from my nightly freshman shenanigans to see her dead asleep in her tiny twin bed, the light from the TV casting a bluish hue on her face which was contorted into a dreamy scowl. The TV would be on "sleep" mode, and it would turn off on its own eventually. But Ruth would wake right up when that happened and turn it back on again to continue her Jay Leno monologue-lullaby. I did not sleep much that year, and when I did, Jay Leno's voice found its way into my subconscious in a way that left me disturbed most mornings. "Have you heard about this one? You know about this?" 

Needless to say, I did not spend a lot of time in my room that first year of college. Except on the weekends when she was gone, of course. That was her gift to me, and it was worth all the weird shit I dealt with during the weekdays. Once she was gone, the dorm room was mine and it was glorious. I blasted Tori Amos and Nine Inch Nails and Ani DeFranco music like nobody’s business. I stayed up way too late. Sometimes my first love, a boy I left behind in my hometown, would take the train a million hours to see me for the weekend and we would take over the whole room while Ruth was gone and make out as much as we wanted without disturbing anyone. I would invite friends to come hang out in my room or just spend an afternoon reading a good book or writing for hours without interruption. Even though I had to deal with the weekday funk of my roommate, it was totally worth it for how sweet I had it on the weekends that year.

Ruth always returned right when her pungent scent had finally left the air in our room, usually late Sunday evening. I would be disappointed to see our light on in the second floor window when I came back from the dorm cafeteria after dinner. I prayed the week would fly by so I could have the place to myself again.

My last memory of Ruth was when she came home crying one night toward the end of our year together. She had been desperate to get into a sorority and had finally found one that accepted her, and this night was some sort of scavenger hunt or something. It seems that Ruth was basically ditched by her sorority sisters during the night. She was alone in her car trying to follow them around caravan-style and hunt for objects, when suddenly they made a series of seemingly purposeful moves to shake her off their trail. She ended up lost and had to come home. She was convinced they did it on purpose, and to be honest, I was secretly convinced too. Sorority girls can be cutthroat, and let’s face it, Ruth was not exactly sorority material in the first place. She had a really hard time getting accepted into one, and now they were being mean to her. That had to hurt.

I listened sympathetically and tried to comfort her by saying maybe they did it by accident. I know she bugged the crap out of me, but no one deserved to be treated that way. I really felt bad for her. She cried some more, the kind of deep guttural sobs reserved for the truly rejected. Then she crawled into her little twin bed with her laptop so she could play solitaire and watch her shows.  


I did not roll my eyes when Kung Fu, The Legend Continues started up. I think I even watched a few minutes of it with her, letting her turn up the volume as loud as she wanted.