Everything Is Awful
Page 15
Alas, having been through the intensity of a New York relationship, I know now what I require from a lover and life partner, and have decided to list those requirements on the off chance that someone reading this book may fit the requirements or know someone who does.
TRAITS FOR LANDING MY HAND IN MARRIAGE OR AT LEAST GETTING ME TO EAT IN FRONT OF YOU
1. Can sing with the emotional spirit of a wounded dove and is willing to sing me to sleep every night.
2. Has skin that is soft like the hair of a freshly washed puppy or the underside of a very old toad.
3. Can build a tree house using only his bare hands, three screws, a shovel, and the hopes and dreams of a nation.
4. Can bake an entire three-tier cake, frost it, write an uplifting message on it, and then eat it, all in under an hour.
5. Has the ability when I’m angry to soothe me with only a series of whispers and clicks, like he’s calming a spooked horse.
6. Is willing to sing with me at karaoke, but must pretend to be a worse singer than I am, even if he can sing like a wounded dove, and also he must cry when I hit the high notes and pretend like I nail them every single time.
7. Knows how to make pasta with his bare hands and also is maybe good enough to open his own restaurant and name it after me and have a picture of me hanging in the kitchen so when he’s old and I’m dead from a carbohydrate overdose, he can stare into my face and remember the times we spent laughing together with mouthfuls of his homemade tagliatelle.
8. Rides a bike to work but isn’t all fancy about it.
9. Is willing to read me bedtime stories upon request.
10. Has a psychic ability to tell when I need coffee and is able to supply it instantly when necessary.
11. Sweats only to the point where it’s sexy and not to the point where it’s all gross and gummy and starts to pool.
12. Knows how to accurately age any wheel of cheese with only a single sniff.
13. Is capable of physically bearing our children in his lush womb.
14. Has hair that isn’t too long but long enough to flow in the wind like the strands on a majestic wildebeest running in the African plains.
15. Can play the guitar but never does because one mere stroke of his strings has been said to bring the chilliest of men to irrepressible tears.
16. Capable of wearing a T-shirt and no bottoms without looking like a rampaging pedophile, which is a nearly impossible look to pull off. I mean, have you ever seen a man with just a shirt on? It’s horrifying almost always.
17. Can prepare an entire Thanksgiving dinner alone and feed it to me using only one giant spoon.
18. Can talk to birds, but only to shut them up when they start doing all their bird shit too early in the morning.
19. Can live with someone who will inevitably develop irritable bowel syndrome, if he hasn’t already, and have an unhesitating willingness to clean the bathroom on his own whenever necessary, which will be more necessary than most humans would consider normal.
20. Brings me donuts when he goes running in the morning because I’m sure as fuck not gonna get up and go running in the morning, and not just any donuts, but the warm kind from the good place that we went to that one time but whose name I can’t remember.
21. Lets me dictate who is big spoon and little spoon every single time with no protests.
22. Brings me free rice pudding.
ON THE STICKY PERILS OF HAVING A ROOMMATE
When I was maybe three or four years old, my mother thought it would be a good idea to move my bed into my brother’s room and combine our bedrooms into one. That’s the thing about having children; you can do these little experiments on them, moving bedrooms and shaking up the social order, and the only consequence is lifelong psychological damage. The reason, at least on its face, was to have a separate room just for toys and games and activities, but I think secretly, her aim was to facilitate bonding between my brother and me. Brothers who sleep in the same room must, she naively thought, grow an unspeakable fellowship.
I was too young to care all that much, but my brother, who is six years older, found the entire arrangement utterly unacceptable (as he should have, if we’re being honest), and conspired against it from its very inception. On the first night, just after my mother kissed us good night, turned out the lights, and shut the door, and just as she walked to her own room, admiring her success, my brother sat up in his bed and began whispering a string of terrifying mumblings in my direction. He warned me of clowns that would kill me in my sleep, and werewolves that would devour the remains, and in the morning, there would only be a pile of blood and bones left for Mom and Dad to find in my stead.
I lay there with my eyes as open as they could be, staring at the ceiling, wondering how exactly the clowns would kill me, and if I would feel anything while the werewolves tore my limbs apart, and whether Mom and Dad would scream when they found what was left of me, and finally, I let out a shriek. My brother quickly fell into a sleeping position, and my mother came running back to find my shivering body in a cold sweat for apparently no reason, unable to speak. This went on, uninterrupted, for at least seven whole nights, until finally my mother realized her experiment had failed and relented, pushing my bed back into its room and restoring the rightful balance. But of course, the damage had been done.
Perhaps because of this, I have always placed precious value on my personal space. I rather like having my own bedroom, and spent most of my childhood cultivating a sanctuary. And indeed, I made it all the way to college before ever having to think about sharing my bedroom with another person again. In fact, avoiding having a roommate was a reason I considered not going to college at all. The idea of having to compromise a fundamental part of my worldview for the sake of education was almost too much to handle.
• • •
As most college freshmen are, I was randomly assigned a roommate by an old computer with a terrible sense of irony and humor. Sure, we were told to fill out surveys to gauge our “lifestyle preferences,” checking boxes like “I like a clean room,” “I like to listen to music while I study,” and “I will not stand over my roommate in the middle of the night and whisper lyrics to Whitney Houston’s greatest hits.” But I’m convinced those surveys were simply a tactic to keep us from rioting when we discovered we’d been matched with someone whose “lifestyle preferences” were practically the polar opposite of our own.
A few months before the school year was set to begin, I got an e-mail announcing I’d been matched with a Troy, and promptly found him on Facebook, which revealed nothing beyond the fact that he was graduating from some preparatory private high school in one of the wealthier Chicago suburbs and was also named Troy.
When I walked in on moving day, Troy had already moved all of his belongings into the room, which appeared to be nothing more than a laptop, two thin pillows, and a duvet, which he was sitting atop, his parents on either side of him, all of them in stern silence. They had the appearance of parents who prized stellar grades and nothing else. Troy sat at attention between them. He was a little shorter than me, but smaller in size, with slight muscles hugging his school T-shirt. He had hair closely cropped to his head, and a sort of blank-looking face, like he was already over it all.
“Hey, I’m Matt,” I said. “Nice to meet you.” But before I could get any further, my family came bounding in with boxes, bins, and baskets overflowing with clothes, food, and furniture, my mother barking directions about what would go where before she’d even fully entered the room. There were some eight or nine family members who came as part of my entourage, and they worked like an assembly line, carting in the mini-fridge, hanging clothes, making the bed, disinfecting the carpet, and constructing shelving units that would hold all of the shit I’d brought with me, all while Troy’s family looked on in stunned wonder. By the time they finished, my half of the room looked like a Bed Bath & Beyond catalog had exploded. Troy’s half of the room looked even more depressing in contrast.
That night, after my circus of a family left and Troy’s parents silently slipped away, we went to the dining hall with a handful of our other dorm mates and I started piecing together Troy’s persona. He’d wanted to go to another school, he told the group, but got stuck with this one. He wanted to live in another dorm, but they stuck him with this, too. With each new answer, it became increasingly clear that he was trying aggressively hard to seem cool. I was waiting for him to point at me and say, “I asked for a straight albino Jamaican, but they stuck me with you.” But that never came.
After dinner, we wandered as a group around campus, hoping perhaps to stumble upon some party. Troy became our group’s de facto leader, and we followed him aimlessly, before realizing he had no idea where he was going. Eventually, we all wandered back to the dorm.
That night, after we’d each gotten in bed, he asked me if I was rushing a fraternity. The only thing I knew about fraternities was what I saw in movies: innocent freshmen standing naked in kiddie pools full of Jell-O, humiliating themselves because a bunch of old dudes did the same thing before them, all to live in a grimy old house with fifty other disgusting guys whose rooms smelled consistently like burnt ramen and soggy cereal. Besides, I’d never heard the term “rushing” before, except in the literal sense. I pictured an army of small-muscled freshmen running at an old frat house with lances and spears, like in Lord of the Rings.
“No?” I guessed out loud. “I mean, I thought about rushing, obviously. But I don’t think it’s for me. Are you?”
I could hear him sigh, presumably because he’d gotten his final confirmation that we just weren’t going to work out. I don’t even think he answered.
• • •
In the days that followed, Troy and I gave up all pretenses that we were anything beyond two random people who happened to share the same two hundred square feet of bedroom. He made his friends, and I made mine. But we’d still occasionally find ourselves at the same dining hall table, and I’d gradually piece together the real Troy. Troy clearly aspired to the stereotypical college boy cliché: party at night, nab some drunk freshman and convince her to give him a depressing hand job in a shower stall, stumble back to the beer-pong table, give a bunch of his dude friends high fives, and eventually pass out in the bushes somewhere behind fraternity row. That was the image he projected at least. But I knew the real Troy, which made his phony frat-boy image all the more insufferable.
For one, he asked me one day a couple months into our year together whether girls could sleep in my bed when I wasn’t there. I went home every other weekend (because I was cool), and left behind a perfectly empty bed. So, Troy asked, if I wasn’t there, could any of his lady friends use my bed? Of course, the bro thing to do would’ve been to say “Yes, of course, your strange drunken conquests can totally sleep on my Egyptian cotton, twelve-hundred-thread-count Nate Berkus bedsheets, that’s what I bought them for!” But I couldn’t get over the image of some blasted freshman throwing up on my memory foam pillows the second Troy pulled down his pants. Besides, I wondered, why would someone as ostensibly accomplished with the opposite sex need a separate bed to store his concubines? I wasn’t exactly roping in ass myself, but I knew, generally speaking, that sleeping in the same bed was typically part of the deal. So I said no, I’d rather he didn’t let anybody sleep in my bed while I was away, or sit on it, or even look at it, because the fabric was too delicate for anybody whose skin composition didn’t exactly match mine. He resented me for denying his request, and I resented him for making the request in the first place, ensuring that every time I returned from a weekend away, I’d be forced to sniff my pillows for sweaty residue left by some intoxicated skank.
In any case, I never saw Troy with a girl, which was fine by me, but flew in the face of his air of utter superiority and the clear importance he put on his sexual domination. He’d brag about the women he’d met at this party or that, but as far as I could tell, nothing ever came of it. Of course, I’m not judging the lack of sex. I spent most of my college nights eating shitty pizza, playing video games, and crushing on straight boys from inside the closet. Troy just got on my goddamn nerves, like a hangnail I was forced to live with, a nagging discomfort that grew more and more unbearable each day. I started begrudging the way he smacked while he ate, the pungent smell of his deodorant after he came back from the shower, and his never-ending cough, a dull “HEGH” that I’d thought was from a simple cold when we first moved in, but that persisted day after day for the entire year, a constant “HEGH” “HEGH” “HEGH” every fifteen minutes until I couldn’t stand it anymore.
• • •
One Friday night in the spring of our freshman year, I’d just turned off all the lights and gotten into bed. It was a little after midnight, and I was alone, and just about to fall asleep when I heard Troy fumbling with his keys at the door. It was taking longer than usual, and when he finally pushed the door open with a final thud, I could tell he was drunk, the smell of vodka filling the room.
“Oh, shit,” I heard him whisper to himself when he noticed I was in bed.
I rolled my eyes in the dark as he struggled to take off his shoes, knocking over a stack of books on his desk. I could hear as he wriggled out of his shirt, wrestled off his pants, the sound of his belt buckle jangling in my ear, and finally plopped down on his bed.
Our beds sat parallel to one another, on opposite sides of the room against facing walls, some eight feet apart, side to side. My back was turned to him, but I could see the wall in front of me light up as he opened his laptop in the dark, the glow of the screen casting a pale glare across the room. I tried to ignore the clacking of the typing, the whirr of the computer fan, the “HEGH” of his coughs. He’d been on his computer before while I was sleeping, his back against the wall opposite me.
But this time the typing suddenly stopped. And then I heard it. The faint sounds of moaning emanating from headphones, the unmistakable whimpers of some poor actress whose dreams had been so different once long ago, who was left with no choice but to groan her way through a video that ended up in the bowels of the Internet and eventually on the laptop of some college boy who drunkenly stumbled home after striking out for the hundredth night in a row but was nevertheless determined to release whatever pressure he’d spent the evening bringing upon himself. Her muted screams punctuated the room like a tiny subway train screeching along its tracks. “Oh no,” I thought to myself, my eyes wide open, staring into the white of the wall in front of me. “This isn’t happening.” And then, there it was, the distinct sound of palm stroking lotioned flesh, the sound of a wooden spoon mixing a bowl of creamy macaroni and cheese, radiating from Troy’s lap.
I lay there in dazed silence, unsure how to process what was happening behind me, or why it was happening, or how to get it to stop.
Now, I certainly don’t profess to be an expert at college masturbation, or its protocols, and I certainly don’t profess to understand the first thing about straight men, or their curious behaviors, or what exactly they feel comfortable doing in the presence of other men. But I do feel confident enough in my own extensive experience on the subject to point out that there does exist a set of unspoken norms to which all college men implicitly agree, and at the risk of betraying its unwritten nature, they are as follows: always knock before entering a room, or at the very least flounder with your keys at the door for a few seconds to signal that you’re about to enter; if possible, post your schedule in public view so your dorm-fellow might better understand which times you’ll be away and when you might return; avoid shower masturbation, as it puts strain on dorm plumbing; and by all means—and this one should really, truly go without saying—keep your dick in your pants when another person is in
the room, be they unconscious or otherwise!
Perhaps it was my mistake for not laying out these rules more explicitly, I wondered as I lay there motionless, plotting my next move. Maybe I should’ve gotten Troy to sign some sort of self-pleasure contract, or at least offhandedly mentioned once or twice that I’d appreciate it if he wouldn’t lotion up his lap snake while I was lying a couple arm lengths away.
But, there we were, the moans of his chosen film’s protagonist struggling to overcome the “squish, squish, squish” of her viewer’s strokes. He was making no apparent attempt to hide the fact that this was happening, either so enraptured by his task or so convinced that I was dead asleep across from him. His confidence made me wonder if this had happened before, if perhaps I’d been snoring through night after night of this and had no idea. And sure, while this entire incident sounds like the beginning of every gay porn ever filmed, I still wanted it to end. Nobody wants a masturbating dick they didn’t ask for, especially not one that’s attached to a vodka-soaked wannabe heartbreaker with a chronic cough.
I’m not one for confrontation, or for awkward encounters, or really for any interactions of any kind. I certainly wasn’t about to let him finish, but I couldn’t imagine sitting up, looking at him dead in his stupid, slack-jawed face, and telling him to unhand his sausage. So I did the easiest thing at my disposal: I let out a loud, prominent cough, accompanied by some light stirring and grumbling, not quite an “AHEM,” but a discernible enough action to send the message: “I am awake. I hear everything. Please sheathe your penis.”