TRUE ROOMMATE STORY-FILTH TAKEN TO A NEW LEVEL

I think that I, along with one of my best friends, were the two worst roommates ever. We were legendary for our filth. It was our sophomore year that we decided to live together. Each of us had problems the year before because the standards of our previous roommates were way too rigorous. The students in our all-male dorm were primarily underclassmen so it was a pretty crappy place to begin with. You know how those places are ... puke in the bathroom that sits there for days; trash cans in the common areas filled with rotten food and beer cans; that urine smell that pervades the entire dorm...Our room was much, much worse. What started out as simply messy turned into a biohazard. It started out as a contest to determine who was lazier. We thought it would be funny to see who could come up with the most comically absurd way to do something with the least amount of work. It started with throwing the daily newspaper on the floor when we were done with it. This being funny for all of two seconds we progressed to empty pizza boxes and rough drafts of papers. After a week we started adding our beer bottles and cans to the mix. (Now you have to understand that we were drinking very heavily. I was drinking nearly seven or eight quarts of Magnum malt liquor a day, and he was contributing vast numbers of cans). When cold season came around we would add our snot rags. When I coughed up flim I would spit it onto the heap. It was not unusual for one of us to drink too much and vomit in bed. In the morning we would simply scrape the vomit onto the floor and turn the mattress over (neither one of us used sheets). I think that one night, after watching "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer" we decided that since we were living like cavemen our dorm room should be as cave-like as possible. We got some black plastic sheeting and covered the single window in our room, sealing it with tape so that no light could get in. The downside was that we could no longer open the window to let in fresh air. That's when it began to stink. When rotten beer but sits out for a few days it begins to smell like vinegar. All the half-drunk cans lying around the room would get knocked over and spill this foul, sticky sludge all over our already stinky stuff. Without fresh air the room got even worse. We soon had whole colonies of flies and roaches living in our room, scurrying around like they owned the place. Being too lazy to kill them, we had a rule that they would be eliminated only if they crawled on us while we were awake. Barring that they were free to do as they pleased. One night after way too many beers I decided that walking across the hall to the bathroom was too much work so I opened the door and peed out into the carpeted hallway. This became a nightly ritual. I think that twice a month the exterminator would go from room to room spraying for bugs. When he came to our room he would key in, look around, and walk out. I guess he figured it was of no use even trying. The funny thing was that very few people knew we lived like this. We were both preppy, clean-cut fraternity guys. All the parties were at the house so nobody ever came to visit. Having females over was out of the question but there were ways to work around that. Towards the end of the semester word began to get out and we realized that while people were laughing eventually somebody in Housing was going to get upset. We were concerned too about leaving it over Christmas break. Who knew what would grow in there while we were gone? The trash was thigh-high and walking around in the room was nearly impossible. It took us a solid day and a half to clean that ten by fifteen foot room. The next semester was pretty bad but it never go like it did before. The next year we moved into the fraternity house and had different roommates, so we were never able to combine forces again. But for that one year we really were the worst roommates ever.