I discovered
something else that night of the boat cruise.
Artemis, my roommate, could sleep through anything. I could have driven a motorcycle down the
hall of our dorm and come crashing through the door without shaking him loose
from dreamland. I got back to the dorm
that night and headed up the stairs (we were on the third floor) and by time I
came around the second landing, I heard music.
It was after midnight, and loud music was verboten, especially the first
week of the semester. This was loud, and
the quality of the system was shitty. Sounded
very much like my little stereo when the volume was cranked all the way up (to
11.) When you tried to blast it, it
sounded like the music was playing from inside a coffee can inside an oil
barrel inside a concrete drainage pipe. Strangely
enough that’s what this sounded like. I walked
down our floor and the music got progressively louder, although no less muffled
or tinny. I immediately knew the song,
Michael Jackson’s Will You Be There. I knew immediately knew where it was
coming from.
Our first Sunday
at Euphegenia after my parents finally left, Artemis and I decided to hop in
his car and check out the local mall.
I’m a mall rat (thank you Kevin Smith.)
Always have been. I think it goes
back to that first serious relationship I had in high school with Arianna. Since were just a couple of kids and there
wasn’t a great deal we could do in the earlier hours of the evening we’d often
hit the mall. From where we lived there
were 3 malls within 20 minutes travel in either direction. It became a great source of cheap recreation to
just hang out at the mall all day. I
love to people watch. And I’ll admit it
I like to window shop. I don’t buy a
lot, but I like to look at cool shit. I
hate shopping for clothes; I’m still that much of a man. I frequent toy stores, novelty chains like my
beloved (and long gone) Suncoast Pictures, which sold movies (VHS of course and giant laser discs – DVD’s didn’t
exist.) What I really loved was all the movie
themed merchandise, collectibles, and toys.
I loved nosing around a Suncoast at any mall. I even applied for a job at one when I was
15, but was told that was below the company’s minimum employment age. In those days we also had things called music
stores where we’d often peruse the racks of cassettes for an hour or so. I have never lost the sense of joy wasting
time around a mall brought in those days.
Even now when I’m a little down, or just plain bored, I’ll head to the
mall. So when Artemis and a couple other
guys on our floor said they were told there was one just ten minutes away, I
was in.
The moment I was
on my own, what I wanted more than anything was to get to a music store and a
buy non-Christian music! Remember at
Dad’s house, secular music was a huge no-no.
Any time I did buy a tape or CD that wasn’t by a Christian artist, I had
to take great pains to hide it. I could
only listen to them when my parents weren’t home or later in my car. My best hiding spot was inside a little
Gremlin amp I had for an electric guitar that I never learned to play. If I unscrewed the back of the wooden box there
was plenty of room for a few tapes, CD’s, and even a couple dirty magazines I’d
managed to get my sticky fingers on.
Without getting too lost in the minutia, let’s just say there was a
reason I always wore my cowboy boots and baggier pants at the home of my
stepmother’s brother. He worked for a
very large magazine printer and had once revealed to me were he kept his best
collections. If a little Top 40 was
enough to get me in trouble, a copy of Genesis or Cheri magazine would have
brought the wrath of God. Ultimately I
did get caught and had to throw not only my nudie mags but all my music away.
As soon as we
found Summer Mill Mall, I went on high alert for the first music store we came
across. I wish I could tell you I bought
the latest alternative grunge rock album that all my generation was listening
to. Sadly, not the case. I had managed to smuggle a bootleg copy of
Pearl Jam’s seminal first album Ten
on cassette, as well as that of another Seattle
super group, Temple
of the Dog. Not to mention an album that
changed my life in the summer of 1993, Pocket
Full of Kryptonite by the Spin Doctors.
They were poppy alt-funk with great lyrics and catchy hooks and I loved it. Not to be one of those guys, but I was way into them before Two Princes was on constant
rotation on every radio station. No,
what I bought that day in retrospect was far less cool. Fortunately I’ve never cared that much what
was cool. I’ve always had strange and
eclectic musical tastes. I admit
it. I own it.
I bought four CD’s
that afternoon to christen our new room, not a one from the current
decade. They were as follows:
A Night on the Town by Rod Stewart
Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player
by Elton John
A Kind of Magic by Queen
By Request: The Best of Billy Vera & the Beaters
I could argue the
first two are classics and need little explanation, even by an 18 year old in
1993. The Queen album was a cult hit,
and the soundtrack to the movie Highlander (more on that later.) As for Billy Vera, well, what can I say? I’ve loved Billy V since the first time I saw
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai. You may not recognize the name, but if you
were born prior to 1980, you know his one “hit” song, At This Moment. It became the unofficial theme between Alex
P. Keaton and his girlfriend Ellen on Family Ties. The casting led to real life marriage for
Michael J. Fox, and the song led to Billy Vera sealing his own little moment in
Pop culture history. More recently he
sang the theme to the sitcom King of Queens.
What I remember him for was the cameo he and The Beaters made in the
movie Blind Date. Ask many people what their favorite Bruce
Willis flick is, you’ll probably hear one of the Die Hard movies, or Pulp
Fiction. For me, it will always be the
80’s romcom, Blind Date. Billy & The
Beaters appeared as a band in an L.A.
club (which in the 80’s was very much art imitating life for Billy Vera.) Those songs stuck in my young mind. The album was full of jazzy, bluesy cuts, all
recorded live. Probably, I like to
imagine, in a hip Los Angeles
club somewhere on Sunset.
Meanwhile, Artemis
picked up some cassettes as well. He
didn’t have a CD player, though I told him what was mine was his (more on that
later as well.) I admit I was a little
concerned about what music he might be bringing back to our dorm room. As far as I knew, the only music he’d ever
listened to was gospel. I was not up for
a semester of Kirk Franklin, or worse. So
I was relieved when I saw the clerk ringing up Artemis’ copy of Michael Jackson’s
most recent album, Dangerous. It became a staple in our room. I admit, while not actually a fan of Michael,
I liked a number of cuts on the album (which of course he’d bought on tape.) We both loved a song called “Give In to Me” which
got played a lot in our room, to our suite-mates’ dismay. But as I walked slowly down that hall and
recognized the familiar theme to that crazy killer whale flick, Free Willy, I knew there was no way it
was coming from anyplace other than my room.
When I stuck my key in the lock, I could feel it vibrating. What the hell was he doing in there? Was about to discover wall-to-wall revelers
in my room at this late hour? Actually,
I’d have liked that.
I opened the door,
and sure enough, the music was so loud and distorted my ears immediately began
to bleed. And there was Artemis sound
asleep. Our room was otherwise
completely empty and dark. Expecting an
angry mob to burst through the bathroom door at any moment, I dove for the
stereo and shut it off. And of course,
when I did, Artemis groggily sat up and asked, “What are you doing?”
Ultimately I loved
rooming with Artemis, and it would make us very close. Those first few weeks at Judson just took a
great deal of adjusting. Probably on
both parts, but I don’t know. We were
very different, beyond the obvious cultural/racial differences. Although, in smaller less significant elements
those issues were there too. I know he
hated a lot of my music. And we didn’t
share the same cultural references. I
was raised on television and movies. He
was raised in the church. I had
fantasies of college involving late night discussions of film and music and
philosophy. The first problem there Artemis
was out cold by 9 o’clock. I was a night
owl. Still am, when parenthood allows. I stay up late for no reason other than I can. I often regret it now as my kids seem to know
when daddy stayed up a little too late (and had one or two cocktails too many) and
they are sure to be awake and screaming by 6:00 AM. Back the only impediment to my late night
habits was class at 8:15, which I would begin to just sleep right through.
I don’t know which
of my little peccadilloes annoyed Artemis most, but I can think of a couple
ticks he had that drove me up the wall.
The first being that Artemis was a loud human being. He was especially noisy in the morning. He even woke up loud. And he was always up before me. Every morning he performed the same ritual: he’d
sit up, swing his legs around the side of his bed (by Day 2 we’d taken the bunk
beds apart and each had our own side of the room) and he’d reach for the 3- liter of generic grape or orange soda
always at the side of his bed. Artemis
began every day with a big swig of the room temperature, super sugary,
artificially fruit-flavored elixir. I
would wake to the sound of the plastic bottle compressing as he sucked on
it. That was always without fail
followed by a cavernous belch echoing from the depths of his soul, shaking the
walls of our dorm room. The piece de resistance was just after the
burp reached its crescendo; he would cap it off with “Oh boy!” My good morning for nearly a year, every
morning, went: BELCH! “Oh boy!”
Prior to having a black roommate, I had no
idea what the term “ashy” meant. Nor was
I aware how many lotions and lubricants were involved. Artemis rarely showered in the morning
because being a basketball player he showered after practice every night. Which, sharing a small space with him I
always appreciated. His morning preparations
involved slapping on multiple lotions before getting dressed. It started with the yellow stuff he slathered
on his arms and upper body. Nothing
unusual as even I, a white man gets very dry around the arms and hands. But then came the green gelatinous goop he
would put in his hair. His hair which was
about a millimeter long at its thickest point.
Before he would apply it to his head, Artemis would squirt a pile of
this emerald shit into one hand and then in a strong fluid motion, for reasons that
defy explanation would clap his hands together.
I shouldn’t have to explain what
happens when someone claps their hands together forcefully while holding a pile
of gel. I would find green goo in my
toaster, my hair dryer, on the microwave and the fridge. It was everywhere.
I know that by
nature I’m a loner. Living in close quarters
with anyone is going to be tough. It
isn’t difficult for little innocuous things to get on my nerves easily. It’s usually a fault of my own and not the
other person’s since they aren’t intentionally trying to be annoying. I know Artemis wasn’t trying to drive me
nuts. But he was just the same. A particular favorite was the day he came
back to the room with a tray of sub sandwiches from a new player reception. He sat on his bed wearing a shirt and tie and
popped the lid on the tray holding at least a dozen party sized subs. He was kind enough to offer me one, but at
that point I was so annoyed by everything he did that I declined, hungry or
not. Not to mention lord knows how long
they’d been sitting out before the end of the meeting. Refrigeration was clearly not a concern of my
roomy. He once found a package of bacon
in a shopping cart outside of a grocery store someone had clearly
forgotten. He grabbed it and threw it
into his car. After all, free
bacon! There it sat while he went in and
shopped, drove back to the dorm and decided to cook it in my microwave. He was kind enough to offer me some, but
again I declined. What an uptight ass I
was, not taking free shopping cart bacon.
Let’s not even get inot what the microwave looked like after that. As for his prized sandwich tray, since there
wasn’t much room in our little fridge; he opted to store the deli subs under
his bed. After all, it was dark. There they remained for days until he finally
realized he couldn’t eat the remains any longer.
What irked me
about the sandwiches growing stale and moldy under his bed was not the health
risk they presented him. One day I was
walking out to class, or who knows where, and saw that when Artemis would sit
on his bed and pick the condiments he didn’t like off of his sandwich, he would
fling them at, not in, at the garbage
can near our door. The lower part of the
wall was encrusted with dried tomato slices, pickles, mustard smears, and dried
lettuce confetti. It looked like that
told arcade game Burger Time! I’ve never
been accused of being a neat freak, but dried produce crusted to the off-white
walls was more than I could deal with.
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