I was a sprite 18 year old, off to college and moving into my first apartment! It was a dream come true really. All my tapes and other stuff together in a place not my tiny bedroom in my mom’s house.
I found my roommate via an index card in the student center on campus. He seemed reasonably nice, on paper, and I had no reason to think that I’d end up wanting to murder the poor son of a bitch within weeks. The first day and after some clever snooping around I discovered we had similar taste in music, once how I defined friendship. (Similar taste is a bit of an overstatement however since I liked Led Zeppelin and he was obsessed with Yes. That’s right, Yes. Little did I know at the time but an appreciation for the music of Yes is a surefire sign of insanity.)
It was our first night together in the new place, a $400 per month particleboard designed, pastel carpet flat in Daytona Beach with a microwave and ice dispenser in the fridge. Pretty sweet digs for an 18 year old fresh from his parent’s place. My new roomie, let’s call him Lester (I’ve since blacked out his name), was quick to show me his cooking “skills”. The skill he had was to plate overcooked spaghetti covered in a glut of watery sauce and burnt garlic bread on the side. He called it, very proudly, Spaghetti a la Lester. I immediately began to hate him.
Not once over the next 3 months (which was exactly how long I tolerated living there) did I enjoy his company. Tedious exercises in suppressing bloodshed were our attempts at conversation. Never did he stop talking about his physics homework, his astigmatism, his complete disapproval of drugs and alcohol and his unadulterated fascination with Yes. Me, I was more of an arts guy, didn’t wear glasses, liked Led Zeppelin, drank like a fish, smoked pot and took acid with surprising regularity.
The end came soon after he threw my glass bong into the dumpster because the smug bastard didn’t “feel comfortable with drug paraphernalia in his house.” Let it be known, I’ve never hit another human being in my life, fortunately for him, because if I’d been the fighting type Lester would have wound up with his glasses shoved so far up his tight ass he wouldn’t have been able to sit down.
By Nico
