While a small percentage of you (like George Michael Bluth and McLovin in Superbad) made plans to live with a friend from high school during your first year of college, the majority of you got to have, at some point in the summer, an extremely awkward conversation about bedding, toasters, televisions, and coffee pots with the random stranger you had been assigned as a roommate. This preparatory phase was probably a bit like the negotiations prior to the first Thanksgiving, where since it appeared that there was going to have to be some sharing of America’s space, the two parties thought they’d better at least try to make the best of it. If you’re a student of history, you’ll remember that the Pilgrims agreed to bring the X-Box, and the Indians brought the corn. Now, I understand the desire to live with someone you know (that whole white-man/red-man experience didn’t turn out too great for one of the parties involved), but today’s advice is for those of you who didn’t make that decision, and instead chose option B: to live with a random stranger.
By choosing option B, you opened yourself up to one of three possibilities. These are…
#1) Through the miracles of the University Housing Office’s magic computer, you get matched up with your new lifelong Best Friend Forever. She’ll be the Maid of Honor at your wedding; or, He’ll buy your kid a speedboat for his Bar Mitzvah. And the benefits of owning a speedboat are obvious! Unfortunately, this scenario is only likely if you live in either a Hollywood Movie or a Target commercial.
#2) You are assigned a perfectly normal, perfectly bland roommate named Steve from Columbus, Ohio who neither becomes your best friend nor invades your personal space. You learn how to co-exist peacefully with someone who shares different values, you gain conflict management skills when Steve’s high school girlfriend Valerie comes to visit and throws up on your favorite pair of Diesels, and at the end of the year you make arrangements to live with either McLovin or the new best friend you made in the fencing club. This is the most probable, and perfectly acceptable, outcome of the random roommate generator.
#3) You get assigned a Charlie Krupe.
Charlie Krupe was the dude from Wichita who was there to greet me on day one at good old Winchester U. To try to explain the essence of Krupe in 500 words, or even in 5000 words, is an impossible task – so I’m not even going to try. All you need to know is, for the purpose of today’s lesson, that Charlie was a genius who scored a 1570 on his SAT (I once saw him write a ten-page paper in 52 minutes – and it was brilliant), and that Charlie was bat-shit crazy, but this second quality was not completely evident at first. For the initial two weeks of our cohabitation, I thought that Charlie was my very own version of bland Steve, from Columbus, Ohio. When I came back from my first visit home over Labor Day Weekend, however, I knew that this was not the case. While I was gone, Krupe had taken 90% of his possessions back to Wichita and replaced them with an army duffel bag full of clothing and a mysterious, locked trunk. When I asked him where all his stuff was, he told me that “he was done with fucking materiality.” Yeah.
Two weeks later, I came home from a party to find Krupe, with his back to the door, sitting in front of his trunk in camouflage clothing. At first, I couldn’t see what he was up to, but when he turned around, I saw that he was doing something with what appeared to be…a dead squirrel. And it actually was. Evidently, that night Krupe had hidden down in the bushes outside of our dorm in camouflage, and…I shit you not…had captured the squirrel with his bare hands and snapped its neck. Disgusting, and crazy, right? Yes. But wait, that’s not all. Just what do you think Krupe had been hiding in his mysterious, locked trunk for the last two weeks? That’s right – an amateur taxidermy kit! Within a week, Charlie Krupe had caught and stuffed three squirrels, which he hung from his side of the dorm room’s ceiling. For me, the last straw occurred during a thunderstorm, when I woke up in the middle of the night to a lightning flash that had freakily illuminated the squirrels suspended in mid air hanging roughly six feet from my head and appearing to be springing viciously towards me, just waiting to reanimate via the power of witchcraft, bite my face off, and give me rabies. I spent the next three days sleeping on a couch at the fraternity house, and as soon as the paperwork could be filed, I moved in with Barry – who I went on to live with for the next three-and-a-half years.
But now, with the perspective of ten years between myself and the Charlie Krupe experience, I give you this piece of advice: if by some chance you got assigned a Crazy, do everything in your power to stick it out for a year. When I think about it these days, I really wish I would have hung in there with Krupe for a whole nine months – who knows what kind of other crazy things he did in that dorm room for the last seven months of freshman year – and I missed out on a lot of potentially awesome stories. Look, you’re going to spend the rest of your life living with people you know and like. I would have lived with Barry the next year anyways, and the loss of those seven months in Centennial Hall would have made no material difference to our friendship. So take the opportunity to gather as many stories from the Crazy during your freshman year as you possibly can. You have no idea how often in your lifetime the subject of college roommates will come up at the various dinner parties your spouse will make you attend once you enter the real world, but I can guarantee that it happens a lot. If you stick it out with the Crazy, you’ll always be prepared.
Joe Webb teaches American literature at Saint Louis University, where he spends equal time discussing Entourage and Leaves of Grass. His book, Dr. Wizard’s Advice for College Students, is scheduled for national release in the fall of 2009, and will include lessons on everything from Greek Life to Greek literature. For more of Dr. Wizard’s Advice, check out www.dr-wizard.com.
Tags: amateur taxidermy kit, bat-shit crazy, college freshman, columbus ohio, crazy roomates, dead squirrel, freshman year, university housing
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