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.
We’d only managed to exchange a handful of words, and already I was worried I was making the impression that I was some type of high-maintenance mama’s boy—which was technically true, just not something I was eager to advertise twenty minutes into our introduction.
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.”
Momentarily, the squishing stopped, and I heard the tapping of his finger on the volume key as he lowered the sound of the moaning video. There was silence, and I stirred again, just to say, “Yep. I am totally awake. Let’s just everybody put their penises away, and we can get on with pretending this never happened.”
The silence lasted, and I let out a sigh that we’d solved the problem swiftly and amicably, with no seed being needlessly spilt.
But the silence lasted only twenty seconds. There came again the “tap, tap, tap” of the volume returned to its previous level, the moans resumed breathlessly from his headphones, and the accompanying “squish, squish, squish” carried on with renewed vigor.
“OH MY GOD,” I screamed in my head. “NOW WHAT?”
Still determined to solve this without having to actually acknowledge that I’d been awake this whole time, I took drastic action. I started to roll over. Until then, I’d been steadfastly facing the wall, giving Troy all the privacy of my turned back. But surely if I turned to face him, even with my eyes still closed, he’d have to stop. No man in his right mind would take that kind of risk.
And so I rolled, more dramatically than I normally would, grumbling and fumbling like an old man looking for the glasses atop his head, coughing for extra measure to indicate full alertness. When I finally landed on my other side, facing Troy’s direction, I noticed he’d stopped yet again. Frozen, I imagined, like a deer in the glow of his laptop.
For five whole minutes, there was nothing but the sound of the whirring computer fan and the occasional click of his touchpad. Glorious silence. I started to focus on falling asleep, wondering how I’d recount this story at breakfast tomorrow.
But sure enough, the subtle moans rang out again, and the “squish, squish, squish” continued, now more strenuously than before, like he was rushing to get it over with, angry at having been interrupted.
Finally, I rolled onto my back and stretched out my arms above me, letting out an obnoxious yawn, like I was stirring myself from a particularly good dream but wasn’t quite awake. This had to end, but I still refused to acknowledge that I was fully awake, intent as I was on avoiding the awkwardness as much as possible. And so I leaned forward, pretending to be half-asleep, and reached into the mini-fridge for a bottle of water, which I opened and chugged unpleasantly. If convincing him I was awake wasn’t enough, I figured, maybe my slobbering would kill his libido entirely.
Meanwhile, Troy had shifted his pillows to obstruct his exposed lap, and the squishing had abated. I maintained the pretense of being half-asleep, fully vertical in bed with the bottle of water still dripping on my lap, but my eyes still closed. I made an exaggerated effort to reach for my cell phone and lay back down, facing the wall, with my phone illuminated against my face. There would be no mistaking now that I was awake.
Defeated, I heard Troy shift on his sheets, pulling his boxers back up, and then the sound of him stumbling toward the door and down to the bathroom, presumably to complete whatever business he had to attend to.
Vindicated, I turned off my phone. And in beautiful silence, I was able to finally fall asleep.
In the days that followed, Troy gave off very little indication that he knew what had happened, or at least managed to convince himself he’d been stealthier than he had been. Though, of course, I wouldn’t expect him to walk in and say, “Hey, that was crazy last night, wasn’t it?!” But it would’ve been nice to detect at least a hint of shame in place of his typical bravado.
I didn’t hesitate repeating the story to my friends the next morning: the Almighty Ladies’ Man, Troy, staggering home on a Friday night, drunk and dejected, vigorously massaging his neglected manhood. I happily admitted to being the unwitting dope in this story, if only to expose Troy and his shameless semi-public masturbating.
• • •
One afternoon, not long after The Night of the Incident, Troy stopped me in our room. A rare moment of communication.
“My parents are coming this weekend,” he said. “They want to take us out to brunch.”
It wasn’t a question, more a delivery of an uncomfortable fact that neither of us wanted to hear, like announcing that a nearby nuclear plant just exploded.
“Oh,” I said back, and then, without thinking, “Um. Sure. I’ll be around.”
Goddammit. Why, in this moment, I didn’t think to come up with an excuse—literally any excuse—is beyond me. This is what I do. I panic. I say yes to things. I can’t say no, especially not to food. What was I supposed to do now? I considered driving my bike into traffic just for a believable pardon.
“Oh, OK. Cool,” Troy said. I could tell he was thinking the same thing. I wasn’t supposed to say yes. He was just delivering the message, one I’m sure his parents forced him to deliver. Either that, or all of his other friends were too obnoxiously fratty to bring around, and I was simply the safest option. As far as they knew, I was Troy’s only friend.
When the weekend came, we walked silently to the only brunch place in town, where his parents were waiting. They were just as serious-looking as the first time I’d met them, on move-in day nearly a year ago. Stern and intellectual. Both doctors.
The entire meal, Troy barely spoke more than a few sentences, lifting his eyes from his plate only to stick his knife in the cup of butter or to take a sip of orange juice. It felt like we’d all just gone to the same funeral.
“So, I’m gonna have to be the one who turns this meal around,” I thought. “Just like I fix everything in this relationship.”
For the rest of the meal, I spoke to Troy’s parents as if they were my own, regaling them with stories of our inseparable friendship, the nights we spent keeping one another awake, watching movies, and comforting ourselves to sleep.
What can I say? I know how to work for a free meal.
• • •
A month later, as the school year was coming to an end, and my time with Troy was finally almost over, I had my own moment of drunken weakness.
By then, I’d been selected as the dorm historian, a meaningless role that had only one responsibility: writing the dorm newsletter. Except the newsletter wasn’t actually a newsletter, but an Onion-like page of satire taped to the back of the dorm’s bathroom stalls. A dumb piece of potty-time entertainment that fell to me.
For the last issue, I drank perhaps a few too many sips of cheap boxed wine while I was writing, and concocted a list, cleverly titled, “Things Not to Do While Your Roommate Is Sleeping.” In my defense, for the most part, the list was entirely innocent. At least 90 percent of it had absolutely nothing to do with Troy. Things like “Don’t eat a bag full of cured salamis and cheeses” and “Don’t perform maintenance on your personal pubic hedges, no matter how aggressively your freakishly pubescent body parts have begun to shed their fur.” And of course, being the drunk asshole that I can be, I added as a final touch, and in caps for unmistakable emphasis: “And most important, DON’T MASTURBATE WHILE YOU THINK YOUR ROOMMATE IS SLEEPING. TROY, I’M TALKING TO YOU. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID.”
Save. Print forty copies. Tape to the back of forty bathroom stalls. Wait to be murdered.
Now, before you write me off as a terrible asshole who broke some kind of deep, unspoken code about never tattling on your midnight-masturbating roommate, it was ostensibly a newsletter full of satire! At the very worst, everybody should’ve assumed I was making a horrible joke, except for all of the people I’d told the truth, which included basically everybody.
Regardless, Troy never mentioned it, either because he never shit in our dorm, or because he pretended, as always, he was too cool to care.
In any case, Troy was the last man I ever (reluctantly) shared a bedroom with. And I hope this story stands as a warning to any man who may consider sharing a bedroom with me in the future: Let it be known that this is my territory. What happens here is in my control.
And if you try to secretly masturbate behind my back, I will tell everybody we know that it happened.