Even newspaper writers had roommates in college. Here are some of our staff’s memories about those with whom they shared those intimate quarters.
HER NAME WAS LAURA. SHE WAS PREPPY AND fashionable and had an eating disorder. While I spent our year together at Georgetown lolling about our concrete-block dorm room, eating her mother’s untouched “CARE package” cookies and practicing my nightclub act into my brush/microphone, she always seemed to be just passing through. She reminded me of a stewardess.
She wore a scarf tightly knotted around her neck, like Leslie Caron in the movies. She favored cotton pants festooned with animals — ducks and geese, mainly. One day she came into the room and caught me trying to get a leg into one of her trousers, but she didn’t say anything.
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My boyfriend had broken up with me in order to move to Tulsa and be a TV reporter. I had a habit of crying loudly in my bed in the dark, but she never mentioned it. She was the campus beauty and after a fashion she let me be her Eve Arden sidekick. I got to choose whom she would date and made up elaborate lists of pros and cons for each prospective candidate.
I introduced her to her husband, handpicked by me because he liked jazz. On the night before their wedding, I got drunk and figured out that he was probably a better fit for me, but by then it was too late.
I ran into her recently. She was demonstrating cooking products at a Crate & Barrel in Washington. She was still thin, beautiful and married to my guy.
— Amy Dickinson
I WAS A “LATE-APP,” owing to a little deadline problem. Late dormitory applicants attending the University of Minnesota freshman year, fall 1978, ended up in the all-male dorm, Frontier Hall. The school offered a break to freshmen willing to triple-bunk for a year — three to a tiny room, rather than two.
And I thought, well, how bad could it be.
Charlie was an ROTC kid whose alarm never woke him up. He was a dirty-underwear-in-the-popcorn-popper guy, and in his merry, Puck-like way, he didn’t care whose popcorn popper. Terry, the other roommate, owned the popcorn popper. Or rather he shoplifted it and pretended to own it. He shoplifted routinely, every week, all kinds of stuff. He put more effort into shoplifting than into dentistry, which was the profession he had in mind for himself.
“Want anything from the store?” he’d say. And I’d say “Uh, no thanks, Ter.” I did not want to risk the jail time.
Then one day Terry and Charlie got into a fistfight. Either Terry shoplifted a hammock for Charlie and Charlie failed to show the proper appreciation, or Charlie used Terry’s popcorn popper once too often. After the fight, of which I caught the first part and then left for class, Terry moved out, hammock, popper and all.
And I wonder still: If he ended up becoming a dentist, what sort of “discount” did he get on his spit-sink?
— Michael Phillips
I KNEW I WAS IN TROUBLE WITH MY FIRST COLLEGE roommate even before I unpacked. There, hanging in the closet, was a scary square-dancing outfit, most notably a flouncy red-and-white skirt. Very do-si-do.
Clue two that this was not a match of similars: She had left her well-thumbed Bible on the nightstand that we shared. By contrast, I was a city girl looking forward to a beer-fueled social frenzy. I’d already spent my summer practicing not getting caught violating a curfew.
She was a farm girl from central P.A. in the college of agriculture at Penn State. I, too, was in the ag school, as a pre-vet major. Besides age and gender, that was the only thing we had in common.
This is not one of those stories where we learned to cherish each others’ differences. I can’t even remember her name. I do recall that my frequent four-letter outbursts made her turn purple. Within 24 hours, we both were looking for new roommates.
After two more tries, I found one — from Philadelphia — who is a friend forever. And the square dancer? After we split, I never saw her again.
— Ellen Warren
AFTER A FRESHMAN YEAR COHABITATING WITH A PINK-WEARING Republican roommate in a cinder block complex, I was thrilled when Mary Luby, the coolest girl in Urbana, invited me to share her off-campus apartment.
Mary was an acting major and a great cook. Her two-flat had a fireplace, a porch and real furniture, including a futon. “Before I’d even heard of a futon,” a mutual friend mused, “Mary was sleeping on one.”
She also had a string of really cool, if sometimes short-term boyfriends. Mary spent one spring break touring around with a then-unknown band called the Lemonheads. “You’ve got to meet their singer Evan,” she reported. “Very cute.”
But it wasn’t her great apartment, her cooking or her friends that made me adore Mary. It was this light that seemed to come shooting out of her eyes, hair and fingertips at all times. She had such enthusiasm and affection for people, books, food, music and ideas that it was infectious.
The year I roomed with Mary, my future husband lived just down the block, but we didn’t meet until two years later. And it’s probably a good thing because he would undoubtedly have distracted me from my favorite roommate of all time. As proof: I lost touch with Mary when I moved to Uzbekistan after my wedding 10 years ago. Mary, if you’re out there, please write.
— Monica Eng
HUGH, MY ROOMMATE AT UCLA, was a good-natured lunk who never, ever seemed to do any homework. I was quiet and studious and played classical music on my portable stereo system whenever he wasn’t around, because he made derogatory remarks whenever a “racket” by Vivaldi or Bach or Mozart greeted him at the end of the afternoon as he returned from the classes he allegedly attended.
What split us up was Hugh’s girlfriend, Lynnette. I’m not talking about a love triangle — perish the thought. I mean my roomie’s habit of gabbing with her for hour after hour over the phone practically every weeknight while I was attempting to study. Lynnette lived only a couple of minutes away in the neighboring women’s dorm. But rather than hang out with each other in person, they preferred doing so telephonically. The phone line was their romantic umbilical cord. If Hugh and Lynnette had shared a Web connection, they could have sent each other torrid e-mails and allowed me to concentrate on my homework in relative silence. Alas, it was not to be. This was 1966, decades before Al Gore invented the Internet.
One night while Hugh was having one of his marathon phone rendezvous with Lynnette, several of us guys in the dorm tried to embarrass him by singing obscene lyrics loudly enough so that she would be sure to hear them on the other end of the line. It ticked him off but didn’t get him to hang up. All my protests were in vain. Hugh told me to study somewhere else. I told him the dorm room was as much mine as his. By the end of the semester, I was showing up for exams half-prepared and my grades were suffering. Finally I told him I had no choice but to move out. He looked at me sort of hurt and puzzled. Did his talking on the phone really bother me all that much? Sensitivity was not in Hugh’s lexicon.
I wound up sharing a room on the other end of the hall with a science major who was as quiet and bookish as I — and he didn’t have a girlfriend. I occasionally ran into Hugh on campus. We exchanged a few pleasantries and that was about it. When somebody later told me he and Lynnette had broken up, I couldn’t hold back a triumphant chuckle.
— John von Rhein
I COULD FORGIVE MY COLLEGE roommate Sonya for her homecoming-queen smile, her glamorous friends, her exasperating tendency to stroll across campus with at least one ridiculously handsome man sweating and trembling in her wake.
What was truly incomprehensible to me — and nearly intolerable — was the way she approached final exams.
Like many Harvard students, I used the two weeks or so of free time before exams to frantically cram entire courses into my brain. Sonya, on the other hand, would send me into fits of anxiety — “There’s no way she’s going to pass that class!” — by spending large blocks of that crucial time period talking to old friends, making new ones or exploring intellectual interests I never knew she had.
I particularly remember sophomore year, when Sonya, by then my best friend on campus, spent much of the pre-exam period helping out on another student’s film project.
I was beside myself, but, as always, Sonya pulled through, and when, later that year, she applied for a program that took students all around the world, meeting famous filmmakers and studying their work, her exam-time film experience turned out to be a major qualification.
Sonya won a spot in the program, toured the world and taught me a lesson. I learned what I now call the Sonya Principle: doing what you really want to do qualifies you to do more of what you want to do.
The principle isn’t the fanciest thing I learned in college, and it’s not foolproof, but in times of career crisis, I’ve found it incredibly valuable.
I still rely on it 18 years later, at a time when I can’t remember half of what I learned by studying for exams.
— Nara Schoenberg
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ALL THE LETTER FROM THE University of Michigan told me was that my roommate-to-be was from Highland Park and a freshman. And all I felt upon receipt of that letter was relief. OK, she was my age, and, most likely, she was Jewish — a.k.a., someone like me.
When we finally met on move-in day, it seemed we’d be fast friends: We both were Jewish camp alums, both had been to Israel and both came from traditional, liberal Jewish families.
But after a week in Ann Arbor, all I wanted to do was leave that stuff behind. I didn’t want to rush a sorority with roomie, or accompany her to Hillel or wait in line to get into a bar, only to be turned away because one of us had a bad fake ID. I was drawn to the granola types, who drank at potluck dinners and hung out in cafes.
So we spent a year on our respective lofts, humoring each other. I helped her dress for her formals, and even pretended to forgive her when she came home drunk and threw up in my shoe (apparently those frat houses throw a pretty good Pimp and Ho party). And she spent the year watching me judge every single person I came in contact with, including her.
Junior year we both ended up on the same study-abroad program in Jerusalem. Turns out she had a lot more substance than I had given her credit for, which I could only see after getting a little more comfortable with myself and sloughing off some of my cynicism. And, I suspect, she, too, had become more self-aware over the years and was confident enough to walk outside of the Greek box. We still weren’t fast friends, but I think we liked each other. Though, of course, not enough to keep in touch.
— Allison Benedikt
AS A TEENAGER GROWING UP IN Madison, Wis., I played in a jazz quartet. Jim was our trumpet player. We shared not only the interest in jazz but also a sense of humor that often eluded other people, and during our junior and senior years at the university there, we shared an apartment.
It was the third-floor garret of a Victorian-era house on the eastern edge of campus — a living room, a bedroom and a bath. The stove was in a part of the bedroom. There was a sizable storage cupboard behind the sink that I would go into to study. I don’t remember that Jim, a handsome, smooth-talking lad, studied much.
We put the names Sahib Shihab and Yusef Latif on the door (they were bebop musicians who had converted to Islam) mostly to throw off one of Jim’s former girlfriends, who really knew how to hold a grudge.
Over Christmas vacation our last year, a girl I had been dating (think rich, pretty, spoiled, Scott Fitzgerald sort of girl) had gone home for the holiday, and a party came up I wanted to go to. I needed a date. I knew that an old high school friend of mine (and a long-ago girlfriend of Jim’s) was in town. I asked her out. After Lois and Jim ran into each other at our apartment, the spark rekindled. They dated. They married. I was best man. They’ve been married 40 years. The girlfriend who went home for Christmas married an Austrian and lives there.
Jim went on to become a labor relations executive with Kimberly-Clark. You know what I do. We see each other at high school reunions, still enjoy each other’s company. We each say how easy it would be to make the several hours’ drive to pay a real visit, but so far neither of us has.
— Charles Leroux
I HAD 10 ROOMMATES DURING my five years at Penn State. My living experiences seemed like an endless series of horrible blind dates that went on for months at a time, each one weirder than the next:
(1) The Prissy One, who thought I was a witch when I decorated the room for Halloween — just black paper bats and orange streamers. No cauldrons and blood sacrifices, mind you. But it was enough for her to alert the rest of the dorm as if it were the Salem Witch Trials.
(2) The Big-haired One, who only spoke into a tape recorder, although her first words to me were real: “I’m allergic to perfume, so put it on in the hallway.” The endless audiotapes she made to her boyfriend contrasted oddly with her secret stash of pornos.
(3) The Anorexic, who turned on all the lights while I was sleeping in order to complete her two-hour morning ritual of hair-drying and listening to the loud radio. She would crack the window to let in the subfreezing winter breeze, and when she moved out, her last request was for me to take out the bags of trash that she left behind.
(4) A snoring Disney fanatic with posters of “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast.” Even her bedspread had Mickey Mouse on it! She often counted her pencils and erasers to make sure no one borrowed any. As if anyone in college would want to be seen with a Goofy eraser.
(5) Fistfight Michelle, who, after being locked out for a few minutes as a joke, stormed in and pushed another roommate into the refrigerator, and when I tried to intervene, shoved me into a wall. I then lifted a wet dish out of the sink and pushed it into her face. Michelle told our other friends that it was all my fault. A year later, she started a fistfight with her new roommate.
(6) The Engaged One, who went to bed at 9 p.m. and responded to any sound I would make as if it had been amplified by a bullhorn.
(7) Paula (“I’m only in college to get my ‘M.R.S.'”), whose college boyfriend of four years cheated on her numerous times and, in a drunken rage, punched a hole through the wall of our apartment, which some of my security deposit went to fill. She left school without the “degree” she wanted.
(8) Two-face Jenny (you get the picture).
(9 & 10) And finally, in my fourth year, Heather and Vicki, who seemed like the perfect match compared with the succession of nightmare roommates I had already survived. We had been friends since our freshman year, but had never lived together. Fortunately, we got along, shared our clothes and food, laughed together — and they did not have any of the bizarre habits that had sent my previous roommate relationships into downward spirals. Heather and Vicki were keepers, and still my good friends.
— Kelly Haramis
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Your turn: We’d love to hear your roommate stories. Send them to Roomies, Tempo, baiduhai, 435 N. Michigan, Chicago, IL. 60611. Or e-mail to [email protected]. Please include your full name, hometown and your telephone number. And, please, spare no details.