Roommate from the Black Lagoon

I’ve had a lot of interesting roommates in my life. The first was Benny, who I’ve written about before because he used to throw mail down the elevator shaft. I liked Benny and the roommates who followed him very much. But I’ve also had some really bad roommates, and of those, Jesse Lee Baker the Third was the worst.

I went to college at the Ohio State University. For my first two years, I lived in an air conditioned mausoleum known to OSUites as Lincoln Tower. In each room, Lincoln boasts one 2×2 window that cannot be opened and absolutely no intermingling with the outside air. Lincoln and its sister Morrill Tower are identical in all ways but two: First, while the entirety of Morrill is a dorm, the bottom fifteen of Lincoln’s thirty floors are administrative offices staffed by people whom the university deemed deserving of a terrible punishment. And second, while Morrill is basic student housing, Lincoln is one of OSU’s honors dorms.

OSU created honors dorms for people who had been deceived into thinking that the purpose of college was education. In general, the honors dorms had much less noise, much less partying, and much less sex than their plebeian counterparts. While our vending machines were stocked with candy, pop, and over-the-counter stimulants like No-Doz, Morrill’s were stocked with condoms. The one saving grace was that we did have our own nerdy breed of shenanigans. Though I never woke up in a pile of naked sorority girls, I did see a pickle electrocuted more than once.

Life in Honors suited my lifestyle perfectly. I was such a partier that I would occasionally have up to one drink in a row, and I was a devious ladies’ man who had been on more than two dates by the time I turned 18. Some of my roommates managed to be cool and smart at the same time (like the guy who used to roll the 32 gallon bathroom trashcan into his room on Friday nights “just in case,” and often woke up in last night’s clothes and asked us how he got home) but many were more like Henry, who would stand behind people while they were working and mouth-breathe heavily.

The Towers were arranged in suites. Each door off of the hallway led into a wedge-shaped common room walled with what looked like yak hair, and beyond that were four two-person rooms and a shared bathroom. So while I only shared a room with one person, I was essentially living in a group of eight. After the first year, a group of us higher-functioning nerds sifted out the spazes and mouth-breathers and formed a group of seven who would live together in Lincoln again during our sophomore year.

We could not find an eighth, so OSU found one for us. His name was Jesse Lee Baker III.

From the very beginning, Jesse Lee felt like an odd fit. He used to pop his plentiful chest acne and leave pus on the bathroom mirror. He would blow his nose in the shower, without using any sort of tissue. He took Playboys into the common bathroom and would peruse them on the john. On Friday and Saturday nights, he would comb his tiny, ratty mustache and head out to a club, asking his roommate Andy ahead of time if he could sleep elsewhere when Jesse Lee came home with a girl, which never actually happened.

Culturally, he was an enigma to us, but we tried to see past this because he shared one large similarity — he, like us, was apparently an honors student. However, this final bond vanished when we discovered that he wasn’t taking 300-level calculus like the rest of us, or even an underachieving Math 101. He was actually taking Math 050, which was remedial. And he was failing it.

To his credit, Jesse Lee did think he was intelligent. After all, OSU had put him in an honors dorm, and he was surrounded by students who understood things like information technology, political science, and soap. He would hear a discussion about astronomical “red shift” and chime in with, “Oh yeah, I know about that — red light” in an “I totally know what you’re talking about” one-up gesture. When one of the other guys couldn’t figure out how to solve a differential equation, Jesse Lee would sigh and say, “Let me look at that.” And in return, Andy helped him with his own homework by giving him the formula for perimeter: “just add up the sides.”

He was loud and he was brash. His habits mystified us in an anthropological sense, the way gorilla behavior would mystify us. One time Andy heard a hairdryer and entered the room to a shout of, “Dude, knock first!” Andy had assumed that there was no need to knock because Jesse Lee was just drying his hair. However, his assumption was only partially correct. Andy found Jesse Lee naked, with one foot up on the bed, blowdrying his undercarriage.

It didn’t make sense — and to be honest, it made us mad. We weren’t getting drunk; we weren’t getting laid. All we asked in exchange for our monastic college existence was to be sequestered away from the Jesse Lee Baker III’s of the world.

The riddle demanded investigation. Luckily, all good nerds have an inappropriately cordial relationship with the local authorities, which in this case took the form of our ostentatious 250-pound hall director, LaTisha. Andy pumped her for information and found out that Jesse Lee was in fact part of a sociological experiment that the university was conducting. The idea was to fill vacant spots in honors dormitories with low- to no-ability students in an attempt to better their academic standing. That might not be the exact wording, but I know for sure that “low- to no-ability” is verbatim because I have never heard a more accurate description of anything, ever.

We were definitely not supposed to know this, and we didn’t tell Jesse Lee. We did tell each other, as an act of self defense. Because what OSU failed to consider was that beyond the possibilities of Jesse Lee’s academic betterment or stagnation (it ended up being the latter), there was a third possible outcome to the experiment. Rather than us buoying Jesse Lee, he might well have dragged us down.

I loved my time at OSU. I paid them, and they gave me an education and some fun times. It was a fair trade, yet the university keeps calling me today, asking for donations. But what they don’t realize is that I remember the Jesse Lee Baker III experiment.

It will always be my opinion that they owe me.

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