Once Upon a Mattress

Once Upon a Mattress

            I was eighteen years old and a freshman at the University of Alabama when I learned that it’s hard to maintain a friendship with someone after you take a crap on his floor.  It was an accident, and I was insanely drunk but for whatever reason, none of that mattered to Jim.  He wanted my head.  Or more importantly, he wanted a new mattress.

            The University of Alabama is located in the heart of Tuscaloosa, an otherwise unremarkable town with not much else going for it than the Crimson Tide.  The football team is the main draw, but their academic program is quite stellar.  For my entire life, I wanted to go to a school far away and study acting, writing, and dance.  When the time came, I bowed to the pressures of my conventional little town, chose the University of Alabama, and decided to become an accountant.  I was an Auburn fan but chose UA because I had gotten a blow job in the Sears restroom in Tuscaloosa during my senior year of high school.  So I figured there must be more.

            By some strange twist of fate, David, my high school classmate, asked me to room with him as he was going to the community college in Tuscaloosa on a baseball scholarship.  His girlfriend, Cindy, and I weren’t particularly fond of each other, nor did I share a fondness with her roommate, Lynn.  But the pros outweighed the cons.  Besides the daily chance of catching David naked in the hallway of our apartment, it was inevitable that there would be plenty of hot baseball players coming over to drink beer.  And the only difference between a gay guy and a bi-curious guy is a six-pack of Budweiser and a marijuana cigarette.  Our parents moved us in late August of 1991.  Strange feelings began to surface.

            Emotionally, I moved further away from my family during the course of my senior year in high school.  Dad was deployed to Bush War I in November 1990.  Another episode in a series of what I perceived to be abandonment that I learned to handle with irritability, misplaced anger, and withdrawal.  The entire country was awash with patriotism, and our house looked like Uncle Sam had thrown up on it.  Red, white and blue ribbons adorned every door.  Yellow bows hugged our trees and mailbox.  Mom wore patriotic sweatshirts, patriotic ribbons, patriotic badges.  She put patriotic bumper stickers on our cars.  We were the poster family for keeping the home fires burning. 

            I didn’t like to cry in front of people, much less my mother.  So I simply quit going anywhere there would be talk of the war, parents, spirituality, or my father.  No more church, no support groups for the families left behind.  No patriotic assemblies at school.  Nothing.  Dad missed everything that year.  State championships, talent shows, graduation.  Even senior prom, although I was dumped by my date who got back together with the football player who knocked her up.  Dad returned home from the war just in time for me to move to Tuscaloosa.

            So as my family drove off and left me alone in my new home with David, Cindy, and Lynn, I was shocked by my welling emotion.  I waited eighteen years to be out of that house.  Now that I was, it didn’t feel good.  I was almost jealous of Mom, Dad, and my brother Keith.  Driving away, the perfect family going to their perfect home.  The three of them.  Without me.  I walked inside, and the other family of three were deep frying deer meat.  It was like we were in high school again, only with a comfortable couch and a Fry-Daddy.  Too bad I hated high school and fried meat gave me the cramps.

            As I settled into college life, my homesickness didn’t last long.  With a little time, my fondness for Cindy and Lynn grew.  We bonded over Jane Fonda workout tapes and “Steel Magnolias.”  They introduced me to Ms. Fonda’s aerobics tapes, and the skinny Cindy and I would laugh at the heftier Lynn and her reaction to any new form of exercise.

            “Fuck you Jane!” she would yell as she got up from the floor and walked into the kitchen for a doughnut.

            Cindy and Lynn hated their dorm, so they spent many a night with us.  Lynn and I would share my bed, and a jealous Cindy would often sneak into my room and sit up with us giggling until a horny David came in and dragged her back to bed.  If there was a downside to our living arrangement, it was that David never walked around naked.  Only Cindy.

            Classes were okay.  I had certain rules pertaining to my class attendance.  If it was above 90 degrees or below 50 degrees, I didn’t go.  If it was raining, snowing, or too windy, I didn’t go.  If “All My Children” was wrapping up a huge storyline, I didn’t go.  Of course, anytime a hangover was involved, there was no class for me.  My grades suffered, but my social life had never been better.  I was hanging around friends from high school who were introducing me to a whole new set of friends.  My younger gal pals were driving up to see me on weekends, and life was good.  For a while.

            Jim and Will lived together in an apartment just off campus.  Both were pretty good friends of mine in high school and still were.  Will was in a fraternity, and Jim attended the community college with David.  One Saturday, all six of us loaded up and went to a football game.  Game days in Tuscaloosa are huge.  Crowds everywhere.  You can’t swing a stick without hitting a redneck.  We taped flasks of whiskey to our legs and snuck it into the game.  So by the end of fourth quarter, we were lit up.  That particular game day, we followed it with a party at a friend’s house.  To this day, I’m not sure exactly what got into me.  I do know that I remember every single detail of what transpired.  Too bad I didn’t black out.

            I started with bourbon and coke.  From there, I segued to shooting tequila and chasing it with swills of whiskey.  Next up, keg stands!  Before I knew it, I was dancing on a coffee table with some strange chicks singing “Straight to Hell.”  When we finally left the party, it was well after midnight.  We trekked across campus to Jim and Will’s apartment.  I immediately headed for the bathroom where the vomiting was so sudden and violent, I couldn’t pick my head up out of the toilet.  There I was—the guy voted Most Likely to Succeed—on my hands and knees, my head resting on a toilet seat as I vomited up my spleen.  I crawled out of the bathroom, unable to walk while everyone was still boozing and laughing.  I made a few funny remarks, yelled at them for being assholes in high school, and made my way to Jim’s room.  I fell down, hit my head on a vacuum cleaner and passed out cold.

            Maybe two hours later, well after my friends should have taken me to the hospital to have my stomach pumped, I woke up.  Everything was quiet.  I walked around the apartment still in a stupor and looked for everyone.  I was alone.  I felt the urge to use the facilities.  So I walked back into Jim’s room which in a stupor looked like the bathroom.  I pulled my pants down, squatted, and crapped right there on his carpet.  Shag carpet.  I suddenly came to and realized that I was, literally and figuratively, in deep shit.  I made my way into the bathroom, cleaned myself up, and somehow drove myself across town to my apartment.

            The next morning, I opened one eye expecting to see God telling me I’m dead.  No such luck.  It was David, Cindy, and Lynn.  The looks on their faces told me that the night before was no bad dream.  A wave of disgust washed over me.  Their jabs and one-liners didn’t help.  I called Will, apologized and made plans to clean their apartment.  Will laughed it off but made it clear that I was expected to come over immediately with cleaning supplies.  To make matters worse, their air-conditioning broke on this 85-degree day, so their apartment was warm.  Very warm. 

            I arrived at their apartment with sixty dollars worth of cleaning supplies to find them hanging out the second-story window for air.  Will was still laughing.  Jim was eerily quiet.  I cleaned the apartment from floor to ceiling.  I cleaned rooms that I never even touched.  I vacuumed, dusted, mopped, scrubbed.  When I was finished, their place was pristine.  No one could tell that someone had shat the place up the night before.  I was about to leave when Jim spoke.

            “You owe me a new mattress.”

            And he was dead serious.  I’m still not sure how his mattress got muddied, but with that sentence, a two month long battle of words began.  Friends took sides, vicious personal attacks were common, and Jim and I spent an inordinate amount of energy declaring the other mentally unfit.  The whole thing ended when I was forced to tell Dad what happened.  He threatened to send me to rehab and told me to have Jim’s father call him where they could work something out.  Obviously, Jim’s father wanted no part of it, because when I told Jim what Dad said, he told me to have my parents send the money over to him directly.

            “Are you fucking kidding me?”  I was livid.  “For months, you wanted me to tell Dad and that’s exactly what I did.  It’s between him and you now.  If you want your goddamned money, go talk to my father.”

            He didn’t talk to my father, and the damage was done.  Dad watched me like a hawk from then on.  Jim and I didn’t speak for over a year, and since Will was his roommate, we didn’t speak either.  And I realized that both of us accomplished our goals.  I didn’t have to buy Jim a new mattress.  And Jim made sure I was utterly humiliated.  Our months long battle of bitchery came to a close, and even though blood was shed, I could declare victory.  And so could Jim.

            We began our college career as adversaries, but David, Cindy, and Lynn stepped up to the plate and stood up for me every chance they got.  We finished our freshman year. David got a starting position on his college’s baseball team, Cindy continued to walk around naked, Lynn threw away the Jane Fonda tapes, and I got a blow job from one of David’s teammates. 

And I didn’t even have to break out the marijuana.