My roommate my sophomore year in college was a guy I'll call Tom. Tom was perhaps the most pretentious, pompous guy I've ever known; and if I'd thought about it a bit, I would have realized this a lot sooner than I did. The telling clue should have been that one of the first things he told me about himself that first day was that he was a philosophy major. Of course, he neglected to add that he was minoring in bullshit. He would debate everything from the existence of God to the significance of gnats and whether or not they had souls. You name it, he'd run on at the mouth about it until everyone within fifty feet was ready to hurl.
But there was more to his elitist attitude that what came out of his mouth: it was his behavior regarding what came out of the other end. Our dorm was one of those suite arrangements, with four guys sharing two bedrooms, two study rooms, and a small, connecting bathroom. The plumbing facilities weren't much bigger than a closet: two shaving sinks, two medicine cabinets, one shower stall, and one toilet. The four of us soon became comfortable enough with each other that we kept the two doors open, constantly walking through to visit one another. This meant that we frequently saw each other on the toilet, shaving, and performing other ablutions.
Thus the other three of us in the suite soon noticed that Tom had an extremely fussy ritual for taking a dump. Announcing to the rest of us early on that he did not wish to offend anyone, he would take five or ten minutes tamping sweet-smelling tobacco into his pipe (and, yes, he wore a smoking jacket around the suite!) before taking a seat. Truth to tell, it would have been fine with me to suffer a brief whiff of the end result of our dismal cafeteria food than to have to put up with a twenty-five minute period of those suffocating, incense-like pipe aromas unrelentingly assaulting our nostrils in our confining little suite.
We eventually adjusted to his puffing performances, even though I always had the feeling he was auditioning for Masterpiece Theater. Imagine my surprise, then, when Tom volunteered a bit of personal info about himself that I definitely considered to be too much information. One evening as he was walking to the bathroom to take a shower, he turned to me and said, "Well, I'm off to make a fresh ass!"
Thinking I understood what he was saying, I replied, "Yeah, we all have one when we get out of the shower!"
To which he returned evenly, "I don't. I only wash my ass once a week. The build-up gets a little crusty, so it takes me a while."
And thus that mental picture challenged my gag reflex for a couple of minutes.
While he was in the shower doing things that decades later might have appeared in a Jackass movie, I was perplexed by the contradiction of it all. I couldn't do the math because it just didn't add up. Here was a guy who went to inordinate lengths to choreograph an elaborate and rather prissy log-a-rhythm mini-drama to avoid offending us, but then delighted in confessing to me that he let his lava harden for up to a week before finally chipping it away and emerging fit for polite company.
I never viewed Tom the same after that. I decided that I didn't want to room with him as a rising junior and we parted company, although I never told him why. Since then, I've often wondered if this character ever found a woman who would tolerate such primitive hygiene in their most intimate situations. Let me put it to you this way: if he did indeed find a woman for whom it was no big deal, that's one couple with whom I wouldn't want to spend any time in the Jacuzzi!
