Pool
By Mike Rickman
I spent 4 months in University living in the basement of a house with two other guys. The main floor of the bungalow was occupied by four Asian students who were silent for 22 hours out of the day and loud as hell between 10pm and midnight. It was pretty annoying but I liked the fact that I never spoke to or even saw them. I liked to pretend that they were ghosts forced to haunt the kitchen table of this house in Waterloo, Ontario, for transgressions against the human race committed a long time ago in their homeland of China.
One of my basement roommates was my roommate previously and blah blah he was cool.
The other roommate, Pool, was a piece of work. He really did seem like a decent guy at first, but he turned out to be an ass, but not a piece of ass. Every night when our Eastern ghosts would come out he would stomp around the basement huffing and grunting angrily about consideration for those trying to sleep. It never made sense to me as he was rarely trying to sleep at any time before 1am, but I guess he was a principal kind of guy.
Pool’s parents would drive up every second weekend and take him to stock up on food. This always involved multiple boxes of fresh fruit. Large boxes. Borderline crates. I'm not going to go so far as to say that he did not eat the fruit, as he was quite the apple chomper (please credit me with any reuse of the phrase “quite the apple chomper”) but it would have taken a cave full of fruit bats to get through these crates of fruit in the two weeks allotted between restockings.
As a result the population of our three bedroom basement abode grew to four million and three: two computer science students, one engineering student and four million fruit flies. It is incredible the sort of unexpected emotional attachment that can be made to what is essentially a flying speck of dirt. I nurtured a special bond with each individual critter. I dreamed of ways to murder each one in a unique and special way. I could have been the idea man for Castle plot lines.
It seemed reasonable to request of Pool that he dispose of Fruitopolis and all of it's inhabitants, but apparently not. Perhaps the empathy he received from them during his nightly racist rants at the ceiling was greater than I understood.
The decline in Pool’s mental stability was evident as he slammed doors and banged walls and shouted phrases last heard during screenings of World War 2 propaganda movies.
We were forced to give up on the attempts at verbal fruit intervention due to the fear of what Pool's mental state might produce as a response. We had seen what Pool was capable of.
A common stress relieving activity for me and my non-Pool roommate was to hunt each other with Nerf guns. Given the tiny space we lived in, hunting quickly degraded into duelling. During one such dueling session a wayward dart struck Pool in the back. His reaction is one that you would describe as “over”. There was yelling and spitting and a final threat of “if you hit me again I’m going to eat the dart”. We hit him again. He ate the dart.
I believe that was the night he started studying Mandarin Chinese. His grades took a dip due to his new focus of study, but by the time he graduated 3 years later he was ready to give hate-filled speeches at whatever the opposite of the United Nations is.
We took three rotting boxes of fruit and placed them outside of his bedroom door. He stepped over them the next morning, mumbled something about throwing them out and went on with his life. Not throwing them out.
Why didn’t I throw them out? Because I’m not his fucking keeper. I can stand on principle too, bitch.
The pile of boxes outside the bedroom grew taller. The fruit fly population lobbied the school for their own student union but were denied based on the fact that not one of the now 8.5 million had been accepted to the University.
I became confused as to how Pool was entering and exiting his room. I knew he was in his room at times as I would hear the music switch from Kyuss to Marylin Manson. I knew he was out of his room at times as I would see him in the kitchen, either eating fruit or screaming at Asia. How he made the transition from one space to other, though … still a mystery.
It was a tumultuous end to the term. Exams followed by a mad move to another city to start a co-op job. We did not return to that house so I cannot comment on its state of haunting. I feel like I saw Pool around the school during my subsequent years of study, but there is no sharp memory I can rely on. Did he ever escape from his room or was he trapped behind a wall of rotting fruit for all eternity? Perhaps he still haunts the basement, destined to spend all of eternity failing to get those goddamn chin musiks to shut up.
I have heard that a monster comprised of brown tangerines, soggy apples and fruit flies now roams the halls of the University. The next time you see a stinky Computer Science student think to yourself, is that b.o. or rotting fruit I smell?
- - -
Mike Rickman is a writer, blogger and full time person. At http://www.indieposit.com he has created a place to celebrate independent blogging by passionate and creative people.
By Mike Rickman
I spent 4 months in University living in the basement of a house with two other guys. The main floor of the bungalow was occupied by four Asian students who were silent for 22 hours out of the day and loud as hell between 10pm and midnight. It was pretty annoying but I liked the fact that I never spoke to or even saw them. I liked to pretend that they were ghosts forced to haunt the kitchen table of this house in Waterloo, Ontario, for transgressions against the human race committed a long time ago in their homeland of China.
One of my basement roommates was my roommate previously and blah blah he was cool.
The other roommate, Pool, was a piece of work. He really did seem like a decent guy at first, but he turned out to be an ass, but not a piece of ass. Every night when our Eastern ghosts would come out he would stomp around the basement huffing and grunting angrily about consideration for those trying to sleep. It never made sense to me as he was rarely trying to sleep at any time before 1am, but I guess he was a principal kind of guy.
Pool’s parents would drive up every second weekend and take him to stock up on food. This always involved multiple boxes of fresh fruit. Large boxes. Borderline crates. I'm not going to go so far as to say that he did not eat the fruit, as he was quite the apple chomper (please credit me with any reuse of the phrase “quite the apple chomper”) but it would have taken a cave full of fruit bats to get through these crates of fruit in the two weeks allotted between restockings.
As a result the population of our three bedroom basement abode grew to four million and three: two computer science students, one engineering student and four million fruit flies. It is incredible the sort of unexpected emotional attachment that can be made to what is essentially a flying speck of dirt. I nurtured a special bond with each individual critter. I dreamed of ways to murder each one in a unique and special way. I could have been the idea man for Castle plot lines.
It seemed reasonable to request of Pool that he dispose of Fruitopolis and all of it's inhabitants, but apparently not. Perhaps the empathy he received from them during his nightly racist rants at the ceiling was greater than I understood.
The decline in Pool’s mental stability was evident as he slammed doors and banged walls and shouted phrases last heard during screenings of World War 2 propaganda movies.
We were forced to give up on the attempts at verbal fruit intervention due to the fear of what Pool's mental state might produce as a response. We had seen what Pool was capable of.
A common stress relieving activity for me and my non-Pool roommate was to hunt each other with Nerf guns. Given the tiny space we lived in, hunting quickly degraded into duelling. During one such dueling session a wayward dart struck Pool in the back. His reaction is one that you would describe as “over”. There was yelling and spitting and a final threat of “if you hit me again I’m going to eat the dart”. We hit him again. He ate the dart.
I believe that was the night he started studying Mandarin Chinese. His grades took a dip due to his new focus of study, but by the time he graduated 3 years later he was ready to give hate-filled speeches at whatever the opposite of the United Nations is.
We took three rotting boxes of fruit and placed them outside of his bedroom door. He stepped over them the next morning, mumbled something about throwing them out and went on with his life. Not throwing them out.
Why didn’t I throw them out? Because I’m not his fucking keeper. I can stand on principle too, bitch.
The pile of boxes outside the bedroom grew taller. The fruit fly population lobbied the school for their own student union but were denied based on the fact that not one of the now 8.5 million had been accepted to the University.
I became confused as to how Pool was entering and exiting his room. I knew he was in his room at times as I would hear the music switch from Kyuss to Marylin Manson. I knew he was out of his room at times as I would see him in the kitchen, either eating fruit or screaming at Asia. How he made the transition from one space to other, though … still a mystery.
It was a tumultuous end to the term. Exams followed by a mad move to another city to start a co-op job. We did not return to that house so I cannot comment on its state of haunting. I feel like I saw Pool around the school during my subsequent years of study, but there is no sharp memory I can rely on. Did he ever escape from his room or was he trapped behind a wall of rotting fruit for all eternity? Perhaps he still haunts the basement, destined to spend all of eternity failing to get those goddamn chin musiks to shut up.
I have heard that a monster comprised of brown tangerines, soggy apples and fruit flies now roams the halls of the University. The next time you see a stinky Computer Science student think to yourself, is that b.o. or rotting fruit I smell?
- - -
Mike Rickman is a writer, blogger and full time person. At http://www.indieposit.com he has created a place to celebrate independent blogging by passionate and creative people.
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I was party to your life (happily)during those years but was never aware of your difficulty with the "fruit guy". A can of Raid would have temporarily gotten rid of the Gestapo but then your ice cream may have tasted like Raid. I honestly don't remember that abode but there's a lot I don't remember or chose not to remember.
RR
I'm for real.