An insufferable roommate with a pumpkin head.

I once had an insufferable roommate with a pumpkin head. We’ll call him L.

He was the son of a minister and lived a clean life, which must have been difficult for him, because he had me and Mark as roommates. We drank and smoked pot and had sex with our girlfriends, though not in front of him. The sex part.

He disapproved.

L.: Asian Supremacist

Roommate Mark was sitting on the stinking blue couch in the living room, holding his eyes, hung-over. L. is there, lifting weights.

Mark: “Got any aspirin or Tylenol or something?”

L (1,000 yard stare. Barely concealing his contempt for Mark’s indiscipline): “No, dude. I don’t drink.”

Mark: “Well, you don’t get headaches…you know, from stress or something.”

L: “No, Dude. Asians don’t get stress. We don’t get headaches. Just how our brains work.”

L. had another pet racial theory that he’d rant about from time to time: white guys can develop muscle mass without doing a goddamn thing, while Asians have to work their asses off to get manly muscles. Since Mark and I, while Causcasian, were toneless mountains of pale gelatin, and L. was fit as a fiddle, we were unsure what exactly sparked these rants. We would discuss it over bong loads. Strangely, we never found the answer.

L. gets an anatomy lesson.

L. lived in fear of his father, the minister. As such, he blinkered himself to the temptations of the world to such an extant that Mark and I could make up completely spurious facts, and have L. believing them for, say, most of an afternoon. We controlled his experience of the universe at will, in other words.

There was one patently retarded fact we passed along to L. that to this day astounds me that we got away with it at all.

Back when I was living with him, I think L. had maybe kissed a girl. He was a stylish, goodish looking guy, but extremely dopey and ascared of girls.

I’m unsure of the context, but one afternoon Mark and I convinced L. that, under certain conditions, a woman anus will whistle like a tea kettle during sex, and that if a fellow was so inclined, he could play it like a bosun’s whistle.

This understandably shocked L., and he began asking a lot of considered, deliberate questions about the female anatomy and the exact conditions that this phenomenon can created.

In other word, he believed us. For a glorious, delicious twenty odd minutes, L. believed this utterly half-assed piece of bullshit. How is it possible? What Jedi powers did we have over his pumpkin head?

It puzzles me to this day.

L. keeps the conversation going.
L. had the conversation skills of a loaf of bread. He was infamous for walking into the middle of parties in his sweats with a bowl of popcorn and turning on the TV. “Dude, SNL is on.”

My girlfriend at the time was responsible for bringing famous graphic designers to talk to the graphic design students at the University. The University was in a picturesque little Podunk cow town on the California coast, but the graphic department had a reputation for quality, so she managed to bring in some respectable names.

The speakers usually had dinner with the students at some local diner after the chat. L., then in his Senior year, and gearing up for a job search, went religiously to these things.

So, dinner at some bistro…the statesman like designer holding court with a dozen dewy-eyed undergrads. A lull in the conversation.

L. sees his opening, and makes a run for it: “I read that pigs are so intelligent that if they had arms they could operate simple machines.”

For some reason, the lull continued after that. The conversation was not marshaled. I wonder why?