Love Is A Palindrome, Part III: Great Expectorations

The rest of the ride up was uneventful, except for the occasional sob and prayer to God, or god-like entity, that I was right about my future roommate's pre-ordained geekdom. As far as I was concerned, giving your child a palindrome for a name was akin to naming your son Jeeves, or your daughter Bambi; you've pretty much drawn up their life plan right there. I wanted to send his parents a thank you card.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Kramm,

Thank you for naming your child Mark. Out of all the names in the world, frankly, I’m not sure why you chose that one. Perhaps you chose it because you have a wicked sense of humor, or because you had full mental health coverage for your family and you didn’t want it to go to waste. Or maybe you are both dyslexic, and you thought you were naming him something else. I am all for equal rights for dyslexics, by the way, who are no less intelligent than the rest of us. Theo Huxtable was one, you know, and he was really smart! Or at least his parents were. Actually, I think he went to a community college.

In any event, your name selection was very beneficial to me, which is really all that matters in the end.

Sincerely,
Jonah K. Haslap

But it also occurred to me, even with my head in the Hamburgler’s toilet, that I could be wrong about Mark Kramm. After all, there must be a CEO somewhere named Jeeves, or a Bambi who is not a complete slut. So somewhere between Providence and Pawtucket, I decided that whatever Mark Kramm was, I would live with it. Even if he enjoyed skinning rabbits. Even if he liked peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Even if he was a Republican.

As long as he wasn't attractive. Above all, I hoped Mark Kramm would not be attractive. An attractive roommate would kill me. Figuratively, when I tore myself up inside lusting after him, and literally, when he caught me.
Of course, the chances that I wouldn't be attracted to Mark Kramm on some level were slim. At 17, I could find something attractive in most anyone. If its shorts jiggled when it jogged, I wanted to see what was in them. It didn't help that most of the boys in my high school class were objectively unattractive (something in the Long Island drinking water, I suspect, turns all gentile boys into Joey Buttafuco, and all Jewish boys into Mel Brooks). That just lowered my standards. Drama freaks; geeks; hippies; delinquents; even spazzes. I wanted them all. Too bad Screech wasn't gay, he would have an easy sell with me.

But there was nothing more unattainable -- and therefore, more desirable -- than the highly prized and much sought-after jocks. In most respects, I was a social black sheep, except within my own little circle of other black sheep. The more people enjoyed something, the less interesting I found it. But when it came to my penis, I was just a sheep, white and woolly (at least until I discovered the magic of trimming), sighing and panting, and sometimes dribbling, along with the rest of the crowd, as the varsity football team swept across the gym floor during pep rallies, like the Greeks swept across a field of Trojans. And I was always hoping to use one of my Trojans on a nice, firm Greek. Sadly, I never got that opportunity, although fortunately Trojans double nicely as water balloons.

Years later, when I finally grew into my looks and out of my decade's-long pubescence (I had my last growth spurt when I was 24, while most other guys my age were already growing a bald spot), either because I had become more confident or because I had grown more complacent, I started actually sleeping with jocks. Only then did I realize that ounces for washboard pounds, sex with them was no better than sex with anyone else, and was often far worse, as they are frequently so self-obsessed that in bed, they resemble less an Abercrombie ad and more a can of no-salt tuna fish, lying motionless on a slab while you do all the work. I hate doing all the work. It leaves me no time to lie motionless myself.

At this stage in my hormonal blossoming, however, jocks were still that golden carrot. Nevermind that I had never actually eaten a carrot before in my life, golden or otherwise. I didn’t even know what I would do if the possibility of sex ever actually presented itself. I suppose it would have involved some clothing manipulation and lots of praising Jesus, at least on my part. Even though I was Jewish, Jesus seemed like the appropriate choice. No one praises Jehovah when they have an orgasm.
Contrary to what my mother believed, though, I did not live in a fantasy world. (According to her, if you’re not constantly looking for anthrax in your orange juice, you’re out of touch with reality.) I knew that neither Satan nor Jesus was putting a jock in my bed anytime soon. I knew that the closest I would come to an All-American lover was my All-American pornography. I knew that I would never sleep with the captain of the football team.

I just hoped the captain of the football team wouldn’t be sleeping anywhere near me.

When we finally arrived at the dormitory, I had exhausted all the possible computations for the inevitable meeting with my once and future roommate, and mentally dealt with them all. Let Adolph Hitler, Jr. walk through that door, I was ready. At least we’d have something to talk about. Your great-grandfather tortured my great-grandfather, and so on. Sounds like an excellent basis for a rewarding and long-lasting friendship.

While my dad went to get a cart to start hauling Her Royal Pigginesses up to their new thrones, I took my first hard look at the campus. Everyone around me was smiling from ear-to-ear; the parents, giving up their burdens, and the children, giving up theirs. Sometime during the trip, the sun had started shining (it must have been after the last rest stop, since I spent the remainder of the ride scraping mud off my sneakers and onto my father’s car, which he greatly appreciated), and it lit up the bright young faces of the new students, exceedingly hopeful, temporally sober. Even the dormitory, which I had remembered as cold and institutional during summer orientation (at which the most “orienting” the incoming class received was discovering the location of the nearest liquor store that didn’t card), looked happy to welcome a new group of freshmen, whose alcohol-induced vomit would soon line its halls.

It was an idyllic scene. Which is to say, I was completely uncomfortable in it. I don’t do well with idyllic. When something isn’t flawed, I just assume that the flaw is so big that it must be hiding. I swear there’s a massive alien spaceship in the Grand Canyon, parked there to lull us all into a sense of complacency, before it emerges and takes out Congress. (I haven’t warned anyone about my suspicions, though, considering the current state of Congress.)

I took a deep breath and made a B-line for the dorm, trying not to make any eye contact with passers-by. I wasn’t ready for friends, not yet. A hasty friend is a recipe for disaster. Maybe if Stalin had gotten to know Mussolini a little better he would have thought twice about teaming up. And I’m sure Balki would have ditched that dweeb cousin in a Chicago minute, had he ever stepped back from their insta-friendship and realized that he was the real life of the party in that relationship, and cousin Larry was just holding him back.

I got to my room, and found my father trying to wrestle my fourteen boxes of junk into a room that could have scared Al Capone straight. The walls were grayish-white concrete, and the linoleum floor was peeling under our feet. There was a small window on the far wall, with a gate that couldn’t be opened. The gate was instantly frightening. We were on the ninth floor – were Boston criminals so technologically adept that they could scale the walls up to our room? I was comforted to learn several weeks later that the school had installed the gates after a series of students had thrown themselves out the dormitory windows. Gates are cheaper than lawsuits.

Then I noticed the size of the room. The furniture was lined up in parallel lines against opposite walls – two identical beds, two identical dressers, and two identical desks (the aesthetic symmetry was appealing, at least). The beds were about four feet apart, and there was approximately eight cubic feet of free space in the entire room. Two of us were going to live in here? Did I accidentally request a room for midgets? How was I going to pass gas without him hearing it (a major concern, given my lactose intolerance and unquenchable love for cheese)? We might actually need to have sex, just to fit us both in the room at the same time.

If it hadn’t been a dormitory, it would have been a hellhole.

“Jonah, I don’t think you’re going to have enough room for all of these,” he said, motioning to the stuffed animals that he had carelessly deposited in the corner. “Maybe you should think about sending some home.”

“No, no, that won’t be necessary,” I replied, quickly lifting all of the Miss Piggys off the floor. She’s not pleasant when she feels rejected, and I had my own neuroses to worry about right now. “I’ll find a place for them.”

I opened my closet – which was set off from the room by a thin curtain – and placed the superfluous Piggys on the top shelf, overlooking the room, her favorite spot. Suddenly I noticed that Mark Kramm had already moved in. By “moved in,” I mean that he had hastily dumped his luggage on his bed, and scotch-taped a poster of Pamela Anderson Lee to the wall (who I had previously recognized only as the female lifeguard on the show with all those hot shirtless guys). Pamela Anderson Lee was not a good sign. Geeks don’t have posters of Pamela Anderson Lee. Even straight ones.

An even worse sign, though, was the various sports accoutrements scattered across his side of the room. I spotted a lacrosse stick, a catcher’s mitt, and a half-inflated basketball. This guy wasn’t just a sports enthusiast. He was a dilettante.

Still, I hoped that he would be one of the few unattractive jocks I saw around the halls in high school, the relatively non-threatening kind who had nothing going for them except an excess of testosterone and an ability to belch loudly. Don’t forget, his name is still a palindrome! How much of a jock could he possibly be?

But I didn’t have the opportunity to run through the ramifications of this new discovery. Just as I started working myself into a tizzy, the door began to open. Mark Kramm was coming home. My time was up. Even the Hamburgler couldn’t save me now.
Please don’t be hot. Please don’t be hot. Please don’t be hot.

Oh fuck.

In walked – jogged, actually – my new roommate, his tight t-shirt (declaring his large bosom predilection) and gym shorts clinging to his tanned, chiseled body. His arms and legs bulged with muscles bigger than my neck, and somehow he had escaped both the curse of the Jewish nose and the Jewish hair to develop a perfectly sculpted face. His dark skin was set off by crystal blue eyes that would have attracted my gaze immediately, if my eyes hadn’t spontaneously traveled south to what I quickly learned was not a sock-enhanced crotch. He had just the right amount of hair in all the right places, at least as far as I could tell at this point, and no hair in the wrong places. Mark Kramm was the after-picture in an episode of Extreme Makeover.

More than scared, I was angry at having been misled. Screw the thank you note to Mr. and Mrs. Kramm. Mark Kramm was not a geek. He wasn’t even a nerd. Mark Kramm was, by most objective standards, a hunk. That’s not a term I throw around loosely. I haven’t known or seen too many hunks in my life; one or two bartenders at The Cock, a few pornography actors, and maybe a handful of television celebrities. But Mark Kramm was one of them. He could have given the porno actors a run for their money. And it’s a good think he was Jewish. Otherwise, he might have gotten a bunch of priests into a shitload of trouble.

“Jonah, what do you want me to do with the stuffed Muppet Babies?” he asked, holding Fozzie in his right hand and Kermit in his left (which was wrong – Kermit always liked being on the right). My father always had perfect timing, ever since he left my mother on the same day that I found my first facial hair.

Fortunately, the hunk du jour was still listening to his Walkman, which was blasting something loud and rock and roll’ish, probably by a band that most kids my age worshipped but I’d never heard of.

“Hi, I’m Jonah,” I shouted to him, extending my hand. I knew enough about social etiquette to shake his hand, at least, though I was afraid I’d unconsciously reach out and shake something else instead. Mark Kramm took off his earphones, wiped his arm on his sleeve, and reached out his hand.

“Hi, I’m Mark, nice to meetchya,” he said, with the kind of carelessness of speech that only the very stupid and the very beautiful can use with impunity. I looked down when our hands touched – as I always did whenever I came into actual human contact -- and watched his shorts jiggle in sync with his arm as we shook hands. I quickly turned my attention back up to his piercing blue eyes, but since they too were unsafe, I rested my gaze on his pinky finger, the only part of his body that I felt ambivalent towards. I have no use for the inefficient appendages.

“You too,” I replied, trying to act calm and collected, which is extremely difficult for someone whose usual baseline is nervous and panicked. “This is my dad.”

My father nodded in Mark’s direction, uninterested in the first chapter of a potential tragedy unfolding before his eyes. He planned to make the trip up and back in one day, and nothing was going to stop him, not even my unscrewing the gate on the window and joining the ranks of flying freshmen before me.

“I’m going to get the rest of your crap,” my father said. “It’s getting late, and I only brought my sunglasses with me so I can’t drive in the dark.” He had a keen mind for the kind of lies that were so obviously lies, you couldn’t argue with them without losing your temper, so you let them go just to fight another day.

Left alone to our own devices, I wasn’t sure what to do next. The introductions were out of the way. I was Jonah; he was Mark. Check. We were roommates. Check. Somewhere in the back of mind I pictured him throwing me down on the bed and having his way with me, but then I remembered my mother looking for anthrax in her orange juice, and erased that fantasy from my mind.

The silence weighed heavily on me, though Mark Kramm didn’t seem to notice. One man’s heart attack is another man’s mild chest pain. He tossed his Walkman on the bed and opened one of his unorganized suitcases, which appeared to overflow with sports equipment and soft-core, straight male-directed magazines, neither of which appealed to me.

“That’s my girlfriend,” he said, ruffling through his bag and pointing to a picture he had taped to his desk. “She’s hot, huh?”

I couldn’t see the picture very well, which appeared to be a wallet-sized high school yearbook photo, but it didn’t really matter. It was more of a rhetorical question.

“Um, yeah, definitely. Hot.” I wondered where my father had packed the screwdriver, and how long it would take to get the gate off the window.

Mark Kramm found a towel in his bag and turned back towards me, for the first time noticing that his dorm room had turned into the toddler section of Toys R’ Us. His eyes narrowed on me, becoming less sexy and more suspicious. Mark Kramm finally realized that his new roommate might be less into playing with balls, and more into playing with balls.

“Ok bud,” he said, beginning to peel off his sweaty clothes, layer by layer, until he stood before me in his white boxer-briefs. I had never seen a pair of boxer-briefs before, but as far as I was concerned at that point, they ranked close to air conditioning and penicillin on the list of great human accomplishments. “I’m going to take a shower.”

He wrapped a towel around his waist and pulled his underwear off underneath it, which only heightened my attraction. There is less pleasure in the bang than in the anticipation of it.

“You know, your name is a palindrome,” I blurted out as he walked towards the door, hoping to form some common bond with my new roommate during our first encounter, as his “my girlfriend is hot” attempt didn’t go over too well. He paused at the door, tightening the towel around his waist and grabbing a bar of soap. It was the first time I truly understood the joke about dropping a bar of soap in a jail shower.

“A what?” So much for that.

“A palindrome,” I replied. “It’s a word that’s spelled the same backwards and forwards.” I wrote “Mark Kramm” on a piece of paper, hoping that a demonstrative exhibit would help.

“See?” I said, handing him the paper. “Mark Kramm, Mark Kramm.” I repeated his name a few times, until even I knew it was creepy.

“Oh,” he replied, crumpling the paper and tossing it in the trash basket next to his bed. “Actually, it’s Marcus.”

With that mystery solved, Marcus Kramm left, and I resumed searching the darkling sky for a time-traveling Delorean.

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Stay tuned for Love Is A Palindrome, Part IV: Empty Adjectives