TTFN

Going away to college is supposed to be one of the most exciting times of your life. You're finally free from the ever watchful eyes of your parents. Free to go out whenever you want, wherever you want, and come home only if you feel like it. You don't have to report to anyone. You're your own boss.

Sure, you have to find that balance between having fun and being responsible, but it's all up to you. Wanna stay up until 4am drinking 3 cases of Natty Light with your crew? Go for it. Wanna take a day off of class to go do something stupid instead? All you. Just make sure you don't do it all the time or the fun will come to an end pretty quickly. You learn to toe the line between Fun and Stupid, and hopefully make it through to graduation.

I stayed home and went to community college for a year and a half because I just wasn't ready to do anything. No motivation whatsoever. I didn't really care about going out to parties, and I was never a big drinker. I've always thought beer tasted like someone grabbed a skunk after a rainy day and just wrung it out into a bottle. Then again, I don't like the way pizza tastes either, so I'm probably the moron on this one.

Anyway, halfway through my sophomore year, I decided to transfer to a big school. I didn't know anyone there, and was lucky enough to get assigned to an off campus apartment. These were the apartments where the athletes lived, and everyone else had to enter a lottery to get a spot there. I somehow got lucky. So I missed out on dorm life, and ended up living with a decent guy named Brian for my first semester. Only thing was, this kept me from meeting many other people. I went to class, occasionally went to the gym to make sure everyone knew I was the worst basketball player at the school, and went back to my apartment.

After my first semester, Brian graduated. and it left me scrambling to find another person to live with me so I could keep my highly sought-after apartment for the upcoming year. Brian's girlfriend knew a guy that was in a similar situation, and she described him as "weird but nice". Okay...I guess that could work. Maybe I'm a little weird and nice, too. So I met him, and he fit the description, so I asked him to come live in the apartment starting in the fall.

Over the summer, I got a letter from him. This is where it all started to go downhill. Email existed. Cell phones existed. But he wrote me an old-school, snail-mail letter. In the letter, he told me he was only doing one semester then graduating in December, so that meant he should get the bigger room with the better view, then I could have it after he left.

He also told me that he would be bringing plates and glasses and silverware, and that he had a record player, so I don't need to bring any of that stuff. Again, this wasn't 1937. This was 2000. College kids didn't listen to record players. We stole our music off of Napster and Kazaa like normal people.

He eventually signed his letter with the one line I would have never expected any self-respecting 20-something year old man to write. "Tata for now, Chris".

From that moment on, he became known to everyone in my family as "Tata". That was his name. I wrote him back, and told him that I would be bringing a microwave, pots and pans, my Playstation, and that I would be taking the larger room with the better view, seeing as how I asked him to live in MY apartment. And I just signed it with my name. No fancy salutation. Not even "Sincerly, John". I just wrote my name and that was it. BECAUSE I AM NOT A CRAZY PERSON.

He wrote back, said it was okay that I had the bigger room, and said he would see me on the first day. Then he did it again. Only this time, it was even worse. This time, he signed it, "TTFN, Chris". This may seem like I'm making a big deal out nothing, and I know I've already written way too much about it already, but I just need to paint the picture for you to be sure you see him as the Super Villain that he really was.

So I get there as early as possible on the first day students are allowed, just to be sure I keep him from stealing the big room. He didn't show up until later in the afternoon, and I offered to help him bring his stuff in. As he was unpacking, he started pulling out his wine glass collection. "These ones are for reds, and these ones are for whites..." Oh boy. He wasn't gay. He had a girlfriend. And even if he was gay, I wouldn't have cared. One of my very best friends who ended up being my roommate my senior year was gay. He was the man. Tata, however, was NOT the man. As he continued unpacking, he started to go through his record collection. "I have the soundtrack to South Pacific, and here's Oklahoma! and here's The King and I..."

This was the music he would play at 6:00 am full blast in our living room on his record player. I told him he had to stop, not even so much for me, but because I had gigantic, menacing football players living next door. One day one of them asked me (very politely) if we could keep the music down until at least 10:00. I apologized and told him it was my roommate and then ran away. I told Tata that he had to cut the shit or deal with our neighbor that could bench press the Lexus our school probably gave him.

Speaking of cutting the shit...Tata flushed the toilet approximately 35% of the time. I would go in there to find Tata Turds doing the backstroke in the toilet at least 5 times a week. And there would be weird lettucey looking crap in there, too. I think he avoided flushing because he was a big time tree-hugging, over the top environmentalist. He went to the school of Environmental Science and Forestry that was on our campus. These were people that would yell at you for walking on the grass on their campus, because they wanted to protect the grass. But at the same time, they would drive big, metal stakes into that very same grass to put up signs to tell everyone to keep off the grass. Somehow, they didn't see the irony in any of this.

I am also 100% sure Tata didn't wear deodorant. His body odor was so bad that it eventually started to get onto my clothes. I was dating a girl, and she refused to come into my apartment because it smelled so bad. There was one time we were going out, and I picked her up and she said I had to go back home because I smelled so bad. I had JUST taken a shower. It turned out that my jacket smelled because it was in the same closet as his jacket. But I didn't smell it because I had become so used to living with it.

I started driving home every weekend. 6 hours home, 6 hours back. All just to get away from Tata. Every time I left, I locked the door to my bedroom, because I didn't want to risk him stepping foot into my personal space and leaving little leafy B.O. riddled pieces of himself on my floor. After my first trip home and back, he said, "Hey, I think the door to your room is locked. I tried to get in there to check something and I couldn't get in." This was the first time of many that I had to restrain myself from punching him in his horrible, beardy face.

Just to give you a better picture of him, he was about 5'7", normal build, and always wore flannel shirts and cargo pants with either boots or Birkenstocks. He had round little glasses and a beard that I can only describe as "juicy". Like, if you grabbed his beard and wrung it out, beard juice would come pouring out of it. Think Tom Hanks in the movie Cast Away, only fluffier. He also wore a green safari hat every day. He had a girlfriend that lived in Wisconsin that I met one time, and not to be mean, but she looked like a rejected Star Wars character. Her body proportions were all out of whack. She was a heavier girl, but her arms were spaghetti thin and dangled down to her ankles. The only time I met her, my two best friends were with me, and after meeting her, the first thing they both said was, "what the eff just happened???" I eventually found out that Tata was cheating on her, and he would brag to me about it.

The one time I had to literally drag myself away from him so I didn't kill him was while I was watching a baseball game and he was eating soup. I grew up a die-hard Red Sox fan, and my school was in New York, so the only time I ever got to see the Red Sox play was if they were playing the Yankees. I was sitting on the couch watching a Sox-Yankees game, and Tata came home, warmed up a can of soup, and plopped down on the couch next to me. He proceeded to slurp every spoonful of soup like he was training for the World's Most Annoying Soup Eater Championship. I got up, turned the tv off, and as I went upstairs to watch the game in my room, I yelled "TATA!!!!" like a deranged lunatic.

He graduated in December, and that was the last I ever heard of him. Or smelled of him. I didn't say goodbye or tata or I hope you rot in hell. I just let him vanish into the great unknown, much like one of his leafy shit surprises I would flush down the toilet a few times each week. A month or so later, some random kid named Chad showed up at my apartment without any forewarning, claiming to be my new roommate. Like a normal person.