(The above photo isn’t Frank, it’s just what came up when I Google image searched “lame dude”. He was a lot uglier than this guy too, maybe I should have searched for “ugly dude”. Next time)

I went to college. I mean I tried to go to college. I didn’t want to really, but when I graduated high school (which was no easy task for me) my Mom asked me what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I don’t remember what I told her but my actual thoughts on the matter were “I want to ride my fucking bike and bang hot chicks, mom”.

She gave me an ultimatum, either I go to community college, which they were willing to pay for (my Mom is a librarian at a state college in Massachusetts so I was able to go to any state school at a large discount) or I could get a full time job and start paying them rent to live at home. I figured college would be more fun than getting a job, so I might as well continue to live off my parents like a bum for a few more years plus be able to stay on their health insurance.

I got straight A’s in college the first year, so my Mom, proud as hell, suggested I apply to Umass Lowell (not exactly Harvard but a drastically better school) for my second year of school. I was over living at home and figured the dorms would be fun, so I went for it.

My roommate was this dude Frank. To call Frank ugly would be like saying that Louie Anderson is fat or that Kobe Bryant is good at basketball. Frank was like 5′4” and had one of those faces that reminds you of some kind of animal, but you can’t really decide what. He definitely looked more like an animal than a human. He also had this fat bitch girlfriend, who as fat and as annoying as she was, was pretty hot in comparison to Frank and she knew it. He was whipped.

I figured out pretty quickly that everyone on my floor in the dorm had lived on the same floor the year before too, and they had all gotten to live with their choice of roommates. Because I was new, I got stuck living with the dude nobody else wanted to live with, and that was Frank. Frank and I didn’t get along from the start. He had many annoying traits, but the most annoying was that he was really, really into Counterstrike and played it for hours and hours every day. He apparently didn’t realize that the sound of computerized guns firing is distracting, because he always has the volume on blast. I woke up many mornings at 9 am to him playing the game at full volume.

He was also a total moral elitist. I had this super hot girlfriend at the time who lived a few hours away and, big surprise, I was still banging other chicks. In my defense, I had told her that I was going to bang other chicks and she said she just didn’t want to hear about it. Frank knew about my agreement with my girlfriend and that didn’t stop him from letting me know whenever I had a girl over, that he thought I was doing something wrong. He told his girlfriend too and she let me know she didn’t approve of my lifestyle either. I wanted to tell Frank that he was so ugly that OF COURSE he didn’t bang other girls, he didn’t have the option to. It was a miracle that even one girl would let him touch their vagina, nevermind more than one.

The final thing you should know about Frank doesn’t really matter for you to enjoy the point of the story, but its still funny, is that Frank was poor. Being poor is fine and all, but Frank was poor due to sheer laziness. I would hear his girlfriend and his parents telling him to get a job all the time and he wouldn’t because it would cut into his Counterstrike time. Granted I wasn’t working at the time and was getting by shoplifting absurd amounts of stuff from stores and selling the goods on eBay, but at least I was making enough money to justify the fact that all I really did was do schoolwork, ride my bike and play Minesweeper.

Okay so you know how a lot of times people will call a nice article of clothing by its brand name? Like for instance, Timberlands are a fairly high quality brand of boot, so it wouldn’t.be out of the ordinary for someone to say “I just bought a new pair of Timberlands”. Another example, “my new Polo just came in the mail” would be a normal way to reference getting a new collared shirt since Polo is a definitive, world famous brand, known for one item of clothing in particular.

Frank would do that, but he would use the names of the bummy clothes he wore. Like I remember him walking into the room one time and he said “goddamnit, I spilled grape juice all over my Aeropostale’ talking about his shirt. One time he came into the room bitching about how he “scuffed up his Sketchers” too. It wasn’t funny because he wore those brands, it was funny because he was oblivious to the fact that those brands were lame and that calling them by name was obnoxious.

Anyway one day Frank was playing Counterstrike while I did schoolwork and he must have died or something, because he blurted out “NIGGER”. I was already at my wit’s end dealing with Frank, so I snapped at him

“Frank, don’t say that shit around me”.

I’m not prone to getting offended but I’ve always had black friends and Frank knew it and was liberal with his use of that word to get under my skin. He mumbled something and that was it.

The next day I was doing something on my computer with the door open and one of the other dudes from the floor walked up to the door. I was listening to Mobb Deep at the time so he said

“man you just love this jiggaboo shit huh?”

And before I could respond or process what he just said, he was gone. I realized that Frank must have bitched about me not being down with racism to this dude, and that the dude was trying to provoke me. I was pissed at him and planned on confronting him, but I was even more pissed at Frank for painting me as the bad guy to dudes I hardly knew for being offended by a racist slur (truthfully, if it was anyone besides Frank saying that word I wouldn’t have given a shit, it was just Frank really).

The story takes a weird turn here now, so bear with me. Some other dude from the floor passes by maybe 10 minutes later and asks me what I think of Frank. I said that I thought he was a fucking douche (I wasn’t exactly secretive about my feelings for him at this point) and the kid said he agreed. He then took Frank’s shaving cream off his desk and began to smear it all over our dorm room door and said “watch this”, before writing “frank is a homo” in it with his finger. I was laughing. I had no clue why he would do such a thing, but I figured I hadn’t done anything so I couldn’t get in trouble.

The kid puts the shaving cream back and stood there talking to me for another couple minutes when Frank walks up. He sees the writing on the door and looks at me, then says

“real fucking funny. Clean it up.”

He was pissed. I told him I didn’t do it. He asked who did, and I said I didn’t know, even though the kid was still standing there. Frank kept drilling me over and over to clean it up, and I kept denying having any involvement.

Then he pushed me.

Now to be sure, it wasn’t exactly a death blow, but it was a push. It didn’t hurt, but it was him indicating that he had had enough and wasn’t going to roll over on this one. Of course none of that went through my head, because as soon as he pushed me, I fucking snapped and turned around and punched him in the face.

Pretty much immediately the shaving cream kid grabbed Frank and tried to pull us apart but all that did was open him up for more punches. I kept attacking Frank and within a few seconds some of the other dudes from the floor rushed in and tried to pull him away from me, but they were all grabbing Frank, not me (he was closer to the door), so I kept getting shots in. While pulling him away one of them even accidentally pulled his shirt over his face and at that point, I nailed the cleanest shot so far on him and immediately blood started to pour out of his face, soaking through his shirt. Its probably my most memorable and rewarding punch of all time.

All this only lasted a minute or less of course (fights always seem to last forever even though they’re usually over in seconds) and quickly we were pulled apart. Everyone wanted to know why we were fighting and Frank blamed the shaving cream on me but by this point the dude who actually put it on the door was telling Frank it wasn’t me and cleaning it off with paper towels.

Immediately Frank starts yelling at me “you fucked up. I’m going down to the front desk and I’m telling them you hit me. You’re getting arrested motherfucker”. Everyone on the floor was trying to convince him not to tell the cops (which surprised me since they all barely knew me and probably thought I was a freak because I didn’t drink and rode a little bike around campus all the time) but he insisted. I said “go ahead Frank, you hit me first so you’re the one whose going to be getting in trouble” but I didn’t really believe it. He has pushed me, but I had brutally beat him and totally overreacted. I was fucked, I was going to get suspended and possibly even expelled. I acted like I didn’t care to the dudes on the floor, but I was so bummed.

15 minutes later a cop came up to my door and asked me to go with him. I complied, and he brought me down to the security office in the dorm and asked me for my side of the story. I told him that Frank had hit me, and that I hit him back, with a few more details to make myself seem less guilty. He said okay and walked me back to my dorm. I closed the door but I could hear the cop interviewing the rest of the floor.

The cop came back 20 minutes later with the dean (or something) and they told me that Frank had been arrested. My mind raced. What the fuck? Why? Him? He was arrested? Oh shit, I must be arrested too. Fuck. They’re about to turn me around and put the cuffs on me.

But nope. They said I wasn’t going to be arrested. They had interviewed everyone on the floor and everyone agreed that Frank had hit me first, so they agreed I wasn’t in the wrong. Holy fuck. I was there, and even I knew I was in the wrong. All these dudes who I barely even knew, who I had had months of opportunity to bond with and had barely even spoke to had believed me that Frank hit me hard enough to warrant me attacking him. I was speechless. He had ratted himself out.

Of course I attempted to act unphased. They told me that Frank and I were both suspended from entering the dorms for 2 weeks. Which was sort of annoying, it meant I had to commute from my parents house, but it was a small price to pay for avoiding an assault charge that I most certainly deserved. They asked me if I wanted to press charges against Frank and I said no. They said he would be released from the police station by the end of the day.

My parents were pretty pissed at me for getting in a fight, but the dorm suspension was no big deal, I attended all my classes normally, just had to commute every morning for 20 minutes.

However when I returned to the dorm, Frank wasn’t there. Some of his stuff was still there but his computer and anything remotely valuable had been removed. It was close to Winter break so I figured he had just moved home for the rest of the semester until he could get a new room and roommate but I asked around and everyone on the floor said they hadn’t seen him, and that he wasn’t answering his phone and hadn’t been on AIM. Someone confirmed he hadn’t been in class either, even for his finals.

I never saw or heard from Frank again. What happened? I don’t know. That was my last year in college and I didn’t keep in touch with anyone who knew him. But it was pretty fucking weird. Maybe he moved back home immediately, took a semester off and went back to ULowell. Maybe he moved home for a bit then started at another school. Maybe he gave up on higher education entirely and is washing dishes at Dennys right now. Either way, I don’t give a shit, Frank, you fucking suck and your girlfriend has a fupa.