(This isn’t the roommate in this story, it’s my current roommate, Brendan. They kinda look alike and are both roommates though so it works, kinda)

My second college roommate was this dude I met because I would see him riding around campus. I think he and I were the only riders who went to ULowell at the time. He seemed nice, and he was a flatlander, which was fine by me because I’ve always been into riding flat ground and curbs. He was pretty quiet at first, but real friendly. Our riding sessions would often just consist of he and I working on hang 5’s in this parking lot for a couple hours at a time (he could do them kinda, I was hopeless) but he would also come ride ledges and the pre-fab skatepark, Hadley, with me.

After I beat up my roommate causing him to die or vanish or something (see part 1 for that story), I needed a roommate and this dude needed one too so I told him he should move into my room. I figured it’d be cool to live with a rider, and he was a nice enough guy. He moved in and it was alright at first. We turned our beds into bunk beds and would push everything aside in the dorm room so we could ride a little bit in the center of the room. I’d do barspins, 180 barspins and fakie barspins (there wasn’t much room, what else was I going to do) and he’d do his weird spinny flatland stuff. It was January, so any riding was better than none.

Then I started to get to know the real him. The most prevalent part of this dude (I’m going to call him Brian just because I don’t feel like dealing with any bullshit in case he reads this)’s personality was that he acted really gay. He was straight, or at least he said he was, but he would joke around about being gay more than anyone I’ve ever met in my entire life. Now, to be sure, a lot of guys joke around about being gay. Dudes smack each other in the dicks, say sexual things sarcastically, acuse each other of being homo’s etc. But this dude did it A LOT. Like 3 minutes would rarely go by without him putting his arm around you or complimenting your hair or something stupid like that. If he had done this stuff like 1% of the time that he actually did it, it might have been funny, or at least not so obnoxious, but he overdid it so fucking bad.

I began to think that he really was gay. He had a very feminine voice, and kind of “moved” in a gay way. I know that all of this sounds terrible homophobic, but you’ve got to believe me that I’m being as objective as possible and I’m being honest, even when you stripped away all the gay jokes and shit, he just seemed like a gay dude. He was also a music major, and while that’s certainly not conclusive proof that he was gay, I’m willing to bet that music majors, on average, are gayer than most other majors. He played the fucking keyboard. Something about playing the keyboard is kind of gay. Also, he was a flatlander, and while once again there’s no proof linking flatlanders and gays, there’s always been a stereotype that flatlanders bang dudes, although I’m not sure if that’s actually true.

Aside from seeming like a potential gay, he was just creepy. This was back in 2004 when a lot of people still used Livejournal. When he realized I had one, he added me and then added the like 300 people that I was friends with. That’s weird, like adding someone you don’t know on Livejournal was considered sort of weird at the time, but taking the time to add 300 people is really weird. He would comment strange shit on my Myspace all the time. He would do stupid shit like smear cake on his face while we were eating in the cafeteria to try and get a laugh but instead my friends and I would stare at him like a freak.

I knew he wasn’t exclusively gay though, because one time he fucked a girl in front of me. He was dating this girl Amanda who was short, kinda chubby and had huge tits. She was funny though, I’d eat lunch with her and her other female friends once in a while. She was real into God and her and I would argue about that pretty often. Also, and I say this while trying to not sound full of myself, she was sooooo into me. Dating this weird pseudo-gay creep definitely had her in the mood to bang a dude who actually acted like a dude and she vibed me super hard even though it was never actually said until much later.

Anyway so yeah I had the bottom bunk in the apartment and one night while I was sleeping, he came home with her. I heard them coming in but I didn’t feel like having a conversation so I pretended to still be asleep. Then they started banging. The bunk beds weren’t super sturdy, so there was a lot of creaking and movement. I was already awake but if I had been sleeping, I definitely would have woken up. Then she just started straight up howling during the sex. It was pretty fucked, because I was just laying underneath them staring at the underside of his bed and I got the feeling that BOTH of them really wanted me to be hearing this. He was gay, I was sure of it. And I wouldn’t let him bang me, despite all the “joke” gay jokes, so this was the closest thing to actually fucking me that he had, banging a girl 3 feet away from me. Really all that was seperating he and I from banging was that 3 feet of space, a 19 year old woman and a mattress. Remove those things, and he would be sexing the shit out of me. I was so creeped out.

Her moaning was really loud. It was like she wanted to make as much noise as possible so that I would hear it, wake up and realize that she was fertile and a suitable mate for me. I was only 19 myself and had had sex with less than 10 girls. But here I was laying in bed feeling that this gay man and this woman were both putting on a show for me exhibiting their sexual performance. I can’t say that I have ever experienced anything similar since.

Then came the roadtrip. My good friend Tardif and I were dying to get out of New England even if just for a week or so, but both of our cars were junk and weren’t likely to make it anywhere warm in one piece, so I asked Brian if he was down and he agreed. He had never been on a roadtrip before. As far as I could tell he had never really done anything besides hang out in Massachusets and pretend to be gay. We took off for Florida. Honestly I don’t really remember much about the trip except that we stayed with Evan Butts in Pensacola for a couple days. I don’t remember what we rode at all really. I think we might have rode those brick tranny walls in Baton Rouge (the ones they rode on Road Fools 5) but that might have been another trip. The reason why my memory is so blurry is probably because Brian was driving us nuts the entire trip.

I remember an Etnies roadtrip article in Ride years ago where they talked about how on every roadtrip, someone ends up being the butt of the jokes. On that Etnies trip, it was Joey Cobbs and on this trip it was Brian. Tardif is honestly one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, but he got in on it too. We gave Brian shit about everything. We made fun of his clothes, his riding, the fact that he would sing along to every fucking song on the radio even though he didn’t know 90 percent of the words (to be fair to Tardif, I was probably doing 95 percent of the teasing, but Tardif is so gentle normally that him getting in on it at all was really notable and telling). This sounds mean, and it was, but his whole gay shtick had really reached an all time high on this trip and even after me telling him over and over to just stop, he wouldn’t. So in my mind, I was justified in destroying him.

That was when I discovered his weakness; his Mom. Nobody likes having their Mother made fun of, but most people take it in stride. I realized Brian wasn’t capable of handling any jokes about his Mom. His Mom was all happy for him that he was going to go on a trip, she bought us a fucking ton of food. Boxes of Cheez-its, granola bars, Gushers, shit like that. After a few days in the car, there were granola bars and empty Gusher wrappers fucking everywhere in the car and we were all too pissed off at each other to be courteous and clean the shit up. We were also sick to death of eating Cheez-its constantly, but we were so broke that we kept doing it anyway. I started to talk shit about Brian’s Mom, saying that it was her fault the car was dirty now. He looked hurt and said “Gee, Dunnie*, I thought it was really nice of my Mom to give us all this free food”.

*Dunnie was his stupid fucking nickname for me that irritated the shit out of me. It irritated me because it’s origin was so stupid. I was listening to Mobb Deep a lot at the time and they frequently use the slang “dun” (which just means “dude”). Occasionally they’d also say “dunnie” which also means dude. He heard it in one of their songs and asked me what it meant, and then he just started calling me it constantly. It wouldn’t have been so bad but he seriously said it so much and it’s such a dumb sounding word, if you’re a gangster rapper from Queens, then you can apparently pull it off but as a suspect-gay from the suburbs, you should know better.

I kept slowly insulting his Mom more and more (Tardif was subtly egging me on by laughing whenever I’d do it) and he was clearly losing his fucking mind. But I didn’t care. I was sick of this kid and really wanted to make him cry. It’s terribly immature and I can’t imagine myself being so cruel these days towards someone, but in my mind at the time, he deserved it. He never really freaked out due to the Mom jokes, just slowly had his spirits broken and by the end of the trip he had clearly picked up on the fact that we hated him and just kept quiet. I almost felt bad, but then I remembered how annoyed I was with him just a few days earlier and then I didn’t feel bad anymore.

After that he started sleeping at his girlfriend’s house all the time because I clearly disliked him so much. Once in a while he would come back to the dorm and if I was there, he’d act like he was just stopping through to grab something and he’d leave. By this point I wasn’t making fun of him, I just wasn’t really talking to him and when he’d try to make jokes I’d either pretend I didn’t hear him or just stare at him. I wasn’t being mean, I just wasn’t even being close to friendly and it clearly bothered the shit out of him. He’d make a little gay joke here or there, not nearly as much as he used to, but sometimes. I wouldn’t acknowledge them at all.

And that was that. He stopped coming around and eventually I moved out of the dorm when he wasn’t even there. The school later sent me a bill for 250 dollars because the room was left too dirty, probably because I jerked off onto the same spot on the wall in the corner where my desk was for the entire year (I didn’t pay the bill). I didn’t hear from him. I’d still see his Myspace bulletins once and a while but I’d mostly forgot about him.

Then… are you ready for this? This isn’t really the best possible ending to the story, but it’s true: Someone told me he had became a male stripper in Providence. The initial source was pretty good, but then I asked around some more and everyone else who lived in that area and had had any interaction with him knew about it too. I never really bothered to find out any details, I was just happy that my instincts were right and that he was, in fact, a gay. I’m not sure if he knew he was gay the entire time and was just keeping it all inside, or if he finally realized it after we stopped hanging out. Maybe he’s not gay and just strips for dudes for money, although I really doubt it. The real tragedy of the whole thing is that if he had been openly gay and stopped joking around about being gay so fucking much, he probably wouldn’t have drove me insane and I probably would have remained friends with him.