Monday, April 30, 2007

This story is part of the roommate story countdown.

The defining moment of my residence with Brad occurred late one night on my way in from work. Brad was having trouble getting his new universal remote to operate on his stolen TV he purchased remote-less. He asked me to fiddle with it, and while I was doing this, he, I, and the dude from jail had a nice little chat. I actually enjoyed it. I can't remember the topic, which I'm sure Brad felt similarly three minutes after the moment. But as we broke to retire Brad demands that we all get high, not a situation I'm comfortable with.

Brad smoked a lot of dope. That's it for this paragraph. Excellent character development Rory.

The man would repeat stuff over and over again, each time in a fresh and exciting way, as if he was enlightening me to something, but he was stupid as hell and I feared that if he realized I was an intelligent person he would start asking me for help with things. This would build a relationship, ultimately leading in him offering me more drugs. So my goal was to give him the impression that I was dumber then he was, which was also my only source of amusement. He goes on vacation for a week and he wants me to feed his gigantic fish. His fish eats meatballs - I'll repeat this cause it's awesome - it doesn't eat fish food, it eats balls of prepared meat. For four days he tells me what I have to do, and each time I have to ask the same stupid questions to insure he believes I'm an idiot.

This came to a front; borderline disabled was about how dumb I was acting. With the only topic of conversation between Brad and I being football, he felt the need to mention during each discussion that he had attended every Raiders home games since he was eight, "even the ones in LA." One Sunday afternoon I caught him at home during a game. Out loud I wonder why he's not at the game: "Does it look like I'm at the fucking game?" I guess there goes that streak. His reaction wasn't a big deal though, except short of "where's my keys?" this is the last thing he ever said to me.

My theory is that I crushed him. I pounded him with so much imbecility for a college educated man teaching the neighborhood children that I was depleting his will and a seemingly innocuous comment, "you're not at the game" was the straw that broke the camel's back. I relished that victory.