The American Psycho

Originally written April 13, 2006

Before these seven years of college end, we have some stories to tell. My freshman year of college, at American University in D.C., I spent the best part of the year with this ratty guy from Vegas and a Pakistani hamster. Mike and Murad were, to say the least, different from the winnetkan crew from the previous six years. We were thrown together in a triple room, where three people were crammed into a dorm room built for two. The situation was only temporary as the school waited for more people to drop out and then flush one of the triple into another dorm elsewhere on campus.

There was the sleeping contest. We had a chart on our door where we plotted out how many hours a day over the course of a week we would sleep. We were ditching classes to get naps in, taking shots of nyquil to get those extra few hours. During the afternoons, I would pour water all over their blankets and pillows so they couldn't sleep in their beds. At the end of the week, I was as calm as a Hindu cow having slept something like 15 hours a day. Of coarse, as a follow up bet, we had to make the next week a no-sleeping week, and we charted how many hours we would stay awake. And thus, college took a quick downturn.

The amazing colors you start to see as you approach 50 straight hours of being awake. The hardest part were the shakes. By mid-week, Murad began to lose it. He had stopped going to class completely and took up running laps around the dorm. I was doing all right until exams later in the week, and then I went into meltdown. Mike was the trooper of the bunch, there was no stopping him. By 80 hours straight without sleep, he was a shaking mess. By Friday, he went missing, and we didn't see him again until the middle of the next week. No one asked where he went.

There were the wrestling matches, one of which we still have on tape. Murad threw me off his bunk bed into the cabinets, I bounced off and fell a good six feet. The bounce effect on the camera, perfect, no need for a second take. Not that I could move by then. We broke into an ECW show, even though we had won tickets for it. We broke into a Blink 182 concert, even though we couldn't care less. We broke into Lauren and B's room, every chance we got. And we still hate the french.

But there was Jay, and there was Mike, and it would be six years before we would meet again in D.C. And for one night we sat in his apartment pounding vodka and telling stories no one else here would think were funny, or relevant, or morally redeemable. If anything or anyone caused that break in reality, from where I was coming in to where I am now, it was obvious this was someone to appreciate, that things would be much different if it were just me and the Murad. I'd be in jail for one, and Murad would be committed. The liberator who destroyed my property realigned my perceptions of reality. What a messed up year that was, and how since then, nothing was the same.