TMI Thursday

Cheers for Thursdays in which the blagonets hum with the sound of TMI broadcast around the world and preserved for future generations to discover and wonder at the mistakes made by their ancestors.  Hip hip!

In my junior year of college, my friends and I rented both floors of this large old house on campus.  We had ten people living in this place, which basically turned it into…well you can probably imagine.  I lived down on the first floor, which usually had the most people hanging out in it because we actually kept it clean (the upstairs was only safe for those with prior immunizations for tropical diseases and a cannabis immunity).  We even hung a pretend fraternity sign on our porch with Delta Tau Chi, and if you don’t know what that means, I have pity on you.

We had a friend, Joel, that was going to spend the second semester abroad, so he didn’t want to rent an apartment that he’d have to sublet after a couple months.  We didn’t have any more bedrooms available for him, but we did have a closet under the stairs.  For a visual, picture the Harry Potter closet, because thats exactly what it looked like.  His “room” was about 6′x3′ with a slanted ceiling.  He just threw an air mattress and sleeping bag in there, and was pretty content.  We called him “The Little Jew Under The Stairs.”

One weekend, it was roommate Chris’ birthday.  He invited a couple friends from his hometown that nobody else knew to come on over, and they brought their other friends, and we had our regular weekend party on top of that.

Fast forward to the background of drinking and revelry that you’ve seen in every teen comedy movie since the 80′s.  The house was full of people, and the party was in full swing.  Over the next couple hours, it becomes apparent that these extra friends are kinda sketchy.  People actually start closing and locking doors just so their belongings don’t walk away, women are afraid to stand to close to them, general skeeviness, that sort of thing.

Birthday boy Chris is made to drink too much, and calls it a night before the end of the party, so now there is no buffer between us and his vagrant acquaintances.  The party is pretty much winding down anyway, so everyone clears out and head off to various bedrooms, and the degenerates disappear to the upstairs.

I’m sitting on the couch winding down with two of the other roommates from my floor, Sahil and Hamil, when the front doorbell rings.  We look at each other, because nobody ever rang the doorbell there; the front door was perpetually unlocked.  Hamil gets up to answer the door, and we hear this exchange:

Hamil: “Can I help you?”

Large African American Lady: “Yeah, I got a call…”

Hamil: “A what?”

LAAL: “A call, I got a call for Chris.”

Hamil: “…Excuse me, what?  A call?  Call for what?”

LAAL: “I…GOT…A…CALL.”

Hamil: “oh…OH! Hang on a minute.”

Hamil wisely leaves the woman at the door, and comes back into the living room with a look of horror on his face.

“Guys, there’s a fat, ugly prostitute on our front step asking for Chris.”

Roommate Sahil and I just start laughing, because that sentence is awesome, and I mean gut busting, rolling on the floor laughter at the absurdity of the situation.  This is clearly the work of Chris’ miscreant friends, so Hamil goes upstairs to wake one of the culprits and make them deal with the situation.  As he walks up the stairs, his footsteps and our laughter is enough to wake Joel from under the staircase.  He rolls out from his little cubbyhole, and wanders into the living room all sleepyfaced.

“Guys, what the hell is going on?”

“Dude!  There’s a prostitute on our front steps!”

“What?  For real?”

“Yeah!”

He kind of nods, walks over and opens the door, and says to the lady very politely, “Excuse me…shoo.  Shoo!  Get out!  Out, out! Shoo!”

Our own little Harry Potterstein shooed the hooker away from the house like he was getting rid of the neighbors cat.