Jackrabbit Remembered

After a failed attempt at living with a friend my freshman year of college—it ended in the kind of dorm-room drama about which they now write reality TV shows—I decided my next roommate would be normal, or at least keep her crazy contained. I ended up with Dana.

Dana was tall, blond, beautiful and as Midwestern as they come. Her only flaw was an obsession with both Major League Baseball and her boyfriend Matt. And where most twentysomething girls with an unhealthy attachment to boyfriends could be considered obnoxious, Dana was different. Her inability to leave Matt’s side— he had a tendency to cheat on her when she did—was something she kept clear of our apartment from the first night I met her.

We’d been paired randomly as roommates in our dorm our sophomore year and when I’d asked her if she was seeing anyone in an attempt to make small talk, she immediately stamped out any ideas I had of being overly exposed to her relationship.

“Yeah I have a boyfriend, but don’t worry, he won’t be staying over,” she offered without explanation.

I’d never have asked for such an arrangement but after meeting Matt, I was more than grateful for the offer. If I had to describe him in one word, it would be obnoxious. Two words: obnoxious asshole. The kind of guy so self-absorbed that he doesn’t bother to delineate between a smile and a sneer as long as it means someone’s looking. And I never understood what Dana saw in him, as his physical appearance was as unappealing as his attitude. Secretly I suspected his appeal centered somewhere around his abilities in the bedroom. She wouldn’t be the first to exchange a few character flaws for a good fuck, and who was I to fault her? Not that she ever talked about it or I ever asked, in accordance with our apartment’s don’t ask, don’t tell policy. I’d never so much as heard a peep out of Dana’s bedroom in the three years we were roommates, but that all changed the last summer we lived together.

Apparently weeks of sleeping in sweat at Matt’s apartment had finally gotten to the two of them, because they came seeking solace in our air-conditioning one night in July. I’d heard them on the stairs as I lay in bed enjoying my regular routine of falling asleep to a DVD playing on my computer. Thinking nothing of it, I went back to watching my stories before the noise on my laptop was replaced by something louder in the room next to mine.

Like a jackhammer breaking concrete, the sound of the headboard banging against the wall adjacent to mine made me freeze. And as I heard what seemed to be him masturbating with her vagina, I couldn’t help but feel sympathy pains centered somewhere below my belly button; I was certain at that very moment Matt was impaling Dana’s ovaries with his penis.

It wasn’t anywhere near the realm of rough sex either. Rather, it bypassed the forceful and seemed to proceed directly to terrible. Sex so terrible it should never be inflicted on someone else’s ears let alone their body. I wasn’t sure if I should rescue her or just plug my ears and pray for it to stop. I went with the latter and fortunately it was over about three minutes later.

As the shock of what I’d just heard began to wear off and I regained my senses, I went back to watching the screen and resolved to pretend I’d slept through the entire thing.

Unfortunately those plans were shot to shit when I realized I needed to retrieve a credit card from my purse—if I didn’t pay my phone bill, the thing would be shut off— and the bag was downstairs in our living room. All the carpet in the world wasn’t going to mask the sound of me tiptoeing down the stairs. My only hope was that their three-minute sexcapade had somehow knocked them both unconscious—Dana from the pain of poor execution and Matt from the sheer exhaustion of effort.

As stealthily as humanly possible, I snuck downstairs, grabbed my wallet and made it back to my bedroom with the kind of moves that could rival Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. But it was all in vain, as the muffled voices from Dana’s bedroom let me know that they had heard me; a point that was confirmed the next morning when Matt left before the sun could think about rising.

Even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I decided to stick to my original plan. When I saw Dana in our living room later that afternoon, I faked amnesia, selective hearing loss and anything else I thought could convince her I’d never heard a sound of her sadly lamentable sex life. As I made my way through the awkward silence to the sofa and sat down, I did my best to wipe any remnants of trauma from my face, turned to her and asked the only question I knew to be a safe topic of discussion. “How ’bout them Yankees?”