Jonathan Glatzer was one of three roommates with whom I shared an off-campus apartment while at Colgate University (stop number 2 on my Academic Tour of America). He was a lanky gent with blond, curly hair and a big bulge. Very bossy and arrogant, but charming in an overly-confident sort of way, I suppose.

He was a big theater blowhard, and directed an Edward Albee play for school during our time together (I did the sound effects for his production, providing semi-authentic doorbell noises when needed). And though he had a good porn collection which he often shared with the flatmates, he also believed food was a communist commodity, never leaving me any of my milk when I wanted to make cereal. I believe he drank it out of the carton as well. Horrors! Ratings: Likeability — 5, Infamy — 5.

I don’t remember a hell of a lot about Mark. Only that he was a laid back, funny guy who liked to play Nintendo baseball against me (I was undefeated, although Jody almost beat me during one visit with a pitch she liked to call "the fancy-schmancy."). He had dark brown hair and was kind of overweightish in an athletic kind of way.

He would roll his eyes along with me whenever Jon would start talking pedantically about "film noir." Polite and decent, but not all too memorable, Mark was the sort of guy you’d want to bring home to mom, if you were into the overweightish athletic type, that is. Ratings: Likeablility — 8, Infamy — 1.

The third of the Colgate roommates, and the one I actually had to share a room with. Mark was a blatant (yet closeted) homosexual, which freaked the shit out of less overt (and closeted) homosexuals like myself. He would fuss and futz around the place, walking with his hips thrust forward, arms bent, limp wrists at waist level, clucking his tongue at my lack of tidiness.

He once pretended to be asleep while I jerked off in bed, only to rat me out the next day to Jon and Mark, the tattletale. Mark was the first gay person I ever knowingly knew, and remains the gayest person I’ve ever met. This didn’t stop him, however, from saying "Oh, she’s hot," when Paula Zahn would read the news for CBS in the morning. Of course, his pronunciation of the word "hot" made Jim J. Bullock sound like Sylvester Stallone, or some other paragon of straightness.

Not a very good bluff, Mark. Ratings: Likeablilty — 3, Infamy — 6.

Brad and Billy were the interracial, homosexual crack addict couple who rented out the downstairs of their home to sorry suckers like me. The fact that they were homosexual crack addicts meant that not only were they addicted to crack, but to each other’s cracks as well. I’ve been making that joke for nine years now. Sad, isn’t it?

My God. Where to start with these two? Billy was the wafer of the Oreo, wafer thin and twitchy; he worked as a janitor at the University of Colorado. He owned three Rottweilers, which he kept in the house or the back yard (I had a separate entrance). I would see him sometimes, all paranoid and the like, standing on the front porch and sniffing, like a dog trying to track down a scent. I had a don’t ask, don’t tell policy with that guy.

Brad, of course, was the cream of the cookie. He looked sort of like a fat vampire who was bloated with the blood of one too many neck-suckings. Brad was actually the calm and stable one, the yin to Billy’s whacked-out yang. Sometimes Brad would cook for us.

Though I stayed for almost six months, we had a falling out somewhere along the way, and Billy started telling me that he would take away my phone privileges if my friends didn’t ask for me politely enough when they called, or that he’d turn off our electricity if the TV was too loud. Eventually, he cut the passive aggressive shit and just sicked his Rottweilers on me good and proper.

I was on a month to month "lease" (though we were probably there illegally), so after I secured another place with my friends, I didn’t tell Brad and Billy. Then, on the last day of May, while B&B were at work, I rented a U-Haul and had all my friends help me get my stuff out of there. Vanished, without a trace. They were out 300 dollars drug money for June — suckers.

Luckily, I managed to live on without reprisal. Likeability — 2, Infamy — 9.