Come si dice, "You smell like putrid death"?

Jim and Jordan-- the two Americans I waste most of my time with-- both work for the same tour company, which is having an exclusive dinner tonight only for people who work with them. That combined with my excessive drinking last night and resulting hangover today, has put me at home alone, with nothing to do but sit in my room and smell the toxic filth of two grown men who don't know how to take care of themselves. This sparked an idea for a blog. Read on.

My first roommate in college was a 6 foot 8 inch, 420 pound behemoth Floridian named Wookie. Before I moved in, I called his house in Florida to see what he was bringing, so that we didn't have two TV's, etc. His mom answered and told me he wasn't in, but that he would be bringing his own bed, since he was 6'8". The next time I called I talked to him on the phone. His voice was deep and he spoke slowly, with a slight drawl. For some reason I envisioned a tall, thin basketball player; I could almost see a 6'8" black haired, blue eyed kid wearing his jersey, casually cupping a basketball in his massive hand while he talked to me with the phone in his other hand. When I first arrived at Alumni Hall of Troy State University in South Alabama on an early August morning, I knocked on the door. I was never very good at meeting people. I think too much and have problems with small talk and generally don't want to have anything to do with most human beings, and so I was a little nervous at the prospect of having to share a room with a stranger. The door swung open and he ducked down under the door frame to step out in the hall. I was momentarily stunned. He filled the entire frame; the slivers of light spilling out from the room, around his massive frame, and into the dark hallway made him look even more frightening. He stuck out his hand and smiled. "I'm Wookie," he said in a slow, deep voice, like that of a retarded ogre.

We sat down in the room and made awkward conversation for a few minutes before he said, "Fuck this, do you smoke? Wanna go outside for a cigarette?" We were instant friends.

The semester passed relatively smoothly. My girlfriend at the time, Darbi (like Darby Crash, from The Germs) was about five feet tall in heels, and was maybe 95 pounds after a good meal. Wookie looked as though he could have devoured her in a few chumps. It would have taken her no less than 14 years to eat him. Wookie wore a shirt sometimes that stated the obvious, "I'm bigger than you," which I found particularly funny.

One thing about living with a beast of a man of his size was the smell. I don't believe Wookie could reach all of his body, and so bathing for him was something impossible. Scrunch an elephant into a dorm room shower stall and turn the water on, and you get an idea of the impossibility of hygiene maintenance. I'm pretty sure there were parts of his body that hadn't been washed since elementary school. There were folds and folds of skin, layers of fat, beneath which dead skin and filth had begun to cake onto his body (Wookie would crush my skull in a single blow if he knew I was writing this). The resulting smell at night, once all his cotton armor had been removed, was horrendous; something akin to the smell of the vagina of a crackhead's corpse after a few days of festering in a sewer. Slowly people stopped coming by our room, my girlfriend dumped me, my grades gradually plummeted (my final GPA for that semester was an impressive 0.38). I sorta blame Wookie's stench for all of this.

Let's jump from 2001 to 2007 (six years!). Jim hasn't done his laundry since he arrived here over 6 weeks ago, his toothbrush was dropped onto the filthy bathroom floor at our old place and he has been refusing to use that one anymore, or any toothbrush that the Italians sell (they only sell medium and hard bristle brushes), and he hasn't had a towel and hasn't bathed for 3 or 4 days. Our landlady (Jordan's girlfriend) came into our apartment to paint the walls or some shit while we were away earlier and, as Jordan recounted to us earlier, couldn't stay in the room. The smell of Jim could give the smell of a man appropriately named "Wookie" a run for it's money. That's frightening. Jim must have some amazing death odor powers. Maybe he's part sasquatch.

I'm seriously not one to judge another human being based off of their smell; anyone who's ever lived with me or spent a prolonged period of time in a vehicle with me understands that I too, believe it or not, can emit odors capable of choking an adult sloth. But this was getting unbearable. Fearing for our well being, the two of us took our laundry to the lavaggio. I only had a pair of jeans and t-shirt that needed to be washed, since I wear the same shit everyday and most of my other laundry I did at my old house, drying it outside (something else Jim refuses to do). After dropping off our clothes we went in search of a store where he could buy a towel or a toothbrush, preferably both. We walked down Tor Pignattara looking for a store. Both of us were exceptionally exhausted from moving and drinking, moving and drinking, so we must have looked like two lobotomized chimpanzees as we grunted directions at each other.

I'm realizing that this story isn't going anywhere. Sorry, folks. The end.