Late one
Sunday evening last
school year my
roommate returned to the
dorm after spending his
weekend at
home (he did that a lot because his only friend was this
married girl and she had to spend time with her
husband too.). So, opened the door with a large
grin on his face, the likes of which I had only seen him wear once before (when he got the new
Dixie Chicks CD). He had brought with him a gift from home...a large pink and blue
rug. Now, I had often expressed an interest in getting a rug, since the floors were tile and were cold on the bare feet. So, even though it was pink, i was initially excited about the rug. It wasn't long before the excitement wore off....
Our dorm was over
one-hundred years old, so it had no form of
air conditioning. The
heat would often become stifling, and it seems that when things become hot the
odors they emit become much more pronounced. As was the case with the rug. On one particularly warm night I was lying in bed trying to sleep and I suddenly noticed an unfamiliar
smell wafting up to my
top bunk. I could never put words to the smell, but it vaguely smelled like sort of burnt food crossed with foot. Whatever it was, it wasn't a pleasant smell. So I
jumped out from the bed in the
darkness to find the source of this undesirable odor. It didn't take me long before i discovered the
culprit....the rug.
The next
morning I decided to ask my roommate about where he got the rug and stuff. Apparently, it was a rug his family kept in their
dining room (apparently it had accumulated a lot of
food particles over its twenty years of service), and his
mom wanted to be rid of it, but, luckily, he saved it from being sent to the
dump. What in the
hell was he thinking? Had he no
olfactory nerve?
When my
friends began commenting on the new smell in my room I felt it was time that I did something about the rug.
I bought a few
bottles of
Febreeze.
My roommate was a very
sensitive person, and he obviously cared a lot about this rug. So I, being the good roommate that I was, kept the Febreeze hidden from him when he was in the room. Whenever he left the room, which was only when he went to his
Baptist Student Union meetings or when he hung out with married girl, I would quickly rush to open all the wrindows and prop open the door to air out the room. I then would proceed to douse the rug in Febreeze. It did a little good, but my roommate got
suspicious when he would return to find the rug a little moist. It did a little good, I suppose, and my friends
applauded me for the effort, but the smell became an ever-present part of my room and I grew used to it eventuallly.
I just wish I had the heart to tell my roommate what I really thought of his
skanky rug.