Jason Rodriguez - The Moose in the Closet: Wisdom and Peanut Gallery: Mohamed

I have nothing to plug, again, but I did find a funny post on a comic message board that made me wonder if I could make an ongoing feature called “Comic Book Wisdom”. Within five minutes I found ten great examples quotes that make me laugh (especially out of context) and decided that it would be pretty easy to keep up with. So, let’s start this one right. (You gotta click it to blow it up).

God, I hope so, because that story sounds exciting.

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There was this Arabic guy that lived next door to me freshman year. I’m pretty sure his name was Mohamed but that doesn’t say much since one of my knee-jerk racist tendencies is to be pretty sure every Arabic guy whose name I’ve forgotten is Mohamed until I discover otherwise. No one’s perfect; we all have our little racist things. For the sake of argument we’ll call him Mohamed.

He hated us. The entire floor. Every single one of us was his enemy. When we had our music too loud he’d knock our doors down. If we were congregating too late in the common room he’d curse at us and threaten to call the RA. He’d never say a word to any of us unless he was yelling.

The other Muslims on our floor had it a lot worse. Mohamed was roomed with one of them, O-Dog, who was a cool as fuck cat that we somewhat corrupted by introducing him to dope. Mohamed would always lecture O-Dog about being a better Muslim. O-Dog would tell us that Mohamed hated that fact that he fraternized with the rest of the floor, that we were a bunch of drug and sex addicts and how we should be avoided.

O-Dog just sort of agreed with the cat because he was honestly afraid of him. He let Mohamed have his way with everything. O-Dog never played music in his room, he liked hip-hop and reggae and Mohamed would always yell at him when he played it. No posters, he couldn’t watch the movies he liked. It’s the reason he was always hanging with one of us, his room was basically only good for sleeping.

Mahim, the other Muslim on our floor, was traditional, he did his daily prayers and lived the life of a peace-loving, inclusive, model Muslim. His roommate was this cat Alex, a metal head that blasted nothing but hair-bands all day. But Mahim and Alex got along well together, they managed to integrate their lifestyles, compromise, so that they functioned as roommates.

This pissed Mohamed off to no end because Alex was Mohamed’s arch enemy. He would lecture Mahim all the time, saying that Alex’s devil music was fouling his room and making Mahim’s prayers useless. Mahim told us Mohamed wouldn’t leave him alone; he kept trying to get Mahim to room with him. Mahim would rather be with loud, dirty, metal head Alex than Mohamed because he honestly thought Mohamed was fucking nuts.

The thing that was funny about Mohamed was that for someone who lectured all of the other Muslims on the floor about cleanliness and bad influences and disrespectful roommates/neighbors was quite possibly one of the most disgusting people I have ever had to live with.

He would hack up tremendous lougies in the shower – we’d hear him bring them up from the depths of his intestines from outside the bathroom, he’d wake people up with the horrible sound. We learned early not to take a shower in the stall next to his – the stalls were paired up so that two showers shared a drain and floor. A couple of instances of a loogie floating over to the drain (or occasionally a particularly noxious, yellow, stream of piss) and we all came to the conclusion that when Mohamed was in the shower, that was his time to do whatever the fuck he wanted, no-one else goes in there.

I occasionally pee in the privacy of my own shower but who the fuck does it when there’s a person three feet from you sharing a drain? That’s never a good thing but making it even worse is the highly detectable presence of the piss. It was like he had an asparagus shake every morning.

He’d also bring all his shaving gear into the shower and he was a hairy dude. He’d leave a pile of hair all over the stall, never bothering to simply run the shower a bit to sweep up the stragglers. You could have made a wig for chemo-patients with the hair he left behind.

And I don’t even want to get into his tendency to not flush, as if it’s beneath him.

We complained about him to the RA quite often but Mohamed had no respect for the RA either. We adapted by getting water slippers (we basically didn’t wash our feet all of freshman year) and running the shower for several minutes before getting in - in case Mohamed used it that morning. We tried to designate one shitter as the Mohamed shitter, he seemed to favor the middle one, and that was fine with us. He’d occasionally switch up his shitter but for the most part he stayed with the middle.

And the kicker? He failed out freshman year. The only one on the floor to not come back. With all the quiet he demanded you’d think he would at least be studying. Good fucking riddance.

Labels: mitc

Wisdom and Peanut Gallery: Mohamed

Monday, September 19, 2005

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