1294
by Hillbilly
Rusty:
I am currently reading a book by two time national champion wrestler and current UFC title contender, Chael Sonnen. In the book he tells a story you may find interesting. Bear with it for a minute, it's a bit long but it will get to the part you will find interesting ...
.
Back when I was a sociology major at the University of Oregon, I had two roommates, Kevin and Jessie. While I was busy studying and building my genius, they liked to play pranks on each other. Some were harmless, and others were rather vicious. One that fell somewhere in the middle took place on April 1 of my sophomore year. On this particular day, I walked into the kitchen to find Jessie brewing a disgusting concoction in a giant salad bowl. He started by pouring in a little milk, then he added some eggs. I didn’t think much of it until he pulled a container of lunch meat from the fridge and started shredding it into little bits and dropping it into the bowl.
“What the heck are you doing?” I asked.
He said nothing, just kept a sinister smile on his face as he put a lid on the salad bowl and then poked small holes into the top, as if there were something in the nasty sludge he needed to keep alive.
I knew something was up, so I followed him as he carried the sloshing bowl to Kevin’s room. I watched in amusement as he wedged the bowl into the narrow space under Kevin’s bed. It wasn’t until he removed Kevin’s mattress and poked holes in his box spring that I realized the extent of his commitment. He didn’t want Kevin to immediately notice the smell; he wanted the stench to slowly work its way up through his box spring, through his mattress, and then infiltrate Kevin’s dreams.
I knew the punch line was going to take a while, so I went back about my business. So did Jessie. Sometime around the middle of May—six weeks after April Fools Day—Kevin came into the living room and proclaimed, “My room stinks.” I went in to investigate. His room didn’t just stink—it smelled worse than a toilet in the slums of Mumbai. I had completely forgotten about Jessie’s little prank. I was in the process of helping Kevin find the source of the stench when Jessie pulled me aside and reminded me about the little brew he had deposited under Kevin’s bed.
At this point, Kevin had begun dating this very annoying, very mean girl whom both Jessie and I had a strong disdain for, so we joined forces and tried to convince Kevin that it was the girl who had made his room smell bad. “Dude, I think she has some issues,” were among the words spoken. Kevin ignored us and, to the best of his ability, the smell. But it was finals week, and the smell in his room got so bad that he could no longer study. He washed his sheets every single day, sometimes twice a day. He vacuumed his floor incessantly. He wiped everything down in his room with disinfecting wipes. And still he couldn’t get rid of the smell.
Although it was mid-May, it was freezing cold in Oregon, and he had to sleep with his widows wide open. Unable to remove the smell by cleaning, he began to believe that perhaps we might be right about his girlfriend, and he broke up with her. When that still didn’t get rid of the vile stench, he checked into a hotel.
The minute he left the apartment, Jessie removed the rancorous bowl and disposed of it. When Kevin returned from the hotel, the smell was gone. Needless to say, Jessie and I informed him that having the apartment free of his former girlfriend for five days finally allowed her stench to clear out.
Although we kept what we had done a secret from Kevin, we didn’t keep it a secret from our other friends. At the time, Ben Crane, the now-famous golfer, was one of our study partners, and he shared a good laugh at Jessie’s shenanigans. We told him every last detail of the prank.
We shot our mouths off far and wide, and we realized that it would eventually get back to Kevin. So on graduation day, Jessie handed Kevin a card inside which was a detailed description of the origin of the mystery smell that had permeated his room months earlier. As you would imagine, a very pissed off Kevin began chasing a giggling Jessie around the campus, confusing everyone in their Sunday best. That was the end of the matter. Jessie had a great story to tell his grandkids.
Fast-forward four years. Jessie and his wife were in town, and Jessie invited his old buddy Ben Crane and his wife out to dinner. At one point the conversation died down, and Ben’s wife said to him, “Hey, tell them the story about what you did to your roommate in college. You know, about that prank that you pulled with the salad container.”
“Aw, I don’t want to tell that story,” Ben said.
“No, you have to tell it. It is soooo funny!”
Ben looked across the table, right into Jessie’s eyes, and said, “For April Fools’ Day one year, I filled a salad container with a whole bunch of nasty stuff and stuck it under my roommate’s bed.”
“Really?” Jessie said.
“Yeah.” He went on to describe Jessie’s prank in minute detail. He talked about how he broke up pieces of turkey, and how his roommate dumped his annoying girlfriend and even moved into a hotel so he could study for finals.
Jessie didn’t need a bullshit detector to know Ben Crane was lying, he was retelling Jessie’s story as if it were his. Apparently Ben had told the lie so often, he had completely forgotten that it was Jessie who had told him the story in the first place. Jessie, being a good guy, was going to let it ride. But Jessie had told his wife that story on many occasions, and she wasn’t going to let it fly. Immediately she said, “Ben, you do realize that you are telling Jessie’s story. You realize that he is the one who did that prank, not you.”
I will spare you all the details about the havoc this caused at the dinner table, but let’s just say that it was pretty freakin’ hilarious: Ben’s wife began screaming at him for lying to her for so many years, and Ben looked as if he wanted to run out of the restaurant.
