And You Thought Dorm Rooms Were Bad

I lived in a dorm room my freshman year of college.  It was perhaps 10' x 15' and had two plastic-wrapped mattresses (to protect from various bodily emissions no doubt, be they gastrointestinal or venereal) on opposite walls and separated by perhaps 2 feet.  There were also two tiny desks crammed in there.  Other than that it had very little space.  I am, by admission, a filthy pig.  My roommate Bryan was not.  Bryan was a good guy.  He was quirky, but an acceptable roommate.  He had a penchant for smoking pipes (not in the room...though I do fondly recall the smell of his tobacco), listening to Soul Coughing and Ben Folds Five, and playing Final Fantasy VII.  I was, as I stated, a filthy pig.  He got to put up with my piles of dirty laundry that I'd refuse to wash until they were capable of ending OR spawning life.  He surely got the worse end of the deal.  

Well, he also got to admire my bad-ass Carmen Electra poster, so I'd call it Even Steven.

Living in a dorm room sucks no matter whom the roommate.  Cramped conditions and little-to-no-privacy.  Things that ordinarily would not be a major issue, like someone muttering in their sleep, snoring and/or flatulence, come to be, not even aggravations or frustrations, but justifications for plotting intricately detailed and exceedingly painful murder.  Bryan was fine.  I was worse.  Even so, I only lived in the dorm my freshman year.  After that, I got an apartment, where, even though I had roommates, I could shut my bedroom door and be left the hell alone so that my frustration and aggravation didn't get to homicidal levels.  


Out here, I started out in a tent.  Great.  I was in the army before.  It was like the old-fashioned "open bay" barracks.  It sucked, but I was under no illusions that it would be otherwise.  It was March of last year.  During the day it was in the fifties (at best) but at night it was around freezing.  As I was the New Guy, I got a top bunk.  There were probably 80+ people in there.  The tents have a central air tube that the heater pumps the air down.  It was set to be a balmy 80 degrees for the people on the bottom bunks.  Up on the top bunk, I had the heat hitting me from 18" away.  It approached 90 degrees.  Then also, regardless of whether it was 80 or 90 degrees, there were lots of people in the tent from countries where hygiene is a novel concept.  Heat=nasty body funk.  Gross.  Still, I was under no illusions.  Snoring? No illusions.


When I transferred from there, I went to another open bay, but this time I got my own bunk to myself.  I was able to block off the sides with blankets and flags (I don't leave home without my SC flag and my SC Battle Flag, "Big Red").  It didn't stink as bad.  It was still noisy.  Nonetheless, I was still under no illusions of privacy.


However, in June of last year, I moved into a B-hut.  A B-hut is a 32' x 20' plywood hut.  On the inside there is a central walkway and on either side it is divided into 4 living spaces, each of which are approximately 8'x 8'.  The floor plan looks like this:

The B-hut is a huge improvement, except for one very crucial part: it helps you lie to yourself.  Now, 8'x8' is not much space at all, but compared to living in a tent with 80+ smelly foreigners, it's heaven.  I can shut my plywood door and be surrounded by my plywood walls, and I feel like I'm almost normal.  Almost.


The first few days I was in my B-hut cell, I was working hard on lying to myself, that I finally had privacy.  When that door shut, I wasn't necessarily in Afghanistan anymore.  I could be anywhere...so long as "anywhere" had 7' tall plywood walls and my bed took up virtually half the space.  Unfortunately, reality kept intruding.  

Sound.


The B-Hut ceiling is about 10' tall, but the walls of each cell are only 7'.  In between the top of the wall and the ceiling is open, that way the light that runs along the center band of the ceiling shines on all of us.  Yay.  The problem with sound, though, wasn't that my fellow tenants were noisy; not specifically; it was that it was too quiet.  There was zero ambient noise.  That meant any noise I heard or produced was amplified.  If I rolled over, the springs sounded like banshees wailing.  Bob's snores sounded like a symphony of chainsaws.  Malik's scratching himself sounded like...him scratching himself.  It was too much.  I quickly went and bought a fan and left it on so it would give some cover sound.


Smell.


I can handle noise.  I don't like it, but I can get used to it.  I was an artillery officer.  I got to the point where I was sleeping when cannons were going off.  I'm not as good with smells, but I've been in the Army.  I can handle some funk.  Not preferred, but okay.  The problem in my B-hut is that I have someone in the Balkans directly across the hallway from me.  The problem, surprisingly, is not funk.  It's virtually the opposite of it.


You see, every morning, like clockwork, I'm woken up.  I'm not woken up by sounds.  Those I can ignore.  I'm not woken up by funk.  That, I can ignore.  No, I'm woken up by the blasts of perfume that the ONE GODDAM BOSNIAN WHO ACTUALLY CARES ABOUT HIS PERSONAL HYGIENE AND I JUST HAD TO HAVE LIVE ACROSS FROM ME showers himself with each morning.  

I have sleeping problems.  I have for a decade.  I struggle to get to sleep and often wake up in the middle of the night.  The one time where I actually manage some sleep is just before dawn, right when this Balkan Bastard is taking his Christian Dior bath.

Actually, that's not right at all. It's not Christian Dior.  Whatever he puts on I can only describe as Old Lady Perfume, the garish, super-bright kind that old ladies wear not because it's subtle or sexy or even pleasant, but because their sense of smell is gone and it can jackhammer into their deadened olfactory receptors and therefore they can be sure it overpowers whatever strange smells might be emanating from their hard-to-reach panes (fat-folds). 

Sadly, now that you've seen this picture, you know the smell I'm talking about.

There I am, finally in the arms of Morpheus (God of Dreams, not Laurence Fishburne -Ed), when this horrifying stench hits me.  I'm immediately awake and furious.  Instead of being able to lie to myself that I'm "anywhere", I'm immediately aware of the fact that I'm in a goddam hut in Afghanistan across from a dam Bosnian.  The worst part is, I can't complain.  "Hey, stop being one of the only people from your area of the planet who is at least aware enough to try to mask his b.o."  No way I can do that.   Even if I did, he wouldn't have to listen to me.  There's no way Human Resources backs me up on that one.  Really, all I can do is resort to my old standby of plotting intricate and exceedingly painful murder.


The only good news is that someday, should I ever have a lazy-ass teenager of my own who won't get out of bed, I'll know how to get the little bastard moving.