Nine Months with a Sink-Pissing Caveman: the Worst Roommate I've Ever Had
I had the ill fortune to live with an actual caveman for almost an entire year. This was about 20 years ago. I was 18 years old and it was my first time living in military barracks and in that unit we did not have a choice of who we got to live with. Here are some of the memories I have of this strange and unpleasant year in my life. I’m just going to call him Caveman, because that’s what I and everyone else called him. He loved it and it got to a point where he wouldn’t even respond if you called him by his real name.
I first have to describe his appearance, which was unique and fitting to his nickname. I have never met anyone quite like him. He was huge and athletic – 6’3’’ and strong as a chimpanzee. His chest hair, which coated him from belly to throat, was thicker than a 70’s shag carpet. His big psychotic hazel eyes bulged furiously and could never focus on one thing, instead bouncing endlessly around the room. His giant head was roughly the size and shape of a basketball. His eyebrows were absurdly thick, hairy and furious. When he got mad or drunk, he’d wildly screech and spin and flail around, knocking anything and anyone in his path down on their ass. When Skyrim was released a few months into our time together, I was amazed to see the similarities between Caveman and the Frost Trolls. I went door to door grabbing all of our friends, screaming “Caveman’s in Skyrim!” and everyone agreed that the mannerisms and behavior were identical.
Within a few weeks of living together, I became familiar with the more unpleasant aspects of Caveman’s daily routine. First off, he had a fundamental and pathological inability to walk down to the bathrooms to take a piss. He was a sink pisser and proud of it. Our prison-style barracks had communal bathrooms but you had to pass through an exterior walkway to get there, and in the winter or in the dead of night a lot of people would just piss in the sink. However, it was understood that if you did that, you’d bleach and rinse the sink afterwards in the name of common courtesy. That was the social contract. Still gross, but not terrible. But Caveman? He didn’t care for all of that. He’d just piss and splatter everywhere and not even bother to rinse it out. So you’d go over to the sink to fill up your camelback or brush your teeth in the morning and there’d be a fine coating of crusted piss everywhere, including the faucet. I learned quickly not to keep my toothbrush there.
What makes it worse is that Caveman was habitually drunk, so he was always stumbling and pissing his dirty brown dehydrated piss all over the place. And the final kicker is that my bed was next to the sink, so I’d pretty frequently wake up getting splattered by the piss of an angry drunken Cro-magnan. I had very little recourse for this, as he outweighed me by half a foot and 60 or so pounds and he ignored my demands to switch beds with him.
After a month or so of this I begged my chain of command for a room change and I was told that “you’re a grown man and should be able to work this out between you.” So I accepted the situation for what it was and just counted down the months until I knew he would do something stupid and get himself kicked out (which is exactly what happened).
I also must describe his genitalia (of which he was immensely proud) because he had an exhibitionist streak. If you have lived in a military environment, you will understand that you come into contact with many, many dicks. That’s normal and there’s always a typical level of joking and “no-homo” humor. Caveman's dick and balls were, without a doubt, the strangest genitalia I have ever seen. His penis was unremarkable but the head was colossal. It looked like a baby’s hand sewn to the end of a vienna sausage. His scrotum, on the other hand, was grotesquely swollen and large: the size of a grapefruit. He claimed that each of his testicles was as big as an egg, and we believed him. Several friends were convinced that he had Elephantiasis. When we had physical training, it looked like he had a softball stuffed in his shorts.
Now, the reason I’m describing this is because Caveman had a horrific habit of sneaking up behind people who were sitting down and resting his monstrous balls on their shoulder. He could be stealthy when he wanted to be. You’d be sitting there reading or playing a game and suddenly what felt like a heavy punching bag plopped onto your shoulder and you’d reflexively look towards it and be face to face with the monster before diving out of your chair in a state of utter fear and disgust. He did this on an almost daily basis to anyone he could, cackling like a gremlin. Few dared to fight him due to his aforementioned strength and chaotic manic energy.
Our barracks ostensibly had air conditioning but it never worked and everyone I knew had a desk fan that they used because we were located in a miserably hot and humid state. One day, Caveman got a mysterious package in the mail. He opened his box and pulled out what I thought was a leafblower. He began to cackle madly. That was one thing about Caveman – he never laughed normally; it was always a sinister cackle, a staccato heh-heh-heh that made him always sound like he was up to some monkey business. He had bought a $300 professional-grade industrial paint drying fan. Picture in your head the body of a chainsaw or snowblower and you can see pretty much what I’m talking about. It took up half his desk and sounded like a jet engine. Literally, when he turned it on, papers and loose items would go flying around the room and whoever was in front of it would be blasted with wind and their face would start flapping like a dog sticking its head out the window on the highway. I had never seen anything like it. Caveman would stumble in from PT, panting and gasping in the late summer heat and flop down at his desk, having only enough energy to drag his weary hand to the fan and flip on the trigger switch. Once he did, all ambient noise of the barracks was immediately drowned out by an incredible WHOOOOOOOOOOSH and Caveman’s cheeks would start flapping and his teeth would be exposed like a chimpanzee as his lips danced too and fro from the wind. I don’t know how he stood it because every time I tried his fan, I found it exceedingly uncomfortable, much like putting your face behind the exhaust of a fighter jet, drying out your eyes and mouth like sandpaper. But he loved that thing. Sometimes, I swear to god, he’d even talk to it, murmuring and whispering sweet nothings into its mechanical ear, quietly, like he didn’t want us to hear.
The rejuvenating effect that this fan had on Caveman cannot be understated. Within a few minutes of this self-induced torture, he’d be back to his regular self, prancing and flailing around the room and screeching triumphantly and beating his chest like a gorilla. I have often thought that he was the missing link between Neanderthal and early modern humans, a hypothesis which is yet to be unproven. Obviously, everyone but him hated the damned thing because when he had it on, it was impossible to communicate or relax or anything else because it was louder than a lawnmower.
Caveman was a consummate glutton for all possible substances, but his true love was for alcohol, chewing tobacco, and chocolate milk. In regards to tobacco, he went through several cans of dip a day, stashing open cups filled with concealed tarry dip-spit all over our room, spilling them on an almost daily basis leaving the disgusting sweet-sour dip smell to fester in his bed. Once, somebody dared him to eat a can of dip which he did without question, earning $50 and promptly turning green and projectile vomiting all over my bed. Then he took his $50 and ran down to the exchange to get more tobacco.
One of Caveman’s more endearing qualities was his childlike obsession with chocolate milk. He would guzzle it straight from the teat of a chocolate cow, if such a thing existed. He swore that chocolate milk was the source behind all of his power and his ability to run a 5:10 mile. Whether or not that’s true remains to be scientifically determined (there were a lot of dudes who did the gallon of milk a day diet) but I can say with all honesty that he probably drank over a gallon of it every single day, perhaps even closer to two. It was his life’s blood. Of course, every now and then he’d put down his cup of chocolate milk in our room and accidentally pick up his dip spit and take a big swig, after which he’d immediately vomit again all over our room. In 9 months of living together, I never once saw him make it to a trash can to puke.
Caveman regularly drank the evillest-tasting liquor I’ve ever had. He had a giant fucking plastic jug of it the size of a gas-can stowed away in his duffelbag that he had gotten from some weird moonshining local he met at Walmart. It looked and smelled like it came out of some slavic hillbilly’s still in Dnipropetrovsk in 1970. The first time I took a sip of it uncut, I gagged and began crying uncontrollably. I temporarily lost my vision. The heartburn was incredible. It was more or less like drinking paint thinner. To ameliorate this, he began mixing it with hot chocolate from our room’s Keurig coffee machine. Only the worst alcoholics in the barracks would gleefully partake in this wretched concoction without question while everyone else watched in horror. When he was drunk – which was four or five nights a week – he was insane, just absolutely terrible to be around. He’d swing his arms wildly and smash shit and scream and yell and most of the time when he got like that I had to flee to another room and wait for him to pass out. His mattress was covered in a Jackson-Pollock array of brown dip stains and yellow piss stains. Also, he’d get so drunk that when he tried to piss in the sink, he’d get turned around in the dark and miss completely and either piss on my bed or piss into his wall locker, splattering his uniforms and shoes and shit. There was a more or less constant aroma of piss in the room.
Luckily for me, it all came crashing down one day when we were all piss-test ed after a holiday weekend. We all passed… except for one. Caveman apparently had pissed hot for weed. It was not his first disciplinary offense and thus he was “fired” and discharged. Even though he was kicked out, the room still smelled absolutely terrible and I was finally able to get transferred to a room with a buddy after enduring 9 long months of hell. I never saw the guy again and have not been able to find him on any social media so I have no idea what he’s up to these days. But he will forever be the bad roommate by which I gauge every other relationship in my life.