My Strange College Roommates

“Dirty Ernie,” Dino and Joe. It sounds like a rock band from the ‘60s. Nope — these were three of the challenging oddball characters I was forced to share a room with during my college years.

I spent much of that time hating the situation. “Why do I have to live with these guys?” I wondered. “How did this happen?”

But it turned out to be a beneficial part of my college education. My wife, who was paired with a compatible roomie at Middlebury College, says of my difficult times: “A bad roommate can be a good thing.”

I started to think back on my old roomies last week when I read a column in the New York Times by Pamela Paul. The title: “Living With a Stranger Is Hard. College Students Should Try It.”

She noted a recent trend instituted by many colleges and universities in which incoming students are given the option of choosing a roommate. They do this usually through social media; there is now a wide assortment of matching services such as RoomSync or StarRez.

The columnist quoted an administrator at Emory University saying “we want students to have a place that’s safe, comfortable, to feel where they belong.” But Pamela Paul pointed out: “College is about encountering the unknown and learning to adapt, even if that means sidestepping a grievously drunk roommate at 3 a.m.”

That’s what it was like living with “Dirty Ernie.”

He seemed like such a nice, quiet young lad when he walked into our dormitory room at Lafayette College with his parents and belongings. He introduced himself as David Kelly, out of some small town in Pennsylvania. We shook hands, set up our things on our sides of that small room and prepared for freshman year.

It was the fall of 1968, a rebellious and sexually active time for many college students. But I wasn’t there yet. “Dirty Ernie” was.

You’re wondering how he got that name. Quite early in our time together, during one of the many late-night b.s sessions we guys had on our dormitory floor, David told the rest of us he had a wonderful joke to share. The center of the joke was a young student named “Dirty Ernie,” a foul-mouthed brat who was always upsetting his teacher with his loud, coarse language. During class one day, the teacher asked students to come up with a word that began with a certain letter as she called out the letters of the alphabet. She avoided calling on Ernie through many letters, worrying what obscene word he would conjure. Finally, when she got to “r,” she pondered what terrible word begins with that letter, but came up with nothing. And so, seeing “Dirty Ernie” wildly waving his hand, she called on him.

This is what he said: “Rat! A big (effing) rat! With a cock this long!” And here “Dirty Ernie” held out his hands, stretching them wide.

Everybody on our floor loved that joke. He told it so often that it became his nickname for the rest of our year together.

“Dirty Ernie” was a slob. I can remember him tossing his clothes and everything else all over the room (and not just on his side). He would start every morning by sniffing the armpit of the shirt he had worn the day before (and probably the day before that) and almost always putting it on for another day.

I was a neatnik, everything in its place. I was also a nerd and sexually inexperienced. “Dirty Ernie” was fully exploring his new-found sex life, even though Lafayette was an all-male college. He didn’t have sex in our room with the women he picked up off-campus but once when I was sound asleep he barged in waving a stained pillow case in my face as he drunkenly bragged about his latest conquest.

Of course we also had different tastes in rock music. While I was playing the early, pre-disco Bee Gees on my phonograph (“Massachusetts,” “Holiday”), he was blasting the soundtrack to “Hair,” Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. He called my records “pussy music.” Within a few years I would come to embrace what he was playing. But I wasn’t ready for it in 1968.

Believe it or not, at that time ROTC was a required course for all freshmen at Lafayette. We actually had to dress up in uniforms once a week and march around carrying M16 rifles. I was a terrible soldier (of course! I was a nerd) but a sophomore “officer” who supervised my unit took pity on me and helped me get through those ridiculous drills. Yes, he “took me under his wing.”

His real name was Richard but everybody called him Dino. He actually enjoyed ROTC and stayed with it, whereas I dropped out of the program as soon as second semester began. In spite of our political differences he introduced me to his fraternity brothers and I liked them. I became a pledge in Phi Kappa Tau and signed up to live in that house for my sophomore year. Guess who arranged to be my roommate?

It turned out Dino was an absolute nut about the music of Johnny Mathis. This became the soundtrack of my sophomore year. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War was intensifying and I was quickly becoming an anti-war activist. Dino and I were growing apart. For my junior year I teamed up with two fraternity members I had much more in common with — but then I got fed up with Easton, Pa. and in the middle of my junior year I lit out for Boston University.

Some stupid B.U. housing administrator booked me into a freshman dorm and paired me with a frosh named Donald. He was a perfectly nice kid but obviously he was two years younger than I. We politely co-existed in our small room with our beds about 10 feet away. We knew we weren’t going to become close friends but we would always be nice to each other. It was another learning experience.

Then, finally, senior year — in a co-ed dorm! But who did I get for a roommate this time? Joe Tarbe, an angry young man, his head shaved bald before anybody did that. He smoked marijuana in our room, around the clock. (This was before I had picked up that habit). And he didn’t like my taste in music any more than had “Dirty Ernie.” He actually tore to pieces a poster I had put on our door of an oldies concert I had attended (Dion and the Belmonts, the Shirelles, etc.) After I found the fragments in the waste basket and asked him why, he shrugged and said, “I didn’t like it.”

But his music collection did broaden my horizons. One day I was listening to a Rolling Stones song he had put on; it had a good beat and interesting lyrics. “What’s the name of this song?” I asked. He took a puff on his joint, looked at me as I was the dumbest moron on earth and said quite indignantly: “‘Sympathy For the Devil’!”

Soon afterward this would become one of my favorite Stones songs. In the summer of 1972, after I graduated, I would dance to their music at Boston Garden.

But by then Joe Tarbe was long gone. He didn’t make it to the end of spring semester. One day I walked into our room and all of his stuff had vanished, along with him.

Joe Tarbe had flunked out.

All of these experiences with those roommates toughened me up, made me more tolerant, more respectful and open-minded to other people’s views and attitudes. It wasn’t always easy, but life isn’t either. My roommates prepared me for my later life, for working alongside people who were as different from me as were “Dirty Ernie,” Dino and Joe.