It's not enough to simply lock your bedroom door.

The story I told you about my 4 ridiculously messy roommates got me reminiscing about that (incredibly filthy, roach-infested) year we lived together. There was yet another lesson I learned from that time.

My roommates and I were all in ROTC...which might lead you to believe I'm a military chick, but that would only be true in the sketchiest sense. I was only in the Reserves, never the active Army, and I did it because it was either that or drop out of school after my sophomore year, since my mom could no longer afford my tuition, and the Army would pay it for those remaining two years. So I was in the Reserves and ROTC for my last two years of college, and after college I fulfilled my Reserve obligation and then got out. It was a great experience, and I had a lot of fun and learned a whole lot, but if you knew me you'd know that I am just not the military type. So I got out when my obligation was up, and went back to being the person of questionable morals and behavior that you've grown to love.

The ROTC department at my university was small--maybe 40 students in all, with only 4 or 5 instructors. The instructors were active Army people, not college professors. While the 7 or 8 seniors in my ROTC class did attend classes taught by the other ROTC instructors, we were primarily assigned to Cpt. Mitchell, while the juniors in ROTC had their own instructor, as did the sophomores and the freshmen. So the 7 or 8 of us seniors (including my roommates) spent the majority of our ROTC class time with Cpt. Mitchell, and we became very familiar with him. Maybe too familiar, as my story will illustrate.

One weekend there was a party at our house. I was not in attendance, since I had driven home for the weekend to see some friends, but apparently this was a hell of a party. Cpt. Mitchell was there, and had appointed himself bartender. He stationed himself by an open window and used a table as his bartop, where he poured tequila shots and basically badgered people into taking them. Every so often he would stick his head out the window and puke into our hapless bushes, then pour himself another shot and carry on, like a true soldier. By everyone's account, this was apparently a great party, probably largely due to the tequila shot pouring prowess of Cpt. Mitchell. When I returned on Sunday, my roommates looked like something that had crawled out of the sewer--each of them was sprawled on various pieces of furniture, moaning and squinting and retching and cursing God. I went into my room to drop my bags, and noticed my bed had been made--which was odd, since I hadn't made it before I left. In fact, I had locked my bedroom door before I'd left. I peered out my bedroom door into the adjacent room, addressed the crew of living dead and asked, "Who slept in my room?" Suddenly, life crept into the eyes of the roommates, who instantly looked guilty. They fumbled. "Um. Well.... Uh," looking from one to the other and back at the floor. I went back into my room and took the sheets and blankets off the bed, thinking the guilty looks of my roommates surely meant that someone had not just slept in there, but possibly banged a hooker or a farm animal, so I might as well wash sheets now and ask questions later.

That's when I saw the tighty whities.

The only thing worse than discovering that some unidentified couple had sex in your bed is discovering that they left their vile little undergarments there. And am I crazy, or would it have been better if it had been the girl that had left her underoos there? Somehow it was worse that it was men's underwear than women's. I wanted to burn my bed to the ground.

Now they had no choice but to tell me the story. Here are the incredibly seedy details:

Party ends at our place, guests crawl home. Cpt. Mitchell remains, and in spite of being so drunk that he has puked several times and looks like Charles Manson instead of the clean-cut Top Gun he had resembled at the start of the evening, he wants to go barhopping. Drunk roommates actually try to resist, but Mitchell insists--and he was, after all, our superior officer, and we were accustomed to taking orders from him. They go to a place so seedy that it actually has big, dark blue sheets thumbtacked up to cover the windows so that you can't see into it from the street. It looks like something you'd find in a warehouse district. Once inside, Cpt. Mitchell picks up some skank. He defiles the skank in my bed after picking the lock to get in, while my roommates stare wide-eyed at each other in the living room, unable to believe this turn of events.

But here's where the story gets even more madcap, more zany.

Our fearless leader and his skank fall asleep in my formerly bacteria-free bed. Just as daylight begins to break, there's a knock at the door. A hungover roommate peers out the window and realizes it's Cpt. Mitchell's wife! Everyone tries to ignore the knocking. She persists, then leaves--but returns again a few minutes later, banging even harder, crying, and calling "I know he's there! His car is parked right here!" Cpt. Mitchell scrambles into his clothes--most of them, anyway--instructs the girl to stay put and not make a sound, then sheepishly answers the door. His crying wife has the baby in her car; the family retreats to the Mitchell household, for what must surely have been a daylong crying and fighting session. (Let me also note that Mitchell had brought his wife to the states from Germany where he'd met her a few years before. She still had a thick accent and had no family here in the states.)

My roommates are then left with Cpt. Mitchell's...friend. Eventually someone takes her home, and soon I arrive to find the filthy evidence at the crime scene.

Naturally it would have made sense to throw his filthy little panties away. But I found his behavior nauseating, particularly since a big portion of his time spent training us to be leaders involved instructing us to behave with strong moral character. So I didn't want to let him off the hook so easily. I picked up his putrid little bloomers by hooking them onto the end of a pen (which I promptly disposed of) and put them into a paper bag, and delivered them to him as he sat at his desk Monday morning. He was embarrassed, horrified, ashamed, etc. I can't imagine a bigger scandal that could have rocked our small ROTC department. He had crossed a boundary by even attending the party--and then, of course, he bludgeoned several other boundaries plum to death. (And no, Cpt. Mitchell isn't his real name.)

The lesson: Locking your bedroom door is never enough when you live with a house full of guys. Someone will get resourceful and find a way to degrade themselves and someone else in your bed. Consider sprinkling glass shards in your bed before you leave for the weekend, or perhaps leaving a wolverine with newborn cubs under the comforter.

Labels: I've been victimized, Lessons I've Learned