Salad Days

As an undergrad, I lived in a big house with four of my buddies, and we rented the sixth bedroom out to a stranger named Sam. Sam was a student, a year younger than us. He struck us as a perfectly fine guy, but we didn't know him; he was just a random dude living with 5 friends. The way our house was laid out, Sam and I had bedrooms on the main floor, and everyone else lived on the second floor. Accordingly, Sam and I shared a bathroom.

One summer night we threw a party. At some point, some bastard decided to flush a bar of soap down our toilet, which obviously clogged the hell out of it. But Sam and I, being lazy and stupid, didn't bother doing anything about it. Our spoken understanding was that we'd use the upstairs bathroom, while our unspoken hope was that someone else would fix the problem. Better still, we'd ignore the problem and it would go away.

So naturally, I began pissing in the bathtub. All you had to do was turn the water on and aim at the drain; it was one hell of a lot easier than going upstairs every time you had to pee. Out of politeness, I tried to go upstairs whenever Sam was around, but part of me assumed he had been peeing in the tub, too.

So one night, a bunch of us are sitting around, watching TV and drinking heavily, as was the style at the time. Eventually I got up to use the tub. The bathroom door was wide open, but Sam was already in there, on his tiptoes, urinating into the sink.

"Jesus Christ", I said calmly.

"What?" Sam blinked at me, still pissing. "Where do you go?"