The Guidance Counselor - Chapter 19 (Patreon)

I had a problem.

            A very, very, very awkward problem.

            I was strangely attracted to my roommate’s farts.

            I hit the ground running my first year at the Dorothy College for the Arts. It was a small cozy school in the middle of smalltown America. The campus was renowned for its theater and plays, while the artists and the writers were more in the background. Technically, it was a liberal arts school, but the forefront was the creative arts. So you still had kids studying biochemistry and physics, but that wasn’t really what the school was known for. Besides my main focus as an art degree, I had to take courses on science and history. I took the really dumb stuff like “How Things Work” (no, really, that was the name of the actual class) to cover those requirements.

            My first-year roommate was a large white guy named Charlie. On orientation day, I immediately know I would not vibe with this guy. He was three-times my size, watched NFL on a regular basis, had no sense of organization or cleanliness, and was one of those people who wore basketball shorts in the winter with a hoodie.

            This guy had interests that were the furthest away from my end of the spectrum. I don’t think he even knows what Dungeons and Dragons is. You would never in a thousand years think that we would know each other, but that was the luck of the draw when paired up with a freshman-year roommate.

            And the worst part…

            Was that I was starting to like the way he farted.

            This was the source of much turmoil right off the bat a week into living with me. The first time he farted in front of me was on a lazy Sunday morning when we were both in our beds. I typically woke up earlier than he. I stared up at the ceiling thinking about my future here when he snored, shifted positions in bed, and then ripped ass.

            The sound honestly made me jump. I didn’t even think it was a fart at first – it sounded like an explosion or something being torn. I thought at first that maybe something above the ceiling tiles was falling down. When I realized it had a been a fart, I stared at him thinking, Jesus Christ, he made that sound? I had no idea a human could make a sound like that.

            He casually sighed a little after he let it out, as if it were nothing.

            In the minutes that dragged on in silence that morning, I stared down at my awkward boner.

            I thought about Ms. Johnson letting off a fart like that. Funny thing is, I’m not sure she could have. That sounded like a “man’s fart”. That sounded like Charlie had a decades-long diet of heavy protein. That was the fart of a man who worked out regularly and ate five plates of food every dinner.

            Whenever Charlie had football practice in the afternoon, that gave me precious alone time to masturbate.

            Despite what had happened between me and Ms. Johnson, I still thought about her. I may have denied my lingering emotions about her, trying to see her as nothing more than a fuckable object. Deep down, I knew I was lying to myself.

            Imagine if Ms. Johnson farted like that…

            Her walking down the halls…hips swaying in that tight skirt…she looks at me and scrunches up her face before letting rip and---

            I came, instead, to the image of Charlie.

            It happened abruptly at the very end.

A very rude intrusive thought.

I stared up at the ceiling for a long time after that happened. My cheeks flushed. I was embarrassed to even admit a thought to myself.

What did this mean?

Well, an intrusive thought was an intrusive thought. We all had those.

Sometimes you think about jumping off a roof out of morbid curiosity. Sometimes you get into a bad argument with your mom or dad and think about shooting them. Sometimes you think what would happen if you veer your car off course and crash into the person next to you. It doesn’t mean you want to do those things – it means that you are human and naturally think about prohibited acts from time to time.

For a guy who played football and went to parties, Charlie surprisingly hung out with me a lot my freshman year. We often went to the cafeteria together for dinner. Sometimes we met up with our own respective friend groups, other times we mingled between friend groups, and sometimes it was just the two of us.

He really did eat about five plates of food. He saw the cafeteria as a bountiful buffet and gobble down chicken, rice, beef, pizza, and ice cream.

I tried not to stare.

The way he ate noisily, the way he licked his lips if there was sauce or cream on his fingertips, the way he ate too fast and sometimes needed a second or two to stop and hiccup.

            He hardly spoke while eating, and that’s when you knew he truly enjoyed eating.

            Oh, and he also belched all the time.

            Great.

            His belches wouldn’t come up until after he ate. All the air he gulped down after shoveling food would eventually come back up and he would belch for hours on end after eating dinner. Just random “BRAAAAUUURRRRRRRRPPPS” and “URRRRRRRRRRPPPPS” while he was in the middle of talking.

            Each belch was as satisfying as the last. I could tell by the way he groaned and rubbed his stomach after letting each of them out.

            We had our desks against the wall with our backs facing each other. Our freshman doors, by the way, were nothing short of prison cells. The space was cramped at best and the white brick walls really added to the prison aesthetic. So being around this guy was always awkward with the little elbow room we had.

            When we did our homework in our room, the silence was often cut rudely by a massive fart rippling against his wooden chair. A lot of the times he propped his leg up on his bedpost in order to fart while sitting. He was a fan of the whole “lifting up one’s leg to fart” position in general. Of course he was. That made it all the more awkward for me since I was in love at the idea of girls doing that.

            Charlie did all this, by the way, without ever apologizing or even acknowledging it. He just casually broke the gas barrier in front of me without any prior discussion about it. I think he was under the impression that men just did that in front of each other. But if he did so, he never questioned why I never burped or farted in front of him.

            Things got worse one night when I got a call from a recent friend of mine named Henry. Henry and I knew each other through art history class. He was a tall tan kid with a friendly disposition that I envied. He was able to dabble easily with both the nerds and the jocks without any prejudice. He was often invited to parties even though he didn’t really drink, if ever.

            I was alone playing video games when he called me up.

            “What’s up?” I asked.

            “Hey….uhhhhh,” Henry hesitated. “You’re in your room, right?”

            “Yeah, why?”

            “Charlie got really fucked up. I was just making sure you were able to open the door for him. We’ve got to carry him. But I’m the only one sober enough and this dude is heavy. Are you able to come over? I’m just afraid Public Safety is going to come around because we already heard of a party that was cracked down across the lot.”

            Public Safety was the college’s own hired police officers, but we didn’t really call them police officers since they didn’t have the power to arrest people or draw a weapon. They just made sure underage kids weren’t getting into trouble. They often made surprise visits in dorm halls whenever they caught wind of a party that possibly had underage drinkers. I wasn’t keen on getting into trouble with the law before hitting 21. I also just generally never liked the idea of a college party. The stuff I experienced in high school was just a small prelude of the much crazier things kids did in college. The idea of being around drunks laughing and stumbling really annoyed me.

            “Jason? You there?’

            “Yeah. Which dorm you at?”

            “Not a dorm. I’m at a frat house on the hill.”

            Ah shit. I hate frat houses.

            “It’s uhhhh Alphia Delta Phi. Use the back door. We’re in the living room. I think P-Safety was seen two doors down.”

            I fetched my keys and took the long quiet walk up the hill to the frat houses and the sororities. A group of brick and wood houses stood next to each other on top of a hill overlooking the town. On Friday nights, the hill was popping with students loitering outside and smoking and waiting to be let in because the parties oftentimes exceeded the legal limit of capacity. If it weren’t for my apprehension of being around big dumb frat people, I would have spent many nights there overlooking the town, because I envied the view as opposed to the simple freshman dorm looking at the street.

            Like I said, the stuff I saw in high school was only a preview of the stuff in college. Seeing all the students laughing and hollering outside the frat houses reminded me of the kids at St. Joseph’s hanging outside the gym during the dances, except this time they were free to loiter.

            I took the back door like Henry suggested. The instant I stepped through, I was taken aback by how the house reeked of beer and weed – and I mean REEEKED. The stuff hung on your clothes too for a while even after you left. It honestly made me nauseous, so I hurried to the living room where Henry said they were. My eardrums vibrated against the loud rap music. I didn’t know when I suddenly became an old man but I hated when my senses were assaulted on all fronts.

            Henry looked sweaty, as did most people by the end of a party night. The party itself had mostly died out but there were two drunk girls with messy eyeliner hooting and hollering as they swung on a pole. Rather, tried to swing on a pole. I found myself eying them for a bit before I stopped, fearing I’d be called out for staring.

            Henry didn’t need to say anything, because I saw the problem right away. I looked down at the floor by the couch to see a very inebriated Charlie unable to sit up. He had a gut the size of a pregnant woman, so much so that his jeans were unbuttoned. His bare, hairless stomach poked up and I swore it moved before he let out a belch that roared over the music. He tried to get up for a second but failed and turned over.

            I felt something stirring in me, something that focused on how vulnerable he looked, all helpless and bloated and…

            No, stop it.

            How much did this moron drink?

            My holier-than-thou attitude about the college party life took over.

            “How did the hell did he drink so much?”

            Henry gave me a sheepish grin. “Edward Fortyhands challenge.”

            He had said it like I knew what it was, so my blank expression prompted him to elaborate. “It’s this game where you have a forty ounce of beer taped to each hand, right? And you can’t take off either of them until you finish it.’

            “So, obviously he finished.”

            “Oh yeah. Twice.”

            I half-cried, “Twice?” I counted in my head. “Isn’t that like a GALLON of beer?”

            “Yeah…” Henry bit his lip. “I’m actually kind of worried. What if…what if he needs to be… ‘transported’?”

            That was code for a student needing to get sent to the hospital to have their stomach pumped from alcohol poisoning. People tended to avoid calling for the hospital because, well, many kids that drank in college were underage. Calling for help would mean getting the authorities involved, and thus getting into trouble.

            If Charlie could eat and drink like a horse on a daily basis, I had no doubt in my mind he was able to drink a gallon of beer. Clearly this happened over the course of several hours. Still, he did it and his body was obviously distended. I had never seen someone so drunk before. The most were a few giggles and obnoxiously loud voices at family gatherings. This was the first time I ever saw someone truly shitfaced.

            “Hey man….” Charlie said, finally realizing that I was there. He was about to say something but belched instead. Henry grimaced and looked away – the stench actually reached us. Charlie looked down at his open palms, raised then, and said dumbly, “Did it…”

            “He’s still functional…” I said, recalling our orientation meeting about the importance of recognizing alcohol poisoning. Had Charlie been passed out, that would be cause for concern.

            “And he hasn’t thrown up?” I asked.

            “Nope. Guy is a tank.”

            I blushed a bit, feeling a rush. Henry saying that about Charlie made me feel…certain ways. Charlie’s overtly distended belly surely did look like a tank. Thinking of him that way – like a human receptacle for beer---

            No, stop it. 

            “There’s no one here to help us carry him, right?” I said.

            Henry grimaced at the sight of the drunk girls cackling.

            “Right, dumb question. Well then. I’ll hold him up on one side and you hold him up on the other.”

            Charlie’s weight made this extremely difficult. Henry and I had to pause and huffed to regain our strength to get him just outside through the back door. Once there, we had to take another break. Henry didn’t look too confident in our ability to do this.

            “We HAVE to sober him up just a little bit to make him carry his own weight.”

            Henry went back inside and brought a water bottle.

            “I don’t think you can fit anymore in him…” I said, gazing a second too long at Charlie’s bloated gut.

            “It’s not for that,” Henry said. He poured some water on Charlie’s head.

            “Hey! Wake up, Charlie. We gotta go!”

            The icy cold water stirred him and he tried to stand up. He mumbled, “Oh shit, okay. Oh shit. Okay. Hmmm.”

            With Charlie able to walk just a little bit, we were able to lug him back to our dorm.