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Doyal had two blue, ropey veins in his forehead that would pop out like angry V-shaped eyebrows in a cartoon when you pissed him off. It was pretty easy to piss him off, too, so the other five of us living in the Evergreen campus apartment always tried to keep him angry as possible so we could see the veins. Plus, instead of saying he was pissed, he would say, “I’m so aggravated right now,” which we also thought was funny as hell.
He was from Austin, which meant he had all kinds of crazy swaggering Texas pride and cool stories about inner tubing down the river and Lone Star beer and needless near-death experiences with short-fuse rednecks. But he was also the most loudmouth liberal guy in the house and he’d never shut up about whatever Bush was doing that week to end the world, or how Israel was committing war crimes. And 9/11 had happened literally the day before we all arrived on campus so it was kind of a charged time anyway.
One of the mainstay features of our apartment was that at all times somebody was designated Most Hated Roommate. You could get this title for being an asshole, like the time Darren used a blanket from the living room couch to clean up his room after some messy sex, and then refused to wash the blanket. You could get it for drinking all the beer when the rest of us were asleep, which was Tyler’s forte.
But Doyal was the all-time Champion Most Hated Roommate. He held the title the most often and for the longest stretches at a time. He was the perfect storm: we were all arrogant, but he was arrogant and from the south. We were all poor cheapskates, but he was the cheapest of us all and brought home the nastiest cheap food. Plus, if nobody was leading the pack in terms of dickishness, we could give the title to Doyal and he’d be angry that it was unfair and he’d get aggravated and, again, the veins would come out.
So one day, we’re all getting drunk and we start bagging on Doyal again and he gets sick of it. He takes off and goes to some party by himself. And he’s trying to forget his pain-in-the-ass roommates when he meets this totally hot girl at the party. Boring story short, she’s drinking up a storm, he’s drinking up a storm, and they end up back at our apartment, drunkenly pawing at each other in Doyal's bed before they both pass out.
Doyal wakes up the next day and the bed is wet. Right in the middle. And she’s still there.
Thinking quickly, he hops out of bed, trots down the hall to take a shower, cleans himself off and makes some coffee.
The girl wakes up and, since it’s just her in the bed soaked with pee, she assumes it was her. Of course, she’s horrified, and she walks out sheepishly to confess to Doyal. She feels awful. She wants to make it up to him. Doyal is so sweet and forgiving, she balls him on the overstuffed chair Doyal stole from the student center and kept in his bedroom.
Now, it may sound at this point like this is a story about Doyal getting over on some poor girl like some kind of calculating sleazebag. But for one, Doyal was desperate. And for two, in the end, she got one over on him.
See, after the sex and the cleanup shower and, “Oh, that was nice,” she’s almost on her way out the door when she grabs Doyal'sarms and leans in with an ashen look on her face:
“Listen, nobody can find out about this.”
Doyal shrugs and goes to console her, of course not, the thing with the bed is just between us, don’t worry about it, it’s no big deal.
“No, that’s not what I mean,” she tells him. “My boyfriend is a drug dealer. Like, he owns guns. A bunch of them.”
Silence.
Doyal: “Seriously?”
“Yeah, and he’s really, really jealous, and he’s gonna want to know where I was last night. I'll have to make something up. So just, like, be careful, okay?”
She gives him a quick kiss and whisks out of the apartment, leaving Doyal standing there with the pee on his sheets seeping into his mattress and a pretty puzzling question to chew over: Will the girl who got fooled into thinking she'd wet the bed be clever enough to fool her methed out, gun-toting drug dealer boyfriend?
Doyal told us the story, of course, but he told it in his bedroom, with the door closed, whispering. At every party we went to, for months, he looked over his shoulder constantly, a few times getting so worked up and nervous he made us leave for no reason except he thought "maybe that's the guy" and he was about to get shot.
None of us ever saw that girl again, but I always wanted to throw her the high five. She got him way worse than any of the rest of us.
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