The Handsome Roommate: A Hypnotic Experiment and Unexpected Desire

As I approached the dormitories at the beginning of my sophomore year, I have to admit I wasn’t entirely happy. I’d had such a great roommate my freshman year that I wasn’t looking forward to a new one. No, it wasn’t what you’re probably thinking. My previous contentment had nothing to do with sex, since Gerry had been totally straight and not at all physically my type; but he was smart, funny, neat, and tolerant, and, in short, perfect to live with. When he decided, over the summer, to get an apartment with his girlfriend Callie, I wanted to tear my hair.

I dragged my suitcase and foot-locker to the door of my newly assigned double, knocked perfunctorily, and let myself in. I was so busy manhandling the luggage that I didn’t even register that there was another person in the room until a voice from behind me said, “Hi. You must be Bryan. I’m Paul, your new roommate.” I turned and almost gasped with astonishment. Facing me was the handsomest guy I’ve ever seen! Paul had blond hair, short, but still long enough to comb (or rather tousle), an incredibly appealing, clean-shaven face, with the clearest blue eyes, and red, sensuous lips that had my own lips pouting with adrenalin, just from imagining contact. He wasn’t very tall, but his body was smokin’ (a fact that his tight, worn jeans and body-hugging t-shirt made unmistakable), and he was, point-for-point everything to fulfill my hottest fantasies. As I shook his hand, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven!

Within a week, that opinion changed one-eighty. Paul may have been a walking wet dream, but he was the roommate from hell! First of all, he was straight as an arrow, but also an obvious homophobe (which fortunately became apparent before I exercised the bad judgment to out myself) and seemingly somewhat less tolerant than a Shiite Muslim. His personal hygiene and grooming were just fine, but his attitude towards housekeeping would have shamed an ape. The floor was covered with dirty clothes, boxes of half-eaten fast food, empty beer and soda cans, and the room had already begun to develop a disgusting odor. His preference in music was for anything really loud and really primitive. Worst of all, though, was the snoring. I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since moving in. Paul could fall asleep at the drop of a hat, would sleep through anything short of nuclear holocaust, and through it all he made sounds worse than the climactic scene from Texas Chainsaw Massacre (minus the screaming, although I was nearly ready to supply that myself). I called the housing office to see if I had any alternatives, but their attitude was “try to make it work”, by which they meant “don’t be such a pansy wimp – it’s only been a week!” I began to wonder whether I would survive the semester, and, if I were to snap and murder Paul in his bed, would the insanity wing of a maximum security prison be worse or better than my current situation.

I was having coffee with Gerry and Callie after our psych class, and bitching full out about my problems, when his chance remark changed what was to become the course of my life. “Too bad you can’t hypnotize him like Mr. Miller just did that guy Andrew in class.” (We’d just witnessed a demonstration on one of our fellow students by the young psychology Graduate Teaching Assistant.) “If he could make Andrew forget how to tie his shoes, and sing the blues whenever he heard his own name, or any of the other stuff he had him do, then it ought to possible to get your new roomie to stop snoring and living like a bear in a cave.”
I laughed, and we started talking about other things, but the idea somehow stuck. Later that afternoon, I found myself thinking, “Why couldn’t I hypnotize Paul?” I was sure I remembered exactly what Mr. Miller had said and done in his demonstration, and it would be easy enough to get a book from the library to double-check in case I’d forgotten some necessary point. The only really tricky bit would be in coming up with the right bait to get Paul to agree to the experiment. Hmmm…

Two weeks later (with me nearly at

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THE END