The Story of _______: Second in a Series

Today’s Feature: Andy

I want to say it was sophomore, but it was almost undoubtedly junior year in college…towards the end of the year, in fact, which surprises me, as we ended up such good friends in what must have been a very short time. I was toiling away under my engineering classes, and starting to see a glimmer of hope for my beleaguered academic life, when I met this guy outside this one class doing this one thing.

This was not Andy.

This was his roommate, Aaron, whom I’m still friends with, as well, but not telling his story. At any rate, Aaron and I get to be friendly in that we sit near each other now, not pay attention in class together, and generally do whatever. And that’s how I end up going to his apartment. I don’t remember why; actually, some assignment we had to work on, or something cool he wanted to show me, or more likely the promise of food or food-related material. Either way, I went to his place.

While walking through the living room, the couch moved and stopped and moved again and stopped again, and Aaron threw his thumb over his shoulder with a “that’s Andy, he sleeps a lot”. And he was, and he did.

From what I can remember, each of the three initial times I met Andy, he was asleep, or lightly napping, or resting his eyes, or catching a quick snooze…to the point that I’m fairly certain he didn’t even know I existed until at least a month after I considered him at least an acquaintance.

Then summer came.

The three of us were staying in IV for the summer for various reasons (not the least of which is that you’d be crazy not to) and we needed a place to stay. My girlfriend at the time had a horrible studio apartment that she would be vacating, and we thought to ourselves, “what better? a cheap studio apartment for three guys!”. But that’s another hundred stories.

At this point, Andy and I weren’t really friends, yet; at least not without Aaron there as glue, and I’m sure you know what I mean.

To continue, in the words of my dad: so there we were: three guys staring at each other in a tiny box. And the power goes out. And stayed out. For about a week. Because of this, Aaron ditches us to live at his parents’ until the power returns…his lame excuse being that he needed reliable electricity to power his alarm clock to wake him up to go to work to make money to pay for the power we didn’t have. The end result being Andy and I stuck in a box in the dark with little to no alone time under our belts.

We became friends very quickly.

In the race for people whom I’d consider having as my best man someday, Andy is one of the finalists, and, we owe it to one awful terrible summer in the darkness of a tiny little box with the thinnest walls imaginable. In fact, this one time…