Quote of the day:

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
—Mark Twain

That third year at Penn State, our neighbors in 518 Mifflin Hall were still Tom and Ken from the previous year. Ken was one of the three guys from the second year who wore their Jesus on their sleeves.

The other two were Herbie, whom I’ve mentioned previously, and a fellow by the name of Jim Garner.

Yes, we had a Jim Garner on the fifth floor of Mifflin Hall.

And I’m not exaggerating when I say that nobody—but nobody—could stand the arrogant jerk. His roommate couldn’t stand him, although he knew how to take him in stride and regarded him with a sort of detached amusement. But here’s the kicker: Steve Sattazahan couldn’t stand him either. I mean, if you’ve lost easy going Steve Sattazahn with the perpetually sunny disposition, where are you?

It wasn’t just Jim Garner’s overbearing religiosity that turned everybody off; he was overbearing on everything. He was one of those people who was always right and everybody else was wrong. I think you know the type.

Jim was a big guy, so I guess he must have worked out a lot, which was unusual back in those days, and he was probably twice my size. He knew I was an atheist and he didn’t try to convert me, I think he realized that was not gonna happen.

I actually did manage to find some common ground with him at one point. That year the book The Passover Plot came out in paperback, and both of us read it and thought it was nonsense, although perhaps for somewhat different reasons.

In any case I don’t know what became of either Jim Garner or his roommate, as neither of them was in Mifflin Hall the following year.

But Tom and Ken were still there. 

I found Ken to be the most inoffensive of the three Jesus people, mostly because he didn’t go around spouting it all the time. But as that fall term wore on, I realized that his roommate Tom was finding it harder and harder to put up with him. I had a hard time understanding why, but then, I didn’t live in the same room with Ken.

Tom kept referring to Ken as a cloud. He’d say that whenever Ken came back from class, the cloud walked into the room and everything turned gray.

Tom finally couldn’t take it anymore, and at the end of the term he moved out, and I never saw him again. I don’t recall his last name.

Ken got a new roommate, Denny, in the winter term, but that’s a whole other story.