The Stoners. These guys were so quintessential, I hardly even need to say anything about them. They sat around, listened to Phish, the Grateful Dead, and Pink Floyd; and got stoned. They even grew their own pot under a sunlamp in their closet. At the end of the year, they transferred their surviving marijuana into a flower planter near the dorm’s front door.

The Druggies. These guys put away their share of Mary Jane as well, but for them, that was just the apertif. They always looked kind of glazed and twitchy, and when they spoke, they spoke loudly—including when they were conducting drug deals via phone in the bathroom stalls. One night they took various bottles and other paraphernalia and piled it all onto the hallway table in a sort of giant ofrenda to their druggie lifestyle.

The Odd Couple. I’ll give them the pseudonyms Tom and Levi. They were assigned to room together, and they drove each other crazy. Tom was a laid-back stonery party guy, and Levi was an uptight straight-edger whose classes were really important to him. Levi would complain to me about Tom, and I’d hold Levi’s kick-boxing bag for him right there in the middle of the hall so he could work out his frustrations via kicking. Levi had a giant steamer trunk that he’d lock all his possessions in—which Tom (and all of us) mocked him for, until the day Tom left the door unlocked and had his laptop stolen while Levi’s remained safe in the steamer trunk. So that he could properly concentrate on his studies, Levi invested in a huge pleather “executive” office chair on rollers, which he would roll across the hall and plant in the middle of the room I shared with my roommate so he could study with us. Levi would also occasionally invite himself to sleepovers on our floor, which predictably led to Tom making unsubtle suggestions regarding what Levi and I were getting up to. Though neither my roommate nor I was sexing Levi, we did feel bad for him. Levi’s hallway was separated from ours by a soundproof fire door, and one day as the fire door swung open we heard Tom barking, “Okay, Levi—get naked!”

The Northern Californian. A film student who dressed the part of the Californian he was—long hair, beard, worn baseball cap, Hawaiian shirts, shorts, sandals—but always introduced himself as a Northern Californian, so as not to be confused with anyone from L.A. or San Diego. He respected the fact that I was from Minnesota, land of the Coen Brothers and hockey: a fan of the San Jose Sharks, he thought it was a travesty that I’d grown up in a land of snow and ice without ever playing hockey.

The RA. Our RA was smoking hot: curly hair, perfect olive skin, green eyes. She was only a year older than us, but seemed like an experienced cougar who could teach us undreamed-of sexual tricks. She didn’t really seem to care much about her job, which explains a lot about my freshman year. She was generally trailed by her boyfriend and a cloud of perfume.

The Clubbing Girl. There were as many women as guys living on our floor, but for various reasons (see above, and below) they tended to make themselves scarce. This one, though, we’d predictably see around 11 PM as we were hanging out in the hallway: she’d come out dressed for clubbing, in a tiny dress and high heels, and check herself out in the floor-length mirror to make sure she looked good for all the guys who were not us. My roommate made a sign for the mirror: ASS-CHECKING MIRROR. She continued to use it for that purpose.

The Republican. This guy had attended a military academy and was a staunch conservative, though he cut a figure more like a young William F. Buckley than a drill sergeant. He was the kind of smart conservative who likes to trap not-so-smart liberals into agreeing with premises that then lead to conclusions wildly diverging from their stated political beliefs. At Christmastime he arranged colored lights in his dorm window to spell N-R-A.

The Anarchist. He was a philosophy student who espoused anarchism as a personal and political credo, though I suspected that was mostly so he could justify going to music stores and stealing the Richard Wagner CDs he liked to listen to—loudly—with the Republican. Within the first semester of freshman year, not one but two of his roommates had to leave college for mental health reasons, and he fervently hoped the housing office would assume that had something to do with him and not assign a third roommate to him. They did ultimately assign a third roommate, and he tried to scare the new guy off by covering the ceiling in Post-It notes with Nietzsche quotes written on them, arranged on the ceiling in the shape of a human body with a raccoon tail hanging where the penis would be. The new guy walked in, dropped his bags, looked up, and said, “Cool.”

The Romeos. Women looking for a good-looking guy who would whisk them into his room, put a sock in the door, and vigorously peen them had two flavors to choose from on our floor: the casual flavor, a guy with big curly hair, rippling muscles, and unbuttoned shirts (sex music: Beastie Boys); and the business flavor, a guy with slicked-back hair, wire-frame glasses, and Oxford shirts (sex music: Enigma). Besides his skill with women, the latter Romeo also became notorious for a stunt where he went away for the weekend leaving his door locked and his stereo blasting John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.”

The Guy in a Relationship. Every dorm floor must have one of these guys: the guy who all you know about him is that he’s in a relationship. On his dresser he had a big picture of his hometown girlfriend, and like every conversation with an evangelical quickly turns into a conversation about Jesus, every conversation with this guy quickly turned into a conversation about his girlfriend.

The Roommate. That’s a story in and of itself.

– Jay Gabler lived in that dorm up there: Sleeper Hall at Boston University. The following year, he roomed with the Northern Californian and the Republican.