What’s in the closet?

Most people have stories to share about strange ex-roommates who now roam their memories, wrapped in crusty bath towels. And if you’ve ever lived on or off a college campus, I guarantee you have a story.

Lately, in some of my idle mental space, I’ve been thinking about people from my past, and for some reason, I keep thinking about Closet Pete.

I met Pete in 1993, our freshman year at Plymouth State College[1]. We were both assigned to rooms on the second floor of Pemigewasset Hall and we became friends, sharing similar interests in music, books and marijuana.

However, there were also some stark contrasts between Pete and me. For example, I attended class and Pete…not so much.

I remember once running into Pete at the library around midterms our second semester and experiencing a jump scare. “What in Hell are you doing here, Pete? Are you trying to pass your classes now?”

Stoned on Planet Zippy, Pete grinned. “No way, man,” he said. “I was just listening to Stevie Wonder albums in the media room.”

Predictably, Pete failed out after his first year—no probation, just gone.

But while Pete was persona non grata in campus classrooms, he decided to stick around the Plymouth area. As one might surmise, Pete’s parents—who lived in Connecticut and paid his tuition— were not thrilled by their son’s decision to pursue a non-matriculated, independent study in Stevie Wonder albums.

Meanwhile, after numerous citations for insubordination in the dorm[2], the college “encouraged” me to move off-campus my sophomore year. After a semester living in my fraternity house, I moved into an apartment next to the frat house with three of my friends.

The dingy apartment—which was an early-20^th Century colonial that was broken into three separate units—had an enormous closet in the living room, maybe a pantry in the original home. Other than one ill-advised night in that closet after one of my roommates and I ingested hallucinogens, we mostly ignored the closet and used it strictly for storage.

At the beginning of my junior year, I bumped into Pete at a downtown bar. Pete was getting evicted from the place where he was living in Campton and on the brink of living out of his car. I told Pete about the closet in the living room, and said that if my roommates were agreeable to the idea, he could run an extension cord and move a mattress into the closet and live there until he found a new place.

A week later, Closet Pete moved in.

We barely saw him. Pete kept different hours, working late at a restaurant and going out afterwards. He would mostly sleep in his closet through the daylight hours. While watching the television in the living room on any afternoon, noises might stir inside the closet. A guest might ask, “What’s the closet?”

“Pete,” we’d say.

As often is the case with these types of things, when Pete moved out of the closet has blurred over the decades. He didn’t live there long—maybe a month or so—and once he left, I didn’t hear from him again until we reconnected at a friend’s untimely funeral.

The last I knew, Pete was living in Colorado with his wife and kids and making furniture for a living. The last time I saw him, he seemed happy, really happy.

And sometimes, to this day, I’ll walk past a closet and swear I can hear the bass-line from “Superstitious” playing softly inside.

[Writer’s note: If anyone has any cool stories about strange roommates, send them to me at ngrazio5@yahoo.com. I’d love to hear them. If I get enough good ones, I’ll compile them in a future column.]

[1] I understand that it is Plymouth State University now, but for those of us who attended PSC this can be a hard pill.

[2] The Puritanical handbook they used to make the rules for the dorm were—if I’m being frank—complete bullshit.