This column may be hazardous to your lunch

Piles have a tendency to grow in my house. Name anything and there's probably a pile of it. There's a pile of empty bottles, pizza boxes and other assorted recycling/garbage standing four feet high and 10 feet long. There's another large pile of dirty clothes accumulating in my living room, while my dirty dishes tend to multiply at the expense of my clean ones.

At one point this year there was a large pile of trash in my front lawn. We covered the heap with a torn, moldy green tarp, which most of the student section walked past on their way to football games.

Jon Zemke St. Michael Speaking

"But our house sparkles compared to where I used to live," my housemate Ray said. "We were so bad, we got sued for more money on top of our damage deposit."

"I doubt it could be much worse than some of the fraternity houses I've seen, at least the one I lived in," Ben said. "We got condemned twice by the fire marshal our first week."

"I've got you both beat," I said. "My house sophomore year was so disgusting that when my father, who's a landlord, came by, he said if it'd been his house, he'd report us to the Health Department."

"Fine, if we're going to compare scars à la Jaws, I might as well shut you two up right now," Ray said. "There was smell so putrid in my house a few years ago, rotting flesh would've been an improvement. We checked the vents to make sure our cat Jules wasn't decomposing there."

"I don't think rotting flesh is a strong enough smell to overcome your stench, Ray," Ben said. "There was an overwhelming stink of Tabasco and other assorted spoiling food products coming from my frat's basement. And when that didn't overtake all three floors there was the combined stench of piss, puke, cheap skunked beer and decaying half empty take-out boxes from four-foot-tall trash piles outside our rooms."

"How in God's name did you guys manage to have parties?" I asked.

"We had a cleaning crew," Ben said.

"None of that matters," I said. "The growth outside my house was so high we got a $500 ticket from the city. You could tell the student house from the townies' by the broken 40's on the porch and in the weeds. Actually, it was probably for the best the officer didn't notice the suspicious-looking tomato plants the gutters sprouted."

"All right, all right, all right. I'm sure we could go on like this all day, but the bathroom's by far the worst part of any student house," Ray said. "At least you know where the standing month-old shower-water in the bathtub has been. You don't know where the hair that you're stepping on came from."

"No, the kitchen's the worst, easy," I said. "We had so many flies in our kitchen from the crusted and broken dishes, we bought fly-swatters and had a three-hour insect massacre."

"That's nothing," Ben said. "My kitchen was so bad you couldn't turn the kitchen light on without being swarmed by fruit flies."

"Yeah, I remember your fruit fly trap," I said. "You had a light shining next to a fan on full blast so they would get sucked in and shot out onto the porch."

"I had a friend who had a yellow jackets' nest on his porch once, so to get rid of it he put a bug zapper with honey under the nest," Ray said. "He'd sit on the other end of the porch, get high and watch their bodies smoke after they electrocuted themselves. He said he always felt like a sadistic hick when he did that."

"Coffee tables are always the most overlooked trash dumps in the house, though," Ben said. "Seriously, look at everything that gets dumped there. Ass-ends of beer bottles with floating cigarette butts next to overflowing ashtrays, with various seeds and stems lying around. You have to make sure none of the those seeds fall into half-empty cans of molding fruit because you don't know what might grow out of there."

"Then there are certain areas you just don't go - the back of the fridge, the flooded basement with the broken light and behind the toilet," I said.

"Why the toilet?" Ben said.

"You don't want to know what crusted stuff you'll find back there," I said.

- Jon Zemke maintains that his bathroom is the most pristine shrine ever made for a porcelain deity. For more information on worship services, e-mail him at jzemke@umich.edu.