Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 23:26:19 -0500
From: jpm 770 <jpm770@gmail.com>
Subject: Joe College, Part 26

Joe College, Part 26

I was too limited to contemplate the word joy in September 2004.  I might
have claimed euphoria, giddiness, excitement, or maybe overstimulation.
 The word doesn't matter.  It was deep happiness, contentment and
fulfillment for consecutive days, something that I haven't felt before or
since.  It felt more meaningful the satisfaction of a good day, as if I
unlocked a new approach to living, where I loved everybody and everything,
and knew that love wherever I stretched.

* * *

When he arrived home from the airport, Sam jumped to my arms like a baby
monkey.  He mashed his teeth at my ear cartilage.  We had people at the
house, and then went to a crowded bar with a sunset roofdeck, and then a
house party, and then a frat party full of new freshmen who looked like
children.  Chris, Sam and I, drunk and exhausted but more lucid than we
should have been, we sat on the concrete in the center of the Quad, waiting
for the sun to rise, observing guys and girls walking home together even at
that hour, guys walking home alone after getting laid, solo guys who looked
drunk and beautiful.  We got breakfast at Charterhouse at 6 a.m., just the
three of us, "the original three," Sam called us, and by now three years
had passed, there was enough history that we could be justifiably nostalgic
about how we met, about the first night in the dorm, how Chris could be
relied upon to conclude every night by puking, the aborted idea of joining
a frat, what life had been like when we were freshmen, when Katie, Trevor
and Michelle had been modest acquaintances of Sam but unknown to me, and
Chris was a shy pre-med student forcing his way through chemistry
textbooks.

The three of us slept until mid-afternoon the next day.  Upon waking, I sat
on the front porch drinking iced coffee and the eating bagels that Michelle
had left us in the kitchen, slow-smoking a cigarette as I watched new
neighbors move in.

Some nights I felt Henry Hill walking through the back entrance of the
Copa, being led to a table in front of the stage.  We went to all of the
parties.  I knew everybody.  I had dozens of good friends and hundreds of
acquaintances.  No hour felt wasted.

At the newspaper, they trotted me in front of the mass meetings to give a
brief talk to 50 or 60 underclassmen about my work and my summer
internship.  I swear, there were sophomore girls who attended because
they'd picked up crushes from my columns and my headshot. I was so good in
those meetings, channeling my best Matt Canetti energy, the way he was all
smiles and enthusiasm when he was pitching his frat to us that first time,
how he was able to summon the charm of a One Tree Hill actor when he knew
that it was time to make a good impression.

I sat around the horseshoe of our Honors English seminar table, talking
about The Waves, Portrait of the Artist, V., a heavy coursepack of essays
on Paradise Lost that we were expected to digest as an object lesson in
different critical schools and historical trends in lit crit.  I would say
douchey things like, "I think Nate is largely correct, but I'd take it a
step further," or, "I think what Nate just said is interesting, but it
misses the mark somewhat," except that we all said douchey things like
that, play-acting that we were grad students or serious intellectuals,
skiing analytical slaloms, showing up one another, which maybe sounds
unbearable except that everyone in our class was so chill and goodnatured,
even the prof, like we were all in on a shared performance to talk about
awesome books in the most sophisticated way possible, knowing that it was
half an act.

I was always on my way to a place that felt important, a backpack of great
books hanging over my shoulder, someone awesome at my elbow saying
something funny or generous or interesting.

But even then, it was a little terrifying, because I knew that this joy was
a temporary condition.  I wish that we had emotional savings accounts,
where we could put aside excess happiness for spending at a later date.

Like, at a certain point in your life, when you go through a blue period,
you learn to draw from your range of experience and reason your way through
unhappiness.  Learning to integrate reason to your emotions is one of the
under-acknowledged benefits of growing up.  For instance, the first few
weeks of my previous summer could easily have burned up in self-pity and
defeat -- but even though my primary happiness at the time had been
solitary, air-conditioned masturbation, I could count the reasons that it
would pass.  I reminded myself that it wasn't as bad as senior year of high
school, when I'd probably been smacked with something like clinical
depression, all of that rage and despair toward the injustice that nature
visited upon me.  So I would lie awake in that shitty apartment I shared
with Rick, reminding myself that a bad time wasn't going to last forever,
that even a bad time can feel good.

But maybe there's also the suspicion that a good time can feel bad.  I'd
never been so happy, and I knew it.  I didn't dwell on its inevitable loss,
even though I knew it would come.  Unrestrained happiness is your brain
hoaxing you.  We don't think of it that way because we want it as our
baseline.  But it's as deluded and transitory as despair.

And then what?  When you're that happy, how do you readjust to a normal
life, where you're pissed that the coffee line isn't moving faster, annoyed
with a girl who corners you at a party, angry over an inept T.A. or a
roommate who interrupted your chill study time by blasting the Backstreet
Boys Millenium album for no apparent reason?  Once you've had the
experience of joy, how do you cope with its absence?  If you're a junkie,
you go back to your dealer for a fix.  That's not an option when your
unexpected high apparently comes from the heart.

There was a moment a few nights back at school, in the first week of
classes in senior year, when I felt a cold tickle more appropriate for a
man twice my age.

Keep a mental postcard of this, because one day, decades from now, you will
be sodden and gray and inelastic.  You will want to remember how this
looked and felt.

It was an angle in my flimsy $20 mirror on the other side of the room, the
two of us lit by orange lamplight from several feet away.  Our bodies were
lined and shadowy and smooth, the muscles of my back and shoulders
pronounced and backlit as I faced his chest from the side.

A sliver of a glimpse, but I couldn't believe that was me.  That this was
happening, that this was my life.

I pressed my forehead to his skin and caught myself.  Time seemed so
flexible, so frightening.  Plant this in your mind so that when it's all
memory, you will know this moment and believe that it was real.

* * *

zGame01.doc

9/27/04

Writing some of this shit down because I need to clear my head and it's
three in the morning and it's one of those nights where my brain can't
settle, no one's around and I'm trying SO HARD to sleep but can't.

Last night I got blackout drunk, maybe for the first time since freshman
year.  I've never been roofied obviously, but at a certain point in the
night it felt like what you read about when girls get roofied, when you're
not sure if you can keep your balance and stay awake and you're not even
sure where you are.  It's like I came to, and I knew I had to get home
immediately but wasn't sure that I could make it.  Trevor and Katie got me,
but even then, I just wanted to lie on a strange lawn and pass out.  The
strips of lawn all looked cool and soft, and walking felt like mile 22 of a
marathon.

I didn't freak out about Chris.  At least not openly.  Amanda Ford is hot
as fuck and on the track team.  She's fucking legit.  I mean, she's not
getting into the Olympics -- or maybe she is, what the fuck do I know --
but I just looked her up, and her time on the 5,000 meter is terrifying.

So it's like, I'm there hanging with Geoff Taylor in the corner of the
living room, been drinking since around eight, kind of at that perfect
tipping point of drunk when you feel yourself teetering toward abdication
but you're still lucid and in control, but everything seems fun and funny
and cool, and I'm just digging talking to Geoff and watching these girls
check us out, Geoff's one of these guys where you feel 20% cooler about
yourself when you hang out with him, and I catch Chris with this hot chick,
who turns out to be Amanda Ford.

And at first I'm all like, Haha, cool, he's got one of these fake
mini-dates going on, but then after a couple of minutes, it's just like,
Oh, wow, maybe this is legitimate.

She just kept, like, touching him and leaning into him.  This wasn't one of
those little performances or a tentative flirting.  Like, they obviously
knew each other and were comfortable with that.  And he's putting his hands
on her arm and her shoulder when they talk.  She's tall for a girl, but
he's still got five inches on her, and has to lean down to talk to her over
the stereo, but when he leans down, it's, like, close.  Like he could kiss
her, his mouth is so close to her ear, and she's leaning toward his chest,
and they look to me like people who have hooked up and are probably going
to hook up again tonight.  But I don't even know if that's a real thing or
i thought that because I was being dramatic.

But now, I'm, like, fully distracted from my conversation with Geoff
Taylor.  I've got a frozen grin on my face and I'm nodding and agreeing
with him on everything, but I'm literally not understanding what he's
saying because all I'm doing is watching Chris with this hot chick while
desperately, pathetically trying not to stare.

So, like, I don't want to be too weird and pushy but I want to know what's
going on, so I wrap up with Geoff and go over to introduce myself to
Chris's friend.  And Chris is, like, happy to see me, and then he
introduces me to this girl Amanda.  She knows about me, and she's like, "Oh
my God, it's so great to meet you, Chris talks about you all the time."

So I'm just like, "Oh yeah, you too!"

And she's like, "It's so awesome that you got him into running."

I mean, there is literally nothing objectively wrong with her in any way.
 She's literally objectively perfect.  Hot body, pretty face, well spoken,
nice as shit.  But I don't know this person at all, have never heard of
her, and she's addressing me like she's his mom or one of his sisters, like
she's got a position of priority to express gratitude about something
involving Chris.  And I give him this locked-up look -- it wasn't hostile
or anything, but it was mild panic or bewilderment, because I didn't want
to embarrass him or get ahead of myself or him or the situation, I wasn't
even aware enough to feel jealous, I just was literally incapable of
understanding what was happening.

I mean, I didn't talk to Amanda for more than three or four minutes.  She's
roommates with a girl who worked with Chris at a restaurant over the
summer.  Amanda and Chris met over the summer.  They went running together.
 She taught him about intervals and speed work.  This was how he'd gotten
so much faster, how his form and posture had gotten stronger.  She'd been
coaching him!  Stupidly, I thought that it had come naturally or that maybe
he'd picked it up from some blog or book.

So this was too much to process.  I wasn't going into meltdown or losing my
shit.  I mean, I was the one who told Chris that it wouldn't hurt him to
have girls around, to go on these harmless dates, and maybe it just so
happened that he found himself with an especially awesome girl.  Like, he's
never been more of a catch, I'm sure; it would make sense for any girl to
latch onto him if he was even a little interested.

And that fucking body language between them.

Then again, who the fuck am I to worry about this shit?  Like, is he
fucking pledged to me?  Am I his fucking owner?  Objectively, who the fuck
am I to care if he's hooking up with someone else?  Agency and free will
are real things.  I'd probably hook up with someone else if my
circumstances didn't make that literally impossible.  He's always claimed
that he isn't into guys at all.  Which is bullshit, but maybe he kind of
digs chicks, or is at least curious enough to want to hook up with them. Or
maybe he's just got a libido.

Goddamn and fuck me for writing about this/thinking like this.

So I find Katie, and I'm trying to be all casual, and I'm like, "So what's
up with Chris's friend Amanda from this summer?"

And she's like, "Who?"

"This girl Amanda?  I guess she's on the track team?"

"No idea.  Never heard of her," Katie says.  And it's obvious she's not
interested in hearing about Amanda.  I pulled her away from conversation
with a hot hipster guy with sideburns and she's looking at me like I'm a
prick and an idiot for pestering her.  So I leave her alone.

I go and bum Camel Lights from a dude outside.  They're the worst
cigarettes.  It's like, afterwards, you have sticky, stinging dust in your
mouth and lungs, it's really disgusting, but I'm pounding this cheap beer
and chainsmoking Camel Lights, hanging on the front porch of this house
party and being as minimally social as I can get away with.

So when I go through the living room to go to the kitchen to go to the keg
to get more beer, I see Chris with this chick Amanda with some people I
don't recognize, and they're having what looks like a normal conversation,
and it looks like she's kind of holding his arm, and I don't look closely
because I don't want to gawk, and I don't want to know, exactly, except
that I think this confirms my suspicion that there's something there, and
when I walk past to go out to the porch again, I give them wide berth, I
don't want to look at them or get within eavesdropping distance, because
I'm going to need to let this all soak in before I get too wound up or make
crazy conclusions.

But, like, he's never mentioned this chick.  Apparently not to anyone.  If
this was all a big nothing, wouldn't someone know that she exists?  If she
was a cover story, wouldn't he publicize the cover story?  The whole point
of a cover story is to fucking tell people.

I can't believe I'm worrying about this.

So anyway, yeah, sometime early -- like, it's only 1 -- I know that I've
got to get out of there.  That thing where your neck muscles turn rubbery
and you can't hold your head straight and you close your eyes for a few
seconds because you need a break from the light.  It struck me at once.  I
felt totally fine, and then I could barely stand up.

It's so embarrassing, but somebody got Trevor, so he's got his hand on my
shoulder and he's all, "Hey, bud, how are you doing?"  And I was like,
"Whoa, I need to get home, now," and he was like, "Yeah, Joey, we're going
to do that."

So Trevor and Katie, like, have to help me down the six steps of the front
porch because I might fall otherwise.  A bunch of people are watching me,
and I'm not a funny party-star drunk guy, more like a scary drunk guy, and
I know this at the time, I'm thinking, "Fuck, I'm Joe College, people
should not be seeing me in this condition, I have a good reputation to
protect."

Then I'm, like, fucking stumbling home with Katie and Trevor keeping me
upright, and I keep spitting to get the taste of cheap beer and shitty
Camel Lights out of my tongue, and a couple of times I stop and hold myself
at my knees, inhaling huge scoops of air through my mouth, because I think
I'm going to be sick and the fresh air is stabilizing.  Which it is, until
we hit the corner of Hamilton and Wainright, and I lean over and puke into
the gutter, what feels like a geyser of gnocchi and hot vinegar blasting
past my tonsils while tears bleed out of my eyes.  Pukety puke.

They put me in Katie's room because they didn't want to try to get me up
two sets of stairs.  They took off my shoes and jeans and tucked me in.
 She has a nice comforter than I do, but I woke up smelling like a chick,
which is disgusting when you're that hungover.

Today Katie said that I kept insisting that I couldn't make it home, and
that I kept calling myself an idiot for smoking Camel Lights, and that I
kept saying that Chris was with a really hot chick who runs track and how
much I hoped that she was his new girlfriend.  She says that I kept
demanding for her to slap me, and that I got upset when she wouldn't, so
that she was slapping me every twenty steps of the walk.

"You were amazing," she said.

I don't remember any of those things.

And now it's 4 a.m. and I have to get up in six hours and I'm not anywhere
close to being able to fall asleep, and I'm just sitting at my desk typing
this bullshit, thinking like I'm some jealous chick in a WB show, and it's
to the point where I'm mainly upset with myself for even being upset.

* * *

I got back into bed after purging that screed and thought that I should
erase it immediately.  I was disgusted by my overwrought feelings, the
late-night carried away sentiments that stalk you when you're restless. For
minutes, I debated deletion, before concluding that, no, maybe one day I'd
think this was funny, so there was no harm in keeping it.

But then I got concerned that someone might read it.  Maybe Chris would
happen across it if he messed with my laptop again.

Wanting to bury my confessions where no one would think to look, in my
laptop's Games folder, I created a new folder called Player Data and saved
the file as zGame01.doc.

* * *

It's quaint, how ashamed and confused I was by my gnawing jealousy.  It was
as if I'd grown up impoverished, and then, at the first feeling of comfort
and satisfaction, felt guilt for my new gluttony.  What odd emotional
Catholicism.

I was confused and scared about Amanda Ford, but the *idea* that I'd be
jealous of her alarmed me as sharply.  Every time that I found myself
worrying about her, I chastised myself for being the kind of person who
worried about these things.

* * *

But obviously, I kept worrying.

If Facebook had existed then, I might have seen that we shared a half-dozen
mutual friends, skimmed through photos of her at house parties, track
meets, family holidays. As it was, I had the image of her standing next to
Chris at that party, a drunk memory that might have exaggerated her hotness
and the physical ease that Chris had when he leaned next to her.

It all could have been nothing, but bad ideas have a way of evolving and
multiplying when they're left in isolation. High-speed evolution, strains
growing stronger, more resistant to reason. How often does a fit of
neurosis or melodrama seem reasonable until you break down and talk it out
with a friend?  Other people are the best vaccination against terrible
analysis.

My problem was that, for this problem, I didn't have other people.

* * *

"I'm coming back!" Matt said.

"Are you serious?  Like, law school?"

"No, dork. Not yet at least. I'm just coming back to hang for a weekend.
End of October. Halloween weekend."

"Oh, sweet. That'll be great."

"You'll be around, right?"

"Where else would I be?"

"Just making sure," he said.

"Do you need a place to crash?" I said.

"Nah, I'm going to stay at the frat.  It's funny, but for as much as I
hated it at the end, I've missed it ever since. This is the last year I'll
know guys well enough that I can stay there."

"Cool," I said. "But obviously, if you need to crash here, just let me
know."

"Will do," he said.  "We'll hang out a ton regardless."

* * *

I still hadn't told Matt about Chris.  I believed that it would be rude to
disclose.  Chris overtook my attention just as my physical interest in Matt
was winding down.  For me, it was a seamless transition.  What's apparent
to me now, but was only shadowy to me then, was how shabby it was to Matt.

Maybe he was still into me back then!  I didn't think so at the time, but
who knows.  We've never discussed it.  What would we gain by walking back
through those stages?  It's now a footnote to our long history, and even
back in college, there seemed to be an understanding that we didn't "break
up."  There was no nastiness or bad feeling.  When, toward the end of
senior year, he was frustrated and disappointed in me, it was as a friend.
 So we made up and moved on.

Telling him about Chris might have reframed all of that.

So for two years, I had delayed, even though he was the only person I could
talk to about Chris.  Poor Andy wouldn't have understood; Matt would have
understood too much.

Here's a thing I've since realized: It's easy to keep one huge secret, but
it's extremely difficult to keep several large secrets, especially when
they involve someone else.

Other people have written that it's exhausting to stay in the closet, but I
never felt that way, at least not for myself.  It was easy to
compartmentalize my gay life from the rest.  I know that I'm an unreliable
narrator, and you, my reader and my brother, probably know me better than I
know myself at this point, but honestly -- compartmentalization was easy!
 Partly because I had sympathetic co-conspirators, but even if I hadn't, it
didn't feel any different than the other aspects of life, where I tweaked
my thinking and behavior based on present company.  If I was at the
newspaper, I would be gregarious and open, keep tabs on my staff and the
day's projects -- basically carry myself as a cool older-brother type; when
I was in my English seminars, I would play like a lofty intellectual,
choose different words, use different hand gestures, inflect my voice in
ways that never would have played in everyday life; when I hung at the bars
with frat dudes and beer bros, I'd aim for profane chillness; with my
housemates, it was more toward verbal games and hijinks.

And being gay didn't feel too different from that!  It didn't!  In the way
that I didn't think about Virginia Woolf during a kegstand, it felt easy to
wall off my sexuality when I was hanging at a sports bar or talking shit
with Sam.  I know that the gay zeitgeist say that's unhealthy, and fuck
knows that I've got my share of inner troubles, but if it hadn't been for
my terrible tactical judgment and a fit of spite, I might have comfortably
remained in the closet years more.

I'm telling you, the one big secret is easy.

But secondary secrets are impossible.  It's like mentally reciting the
alphabet backward while holding a conversation, and you have to do it all
day, every day.

The initial year-and-a-half of hooking up with Matt, where I had to evade
Sam; Chris, whose social and residential proximity made the secrecy more
difficult; concealing the Chris situation from Matt, the one person who I'd
grown accustomed to addressing without a filter; Chris's *mom* knowing that
Chris was gay -- knowledge that I was concealing from Chris, but also that,
in her company, I pretended not to understand.

I balanced layer upon layer of subterfuge and feigned ignorance.  I let
nothing slip.

Now I wonder: If Matt had known I was with Chris, would he have called me
so often?  Was he calling me because he worried about me?  If he'd known
that I'd been with another dude, would it have put him at ease?  I imagine
him in D.C., bored and disillusioned, thinking that I was in a cave of
repressed gayness and sexual isolation.  He thought that with him gone, I
had no one, which explained his steady encouragement for me to hang out
with Wally.  He wanted me to hang with Wally so that I'd have a guy to hook
up with, or at least, maybe, a gay guy as a friend.  Matt was imagining me
entirely alone.  Even if less than 10 percent of our conversation touched
on anything gay, maybe he thought, sweetly, that all of his calls to me
were a push and a reminder that I wasn't as alone as I thought.

Here is a theory: Matt Canetti is such a good friend and person that, after
I aloofly dumped him, a year and a half later he still called me a couple
of times a week because he worried about me.

* * *

zGame02.doc

10/9/04

It's late and I just got home but only a little drunk, all pissed and
stressed and annoyed and need to think this out, so fuck it, here goes more
bullshit.

Egan's party was PACKED, which must've took them by surprise because their
keg ran out before midnight and they panicked to find someone sober to
drive them to Party Barn and buy another keg, and while that was happening
Tony got like five people to go with him on foot to Cornershop to buy cases
of PBR, and I almost got guilted into going with them, but I was like,
"Fuck that, Egan is mainly Sam's friend and I just want to hang."

It was crowded and chaotic and sweaty.  They let people cigarettes and weed
inside.  Like, my clothes reek from cigarettes right now.

Random people, party people, Sam's friends and their friends.  Not my usual
drunk-nerd crowd (Jesus, that's my crowd now?) so maybe I was slightly out
of place, I felt like I knew a lot of people but not as many as usual.  But
it was fun!  Sam was shitfaced and he came over to me and Chris with these
two girls, and one of them he liked and the other he wanted to introduce me
to, because he came up to me with the second girl and was like, "See, this
is Joe College, I told you that he's my housemate," and the girl was all,
"I love your articles!" and Sam said, to me, "I love you," and I was all,
"No, I love *you*," to Sam, and he was wasted, so he grabbed my head and
licked my cheek.  I said, "That's fucking gross, dude, keep your tongue off
me, you homo," and Sam was like, to those girls, "See!  I told you that I
know him!"

And you'd think that this would blow his chances with the one girl he liked
because he just licked a dude in front of her, but she laughed, I guess she
was hammered too and sometimes Sam can be pretty charming, he's weirdly
good with girls sometimes, so the two girls thought that we were hilarious,
and Chris says to them, "Yeah, I have to live with this every day, this is
my life, it sucks."

But whatever, I'm not writing this to talk about Sam.

So I'm hanging with Chris, we're just chilling near the front door, he's
into Wonder Boys lately so we keep doing this thing like in the movie,
where we make up biographies for strangers, a little dickish but not really
mean, and he's kind of drunk but not fucked-up drunk, just loose and funny,
and I'm not drinking very hard because I'm still squeamish about how fucked
up I got a couple of weeks back.

Chris and I are playing this game about people and he's being extremely
funny, and I see that guy Wally again.  I immediately freeze, and turn my
back to the room, facing Chris.  My poker face sucks, so Chris is like,
"What's up?" and I tell him that it's a friend of a friend who can be a
little annoying.

The thing is -- and I know I should be a bigger person about this, I'm
trying Ringo, I'm tryin real hard -- but Wally was drunk and he looked gay.
 He moved like a gay guy.  And he was with a couple of other dudes who
looked pretty gay.  I mean, like, they weren't blowing each other or making
out, but it was just like the way they carried themselves, the body
language, the way they positioned their shoulders and necks, how their arms
moved.  If you'd never met them but just spotted them, you'd know.

I should be over this by now and it's adolescent, but it still makes me
nervous.  I can't process a certain kind of gay style, there's this voice
in the back of my mind that's warning me not to be like that, but I'm also,
like, "Be like what, a dude who gestures with his hands sometimes when he
talks?  What's your problem you huge asshole?"

So I'm thinking about this and tying myself up when Chris says, kind of
mocking, "Dude, did you see those faggots?"

So that kind of punctures me.  I've never heard him talk like that before
and it weirds me out, but I'm already stressed that Wally will see me and
come over.  I sigh, and say, "Yeahhhhh," in a long, weary way.  "I mean,
let's not call them faggots."

"I know.  You're Mr. PC."

"Dude, it's not political correctness, it's just dickish and offensive."

"They look very faggoty, though."

And I'm thinking to myself: I get it, he's trying to put distance between
himself and them, except that I was genuinely irritated with his word
choice and his now-obvious interest in provoking me.  I could laugh it off
and prove that we're both tough guys, that we're not like those other guys,
that whatever it is we do with each other, we're apart from and superior to
them.  But I also thought it was just fucked up of him to talk that way,
and he was tweaking me on purpose, and I didn't want to let it stand.

"Dude, let's not talk about other people like this," I said.

"You don't agree?"

"I mean, they're kinda gay-acting."

He smirked a little, like he got satisfaction out of a small concession.

"I just don't understand how people could act like that," he said.

"Dude," I said, suddenly righteous, "it doesn't matter.  What does it
matter?  It's less offensive than, like, if someone puked on the front
steps or started a fight or groped a random girl.  Totally harmless.
 They're just guys hanging out."

I turned back to glance at them.  No spectacle.  Now they seemed fine to
me.  Just three dudes at a party.

"I didn't know you were so sensitive about this subject," Chris said.

There was this tone in his voice, like he was mocking me, like he thought
he'd fenced me in and I was squirming.  This kind of infuriated me.

"Katie or Michelle would murder you if they heard you call people faggots.
 Sam and Trevor would rip the shit out of you.  I'm being cool about it.
 Just don't talk  that way."

"Whatever," he said, smirking at my political correctness.

"Jesus, dude," I said, turning heated, "I know why you're talking like
this, and you can cut it out.  You don't have to act like you're above
anybody when you're around me.  You don't have to make any point.  That's
stupid."

"I'm not making any point.  You're the one trying to make points.  I should
have realized that this was delicate."

For a second I thought that I was gonna fucking explode -- it reminded me
of when I lost my shit with Rob a couple of years ago, when I kicked his
ass after he called Andy a fag, the way my anger abruptly tipped.  I mean,
thank God I wasn't drunker.  I was on the verge of being like, "Naw, bro,
you're the fucking faggot and you know it."

We had a little eye contact and I think it scared him, like he knew I was
in a hot zone.  That caught me, because right away I called off the dogs of
war.

"It's cool, man," I said, feeling my heart rate drop and my hands cool.
 "You use whatever words you want."

So I turn away from him and walk over to say hi to Wally.  Am I a fucking
hero or what?  A great example and moral visionary.  Practically Gandhi.  I
hit Wally's shoulder and say, "Hey, dude!  Just saw you and thought I'd say
what's up."

He's wasted, so he says my name more enthusiastically than I would've liked
and gives me this pretty gay shoulder-length hug, and I'm thinking, Fuck,
what am I doing?, but nobody's watching, no one even cares, no one would
suspect anything.  He introduces me to his friends and I say that I know
Egan and Wally says that his friend Mike knows Tony and I'm just like,
"Cool," and quickly change the topic to classes and smalltalky bullshit,
and drunk Wally's like, "We should all hang out sometime!" and I'm like,
"Cool!" even though I'm thinking, "Unlikely," but I talk to him a little
while longer (one of his friends looked pretty of hot, the other not so
much), enough that my conversation satisfies relevant politeness guidelines.

By the time I'm done, Chris has left the room, I find him downstairs
hanging around Sam, who appears to be charming the fuck out of this girl he
likes.  Chris looks at me -- not exactly pissed off but annoyed.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey."

"Sorry about that.  Just thought I'd say hi.  Know him from a class."

"Figures," Chris said.

"Right."  I was sarcastic.  "Exactly."

"Talk about people trying to prove a point," he said.

"This is literally the dumbest conversation I've ever had with you," I
said.  "We should stop having it."

He's not happy, also wants to keep pushing this, he purses his lips (I knew
he'd do that) and drinks his beer and surveys the room, like he's looking
for someone, even though he blatantly doesn't know anybody, that's why he's
hanging off me and Sam all night.

And then a few seconds later, he mumble-whispers under his breath, just
loud enough for only me to hear, "Faggots."

Fuck him.

"Goddammit," I said.  "You obviously know better or else you wouldn't have
whispered it.  You would have said it out loud and not cared who heard.
 Asshole."

Sam was like 10 feet away, sitting on top of a washing machine with the
girl, they were drunk and leaning into each other with their arms around
each other's waists.

"Sam!" I said, now completely fired up.  I pulled Chris toward him by the
arm, like I was his dad pulling him over to get in trouble with mom.  "Sam,
Chris thinks it's fucking cool to call some random gay dudes faggots and
I'm telling him that's bullshit, so can you please settle this fight."

Drunk Sam's face kind of lights up, and I'm like, Oh fuck, I shouldn't have
brought him into this.  And Sam's like, "For fuck's sake Pieces, you stupid
fucking hick.  I will literally punch the stupid out of you, you fat
bigoted bumpkin.  What in the holy fuck is happening in your shit-clogged
neurons?"

And the girl laughs at Sam's vulgarity and buries her face in his shoulder,
and Chris goes deep red, he gives me this look like I've betrayed him, it's
obviously humiliating that he's getting reamed out by Sam in front of this
girl and a couple of other strangers.

"Pieces," Sam said, "if I ever hear about you calling people faggots, I
will personally stick my enormous uncircumcised cock so far up your ass,
it'll go all the way up your throat and knock one of your stupid Hot
Pockets right out of your mouth.  Jesus, Pieces.  You ignorant fucking
cowfucker."

And now Chris just wants to run, and I kind of want to run, so I put up my
hands, like, Enough, Sam, but I wearily say to Chris, "Yeah, I told you Sam
would go nuts."

And Chris says, "Fuck this bullshit," his voice crackly and scratchy, and
he's got this weak smile on his face, kind of like he's trying to laugh
along at Sam's insults to him, but he's just fucking mortified and
humiliated, so he chugs down his beer and casually walks away, like he's
been detained from something else.

"So that just happened," I said to Sam.

"I mean, honestly.  That kid needs to be straightened out.  It's completely
unacceptable."

But then Chris was gone!  He left that party without saying anything, and
he's still not fucking home!  I sent him a text when I started writing this
and was like, "Dude, it's all cool, everybody got a little out of control,"
but he hasn't replied!

So what the fuck???  Is he out drinking alone at like Charterhouse?  Did he
go to another party?  Off boning his track chick hottie?

Like, I'm not going to text him again because he started this whole stupid
fiasco for absolutely no reason, I'm not going to baby him and apologize
and be all, Poor Chris, but goddamn I shouldn't have brought Sam into this,
should've just shut up and raised it again later on, obviously he was just
trying to provoke me but it worked too well, so now everybody's just pissed
and upset with each other.

So I'm just all ... MOTHER FUCK

* * *

Amid those bouts of weirdness, we were still getting off.

In my memory, it feels like Chris and I hooked up all the time, but it
probably averaged less than once a week.  There were those nights when I
came home at one or two in the morning completely exhausted from school or
the newspaper, and all of those other nights that were consumed by parties.
 There were only so many free nights.

It happened on intervals that were sufficiently unpredictable that getting
off with him always felt like a minor event, like a happy surprise.
 Usually he'd come to my room unannounced, greet me with the predictable,
"Hey," and one of us would make our move.  Once in awhile we'd be out
together or hanging out in the living room, and we'd trade a quick look, a
flash of eye contact signalling me that something would happen later.
 There was nothing special about that look, but we always knew what it
meant.

And it was always awesome.  Now that I have more experience -- with guys
whose styles are too pinchy or pokey, guys who kiss with rigid tongues,
guys who want to overthink or overplan each gesture -- I fully appreciate
how good Chris was.  He was so new to it all when we started, maybe I just
molded him to my tastes.

That fall, every time we hooked up, it was like I renewed an assurance
policy.

This was Chris's trick, kind of.  I don't know if he did it on purpose.  He
was very good at conjuring our sympathy and forgiveness.  Chris had the
power to intentionally provoke people and then guilt them into profuse
apology.  What did Chris actually think?  What did he feel?  He wanted to
act out, assert himself against me, against all of us, but he didn't
actually want us to stay angry with him.  A gentle sulk, downward looks
with his long-lashed blue eyes, and he, in his soft beauty, was given more
emotional charity than would be thinkable for a more peaceable, ugly man.
 That was his adaptation.

His spells worked on me, more than on anyone.  I would allow him to conjure
these scenes, so long as they confirmed what I thought I wanted.  So I
didn't revisit the bad moments or confront them.  He would come to my room
at one in the morning -- teeth freshly brushed, face scrubbed clean -- and
a few minutes later, all of that bad shit was written out of history.  Even
after he called those guys faggots, we didn't maintain the fight.  I don't
know where he ended up that night, but he was back by the time I woke, and
we never talked about it.  He sulked quietly for a day, and then on Tuesday
he was in my room, sucking my cock and lickng my tongue.  When it seemed
like he was so into me, my fears about Amanda Ford seemed irrational; my
distaste for the word faggot, a product of hypersensitivity.  He was
blameless and innocent, after all.

* * *

"I don't know if anyone else picked up on this," I said, after Professor
Rothman smiled and pointed to me, "but it seems to me that a strong
undercurrent of homoeroticism carries through the book, that possibly Henry
even kills Bon Charles because he's so conflicted about his feelings of
same-sex attraction.  There's the relationship between Henry and Bon
Charles, but there's also the relationship between Shreve and Quentin, and
they fold into one another.

"There's this passage about Shreve and Quentin: Faulkner has them staring
at one another, they're 'curious and quiet and profoundly intent,' but it's
'not at all as two young men might look at each other,' but the way a young
girl would regard virginity itself, a 'hushed and naked searching,'
Faulkner calls it.  Or when Shreve says on page 253, 'Oh, now we're going
to talk about love,' but Faulkner says that Shreve didn't need to say it
because they hadn't been thinking about anything else.  One of the other
guys in the dorm say that Shreve seems like Quentin's husband.  And on page
234 -- Shreve says to end the conversation and let's go to bed.  Faulkner
is oddly preoccupied with describing their clothing, how Quentin's clothes
are thin because he's from Mississippi. It seems like Shreve is always in
his bathrobe.  There's a description of how someone walking into the room
would think that Shreve was completely naked, and Faulkner has that strange
passage where he describes Shreve's chest as hairless and 'cherubic.'  And
every time Faulkner does this, it jumps out because it seems so at odds
with most of the book, like these are descriptions culled from a different
story.  I mean, it seems like basically, Shreve and Quentin spend all of
their free time together in their dorm room, in a state of undress."

The seminar room snickered appreciatively when I said this.  I hadn't meant
for it to be a laugh line, so I blushed slightly, sipped my coffee and
composed myself.

"But this homoerotic undertone between Shreve and Quentin isn't just a
grace note.  In a way, if you think there's a -- I don't know, for lack of
a better term, this might be too simplistic -- but if you think that
there's a *gay* subtext to Absalom, and that maybe there's some sort of
tentative -- I mean, I don't know -- this tentative, same-sex desire
between Shreve and Quentin, then it would influence their reconstruction --
no pun intended -- of Henry and Bon Charles.  Because then they're imputing
their own feelings to Henry and Bon Charles.  Faulkner is constantly
telling us that Henry loves Bon Charles.  Literally, he uses the word
'love' repeatedly.  He has this passage about how difficult it was to tell
who is more enamored with Bon Charles -- Henry or Judith -- with a
description of how struck Henry is by Bon Charles's appearance and his
clothes.  Henry seems far more passionate about Bon Charles than Judith is.
 And I couldn't find the exact page, but Henry brings Bon Charles home to
stay with him in the summer.  He brings him home for the summer for what
purpose, exactly?

"So there's the miscegenation aspect, yes, and there's the incest element,
but what if Henry kills Bon Charles because they were, to some extent -- I
guess the word is lovers?  Let's not say lovers, maybe, but that there was
some deep element of same-sex attraction, and perhaps it's been
consummated, or perhaps it hasn't.  Henry kills Bon Charles because he
can't internalize this reality, or perhaps he kills Bon Charles because he
can't bear the prospect of losing him to his own sister."

A couple of hands shot up.  Professor Rothman nodded slowly, writing a note
on his day's syllabus.

"That's very interesting stuff, Joe," said Professor Rothman, "and there's
a body of queer theory work that pick up on this exact idea-"

When he said queer theory, my forehead prickled and the coffee went stale
in my mouth.  Did he say I was espousing queer theory?

I had just scored a minor triumph, yes.  If I thought of the honors seminar
as a low-energy contest, an academic American Idol with no tangible prize
or recognition, one way of winning was to be the first to articulate some
non-obvious subtext to our reading.  No one else in class had proposed this
interpretation, not even Neil Price, who was openly gay.

That English seminar was probably the only setting where I could
comfortably pontificate on this subject.  We constantly talked about "the
Other," batted the language of feminism, masculinism, hegemony,
heteronormativism, classism.  It would have been student malpractice not to
show off my Absalom, Absalom! insight.

Queer theory?  Bro, no -- I had not wandered into a known scholarly lineage
of queer theory about Absalom.  I was one of only two dude-bros in the
class -- the other guy wore dirty backward baseball caps and barely talked,
but he must have been sharp because admission into the seminar was so
competitive, so his silence led the rest of us to suspect that he was
secretly brilliant and silently judging us.

So basically, I was the only notable dude-bro in the class.

While Professor Rothman worked through my queer theory insights, I flexed
my neck and my back, three sets before the tension dropped from my
trembling muscles and I held my head high.  Kira Lewis gave me an odd look
and smirked.  I smirked back.

Had I, like, just accidentally come out to my entire seminar?  Is that what
I'd done?  Is Neil Price giving me a look?  No, he was typing into his
laptop.  Did he just glance at me when I wasn't looking?  Maybe?  I'd lost
track of what Rothman was saying and he seemed to know it -- he looked at
me until we made eye contact and I nodded in understanding.

I stayed adrift through the remainder of class unless someone said my name,
in which case I was slapped awake.

"I quite like Joe's observations," Nate said, "and I had much less
developed thoughts along the same lines at a couple of points, although not
about Quentin and Shreve.  Joe's focus on Quentin and Shreve works with
Kira's insight that this is Quentin and Shreve's book, not Sutpen's.  But
it's also entirely consistent with what Helene called her Forbidden Love
theory -- Southern masculinity would certainly forbid homosexual love as
severely as it would miscegenation and incest.  So Joe's gay interpretation
fit's exactly with Helene's Forbidden Love theory--"

And so on.

I found focus for a few seconds, then crashed back to what I'd announced to
the class.  I'd altered the week's discussion -- they were all integrating
my points to their own interpretations -- and I felt good about that, but I
couldn't stop replaying my words.  Had I seemed too invested in my
viewpoint?  Was I overly persuasive?  Had it sounded too personal?

Even at the end of class, my hands were unsteady when I put away my
paperback and my laptop.  The class was unusually social, and some of us
often lingered and bantered until the section afterward slowly filed in and
set up.  I was one who stayed and kicked around, but that day I weakly
smiled and slipped out of the room.

No one said anything.  Neil Price didn't give me a knowing look.  But
several weeks later, when my dreaded secret became stupidly, spectacularly
public, a couple of them remembered Absalom, Absalom! week, and mentioned
that my apparent anguish in discussing the book made them wonder why.
 "Although honestly, you never set off my gaydar.  No offense," Neil Price
would say.

* * *

zGame03.doc

10/14/04

I've got to get a handle on how fucking jealous I am of Michelle.  Not
jealous in an envious/angry way, just in a "fuck, she has her shit
together" way.

She's the only one in the house that I'm able to seriously study with.
 Everyone else, it means lets dick around at a coffee house for a few hours
with books on our table.  Michelle goes hardcore though, which is what I
want.  So we went out tonight, and after about an hour, she starts talking
about her grad school apps and asks if I'd mind going through some of her
personal essays.

So I read through them and marked them up.  They were good anyway, but I
tightened her language and re-organized to emphasize her stronger themes.
 There's definitely something to be said about the motivation and drive of
people who are the children of immigrants.  That's not an idea that's
original to me, but wow, is it true.  I just look at her, versus myself and
the entitled douchebags that I grew up with, and she's so much more driven
and grateful for everything she does.

I've always thought of myself as the serious student and the person who's
on top of things and knows what he's doing, but that's definitely not true
now, if it ever was true.  It probably wasn't.  It was my ego fucking with
me.

Michelle destroyed the LSAT and the GRE this summer, and she got George
MacDonald to be her thesis advisor, which I guess is a huge deal because he
apparently never advises undergrads, only grad students.  She's applying to
every law school in the top 10; history Ph.D programs at Princeton, Yale,
Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and Michigan.  No safety schools.  And she's
going to get into all of them!  She's got a 3.9-something with really tough
classes, she dominated the tests, she has all of her recs lined up, and
given George MacDonald's rep, if she has her heart set on one place, a
phone call from him and she's probably in.  If she does history, she's an
Asian female whose main interest is Jacksonian America -- which, I mean,
hello Ivy tenure track appointment.  Basically, her only dilemma is going
to be whether she wants a Ph.D from Princeton or a J.D. from Yale.  Maybe
both.

Meanwhile, I've got no fucking idea what I'm doing anymore.  I'm a little
scared of ending up like Matt, I think Matt is almost a cautionary tale
now, he seems so unhappy with whatever he's doing in D.C., he only talks
about it to throw out a quick slam at his boss or to talk about how
everyone there is an asskisser, how no one even cares or knows what they're
talking about, they're the worst of the worst, the kind of people on
student government who we used to make fun of.

Matt used to talk about how hard it was to think about graduating and
leaving school, how he put off thinking about work for as long as possible
because if he could keep from thinking about it, it wouldn't happen.  I'm
doing the same thing now, completely, and I know it.

Max and Jenny and Paul are talking about sending resumes and clips to
magazines and newspapers, but I haven't thought about that yet.  There are
places with 12/1 deadlines for post-grad internships and fellowships but I
can't get myself to think about it yet.  Like, why would I?  After last
summer, am I going to just go off to write bullshit that no one will ever
read?  Do journalists even do anything?  They're passive observers.  Or
maybe I could write about Sufjan Stevens for Pitchfork or something?  Yay
me.

And my dad is all, "Take your time, you've got the rest of your life to
figure out what you want.  Take a year to travel.  Do the Peace Corps.  You
can always apply to grad school."  Which is really nice of him, my parents
are so fucking supportive that it kills me sometimes, I know he means what
he's saying, that would be perfect if I were some carefree hippie kid, but
I can't imagine a year of that, not knowing what I'm doing, living off of
my parents no different than if I was 13.  I've got to do something or else
I'll go insane, but fucking what?

And how is Michelle so on top of everything?  Should I have done the GRE?
 Should I be getting a Ph.D in English?  Specialize in queer theory about
Faulkner?

I can't stand thinking about this shit because I can't stand thinking about
leaving.  What am I going to do about Chris?  What is Chris going to do
about Chris?  Katie talks about moving to NYC; Sam thinks he's going to do
finance, so maybe he'll be there; Trevor has no idea; it would be awesome
if Chris moved there too, but I don't think that'll happen.  I mean, it'd
be fucked up if I was holding off on making any plans because I feel like I
should to some extent plan around Chris -- I mean, if he wants to live in
Chicago, would I actually live in Chicago?  Is that even fathomable?  What
makes me think he wants to go to Chicago, anyway?

I don't want to leave.  I don't want to leave.  I don't want to leave.  I
can't remember what my life was like before I came here.  This house feels
like my home in a way that I never had in Westchester.  If I could, I'd go
to classes forever, go to the same house parties and bars forever, hang out
with these people forever.  It kills me that I'm going to have to leave,
that I won't have these people around every day, that one day this is only
going to be a thing that I'll have to think about and remember, and it's
not my real day-to-day life, just some memory, and at a certain point
memories don't feel real anymore, they must become mental movies that you
play from time to time.  And these people who I love are all going to go
off and get married and they'll have kids, and I'll still be friends with
them, but mostly I'll just be some guy they used to know when.  Joe, who
they used to live with, or Joe, who they worked with at the newspaper when
they were 19, or Joe, who I met at that party when I was 18, and then we
ended up taking all the same classes for the next four years.  And we'll
all be those people to each other and it sucks to think about that because
it feels like it's so much more than that to me, and I can't get my arms
around it, like I love these people so intensely that I'm paralyzed to
express it or do anything about it, and I don't know if I'm the only one
who feels that way, no one ever talks about these things because it
probably sounds insane.

Anyway, reading Michelle's essays got me on this track, and it got me in
this stupid state.  Talked to her about it a little on the walk home --
more about the job stuff than my more psychotic ramblings about other
people, although I briefly wandered into that.  When we got back we hung
out in the living room talking for another hour.  It was really good just
talking to her and letting some of this stuff out -- she's been so busy
lately that I barely ever see her, and when I do there's usually something
stupid and chaotic happening.  She's so awesome.  Fuck knows what good
thing I did to have a person as great as Michelle Pham into my life, but
there you go.

I thought that writing this out would help to take the load off.  That
never works.

* * *

Matt Canetti, standing outside the front door of Charterhouse, composing a
text message, cigarette hanging from his lips, wearing a trim black jacket,
backlit by red neon announcing that the establishment was open until 3 a.m.

When he saw me, he took the cigarette from his mouth and smiled.  "What's
up, hoss?" he said, putting out a hand.

"Oh, fuck you, with your what's up hoss," I said, putting my arms out,
hugging him around the shoulders, making him reciprocate with the tip of
his cigarette held away from my back.  "You're back!"

"I've missed you too," he said.  "I can't believe you're 21 now.  That's so
old.  I don't even have to worry about the logistics of getting you drunk."

"You're the one who always wanted me drunk," I said.

And we paused to regard each other.  I don't know why I thought that he
might look different.  He still had the same haircut, the same Adam's
apple, the same high-metabolism build.  If his job was beating him down, it
didn't show in his face.

It had been seventeen months.  I haven't gone that long without seeing him
since.  The rush and flutter wasn't like when I saw Chris in the airport
the previous August.  It was more relief than excitement, a wind of
allrightness.  Here was my friend, who I'd missed, who was back where he
belonged, the way I always thought of him.

His flight from D.C. had landed only a couple of hours earlier.  He'd
dropped his bags at his old fraternity house, said hello to the guys who he
still knew, did a couple of shots with them, and then left to meet met at
Charterhouse at midnight on a Thursday.

"Apparently there's a gay freshman in their pledge class," he said, once we
were inside and had ordered a pitcher.  "I'll let you know if he's hot.  I
didn't see him.  He'll be at the party tomorrow night.  They've talked me
up to him.  I'm their model gay alum."

"That's, like, flattering," I said.  "Jackie Robinson.  You basically
gay-integrated the Greek system."

"That's not true," he said, and we both know it wasn't, but he still kind
of blushed and grinned.  "I guess we've got three gay brothers now."

"Wow.  So is it the gay frat?"

"No, that's about average.  It's good.  It makes us look good to the
administration and nationals.  Kappa doesn't have any gay brothers.  It's
become a problem.  But they've always been so exclusive and bad-ass.  You'd
think there was some gay guy on the swim team or something who they could
recruit.  I hear Sigma's actually gotten, like, notably gay.  They're not
actually a gay frat but they're known to be very gay friendly.  I'm sure I
could get you into one of their parties if you want."

"Dude, I don't even know what Kappa and Sigma are.  I don't keep tabs this
Greek bullshit," I said.  "Besides, I'm not going to just show up at the
party of some gay-curious frat."

"Why not?"

"I'm Joe College," I said.  "They'd recognize me."

"Is that actually a thing?"

"Dude.  Yes.  I get recognized all the time."

"Well, it is a fantastic headshot," he said.  "Do you think people here
really recognize you?"

"At least a couple, yeah."

"You're so prestigious now."

"It sounds like delusions of grandeur, but it's an actual thing," I said,
"so if I show up at some gay frat party, and I'm, like, hooking up with gay
frat guys, it's not like I'm just random Joe Sophomore."

"Yes, celebrity is a terrible burden for you.  Just as well," he said,
waving off the idea.  "Sigma was always lame.  Their parties probably still
suck."

We both tended to drink fast up front.  It took less than a half-hour to
finish our first pitcher and even less than that to finish our second.  I
started bumming cigarettes from him.

"Does Rosemary Kavanaugh ever ask about me?" he said.

"She did!"

"Are you serious?"

"Completely!  You know how sometimes, she goes around and chats with people
before lecture?  One day she stopped to me and said, 'What happened to your
handsome friend from our time together on the Comedy?' and I told her that
you'd graduated and were in D.C.  She made this grimace and was like,
'Oooh, D.C.  He better watch out!  They better not get to him! He's such a
charming fellow.'"

"Oh, shut up," he said, laughing and blushing.  "She didn't say that."

"I swear to God.  She remembers you completely.  She thought you were
charming."

"People always say that about her, that she has an insane memory for
students' names and faces.  I was suspicious.  But maybe it's true?"

"True for you," I said.  "You should go sit in on her class tomorrow.  I
think -- I don't remember what her Friday lectures are.  I think it's
Shakespeare and His Contemporaries?  Must be Marlowe and Thomas Kidd and
shit.  It doesn't matter.  Go sit in the back and watch her.  She's
wonderful."

"Ah fuck, it's fucking horrible being away from here.  Do you know how much
it sucks being away from here?"

"I'm starting to think about it."

"Sometimes I think about applying to law school just to come back.  But
then I remember that I'd have to be a lawyer."

"Yeah, don't do that."

"I know.  I just miss it and it makes me want to do stupid things.  I feel
like I've been exiled.  Like, Kavanaugh used to go on about, like Dante
exiled from Florence to Ravenna.  Like I'm Dante, and this school is my
Florence, and D.C. is Ravenna."

"See, I thought of myself as Dante, and you were my Virgil."

"That's good too," he said.  "I like that.  I *am* your Virgil."

Halfway into our third pitcher, I said, "So are you pulling a lot of dudes
in D.C. or what?"

"I sort of have this thing for closeted Republican staffers.  Which is kind
of disgusting.  And they're not even exactly closeted.  They go to gay bars
and post their face pics on Manhunt.  They can't be fully out because of
their bosses' politics and sometimes because of family politics."  He waved
his hand, like he was swatting them away.  "They're all so hot and so red
state and so profoundly stupid and so ambitious.  They're hot idiots who
have literally no idea what they're talking about.  They try to talk to you
about their stupid economic ideas but they don't even know what the Laffer
Curve is.  Completely ignorant of the things they think that they're
espousing.  But they're so hot.  They're so much hotter than the annoying
sanctimonious gays that the Democrats hire on the Hill.  Some dumb six-two
guy with a deep voice who went to UGA and has freckles, versus some
overcaffeinated twink from Yale who yaps about education policy and don't
ask, don't tell?"

"I can see that," I said, pondering my analogue.

"So that's what I do.  For about three months I was hooking up with this
really hot guy from the Atlanta suburbs, and he wasn't even a complete
idiot like some of the others.  He went to Princeton undergrad.  He has
this great presence.  But then he completely flaked.  You can't properly
date a gay Republican staffer because eventually they lose their minds.
 Maybe when they're older.  Maybe when they're in their thirties, they get
it together."

It couldn't have been a more perfect segue for me to describe Chris, but
when I tried to think of how to transition, I locked up.  He'd be around
for two more nights, and I was so happy to be hanging out with him that I
didn't want to bog us down in my clutter.

At 1:30, we went across the street to Goal Line, which was packed on
Thursdays.  Even though it was only a half-hour before close, Matt ran into
so many people that he knew, you wouldn't have guessed that he'd been away
two years.

Randomly, Michelle and Sam were there, hanging with Geoff Taylor and some
of that crew, and Michelle and Sam had both known Matt, so when the bar
threw the brights at 2 a.m., about ten of us went back to the house, where
we set up in the basement, accidentally woke Trevor, and played flip cup
until around 3:30.

"Fuck it, I'm moving back," Matt said, as he and I ended our night,
standing on the front porch smoking.

* * *

I didn't see him again until my house's Halloween party on Saturday night.
 I stayed in on Friday because there was a noon kickoff on Saturday, and if
I was waking at nine to hit a couple of tailgates before going to the
stadium, I didn't want a hangover.

>From the beginning, I was against that Halloween party.  I argued that
Halloween was for dorks, children and the sexually desperate.  My
housemates hated this argument, and I was outvoted 5-1.

So we spent that Friday buying booze, slow-drinking and decorating, which
turned out kind of fun.  We had cheap fake spiderwebs in corners of the
living room, dangling orange lights, a fog machine that Trevor rented,
half-barrels of Sierra Nevada and Stella, and approximately twelve
pumpkins, which were efficiently and sloppily carved into jack-o-lanterns.

In opposing the party, I'd forgotten 1.) how well our parties came
together, and 2.) how much some people like dressing in costumes.  An
undergrad version of the beautiful people flirted and mingled while two of
my drunk freshman staffers danced on our coffee table, while College
Democrats emoted about Senate races in a cluster, while bros played beer
pong in the basement, while Trevor supervised bong rips in his room, while
the attractive offspring of Chicago's South Asian gentry gossiped in our
kitchen, while hipsters talked about euphoric blog reports coming out of
CMJ about a new band called Arcade Fire, and somehow it all work.  Dressed
like superheros, slutty nuns, quarterbacks, zombie Dick Cheney, mummies,
toilet paper rolls, butterflies, bees, Gandalfs, persons or items of
indeterminate nature, or like me, nothing at all, they fed off each other.

Amid this kick-ass party, there were two people I was looking for: Matt
Canetti and Amanda Ford.  I didn't even know whether the second would be
attending.  Matt insisted that he'd be there once he finished dinner and
hit up another party.  "You're my anchor party for tonight," he texted me,
"once I'm there, that's where I'll hang.  Know how you claim to have the
best parties."

When he arrived at 10:30, it was still an hour before peak party.  He was
costume-free, but in a nod to the holiday, had a black patch over one eye.
 "I'm Jack Sparrow," he said.

"There's no way you've seen that movie."

"Of course I haven't seen that movie.  Disney?  Pirates?  Blech," he said.
 "Nice fog machine, though.  Sweet webs."

"Shut up.  Let's get beer.  Keg's downstairs."

I hung back and played host to my newspaper friends while Matt circulated.
 Funny, how you forget certain aspects of a personality, how when they
resurface, they can be surprising and distinct.  He knew a lot of
Michelle's friends from his political activism, but he knew plenty of my
newspaper friends, he knew some randoms, and seeing him work the room,
you'd think that he was trying to raise funds for his new Congressional
campaign.

This was his place.  He deserved to stay forever.  As a freshman, I'd been
in awe of him, the way he threw himself into his classes and organizations,
how seamlessly he moved through different social crowds.  There weren't
people like him in my Westchester cocoon.  He was a revelation, that you
could be all of these things at once.

I wasn't hanging with Chris that night.  He and Katie had decided to dress
like Fred and Daphne from Scooby-Doo.  The self-casting was perfect.  You
looked at them and immediately knew who they were supposed to be -- like,
"Shit, they really *could be* Fred and Daphne in real life."  So early in
the night, they stayed together, enjoying the attention.

I found myself wanting a mask.  Even a stupid one.  Being one of the
uncostumed, I felt exposed.  Watching our guests, I saw that even a simple
costume let them become someone else.  Dance wilder, whoop louder, drink
harder.  It fissures reality.  Generations of Mardi Gras revelers had known
this, but I only then appreciated it.

Petey Pablo's Freek-A-Leek.  A friend of Katie pulled me by the shirt
button to dance with her.  One of those situations where I thought that our
hypersexualized dancing was a joke, but maybe she didn't when she leaned
forward so that her hair brushed against my chest.  That was my signal to
move.

"Let's go outside for a cigarette," I said to Matt, when I found him.

We lit up on the front porch.  "What do you think about my roommate Chris?"

"That's a solid Fred costume," he said.

"I know, right?  He's killing it with that."

"Totally."

"He looks good, right?" I said.

"Just generally?"

"Yeah."

"Sure.  He always looked good."

"But he's lost weight," I said.  "He's much more lithe now."

"That's true," Matt said.  "Are you asking this because you have a crush on
him?  Oh, Christ."

"Dude," I said, "it's not exactly a crush."

He immediately recognized what I implied.  "I see," he said, looking up,
smirking, blowing cigarette smoke.  "That's very intriguing.  That's kind
of amazing."

"It's an occurrence," I said.

He giggled.  "It was obvious that you guys liked each other *so* *much*.
 Just as friends, I mean.  And it was funny to me because you seem so
different, yet you obviously loved being around each other."

"I know," I said.

"What are we talking about?" he asked.  "Like, a couple of drunk incidents,
or something more substantial."

"Much more substantial," I said.  I looked around the porch, making sure
that no one was close enough that our conversation could ping an
eavesdropper's sonar.  "Let's go up to my room and talk about it.  I don't
want to talk about it here.  It's kind of a long story."

In the security of my room, I told him everything, as clearly and
efficiently as possible.  About our first stoned night listening to Wilco,
about the succession of hook-ups, our inability to discuss it, the
deceptions and silences to evade our housemates, up through my August week
in Michigan, my chat with Barbara Riis, my paranoia about Amanda Ford and
our recent friction.  Later, Matt told me that I spoke so energetically
that he felt like he was watching a performance, as if I'd rehearsed this
monologue and was prepping my one-man show.  But it was more the
exhilaration of purging so many experiences and anxieties, little moments
and feelings and fears that I'd never been able to express, and now I
finally could, before my audience of one: a guy who didn't even bother to
take off his black eyepatch while he sat crosslegged on my bed.

"Can we smoke in here?" Matt said, when I finished.

"I mean, I never have, but I guess.  We can open a window."

"Okay, because I feel like we both need a smoke," he said, tossing me his
pack and lighting one for himself.  He scratched his scalp and regarded me.
 "So basically, you guys are in love with each other."

"That's not how I'd put it."

"Of course, that not how *you'd* put it.  I'm the one acknowledging it.
 You're full-frontal in love with each other, and his mom knows that he's a
huge homo and thinks that you're the best thing that ever happened to him,
but she can't say anything to him because even she knows he's kind of
crazy."

"I mean, no.  That's not how I'd put it."

"Go along with this.  Let's not play word games.  If I'm being slightly
indelicate, it's because I'm being efficient.  We can't talk about this all
night.  Not right now, with this party raging."  Inhale, smoke, exhale.
 "But the problem is that he's a basket case.  He can't stand it.  And you
kind of can't stand it either, even if you're not as insane as he is.
 There's a part of both of you that just wants this all to go away, but
*you* at least live in reality, whereas he's in bad denial.  You're going
to have to deal with it, Joe.  Some of the stuff you say makes him sound
insane."

"Maybe."

"The faggot incident is bonkers, and I wouldn't be surprised if he actually
is banging this hot track chick, just as a test of himself, to see whether
he's into it.  And the way you say that he tenses up and goes dark any time
you bring up gayness, no matter how obliquely.  He's never even tried to
talk about it with you, except to insist that he isn't attracted to dudes.
 He's in complete turmoil, Joe."

"He's, like, conflicted," I said.

"No, you're conflicted.  He's at war.  But the good part is, he obviously
likes you.  Really, really, very much likes you.  I'd tell you that you
were putting too much into this -- that this was a lot of projection -- if
it weren't for the fact that he had you out to his family's cabin for a
week.  That's like, 'Let's get engaged' kind of conduct.  And you make it
sound like he's physically proactive."

"He's the one who initiates.  Always, always, always.  I'm never the one
who starts the physical stuff.  It's all on him."

"Dude, you've got to confront him," Matt said.

"I know."

"I know you don't want to, but you've got to force his hand.  I don't mean
tonight.  But you've got, what, six months to graduation?"

"Fuck, dude, that sounds awful."

"I know," Matt said, "but you've got to be realistic.  You've got six
months left with him, and if you don't sort it out, you're never going to
know.  And maybe, even worse, he might graduate without you making him
confront it.  Then you go off to New York and do your thing, and he's
knocking around, who the fuck knows where, someplace in the Midwest, this
giant, hot, repressed homosexual, just wound up as fuck.  You've got to at
least make him decide.  You need to do it for your own sanity, but it's
also the right thing to do for him."

"I know," I said.

"Otherwise, you're just going to, like, graduate, shake hands with each
other, say bye and that's it."  He extinguished his cigarette his empty
beer cup and lit another.  "Dude, what do you want from him?  What's your
endgame?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Dude, be honest."

"I don't know," I said.  "I just like him.  I don't know if I'd want to gay
marry him or anything, but I really like him.  I want to see where it goes.
 I want it to take its full course."

"You want to be with him after college."

"Maybe," I said.  "That's too much for me to think about."

"God," Matt said, "you're hopeless.  You know I'm not going to judge you.
 So let me put some words in your mouth, since you don't feel right saying
them.  You really, really like him.  You're probably 'in love'" sarcastic
air quotes "with each other.  You don't want it to end with graduation but
you're scared to confront him because he might reject you.  Is that fair?"

"I guess."

"So you need to feel that conviction.  You need to feel it hard, dude.  And
you've got to talk to him and bring him along.  And he might not come
along.  If he spurns you, you'll ultimately end up in the same place as if
you just let it drain out.  You've got to get him righteous about being a
gay guy, and you're going to have to reassure him that it's okay.  And
you've got to do it with fucking conviction, Joe.  I'm serious.  You've got
to be more persuasive with him than I apparently was with you."

"Ha," I said.  "You were persuasive with me."

"Except that you're still in the closet and terrified of the whole thing,
and can't even talk about being gay with your very serious
boyfriend-slash-roommate."  An aggressive exhale of cigarette smoke.  "You
can barely even talk about this with me!  Why didn't talk to me about this,
like, months ago?  I'm calling you twice a week, and you haven't even
hinted at this.  I mean, not to make this about me, but honestly."

"I should have talked about it with you earlier, yeah," I said.  "It would
have been good.  You know how I am about talking about myself, and I didn't
want to bother you."

"Sounds like you and Chris Riis were truly made for each other, then," he
said.  He put out the tip of his cigarette and stood up.  He walked over to
me and hugged me.  "You've got to do this, and you've got to find a way to
be confident and feel good about it."

"Thanks man.  I know."

"If you need to, even at 4 a.m., you can call me."

"I won't call you at 4 a.m., but thanks."

We broke our hug and agreed that it was time to go back downstairs to the
party.  We'd been talking for more than an hour.  It was past midnight.
 Below, people shouted along to the lyrics of "What's My Age Again,"
running full flush of Clinton Era nostalgia.

"By the way," I said, "you know that whenever I really feel like shit, I go
back and re-read that e-mail you sent me."

"What e-mail?" he said.

"You know, the e-mail.  The one you sent a couple of weeks before you
graduated."

"Oh, that!" he said.  "Oh, God.  Really?"

"Yeah.  Why?  It was, like, the nicest stuff that anyone's ever said to me."

"That's good to hear," he said.  "I got really drunk and sent a bunch of
sentimental e-mails.  I don't even want to think about what it said."

"Dude, no," I said.  "It was the best.  I bawled for a day afterward."

"Oh, jeez," he said.  "You're welcome, I guess?"

Slightly crestfallen that writing that e-mail hadn't been as powerful as
receiving it, I asked him to let me bum another smoke and to go downstairs
ahead of me.  I needed to collect my thoughts, to get back into party mode.
 Nervously smoking my cigarette, hands cold and almost shaking, I looked on
my bulletin board at that classic picture of me and Chris from the fall
before, the two of us sitting on opposite ends of the front porch, looking
sweaty and slightly debauched, Chris with an easy grin, me with the glimmer
of a glare.

Smiling at that picture, part of me wanted to go to the main floor and
shout out my gayness.

I'd sobered up over the last hour.  When I went downstairs, I'd have to
pound beers and dance to bad hip-hop in order to get myself back in a party
state.

Heart slam-dancing, brain slow-dancing, I stepped down and reentered
reality.

Seconds later, I saw Matt smiling with his arms folded, engaged in friendly
conversation with Christian Riis and his friend Amanda Ford.

* * *

Without thinking in these terms, when I got back to school that fall, I'd
become hopeful that my struggle was over. And it wasn't just about Chris. I
could glimpse the conclusion -- a reality where guys were no longer
cinderblocks tied to my ankles.

I would never be so cliche to think that I'm "in love with" a person, but
like Matt recognized, that's just a semantic game, a product of insecurity.
 I anticipated his facial gestures and verbal tics.  I understood the
things that pleased him -- movies or songs to suggest, what routes to run,
what bagel to buy him (toasted sesame, scallion cream cheese) if I woke
with a hangover and walked a couple blocks to the coffee house -- and went
out of my way to make him happy.  I came home from class or the newspaper
and looked forward to seeing him; I was disappointed on nights when he
wasn't around.

So I believed that he felt the same way about me, and the story I told
myself unfolded so easily.  It amused me to picture our housemates'
reactions when we told them.  They would be shocked and entertained and
happy.  At the right moment, I would reassure him that his mom already
knew.  Would I raise it with my parents over Christmas?  Would it be easier
to tell them on the phone?  What about when our parents met at graduation?

Oh, man, you, my brother, want that kind of story so badly.  LOL, right?
 At one point you thought that this was a love story, and I still think
that it's a sort of love story, but it's a different kind of love.  There's
nothing wrong with hope.  But really, in your heart of hearts, how could a
reasonable person look at our respective limitations and amputations and
think we would lock hands and walk out into an indefinite future?

And if it was doomed from the beginning -- something that I understand
better from the process of writing this -- isn't it all still worthwhile?
 How many college couples, gay or straight, "end up together"?  Almost none
-- not in the 2000s, not in our demographic.  I was lucky to have him.  In
my dotage and infirmity, I will think happily of my years with Chris Riis.
 He will remain one of my great memories.

I didn't see this at the time, but while I believed that I was beginning a
renaissance, Chris felt something closer to terror.  No doubt, he was
attracted to me and loved me as a person.  But his emotions risked
overturning everything that he understood about himself, the way he lived,
the kind of future that he'd imagined.  I saw our relationship as our
potential salvation; he saw it as an existential threat.

"What kind of pathetic fantasies do you have?" he would ask later, after he
finally erupted.  "Do you think we're going to live together and play
house?  Go on vacations together?  Get a nice dog and take it on walks and
go out to breakfast on Saturdays?  That's all a joke.  That's completely
deluded.  I'm not going to abandon who I am to make a statement for other
people."

What I thought was comfort and affection, Chris eventually labeled
brainwashing and manipulation.  As if I had those kinds of skills!  As if
he hadn't pulled me to a stop and kissed me in the middle of a country road
in Michigan!  I'd been conscientious about letting him pace our time,
giving him the feeling of control, but once he detonated, none of that
mattered.

He believed his disparagements. You repeat the same story to yourself often
enough, and it becomes a conviction.  I knew that from experience.

Now I wonder what would have happened if I'd been a different person, and
instead of helping him pile layer after layer on himself, coaching him on
how to stay in the closet, sheltering him from any suspicions -- if
instead, I'd gently nudged him toward reality.  I think he would have
resented me sooner, and it wouldn't have affected him; maybe that's a lie I
tell my conscience.

But even then, even at the worst times, when he talked like a crazy person
and accused me of wanting to ruin his life, I mostly felt sorry for him.
 Angry, hurt, confused -- sure.  But he was still my friend; I still loved
him as a friend, and above the resentment, I felt pity.

He was still the guy that greeted me in the airport that day in August, who
wouldn't leave my side at parties and bars, who hugged my words and read my
gestures when no one else paid attention.  Even when our friendship was
collapsing, he craved my approval.  He went on to punish himself -- choked,
numbed, hypothermic -- but he couldn't harm me if I didn't let him.

I always believed that I'd be okay, and then I saw that he wouldn't be.

After graduation, years would pass when we wouldn't see each other or
communicate.  During all of that time, I don't think a week passed where I
wouldn't think about him and feel pity.  Always something there to remind
me.  Katie or Sam would mention Chris Riis or I'd hear one of the old songs
that he loved, and I imagined him hundreds of miles away, sitting in front
of a flat screen, anxious and adrift.

Over years of his silence, I gave him cover, looked out for him,
preemptively smoothed over any potential wrinkles, apologized on his behalf
for the indignities that he'd directed toward me.

I'll always think of Chris Riis as my friend, always find rationales to
forgive him.

It's not because I'm a sucker.  It's because I still believe that he
rescued me, and when I tried to return the favor, he swam further from
shore.