Date: Sat, 3 May 2014 14:26:09 -0400 From: jpm 770 Subject: Joe College, Part 27 NOTE: Thanks again to everyone for reading and for your e-mails. I was pretty thrown off that so many of you thought the previous chapter was the end of the story. If you want to keep track between updates, check me out on Twitter -- https://twitter.com/JPM770 -- or at http://jpm770.blogspot.com/ . Joe College, Part 27 Sometimes you feel an artificial intensity when you run alongside another person. I've felt it with strangers in races. In most decent runs, there's a moment where you feel like you've hit peak effort, where your lungs or legs want to slow the pace. When you're with another person, you don't slow. You want to maintain stride together, no matter how much it hurts. Alone, you might drop to an 8:20 mile, but with your friend you'll push 7:30. This is true even if you're not competing. Now that he was fast -- stronger than I was -- there was heightened focus. It seemed platonically erotic. I've jerked off to mental images of running with him; in the summer after graduation, I had dreams about it. After our showers, we hung sweat-drenched shorts and shirts to dry over the shower curtain. The bathroom had a sharp sport-glands odor for hours afterward, and while I tend not to go for that kind of thing, knowing that it was ours turned me on. (Michelle understandably found it disgusting. If she was home, she demanded one of us to take them down, saying the "boy stench" made her "want to retch.") If there had always been that edge to our runs together, it became honed once we both were capable of sub-8:00 miles. Our toughest route took us through hills to a parcel of wilderness park on the north end of campus. It was a stretch of hilly forest that led to a plain of tall grasses, a park much loved by runners, cross-country skiers, high-school makeout rogues and college freshman scared to smoke weed in the dorms. It was an uphill mile from our house, through the neighborhood and past a row dorms, then a sharp quarter-mile incline to the entrance. Some days we ran there without seeing another person. By the spring of graduation, both of us might visibly flinch if unexpectedly pressed to one another's company. We became hostile. But we still went on those fucking runs together! By then, there was a directly competitive aspect, sometimes tipping into aggression. Even that day in April when we came to mild, mean-girl violence, turning bloody and mud-flecked on a trail in that park. And then, two days after our scrape, we laced up and ran together, in what felt like exuberant, mutual rage. I mean, these are some of the things that have kept him so present in my thinking, even all these years later. How's that for dysfunction? As he was exploding, I might have felt closer to him than when I daydreamed that we might live together in Chicago. It felt like we might immediately flip from fighting to fucking each other. He spoke in a stronger voice than I'd heard in the three years before. His gaze became clear, his cadence sharp and resolute. He forgot that dopey, trout-faced mask. The angrier his denial, the more real he felt. And it was the running, always the running, running with him like I did with Andy when we were ninth graders on the cross-country team, winter runs when the sweat steamed like each pore was a hot spring, running the first warm April day when our shoulders turned pink in the sun, running until he broke several paces ahead of me and looked back with a superior, mocking smirk: dude, you can't catch me anymore. * * * "So," I gasped to him. "Amanda Ford." "Ha!" A smile. "Your coach?" "Yeah," he gasped. "She's nice." "Cool," I gasped. "Fast too." "Yeah." He looked at me sideways, smiling. "Jealous?" "Ha," I choked. "Nah." "Cool," he gasped. "Don't be." He laughed inasmuch as he could while we sprinted downhill toward home. "I was," he grunted, "waiting. For you to. Say. Something." "Ha," I gasped. "Why?" "I saw. How stressed. You got. That time." "When?" "Egan's. Your. Drunk night." "Nah." "Liar," he gasped. "You're funny." We were getting close to home -- we could see the street sign for Hamilton ahead, and then two blocks left to the house. We gutted the downhill. It was too hard to push pace and talk, even in short bursts. I was five pounds lighter, though, after the iron clot in my chest popped out and landed on Van Buren Street. I smiled because we were almost done, my endorphins were at their peak fire, but mostly because he had just deflated a month of anxiety. I picked up my footsteps and he kept pace. We turned left on Hamilton for our last push, the flat sidewalk feeling extra-gravitational after the long downhill. When we reached the front walk to the house, I leaned forward, like I was trying to break an invisible finish line, but he kept up beside me, maybe even taking a half-step edge. He issued several high-pitched grunts of relief as we slowed to a walk, like louder mimics of the whimpers he made when he was cumming. "Good run," I said. "Awesome run," he said. My quads tingled as we started to walk the cooldown. "So, I don't have to worry," I said. "You can worry if you want," he said. He'd known I was jealous, and apparently enjoyed it. "I know she likes me, but she's just a nice person. Why seeing her freaked you out so much, I have no idea." "Okay," I said, running my fingers through my sweat-damp hair, deciding whether to say more. "I don't know either. It was just a bad idea." "I know I'm not like you or Sam or Trevor. I don't have a thousand friends. I know it's probably a shock to see me with a friend. But dude," he said, bringing his voice low, looking behind to ensure that we were solitary, "you're the only one I do that stuff with." The look and faint scent of him, pink and sweating, embarrassed but knowing how much he'd just complimented me, the sound of his breathing, the fact of his bare calves, the existence of his ear cartilage, the knowledge that he had a pancreas, the treads on the bottoms of his sneakers -- all that stuff was enough that I spontaneously started to chub in my nylon shorts, as we walked outside, in public, in cool November air. I stabbed fingernails into my thumb muscle and pictured Cheney assflesh, trying to will away my interest before it turned visible. It was election day. No one else was home. Michelle had left in a bus caravan the morning before to canvass for Kerry in Iowa. Katie and Trevor volunteered at a call center and Sam (not a citizen) was at an all-day election party in one of the dollar-pitcher bars. "I'm the only one you do that stuff with?" I said, closing the front door behind us and following him up the stairs. "Ha," he said, looking back at me. I hit his lower back with my fingers. We were both sporting half-erections in our flimsy shorts. At the second-floor landing he faced me and adjusted himself, uselessly. "Do you want the shower first?" he said. "No, I want you to come with me." He stuck his head in Michelle's room, just to confirm to himself that she was still in Iowa, and kicked off his shoes in the hallway. He closed the bathroom door behind us, and seconds later our shorts and shirts were off. We stood under the shower head. I sucked on his neck, just below his jaw line. His half-cocked dick tick-tocked against the corner of my hip. It's true that we were making out when he slipped and fell backward. He was also soaping himself up and jerking my dick. I certainly didn't shift weight against him or make an abrupt move. The dude lost his footing and slipped. It wasn't my fault. He tried to steady himself against the tile wall to his right, but he slammed down, catching himself on the edge of the tub with the heel of his left hand. As he went down, his legs tangled in mine. I wobbled, grabbing the shower curtain on one side, its rod crashing to the floor, but managing to steady myself against the wall. We reflexively laughed. Our limbs looked like Naked Twister gone wrong. He hadn't finished his laugh cycle when his face curved. "Ouch, ouch, ouch," he said, grasping his left hand. "Wow ow ow ow." "Shit, dude," I said, not knowing. "Owwwwwwwwwww," he whisper-wailed. With the fallen curtain, water ricocheted off my back and pooled over the bathroom floor. I flipped the shower handle. He was lying naked in the tub, clutching his left hand. "Dude, what is it?" "My hand." "Is it okay?" "No!" he pain-shouted. "Obviously, no!" I wrapped a towel around myself, ran downstairs and packed a bag of ice. When I came back he stood naked in the bathroom, his lower back propped against the edge of the sink, hunched forward, grimacing and holding himself. I helped him dress in the first suitably warm clothes we found on his floor, which included the orange hoodie. So we ended up spending most of election day 2004 in the University's walk-in health services, where a doctor X-rayed Chris's hand and set his sprained thumb in a splint. "Took a fall?" the doctor said. "Slipped in the shower," he mumbled. "We just got in from a run," I said. Chris peered at me, looking puffy and miserable. We were at the clinic for about two-and-a-half hours, which didn't seem terrible, considering the wait, the X-ray, and his session with the doctor. I completed forms for him with my steady hand while he held the ice bag to himself and gently writhed. As soon as we departed, he called his brother Pete, the E.R. doc, to describe the injury and see whether he agreed with the doctor. "Nah, don't tell Mom and Dad," he said into the phone. "You know. She'll want to call me and talk about it." Pause. "No! It's completely humiliating. It's not like I got injured in a playoff game. I slipped in the dumb shower like an old woman. So embarrassing." Pause. "No, I don't want painkillers. No, no, no. They gave me a cortisone shot. Prescriptions freak me out. I don't want anything that takes a prescription. Even if I'm dying." Pause. "No, Pete, seriously. I don't care." "What's your issue with prescriptions?" I asked when he hung up. "They're just, like, for-profit poison. It's complete marketing and chemical dependency, all of it. Even the stuff that seems benign." "Did you get that from your dad or siblings or something?" "No," he said. "They have the mainstream ideas. Just got it from watching commercials and hearing people talk about it. It's a principle thing for me. I want to be self-reliant." It was dark when we returned. Still home alone. Throughout the afternoon, I'd gotten periodic texts from Matt Canetti and others, telling me that exit polls had leaked online, that Kerry was exceeding expectations, with a cushion in Ohio and maybe even an upset in North Carolina. Each time, I got that feeling of seeing your team improbably creeping toward a fourth-quarter surprise, this sense of dumbfoundedness that your underdog would shock the experts. "Yo, come upstairs with me," I said when I was done sopping up the water from our half-flooded bathroom. "What for?" "Just come hang. I know you're, like, too messed up to really do anything. Everybody else is at parties tonight and I don't want to lie around alone." The doctor had told him to keep his hand elevated, so he got into my bed, arm propped around his head. "This seriously sucks," he said. "I know." "And now everybody's going to ask me what happened, and they'll be all dramatic about it. And I'll just be like, `Yeah, I slipped in the shower. Like, I've fallen but I can't get up.' God." "Does it still hurt?" "Not like before. But it's throbbing. It hurts every time my heart beats." "Fuck man. I'm sorry." "It's okay." He said. He exhaled long out of his nostrils. "I know you didn't mean to. Thanks for staying with me." "Didn't mean to what?" "Like, how you tripped me up. It just happened." "Ah." I didn't correct or clarify. His dignity felt as sore as his thumb. It felt nice to be warm and silent with him in our dark, empty house. That was the kind of thing we rarely did. I had a bunch of election party invites that night, but the afternoon's surprise drama had pushed all of that out of thinking. Exhausted, I went to sleep against him. * * * I shielded him when Sam came home. Sam was a drunker, more disturbed version of Jack Nicholson in "The Shining." He breaks the house apart with an ax; Shelley Duvall's screaming comes across the sky. By one a.m., he must have been drinking for ten hours, his mood going to ashes as the night transitioned from nervous confidence to soul-scraped horror. "Pieces!" he screamed from the living room. "Pieces, get your fucking psychotic Republican asshole into this living room now! Pieces!" "Dude, stop it," I said. "He fell and busted his thumb. We spent half the day in the ER. He's so down." "Awww, fuck it, Pawtuckett," Sam said. "Pieces!" "Dude, stop," I said. "He didn't even vote. Remember he fucked up on the absentee ballot deadline? Besides, Michigan went for Kerry, so it's not his fault." "Pieces!" Sam shouted. "You're not going after him tonight," I said, giving a light shove that sent him staggering backward. "We agree that this fucking sucks but let's not take it out on him. He's been good all day. He hasn't put on Fox News once." "Fuck Fox News!" Sam shouted. He excavated a couch cushion and lobbed it at our dormant TV. "Go the fuck to sleep," I said. "Why, you fucking fascist," Sam said. "We should go riot. Let's go fucking riot. Let's go fuck shit up. The people of this country need to rise up. That's the whole problem. No one is rising up. But one day the people are going to stop buying fascist lies, and when they rise up, Bush and Cheney, that entire cabal, they're fucked." "You're acting like an Australian," I said. "Like a bogan Australian. Mixed with, like, a dumb Amiri Baraka." "Fuck the fucking Aussies," he said. "Fuck John Howard. John Howard fucking looooves W. Bush. Want to go slaughter some brown people in the desert? Let's go slaughter a bunch of brown people in the desert! Fuckinnnnnng American war-machine bullshit. Fucking fuck. You fucking fuck. You don't even fucking care at all. You just want to sit around with that fascist Pieces, write your little columns," he mimicked fey typing gestures and spoke in falsetto, "`Boopity boop, I'm Joe College, aren't I so clever and handsome, I'm writing my charming little prose now about what would happen if Dick Cheney and The Shins came to my fancy Beowulf seminar, boopity boop! Garden State is my favorite movie but I'm too good for The O.C.! Boopity boop!' Where is your fucking rage, Joe? Where is your outrage?" "What's boopity boop?" "That's what you say, it's always, `Boopity boop, you'd think I'm a frat bro but I want to be a sensitive hipster. Did you read my new column, tee hee?' But meanwhile, your government. Your president. They're killing people in your name. Massive, mechanized slaughter. Are you not ashamed? Are you not outraged? And your countrymen have just ratified and celebrated that. But you're more worried about Pieces's stupid thumb. `Oh, I have no time for massacres, Pieces hurt his thumb.'" I gave a gentle push. He took a few steps backward and toppled on his ass. "That's appalling, what you just did," Sam said, struggling to rise off the carpet. "You're, like, improving my mood now." "I'm going to fucking kick your ass," Sam said. He fought to stand before deciding to stay on the floor. "This is a metaphor," he said, swinging a finger at me. "You are hegemony. America. I am the world. I want justice. And you deny me. Via violence." "Go to bed, asshole." I pushed his shoulder with the toe of my sock. "Cocksucker," he said from the floor, grabbing for my foot a second too late. "Fascist. Fuck Bush. Fuck Cheney." Chris was on my own floor, spread across my futon mattress, half awake to his Wonder Boys DVD, nursing his thumb. "Sam's wild," I said. "I heard him screaming." "He's resting on the floor now." "You're all insane," he said. "I don't know why you care that much. You all try to fight with me, but it's not like I'm the one who gets upset. I don't know how people can get sincerely, emotionally angry about it." "Michelle is probably openly weeping and hugging people right now. I have voicemails from her. I'm not listening tonight. I don't need to get more stressed out. Fuck it all," I said, lying across the room from him on my bed, arm crooked over my eyes. "Katie said that if Bush wins, her goal for the night is to get hate-fucked by a dirty Republican." "So foul. I hate when she talks like that," he said. "I know you do. I shouldn't have told you that." "Like, why aren't she and Trevor just together? They clearly like each other. Instead he hooks up with skanky girls and she goes after dirtbag guys." "I don't know, man," I said. "I couldn't take her. She gets too intense. They're obviously hot for each other and care about each other, but they, like, always want to push each other's buttons. Like when we go out to parties and they don't even acknowledge each other? And then the next afternoon they're flirting in the kitchen." "They for sure hook up with other people to make each other jealous," he said. "So many head games." "I don't know how people can stand those kinds of relationships," he said, stretching on the floor. "Seems like constant stress and drama." "Pretty much." "Like, my parents do okay, but they're a different generation," he said. "Like, Pete and Amy. But they're older, and they fight. They definitely fight. She pretty much controls Pete now." "But you're just seeing slivers of it," I said. "I know! Imagine what it must be like when they're alone." "But not everything needs to be that way," I said. "Not every relationship has to be stress and headgames." "Maybe," he said, massaging the wrist of his lame hand. "I guess it's hard to picture myself putting up with that situation." He sounded casual, slightly cheerful. "Oh well. Not my life." * * * And then Chris was miserable, in the way that a person who doesn't understand serious pain can exaggerate a minor flu into a case of Dickens-era consumption. "I spent the last two years getting in shape, and now everything's ruined," he said, as Trevor and I left for the gym without him. "I can already feel myself getting soft and it's only been four days." "Brother, pro athletes get injured and pulled all the time," Trevor said. "You'll be good soon enough." "Dude, you can do squats. Come do squats." "Are you serious?" he said. "Because if I'm doing squats and I lose my grip on the bar, I'll only get paralyzed." The pouting and drama. We joked with him, sympathized, did small favors. Our housemates were sweet to him. Sam didn't mock. I bought him Days of Heaven and Badlands because they were on sale for $9.99 and it seemed like he'd dig them. Katie skipped a lecture to accompany him on his follow-up visit with the doctor. It grew tiresome after a week. He went to class, but otherwise spent much of the day napping on the couch. Then he stayed awake watching TV and stirring until four or five a.m. He didn't shave, which was a rotten look for him, with his pale, silky, uneven stubble. "Is he even showering?" Katie said. "What the fuck? It's his thumb, not his dick." And as you'd guess, he was taking it out on me. He wanted to blame me for the incident, though stopped short of accusing me straight on. He commented that he should have known better and this was what he got for going against his better judgment. He must have been replaying the moment of his fall, like he was Jim Garrison with a mental Zapruder Tape. There was no use in questioning his assessment. I didn't try. He didn't hear pushback or reason, just mockery or a challenge. It was his whole youngest-brother thing, where he craved attention on grounds of weakness and sympathy. It was better for him to cycle through his craziness without telling him all the ways that he was being ridiculous. He also wasn't making late-night visits to my room, but that seemed fine. It was consistent with the rest of that pathetic episode, and I was happy to jerk off and not sweat it. He probably would have winced and whined about his thumb, exaggerating every modest throb and pressure. I was more motivated to shut him up than I was to get him off. Plus, I suddenly found myself really, really consumed by porn. It was like I was fourteen and had discovered that stuff for the first time. My teenhood had been spent on dial-up, where, if you weren't terrified of parental discovery, like I was, you might occasionally access an .mpg clip or a .gif, but there were no glorious, crisply defined Sean Cody and Corbin Fisher videos. The early-aughts renaissance in gay porn was underway, and I'd barely noticed. Suddenly this was the most arousing stuff in the world to me, and because I was less paranoid about a vague charge to my credit card than I was about being criminally prosecuted for illegal downloading, I buckled for a couple of 3-a.m. subscriptions. During afternoon daydreams, my mind didn't wander toward Chris, but to holing up in my room with my laptop. If whining, unshaved Christian Riis wanted to sit in the living room watching Conan O'Brien or Lord of the Rings, I was plenty content spending hours alone in late-night masturbatory arcs. I don't want to get to lofty about gay porn, but at its best, it can be a how-to manual. I know how strange it is to some of you, that I was so apathetic about anal sex. Like I've probably mentioned before, my very limited, digit-based self-explorations in the shower left me wondering why any person would want to experience that kind of intense pain, and, presumably, degradation. Nothing about that could have been pleasurable -- at least not to a healthy person. Even if I were the fucker, how could I, as a non-sadistic person, permit the fuckee to endure such discomfort? I thought of it as a fetish, not the gay equivalent of straight intercourse, and suspected that the persistent mania for gay buttsex was an exaggerated homo norm run amok. But studying these twenty-minute clips, I suspected that I had misapprehended something. Allowing for exaggeration and acting, clearly it wasn't all miserable. Yeah yeah yeah, I'd googled and had a general understanding of the underlying biology of prostate stimulation, how even certain allegedly straight dudes allegedly liked to get pegged, but intellectually comprehending the mechanics wasn't the same as lucidly imagining how it might feel. So this became an acceptable substitute for actually getting off with Chris. With my laptop humming on my chest, I spent hours watching videos of reputedly straight guys with California-WASP pseudonyms pork each other. * * * As I was about to go dark in bed, it struck me that once I fell asleep, my heart would stop and I would die. It was like the way a twitch in your leg might jerk you awake when you're on the verge of sleep. I flipped up confused, rudely notified of my resting heart rate and shallow breathing. I've never been prone to death-related fixations like some of my friends. I mean, grow up. We're all gonna die, the sun will swallow the Earth, this is all meaningless anyway so whatevs, blast "Turn Down for What," pass me a Lagunitas and get over yourself. Of course, that doesn't mean that I actually *wanted* to die in my sleep, and for seconds the message of this brain spasm felt plausible, like an actual warning of imminent extinction. I paced my room, checked my pulse at my neck, breathed deeply, counted my heart rate, reassuring myself that I was fine. Had my mind overreacted to an errant beat -- the result of caffeine, nicotine, dehydration, stress? Who knows. When I returned to bed, I was too mentally alert to slip away. I loaded one of my beloved pornos on the laptop and watched a hot guy with a lean swimmer's build and a peachfuzz ass blow, rim and fuck a hot muscular guy who apparently waxed his asshole. Both of them purported to be straight. Jerking off usually sedates me, but a couple of minutes after a lame dribble of jizz, I was on my back swatting at anxiety. This was when I really spun out. For the sake of argument, let's say I actually *was* poised to die in my sleep. All I'd have to show for my life were good grades, some cleverly worded album reviews and newspaper columns. Even in my irrational fit, I knew that it was laughable to judge myself like that as a 21 year old (haha, you lazy fucker, tell that to Mozart, to S.E. Hinton, to Carson McCullers) but I began to understand how pathetic my chosen future looked. Would I be a gadfly, a critic, an observer all my life? Sit back, analyze, never have the courage to participate? Who built monuments to Lester Bangs or Lionel Trilling? Who would mourn Maureen Dowd? Even Mencken or Walter Lippman, did they mean anything to anyone but a miniscule population of enormous dorks like me? Words, words, words, pointless empty words. I was an inert mass of words. I liked running and I liked getting drunk, but I otherwise didn't live in a physical world. I was a bloodless collection of adjectives. My friends would miss me, but we'd be graduating anyway. I might as well be dead for their purposes. My family would mourn me -- but my parents still had two younger sons, and Rob would secretly be pleased with my death. That English morality play, Everyman, that they assign us all in high school: I had committed no good deeds. I hadn't even done Alternative Spring Break. I'd also committed no *bad* deeds. (Not really, I told myself; being cruel to Andy Trafford, that was my bad deed, but that was standard teenage shit, right? No? Fuck, I'm worse than a monster.) My words were indulgences. Peacocking. They meant nothing. My passions, ideas, obsessions -- they existed only in my imagination. I had no future. Graduation was the end for me. From age five to eighteen, I prepared myself for these last four years. All my life, the goal was college. This was the achievement. I had no goal thereafter. Maybe I would write a brilliant thesis, a bittersweet and thoughtful farewell column in the newspaper, and they would be the capstone on 22 years of life. And I was gay. Fuck! A faggot. A sodomite. The Other. A genetic detour, a reproductive failure. The human experience was mostly a competition for successful gene-transferral, and I was permanently on the tournament's disabled list. The most basic human experience would be out of my grasp forever, unless I lied to and betrayed a trusting and naive woman and condemned myself to indefinite misery. This might explain everything. Being good brought me no reproductive advantage, so, like all outcast faggots since the beginning of civilization, I would settle for little intellectual games and trivial showmanship. I paused my sobbing and staggered out of bed to my phone. It was 3:20 a.m. I sent Matt a text -- "Yo, you awake?" -- and spent ten minutes circling my room, irrationally hoping that he would respond. The Counting Crows song "Mr. Jones" cheered me up since I'd been like ten years old. I pulled August and Everything After from my CD shelf and turned up the volume, enjoying the wistful inanity of those lyrics, sitting cross-legged on my floor with a high-school yearbook on my lap. Rick, Sanjay, Danielle -- I once thought that those people would be my best friends for life. They'd been my Sam, Trevor and Katie. A yearbook photo of me posing with Rick and Danielle at the homecoming dance -- all of us looking impossibly young and leanly, gawkily pretty, even though it was only four years ago -- seemed like a postcard from a stranger's life. "Dude, thank *God* you're awake," I said when he picked up my call. "I've said this before, but I just want to tell you again how sorry I am about how I acted junior year. It's like I understand it for the first time, like truly understand it. Everybody loves you, you're the best guy, and I intentionally tried to destroy you as a person. And it was probably when you were most vulnerable. You were just this sweet little gay guy. I was like a monster." I thought that the connection had dropped. "What drugs are you on? You're tripping, dude." "No, none." "Just because it's like 3:45 where you are and your voice sounds very strange and what you're saying is unhinged. And I can hear The Counting Crows, which is frankly bizarre." "I'm just, like, freaking out pretty bad here, to be honest. I'm looking at our senior yearbook right now. I don't want to bore you with the details. I don't know what's happening. I was lying in bed and I thought that I was dying. And you know how sometimes you get like this, and one thought leads to another?" "I think I know what you mean," Andy said. "And I'm haunted by that shit. It torments me. Remember when I cut you down in Slaton's class, and the whole room froze, including Slaton? Because we were friends and we were both pretty popular, and dudes don't act like that. You turned so red. And you didn't know what to do, right? Because you're a nice guy, and you weren't expecting it, and you weren't going to try to make me look stupid in front of people even if you were embarrassed. You were too decent to think like that, but also, you were scared of me, because I'm a terrible person, and sometimes I do terrible things." "Joe, just chill." His voice was so calm. "This hasn't been a thing for years. I got over it pretty fast. We were friends again by graduation, right?" "Yeah." "And then we spent that whole summer hooking up." "Right." "So it was okay by then. Please don't make yourself crazy about this. It's not relevant to anything in my life anymore." "Okay," I said. "You honestly mean that? Truly. You're not saying that to make me feel good?" "Yes." "That's awesome then," I said. He was right: I was sober, but was thinking and talking like I was high. "Thank you so much." His voice was steady and patient. "What else is going on? What triggered this fit?" "Everything is happening all at once, and I have no idea what to do about it or how to handle myself. I can't explain it in a way that makes sense, even to me. Everybody has to graduate. It's a fact of life like death. Chris sprained his thumb and is upset all the time, then Bush just got re-elected so we're going to keep killing all those people. I'm just some stupid, spoiled, douchebag faggot, and I do shitty things and pointless things. I can barely hold it together right now. Like I'm going to spin apart." Fuck, he was so calm and reassuring. He should have a call-in radio show, I swear. I turned off Counting Crows and got back into bed with the lights out. I whimpered agreement or dissent under the covers while he talked me through my unreason. It was late, even in Cali, so our conversation didn't go more than 20 minutes. Not long after four, we said good-bye and I fell into a safe and living sleep. When I woke up late the next day, I didn't dwell on my fit of darkness, and thought instead of how nice Andy had been. * * * "Chris, dude," I said, not looking at him. "I've got to say this, and I'll talk about it once and then we can forget about it forever if you want, and I won't be weird about that. Is that okay?" He tried to play amused, but that was a cover up for how uncomfortable my disclaimer made him. "Maybe it's okay," he said. "Do I have to give you my Social Security number?" "I'm serious about forgetting it, dude. I don't want to say anything that would make you uncomfortable, and, like, have you hold it against me. I'm not going to say something that does that on purpose. I'm going through a hard time. There's a lot of shit I'm trying to work out in my head, so if I say something and it rubs you the wrong way, cut me slack." "Okay..." he said, speaking the ellipsis. "Okay, because this is uncomfortable for me, right? And if you give me a hard time for it, I might freak out. You have a lot of power in this conversation. Like, all the power. It probably makes sense to tell you that up front." "I meant it when I said okay," he said. "I'm listening." "Okay," I said, taking a deep breath. "You know how the last summer roughed me up. It's, like, I don't know what to do with myself anymore. Career-wise or personally. It's like you have plans for your life, and something comes along and none of it makes sense. I've only felt like that once before, and I'm still not over it, but this time it's a bundle of everything, it's not just that one issue. "There's this knot where I don't know what I'm going to do with myself about leaving here and leaving everybody. I can't stand it. In six months, we're not going to be walking through the quad. We're not going to come home to this house. I have this whole life, all of these people -- like, I have twenty best friends and all of them will be gone. It's freaking me the fuck out. High school, I couldn't graduate a day too soon. Here, I pretend that it isn't happening. The only way to stay sane is to block it out. "There are so many people that I like so much. Even at the end of high school, when I'd known my best friends since we were little kids, it didn't feel this way. It feels cheesy to articulate this, but I've never had so many people that I feel so close to. "And to be even more specific, some of that is specifically you. I don't mean this in an emotional, pussy, chick way. Even when you're being annoying, I want to hang out with you. I'd be around you all the time if I could. That's not, like, normal for me. Usually I want to be around a ton of people for smaller amounts of time. When we left your cabin, it sucked, because I knew we wouldn't have as much time together. As psyched as I was to get back here, I was also bummed that we'd both be doing our own things, and I'd just catch you when I could. I mean, just talking about it, it already feels like it was years ago, but everything about that week was fucking perfect, dude. We had so much fun. I wish that it could have kept going like that, even though I obviously understand why it couldn't. If it were up to me, it'd be like that all the time. "I think I'm telling you this because while I'll probably keep freaking out until graduation, I think it'd be awesome if we still hung out afterward. I don't say that with an agenda. I don't know what that would mean. But it sucks to think about not having you around me. Like, if you wanted to move to New York, I'm sure there are things I could do to help you get set up, but if you don't want to move to New York -- like, if you wanted to move to Chicago or L.A. or wherever, even if it's back to Michigan -- maybe we could sort of try to think about that. "Or maybe not, man! I don't fucking know, dude. Like, Sam and Katie talk about moving to New York. And maybe Michelle will go to Columbia, although she'll probably get into more selective places so probably not. I'm just, like, trying to think of a way to keep this going in some way. Do you know what I mean? Do I sound crazy?" He didn't even pause. "Look, I mean-" And that was it. He could have said no more. From his tone, I knew that this was off the table, and that it was probably hopeless. I didn't need to look at him. I hadn't looked at him the whole time that I spoke. It was honest what I said, about Chris having all the power. "Well, first of all, you always sound crazy." He meant it as a gentle jab, a tension-breaker. I responded by laughing too hard, even though my face was sweating its discomfort. "I guess I don't understand what you're talking about, to be honest with you," he said. "Obviously I'm flattered that you think of me that way, and you're, like, definitely one of my closest friends. I'll miss you too. But I don't get what you're saying here. What are you saying?" "I'm just saying," I said, pausing, want to balance the depth my truth against the risk that he would recoil, "that I have a really, really good time when you're around. The idea of not having you around, it sucks. And if you wanted to figure something out after college, I might like that." "But." He paused. "You think you'd actually want to move to Michigan?" He asked it like I said my goal was to start a ministry. "I mean, maybe! It seemed-" "Because you'd hate it," he said. "It has none of the things you like. You wouldn't last a month." "Dude, but I had a great time when I was there in August. I don't know what you think I couldn't get. Nothing that really matters to me. It's not like I need to go to clubs or rock shows or the theater-" "But that week in August was a vacation," he said. "It wasn't real life. You'd hate it. Malls, suburbs, poor little towns full of rednecks. Below-zero windchills in the winter. A lot of Christians and right-wingers. NRA types. Pretty much everybody's white and anyplace that isn't white is totally segregated. There's none of the food you like. I can't even picture what you'd do." "So, like -- but what are *you* going to do? Do you really want to go back to that?" "But that's my life. In the way that New York is your life." "It doesn't have to be though. What if we went to Chicago? Or, like, L.A.? There are lots of great places. Seattle. Portland's supposed to be cool, but I've never been." "I think I get what you're saying," he said, "and it's super-nice of you. You're a great guy and you're a good friend. But that kind of move, and trying to have that kind of life, that stuff was never in the cards for me. It's nothing about you." Even though we were alone in my room and Michelle was out, he brought his voice down to a whisper. "Like, I know you're _gay_." He barely spoke the word. "I've realized that for awhile. I'm cool with that. But maybe somewhere along the line you got the wrong idea, just because of how we got to be so close." "What was my wrong idea?" He thumbed toward his chest and shook his head. The look of dismissal and timber in his voice were overplayed by half. "That's not me. I'm not like that. What's happened with us has been cool, but that's not where I'm going." "No?" "Definitely not. No way" He had the misplaced emphasis of a community-theater actor. "Like, I see why you might have that impression. But it wasn't about the," dropped to the half-whisper, "_sexuality_ of it. It's not a sexual thing. And it's definitely not a romantic thing. It's more like an intensity thing, or a closeness thing." "Right," I said. We were both calm. I'd expected one of us to be more emotional -- hostile or affectionate, but expressive, at least. Still, I was the only one sweating. I felt it soak the armpits of my shirt. "It's definitely pretty intense. And close" "Right," Chris said. "And kind of weird." "That's true sometimes," I said, almost like I was doing word lessons with a child. "Sometimes, it is both weird and very intense." "And I think that I've been drawn to, like, the uniqueness and intensity of it, but that doesn't mean that's who I am, as a category or a label. Like, for example, when we're doing mayhem in Vice City, it's not real. If it were, I'd actually take a rocket launcher into a strip club." "Okay, but hold up," I said, snapping into my voice. "This is where you've lost me, maybe. That's a video game. That's not real. The stuff we do is real. It exists." "In a manner of speaking, definitely. Actors in a play do real things too. But our thing is only real in the way that a touch football game is real, but still isn't the NFL, or even college." "Yeah, but if you're playing touch football, you're still playing football. And if you're," whispering, "hooking up with somebody and messing around with somebody, that means you're getting off with them. We're definitely attracted to each other. You can't say that we're not attracted to each other. And that we also really, really like each other, just personally. Like I said, we have so much fun together. And I fucking care about you, dude. Not in some crazy dramatic way, just in a way where, like, I really, really want the best for you, and I feel like I have some kind of stake in your life. Don't you think that's real? That's not like causing mayhem in Vice City." "No, it's not," he said. "I agree with all of that. I think we're kind of doing semantics now." "I'm not trying to do semantics. I'm not trying to do word games at all. This is as straightforward as I know how to be. I understand if you think it's crazy to try to arrange something post-college, but so far, I feel like you're talking in a circle." The way he exhaled through his nostrils and paused, I expected something brutish. "But, like, maybe," he said, his thought evaporating. "It could be that you feel happy here and like you belong here, and what you're doing is associating me with all of that. So that I represent something that's bigger than who I am. When, at the end of the day, I'm not that big a deal. I'm a symbol for a part of your life that you don't want to leave behind. This isn't about me for you." If only he hadn't said that! It only confirmed that, behind his dim camouflage, he was savvier than he ever wanted to show. I wasn't persuaded by the merits of what he said -- I was confident that he was wrong -- but here was the thoughtful, perceptive person, the one he hid behind confusions, bad metaphors, evasions and pretend indifference. His comment, which was intended to ground me, confirmed to me that I was right. "Can I just do something?" I said. By then, I had fully sweated through the armpits of my shirt. "It's not a trick. I'm not trying to mess with you." "Ha," he said. "Okay." I walked to him and leaned over my papasan chair, balancing myself while I kissed him. I expected resistance -- that if he didn't turn his face, or push me back, that at least his lips and tongue would tense and withdraw. He willingly participated. I placed my hand to the center of his chest, balancing against him. He felt and smelled and tasted so comfortable. It was the first time I'd kissed him since the thumb sprain. When I pulled my mouth away, his eyes were still closed and his mouth remained poised. We were both breathing heavily. "That was intense, right?" I said. He nodded. He looked like he wanted me to keep going, and I wanted to keep going. I was immediately hard, and our proximity reminded me how much I'd missed messing around with him in the couple of weeks after his fall. It wasn't liminal arousal; energy surged from my solar plexus to my forehead. Getting off with him seemed like a historically good idea. Then I stopped myself. If we were going to do that, he had to make the move, the way he almost always was the one who made the move. He had to be the one with agency. "Shouldn't we be doing that all the time?" I said. His face pinched slightly. I said the wrong thing. "That's fine. But then what?" "Is that, like, an existential question?" I said. "But then what anything? There's a then what for everything." "I'm not trying to make a point. I don't mean to disappoint you," he said. He adjusted himself and pushed out of the chair. "We both know this scenario you're cooking up is never going to happen. It doesn't make sense. Sorry if that's too direct, but it's true, and I think that you know it. I hope that we'll always stay friends, but this other stuff isn't even real." * * * Some hours later, I was alone in bed, fidgeting, rearranging our conversation, but mostly alert because it felt like I'd expelled so much. Oddly, I felt more exhilarated than disappointed. I had feared a rage fit or a bitter accusation. He'd said enough to give me false hope, but I was proud at myself for recognizing my falseness. As I counted my slow, even breaths, I imagined post-graduation life without him, and reminded myself of the ways that I would be okay. He was a good and decent guy, no matter how deluded he was. He was only trying to take care of himself. His concept of that might be terrible, but there was no malice behind it. I heard him mount my spiral stairs before the door in my floor came open and shot light against my ceiling. My instinct was to sit up and talk to him, but before he could make out my silhouette, I decided to fake sleep, maintaining a fetal position that faced outward. He gently closed the door and allowed his eyes to account for the dark before approaching my bed. "Yo, you awake dude?" he whispered, standing a couple of feet from my bed. I watched him through slitted eyelids. I smelled toothpaste on his breath. "Joe," he said, his whisper slightly louder. He tugged at his dick through his basketball shorts. "Joe," he said in a quiet speaking voice. I remained motionless, pacing my breathing to mimic sleep, eyelids cracked just enough to discern his movements. It wasn't that I was avoiding him -- I wanted to see what he would do, whether he would shake me awake or approach. He needed to make the gesture. He pulled his basketball shorts to his thighs and took his dick out, stroking slowly. They weren't the motions that you use to jerk off, but the motions you use to get yourself hard. "Whoah," I said, pretending to be startled and disoriented. "Dude." "Yeah," he said. "Dude." I wiped my eyes. "Were you jerking to me while I slept?" "No!" he loud whispered. "I came up here and was trying to see if you were up." "But you saw me sleeping and decided to jerk off over me?" I pretended to be confused, not creeped out. "No, man, it wasn't like that," he said, putting his cock away. "I, like, said your name a few times and you didn't wake up, and I was gonna try again. Dude, some of the stuff you said got me pretty turned on." "Like what?" I said, sitting up. "I don't know. Just, like, how attracted you are to me." "Definitely attracted to you," I said. "You're hot as fuck, dude. That said, I've never snuck into your room and jerked off over you while you were sleeping. Seems sort of raunchy." "Oh, forget it." His voice turned muddy. "You're trying to prove a point now. I guess that's going to be your thing with me from now on." "No. What?" "You want to mess with my head until I do what you think I should." "Right, I just made you come up here and jerk off over me while I slept. That was my mind control. But you're not gay. You didn't do that because you wanted to get off with me. You did that because it seemed *intense*." He clawed at the back of his head. "Stop imputing things." "Whatever, I think it's pretty flattering," I said. "I want to suck your dick, dude. I'm awake now. I like that you were doing that. It's super-hot and dirty. You could've jizzed on me and it would've been cool." "Degenerate," he hissed. My stab at dirty talk had sounded like sarcasm. "Oh, I see," I said. "Why don't you go back to your room and go fuck yourself. Go jerk off alone while you think about how much you want my cock. You hypocrite. The Midnight Jerker." I couldn't make out his expression. His neck and shoulders locked and he raised himself slightly at the toes. I bet if we'd been in a different situation -- if we didn't live with four other people, if it wouldn't have triggered so many questions -- he would have taken swings at me. He wasn't a fighter, but he was a big enough guy that he could've left a couple of bruises before I bloodied him up. As he walked away from my bed, I said, "Wait, dude, you know I'm not extremely angry with you. We're still basically cool." "Oh my God!" he whisper-shouted, before he opened my door. "You need professional help." * * * The next day, he went back to whining about his dumb thumb. Seriously! His default response to stress was begging sympathy by icing his stupid thumb and mumbling that his "condition was deteriorating." In the final days before everyone split for Thanksgiving, if we were in a room together, he acknowledged me only enough to avoid seeming awkward in front of other people. * * * Hey dude. I feel like a coward for writing instead of talking face to face. But some things don't sound right when you try to say them out loud. Maybe you don't say what you mean because the words escape you. Or you start to say the right things, and you get scared of how you sound, so you stop. And sometimes a person writes to you, and seeing their words resonates in a way that hearing them doesn't. They feel more permanent. When I'm down, there's an old e-mail from a friend that I re-read to cheer myself up. Not that I think this will become that kind of letter for you, but there can be just something different about written words. The first thing I want to tell you is that I fucking love you. Put whatever spin or variation that you want on it. Principally, I love you as a friend and I'd love you as a friend even if none of that other stuff went down between us. I think about that night we first hung out in the Florida Boys' dorm room and we all went out to that frat, and how random and lucky that was, and how within the first five minutes of meeting you, I knew that we'd be friends. Whatever else happens -- if all this other stuff between us is getting messed up -- I'll always feel that way. I'm not saying that like a sixteen year old writing in a yearbook. You are my friend. You will always be my friend. That will not change, even if you want to tell me to fuck off. But I love you more than that. And you've known that for awhile. There was that one night last spring when we ended up at that random afterparty, freestyling in the basement, and we were drunk and stoned and sweaty and hanging off each other, and you were hugging me and telling me how much you loved me. We kept telling each other how much we loved each other, and we left and it was sunrise, and then we picked up breakfast on the way home and passed out next to each other on the living room couch. It seemed like we spent an hour in a stoned argument about which of us loved the other more, and it was kind of a joke but also it wasn't. And I can't correctly summarize what went on at the cabin in August, but I don't need to because you lived it as much as I did. I fucking love you, dude. I love your family. I love your mom. I left there wanting to be one of you. I felt closer to you than I've ever felt to anybody. This all sounds so dramatic, I know. I myself don't understand the meaning. It comes with so much baggage and gets tossed around so much by chicks on TV shows and in rom-coms that it feels like a punchline. It sounds like something that Kate Hudson would say to Topher Grace at her brother's wedding, and putting it in writing makes me feel like a cliche. But I guess there's only one way to say it in English, so there you have it. The second thing I want to tell you is that, yes, I obviously know I'm gay. You were correct. And yes, writing that also feels like a horrible cliche that comes with cultural baggage, but again, there's no other way to say it without being coy. I'm not sure if I've ever written it before. I told you about my friend Andy in high school, and my buddy Matt Canetti. And I love them, too. I think about how lucky I am to know them, and how I wouldn't have those friendships if I weren't gay, and that maybe, to the extent there's a silver lining, it's that I found people like them and like you, and that I feel closer to them than I would if they'd been normal people that I met in the standard course of life. There's a lot that I haven't figured out yet. I don't know if I'll ever figure it out. I'm a horrible role model for all things gay. I wish that I were better at this, if only so that I could be the kind of person for you that Andy and Matt were for me. Instead of telling you to plot schemes to make everyone think you had a bunch of girlfriends, I should have been saying constructive things. Or at least hanging out with you. If you never talk to me again after reading this, part of that's because I've been one of the worst influences possible, and I'll have no one to blame but myself. The reason I think that you might never talk to me again after reading this is because the last thing I want to tell you is that you're gay. We both know that. I'm sorry that it's so awful for you. Reading those last three sentences makes you want to punch me. I know that feeling. I've been trying to make sense of it for 5-1/2 years. Sometimes it seems like I'm not any closer to figuring it out than I was when it started. I know what it's like to stay up all night angry and flipping out because it doesn't make sense, because it feels unfair, because it's lonely, because it makes you feel like a permanent outcast, because you're frustrated, because you're doing everything to make it go away but then it won't go away no matter how hard you try to force it out of your thinking. You get hung up about not letting it define you, but then one day you start to realize that your hatred and resistance to it are becoming the things that define you instead, and you're choking on yourself. I don't know if that's how it's been for you. Probably not exactly. In certain ways you've handled it better than I have, even if it might not seem like it. Some guys seem to get over this by the time they're fifteen. I'm jealous of them. I feel like you understand this in ways that other people dismiss, even guys like Matt and Andy. You understand how out of place and daunting it feels. At the same time, being with you is so fun and easy and comfortable -- at least when one of us isn't acting like a tool. I meant what I said about wanting you around after we graduate. That wasn't a spontaneous suggestion that I blurted out in a moment of irrational exuberance. I also appreciate why that might sound crazy. I wasn't trying to say that we should move in together, or be together forever, or even necessarily stay together in some non-friendship capacity. But I at least want to keep hanging out until sunrise with you, laughing our asses off, going on long runs, listening to classic rock at night in the summer, sparring and then forgetting about it, and doing it all again the next day. And if we *can't* do that, the one thing you've got to do is find another dude (or dudes) who can help you piece it all together in a way that I haven't been able to. I've done the best that I could with what I have. Knowing you has made me a better person. You might not be able to say the same for me, but if you can't, hopefully you'll find a dude who makes you feel that way. If we graduate and you never see me again, you need to stick with this until it starts to make a glimmer of sense. I can't argue that strongly enough. You've got to find a way to feel cool with being gay, if only so you can have that interior conversation with yourself. Or you've at least got to find a person who can make you feel safe to think about it and verbalize it. Forget coming out -- start by finding a way to live with yourself. If I'm not the person who fits that role, you need to find someone who does, even if it's a platonic friend. I've written too much. I hope this isn't as awkward to read as it was to write. Please realize that I mean every word of it in the best way possible, and that however rambling it might be, I've got nothing but love for you. * * * I began writing while I visited Westchester over Thanksgiving and couldn't sleep on the Saturday night before flying home to school. I edited it only once before leaving it for him; more than that and my revisions would turn cowardly, softening and omitting my grandiose sentiments. The file then went into my laptop's top-secret Player Data folder, with my zGame.doc confessionals, all of which remain to this moment preserved in an external hard drive at the bottom of my apartment's underwear drawer, beneath the NYC condoms and a pair of dark green briefs that I will never wear. * * * I didn't want to blindside him with an e-mail. I printed it in my bedroom -- five pages, double-spaced, Times New Roman -- and folded it in an envelope. "Read me, dude," the envelope commanded in blue ink. I tucked it under his pillow. He'd find it when he went to sleep. He didn't need to stumble across it in the middle of the afternoon with his door open. I wanted him to read it at night, when he was alone, behind a closed door. * * * His reply was waiting for me when I came home the next night, printed in 12-point courier, folded in half and placed on my bed: Never put something like that in writing to me again. If anyone saw what you wrote, we'd both be humiliated. I tore your letter into six pieces and threw away each part in a different trashcan in Seward. That should give you peace of mind when you come to your senses and worry that someone might see it. It seems like you're going through a terrible time. I'm sorry. Please stop taking it out on me. You need to get a grip or the next few months will be miserable. Let's try to be mature and realistic. PS: "irrational exuberance"? You think you're Greenspan or something? :) * * * It was the joke :) that enraged me. Yeah, it hurt, it all fucking hurt, when the thing you hate most is articulating any type of vulnerability, and then your confession gets literally torn apart. Even now, 9-1/2 years later, admitting that it hurt makes me feel like a pussy. You want to call me a pussy for admitting that? Fuck off. I consciously left myself unguarded, to have my words discarded in multiple gray garbage bins of the campus's ugliest building. As if this had been a document of treason in some morally foul espionage operation. But that Greenspan crack and the emoticon -- that was fury. He might at least have rejected me with dignity. Tell me that I'm a self-righteous asshole, that my approach was too rigid, that this wasn't something that he wanted for himself. Anything to honor my effort. To isolate that one ill-chosen phrase and throw in the :) -- that was contempt. He didn't even take it seriously enough to resent or reject me. * * * I retreated. Went socially comatose for the semester's last three weeks. I don't remember much about specific incidents from December 2004. I consorted with my newspaper crowd, but didn't hang with my roommates or people who I considered friends of the house. It was time to be alone. I had to finish a 30-page term paper for Rothman's seminar, and then it was reading period and exams. If I seemed moody, people would assume that I was stressed out, which I was -- my recollection of Arabic blinked in and out and my comprehension of post-structural theory was hideous at best. There were bars and Christmas parties during exams, but those were purging affairs. People drank to numb themselves from exam stress. They were happy for the release but not happy in a pure way. In my recollection, that December was always cold, often gray and I slept far too much. If I studied in a library, I would fall asleep at the table, so I had to work out of coffeehouses. I had an easy excuse to avoid small-talk with acquaintances: I was studying. On Sunday nights I still watched The Wire with Trevor, his buddy Jimmy, Katie and Sam. Trevor was one of the few that watched from its original premiere -- a fact that he might still view as his greatest cultural bragging point -- and he'd hooked the rest of us early, too. It was the next-to-last episode of Season 3, when Omar killed Stringer, and that fucked me up far more than it should have. I expected the entire series to build a heroic, transformative arc for Stringer. We were stunned on the night when he was shot down -- Trevor kept repeating, "I can't believe Omar killed Stringer," as we spent the night dissecting the moment and re-watching the episode. This was before killing main characters became routine in prestige dramas. I must have spent two or three days rattled by it, like it compounded the doom and unfairness of my own life's course. Yeah, Chris and I went running a couple of times. It was more than a month after he fell and mangled his thumb because my dick was too exciting for him. The arm motions of running no longer caused excruciating, agonizing, crippling, debilitating, shameful, shameful, unbearably shameful and humiliating pain. It was cold and he didn't have proper cold-weather gear, so his hands froze til they numbed and he sweated too much under a heavy cotton sweatshirt and windpants. "Fine. Be that way," he said, when I didn't banter. I wanted to shove him into a parked car. "Not like that," I said. "Just doing Arabic in my head. Fucking exams." No response. Good call, Slick. Be grateful that I don't want to fucking wreck you. * * * I'd never been better prepared for exams. My exams seemed so easy, they felt like insults to my intelligence. * * * Visiting my family in Westchester, my performance was amazing. I wouldn't brood around them. Brooding would invite concerns, and definitely an effort from my parents to please me. Chipper and upbeat even when Rob behaved like a dickwad on the day my parents took us all into the City to see Avenue Q and go out for a late-night dinner. I avoided everyone else from the place where I grew up. In a brief phone conversation, I acknowledged to Andy that everything was a mess, even worse than the night when he talked me to sleep, but that I didn't want to talk about myself. I was sorry that I said even that much, because of course the encouraging texts followed. It was tempting to go out drinking with him in the City one night, but I suspect that he wanted to try hitting an NYC gay bar, and the possibility of even discussing that, even if only for the sake of me shooting it down, was curdling. Doug, Sanjay, the rest of them -- they would think that my absence was further proof that I was "different now." That I considered myself above them. Like -- oh well! Maybe they were correct! Maybe if I felt that way, it was justified. I took Evan on a couple of short, slow runs, but mostly ran alone. I went for a stupidly long run to the Hudson River -- longer than was responsible for a guy who hadn't been training for a marathon -- that left me hurting so much for a couple of days between Christmas and New Year's that going up and down stairs became a struggle. I puked a half-hour after getting in from that run, and bruised my knuckles when I punched my bathroom tile as I flushed it down. * * * Waves of texts on New Year's Eve. Solo texts, group texts. Hazy photos from cold or tropical places, snapped on thick ante-smart fliphones, beginning around 11:50 but arriving hourly through West Coast new year at 3 a.m. Everyone seemed wasted but me. They were almost all from college friends, and again it seemed incorrect that we weren't all together. Why hadn't Sam and I organized a group for New Year's Eve? Why hadn't a group of us within travel distance to the City organized something for the night? Stupid, lazy, stupid. At 12:05 Rick texted me: "Dude, Happy New Year's. Just come on over if you're around." A few minutes later, Andy: "Joe, come hang out, it's actually really fun." Danielle: "Joey, I miss your face! You should come to Rick's!" I located my boots and began to dress for Rick's house, but my phone kept zinging, and the more I thought about college people, the harder it became to motivate for the Westchester crew. I had my party shirt half-buttoned when I decided to fuck it. My parents and Evan arrived home from the neighbors' party. They seemed puzzled that I'd decided to stay in. Empty, empty words. After the scattering of Pacific Time texts, I opened my laptop and began to compose a notorious, unexpected scream about Omar Little's murder of Stringer Bell.