Chapter 33: The Brotherhood
There was an incident at lunch. The dining room housed a number of large round tables. They sat ten comfortably. We had, since the beginning of the summer, been eating at one table regularly. It was cramped when we were all there at the same time, but not overly so. Lunches were the worst in this respect. While the boys floated in and out of breakfast and dinner depending on their preferred individual schedules, everyone ate lunch at the same time. That day, Corey was the last to arrive. With the addition of Shmu at the table, all the seats were taken.
"Move," Corey said, standing behind Shmu.
"Die," was Shmu's response.
Conversation continued as if the exchange hadn't taken place. Corey continued to stand behind Shmu, tray in hand, and glower at him.
"I said 'move'," he repeated when he realized that Shmu was going to continue ignoring him.
"Sit at another table, Corey," Steven said testily.
"Why the fuck should I have to move?" Corey whined angrily. "He's not even on the team."
"Neither are you, asshole," Doug said.
This was important. I watched in morbid fascination as if it were a train wreck in the making.
"He's a guest," said Steven. "Have some manners." Shmu made no move to get up. While I wouldn't have either were I in his position, there was a significant difference between the way he was handling the situation and the way I would have. He remained entirely nonchalant throughout. My smile would have been forced and for effect. His was the same easy smile that was there before Corey had interrupted. I would have been tense as a cat about to pounce. Shmu was as relaxed as a cat in the morning sun.
"Get your faggot ass out of that chair," Corey said.
I had seen this scene before. There was, again, a moment of perfect silence in which all the players froze - the calm before the storm. There was, again, an explosion of movement. As before, everyone save me knew exactly what the response would be and where they should be to prevent it. Unlike the last time, though, the boys dove to restrain Shmu, not Corey. His arm was already raised to strike when Dan grabbed it. Doug was on Shmu holding him down in his chair with a bear hug. Matt was standing between Corey and Shmu to prevent a possible counter-attack. It was balletic. Everyone was talking over the din of falling silverware, either yelling at Corey or trying to calm Shmu.
Shmu had trumped Corey. How could that be? Was there some unwritten rule that said age won over team identification? Granted, Corey wasn't on the team, but still - he did practice with them every day. Or was it the dynamics of the particular people involved? Corey wasn't much liked among the inner circle of the team, and Shmu, of course, was an instant hit wherever he went. Had it been me, would it have come out the same? Well, it had been me earlier in the summer, and the outcome had been the same. Or had it? When I was involved in this scene, I had felt that the boys had restrained Corey to protect Corey from making a mistake. Punching damages the hands, and gymnasts need their hands. Now I had the clear sense that the boys were restraining Shmu to protect Shmu. Not from physical harm, or course. It was pretty evident that everyone at the table thought Shmu would flatten Corey. It was to protect Shmu's presence in the camp. If he beat the shit out of Corey, he would be required to leave.
There was an uncomfortable stand-off until Drew announced that as he was finished eating anyway, Corey could have his seat at the table. Tensions eased, and people returned to their meals - all save Adam, who had continued eating throughout the exchange. I looked at him. He smirked inscrutably and winked.
Shmu went to explore the grounds after lunch and to enjoy a workout of his own. I took my place in the stands with my green notebook. I had recognized another hint of Alphadom that morning and was intently trying to distill it into measurable units. While Dan seemed somewhat less so, Adam was definitely, if subtly, chameleonlike in his nonverbal communication. He matched his signals to the expectations of the person with whom he was interacting. I took notes furiously, transcribing all his and Dan's moves. Still, I was haunted by the nagging suspicion that despite my copious notes, despite my careful attention to detail, all the transcriptions would amount to no more than sheaf after sheaf of useless wallpaper. There was something I was missing. I had catalogued numerous behaviors - each noteworthy and curious in its own way. But combined, they were still not enough to explain the control these boys enforced.
The commons room sport of the evening was TPB, or Toilet Paper Ball - a Machavelian game of ambiguous origin that involved throwing a roll of toilet paper around the room into wastebaskets placed in strategic positions. The key to the game was to get the toilet paper to unroll continuously when thrown, so that the room became a maze of criss-crossing, unbroken lines of tissue. "Running bases" was overlaid onto this field - made difficult, of course, as one had to negotiate paths where great care had to be taken not to tear the streamers - as were mechanisms for scoring goals, getting people "out" and, of all things, a penalty box. Penalties were awarded for even the most minor infraction of the endless corpus of obscure rules that included no pointing, no bestial noises and, my personal favorite, no use of the letter "k".
It was one of the endless list of reindeer games in which the happy little elves engaged on boring camp evenings to stave off psychosis. While I found this one particularly baffling, Shmu was immediately taken with its meaningless moments of athletic virtuosity, refereed decisions based on the arcana of play and the fact that the stakes were high: this game was for the championship. No less than a claim to be the Best TPB Team in the Universe was at stake that night. Even were I tremendously drunk, I could not have enjoyed watching them more, or wanted to participate less.
Evan, it seems, had a knack for play. I could not tell this myself, of course, as having watched no less than four tournaments over the course of three weeks, I still had absolutely no idea how points were accumulated. But he was regularly complimented on his style. Doug was also considered good, which amazed me. Here was a man who had to be reminded which direction left but was who was able to call a penalty on Drew because he threw an underhand pitch, and everyone knows that when you throw the pitch underhand the spool of toilet paper was only allowed to unwind counterclockwise (unless there were already two players standing in wastebaskets, called a "deuce", in which case the roll could unravel in either direction.)
Doug raised his elbow at Drew, assiduously following the no pointing rule. "Penalty on Drew," he called. "That didn't fly in the opposite direction that a watch runs." The word 'counterclockwise' was, of course, verboten as it contained a 'k'.
I can imagine this, as well as many of their other games, being born of long nights of alcohol induced haze. Hell, I myself had created the random game or two on the occasional undergraduate night wasted wasted. Watching them laugh and play and move and argue over rules reminded me of my own clique of undergraduate friends, except that with us, it was more whether or not 'oe', a whirlwind off the Faeroe Islands, should be capitalized and therefore be ineligible to use in Scrabble. I still say it was valid!
The game was almost over. Only 100 feet or so of tissue paper remained on the roll. All three trash cans were filled with players, which signified something important, though for the life of me I could not figure out what. The boys were excited as Brad came to "home trash" for his turn. Amidst the banter of the game, Adam appeared in the threshold and leaned, thumbs hooked in pockets.
When his mere presence caught everyone's attention and they quieted down, he said "Corey," turned and left. Corey turned white. The rest of the boys' reactions varied from amusement to indifference to disappointment to relief. Reluctantly, but without a word, Corey got out of the wastepaper basket and left the room, turning right to follow Adam.
This caused a problem.
"We need another player," Evan protested.
"Heywood, get in the trash can." Brad said.
"Who?" This from Shmu.
Doug's elbow immediately went up in Shmu's direction. "Bestial noise:" he said, "owl."
"There's no way I'm getting in that wastebasket."
"Unauthorized use of eleventh letter," Doug called, his elbow swinging around to point at me.
"He's not playing yet," Evan complained to Doug. "You can't site a non-combatant."
"Combatant?" I asked, amused.
"Get in the can," Brad repeated. "Help us out, Bud. We can't play with four people. We're winning!"
The truth of it was that I didn't belong in that game. It was not my place to play. How can I describe why? For all my envy at the bond they had, for all my wishes to be one of them, I recognized that I was not and could never be. Not because they would not accept me - they would, I had come to believe. But because it was not the role I wanted or needed to play with them. Shmu could come to the camp and instantly belong. Regardless of how long I stayed with them, I would always be on the outside - despite my strong connections to many of them individually. There were things about their interactions which, despite my best research, despite my most intense observation, I would never understand. While I ran with the wolves, I was not a member of the pack.
But how could I express this without offending them? I could not say, "I'm not one of you," since their hospitality toward me had been prodigious, and from their perspective I belonged in the camp, even if not on the team. I could not say, "it is not my place," since from their perspective, it was my place to help them out when they needed. What I had invested to be a laden symbolic rite of membership was simply a game to them. I could not say "I don't understand how you interact." Their answer would have been, "doi. Just interact."
With few other avenues left open to me, I retreated behind the fastidiousness with which I had already become identified anyway.
"I'll do your laundry," I said, "I'll mop your floors, I'll go on gofer runs for you, I'll clean your squirt off the fucking rug, but I tell you, honey, I am not standing in a trash can."
The room erupted. Appeals were made to my sense of duty, to my sense of fair play, to my sense of honor. My favorite was Doug's. "But it's for the championship of the entire universe!" he said, dumbfounded that this would not sway me. Finally, and to my undying relief, Dan offered a solution.
"I'll sit out the rest of the game," he said. "I'm satisfied with the galactic title, anyway." He hopped off the round table where he had been playing the position of "high fielder" and negotiated his way through the weave of toilet paper strands.
"Let's take a walk," he said.
"Okay." I followed him, both sad and grateful to be out of the room.
When outside in the cool night air, I thanked him.
"For what?" he said.
"Getting me out of that. You came to my rescue."
He shrugged his shoulders.
"Do you know why I wouldn't play?" I asked.
"Something ridiculous, I bet."
I smiled. "Do you want to know why?"
"No need," he said. "Everyone's allowed to be ridiculous twice."
I laughed. "Rule of the game?"
"My rule," he said.
I put my hand in his and we walked on in silence through the darkness.
"How's your ass?" he asked after a while.
"It's okay," I said. "Kinda tingles. I know we played, that's for fucking sure. Just a little tender when I sit down."
"Do you like it when I do that kind of stuff to you?" he asked.
The question caught me entirely off guard. I stopped and turned to face him. We had come to the edge of one of the fields. A distant light cast a dim, oblique glow on one side of his face, leaving the other entirely in shadow.
"That's a really difficult question for me to answer," I said. "I don't like the pain. I mean," I added, interrupting myself, wanting to get just the right words, "I don't like pain. And sometimes you freak me out a little." He turned us and we started walking again as I continued to explain. "But I'm learning that there's a lot about what we do that I really like. I mean, I really like it."
"Like what?"
"This is all so new to me, Dan, it's really hard for me to say. When I'm with you...before you, I'd always felt like something was missing. I don't feel that with you." We walked on a while as I tried to gather my thoughts.
It was a new sensation for me. Usually I figured out what I thought by speaking. Doing it the other way around was a curious approach to life.
"You bring me to places I never even knew existed. I'm scared by some of them. And excited. I think I realized last night, that there's a key to it all. It's fills in the hole that had always been there."
"What's that?" Dan asked.
"Surrender."
He let go of my hand and put his arm around my waist. I rested mine on his shoulder. We walked on.
"A long time ago, you said that it was 'need' that got you off. Is that kind of what you were talking about?"
"Yeah," said Dan. "That's about it."
"So can I ask the same question?"
"What question?"
"Do you like it when you do that kind of stuff to me?"
He squeezed my waist. "Yeah," he said. "I like it."
"Is it the pain for you? I mean, inflicting it?"
"No," he said, "not exactly."
"What then?"
He tried to find the words with the same care as I had. "I like to see you squirm. I think it's hot. I like to see you squirm from what I'm doing to you. Being able to do it to you - make you squirm - gets me off. Because you let me. You surrender to it. Doesn't have to be from pain, though."
"What's hot about it?"
"I don't know," he said. "You're the expert."
I laughed. "Not in this shit, I'm not," I said.
"Then we don't know," he said, satisfied to leave it at that.
We were in the middle of the field by now, walking slowly and aimlessly.
"How did you know?" I asked.
"How did I know what?"
"How did you know you liked it?"
"How did you know you were gay?" he asked in return.
"When I started jerking off, I only fantasized about men," I said. He shrugged his shoulders. "Okay," I said. "Point taken. So when you fantasize, is it about men or women?"
"You still into this gay/straight thing?" he asked. I could hear the smile in his voice.
"Yeah," I said in seriousness. "I have to be, I think. I mean, we worked our asses off to make the world a safer place to be. At least, parts of it.
So, yeah. It's important to me that people who are gay can be gay."
"So what if it worked?"
"What do you mean?"
"What if all y'all made a world where it didn't matter if people were gay or straight? Right? Isn't that the point? If everyone is treated equally, does it still matter if I was gay or straight then?"
"We're not there yet."
"Hypothetically."
"Hypothetically?"
"Yeah. Hypothetically."
"No, hypothetically, if we really were all equal and everyone was treated with the same respect, then no. It wouldn't matter. But we're not there yet. Not by a long shot."
"Don't you change the world one person at a time? Isn't that one of all y'all's slogans?"
"Yeah, but..."
"So we'll change the world startin' right here. It won't matter whether I'm gay or straight."
"But it still matters to me," I said.
"Why?"
"Because if you leave me for a woman, I'll be really pissed."
"But not if I leave you for a guy?"
"It doesn't have to make sense, Dan. It's the way I feel."
"So why can't I not care about whether I'm with a guy or a girl?"
"Because it doesn't make sense!"
He stopped walking, turned and smiled at me. I laughed.
"You know," I said, "very few people can trap me that way."
"Surrender, Dorothy," he said.
"Oh," I said, laughing even harder, "that does it. You're definitely queer."
We made our way back to the dorm. It felt so good just to be with him like that. I had grown since my last relationship. Somehow, I didn't have to persuade Dan that I was right. It didn't matter so much that we saw things differently or that we disagreed. If effort was to be put in, in the future, it would be in trying to understand, not to convince.
We strolled down the hall past the commons room. The game had broken up. Some of the boys remained, others had turned in.
"So ho long's Shmu staying?" Dan asked.
"Why? You want me to stay in my own room tonight?"
"Nope," he said, "just..." but he never got to the end of his sentence. We had turned right at the end of the hall, and Dan had opened the door for me.
There on the bed on the right was Adam, shorts drawn down to his knees. And under him, sobbing, impaled, was Corey.