Joe College

"What do you think you'll do after Matt graduates?" Kevin Berger asked me.

"Take some more poetry classes. Maybe play club rugby," I said. "I want to tackle people in a socially acceptable way."

"How are you going to meet people? What are you going to do?"

"I meet people all the time."

"But here's the problem," Kevin said. "You're not, like, gay socialized. Some of that is due to Matt, but you're really not. You need to know other guys. Even if it's just as friends."

"Why?"

"Do you live in an isolation chamber?" Kevin said. "Or, like, Superman's Fortress of Solitude?"

"Dude, you know about superheroes?" I said. "That's a shock. Are you going to lecture me about NASCAR and football, too?"

His posture slacked.

"That's extremely condescending," Kevin said. "I'm only trying to help."

He was correct on both counts.

"And right when I was talking about poorly socialized." His pronunciations were impeccable. "I think my point is proven."

I sought Kevin out, and that was the only reason this conversation happened. It had been important that I maintain a nonchalant attitude. Even though I had his e-mail address, I didn't want to reach out so bluntly. There had been times when I started typing his name, it appeared on my contacts list, and the sight of it made me anxious, so I clicked the window shut. While I hadn't otherwise hunted for him, I assumed that I'd see him around. It was a big school, yes, but you ran into people all the time.

This kind of broad life advice was not what I had in mind. I wanted to talk about Matt with someone who knew him; I needed to explain my Chris situation with someone who was removed. Kevin Berger was, truly and literally, my only option. Yes, I found him abrasive in the past, but he was indirectly responsible for once getting me laid (by bringing me to the party where I met that guy Ben) and he was friends with Matt (who didn't suffer fools). To the extent that he unnerved me, I blamed it on a phrase that I recently had been highlighting in my thoughts: internalized homophobia.

One night I caught Kevin Berger in the reading room of the library, sitting at the end of a long table, flipping through notes and gazing around the room. Seated next to him was a more studious-looking fellow, who, in vocabulary I acquired later, might have been labeled in gay culture as a twink.

Seeing Kevin startled me. I walked away, pretending to search for a seat in the half-empty reading room, before circling back and whispering his name in a half-friendly croak.

"Hi, Joe," Kevin whispered. "How are you?"

"Good, good."

"Sorry about, you know. Stuff with you and Matt."

I cocked my head and blushed. "There's, you know. It's not a thing. We still sit together in class and talk all the time."

"I'm sure, but even so." His voice was sympathetic.

His more studious friend looked up from his books and regarded me. He was, I concluded, checking me out. It wasn't helpful.

"Joe," Kevin said, "this is my friend Wally." He gestured toward the thin, tall, attractive guy to his left.

"Walter," said Wally, trying to sound friendly. "It's a family name."

He had the telltale cadence.

I whisper-laughed. I am a disaster, I thought. I must have been blushing. Wally smiled at me, turned back to his book, turned back to me smiling, then returned to his studies.

"Maybe we could," I said to Kevin, "just for, you know. Just for talk. Nothing more. If you're not too busy."

"It sounds like you want to talk."

"Nah," I said. "It's okay."

"No, no, no," he said. "I'm honored."

"Not dramatic or anything."

This made Wally laugh, full-on.

A woman a few feet away sighed and shifted in her seat.

I wanted to dart away, like a junior high kid fleeing a moment of awkwardness. Instead, I stood stammering and grinning, looking around to see whether anyone I knew saw me in this exchange. I mean, I'm sure that there were people I knew in that reading room somewhere, capable of observing me blushing and smiling, fighting with words, as I talked to a couple of slightly effeminate, fairly attractive gay dudes.

"Just, you know, you can e-mail me sometime," I said quickly. "Just, coffee and walking around. Or the phone. No big deal."

"I have your permission to contact you?" Kevin said. "Can I get that in writing?"

Shut up.

"Ha," I said. "Okay. Talk to you later, if you want."

He e-mailed me later that night:

Dear Joe,

How's it going? You seemed tense. Hope it's all okay...

Best,

Kevin

That was how I found myself sitting across from Kevin Berger late on a weekday morning, drinking coffee while he tried to guide my life and I responded defensively.

"I guess I was more sort of worried about Matt than I was about my own situation," I said.

"Awww, that's actually very sweet," Kevin said. "Matt's more worried about you."

"Wait, does he know we're meeting up?"

Kevin wrinkled his nose and shook his head. "No. He would have gotten weird about that."

"Wait, why is Matt worried about me?" I said.

"He thinks that after he graduates you'll really go crazy," Kevin said. "He said that he feels like a terminally ill mother worrying about her retarded child."

"That's unfair," I said, pretending that it wasn't funny.

"You know how much Matt likes you," Kevin said. "Don't pretend to be all coy and surprised. I don't think that I'm selling him out if I said that Matt spends time thinking about you."

In Canto 15 of his Inferno, Dante encounters Brunetto Latini. As it was taught to me in college, Brunetto Latini was one of the most brilliant and well known scholars in Dante's Florence -- Dante's most influential teacher. It was fair to say that Dante loved him. In the platonic sense, of course.

All the same, Brunetto Latini was a sodomite. It wasn't that Dante wanted to assign him to hell, or that he was homophobic, not even in a pre-modern, medieval sense. He situates well known gay figures in the Purgatorio, so it wasn't impossible for a gay man to get to heaven. At least, not in the eyes of a Florentine poet in the year 1300.

The explanation from our professor, the great Rosemary Kavanaugh, was that Dante's God didn't play favorites. That despite Brunetto Latini's excellence and Dante's own personal affection, Brunetto's sin consigned him to hell. Dante was making a point that no matter how esteemed a person was, they would pay for their sin in the end. It so happened that Brunetto's sin was his sexuality.

The sodomites resided in a gay version of hell, and the stereotypes that ring true today had a place in 1300. The men stared at each other like it was dusk in a new moon, squinting their eyebrows, eyeing each other in the manner of a brotherhood. You read this passage and conclude that Brunetto and the other sodomites are cruising each other. Given that it was hell, they probably can't actually get laid, just eye-fuck forever, like closet cases skulking on Manhunt or Craigslist.

At the end of Canto 15, before Dante proceeds to the usurers, Brunetto returns to his tribe, like he'd finished first in the run of the green cloth in Verona: the winner of the race, and not the loser.

That was a grace note, you see. You can be a sodomite and go to hell, and cruise the other gays in hell without hooking up with them, while flames singe your tunics, and then have small moments of triumph reminiscent of a Veronese footrace.

The Brunetto Latini canto is less inflammatory than what you'd hear from elected Republicans and Southern evangelicals. But what Dante did -- Dante as poet, employing a version of Catholicism and moral order unique to him, did -- was cast one of the most brilliant and influential persons known to him into hell for the fact of being gay. Dante's displays of respect and affection for Brunetto don't quite make up for that. The green cloth of Verona would have to do.

Kevin Berger talked to me for an hour in that coffeehouse, and when we cut off conversation, it was because he had a class. Writing this today, I now understand that Kevin made me nervous because he had all of the qualities that I didn't: he was sexually confident; he was at terms with being gay and wasn't cautious about hiding that; he made a lot of eye contact during casual conversation. If I found his social style mildly ridiculous, the feeling went both ways.

"Don't you think that you should try to make more friends?" he said. "What about Wally? I saw how you were looking at each other."

"Why doesn't he call himself Walt?" I said. "You can't take someone seriously if they call themself Wally."

"Oh, God. Probably because Walt is an old man's name, and Wally sounds cute. Wally's cute. Don't you think Wally's cute? You do. I can tell."

"I wasn't even thinking about that," I said. "I don't even remember what he looks like."

"Liar," he said. "Besides, Matt thinks you have a crush on some straight guy. How's that working out?"

Originally, I wanted to talk to Kevin about Chris. I needed the perspective of an outsider. I could describe the situation neutrally and get Kevin's read. It hadn't hit me that naturally, Matt and Kevin were friendly, and that Matt had mentioned something about the dynamic. I wasn't going to out Chris, and what business was it of mine to go around spilling this stuff to a guy I barely knew?

"That's not anything real," I said. "Matt was exaggerating or misconstruing."

"That would make it all the more important that you meet other people," Kevin said.

"Fine, but how? Who?"

"Don't pretend to be so dense," Kevin said. "I know a ton of people. You can have instant friends."

"How, though? I'm not going to go on blind dates that you arrange. I don't want you setting me up with Wally."

"Don't say Wally so contemptuously," Kevin said. "`Waaaallllleeee.' Be annoyed with me, but don't be rude about him. Actually, don't be rude about me either, if you please."

"I'm not trying to be rude. For all I know, he could be an awesome person. I just don't understand the logistics of what you're talking about."

"The next time that there's a party or something going on that I think you'll enjoy, I'll send you an e-mail. You can attend the social event with me. We'll talk, verbally, with other people who you don't currently know, and if you have common interests or personalities -- which, I can tell, may be a longshot -- you can then consider becoming friends. Independent socializing."

"I mean, Kevin, it's not like I'm a social retard. I have, like, fifty good friends here, and I know at least a couple hundred more."

"Of course you do. But do any of them know about your secret? No. This isn't difficult. The alternative is spending the next two years of college, the best years of your life, lusting after strangers who are probably straight. Lots of quiet desperation. Or you can take the plunge and meet some smart, nice, good-looking young men who will possibly relate -- God help them -- with whatever's going on in your head. Sounds good, right? It's a deal."

I rolled my eyes. "Maybe. Maybe it's a deal. I don't know. Sounds awkward."

"Grow a pair," Kevin said.

To the extent that Matt and I had splintered at that point, it wasn't even about Chris. I hadn't mentioned Chris since Matt told me that I was delusional about him. Afterward, Matt never asked. In light of his savvy, that alone was telling.

The foggy and stumbly nature of our relationship meant that we never broke up in the sense that I understand the phrase. Because we were taking that Dante class together, we saw each other three times a week, which was more predictable than it had been when we were physically involved. I looked forward to seeing him, and Kevin's comment about what my life would be like once Matt graduated was accurate.

Matt was the only person who understood me, I thought; by that time, he was my closest friend.

Look, I loved the dude, but I wasn't going to be like a World War II newlywed waiting on the homefront while the guy went off to war. He'd graduate and leave. I didn't have the temperament or motivation to maintain an awkward long-distance relationship while he was off to DC, or wherever else, when we both knew that the arrangement would quickly die.

There are times when I still feel guilty about how it played out. After Chris and I hooked up for the first time, I stopped doing anything physical with Matt. Cynically put, I made a trade. If Matt and I had been in the same year, and had gone through more shared experiences, moving on would have been a struggle; it probably wouldn't have happened. After Chris announced himself, my decision was made.

February 15, 2003 was the national day of protest against the Iraq War. It's not something I've thought about in the last few years. Not since Katrina, the financial crisis, Haiti, last week's Japan quake -- after I turned 18, the world became a franchise of the "Hostel" movies. The urgency of your despair can't last. It's like losing someone you love. Years later you recall it, and it makes you sad, but you forget how crippling it felt.

At the time, I wasn't as detached and cynical about the issue as I am when I write about it now.

Being a college campus largely populated by risk-averse, upper-middle-class achievers, the responses to that fucking war were predictable. There were fliers and e-mail forwards about teach-ins, as if this were a continuation of a campus rebellion against Vietnam. All very well meaning, with talks given by people with titles like Director of the Center of Near Eastern Studies, or Visiting Professor of Medieval Islamic Culture.

Of course, Matt became heavily involved. He was scheduled to be one of a half-dozen speakers at a rally at the central quad. In the week beforehand, he didn't shut up about it. He bcc'd late-night brainstorms about his speech to an unrevealed number of recipients, including me.

Matt was a brilliant guy, but he wasn't a natural writer. I mean, he was competent, and he could put together a solid research paper, but his sentences didn't sing. He had a weakness for the passive voice, adverbs and cliches. His proposed speech was wordy and strident. At one point, I worked through an e-mail of his and revised it.

Then I thought, What's the point? He had the pride of authorship and would bristle at my suggestions. He knew what he wanted to say and he knew his audience better than I did.

The day before his rally, I sent him a short e-mail: The draft is awesome. I'm sure you'll be great.

I showed up on time, with a cup of coffee in my hand, and a laptop and paperbacks in my bag. I'd stay until Matt spoke, then hit the library.

If I had to estimate, it looked like a crowd of about a thousand people, but it might have been half that. The majority was students, along with a major contingent of older-hippie townies. Most of the signs were about the war, but there were vocal groups on behalf of the standard causes: legalize marijuana, down with capitalism, Free Mumia, Free Palestine.

Every politically motivated college student imagines himself in a tradition that goes back to Berkeley and Ann Arbor and Columbia in the `60s, without remembering how those brief moments ultimately played out. They fantasize that they'll capture the imagination of other people; that they have a chance to become a leader of something great and bold. Those kinds of people, they're all idealists waiting to be broken. Matt knew that he wasn't the star of the day -- but what he hoped for, I imagine, was cheers and applause, people carried away by his rhetoric, but more than the ego gratification, people who heard him and felt inspired in some way.

Instead, he stood on a cold and overcast day in front of that dissonant, shambolic crowd. I mean, Free Mumia? "Using drugs does not make you a criminal -- just ask George Bush"? He spoke after a graduate student from Egypt and an associate political science professor, and by then, the crowd had already lost interest in the speaker slate. The protesters milled around. There were lines in Matt's speech that were intended for applause, but instead they were met with a handful of claps. I might've guessed that a dozen or two of Matt's frat brothers would have shown to provide vocal support, but there wasn't even that.

As the speech went on, his voice became louder and slightly desperate.

If he couldn't draw their attention with his words, he'd attempt shouting.

This failed. He knew that it wasn't working. The shouting became tightness. Knowing Matt, he practiced the speech dozen of times, but now he was stumbling on words and rushing through them. This was no longer a crowning moment. It was something to endure. He just wanted to finish.

Dude, it hurt too much. I couldn't handle it. The confused, motley crowd that couldn't agree to what it was protesting. The achingly sincere undergrads mixed with the professional activists. The cold. And mostly, Matt's disintegrating performance. Seeing him like that pained me. In big moments, he was always polished. Not on that day.

I should have stayed because he was my friend, and because I loved him. Because he cared about this as much as a person can care about an issue, and because in Matt's mind, all of his studying and networking, his near-manic energy and organizational talents, had probably built to this moment.

I should have stayed because I cared, too. I cared about what he was saying, because of the issue involved and because it was him.

But instead, I left. I put my head down, heart thumping in my ears, and walked a straight line toward the library.

In high school, I gratuitously hurt Andy. Without realizing it, I'd just done the same thing to Matt.

In the second semester of sophomore year, it was like Chris Riis discovered movies for the first time. It began with Dead Poets Society. It aired late one night on cable. I came home at around 1 a.m., and he was sitting in the living room, captivated.

"Joe!" he said. "Have you ever seen this?"

It wasn't one of my favorites.

"O Captain, my captain," I said.

"It's amazing, right?"

Michelle was with him on the couch. She looked at me, smiled, and rolled her eyes.

You probably know the movie. Robin Williams is a poetry-loving, anti-authority English teacher at a stern all-boys boarding school in 1950s New England. His students include Robert Sean Leonard and Ethan Hawke, who play roommates struggling to find themselves in light of crushing pressure from authoritarian fathers. Robert Sean Leonard discovers a love of acting and performs in A Midsummer Night's Dream despite his father's overwrought disapproval. After his father confronts him, the character kills himself, Ethan Hawke is devastated to lose his roommate, Robin Williams loses his job, and a classroom of prep school boys ends the film by standing on their desks proclaiming, "O captain, my captain," in salute to their newly fired English teacher.

I'm a sucker for that kind of setting and theme, but the movie's execution didn't work for me. Still, when I saw Chris's reaction, I thought to myself, "This could get amusing."

Instead, Chris cried twice. First when the Ethan Hawke weeps in the snow after his roommate dies. The second was the final standing-on-desk scene. His reaction was enough to pierce my cynicism. I hate it when people cry. It's the worst thing imaginable. I'd rather die than have people see me cry, so when this movie started to get to Chris, I became deferential and powerless. Michelle and I didn't make fun of him. We exchanged no more than a surprised glance.

"Wow," MIchelle said unconvincingly over the closing credits. "What a great movie."

"Oh my God," Chris said, wiping his eyes with his collar. "Don't make fun of me for this. That was incredible."

"You haven't seen it before?"

"No," he said. "I haven't seen every movie, like, ten times. I know that's shocking for you."

"I bawled in the theater at In America," Michelle said.

"But, like, the message here," Chris said. "And everything that happened to Neil. He was such a good person, and they basically destroyed him. For no reason."

"Strong stuff," I said.

"They did that to him for what?" When Michelle and I didn't answer, he said, "God, I really want to get into poetry."

With this remark, I fought not to smirk. Even so -- his response to the movie was so sincere. I think it made me want to, like, cuddle him.

The next day he bought it on DVD, and for the succeeding two weeks, he watched it constantly. It became background music for him. I wondered what triggered this kind of response. The stern fathers? The friendships between the guys? The movie's relatively tame defense of non-conformity?

On my fourth viewing, I devised a private interpretation. I still think that it's correct. Neil -- the Robert Sean Leonard character who discovers a love of acting -- was actually gay. The PG movie was released in 1989 and set in the `50s, and in order to be commercially acceptable, the script couldn't portray this directly. I recognized the telltale signs: he wasn't girl-crazy like the other guys; he was committed to the arts. When he acts, it's as Puck (a jester to the fairy queen) who prances, puckishly, across stage. The performance looks flamboyant. When his father angrily forbids Neil from acting and says that he'll send him to military school, that's a proxy. The father's severity never made sense before, and neither did Neil's terminal response. But if you understand that Neil is gay, and that's why his father rages, their conflict seems organic. Why else would he kill himself? The theater was a stand-in for his orientation. When he acted, it was the first time that he felt alive. He was gay. Then, it was denied from him and treated as a moral wrong. This explains a denouement that is otherwise incoherent.

That's what this movie became for me: the story of a guy who realized that he was gay, then had a moment of glory, and couldn't cope when it was stolen from him.

There's no way that Chris landed on this interpretation, and I didn't share it. It would have made him self-conscious. Then, when I watched this movie with him for the fifth fucking time (this movie was playing in our house on a loop) with my own version in mind, it shattered me.

It started on the night of February 15, in an e-mail with no subject line. The text said: "The amazing thing about you is that you don't even recognize what a prick you are."

This was from Matt. My response: "Ha. You're kidding, right? Your speech was great, by the way. Congratulations."

Hours later, and he still hadn't replied. He was one of those people who often replied in minutes. Hours, at most.

I sent him an e-mail the next afternoon: "Dude, everything's cool, right?"

His response: "Don't patronize me. You know my speech wasn't "great." Everything in your last two e-mails is proof of my initial point. Usually, when you're inconsiderate, I write it off because I know it's not on purpose. But I can't handle it any more. I'm done. Good luck."

He'd seen me leave his speech. I'd been standing alone, a few dozen feet from the crowd, leaning against a tree and drinking my coffee. If I'd mingled in the crowd, he wouldn't have seen me leave.

And no, I shouldn't have left. Then, my guilt had been for symbolic reasons. It hadn't occurred to me that I'd get called out on it.

I needed to finish my work at the newspaper. I couldn't, though. His e-mail had me too distracted.

When I was a block from the newspaper's offices, I called his cell. I didn't expect him to answer.

"Hey," he said.

Oh shit.

"Hey," I said, trying to sound light and apologetic. "What's going on?"

"You know, the thing is," his tone, raw and confrontational, "that we both know the whole thing sucked. The whole thing was fucking stupid. I'm an idiot for thinking it would be any different. Like, who the hell did I think that I was? I thought anybody was going to listen to me, or give a shit? What credibility do I have?"

It sounded like he struck something -- a wall, a table.

"That's how this stupid, fucked-up shit is. People like Paul Wellstones die, we invade a country for bullshit and lies, and a pompous asshole like me obviously isn't going to change any of that."

Holy shit.

"But it's like, I'm up there flailing, and everything is completely fucked. You think I didn't know that? You think that I thought that it was going great?"

I didn't say anything.

"I meant that as a real question."

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe. I'm not sure what you thought. But why are you mad at me? I know you're pissed, but I didn't do any of that."

"Yeah, but I'm up there and the whole thing is sucking, and I'm realizing what a jackass I am, and there were, like, three people there I was focusing on. You, and Erin, who I believe you know, and this guy Jonah who was in my pledge class, who you've also met. He's my best friend." Matt said that about everybody. I think he'd claimed at least three dozen best friends. "At a certain point, I'm just looking between the three of you and pretending that the rest of it isn't happening. Then you walk off. Straight line to the library, like you're, I don't know. Fucking late for church. I mean, holy shit. Could you have been more blatant?"

"Oh, man," I said.

"It's like you don't give a shit about other people. Maybe it's not your fault. Maybe you're just hardwired in a different way. Mildly autistic, even."

"Matt, come on."

"But you're not exactly a prick, right? You don't do malicious shit. Like, you expect so little from other people that you think the things you do don't matter. You're just inherently oblivious, and as a result, frequently insulting and inconsiderate."

"Dude, I'm sorry."

"But not sorry because you turned your back on me. Just sorry because you're getting called out on it."

I stammered as I contemplated a response. He laughed. It was mocking.

"I'm right, obviously," he said. "In your robot brain, it doesn't register that you're hurtful. It just registers that you made someone mad at you, and you need to say something to make the other person stop being mad at you. That's the only way you understand it."

It was uncomfortably accurate. My main thoughts had to do with finding the necessary words to settle him down. He was, I concluded, mostly just angry at the state of the world, and able to take it out on me. People don't actually get upset about these kinds of things.

It was significant of something else.

"Okay," Matt said. "Let's return to basics. You do understand that the way you act toward other people can affect them? Correct? It's not just you in an imaginary battle against the world."

"I mean, dude, I'm sorry," I said. "Really, I am. I never should have just walked away from you like that. To be honest, I really did think that your speech was great. I mean, I didn't know that you could see me."

"Oh my God!" he shouted. "It's like you didn't hear anything that I just said! You're completely hopeless. Hopeless! It's like trying to, I don't know, have a conversation with a vacuum cleaner. One that's not even plugged in."

I was eager to please him, so I nervously tittered at the metaphor.

"Yes. You're an inert vacuum. Your principal role is sucking, but you're destined to spend your existence alone in the closet."

"I-" It was clever, yes, but in a different direction than the seemingly silly, abstract image that made me laugh. "Dude. That was pretty harsh."

"Did that hurt your feelings?" he said.

Up until then, I'd been disoriented, confused, but still mainly eager to please. My hands had become jittery from the stress, but Matt's anger still seemed distant. Like I said before: secretly about the world, and not me.

"Sort of, maybe," I said. "Am I really that bad?"

He was silent for about three seconds. "Pretty much."

"Seriously?"

"You're kind of a dick, man. Sorry to break it to you, but it's a long time coming."

"So, okay," I said. I wasn't in the mental condition to fight back. I needed to go someplace alone and think about it. "I guess I'll see you in class tomorrow?"

He made another sarcastic laugh. I didn't know what it meant.

In Canto 34 of his Inferno, Dante and Virgil confront the sin of betrayal. In Dante's hell, betrayal is the ultimate sin, and he sets his scene accordingly. The center of hell is freezing cold. Satan rises chest-high from the ice -- three-headed, with three pairs of wings that look like a bat's. In each mouth, he chews the body of a notorious traitor: Brutus, Cassius and Judas.

And then, with barely enough time for you to digest or philosophize about the awesome strangeness of this spectacle, Virgil and Dante descend the body of Satan and appear on the other side of the world. The second volume of the Comedy begins: the Purgatorio.

To the extent that Dante has influence in the popular consciousness, it's mostly for his vision of hell (whatever they try to taught you in your fucked-up Sunday school, hell as we think of it all comes from Dante) which is kind of a shame, because The Divine Comedy is not about misery or despair. Exile, love, politics, hope, friendship -- yes. I guess it's a credit to the force of his imagination that people most remember the Inferno, which, to me, is more vivid than the best stuff by Tolkien or Stephen King. That's not what he was about, though.

In Dante's story, hell ends in betrayal, but Purgatory is a place of infinite hope. The gates of his hell advise the matriculants to abandon all hope; in the Purgatorio, all of his pilgrims work toward an inevitable, long-delayed salvation. In the Purgatorio, the pilgrims' wrongdoing derived from a sense of distorted love. It's not that they were evil in life -- they just loved wrongly. They paid for it, and then they atoned, and then they went to paradise.

Reading it for the first time, you get so acclimated to the Inferno's relentless despair that the arrival to Mount Purgatory feels like a huge relief in itself. I mean, Dante's work doesn't live on because he depicted only novel tortures and miseries. He was more interested in the range of human experiences. Only a lunatic would write something that exhaustive just to showcase variations of unhappiness.

I had dreams about Matt shouting at me. My concentration was shot. If you'd told me that I'd be this rattled, I would've called you a loser. Apparently, other people noticed, because I'd taken a handful of questions about whether I was okay. I answered that I was tired.

I was undergoing a reckoning as to what a strange, socially sheltered life I'd led. This requires some explaining.

Before college, I'd spent my life around the same group of people. My best friends in high school, I'd known since elementary school. Some people moved away, some came in, some transferred to private school, but the people I knew and were close to lingered forever. Our negative interactions were relatively consequence-free. I could get in a fight with one of my friends -- I could feel actual hatred for a friend -- but I didn't live in a world where walking away was a feasible option. Like, once you got close to a person, that relationship was there forever. In part, you didn't really have a choice. You could be irate with a good friend, but you'd still have to see him at school the next day, and forever after.

And when you grow up with a group of people like that, you understand their personalities and quirks in a way that becomes second nature, such that you don't test their limits. In high school, I knew that my friend Sanjay could get high-strung and belligerent about minor social slights, that you needed to defer to Danielle in an argument, that Rick talked big but turned shy in the heat of a disagreement. That Andy Trafford would always play peacemaker and forgive.

When I got to college, I made the same assumptions, and for the most part, they turned out to be true. I met people and made friends with them. I began to trust them; I began to love them. Sam Frost could infuriate me but he never meant it to be serious. He could shout at me or I could shove him into a wall, but he'd still be my friend. Katie needed to punch my vanity, but I didn't want to look away.

Most people -- normal ones, ones with fluid upbringings, with more Darwinian baselines on playgrounds and at the lockers -- learned their lessons early. Like, by second grade. That you could hurt someone sufficiently that they no longer wanted a part of you, and your social reciprocity wasn't there as a default condition, but something that grew from a history of trust and affection. Most healthy people assume the best of others, but they all have a breaking point.

And you see, I'd never really tested that breaking point, and, I guess, shame on me for that. In the scheme of a life, what I'd done to hurt Matt was minor league stuff compared to the cold shoulder I gave to Andy Trafford in high school. With Matt, I was reckless, but with Andy, I'd been knowingly mean. It was something that I literally didn't understand. It had been a kind of social game, and if there's anything in my life that can keep me from falling asleep when I'm restless, it's thinking about the petty cruelties I visited on Andy back in junior year. If I'd been a fuller person -- if I'd been normal -- I could have had the empathy to reason through it in real time. There'd been no need to hurt a friend to prove the impossible to myself.

But when I was 16 and 17, I knew Andy. I knew how he'd respond, and I knew that in the end, he wouldn't hold it against me. It was emotional exploitation by me. If I thought that Andy could walk away and never talk to me again, I might have treated him differently. Maybe I would have been better.

Matt was different. In less than three months he'd graduate, and he'd be gone. At the time, I thought that there was a good chance that I'd never see him again, not because of a falling out, but because he would move on with his life, and I'd still be at school. He was leaving, and I didn't have that room for error. It felt like a matter of principle that he didn't leave with bad feelings. It wasn't just a matter of courtesy or wanting him to like me. It was just how the world was supposed to work. You aren't supposed to let the good people get away from you.

I thought of Andy, and something he'd reminded me of after we graduated -- how in high school sports, my play was awesome in games that were lost causes but weak when I could have made a difference.

For once, I should be good with the game on the line.

Before my next class with Matt, I was as tense as on an exam day. When others in the class entered my peripheral vision, I looked up, hoping that it was him. A few times, I turned around and scanned the auditorium, looking to see if he was sitting elsewhere. He arrived a few minutes before the lecture started, while the professor was mic'd by an A/V guy and made smalltalk with the front row.

Matt stood in the aisle, peering down at me. My legs were stretched out, blocking his entry. I bolted up straight.

"Hey," I said.

"I've got to sit somewhere," he said, his volume normal but his tone confrontational, as if I'd accused him.

He took his normal spot, three seats in, and dropped his coat and bag on the empty seat between us.

I loved the class, and Rosemary Kavanaugh's reputation as a lecturer was deserved, but I wasn't processing a word. I wrote empty text into my notebook -- stray strands of her observations and arguments on the Purgatorio. I glanced at Matt, but he didn't acknowledge me. His eyes were focused on the professor and his notes. He thoughtfully pinched his lower lip between his teeth.

Lecture ended. With deliberate slowness, I put my things away. Something needed to be said, but maybe not in front of the lecture hall as it emptied out.

"Hey," I said to him, tentatively.

He looked at me, half-laughed, half-snorted, and shook his head.

I felt myself turn red. I know that my expression changed. I looked away and zipped my backpack.

"Look," he said, his voice sounding normal, "I'm not going to take sympathy on you because you feel bad for once."

"No, no," I said. "That's fair."

"Oh, for fuck's sake," he said, quiet and exasperated. We stood up together. "Stop pretending that you're mature."

"I'm not mature," I said. There weren't many people within earshot of us. People trickled in for the stats lecture that came next. "I'm just, I don't know. Nervous."

"I'm not going to punch you or anything."

"I know."

"I'm not even going to out you."

"Thanks," I said. "The unplugged vacuum."

"Ha," he said. "You know I made that up on the spot, right?"

"Really?" I managed a pained smile. "I thought that maybe you'd been saving it."

"You'd think so," he said. "It just came to me while we were on the phone."

I'm not sure if he knew how much this banter tortured me.

"Look," I said, finally moving to walk out of the auditorium, "could we just walk around for awhile? Or get coffee, or get drunk somewhere."

"That might be nice," he said, "but I have to meet my friend Jonah for lunch in 15 minutes."

I walked alongside him, out into the cold February air. He immediately lit a cigarette.

"Where are you going for lunch?"

"Just to the Charterhouse," Matt said.

I kept abreast of him. We didn't talk for like two minutes, which was a grueling interval when you can't figure out what you're supposed to say. He smoked his cigarette hard and walked briskly. He wasn't ignoring me, exactly. He was thinking about something. It was more likely to be about Kavanaugh's lecture or a paper he had to write than it was about me.

"Okay," I said, my voice soft and nervous, "I know that I fucked up, and that it wasn't just this thing where I walked away. That it was, like, a metaphor for other things."

"You really think so?" he said, his voice friendly, pretending to be curious.

"Yeah, it was," I said. "This was pretty blatant, but I know it wasn't the only thing. And let me just say," I said, my voice dropping down. My thoughts stalled, because I didn't know what I wanted to say. I stopped talking, which was worse, because now he was actively anticipating what would come next. He no longer thought about other things.

"I think what I want to say is," I resumed, "and I don't want to be too dramatic or anything, but I think that you're probably the most important person to me that I've ever met, right? And not just for the physical reasons. Like, you've made me a better person, right?"

There was more I wanted to say, and I was formulating it, when Matt said, "How?"

"How?"

"Explain, please." His voice wasn't confrontational. It was a gentle push.

"You always makes me think harder and you make me want to do better. I've had a lot of good friends and no one else does that. I don't know how someone else could do that." This brought me back to my words. Instead of being mumbly and embarrassed and tense, I had to pull him back. I had to win. "You think about everything, you're good at everything, you do everything, and you're decent about it and you're decent to other people. And you're also your own person, but not in some kind of trite, contrarian way. You're the only person who understands me, even if I spend most of my time sucking. Right? And since we became friends, I've been different. Maybe you can't tell because you didn't know me before. I'm different on the inside, in some way."

"How?" he said again. This time, it wasn't even a gentle push. It was almost kind.

"Oh, God, I don't know," I said. We had walked off campus now, onto College Ave., with the blocks of coffeehouses, take-out places and bars. "When I was growing up, I was always so cocky. Kind of aggressive, maybe. I only ever thought about what my next step would be and what I needed to do to get there. I was writing off big parts of my life because they seemed like an obstacle, and if I could block them out, everything would be great."

"You mean being gay," he said to me, out loud, in public.

I glanced up to make sure that no one I knew was in sight. "Yeah, but not just that. It was everything. And now it's more like, I want to spend time thinking about things for their own sake. I care about people in a different way, if that makes sense." My words tumbled without forethought. I wasn't worried that I sounded stupid or weak. "Dude, I know I'm fucked up, and I shouldn't have walked away from you. Honestly, I didn't think that you'd care, but that was my own fault, and no, it wasn't the first fucked-up thing I've done, and I'm sure it's not the last, but hopefully it is where you're concerned. Even if you don't want to talk to me again or you think I'm a dick, I can't understate how much I appreciate you and what a good friend you've been to me, and I swear to fucking God, if I ever get my shit together and make something good out of it, I owe a huge part of that to you."

We were next door to Charterhouse now, where he was purportedly meeting his friend Jonah for lunch. He paused and lit one of his cigarettes, keeping his eyes on my face while he did.

"I was going to forgive you eventually," he said. "I wanted to make you sweat it, because you deserved it. But holy shit, it was so much more satisfying this way."

I unclenched. I wanted to do something to please him.

"Come here," Matt said, giving me a bro hug that I didn't resist.

When I pulled back, he kissed me on the cheek. It wasn't a deeply romantic kiss, or one of those European pecks that you do in New York when you greet a chick friend. The gesture was more affectionate, a one-and-a-half second, lips-on-the-cheek kiss, in broad daylight, on one of the busiest stretches of campus. If I'd been in a different state, I might have jumped back and yelled. Matt knew exactly what he was doing.

He took a drag off his cigarette. "See? You didn't melt, you huge pussy."

After Chris exhausted himself of Dead Poets Society, he went on DVD binges. He liked upper-middlebrow Hollywood dramas, the kinds that get nominated for Academy Awards -- the Godfather movies and the Vietnam classics. Full Metal Jacket turned him on to Stanley Kubrick, so all of that weirdness followed.

"Dude, I don't want to watch A Clockwork Orange," I said. "It fucks you up."

"Wuss," he said.

"Way more extreme than The Exorcist. In a different way. Just be in the right mood when you watch, because it messes with your head."

Like a teenager defying his parents, he viewed it immediately, told me that it was brilliant, then much later admitted that he didn't understand the movie and that it made him feel dirty.

As the semester proceeded, a line of DVDs grew against the living room wall. He bought a new stash about once a week. He seemed to have a principle against rentals. To each his own.

For awhile, I think that our other housemates liked his new interest. I mean, we suddenly had a robust and growing movie library. It wore down after a few weeks. People wanted to watch The Practice and March Madness instead of a double feature of "Schindler's List" and "Rainman." Chris would get kicked out of the living room and head to my room instead.

As much as I liked Chris, this was annoying. Maybe once a week, I came home and he sat on my futon, in front of my TV, watching one of his movies. If it had seemed like an excuse to be around me, I might have been flattered. Much of the time, he barely acknowledged me, and half-ignored anything that I said. When I came home at one or two in the morning, I'd find Chris traces (DVD cases; pear rinds in the trash) left behind. Apparently, if the living room was taken, my room was the preferred option. Sam had a TV and DVD player in his basement lair, but the TV was small and his room was gross. My room made practical sense.

I need fairly intense alone time: napping, reading, music with my eyes closed, masturbation. It's still that way. If I go a day or two without a couple hours of mental solitude (that's not a euphemism for merely jerking off) it's as bad as being deprived coffee or a full night's sleep.

Chris's screenings interfered with this. He didn't respond to passive-aggressive sighing. If I turned off the lights and pretended that I was trying to sleep, he kept going.

"Could you turn it down, please?" I said to him, irritation breaking out in my voice.

He pretended to ignore me.

"Dude! Turn it the fuck down!"

He glared at me and knocked the volume down one notch.

"Dude, this isn't your room," I said. "Get your own setup in your own room if you want to blast the volume during `Raging Bull.' That movie's overrated anyway."

He paused it. "Okay, but I can't, because I don't have a massive room with space for a couch and all kinds of other stuff."

"Tough shit," I said. "I pay more rent."

"Only because you basically demanded that you get this space and made it clear that you'd back out of the house if you didn't get it. I could pay more rent, too."

"That's such bullshit. I wanted this room, but I never threatened to leave if I couldn't get it."

"Pretty much," he said.

"What are you even talking about?" I said. "Even if you weren't making shit up, it's still my room, and you're only using it because I let you."

"You're so spoiled," he said. "You act like an only child."

"Wait, I'm the spoiled one? You're the one who thinks he can commandeer someone else's personal space without asking or saying thanks."

"Okay," he said. He was red and sarcastic. "Thanks."

"And I never threatened not to live here if I didn't get this space. That's totally made up."

"Yep, yep, yep. You're always right. Okay."

"You need to learn how to make an argument," I said.

"You're just never wrong," he said. "So what's the point?"

I angrily grabbed my copy of Purgatorio. I thought about throwing it at him, but instead, I stormed out of my room to study somewhere else.

"He's like a fucking infant," I said to Michelle. She looked blank. "Chris. He takes over my room for his one-man film festivals."

"Well," she said, not seeming interested or sympathetic, "he is the youngest kid in his family."

"It shows."

She shrugged.

"Wait, no. What if he lingered in your room and never left?"

"Joe," she said, weary, "he does. He just doesn't do it to watch movies. Besides, you and Katie got him interested interested in all of this. I'm not responsible."

Tit for tat. I went into Chris's room and turned on the radio. It was set to an oldies station. Of course it was.

I sat at his desk and read my Dante -- the prideful of purgatory, carrying weights on their back -- while the Mamas and the Papas played. A photo of his golden retriever Handsome was taped to the wall over his desk. I looked at a framed photo where he posed outside with his parents a year or two before. It was slightly outdated: Chris's face had the same puff of baby fat in his cheeks as at the start of freshman year.

He had doodled the cover of a spiral notebook. It looked like a ballpoint pen drawing of a bat, surrounded by stars. A Beautiful Mind, I thought. I flipped it open. His handwriting was neat and angular. It was almost like a font selection.

These lines were on the first page:

Winter's cold and cold winds blow. Someday I will become old.

I shivered. How many bad poems did Robin Williams and Robert Sean Leonard inspire from impressionable young people?

It was bad poetry, yes, and the idea of Chris writing verse hit me as at least a little bit funny. It's not something I would have been able to discuss with him in a straight face. At the same time, it was so sincere that I felt protective. It was like he was trying to express something and he didn't have the technical skills to get it out.

I touch your face and feel your heart pulse, wanting you to look at mine but knowing that you look away.

My thinking and my sense dulls, and even if I cross a line there's nothing that I know to say.

Underneath his neat handwriting, he had erased and re-written unknowable false starts for these lines. I imagined him sitting at this desk or alone in a library, laboring over these words.

Also, when had I ever looked away? I'd been anxious that I looked too much.

His notebook had only four or five pages of writing. There were fragments, and half-completed works. Weather was a theme for him -- more than the cryptic "you" whose face he touched.

I closed his notebook and put it in the position where I found it. I strummed my fingers against my copy of Purgatorio and looked up at his photo of Handsome the golden retriever -- the dog was true to its name, and in the photo, happily panting in front of a lake.

Upstairs, Chris watched fat Robert DeNiro mumble at the camera. As was typical, he didn't glance at me when I entered my room.

"Hey," I said to him. My voice was neither friendly nor hostile. I made sure to look at him when I jostled his shoulder.

"Hey to you, too," he said. He suppressed some sort of grin and creased his eyebrows and forehead. He looked perplexed but happy.

I stood behind him. The movie was almost over. He didn't react when I turned off the lights, put on a pair of flannel pants, and got into bed. Under the covers and rolled up, I slid a hand down to my elastic, feeling a hard pulse and thinking of him.

A couple of weeks later, I woke in a strange dorm room, wearing somebody else's black briefs. They were at least a size too small, and they strangled the circulation in my balls. Looking down, my pubes and inner-thigh hair twisted in the elastic. The shorts were so tight that it looked like I had a belly.

Matt Canetti slept next to me, and, on the other side of Matt, slept that guy Wally -- Kevin Berger's friend, the one who regarded me at the library. Matt was fully dressed. He was in a hoodie, with the hood pulled up and the drawstring tight around his neck. Wally was on the other side of him, shirtless in basketball shorts, with his bony chest rising up and down to the rhythm of a light snore.

I'd been drinking liquor. My hangover's temperament and the sweet-and-sour paste in my mouth reminded me. The night was not a complete blackout. It was only hazy at the end.

The prelude to all of this is a long story in itself, and, indeed, I considered making the night a chapter of its own. To cut several thousand words down to several hundred, Kevin Berger had called me about a house party. This led to my typical overwrought hand-wringing -- the lady doth protest too much, et cetera. Kevin didn't work hard enough to persuade me, even though I secretly wanted to go.

"Kevin Berger wants to take me to a gay party," I told Matt over the phone.

"Weird. Uh, how? Why?"

"Do you think it's a bad idea?"

"No," he said, "I think it's an awesome idea, and I want to know where so that I can go and enjoy the hilarity."

"Don't be obnoxious."

"God, I know where. Is the address on Thackeray?"

"I don't know. Why?"

"Musical theater kids. There's some kind of party on Saturday. He's not just taking you to a gay party. He's taking you to, like, the gayest people ever."

"So I shouldn't go."

"No, you should definitely go, and I'm trying to understand how this happened. It's odd even picturing you and Kevin having a conversation."

"For the last two years, you've been telling me to be open-minded, and now you're making fun of me for even, like, considering it."

"Don't be a drama queen," he said. "You're so sensitive. I'm excited about every part of this."

"So you're going?"

"I wasn't considering it, but now I'm intrigued."

I sullenly phoned Kevin and informed him I'd attend. I was tense the entire Saturday, and the spring weather was enough for a long run. I went alone -- no Chris that day. Even the run didn't mellow me, and Chris seemed annoyed that I went without him. "Next time," I said.

I pre-partied at Kevin Berger's apartment. He lived alone, and the place was messier than I expected. Three of his friends came over, including Wally. They were all nice guys; fairly attractive. They tried to put me at ease. My struggle to have a conversation with them wasn't disdainful or passive-aggressive -- it wasn't Bad Joe -- but a consequence of my stress about the whole evening.

It got better as I drank. I found myself attracted to them, and as they got drunker, they laughed at some of my intentionally funny comments. This gave me enough momentum to feel socially interesting.

By the time we reached this party, I had partially disassociated from myself. I controlled myself remotely. Like the Joe at that party was not the me me. He was the disembodied man. I was completely lucid and everything; it's not like I was tripping or going through a disturbed episode. I just felt like someone else, and appreciated the anesthetized comfort of concluding that the me at that party was not the me that would wake up and go to class on Monday. I could be whatever I liked, and control him.

This party was a little like going to an upscale gay bar in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York. Guys checked me out. They checked each other out. Some were subtle about it. Others gawked openly. And it wasn't like going to a frat party where guys and girls were scheming each other. Most of these people knew each other well. If I had showed up without context, I could have figured that out just from their body language and the crowd flow.

My status as an outsider was probably intriguing. They looked at me, not so much in a way to signal that I didn't belong, but more that they were kind of curious. I stood apart from them anyway. I didn't dress as well as they did; I could have used a haircut. They looked so trim and well groomed.

Kevin introduced me to a sophomore named Neil.

"Joe," I said, putting out my hand.

"Joe what?" Neil said, shaking it.

"Joe." I paused. "Smith."

"Joseph Smith? Like the Mormon?"

"Oh my God!" Kevin shouted over my ear. I hate to admit it, but I felt tingly when Kevin gently shook my shoulder and I felt his vodka breath on my neck. "His last name is not Smith!"

I spun weird stories and half-lies. I said that I grew up in Wyoming, or that I was a childhood friend of Kevin's visiting from school at Syracuse. (Why Syracuse? Who knows?) I claimed to be a junior; I said that I was a physics major. If I started to feel more relaxed with a guy, I would acknowledge my lies and write them off as a joke. They didn't seem to get it.

All the while, I noticed Kevin's friend Wally talking to the same three or four guys. They were cute, skinny guys, much like Wally. Occasionally Wally pointed in my direction and said something to them while smiling. I began to feel think of this kid Wally as a documentary narrator, and I was the exotic species being filmed.

By the time Matt Canetti showed up, I was already extremely drunk. I hugged him. He smelled like cigarettes and beer. "You seem excited," he said.

"Dude, I'm Joseph Smith. A Mormon physics major at Syracuse. But don't tell anyone."

"This is exactly what I expected to hear from you," he said.

I know that it had been Kevin Berger's hope that I'd arrive and make a couple of prospective friends. By the time that Matt showed up, my primary goal was to make interesting conversation. At least, I thought that I was being interesting. I remember sitting at the top of a staircase, talking to a very earnest senior, saying something like, "I really dig big cocks, but I can't identify as gay."

Alcohol and cock and endless balls.

While I waited in line for the bathroom, I talked to an extremely attractive short guy, who said something that I thought was hysterical. Afterward, we spoke for several minutes. I'm not exactly sure what we talked about, but it had me doubled over, laughing so hard that it hurt. People must have been staring.

How it came to pass that Matt, Wally and I left together, I'm not exactly sure. "Children's Story" by Slick Rick played at a pivotal point. Matt held my jacket and gently guided me toward the front door. I said good-bye to a stranger and told him that I loved him. Laughter followed.

"You need to be caged," Matt said when we were outside. He helped me into my jacket. Wally was with us.

"But I'm not even tired," I said.

"Did you snort a bunch of coke earlier?" Matt said.

"Hard liquor. I never drink it. It gets me drunker than beer." I threw my arm around Matt and walked next to him. "You are my best friend. My best fucking friend. Like, ever." I turned to Wally. "Walter, I was really, really rude to him once-"

"Once?" Matt said.

"-and he forgave me for it. Is he awesome or what?"

"It's amaaazing," Wally said.

"Don't be sarcastic, Walter," I said. "You don't know what you're talking about." I tried to steer Matt into a tree.

"Does he get like this often?" Wally said.

"If it's not one thing, it's another," Matt said.

"Don't think that you'll ever replace him," I said to Wally, in a tone that I like to think of as friendly/confrontational. "No one can replace him. Not even close."

"I'm not trying to replace anybody," Wally said. "I'm my own person."

"What are you, Walter? Scandinavian?"

"No," he said. "Polish, German and Spanish, with some Balkan stuff thrown in."

"Weird," I said.

"Joe!" Matt said. "Stop being obnoxious!"

The next thing I knew, I was in Wally's dorm room, wearing my boxer shorts and my baggy button-down shirt, standing on a desk chair to Jay-Z.

The memories get fuzzy around there, but Matt remembered it all. Take it away, Matt:

"I was trying to get you home, but you weren't listening to reason. We went to drop Wally off at his dorm and you sprinted inside. I told him not to give you anything more to drink, but you were belligerent and he folded. You kept demanding the two of us to show our dicks and were trying to grab our junk. You were so wasted that every time you tried to molest us, we'd give you a push and you fell over. It was pretty fun. H to the Izzo came on, and you performed a striptease, which, I know that I shouldn't have been surprised by that, because you act ridiculous whenever you hear that song, but I was caught off guard anyway. You were trying to give me a lapdance. I poked your shoulder and you fell down. You kept whipping it out. You tried to dick-slap me. You were being a homoerotic eighth-grader at a slumber party. I tried to stop you a couple of times, but then I was like, `What's the point? He's experimenting with how to express his sexuality.'

"It's probably embarrassing for you to hear this now that you're sober, but it wasn't totally horrible. It was, like, 15 percent dirty but 85 percent hilarious. You were only completely naked for like three minutes, cumulatively, over the course of a couple of hours. You kept trying to kiss Wally, and he eventually let you, but just for a couple of seconds, and then he apologized to me. `I can't control him,' I said. Wally didn't mind it because he obviously sort of likes you, and it sounded like Kevin prepared him. He was an extremely good sport about the whole thing, actually. He seemed to think it was pretty funny. You might want to consider following up with him.

"The underwear business was weird, though. Like, you started to pick up a pair off the floor, and I yelled at you not to wear another person's dirty underwear. You're such a child. So you rifled through his drawers until you found a pair. You looked incredibly stupid in them. Don't wear black briefs. That was your most embarrassing moment. Very unerotic. I thought that you were gong to run out of steam and crash, but you kept going. Also, you kept calling Wally `McFly.' You were acting like you were tripping out. I felt like a babysitter.

"Eventually, I crashed on his bed. I woke up and the two of you were sitting at the foot of it, making out. Wally wasn't wearing a shirt. You looked like a retard, wearing those black briefs. I pretended that I was still asleep because I wanted to see how it played out. You tried to touch his junk, and he was like, `No, I'm tired. I have to go to sleep.' As far as I know, that was the end of it. I'm sure you woke up thinking that we'd had a threesome, and if you hadn't been such a drunk asshole, who knows? That might have been fun! But instead, you just kept flashing your drunk dick and acting like a lunatic. It was a little gross, and maybe even a slight turn-on, but wasn't that scandalous, so chill."

When I woke up the next morning, I collected my clothes off the floor, but only after yanking off those stupid briefs and liberating my balls. Sober, I was modest, and quickly dressed before they could see me naked. Matt had been correct: at that point, I thought that I'd succumbed to a pornish group sex scenario, and that I was the victim, not the instigator.

I was dehydrated, and I was starving. My first impulse was to run out the door in shame. Recalculating, I shook Matt by the shoulder.

"Hey," I said to him. "Hey."

His eyes opened, startled. "Oh, Jesus. It's the small-dicked Tommy Lee."

"Do you want to go out to breakfast?"

"Yes," he said, carefully maneuvering off the mattress. "Let's just go to Charterhouse?"

"I want hasbrowns and fried eggs," I said. "Should we invite Wally?"

Matt looked over to the skinny snoring kid. "Nah. You've traumatized him enough for now."

The following Thursday, I was summoned by the editor in chief of the school newspaper. My first reaction was that my party performance had been such a scandal that I was now being called to account. I immediately e-mailed back asking him what it was about.

"I want to discuss your future at the paper," he wrote.

His last name was Russell, and that's what everybody called him. At age 21, he looked ten years older, and already had the bearing of a man you could imagine as a frightening trial lawyer or an imposing editor at a major national publication. He was about fifty pounds overweight, with glasses and a beard. His hair was a mess, and he chainsmoked horribly. You could tell if he was within a dozen feet of you from the dry cloud of tobacco stink. Stale cigarette smoke on clothes can smell like polluted peanuts.

When Russell walked into a room, you fucking noticed. His deep voice echoed through his lungs. He laughed loudly. If he disagreed with you, he'd shout you down, but once he said his piece, he'd sit back quietly, arms folded over his rotund chest, listen carefully, and then concede points of merit. He was a prodigious drinker who famously downed 21 shots on his 21st birthday, and kept going until he hit 33. As you know, I've been friends with some extreme characters, but the force of Russell's personality had occasionally cowed me to awe and deference.

I'd been promoted to music editor at the paper that semester. The position wasn't incredibly demanding. Maybe about 12 leisurely hours per week at the publication's offices, sorting through promo CDs and assigning them to the small staff, whose reliability and enthusiasm were variable. Still: it was fun. I liked seeing my name in print. I liked my interactions with everyone there. They were smart and assertive and confident. They dressed shabbily, and they liked to drink.

Russell was already at the bar where I was to meet him for dinner. The first thing he said was, "Joe, I want you to take a major role at the paper next fall," and proceeded to lay out the reasons why.

Do you know that I'm a sucker for flattery? All you have to do is tell me that I'm a good writer, and I'll respond like an Irish Setter in the company of available bacon. Russell did me several better.

"You're just a fabulous writer," he told me, after a gulp of Newcastle. "Everything you touch gets better. When Liz was running music, the pieces were certainly fine, but not to your standard. You have rare talent. Everybody likes you. The question I have is, why should I not appoint you section head for next year before we leave for the summer?"

"Well," I said, taking the question literally, "Rick Sheehan is more senior than I am, so I figured that he'd take over, and I'd keep doing music."

This led to some talk about workplace politics that I won't bore you with. Russell wasn't having any of it. "I don't know what your summer plans are," he said. "Do you have any?"

"Not really," I said.

"So, look," Russell said. "Here's what I'd really like. In my ideal scenario. You stay for the summer and run the paper. I know that sounds like a huge leap, but it's not anything like it is during the year. You'll have plenty of time on your own. It'll be a lot of fun, you'll have a lot of support and the pay isn't half bad. And when we're all back in the fall, you'll run Arts & Entertainment. And then next summer, your resume will be teed up for a great internship."

He was throwing out scenarios and proposals so quickly that I couldn't keep up. I stared into space behind him, playing out his suggestions.

Russell slammed his fist on the table in frustration. "Jesus Christ, you are going into journalism, right? You're not going to go to law school or be a fucking consultant."

"I'm not totally sure," I said.

"In that case, I'm telling you," Russell said, with more certainty than I'd see from a parent or a professor, "you are. I'm not going to have you waste your talents doing line edits on some freshman's two-star review of Blind Melon's posthumous greatest hits, and then grow up to be flunky running spreadsheets in a cubicle. Fuck you if that happens."

"Doesn't sound so great, no."

"The only reason I'm here," he said, with the confidence of a royal, "is that a couple of years ago, Ben Epstein called me out to dinner and told me things very similar to what I'm telling you now. As you know, Ben is at the Journal now. He's a fabulous guy. Before I got that talking to, I was covering fucking student government and thinking that I'd go to law school." He lit one of his American Spirits. "Fuck, Joe, that's the only way anybody goes anywhere. You use your talents and people naturally find you."

"This is all extremely flattering," I said. "I'm really that good of a writer?"

He didn't understand that I was begging for bacon.

"Superb. Clever, but never cute. Very efficient. But you seem to be quite good with managing people, too. You see these people," he said, throwing out a bunch of names that would mean nothing to you, "and they're all great reporters, but they're socially dysfunctional. Could you imagine being a freshman and having [name redacted] teaching you how to write a story? I'd shoot my fucking self. She's a great girl and everything, but as a people person? Come on."

By the time I finished my burger, fries and Coke, Russell and finished three pints and a half-dozen cigarettes. I hadn't had a drink, but as we left, I was reeling. Russell had filled my head with visions of prestige and titles -- a small slice of undergraduate greatness. He told me to take my time and think it over, and that I could let him know by the end of the week.

I talked it over with Matt, Katie and Michelle, and accepted all of Russell's proposals two days later.

Chris and I went running on a beautiful end-of-March day. It was the kind of weather where people broke out shorts for the first time, and girls went sleeveless in barely tolerable temperatures so as to trigger the biochemical nostalgia of sunlight on skin.

He could handle long runs now -- seven miles, eight miles. He wore nylon running shirts and expensive running shoes. His stride was not hunched and pained -- he now ran with his shoulders upright and chest puffed out, his head held high. Sometimes I'd slow to where he ran 10 or 20 feet ahead of me, just to regard his stride.

The weather had us both in great moods. We'd broken out of chrysalises and taken flight. He'd been more diligent at the gym that winter, and after all that time on a treadmill, he was finally able to break out in full stride. The only reason I could still outpace him was that I had about six years of experience on him.

As I've noted before, we tended not to talk on the runs, but we bantered a lot that day.

"Dog," Chris said, pointing ahead to a lady walking a gray mutt in our direction.

"Tree," I responded, pointing to a tree.

It hit us as funny to point out objects.

"Blue house."

"White house."

"Red car."

"Girls."

"White car."

"More girls."

"Tree."

"Another tree."

"Shubbery!"

"Shrubbery! Ha!"

This lasted for a couple of miles, and culminated with us shouting things like, "Manhole cover!" and "Mailbox!", timing our screams to maximize the attention strangers out enjoying the day.

"Chris," I said.

"Joe," he said.

"Are you going home to Michigan this summer?"

He breathed heavy for a moment. "Yeah," he paused. "Why?"

"Because I'm staying here now," I said, "and Trevor's staying, and Katie has the subletter." I paused to breathe. "So maybe it'd be more fun if you stayed. Instead of going back to your parents' house.

Especially if it's just to wait tables, which you can do here, too."

After several seconds, he said, "Interesting."

"Thought I'd mention it."

"Miss my mom and dad, though," he said.

"Me too," I said. It was a struggle to speak long sentences during the run. "Longer I'm here, the harder it'd be to live with them."

"True," he said. "I just miss them."

"Me too," I said. "Just thought I'd mention it. It'd be a lot of fun."

"Yes," he said.

I interpreted his comments as a no. We didn't talk about it for the rest of the run ("German shepherd!" Chris bellowed, making the dog bark and yank its leash) and while I was slightly disappointed, I wasn't going to lobby him.

Even as it got cooler that night, Sam and I grilled burgers and chicken on the front porch. People stayed in shorts.

"Trevor," Chris said, several beers in, "do you think I should stick around this summer?"

"Hell yes, I do," Trevor said. "Dude, it'll be a blast."

"Bullshit," Sam said. "You'll be bored without me. I feel sorry for you. Maybe you fucks will finally appreciate my value."

"You should stay, too," Trevor said.

"I'm leaving to pursue sophisticated women," Sam said. He had some sort of political internship in Ottawa.

"By which you mean, chase them away," Katie said.

"Correct. I didn't say that I'll to catch them," Sam said. "There aren't sophisticated women in Canada, anyway."

"No," Trevor said, pointing at Chris, "you stay here with me and Joey."

"Eh. Maybe. I'm thinking about it."

"Why wouldn't you?" Trevor said. "Do you really need your mom and dad asking you questions all the time? Who would you even hang out with? I'd go crazy."

"Personally," I said, "I think it'll be awesome being here without a ton of people around. Like a kid getting to hang out at Disney after the park closes."

"That might be taking it too far," Trevor said.

"I'll take an Arabic class, work at the paper, do a lot of drinking, barbecue every night. Go running at the park."

Chris nodded along to all of this. Trevor and I were reeling him in.

"Do you have any good friends who'll be around at home?" Trevor said.

"Nah," Chris said. "Maybe. Not that I know of."

"So there's no reason to sit around your parents' living room when you can stay and hang out," Trevor said.

"I wish I was staying here," Michelle said. "I'm jealous."

"We'll miss you, baby," Trevor said to her. "Pieces will miss you while he's here with us."

"Oh, Pieces."

"Pieces, you know you want to stay."

"Think of how huge your tips would be if you waited tables at, like, Le Meridian."

"Let me think about it," he said. "I'm not going to decide tonight."

A couple of nights later, he was back in my room, screening "Out of Africa."

"God, finally something that's not completely dark," I said.

"Won Best Picture in 1985," Chris said.

"Yeah, it's good," I said. "`I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.' There's some stuff about syphilis toward the end that's a bit of a downer."

"Way to give away the ending."

"It's not a surprise twist. Isak Dinesen's syphilis isn't, like, the secret of Kaiser Soze."

I like "Out of Africa." I had reluctantly conceded him squatter's rights to part of my room, and he had more recently been good about not watching late at night.

After 15 or 20 minutes, I said, "You're staying this summer, right?"

"Still haven't decided," he said.

"Yeah, you are. You're just playing indecisive. That's what I do when I've made up my mind but I want to make sure. Because that way, people keep telling you why you should do it, and it reinforces you."

"So any time you say that you're not sure about something," he said, "you've already made up your mind."

"It helps me to work through my thinking."

"That would mean that you're always sure." He paused the DVD.

"No. I mean, in, like, the philosophical sense, I'm never actually sure of anything, but a lot of the time, when I say that I'm not sure, I already know, but I want to hear what other people say. When I'm actually not sure, I don't talk about it."

"What about the times when you say that you're sure?"

"I'm trying to persuade other people. That doesn't mean that I actually know."

"You're, like, a code," he said.

"You're shrubbery," I said, "and a manhole cover."

"You're a Danish coffee farmer in Africa," he said.

"Do I get to have syphilis?"

"If it means that much to you, I suppose."

"Just kidding," I said. "I don't want it."

"I hope not."

"I can imagine!" I said, and punched him in the shoulder.

His face went a dark red. He glared for a second and shook his head.

"Chill," I said. "I know how you revere syphilis."

"Shut up," he said. "You always take things too far."

"I'm kidding around." I paused. "I'm obviously not going to give you syphilis. Not on purpose."

"Gross!" he said. "Just shut up about it! I just want to watch this movie and not talk about getting syphilis, okay?"

He unpaused the movie.

I reached over and put my arm around his neck. It wasn't like putting your arm around a girl at a movie. It was more like a soft headlock, the kind of thing that I'd do to my youngest brother. With Chris, it straddled the line between brosephness and homo.

A lot of our little gestures were like that. It had been three months since that night he grabbed me in his bedroom. We hadn't done anything so intense since then; we hadn't really done anything. We didn't even talk about it. That night back in January, after I shot my wad all over his floor, I went into the bathroom to wash up and collect myself. After we went back downstairs, we avoided eye contact. I felt tense, tired and gross; I wanted to go to sleep, but there were people all over the house, including friends of mine.

I wanted to talk to him about it, but when I was around him, he sat upright. It was like he was scared of me. I've been there; I didn't blame him.

Then his movie obsession started, and I was heavily preoccupied by Matt. Over time, we were back to little gestures. When we walked someplace, it seemed like we walked closer than before. We touched each other's hair a lot: if he walked past when I was sitting, he'd rap me on the head. I did the same. We grabbed each other's shoulder at every opportunity. Once, at a party, I was sitting next to him on the couch during a conversation, and without prompting, he poked me in the ribs. Surrounded by people with shitty music playing, his poke in the ribs was enough to give me a slight boner.

We swam laps at the pool one night in February. When we were in the showers afterward, I slipped off my trunks as usual. He kept his on. It wasn't a big moment or anything, but the pool showers tended to be a lot of naked, and it was the first time that he'd shown physical modesty around me. My first thought was that he was now self-conscious around me, but later I thought that it might have been because he was scared of getting hard.

I continued to prop his head against my chest. He didn't fight to get away.

"You're sooooo weeeeird," he said, his voice vibrating at my ribs.

"Thanks for the newsflash, Brokaw."

I tapped a finger at his cheek. He didn't struggle.

He exhaled hard out of his nostrils. It reminded me of air brakes.

"I don't know why I like holding your head like this," I said.

"Because it feels good?"

"Yes," I said. "It does feel good."

"What, uh," he said. And then: "Huh."

In a snap, it was like he had jumped up on top of me. Chris, it turned out, wasn't into slow build ups. He wedged himself against me.

I wheeled him sideways and we toppled off the futon.

I held him against the floor at the wrists. He was dressed in basketball shorts. I yanked them to the thigh. As I already knew, his dick was hard. It pressed up against his shirt. I pulled my corduroys open. We didn't say a word or make a sound. Nothing but deep breathing. I held our dicks together. Mine is respectably average, and probably thicker than the norm, but it looked so minimal next to his. He looked flushed and hot, the blood rushing pink to his cheeks.

"Oh, wait," he said. He reached over and paused the movie.

He held me down at the floor, his nose pressed against my ear. He pinched the skin of my jaw in his teeth.

Like the last time, he came quickly, and with a restrained whimper. It went all over my shirt.

"Sorry," he whispered.

"We have laundry," I whispered. "Wait, don't move."

I arched my back and stared up at his face. I put a hand at his ass, with his Damoclean dick swaying over my pelvis. He stared down at me with his lower lip hanging out. We made prolonged eye contact. I thrust myself up, and it shot all over my shirt. I bounded up and tore it off, using it to mop what had gotten matted in my pubes. Chris watched all of this, and slowly pulled up his shorts.

"Whew," he said, as I discarded the T-shirt to the floor and found a new one in my dresser. "Okay. Back to the movie for now."

The e-mail came at 12:43 a.m. on Wednesday, April 16, 2003. I was sitting in the undergrad computing center, working on a final paper about Ozymandias. Rarely was I productive at home. The computing center offered no temptations.

The kid immediately to my right played a game like EverQuest and drank a Red Bull. Whenever I looked upon my works, ye mighty, and despaired, I glanced over at his screen. Sometimes those things annoyed me. That night, it was a reliable distraction.

I didn't read Matt's e-mail at first. We took our Dante exam the day before, and prior to that, we spent the Sunday studying the Divine Comedy. We skimmed all 100 cantos. We quizzed each other about the major characters and the levels of hell, purgatory and paradise. We discussed themes of exile, empire, schism, love and sin. We sat next to each other for the final, one seat separating us. I smirked when Matt completed his first Bluebook and raised his hand for a second one.

After two hours, we handed our completed exams to Professor Kavanaugh.

She congratulated us and shook our hands. This was an informal tradition at the school: you always handed your final to the professor, and the professor always shook your hand. "I'll miss looking at two handsome fellows paying such close attention to me," she said in her quasi-British accent. She smiled and winked. "Best of luck to you!"

Leave it to a slightly chubby, fiftysomething lady English professor to make a couple of gay dudes blush and mumble in humility.

I asked Matt how he thought he did. He smiled and gave a thumb's up.

"Cacciaguida, Count Ugolino, Ulysses. Good stuff."

"Yeah," I said, "her finals have a reputation for being pretty easy."

"Why didn't you tell me that ahead of time?" he said.

"I didn't want you to get lazy. Besides, I thought you knew."

We walked outside. It was sunny and in the low 60s. The quad was rimmed in patches of daffodils. Hippies hackysacked on the grass.

"Joe," he said to me, putting out his hand, "it's been a pleasure."

"Ha," I said. "Wait," I said, my voice catching. "We're hanging out again before you leave, right? This isn't, like, good-bye good-bye."

"I just meant that the class was a pleasure," Matt said, "but come to think of it, who knows?"

"Ha, no," I said. "We've got to go get wasted at least once between finals and commencement. Just, like, to Charterhouse, for old time's sake."

"I can't believe that you still don't have a fake ID."

"No," I said. "I'm serious."

"Oh, God," he said, putting on a pair of sunglasses and smiling up at the sky. "I should say no, if only for the triumph of making you cry in public."

"Shut up."

"I'm joking," he said. "We'll go get shitfaced before I leave." He opened his arms and gave me a bro-hug. "It was an honor having my next-to-last final with you."

The next night, I was working on my Ozymandias paper when Matt's e-mail arrived. It didn't have a subject line. I thought about clicking through, but I was trying to finish a line of thought. Knowing Matt, the e-mail would be some kind of belated insight about yesterday's exam.

A few minutes later, I distractedly clicked through the message. The first paragraph made me smirk. The second paragraph made me smile. The third made my toes tingle. The fourth made me blush. By the time I finished the fifth paragraph, I could feel all of my red blood cells, and I was trying not to turn weepy in the middle of the computing center.

Frightened by my response, I clicked to my inbox and leaned back in my chair. My heart rate must have bumped up to a hundred a minute. I had this conflicting urge to laugh and cry at the same time.

They were the nicest words that anyone has said to me. It wasn't a love letter or anything like that -- it was more like an articulation of what you always hope, deep down, your friends think of you, except that they never have an excuse to say it. This was not what I'd expected to hear from him -- not then, and really, not ever.

I collected myself and stared blankly at the screen of the guy playing his multiplayer online fantasy game. I laughed for a half-second, the pink noise of keyboard clatter and printers filling the background. Thinking that I had steeled myself, I dared to open the e-mail and read it again. This time, I barely made it through the first sentence before feeling my red blood cells and wanting to cry.

"Oh, shit," I whispered.

The gamer next to me paid no attention.

I forgot my Ozymandias paper. It wasn't due until 5 p.m. the next day, anyway.

I wasn't about to send the e-mail to the printers, where any curious stranger could pick it up and skim it. I mean, those printers were like a scrum, dude, and this time, it wasn't even about me being gay. It was that the things he'd told me seemed so kind and personal that I couldn't let someone else's eyes dilute it -- including yours.

Instead, I took out a piece of notebook paper and a mechanical pencil, and copied his entire message by hand. I still have it with me. The act of copying seemed so important, and my task so serious, that it felt like an act of translation. I practically had to spell the words to myself in order not to miss anything. I maintained composure.

I'm not going to share the whole thing with you, but to get a sense of what he was thinking, here's the beginning: ---------------------

From: Matt Canetti To: Joe C. Date: April 16, 12:43 a.m. Re: . Joe --

At the end of my freshman year I got an e-mail from a friend of mine who was graduating. He'd been my so-called big brother from rush, but we turned out being close regardless. (Not like that.) He called the e-mail a dead letter. He said that with graduation coming and the knowledge that he'd be leaving this place, it felt like a piece of who he was was about to die, and that he was writing to his friends who'd still be here. A little extreme, maybe, but right now, I understand how he felt. ---------------------

When I finished my act of transcription, I sent Matt a reply: "I appreciate you more than you can possibly realize. I'll miss you, man."

I logged out of the computer, stuffed my papers into my bag, and rushed to get home.

The thing was, I needed to be alone, and the whole walk, I was fighting not to cry. It was like a physical battle -- the closest comparison is one of those situations when you're on the freeway and you need to take a piss so bad it hurts, and you tell yourself that you can wait until the next exit, but the pressure in your body makes it an open question. This was the same feeling of propriety taunting need. As I walked, my thoughts turned to the contents of Matt's e-mail and I'd feel myself start to weaken; to counteract that, I thought of Sam Frost barking profane taunts at me, but that really wasn't successful, either, because if I'd encountered Sam at that moment, my reaction likely would have been to tell him that I loved him, too.

I arrived home and tackled the stairs two at a time. My eyes weakened, and I was swept with the relief of knowing that in seconds, I would crash on my bed and let it all pour out.

When I hit the landing on the second floor and approached the spiral stairs, I already knew that Chris was in my room. I heard my TV blasting. It was "Chariots of Fire."

I thundered up the stairs to my room, and there he sat -- on the futon, observing the mundanities of British long-distance runners. My calamitous entry startled him. I spun my face away.

"Chris, please leave," I said. My voice had already broken into sobs.

"I need to be alone."

"Whoah." He paused the DVD. "Whoah. Did something happen in your family?"

"No," I said, throwing my backpack on the floor.

"Oh my God. Did somebody die? Are you sick?"

"No." I choked on myself as I talked. I covered my face with my hands, even though I'd already turned away from him. "Please go. You can't see me like this. If you see me like this I'll hold it against you."

I heard his breathing several feet behind me. He hadn't moved. "Go," I said. "Don't tell anyone you saw this. Never."

He still hadn't moved. I pictured him behind me, fighting with himself about how to handle this.

"Get out!" I shouted.

"Are you o-?"

"Yes," I said. "I'm sorry I just yelled at you. I have to be by myself right now."

Seconds passed as I cried audibly. I heard him move.

"Wait," I said, catching myself. "Don't go." I turned toward him and peeked through my fingers. He regarded me, scared and dumbfounded. "All that happened was," I said, "that a very good friend of mine e-mailed some very nice things to me." I sniffed and paused. "And I miss them very, very much."

"Oh," he said. From what I could tell, my explanation both confused and relieved him. He said, as if a switch had clicked, "I mean, I'll e-mail you nice things once in awhile if you want. Just, like, don't make fun of me for it."

This caused me to laugh, but not to stop crying or to reveal my face. I wanted to do, like, fifty things with him at once. Only four or five of them were overtly sexual.

"I know it sounds crazy," I said. "I just don't want you to think that I'm, like, suffering."

"It's all right," he said, moving toward the door in the floor. "I guess when you miss a person, it's a reminder of how good they are."

He stepped down the stairs and left me alone.

At last, I could cry in peace, and it seemed like I cried for hours, as Chariots of Fire continued to run in the background. It was an esophageal, windpiped outpouring. I held a pillow over my head to muffle the sound. It was the hardest I'd cried since I was eight, when I tried to hurdle the couch in my friend Sanjay's basement and erred, resulting with a head slam to the concrete and a dislocated shoulder.

Sometimes our lives seem so fixed and ordained, but if you follow the causation, I only met Matt because I went to his fraternity's rush party; I only went to the party because I knew Chris; I only knew Chris because I was drinking with those execrable Florida Boys in their room; and Chris was only there because a girl from his hall had that crush on him. But-for that girl's crush, or the idiot Florida Boys, I wouldn't have known either of them. It might be that we're constantly brushing up against amazing people, but miss them because we don't pay attention.

Matt's leaving felt fundamentally unfair -- much as he said in the e-mail, like a part of him was dying for me. It didn't seem right that you got to know someone and to care about them, only to have them depart like this.

The parts of movies that break me up have never been the death scenes or the tragedies. It's always the moments of unexpected grace. Wayne Coyne got it right -- happiness makes you cry. Yes, I was sad that Matt was leaving, but what killed me was my good fortune in having him. My mind sped like a flipbook. I've recounted a lot of the scenes and images for you already, but it was more than that -- how relieved and assured I felt when I found him in Penn Station the summer before, or the hours spent in coffeehouses, with our books open, when I'd occasionally put my reading down for a few seconds and think about him.

It's rare that a person gives us an expression of either genuine closure or of love. Matt, that bastard, gave me both at once.

We agreed that when Virgil leaves Dante at the top of Mount Purgatory, his departure seems unjust, and that the rest of the Comedy never feels quite the same.

If you don't know, Virgil is the Virgil -- author of The Aeneid, greatest of the Latin poets. In the Comedy, Dante self-consciously emulates himself after Virgil. The first 63 cantos of the Comedy have aspects of a buddy story: Virgil, the wiser, older, venerated guide, leading Dante down through the levels of hell, and then, more happily, up through the terraces of purgatory until they reach the summit together. Virgil corrects Dante's stupidities, teaches him to be brave when confronted with terrors, and ultimately ushers him to the Earthly Paradise and Dante's true love, Beatrice.

Impliedly, without Virgil, there is no Dante, and there is no story. Not in real life, because if Virgil hadn't been there for Dante to emulate, he might not have written the Comedy; in the story, because without Virgil, Dante wouldn't have had the courage or knowledge to brave his journey.

And the thing is, you know all along that Virgil doesn't get to travel with Dante through the end. It's an accident of birth. In Dante's cosmos, Virgil is a virtuous pagan. He resides forever with Homer, Ovid and Horace, in a kind of knock-off plastic paradise. Because they were born in a time before salvation, they would never reach heaven, regardless of how good they were.

The whole work is a love poem to Beatrice -- the woman who Dante first glimpsed at a May Day party when he was eight and she was nine, who grew up to marry another man, and then died at age 24. Dante spent the rest of his life writing about her. The journey of Dante and Virgil climaxes only when the poet is reunited with his love.

Yt on the cusp of heaven, when Dante again lays eyes on Beatrice, he's intimidated. He turns to his left, with the confidence of a child running to his mother, but when he speaks, Virgil has disappeared. Realizing his friend's departure, Dante's cheeks, already washed in the dew, are stained again in tears.

I never did get those drinks with him.

There was a week between the end of finals and the graduation ceremony. His time was occupied by parties and packing. We had an end-of-semester party at our house before Katie, Michelle and Sam left for the summer. Katie's subletter, a seemingly serious guy named Jacob, who'd just finished his first year of law school, moved in. I attended various meetings and organizational sessions to prepare for my vaunted summer position at the school newspaper.

Matt and Erin had a party at their house. He invited me. I considered going, but I didn't. After his e-mail, it felt like there was nothing that needed to be said. He needed to be with his friends.

I would have been a distraction. This was their time. I didn't want to detract from that.

I woke up early on the day of their graduation. I heard the Next Door Girls through my open window -- the voices of their parents meeting each other, car doors closing, some loud laughter before they left for the ceremony.

Once they departed, I couldn't get back to sleep. I dressed and walked toward campus, in search of coffee and a bagel. The school held commencement on the middle of the quad, somehow managing to arrange seating for several thousand people in that limited space. I expected campus to be a madhouse, but with the commencement underway, it was ghostly. In my two years at the school, I'd never experienced it without constant jostlings and lines. Summer would be different.

Voices from loudspeakers echoed off the storefronts. Rolls of crowd laughter and applause rode out from the quad. My favorite coffeehouse was at ease between the pre- and post-ceremony crowds that flooded it.

Instead of walking home, I went a roundabout route, which allowed the slightest glimpse of the quad and the speaker's dais -- faculty and administrators in their color-coded, nearly medieval ceremonial garb. The commencement speaker was a high-level figure from the Clinton Administration. Remarks were already underway.

I leaned against the base of a tree, feeling particularly unkempt and unshaven so close to the swath of grandparents and younger sisters. Graduating classes were too big to recognize any of the graduates by name. Standing there, peeking through to the crowd, it of course reminded me of Matt's disastrous speech two-and-a-half months earlier.

I felt ashamed, and I smiled.

It was nice knowing that he was in there somewhere -- along with his roommate Erin, Kevin Berger, the editors who first taught me how to write a decent review, and probably a couple of dozen others I knew by name, who were fixtures at parties and meetings, who'd been around for my moments of small triumph and probably for moments of drunken, oblivious shame.

When you're twenty, you think that every talented person you know will go on to great things -- that they have the world at their disposal, and will have boundless careers in law, politics, business, the media.

It's inconceivable that they'll encounter disappointments, blow their opportunities, marry the wrong person, settle into uneasy equilibrium and compromise. On that day, they all seemed so full of promise.

Matt's parents were in there, too. I'd never met them, although I'd seen a picture, and imagined them. Tomorrow they would help him pack, and the next day, they would drive him to D.C., where Matt would work on the staff of a liberal Congressman from Massachusetts. He was entirely too blase about the move. I couldn't tell if he was disappointed, or whether he'd always just assumed that he'd get a job like that, and the offer was as expected as a good grade.

I considered walking back to the house to shower and start my day, but college graduation ceremonies don't last long. I enjoyed the sun, and the smattering of civilians who hovered around me. Well-dressed women with children who couldn't sit still long enough, well-dressed grandparents who didn't go in because they wanted to smoke. When the college president declared them as graduates, they actually did throw their caps in the air, like in a movie. Somewhere inside, Matt was buzzed on cheap champagne, hugging his roommate Erin.

"Are you at home right now?" he said that night on the phone.

"Ha. Yeah." I was lying barefoot on the couch, watching baseball with Chris and Trevor.

"Just go out to your front porch," he said. "I'm like a minute away."

I saw his lit cigarette approach from down the block. I stepped barefoot down to the sidewalk. He was still in a white dress shirt and khakis.

"Hey!" he said. "I'm between parties and you're just a half block out of my way. I couldn't leave without saying good-bye."

"Oh, man," I said. "I hate stuff like saying good-bye."

"I know you do," he said, hugging me around the shoulders. "That's part of why I'm doing it."

"I'm going to call you all the time," I said. "Every time I start getting crazy, I'm going to call."

"Oh, God. So basically, we'll talk five times a day."

"More, hopefully," I said.

"I knew that I should have stayed for a fifth year."

"Fuck. I wish."

We stood there awkwardly. He was drunk and happy and full of energy. I just wanted an excuse to delay his departure.

"And your e-mail, of course, was awesome," I said. "Any time I'm feeling bad, I'm going to take it out and re-read it."

"We all have our moments, I guess. I actually meant it."

"Can I get a cigarette from you before you go?"

He handed me a Marlboro and lit it for me.

"Well," he said. "I need to catch up with everybody. I just wanted to say good-bye."

"I know," I said. "Thanks for stopping by. Seriously."

"Quit it," he said, walking away while still facing me. "I'm going to leave before you say something you'll regret. You know that I love you, you psycho."

He was grinning and wiry and bouncing on his heels. If he hadn't been so ebullient, I might have turned mushy in front of him, and the whole thing would've become a disaster.

"Be good!" he shouted, walking away.

"Never!" I said.

He turned to continue onward, lighting another cigarette. He wheeled his face back and waved. "Bye, Joe! I'll miss you!"

I raised an arm in farewell. He scampered off into the night.