For a long time Andy Trafford was the only person who knew I was gay, and the only guy I'd done anything with. That one night in the summer of our sixteenth year gave me a mental library of jerk-off material. I was a healthy young man in my mid-teens. Conservatively average my jerk-off rate to 2.5 times a day, and in my last two years of high school we're approaching 2,000 masturbation sessions stemming from one incident.
In the end, maybe Andy spared me an upper-middle class "Brokeback Mountain" fiasco stretching into my middle age, or maybe he just lent me enough confidence that when I arrived to college I didn't spend the first couple of years paralyzed.
Whatever thanks I came to owe him, our first encounter had left me in a state of constant lust and denial. Sometimes that energized me, but most of the time it thwarted me. I wouldn't let our rapport return to normal, even after my icy behavior broke. We didn't have the same easy, quick interactions. When I was with him, even in a large group, I found myself glancing his way. My heart picked up. I'd get slightly aroused, which surprised and embarrassed me. To counterbalance that, my demeanor with Andy became formal and ill-at-ease, as if he were an older relative that I didn't want to offend.
Hold out until after graduation, I thought. Push this shit aside and focus on the things that matter more, I thought -- like your SAT score, your admissions essays and your jump shot.
A few weeks before commencement, with our college decisions made and just a couple of AP exams left to resolve, the situation began to decompress. There was a house party when Harvard admitted our friend Sanjay from the wait list (the bastard) and after some beers I tackled Andy on the back lawn. I was goofing around like I would with any other friend, but the beers made me courageous and I badly wanted to touch him, just to feel what it was like to press him against me again. We wrestled sloppily in front of a bored audience. I threw a little wood safely inside my jeans. Andy put his hand against my face and shoved me off of him. Later that night the two of us sat around a patio table with a group, where we made eye contact and smirked. Eventually he rolled his eyes and shook his head. Instead of being unsettled, I laughed.
Andy had been waiting all along.
After commencement and the graduation open houses, Andy organized a weekend at his parents' beach house. Like my own dad, Andy's father is a partner in a large Manhattan law firm, except that Mr. Trafford bought a beachfront plot on Fire Island back in the 80s and constructed a weekend house when we were in elementary school. If you've never lived in New York, you might equate Fire Island to a gay resort, which isn't exactly the case. A couple of the island's villages cater to a gay population, but the island is a strip 30 miles long, with the gay communities just part of it.
Andy's beach house put my own family's Vermont cabin to shame. The living room has a big fireplace and sixteen-foot ceilings, with tall windows facing south to the Atlantic. There are six bedrooms and two tiers of decks overlooking the beach and surf. I have great memories of childhood trips to that house, which I made two or three times each summer going back to when I was a little kid. Andy's dad would hold me on his shoulders as waves came to shore and washed over us. The island has a ban on cars and motor vehicles, leaving everyone to travel by foot and bicycle after the ferry trip from Long Island. As a kid, visiting had the feel of a complete, whimsical escape.
Thirteen people came to the house for our unsupervised party -- seven guys and six girls. We caravanned from our homes in Westchester County, then took the ferry out to the island, arriving at Andy's place late in the afternoon. Conspicuously, nobody picked rooms, and our luggage sat piled and organized in the kitchen.
Andy and I weren't the only two with outstanding concerns toward each other -- we were just the only ones completely undercover.
A few of us threw on our swimming trunks and ran to the water. In mid-June the Atlantic stayed chilly, and a cool breeze blew off the ocean. Andy and a couple of the girls took charge of grilling dinner while a group of us played football on the sand. I made out the shape of him, with a beer bottle in hand, leaning over the balcony railing and watching us from a distance.
People started drinking at dinner. Through older siblings, theft from parents, and bribing shady-looking strangers at strip malls, we built a collection of light beers, specialty beers, hard liquors, Boone's Farm and schnapps. We were 18 and legally adults, but an air of the illicit underlined that entire weekend, especially for the girls. I'm not sure who said what to whose parents in order for all of us to be there; the mere fact of our collection was an accomplishment.
By eleven at night, voices were raised to antic levels of excitement, as if we were finally and truly celebrating the end of a battle. One of the girls -- Bethany, 5'2 and unhealthily skinny -- had become sick and passed out on the couch. I sat on the deck in sweatshirt and khaki shorts, sharing a blanket and a cigarette with a girl named Danielle, who had hooked up with our friend Sanjay in the past and was hoping to do so again that night. Cigarettes were new for me. When I was a varsity athlete in three sports -- cross country, basketball and baseball -- I treated my physical condition seriously. Post-graduation, smoking was an act of rebellion against the scheduling tyranny that organized sports imposed on my high school years. I pledged that I would not lift weights or run once that summer, and cigarettes signaled my determination in this project.
Danielle and I were talking sentimental about our friends and the seemingly imminent departure for college. Andy stepped out and joined us.
"I like this song as much as the next guy," he said, "but the chorus is killing me."
Through the screen door, "Laid" by James was playing: "Ah, you think you're so pretty," our friends inside enthused, followed by a round of lung-busting screeches and gravelly screams. Danielle doubled over in drunk amusement, dropping cigarette ash on our blanket.
The ocean's white noise gave us a volume license where neighbors were concerned. It would take more than sing-along screeching to disturb anyone.
Danielle finished the cigarette. The three of us stayed on the porch until Danielle complained that she was getting cold. "I think I need to go back inside," she said. "If you want another cigarette I can get you one."
"Nah," I said. "I'll hang out here with Andy for awhile."
"Why? Are you guys going to smoke up?" She turned to Andy. "Did you bring pot?"
"Yeah," he said, "but it's not for tonight. We'll save it for tomorrow."
She kissed him on the cheek.
"C'mon, dude," I said once Danielle closed the sliding door. "Let's go for a walk."
"I knew it," he said. "You've had something up your sleeve all day. I could tell."
"Yeah, my forearms," I said, "but that's not why we should go for a walk."
"This is a set-up. I know it," he said. "You're going to kill me and dump the body in the ocean. Or maybe you'll just pull the rug out from under me and hurt my feelings again."
"Nah, man," I said, and glanced through the door to our laughing, screaming, dancing friends, just to make sure no one else spied me in a moment. "That's not what I want to happen at all, but I guess it's what I want to talk about. I'm so sorry for that, man. I've felt like shit over that." By nature I don't get serious -- not about my own life, at least, not where emotion or wounding is concerned. "Seriously, man," I said, "we'll just walk out for a second, just down to the water and back. I don't want to head out of here without being at peace with you, and I don't want anyone else to walk in on the middle of me saying ridiculous stuff."
"It's okay," Andy said. "I was going to go with you anyway. I don't think you'd actually kill me. Not on purpose."
He slapped my shoulder. We walked barefoot down the wooden stairs and the public path leading to the beach. It was overcast; we didn't have moonlight, and the only other house with lights on at that hour was hundreds of yards away. The sand was cold between my toes. We stood close while we walked. With other guys, I wouldn't have put so much importance in that.
"I guess," I said, my voice sounding pinched and high, "that I feel like I've needed to settle up with you for a long time is all, and I'm sorry if I handled it-"
"Look, man, I appreciate where you're going, and I don't mean to cut you off, but check that shit out," he said, pointing eastward down the beach. Alarmed, I looked out and squinted my eyes.
While I stared down shore he grabbed the back of my neck and pulled my face down to his. He planted a kiss on my lips, just a dry kiss, but he held the back of my head tightly, such that our noses pressed together. My instinct told me to pull away, but after two tenths of a second, my nervous system went to butter. When he pulled his lips from mine I stared, arms motionless at my sides.
"You see what I did?" He looked like he'd scored a brilliant argument at my expense. My boner was blocking my voicebox, yes, but I was otherwise so surprised and giddy that I lacked the free neural pathways necessary for communication. "I just said to myself, 'Fuck it, who cares,' and so I kissed you. Running the risk that you'll turn to stone or a fucking pillar of salt and not speak to me for the next eight or ten weeks, but really, we'll be gone soon, so what's the worst that can happen."
"Yes," I said. "That was good."
"You articulate bastard," he said. "I'm actually pretty interested in hearing what you have to say, it's just that I already know that you acted like a motherfucker, just like I know you've been tormenting yourself for the fact that you're pretty gay. We'll go over all that later, because I need to talk about those things too. I just thought it would feel great to kiss you, which is something I've been wanting to do for a long fucking time now. Nobody said I've got good taste."
I had a few inches on him, so I needed to lean down in order to kiss him properly. This time when we kissed I inched ahead and parted my lips. First the wet interiors of our lips slid, and then Andy flicked his tongue against my mouth in a pair of short licks.
"Dude, why do you taste like fruit?" he said.
"Danielle has Schnapps, and I drank some with her."
"You taste like cherry, Joe."
"I think it was sour apple or something."
Andy leaned forward to kiss me again. He rubbed his tongue on my lower lip. "Yeah, you taste like sour apple and cigarette. Fucking Danielle." With his next kiss, he kept hold of my lower lip in his mouth. He tugged at it lightly with his teeth. I held my hands over his shoulder blades and hugged his body against mine. Andy liked this. The tension of his bones and muscles, and the heat of his body, felt good in the chill air. I leaned into him with my hard-on. He sighed through his nose mid-kiss, which I myself liked, the feel of Andy breathing on my upper lip. He emitted a short, whimpering sound and rested his head on my shoulder. Our saliva evaporated cold on the skin around my lips.
"We need to be roommates tonight," Andy said. "I'm taking the awesome room. I don't care if I have to throw cold water over Sanjay and Danielle, that's going to be my room."
"Sure, man," I said. "I'll room with you."
"You'll still have to look at me and speak to me for the rest of the trip, and possibly for the indefinite future, too. I know how hard that will be for you." He squeezed the top of my ass and pulled me against him. "Do you think you can handle that, or will you act like a retard again?"
"I'll be able to handle it. I'm better now."
"I bet this isn't the conversation you thought we were going to have."
"I thought I was going to apologize a lot, probably even cry for awhile, and tell you why you're the greatest guy ever and I acted like a dick."
"So you lost your shit after it happened. Maybe we should be lucky that all you did was avoid me, and that we don't live in the Bible Belt, where maybe you would have done something nuts." He reached his hand into the top of my shorts until his fingers were at the head of my cock. "You could have talked about it. We've been good friends since we were five. It's not like I was going to make fun of you or try to out you to anybody." He pushed his hands deeper into my shorts fondled my dick with a couple of fingers. I was leaning hard against him with my arms still wrapped around his shoulders. "Christ, you're leaking pre-cum like crazy, dude. We should probably stop for now." He looked back at the house. "I'm scared that you're going to shoot your load right here, or else that someone will come out and see us, or that you'll have to walk back through the house with a boner that won't stop."
Andy suggested that I stay outside and collect myself. He'd go ahead of me, with a report that I'd become sick and was walking it off. It'd give me an excuse to run upstairs, claim dibs on the awesome bedroom, and crash for awhile. Andy wasn't sure when he'd be able to join me given hosting duties and the intensity of our drunk friends, but he'd jump away at the nearest chance.
It took awhile to deflate my hard-on. I walked in front of the ocean and let the waves run up to my ankles. At best I expected Andy to grill me like a prosecutor, and then begrudgingly accept my apology. He was too socially smooth to reject me outright or cause a scene, but I wouldn't have blamed him if the response had been unimpressed. Instead of all that angst, I hugged myself at the shoulders and laughed at the cold seawater that rose past my ankles
I walked back to the house, brushed the sand off my feet, and retrieved my bag from the kitchen.
"You're looking rough, killer," said my best friend Rick. "I think you need a shot of Jack."
"No shots," I said. "I just puked up my burgers outside."
"You haven't even been drinking that much. When did you become such a puss?"
I muttered and walked past him. They were all too drunk to notice that I was faking, and given how intensely Andy had surprised me, my balance and body language were sloppy in their own right.
Andy wanted the two of us to take the room with the king-sized bed, private bathroom, and skylight. It had windows facing out to the ocean and a little private balcony. I dropped my luggage, stripped down to my boxers and T-shirt, turned on the TV, and waited.
Sometime after two, Andy came in with his bag over his shoulder. He locked the door. "They're pissed that we're taking this room, but fuck 'em," he said. "Host's prerogative. They're all too drunk to think through anything."
I was reclined back in the bed, soft under covers. Andy's appearance and his grin gave me a quick hard-on. Speech wasn't coming smoothly for me. He brushed his teeth and removed his contacts, then unbuttoned his shirt. I watched the outline of his abs and ribs and chest muscles through the shirt's opening.
"It'd be more romantic if you undressed me," he said, as he dropped his shirt, "but you're already in bed and looking pretty comfortable." He dropped his shorts. Through white boxers, I could see that Andy's dick already was at full mast, too.
At that point in his life, Andy may have had less body fat than any other guy I'd ever see naked. He ran and swam so much, it seemed like every time he moved, cords and muscles tensed visibly beneath his skin. His navel was pulled into him; his hip bones stuck out just slightly. The sun had freckled his shoulders and upper arms, and left a slight, dusty tan on his skin.
He posed long enough for me to swallow a good look of his disrobed torso and the outline of his cock pressing against the top of his boxers, then he threw himself onto the bed.
Andy's his mouth was all over mine. The one previous time we fooled around, I was frightened to look him in the face and hadn't wanted to kiss him, since the idea seemed too gay. Now it seemed like his tongue was intent to do battle against mine, and I was happy to give him the win. We breathed hot breath into each other's mouths. He paused mid-kiss with his lower lip pressed against mine and his tongue soft in my mouth, and just held it for a couple of seconds. I opened my eyes and looked down at his face, and held tight at his lower back.
After our aerobic kissing, Andy extracted himself. He got on his knees. He pulled up at my white T-shirt, and I lifted my arms until it slipped off. We hugged each other bare-chested. He wrapped his legs around mine and put his hand over my chest. Through the layers of our boxers I felt his penis hard and loose pressed at my thigh.
"I'm testing you," he said. "I want to make sure that you're not going to freak out again. So far, so good. You're making eye contact. You seem to be having fun with the kissing. Doesn't seem like you're having a nervous breakdown."
"I missed you a lot, man."
"That's all your fault," he said. "I didn't go anywhere, and I missed you too. Until you tried to wrestle me a few weeks ago, I didn't think this would happen again."
He'd been lying on top of me, but then he slid off, lying curled at my side, both of us still in our boxers. He kissed me below the ear and at the neck. He pressed a finger against my nipple and rubbed it in a light circular motion then reached down and pulled down my shorts. I lifted my hips and looked at the seven-incher rising out of my black bush of pubic hair, and kicked down my shorts.
"Man, Joey, you sure do have a lot of pre-cum," he said. He stroked the underbelly of my cock, as if it were a pet that might bite. He put his finger over my purplish dickhead and spread my pre-cum over it.
"Is that not normal?" I asked.
"I don't know," he said. "I do it too, just not as much as you." He shifted his hips so that I could see the wet spot in the center-top of his red boxers.
"Do you want to take them off yet?"
"You can go ahead," he said.
I slid them down by the hems. My face was over his stomach as I dropped his shorts. His dick plunked against his belly with a slight slapping sound. Andy arched his lower back, his dick pink and quivering and tense, as if he were fucking the air. I was crouched sideways over him, with my dick and butt in profile. He placed a hand on the cheek of my ass.
"Have you been doing squat thrusts or something?"
"Ha. Noticeable?"
"I remember it pretty clearly from last time, and I was checking it out after every practice last fall, so yeah, I guess. Looks good."
I straddled over him above the hips. My balls draped onto his and the bases of our dicks touched. Andy covered his eyes with his elbows and laughed. "Shit, you have the potential to make some guy at college really happy," he said, "as long as you stay cool."
"I'll be better," I said.
He tugged at my arm and pulled me back down next to him. We laid parallel with my dick against his hip. He gave me a quick kiss on the lips. His dick was about the same length as mine, but it looked huge and hot rising out of his thick copper-colored pubes. For awhile we just laid there like that, lit by the lamp next to the bed. Turned on as I felt, lying with his body nudged next to mine, my mind somewhat clouded, and I felt myself starting to doze. A girl's laugh sounded from the hallway.
"God, you are fucking hot, though," Andy said softly. "Maybe I'm just a sucker for your face."
I put my face at the crook of his neck and shoulder and sniffed in, kissing him at the shoulder. I slid down and sucked on his nipple, rubbing my tongue around the circumference. He arched his back and moved his hips up and down, again fucking the air at some invisible body. His body looked so good, and he was so un-self conscious about showing it off, that the sight of his dick and hips thrusting at nothing was a huge turn-on. I licked the palm of my left hand and pulled softly at his cock while keeping my mouth at his nipple. Andy moaned and held tight at my shoulders, then rubbed his hand through my hair like he wanted to mess it as severely as possible.
"Keep going like that and I'm going to cum," he said.
"Do you want to cum?"
"Just keep going."
I slowed the pace and squeezed tight at his cock. My thumb muscle was beginning to ache. I was lightly dry-humping at his tight, lightly haired thigh. My pre-cum lubricated my movements against him. My face and chest were sweating now, and I felt him sweat against me. It smelled good right then. I took my mouth off of him and put my head at the side of his chest; I could hear his heart under his muscle and bones. Otherwise the sound was of our breathing and the wet, squishy friction of my spit-licked hand against his cock.
Andy made some quick thrusts of his hips before he shot off. "Oh, fuck, Joe," he said, hugging tight to my head. His cum shot hard out of him, high up his chest, almost to where my face rested. The second shot went almost as far, and the third and fourth dribbled out of him. I picked up the odor of Andy's jizz, something like a chlorinated pool combined with mushrooms.
"Do you want me to get something to clean it up?" I said.
"Ah, fuck it," he said, pulling my face back up to kiss me. My chest pressed on his; Andy's cum was slick on my chest and I wasn't even grossed out by it. The notion made me feel even hotter, if anything. He held onto my hand. I pushed my face against his until our teeth clicked, our eyebrows touched, our noses pressed at each other. My free hand, I rested at his lower back, then down to cup the left cheek of his smooth, toned ass. Neither of us had shaved that day, so when we kissed my black stubble scraped against his auburn stubble. I wondered if this sanded down our faces, and if the next morning we'd meet our friends looking like we'd scrubbed with sandpaper, and I didn't even care. Their hangovers would impede them from questioning.
"Dude." He pulled back from me with his lips full and his dimples drawn. "I might try to go down on you. What do you think?"
"When I'm nice to people and make eye contact with them, I get blow jobs."
"That seems like a good first lesson," he said. "I know it's not romantic for me to announce it this way, but I'm not sure what it'll be like. I might stop right away."
"Like, 'Oh, balls, Andy's fellatio etiquette is for shit.'"
"Shh," he said. "Somebody might hear you."
"They're all too drunk that they wouldn't remember it in the morning."
"Shh," he said. "Just shut the fuck up while I try."
He already was sliding his body down mine. Even though he'd already shot, his hard-on was still in effect. He put his face even with my dick, pulling the erection away from my body, practically putting his eye up against it. Looking it over, he was still jerking himself off, lying on his side with his hips facing toward me. He put his closed lips against the base of my cockhead and flicked it with his tongue. Even that preliminary gesture felt better than I thought, and it sent a tingle down my hips. He parted his lips and took the top of my dick into his mouth, working it over with his tongue for a few seconds. I breathed through my hips and lifted my hips off the sheets. Andy pulled harder on his own dick while he kept wrapping his tongue around the top of mine. He began to thrust his own hips; his stomach muscles clenched and unclenched.
"Is that okay?"
"Yeah, feels great, man," I said. "I can do play-by-play if you want."
"Shh," he said.
He slid my rod back into his mouth and continued his own intense masturbation. He moved his head to the side, rubbing my dick at the inside of his cheek. The spark he caused ran down from my stomach to the end of my dick. My neck felt weaker. I kept my eyes on Andy's dick, pink and wet and sensitive, his pubes looking matted up and tangled around it. I let out a tense, shaky sigh, and felt a tremble down my thighs.
"Now I'm fucking your dimple from the interior," I said in a voice meant to mimic a sports commentator's.
He interrupted the blow job to laugh. I looked down to his smile, and the purple, spit-shined head of my cock that he held next to his face.
Practically without warning, a line of semen shot out of me. "Fuck!" I shouted I arched my back and lifted my hips from the sheets. The involuntary sharpness and intensity reminded me of getting tickled. I thrust my hips a couple more times and watched the rope of jizz stretch out of my dick. Andy pumped at my penis, rubbing the semen that hit his thumb against me as a lubricant. Even though I'd just ejaculated, his continued rubbing felt great. "Sorry man," I said, laughing, "I didn't know that was coming."
"That was just, like, spontaneous?"
"I didn't know it was about to happen."
Feeling the need to clean myself off, I leaned over and wiped my chest and stomach with the nearest available cloth, which happened to be Andy's boxers lying on the floor next to the bed. "Guess my mom won't be doing my laundry this week," he said. I tossed the boxers halfway across the room. Andy held my hand again and curled up next to me. We were full-boned, but it was late and we were both pretty exhausted. Plus, it just felt nice to wrap around with him like that. I gave him a nice little kiss on the cheek, which segued to a peck on the lips, and then a few minutes of making out, before I faded off and went to sleep with him.
We spent three more days at that beach house, two more nights sharing that room. Nobody suspected a thing. After that, we had eight weeks before leaving to our respective colleges.
Andy was one of my best friends going back years, and despite the intense, short-lived sexual chemistry, I never stopped classifying him as more than that. The physical stuff made us closer, and we were probably more into the intimate affections -- the making out and sleeping on each other -- than other guys go through at first, but at no point did I quite think of him as a boyfriend, or consider myself in love with him. He'd forgiven me the coldheartedness I directed to him after our first night together, but my previous standoffishness left a ceiling for his confidence in me. In the weeks before leaving our hometown for college, the two of us had a blast.
Neither of us worked that summer. I have two younger brothers -- Rob, the fourteen-year-old, and Evan, the eleven-year-old. Rob was away at camp in Maine, but I was assigned to drive twenty minutes every day to retrieve Evan from his day camps for soccer and swimming. Until around 4 p.m. on weekdays, I was a free man. Mark came to my parents' house most weekday mornings. Sometimes we hung out in the pool like normal, or sat around and played video games, but most of the time we were upstairs in my bedroom, or down in the basement on the couch in front of the TV. He was really into affection, and I guess we both were. He curled and cuddled against me; he liked having his arms over my neck and shoulders, kissing at my neck and nuzzling his nose at my chin. I loved the attention, I admit, and it didn't take much for either of us to get turned on to the point of blowing our wads. We talked while we hung off each other, mostly about our friends, or bands, or speculating about what could happen in college.
Andy would move across the country to Berkeley. My destination was in the Midwest. Lower-rung Ivies had accepted us both, and the premier ones rejected us. Stanford and Berkeley had always been Andy's first choices, but Stanford nixed him while Berkeley sent the golden ticket.
I was deciding between Dartmouth or Penn until I made my visits. Those two campuses proved incredibly irritating, and a dark horse won my heart.
"I can foresee you getting impatient with too much structure, and with more time around sort of high-strung kids from the Tri-State area," my guidance counselor said. "All of your finalists are superb schools. Toss out the rankings and go where you'll be happy. Too many people find themselves miserable and perform poorly because they picked schools that were terrible matches. Unless we're talking about Harvard or Yale -- which are almost impossible to refuse -- this is more like dating, where chemistry and intangibles count for a lot. Doing what you want is always the best plan."
As usual, my parents thought I was making my decision more complicated than necessary: "You said Penn seemed miserable," my mom said, "and you used the phrase 'Potemkin Village' for Dartmouth. That was a proud moment in my life. I don't know why we're still talking about it. You know where you want to go, and I want what you want, so go. I've said all along that the Ivy label is overrated, but you thought I was just trying to make you feel good in case of rejection."
So I made my choice and never looked back.
What wasn't to love about our life during that summer? I was a free man about to leave for college, with an adorably attractive guy who liked to strip down and roll around in my bed while we were safely home alone.
"I was thinking about something the other day," Andy said to me in early August, following a duel with my boner. "Remember what Slaton said after that game where you scored 28 points or whatever?"
The previous January, the varsity basketball team played a country day school from near Scarsdale. They crushed us. They came from one of those schools that -- in addition to drawing the five-figure-tuition crowd fighting for admission to Harvard -- ran a renowned basketball program, the kind that recruited kids from the Bronx with athletic futures at Division 1A programs. We were down 32 points at the half; the only realistic goal was to end the game with our heads held high.
I wasn't much of a basketball player -- a small forward competent off the bench, I could be relied on for a couple rebounds and assists, about six points a game, and stability at the free-throw line. This made me content. But in the second half of the game against that country day school, with our defeat assured and their greenest juniors and a couple sophomores on the court, I elevated to a different place. I'd made a pair of field goals in the first half, but suddenly I was possessed. I couldn't miss! Shot after shot rolled off my fingers in wicked arcs, and (plifff!) nothing but net. I was barely aware of my teammates' enthusiasm or the crowd or the momentum behind what I was doing -- fueled by instinct, detached from the outcome, feeling no passion, it was like I tapped into an unused part of my brain, a new trick of the meditative religions or whatnot.
"Dammit, Joe," our coach, Mr. Slaton, said afterward, "if you were this great when it mattered, I might even like you a little."
In addition to being my basketball coach, Mr. Slaton taught AP History, and he loved me. I laughed at the comment but he gave me a look that wasn't entirely joking. He wanted me to hear something, at least as pertained to my athletic performance: I was great when it didn't matter, lackluster when it did, and diffident in the clutch.
I'd done this before: gone four-for-four in a doomed baseball game (varsity shortstop -- my fielding was consistently good) but struck out with the game-tying run on third; made a quick trio of three-pointers when we already were up by 12 with just a couple minutes left. I was even a little proud of my fickle performances, like it was one of those charming quirks or symptoms of non-conformist genius. Personally, I like that A-Rod puts up huge numbers over a season yet infuriates Yankees fans by not being heroic on demand -- as if somehow that diminished his excellence. My own unevenness was never premeditated. I certainly never under-exerted for a game. It just came in extremes.
"You more or less admitted before that you decided to discipline yourself and wait until after graduation," Andy said, "like that somehow makes sense. Basically, you ran out the clock until you thought it wouldn't matter. Now you should probably wait until retirement before getting touched by another dude. Too many other obligations between now and then. Cut down on the distractions."
At this point you might be suspecting that my family was religious or conservative, or that there had been a childhood incident that left me uneasy about my sexuality. In reality, my parents were lapsed Catholics, politically progressive and open-minded; the only childhood scars were on my shins.
We lived in a small town in Westchester County just north of New York. It's a commuting suburb for investment bankers and Wall Street lawyers. People were well-off but not ostentatious -- bizarrely, while we were growing up, my friends and I considered ourselves gritty, relative to peers in Manhattan, Scarsdale, and the more high-pressure suburbs of Long Island. We didn't drive sports cars to school or have permanent house staff or anything like that, so we believed that we were relatively blue-collar. In reality, our lifestyles were more a reflection of parental reticence about how you displayed affluence.
Our high school had a well accepted gay-straight alliance, and a half-dozen kids in our graduating class of 150 had -- either tacitly or explicitly -- come out of the closet. I'm sure they had rough social moments, but I don't remember any of those kids being serious outcasts or openly bullied. The word "fag" wasn't uttered openly or in formal company -- in most crowds it go the same response as the N-word. I grew up in a culture that couldn't have been more supportive of gay kids.
The anxiety about this part of my life came from someplace different, and so far as I can tell, was all internal. I hadn't grown up thinking of myself as gay, although there had been many times -- maybe going back to fifth grade -- where I felt a vague closeness with certain of my male friends, always the ones who happened to be athletic and good-looking. There had been moments when I liked touching them, not in a sexual way, but throwing my arm around their neck at odd moments or wrestling around with them. This hadn't aroused me -- it just felt warm and good. I liked holding onto them and the faint smell of them. Early in high school, there had been times when I turned self-conscious and clumsy around certain upperclassmen who were considered popular and good-looking. I suppose part of my reptile brain had been attracted to them, and my consciousness wasn't sure how to behave with that.
When Andy and I found each other, the photo stopped being fuzzy, but even then, it made no sense that I could be attracted to other guys. I treated it like any part of our body or personality that we can't control and won't embrace -- a bad temper, a predisposition to seizures, a genetic disease. I began with the denial and then moved to anger: What had I done to deserve this? I couldn't think of an upside. I associated homosexuality with weakness and with people on the margins; they were punchlines on sitcoms and Jay Leno monologues; awkward, promiscuous disasters with interests far from my own. The gay world didn't have anything to do with me or my life, I concluded. I liked sports and read biographies about generals and presidents; I liked winning things, and occasionally breaking stuff. I wanted to be an all-around guy, an alpha. What mattered most was that I was taken seriously, that I won when I wanted to win, and was liked by friends and strangers.
Add to that the sense that I'd be letting people down. My parents loved me and were proud of me. My middle brother Rob and I had always been in conflict (and not necessarily in the nature of a rowdy sibling rivalry) but my youngest brother Evan tracked my life with more enthusiasm than I did. After my sporting events, his voice frequently was hoarse; if I sat down while he watched TV, he went to lengths explaining what I'd missed. He would find small excuses to talk to me and hit me with questions about school, sports and movies. That kid loved me and idealized me, even in the times when I didn't deserve it. How's an eleven-year-old kid going to deal with the news that his older brother is into guys' boners? I wasn't about to find out.
My past coldness toward Andy might originated because I blamed him for holding the door open -- or a misguided belief that he'd changed me into a person that I didn't want to be.
"Just shut the fuck up and put yourself in my shoes," Andy said. "There I was, sixteen years old, been jerking off since I was twelve to that one shot of Tom Cruise's dick in 'All the Right Moves' and Ewan McGregor's full-frontals and every men's swimming and diving meet I can find on TV, because I'm too paranoid to look anything up on the internet in my parents' house. And it pretty much sucks, and I can't talk about it with anybody, and I've got no idea what the hell to do with myself, when it turns out that somebody I know is also into dudes. But it gets even better because it's not just some random dude from the line at McDonald's, but you, who I've known forever. It was like immediately I went from this bucket of shit to a fucking treasure chest. Then you tossed it all. I just needed somebody real in my life that I could talk to. Getting off with you would've been awesome, but I mostly needed you as a friend. I didn't even get that, because you were such a basket case."
"Okay, genius," I said, "but maybe you should think of it like this. Was it worse than if nothing happened in the first place? We know I mishandled it, and we know how sorry I am, and that we missed out on a ton of good stuff. Still, after that, you knew you weren't alone, and now you've had a summer of awesome blow jobs, making out and sleepovers. Plus, you held some cards, too. A couple of words and an arm around my neck, and I probably would've folded for you. I think that you've exaggerated the extent of my sucking."
He looked down at my face, which was on a pillow on his lap on the couch in my basement. "You act like a bonkers little asshole sometimes," he said, "but then, when you're affectionate, you become so sweet and vulnerable."
"God, Andy, stop making me feel like a pussy."
The college departures came without fireworks. We had another party at another summer house -- this time in the Adirondacks -- which left me with a hangover so wicked that Rick pulled over the car twice on the drive home in order to address my vomiting needs.
On a less gastrointestinal note, I thereafter had a last night with Andy, where we both shot our loads three times and didn't get any proper sleep.
"I think I'll miss your cock," he said in a moment of passion.
"What about my personality?"
"That, less so."
"Likewise, motherfucker," I said, pulling at his hard-on before kissing him for a few minutes. "Actually, I'm pretty lucky with how this shook out. I really love you man. Not in the gay way, just in a friend way."
"Likewise, motherfucker," he said.
A couple days later, Andy departed for Berkeley, where he would become every gay guy's ideal boyfriend: Pleasant and outgoing and confident and kind. In college he started running triathlons; he was immaculately groomed; he volunteered in progressive political campaigns. He would come out of the closet at the end of his sophomore year. Phi Beta Kappa in history, a summer abroad in Italy.
Don't worry -- Andy will be back more than once before this story ends. I'm not sharing his fate because we're saying good-bye to him. I just wanted you to know how he turned out, so that every time I make a stupid-assed decision, go days without shaving, ingest unhealthy substances, or pull an all-nighter because I'm freaking out about nonsense, we can stop and consider Andy Trafford our role model.
My parents and I shipped belongings to my own destination and flew into the nearest airport. My youngest Brother Evan came along; middle-brother Rob remained in the custody of a family friend.
My new roommate and I spoke on the phone three times that summer. His name was Sam Frost. He was from Ottawa and had a British accent. A British accent makes even the most pointless remark sound either insightful or gently mocking, and in our phone chats, I found myself anxious to make a good impression. He seemed funny, smart and considerate, but whether my impression was accurate or just the automatic product of his accent, I couldn't tell. I knew that Sam and his family had arrived to school two days ahead of us, and that he'd eagerly volunteered to supply the television and the rug and the futon.
My parents and I arrived to the new dorm room in early afternoon. We'd already had a long day; I was bickering with my mother. The room I found was smaller and more spartan than I expected. It was stuffy despite an open window, and hot in the late-August heat. A small television was set up on a dresser, some bedsheets and a comforter were scattered on the lower bunk, and the room seemed cluttered with half-empty boxes, stacks of books and piles of clothes.
A note rested on an empty desk, with capitalizations employed as shown here:
DEAR JOE,
If you read this, welcome to our awesome new room. I'm out to lunch with my parents and haven't had the time to organize. Please forgive the mess. Reorganize at your convenience. Incinerate if necessary. Look forward to meeting and catching up soon.
Best regards, SAM FROST