Joe College

Joe College, Part 26

I was too limited to contemplate the word joy in September 2004. I might have claimed euphoria, giddiness, excitement, or maybe overstimulation.

The word doesn't matter. It was deep happiness, contentment and fulfillment for consecutive days, something that I haven't felt before or since. It felt more meaningful the satisfaction of a good day, as if I unlocked a new approach to living, where I loved everybody and everything, and knew that love wherever I stretched.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

zGame01.doc

9/27/04

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mean, there is literally nothing objectively wrong with her in any way.

She's literally objectively perfect. Hot body, pretty face, well spoken, nice as shit. But I don't know this person at all, have never heard of her, and she's addressing me like she's his mom or one of his sisters, like she's got a position of priority to express gratitude about something involving Chris. And I give him this locked-up look -- it wasn't hostile or anything, but it was mild panic or bewilderment, because I didn't want to embarrass him or get ahead of myself or him or the situation, I wasn't even aware enough to feel jealous, I just was literally incapable of understanding what was happening.

I mean, I didn't talk to Amanda for more than three or four minutes. She's roommates with a girl who worked with Chris at a restaurant over the summer. Amanda and Chris met over the summer. They went running together.

She taught him about intervals and speed work. This was how he'd gotten so much faster, how his form and posture had gotten stronger. She'd been coaching him! Stupidly, I thought that it had come naturally or that maybe he'd picked it up from some blog or book.

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

And that fucking body language between them.

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

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

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

And she's like, "Who?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They put me in Katie's room because they didn't want to try to get me up two sets of stairs. They took off my shoes and jeans and tucked me in.

She has a nice comforter than I do, but I woke up smelling like a chick, which is disgusting when you're that hungover.

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

"You were amazing," she said.

I don't remember any of those things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But obviously, I kept worrying.

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

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

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

"I'm coming back!" Matt said.

"Are you serious? Like, law school?"

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

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

"You'll be around, right?"

"Where else would I be?"

"Just making sure," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So we made up and moved on.

Telling him about Chris might have reframed all of that.

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

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

Other people have written that it's exhausting to stay in the closet, but I never felt that way, at least not for myself. It was easy to compartmentalize my gay life from the rest. I know that I'm an unreliable narrator, and you, my reader and my brother, probably know me better than I know myself at this point, but honestly -- compartmentalization was easy!

Partly because I had sympathetic co-conspirators, but even if I hadn't, it didn't feel any different than the other aspects of life, where I tweaked my thinking and behavior based on present company. If I was at the newspaper, I would be gregarious and open, keep tabs on my staff and the day's projects -- basically carry myself as a cool older-brother type; when I was in my English seminars, I would play like a lofty intellectual, choose different words, use different hand gestures, inflect my voice in ways that never would have played in everyday life; when I hung at the bars with frat dudes and beer bros, I'd aim for profane chillness; with my housemates, it was more toward verbal games and hijinks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

zGame02.doc

10/9/04

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The thing is -- and I know I should be a bigger person about this, I'm trying Ringo, I'm tryin real hard -- but Wally was drunk and he looked gay.

He moved like a gay guy. And he was with a couple of other dudes who looked pretty gay. I mean, like, they weren't blowing each other or making out, but it was just like the way they carried themselves, the body language, the way they positioned their shoulders and necks, how their arms moved. If you'd never met them but just spotted them, you'd know.

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

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

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

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

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

"They look very faggoty, though."

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

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

"You don't agree?"

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

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

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

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

They're just guys hanging out."

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

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

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

"Katie or Michelle would murder you if they heard you call people faggots.

Sam and Trevor would rip the shit out of you. I'm being cool about it.

Just don't talk that way."

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

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

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

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

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

"It's cool, man," I said, feeling my heart rate drop and my hands cool.

"You use whatever words you want."

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

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

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

"Hey," I said.

"Hey."

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

"Figures," Chris said.

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck him.

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

Asshole."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I'm just all ... MOTHER FUCK

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

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

There were only so many free nights.

It happened on intervals that were sufficiently unpredictable that getting off with him always felt like a minor event, like a happy surprise.

Usually he'd come to my room unannounced, greet me with the predictable, "Hey," and one of us would make our move. Once in awhile we'd be out together or hanging out in the living room, and we'd trade a quick look, a flash of eye contact signalling me that something would happen later.

There was nothing special about that look, but we always knew what it meant.

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

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

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

That was his adaptation.

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

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

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

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

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

And I couldn't find the exact page, but Henry brings Bon Charles home to stay with him in the summer. He brings him home for the summer for what purpose, exactly?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so on.

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

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

No one said anything. Neil Price didn't give me a knowing look. But several weeks later, when my dreaded secret became stupidly, spectacularly public, a couple of them remembered Absalom, Absalom! week, and mentioned that my apparent anguish in discussing the book made them wonder why.

"Although honestly, you never set off my gaydar. No offense," Neil Price would say.

zGame03.doc

10/14/04

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

She's the only one in the house that I'm able to seriously study with.

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

So I read through them and marked them up. They were good anyway, but I tightened her language and re-organized to emphasize her stronger themes.

There's definitely something to be said about the motivation and drive of people who are the children of immigrants. That's not an idea that's original to me, but wow, is it true. I just look at her, versus myself and the entitled douchebags that I grew up with, and she's so much more driven and grateful for everything she does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And how is Michelle so on top of everything? Should I have done the GRE?

Should I be getting a Ph.D in English? Specialize in queer theory about Faulkner?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Wow. So is it the gay frat?"

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

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

"Why not?"

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

"Is that actually a thing?"

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

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

"At least a couple, yeah."

"You're so prestigious now."

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

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

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

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

"She did!"

"Are you serious?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm starting to think about it."

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

"Yeah, don't do that."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe when they're older. Maybe when they're in their thirties, they get it together."

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

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

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

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

I didn't see him again until my house's Halloween party on Saturday night.

I stayed in on Friday because there was a noon kickoff on Saturday, and if I was waking at nine to hit a couple of tailgates before going to the stadium, I didn't want a hangover.

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm Jack Sparrow," he said.

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

"Of course I haven't seen that movie. Disney? Pirates? Blech," he said.

"Nice fog machine, though. Sweet webs."

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

I hung back and played host to my newspaper friends while Matt circulated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Totally."

"He looks good, right?" I said.

"Just generally?"

"Yeah."

"Sure. He always looked good."

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

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

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

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

"It's an occurrence," I said.

He giggled. "It was obvious that you guys liked each other so much.

Just as friends, I mean. And it was funny to me because you seem so different, yet you obviously loved being around each other."

"I know," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

"Okay, because I feel like we both need a smoke," he said, tossing me his pack and lighting one for himself. He scratched his scalp and regarded me.

"So basically, you guys are in love with each other."

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

"Of course, that not how you'd put it. I'm the one acknowledging it.

You're full-frontal in love with each other, and his mom knows that he's a huge homo and thinks that you're the best thing that ever happened to him, but she can't say anything to him because even she knows he's kind of crazy."

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

"Go along with this. Let's not play word games. If I'm being slightly indelicate, it's because I'm being efficient. We can't talk about this all night. Not right now, with this party raging." Inhale, smoke, exhale.

"But the problem is that he's a basket case. He can't stand it. And you kind of can't stand it either, even if you're not as insane as he is.

There's a part of both of you that just wants this all to go away, but you at least live in reality, whereas he's in bad denial. You're going to have to deal with it, Joe. Some of the stuff you say makes him sound insane."

"Maybe."

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

He's in complete turmoil, Joe."

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

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

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

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

"I know."

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

"Fuck, dude, that sounds awful."

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

"I know," I said.

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

"I don't know," I said.

"Dude, be honest."

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

I want it to take its full course."

"You want to be with him after college."

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

"God," Matt said, "you're hopeless. You know I'm not going to judge you.

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

"I guess."

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

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

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

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

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

"Thanks man. I know."

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

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

We broke our hug and agreed that it was time to go back downstairs to the party. We'd been talking for more than an hour. It was past midnight.

Below, people shouted along to the lyrics of "What's My Age Again," running full flush of Clinton Era nostalgia.

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

"What e-mail?" he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slightly crestfallen that writing that e-mail hadn't been as powerful as receiving it, I asked him to let me bum another smoke and to go downstairs ahead of me. I needed to collect my thoughts, to get back into party mode.

Nervously smoking my cigarette, hands cold and almost shaking, I looked on my bulletin board at that classic picture of me and Chris from the fall before, the two of us sitting on opposite ends of the front porch, looking sweaty and slightly debauched, Chris with an easy grin, me with the glimmer of a glare.

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

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

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

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

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

I would never be so cliche to think that I'm "in love with" a person, but like Matt recognized, that's just a semantic game, a product of insecurity.

I anticipated his facial gestures and verbal tics. I understood the things that pleased him -- movies or songs to suggest, what routes to run, what bagel to buy him (toasted sesame, scallion cream cheese) if I woke with a hangover and walked a couple blocks to the coffee house -- and went out of my way to make him happy. I came home from class or the newspaper and looked forward to seeing him; I was disappointed on nights when he wasn't around.

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

Oh, man, you, my brother, want that kind of story so badly. LOL, right?

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

And if it was doomed from the beginning -- something that I understand better from the process of writing this -- isn't it all still worthwhile?

How many college couples, gay or straight, "end up together"? Almost none -- not in the 2000s, not in our demographic. I was lucky to have him. In my dotage and infirmity, I will think happily of my years with Chris Riis.

He will remain one of my great memories.

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

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

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

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

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

But even then, even at the worst times, when he talked like a crazy person and accused me of wanting to ruin his life, I mostly felt sorry for him.

Angry, hurt, confused -- sure. But he was still my friend; I still loved him as a friend, and above the resentment, I felt pity.

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

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

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

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

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

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