Joe College

INTRODUCTION: I'm trying an experiment at http://jpm770.blogspot.com. Visit, and I'll update you when a new chapter posts here. I may talk about other things, but probably not that often.

Joe College, Part 15

I was the first awake. I hate that. What is not fun: being the last to go to sleep and the first to wake up. You never miss anything, but you spend too much time wishing other people were around.

A slightly pudgy guy with a blond goatee had passed out on our couch. He wasn't sleeping very soundly, because when he saw me, he flashed eye contact, then rolled on his side.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey," he said. "Sam said I could stay on your couch."

"Why?"

"Because my roommate is an anal-retentive fuck and he gets mad when I come home late."

I wanted him to leave but I didn't want to be the bad guy: "Might not be a terrible idea to take off," I said. "We live with chicks here. One of them might get spazzy."

He was gone by the time I finished making coffee. It was still raining outside. We didn't have anything to eat. I put on a poncho and walked five minutes to a bagel place. I bought a dozen, then went to a party store for bottles of Gatorade. I wanted to be a hero for the house.

The post-drunk shame is a documented phenomenon that I previously thought was unique to me. You're never sure where you should blame yourself. Aside from extreme examples like Chris Riis's vomit infernos, I've rarely mentally criticized someone for actions taken while drunk. It's a scary thing, though, to wake up and question the agency over your own actions.

I remembered things clearly, obviously. I already wrote about them. I kissed Katie, and then Matt was gone. I went to the front porch, and then Katie was gone. Chris fingered my face on the front porch. Thirty minutes later, I was sprawled on our freshly vacuumed living room floor, devouring mushroom pizza and chugging water while we all laughed hysterically about something stupid. There, in a nutshell, was my night.

I guess it was lucky that Katie was the first one up. She came into the kitchen seemingly spry. I didn't look at her directly. She poured a cup of black coffee.

"Did you get these?" she said, pointing at the bagels.

"Yeah."

"You're the best." She sat at the table and flipped through my copy of the Times.

"Do you have Sunday Styles?"

"Yeah," I said. "You shouldn't read it first. You should always read Week in Review first."

"Why?"

"Obviously, because it's where you learn the most. Then the features sections are like your dessert."

"Interesting," she said.

"Like, you never start out reading about designer dogs, and then decide you should read about war crimes. No. War crimes first, then designer dogs."

I slid my copy of Sunday Styles across the table anyway. I didn't look at her.

"How are you feeling?" she said.

"Surprisingly okay," I said. I pretended to read the Book Review. "I bought Gatorade, too."

"You win housemate of the day."

"Thank you."

We didn't say anything for about five minutes. Then I looked at her and said, "So..."

She closed her eyes and shook her head. "Don't worry about it."

"I'm not worried. I just want to make sure you're not worried."

"It's okay," she said. She was embarrassed, more than I was. "We were both drunk. I didn't know what I was doing."

I'd never seen her flustered like that.

"It's not like anyone did something wrong."

"No, I know."

"It's just with all of us living here, I don't want anything to be awkward."

She looked at me like she was having a conversation with herself. "Maybe we should go out to the porch."

"Why?"

"Just because."

It was in the 40s and rainy still. I'd walked in my shorts to get bagels and Gatorade. I didn't mind the cold. Our cups of coffee steamed.

"Please don't repeat this," she said.

"Okay."

"I just don't want you to have the wrong idea."

"Uh oh."

She spoke in a discreet half-whisper. "You may have picked up on this before, but Trevor and I have spent some time together."

"Oh, really?"

"Nothing serious. We've never formally dated."

"Okay."

"But stuff happened between us last year. And this year a little bit. Nothing too crazy."

"Okay."

"He was dancing in the living room last night with a skankwhore. And it was like, you were right there."

"And you wanted to make him jealous."

"I don't want you to think I used you."

"No offense taken," I said.

"You're good looking and smart and cool to be around. Honestly, you're probably better looking and smarter and cooler than Trevor."

"Let's not get carried away."

"I should probably be using Trevor to make you jealous." She was joking; she was relieved, too.

"No thank you. I don't want to be in Dawson's Creek."

"I just don't want you to be offended."

"I'm not offended," I said. "I was, like, slightly concerned that you had something else in mind. I wanted to make sure that you weren't, like, interested in me, or that I hadn't done something to give you the wrong idea."

She sighed and shook her head, and drank a cup of coffee. "You're a complete mystery," she said. "The black hole in the black hole. I couldn't handle dating you."

"Seriously?"

"Oh, yeah." She wrinkled her forehead and gave me a dismissive hand gesture. "Holding hands or snuggling on the couch or talking about feelings over dinner: I can't picture that."

"Good," I said. "You shouldn't. That shit's for pussies."

"I mean, I heard about how you went crazy on Chris last week."

"Dear God. Is he, like, talking about me with everybody?"

"Dude, he was pretty rattled," she said.

"Great."

"He only talks about things with me and Michelle. You and Sam scare him."

"That's ridiculous."

"You need to let him know that."

"I did," I said. "We're cool now. I've talked to him. I've talked to Sam about it. It's going to be fine."

"If you yell at him like that again," she said, "I'm going to kick your ass."

"Okay," I said, feeling my defenses arch, "but number one, Sam and I were friends with him a year before we moved in with all of you. We're friends with him independent of everybody else feeling like they need to intervene like it's a fucking peacekeeping mission. Number two, you and Michelle getting him worked up occasionally, that is not helpful. It'd be good that if something comes up, I talk to Chris, and Chris talks to me, and it gets settled without an audience to react and speculate."

"People need to talk about people with other people sometimes."

"Which is fair enough, but saying you're going to kick my ass based on what I may or may not say to Christian is not helpful. It's condescending to him -- like, yeah, you're his protector -- and it sucks for me to think that anything I might say to him is going to get flipped for consumption by you and Michelle. If anything, it just fucks us all up. Like, I'm not going to go run down to Trevor and broker a peace between you two. That's not for me to do."

I paused, deciding whether I wanted to deliver a final riposte. In so doing, I changed my tone of voice: "I don't want you to think that I'm saying this in connection to that. I'm just saying it so that you know what's going on. But that skankwhore with Trevor, from what I understand, spent the night here?"

"Oh, that fucker," she said.

"Yeah."

She made a gaggy sigh and said, "Reeee-diculous."

"You were going to find out anyway, so do what you want with that," I said, sipping my coffee.

"Once in awhile, I think you're kind of an asshole," Katie said, "but you're a funny asshole, and you know that you're an asshole, and that makes it easier."

"That's nice to hear, I think," I said. I didn't love that remark. I didn't think of myself that way. "I'd like to make clear that I don't think you're an asshole."

"I had a bunch of weird stuff happening last night," I said to Matt.

"I heard," he said. "Gay dudes blowing me, and then running off to make out with girls."

I hadn't expected that response. Not so much the substance, but the tone. It was chilly; cutting. He was cold, not angry. I'd never heard that from him. I'd only heard that from my mom.

I paused, thinking whether I should explain in earnest or make a joke. A few seconds passed.

Matt cracked up. "I'm just fucking with you."

"Jesus."

"Did I scare you?"

"Something like that. I didn't know you were capable of that."

"I'm not. That's why it was funny. Almost as funny as seeing you make out with a girl."

"Jesus."

"I'm sure I don't need to tell you why that was a bad idea," he said.

"She told me that my breath smelled like dick."

"Her senses are acute."

"I know."

"Did you think you had something to prove to your roommates, or what?"

"Not even," I said. "I didn't do anything to start it. I wasn't paying attention. She started kissing me and I was stuck."

"Involuntary kissing is a bitch. It happens to me all the time. I'll be eating a donut, minding my own beeswax, and the next thing I know, some girl is making out with me."

"Wait, so you are mad."

"No," he said. "I'm just telling you not to be stupid."

"This wasn't even why I was calling you," I said. "We talked about it this morning. It's cool. We were both drunk. There's a guy she likes and he was dancing with a skankwhore. I was actually distracted the whole time because I saw you and Chris Riis talking. That was a disaster waiting to happen."

"That's one funny guy," Matt said.

"What was he saying?"

"He basically told me he was impressed because I'm gay even though I don't wear pink hotpants. Something like that. Then he bragged for awhile about how he was drunk but not so drunk that he had to puke."

"Yes," I said. "That's exactly what I'd expect. Maybe a little better."

"Then I saw you making out with a girl, and thought, `Christ, I'm getting out of here.'"

"Glad you had fun."

"It certainly was an adventure. You know, I've gotten blown by guys, and I've been with guys who said they were straight, but I've never been with a guy who went from blowing me to kissing a girl an hour later."

"I know. It was ridiculous."

"By the transitive properties, I think that girl had my dick in her mouth and didn't even know it."

"She'd be horrified."

"Who was she?"

"That was one of my roommates."

"Katie?"

"Yeah."

"Awww," Matt said. "She's cute. You guys are a cute couple."

"You'd like her," I said.

"It'd be nice to meet her," he said. "But you're not out to her. So that would make the whole thing pretty awkward, right?"

There: his voice did it again. It wandered over into that cold, hard-edged tone.

Then, like last time, he snickered.

"This is what I've tried to say before," he said. "This indefinitely closeted, sexually aloof approach. You start to act out. The way you talk to other people gets distorted. This girl starts liking you because she doesn't know any better, and then everything between you gets ruined because of it. I don't get to know most of your friends -- who may be awesome people; I wouldn't know -- because you'd have to lie about it and it would get, like, mentally impossible for you to keep it all straight. So you end up drunk as hell, slamming around your house party, blowing me and using a stack of books and a futon to bar the door, which was ridiculous, and a few minutes later, you're kissing some girl because you feel like you have to prove your manliness in front of your friends. Don't you think it's a little histrionic?"

Now he wasn't kidding. I didn't have words.

"I mean, you can just tell them. I don't know all of your friends, but I've seen enough to know the types. It's not like you run around with homophobic hockey players or, like, engineering students from small towns. When you come out you're going to wonder what the big deal was and why you were such a spaz about it."

"God," I said, lying back in my bed, covering my eyes with my arm, "this is much too much for me to talk about right now."

He laughed and his voice reverted to gregarious Matt; Matt the politician. "I know. You gave me an opening so I thought I'd throw it out there again."

"I wasn't even calling to talk about any of that. The Katie stuff wasn't even the headline for the night. And really, that's all okay. She actually was only trying to make this other guy jealous. If it had been something else, I would have been able to tell. But then after you left, like, other stuff happened."

"What? Did you eat a girl out?"

"Gross! No."

"What happened?"

"So, like, what do you make of Chris Riis?"

"In what respect?"

"I mean, from what you say, you think you have a sixth sense about figuring out whether certain guys are, like, gay, or confused, or nothing."

He was exasperated.

"See, this is in line with what I was saying before. At some point, every gay guy gets a crush on a straight friend, and convinces himself that the friend is gay, too. It happened to me in high school. But they're not gay, and you get yourself worked into this stress and tension over it, and the next thing you know, you've messed up the friendship because your head is all over the place."

"No, dude. No. That's not it." Now my voice was serious. "Chris, like, does these things to me sometimes. Like, physically. Like, last night, we were cleaning up the front porch, and the next thing I know, he's got his arm around me, and he's, like, stroking my face. Not touching it or being funny. Like running the back of his fingers down my cheek and my neck. Caressing. A few weeks ago there was this other thing where we were kind of roughhousing, and he got a boner. Like, a full-on 90 degree one, and he was barely trying to cover it."

Matt paused. He breathed into the receiver.

"Really?" he said.

"Yeah."

"Really." He sounded skeptical.

"Yeah!"

"Are you sure you're not exaggerating these things in your mind?"

"Yes! He was seriously caressing my face last night. And apparently when I touch him, he gets a boner."

"Are you serious?"

"Yes."

"I never would've guessed it," Matt said. "Never. And I feel like I can spot these things from a hundred feet."

"And there are little things that you've mentioned before. He's never had a girlfriend. He never talks about girls. He needs to get wasted to do anything with them. Sometimes when I'm talking to him, he gets nervous and embarrassed, but he's not like that with other people."

"Really."

"Yes!"

"Because I get no gay vibe from him," Matt said. "Like, none at all. But you know him a lot better than I do."

"It's weird."

"And he's a good looking guy. Not my type, really-"

"Really?" I'd found Chris so objectively handsome that Matt's qualification wasn't credible.

"Nah," Matt said. "There's something, like, delicate about his looks. There's not any character to them."

"Huh."

"He looks like, I don't know. Like he could be Greg's best friend on The Brady Bunch."

"Because I think he's so attractive."

"He's good looking, yeah," Matt said. "But it's in a bland way. He has a slightly glassed-over look in his face."

"You're nuts."

"I mean, I'd hook up with him, but I wouldn't get swept off my feet. To each his own," Matt said. "Do you have a plan for handling this?"

"Yes," I said. "Ignore it and see what he does. Like, I'm not going to push it."

"Good," Matt said. "Good boy. Because pressing it will make him freak out either way."

"Exactly," I said. "I mean, to go back to what you're saying, in my head, one reason I don't want to come out is because I could see him freaking. Chris more than anybody. Like, he's a Republican and a Christian. He's from Michigan. If he knew this about me, he'd, like, want to pray for me or something."

"Boy, this just sounds like a great idea all around." Matt was back in serious mode. "So you think your good-looking housemate wants your bod, and obviously you have a huge crush on him, but he's a right-wing homophobe, and you can't come out because you think he'll judge you for it? Wow."

"Kind of, but-"

"I mean, there are a ton of attractive, perfectly nice gay guys at this school. If you're getting bored with me, there are plenty of options that won't, like, hurl you into a Kafkaesque abyss."

"Chill, Matt. Jesus. Chill." He stopped talking. "Number one, you haven't even read Kafka-"

"Yeah, but I know what Kafkaesque means."

"Number two, I'm not bored with you. I don't know why you said that. I'd, like, hang out with you every day if you weren't busy all the time, so calm down. Number three, he's not a right-wing homophobe. He's just, like, naive. You and I are used to being around people who grew up near cities listening to NPR and going to arts camps. He doesn't, like, have a sophisticated understanding. It's not like he's raging. He just doesn't understand. Everything's new to him. All of these things that you and I take for granted, he's never been around them."

"Dude, he grew up in some rich suburb. His dad's a doctor. It's not like he's some kind of farmboy from Kansas."

"Yeah, but he might as well be. I mean, seriously, calm down. I'm not his lawyer. I'm not going to defend him, but it's not as extreme as you think."

Voice reversion: normal Matt. "You might be right. You know him more than I do. I've just talked to him five or six times at parties. I mean, I like him. He's a nice guy. Your description just doesn't sound ideal to me. Like, play this out. Let's say he's actually gay and has the hots for you. But he lives in your house, and he's freaked out about himself and his sexuality. You're not going to be able to get away from that. It's going to be a full-time job. Is that something you want to handle?" Voice reversion: scary Matt. "Number two, let's say that you're wrong, and you're reading too much into some of the things that have happened between you. You really want to let that burrow into your head? When there are probably literally between 200 and 500 guys at this school who are smart and interesting and attractive enough that you'd at least give them handjobs, if not want to gay-marry them?

"But, oh, that's right: you'd probably have to come out in order to find them. And you can't, because you're scared that the hot Christian Republican, who may or may not be gay, might judge you for that." Voice reversion: normal Matt. "Dude. This does not begin to make sense."

"Dude," I said, trying to sound light, "are you jealous?"

"Honestly? Yes! Mildly. Or at least, like, concerned. I mean, I'm a little rattled. We've been hanging out for more than a year. I've stayed at your parents' house. It seemed like you were getting it together, and then all of a sudden, you're making out with a chick and crushing on a guy who has you in a quandary that sounds, at best, mildly self-defeating. So, yes. Just when I thought you were about to be cool with things, you're making it all worse for yourself. Yes. I'm somewhat jealous, but mostly, I'm just, like, concerned for you as a friend."

This was not the conversation I expected. I figured that he'd find the Chris situation amusing or hot. When I called him, I thought we'd plot about it, or that he'd have some kind of gameplan in mind. I expected a pep talk about the prospects for a conquest. Not whatever this was. If we'd been face to face, I might have argued back harder, or it would have stayed lighter, or I could have taken it all in stride.

"Jesus, I kind of don't feel like having this kind of conversation right now," I said. "I think you're being extreme."

"Really."

"Yeah. It's not as severe as you think. It's just something I've been thinking about. You sound, like, different than usual. Like you're in a bad mood. Maybe we shouldn't talk about it right now."

"Okay. Call me later, then," he said. "Bye."

Matt Canetti hung up on me.

Matt didn't talk about it until years later, when we both were out of college and drunk. The fall of his senior year was not great for him. He said that he was around his best friends all the time but couldn't shake the knowledge that it was going to be over in a few months. His friends were applying to law school or talking about consulting jobs. Matt didn't want to do any of that. As he later described it, he wasn't thinking about jobs because he didn't want to leave.

He thought he wanted to work in Washington, in some kind of government job or policy organization, but he wasn't applying or sending out resumes. As soon as he did that, it would mean that he was going to graduate, and he wanted to push off that threshold for as long as possible. At the time, he was doing everything to hold onto his present.

Hoping to prolong it, he was going through the Rhodes Scholarship application process, which would end up not working out for him. It left a longstanding bitterness that I've never understood. As he later described it: "My interests weren't, like, exotic enough. Maybe if I'd been all about teaching a parrot how to play Chopin or cross-breeding fruitflies with an internet server. Being gay must be played out for them. It doesn't have the cachet it used to, I think. Basically, I suck."

Because he looked ahead and despaired, he threw himself into everything he had. He studied like crazy. He eventually graduated with 10 more credits than necessary. He never turned down a party invitation. He wrote his senior thesis. He organized that trip up to Minnesota to campaign for Mondale after Paul Wellstone died. Wellstone was some kind of hero for Matt, and when a Republican took the seat, he was as close to properly distraught as I'd ever seen him.

You never know what other people think of you. I liked Matt a lot. Even when I felt frustrated, I appreciated him and felt lucky that I had him -- as a friend and a hook-up and somebody who knew the lay of the land with a level of confidence that seemed foreign to me.

Of course he liked me, but I didn't appreciate how much. For instance, I knew that he'd never had a relationship with a guy that lasted more than a couple months, whereas we'd been doing stuff together for more than a year. Except for a couple of random encounters when he'd been in DC, he hadn't been with anybody else. As he noted in our call, he'd even stayed at my parents' house -- albeit under false pretenses.

You hear this and it all adds up to the label of a serious relationship. In retrospect, it was. I didn't realize that at the time. It wasn't because I didn't like him. At times I was crazy about him; even when I was annoyed with him, I thought he was interesting and would've acknowledged a lot of affection. He was, in a word, awesome.

My barriers were simple: cluelessness; naivete; maybe even something like low self-esteem. I didn't think that he liked me enough that it mattered to him. Not because he ever blew me off, but because I didn't see myself as anything special. As a good friend or in life at large, certainly, but not in the relationship sphere. To my mind, he thought of me as a friend, a project, an amusing diversion, like all of the other people that he had in his orbit. It would have struck me as presumptuous and self-important to think that his feelings ran deeper.

Please don't mistake this statement as either judgmental to others or self-pitying: almost every gay guy is emotionally stunted. It varies in degrees, and a lot of people work through it, but some do it worse than others. The struggle of it doesn't come as naturally. I was 19 but still hadn't mastered the cues and boundaries that other people get when they're high school freshmen or sophomores. In my case, I literally could not internalize the differences between a friendship, a hook-up or a relationship. In my thoughts about Matt, these categories melted together. I felt different about him, but I'd had a lot of close friends in my life. What was the difference in the closeness I felt to Matt versus one of my other good friends? It was there, but I wouldn't have been able to identify it. I would have described him as a friend who I hooked up with. To say something deeper would have perplexed me.

It's not like you necessarily end up dysfunctional about this so much as interpersonally colorblind, and even if it's not fucking you up directly, it's fucking up other people. I mean, Matt had issues in this department, too. Why couldn't he directly articulate how much he liked me? That might have changed many things about my time with him. It would have made it more emotionally brutal when he graduated, but in light of his sincere and truly helpful attempts to acclimate me to my gayness, a portion of it was undermined by our inability to sit down and carry a non-sarcastic conversation about each other. Politics or school: Yes. "Hey man, I really like you a lot. What should we do about that?": Never.

I could not have told you whether it was appropriate etiquette to call a guy your boyfriend or use a word like dating to describe going out with a guy. They would have sounded sarcastic to me, or like a taunt. I'd think of it as having a friend, not a boyfriend; instead of dating, I'd think of it as hanging out.

What Matt told me years later was that after he left my parents' place in New York the August before, he spent basically the whole trainride home thinking about me. He was out to his parents. He talked to them about me; they talked to him about wanting to meet me. A part of his brain was thinking about what to do after he graduated -- that there was a part of him who wanted to keep it going, even while understanding that in practical terms, this made little sense.

When he was with me that August -- in the city, out on the island with Andy -- it had been just us. He'd been calmer, easier -- no distractions. Matt said that it was one of the best times that he'd had in years. It reminded him of when he first got to college. He said that after he left, he started thinking that at some point in his life he'd want to live in New York, independent of anything having to do with me.

Back at school, with all of his responsibilities and stimulants, there was too much going on to keep track. We weren't seeing each other as much. I had my own life, too. It's not like we lost interest or were growing apart. It was just more difficult. Now, I understand why me not being out made it complicated for him; at the time, I considered his concern with the topic meddling, or vaguely militant.

By the time Chris started taking unoccupied shelfspace in my thoughts, I didn't think of myself as having a serious relationship with Matt. My status was with Matt was abstract friendship.

Maybe you're wondering what happened next with Chris. The answer: nothing.

That Sunday, I ignored the incident. He spent the afternoon on the couch watching NFL. I made fun of his shameful futility as a Lions fan. He thanked me for buying bagels and commented about how drunk he was the night before.

Around 5 p.m., he and Trevor and I went to the gym, then came back without incident. Chris tried to pump Trevor for information about the girl that he hooked up with the night before. Trevor shrugged him off; I inferred that it was because he didn't want it circling back to Katie. Once home, I went in my room to write a reaction paper and study for Arabic class. That was pretty much it.

Our moment together having passed, it wasn't eating away at me. He was just Chris. I got into a habit where about a quarter of my jack-off sessions involved him, a quarter involved specific stuff about Canetti, and the rest was miscellany. That didn't mess with me too much, though. I could jerk off to him, clean up, and fifteen minutes later, see him on the couch eating a Hot Pocket. It didn't affect me.

The only wrinkle was that I stayed true to my new be-nice-to-Chris policy. It was the Good Housemate Doctrine. I didn't make fun of him as much, not even on a Wednesday night when Chris, Katie and I started watching "The Exorcist" at 1 a.m. and Chris flipped out afterward.

"That's the most horrible thing I've ever seen!" he shrieked more than once. He acted like a fat matron in Loony Tunes who spies a mouse. I let him go.

Newer, nicer Joe seemed to frustrate him. He started doing willfully annoying things in order to see if I'd make fun of him. One night I came home, and he and Michelle sat on the living room couch, studying with an NBA game on TV. As soon as I sat in a chair with my coffee, Chris picked up the remote and switched it to Sean Hannity.

"Oh, God, no," Michelle said.

Chris pretended to look interested in the TV in an obviously fake way.

"Seriously, Chris," she said, "if you're going to watch this, I'm going up to my room. I know you don't actually like this."

The look on his face reminded me of a beagle confused by an exotic sound. He cocked his head to one side and stared blankly at the television, a cheek pulled down by gravity. He definitely was suppressing a smile.

"Chris!" Michelle said.

"Ignore him," I said. "He never watches Hannity. He's only doing this to see how we react."

"How dare you," Chris said.

"No more," Michelle said.

Chris handed her the remote. He'd tangle with me or Sam, but knew better than to piss off one of the girls.

For awhile, it was like having a little kid. He'd say stuff hoping to provoke me; I'd shrug it off. If he wanted a nice, new Joe that didn't make fun of people, I'd play along until it made him crazy.

Back home for Thanksgiving, everything was weird again. My dad was distracted by work, as was standard, but it seemed like my presence barely registered. My youngest brother Evan had a couple of huge zits. His voice was was warped and cracked. Only a year before, he'd been almost embarrassingly excited to see me when I got home from school. Now he was aloof, the way we all were when that shit was going on.

My mom and my brother Rob were warring with each other, for reasons that are too petty and obnoxious to describe in detail, but the gist was that my mom was applying to a couple of local grad schools to get a doctorate in psychology, Rob was offended by the prospect that she wouldn't be sufficiently at home and available for his needs, and that to boot, she was too old for more school and wasn't even applying to anyplace he deemed prestigious, like Columbia or Yale. His laments were too dumb and too far removed from this story to deserve more attention, but when he tried to recruit me to his position -- as if, yeah, teaming up to make our mom feel like shit would be a bonding experience -- I made clear to my mom that it was awesome that she'd think about a Ph.D and that she'd have my full support.

On Friday night I was out with the high school friends, but that was weird, too. We weren't drinking. We just hung out at somebody's parents' house. I was still psyched to see everybody, but they no longer felt like my best friends. My college friends seemed funnier and more natural than they did. Like, dude, I loved my friends Rick and Sanjay and Danielle, but their concerns and ways of talking and reference points seemed different. Not pretentious, exactly, but certainly not fun. I felt validated in leaving the Northeast.

Andy Trafford wasn't around. He was visiting grandparents in Maryland. I hadn't realized he'd be away until I called him that afternoon. We didn't speak for long.

On Saturday evening, the shit hit the fan. I know that's a cliche, and a gross one, but in talking about my brother Rob, the description works.

My mom and dad were out of the house for a couple of hours. It was an early party hosted by longtime friends who lived 20 minutes away. My two brothers and I were invited, but none of us wanted to go. Rob was going out later, and some of my high school friends were supposed to come over to the house. We accurately believed that we could get away with drinking in the basement. As to Evan, he did what seemed to have become his second nature: sitting in my mom's office upstairs, playing World of Warcraft.

I was lying on the living room couch, listening to my parents' CD of Blood on the Tracks and reading The New Yorker, but mostly fidgeting, knowing that my friends would start coming by at around 9:00 and that I had another hour to kill before that happened.

Sometimes in movies or television shows you get stories where the brothers argue and compete, but their antics are belied by a deep yet unexpressed well of affection.

I hate those depictions. For me, my antagonism with Rob was purely aggressive and sincerely felt. If anything, our being brothers made it run deeper. It's not like I could walk away.

He walked in from the dining room, kind of swaggering, with a grin on his face. I knew that whatever he was about to say, I wouldn't like it.

"I overheard from Mom that your best friend Andy Trafford is a huge faggot," Rob said.

Before I got a word out, I saw his fear and regret. Rob declared his learning with the jocky, cocky, smirking delivery that you'd normally use to disparage the fan of a rival, defeated sports team. That might have been what he thought he was doing. He might have thought that he was starting rough banter and trash talk. "Faggot" hadn't been a socially acceptable epithet in my circle of high school friends, but it was one of those words that slipped out occasionally (kind of like cunt) and if the context was appropriate ("Stop flinching, you faggot.") nobody objected.

So maybe that's what Rob was doing. Maybe it was meant as the equivalent of a yo-mama joke, except it was about a friend. I don't know his original intent. I've never asked. I don't like him, so I don't care.

What I roared in response was, "What did you just say?"

He paused. Now he wanted to backtrack. "I just heard Mom talk-"

Before the rest came out, I'd leaped off the couch, punched him in the ear, and slammed him against the wall. Frames went off-kilter, but we didn't dent the plaster, thank balls.

I'm not a fighter. I never want to hurt anybody. Unless one of the participants is a psychopath or a professional, no fight looks like it does in the movies. There's a lot of slow grappling punctuated by an occasional, frantic punch that misses its mark.

But I wanted to kill my brother.

He was so stunned that when I threw him by the shoulder, he tumbled to the floor, like a drunk on a runaway boat.

"What the fuck!" Rob screamed, high pitched and weepy, in the same frantic indignation that he'd employed since he was seven or eight.

"'What the fuck?'" I mocked his delivery. "Loser piece of shit."

I pinned him to the floor. I couldn't think of what to do next. He was on his back, trying to punch me in the chest or land a hand on my face. I grabbed him by the hair and slammed his head against the carpet.

"You're a psycho!" Rob screamed.

"You're a stupid sack of shit," I said. I punched him hard in the shoulder. Rob was trying not to cry. His face was red and it was like he gasped for air.

Sixteen by now and a high school junior. If I'd never met him, I could have spotted him as a son of a bitch. I knew guys like him in high school. They wore their entitlement like a title. Rob wasn't very smart and he wasn't very funny, but he was good looking enough and fearlessly rude in a way that led certain teenage sycophants to follow him. In the end, he was a verbal bully. He didn't care about things or like things. His interests and instincts were predictable.

I could picture him at some back corner of a party, getting turned down by a girl, then trying to rough her up about it. I've never known him to do that, as fact. It's probably a terrible thing to speculate about someone, especially your own brother, but I could see it. It was like all the shit and stress and comfort that can do bad things to a guy when he's sixteen -- all of the things that I'd avoided, with due credit to my mom and dad -- reposed themselves in Rob and metastasized like tumors. Those Duke Lacrosse guys? Those guys were like my brother.

"Don't talk that kind of shit about Andy Trafford, ever," I said to him, "or about any of my friends."

"But it's true!" he said, as if this were the source of the conflict. "Andy's gay-"

"Yeah, I know, and fuck you for talking about him like that." I slugged him in the shoulder again. Hearing him say those words -- "Andy's gay" -- made me hug tight at my rage. I hit him in the solar plexus. He yowled.

I was twelve and Rob was nine, and the volt from the hard angle of my fist was enough to send him cowering. When he was nine, our mother flipped out on us for always fighting, and Rob answered that it was stupid to say that we really loved each other just because we were brothers when that was social convention. As a nine year old, he used those two words -- social convention. It was the only smart thing I've ever heard him say.

"It doesn't matter if you call him a faggot. He's fifty times better than you'll ever be." I slugged his shoulder again. "Just because I have real friends. You're so jealous of it. I have real friends. All the people you think are your friends, they hate you. Even Ryan and Mick."

"Fuck you," he half-blubbered.

"No, asshole, it's true. When they'd come over to hang out with you, if you weren't around, they'd talk shit about you with me. Everything they said was right. Everybody hates you." I sort of wanted to torture him. The ear that I'd punched, I grabbed the cartilage and twisted it. Rob screamed like a girl. "Nobody likes you. Everybody likes Andy. It doesn't matter if he's gay or not. He's better than you'll ever be. It's not even close. You'd be fucking lucky if that guy were ever your friend. You'd wake up liking the world that much more, just because that guy thought of you as his friend."

I had my hand at his neck now. Rob thought that I was going to choke him; about 25 percent of me was headed in that direction. It was enough to send Rob truly manic. He clawed and pushed, and like a middle-aged lady trained in self defense, attempted to knee or punch my balls.

It had gone far enough by then. I leaped off of him. He scurried backward and sat against the wall. He couldn't decide whether to massage the pain in his shoulder or feel out the pain of his slightly inflated ear.

"Why did you do that?" whined the victim.

"Fuck you for acting like you don't know. Pathetic."

Evan heard our crash against the wall. He interrupted his World of Warcraft session to sit on the top steps, watching me and Rob in our fury. This was brotherhood: just like old times.

"You broke my ear, you asshole," Rob said.

"Then put some ice on it, dumbshit," I said. "What are you going to do, tell Mom? I'll tell her you called Andy a faggot. She'll be pissed at me for kicking your ass, but she'll hate you worse for saying that."

He wasn't actually crying. I guess he gets credit for that. All our lives, Rob would instigate, then expect pity and forgiveness when he cried. At least he'd given up the game on that one.

I straightened the framed photos on the wall and left Rob in his self-pity. He didn't report the incident to our parents. I wouldn't have cared if he did. My parents would have been appalled. They're classic Westchester limousine liberals. They wouldn't have approved of my response, but they would have approved of Rob's comment even less.

I mean, obviously Mrs. Trafford had had some kind of conversation with my mom about it. Andy's mom was probably a little rattled. Our mothers weren't extremely close, but they were friendly. I imagined Mrs. Trafford raising it with my mom, and my mom telling her that it's great that they had a relationship where Andy could tell her that -- something along those lines -- and then recounting it to my dad, with Rob overhearing some snippets of it.

There was absolutely no way I factored into the discussions. I know that as a fact.

"Hey, Evan," I said.

"What." Christ, even from across the room, I could see the enormous zit on the southwest corner of his lip. Someone needed to tell him about Clearasil before he turned outcast.

"Don't worry about it."

"I don't," he said. "It's what you guys always do."

"If he ever fucks with you," I said, "you have my permission to kill him."

"I already know that," he said.

Back in my bedroom, I felt my adrenaline drop. My hands jittered. It was the way you feel after you narrowly avoid a car accident, or check your grades for a successful score after feeling convinced that you'd flunked the exam. I paced the room for a few minutes and felt my heart settle.

Then I called Andy to see what he was up to. When we were talking, he sounded goodspirited and cheerful. I wanted to mention to him what just happened with Rob, but I didn't. He doesn't think much of Rob, either, but at that point in time, the story wouldn't have hit him as funny. Sometime that semester he'd sent an e-mail vaguely raising the prospect of coming out to his parents, but I didn't follow up; I didn't want to pry or be pushy -- or, even worse, blurt out something sarcastic. Through the phone, I could hear him close the back door to his grandparents' house so he could step outside and talk to me for real.

I never discussed the Rob incident with anybody. Whenever I think about it, it summons the kind of righteous rage I felt in the moment. It's not a good place to live.

I needed to stick up for my friend, but in truth, I wanted to unleash it all on Rob. I wanted to leave my brother in pain.