Joe College, Part 21
Sam said that Chris flipped out and tried to punch him. It was only eleven on a Monday. Sam was drunk, which made it hard to unpack his story. He didn't seem angry about it -- excited, mostly, but it was complicated, like his nervous energy was splintering out.
I hadn't been home since nine that morning. I'd had three classes, an hour at the gym, a couple hours of reading, a library nap, and half the day at the newspaper. That included a lengthy session with a belligerent sophomore who'd written a think piece about what Foucault would have thought about Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica. ("Dude," I said, "for one thing, I'm pretty sure Foucault was gay so the Jessica Simpson horniness line doesn't make sense, but also, we're not an academic journal or an American Studies seminar.") The guy acted like a dick, and while I didn't care if he followed through on his threat to quit, I enjoyed my authority. I spent an hour reworking his review and explaining why a newspaper shouldn't publish that kind of thing, until he finally conceded. It seemed like a bigger win than it was.
By the time I got home, my only plan was to brush my teeth and go to bed.
"What did you say that made him flip out?" I asked.
"Oh!" Sam said, indignant. "Just taking the piss out of him."
"When you use British slang you sound like an idiot. You're barely even British anymore. You're a Canadian prick with a weird accent."
"Aren't you a bloody sod," he said in a different dialect, like he was Prince Charles.
"Seriously, asshole, what did you say?"
"It doesn't matter," he said. "It wasn't anything that bad."
"Did he actually hit you?" I said.
He considered my question and said, "He connected, but it was more of a bitch slap. Then he seemed upset and stormed out, like just a little bitch."
"Awesome," I said.
"Oh, like you're his fucking keeper."
"No, I'm your fucking keeper, you stupid motherfuckface," I said.
Sam turned mildly dangerous if he was home drunk and it was early. He had conversational aggression and excitement to purge, with no distraction of loud music, short skirts or enthused bros. it made him a party of one, seemingly unaware that no one else part of the scene.
He'd been first in the house to turn 21. Nobody had house parties for their 21st birthdays. They went to a bar at midnight with friends who were already drinking age. He'd gone to a sports bar called Goal Line with a dozen people, and then, the next night, out again, for a doomed effort at 21 shots. He puked in a bathroom before midnight, tried to keep going, puked on an open table 30 minutes later, was ordered to leave, and escorted home by his friends. They carried him down to bed and then hung out in our living room for another couple of hours.
Since his birthday, there'd been a small uptick in Sam's outbursts. I wasn't home enough to experience them, but if I had, they wouldn't have bothered me. I liked Sam's obnoxiousness. Others were not so sporting.
"Not wanting you and Chris to start hating each other isn't being a keeper," I said. "If you need to instigate some shit, go after me or Katie or Trevor, because we'll destroy you without taking a swing."
My words were wasted. Even conversing when he was in that condition, it was like playing tennis around a retriever.
So first I called Chris, and he didn't pick up, which was understandable because, what, like I was his fucking keeper? The act of calling itself might have been patronizing or meddling, as if he couldn't sort it out with a friend, absent my intervention.
And it was meddling. If two friends had a scuffle like that now, I'd be mildly amused and ignore it, especially in a showdown between a drunk asshole and a sensitive manchild. It's not like Chris beat the shit out of Sam.
In that time of your life, though, everybody is intensely over-involved with everyone else. It feels magnified, not in the high-school way or the office-rumor way, where people yank threads of gossip or knit drama as part of a social hierarchy. Everything felt more earnest then. I actually didn't want Chris and Sam to start hating each other; of course it was my business to negotiate a peace treaty. These things were everybody's business, because why not? There was no parent or spouse to tend to things. Certain standards had to be maintained. It only worked if you policed each other.
I first looked for Chris in the coffee houses, then found him at Charterhouse, where it was quiet on a Monday. A table of drunk frat types sat near the front, but most people studied in quiet groups over cigarettes, fried food and slow beers.
Chris had a booth to himself. The following items were on his table: The Norton Critical Edition of Huckleberry Finn; an issue of Sports Illustrated with Lebron James on the cover; a cup of black coffee; and an empty plate, smeared with grease and the remains of a ketchup pool.
He wasn't paying attention to any of that, though, as he peered up at the end of a Monday Night Football broadcast playing soundlessly on a screen mounted near the ceiling.
"Hey," I said, dropping my backpack on the seat across from him.
He didn't look away from the screen. "Dude, this is a really good game. New England had to take a safety on purpose on fourth and one. Denver's up by three but Brady's driving."
"Brady's such a badass," I said. "Did you get my call?"
"How'd you know I was here?" he said, his eyes locked on the screen.
"I didn't," I said. "I was at the newspaper. Stephanie called a couple of hours ago and said that she was here so I figured I'd meet her, and I thought you might feel like hanging out with us. Weirdly, it looks like Stephanie's not here, but you are."
"Yeah, that's funny." He concentrated on the TV, barely listening. I thought that he would be in a bad state, but he was just Chris, pretending to study while he watched TV and ate bad food. I wondered if Sam exaggerated.
The table of frat dudes at the front of the bar shouted and Chris gently raised his hands in a touchdown sign. "Dude, did you see that?" he said.
"Awesome," I said. Brady had thrown a touchdown from about the 20. Only 30 seconds remained.
"I don't even care about New England or Denver," he said, taking his eyes off the TV and looking at me for the first time. "I just wanted to see them pull that off. Taking the safety on purpose was gutsy."
"Why are you hanging out here?" I said. "Were you with somebody?"
"Nah," he said. "I just felt like getting out of the house for awhile."
"Cool. Did you see Stephanie when you got here?"
He shook his head and turned his attention away as the game's last 30 seconds bled out. "Yeah, that was awesome," he said.
At this point, I was no longer concerned about Chris in my capacity as his fucking keeper. It became basic curiosity.
"Actually," I said, "and I don't want to make this weird, but I partly called you because Sam called me and said that he severely pissed you off and you ran out of the house."
"I figured that out," Chris said.
"Right. Well, Sam is pretty wasted," I said.
"That's, like, borderline redundant," Chris said.
"Even so," I said. "Dude, you shouldn't let him get to you."
"Sam doesn't talk to you the way that he talks to me."
"Right. He talks worse to me, but you shouldn't let it get to you, especially when he's drunk like that."
"I don't need him to talk to me that way. I don't care if he's drunk.
I still like the guy. I don't have anything against him. But really, I sort of hate him."
"He fucking loves you. He can't help himself."
"Why do you make excuses for people?"
"Sam says nasty things but it's all a game. It's like he's on stage, pretty much all of the time, and he acts like that because many of us actively cheer him on. As soon as he gets into Crazy Sam mode, with me, it's like, Oh, game on,' and if I'm not in the mood for it, I'm like, Sam, shut the fuck up, not now,' and he stops. And on the very few occasions when I've needed to talk seriously with him, he's actually very thoughtful and sincere, right? He was generally freaking out that he'd made you so upset."
"I know that you're close with him," Chris said. "I'm not going to bash him and I'm not super-pissed, but I've been down this with him two or three times before. It's shouldn't be like we're in high school and I'm some outcast that gets bullied all the time."
What follows is my dramatized, imagined version of how the confrontation carried out. Most descriptions about Chris's mood and thinking are based on my own inferences, not anything that he told me.
I'm also inventing the dialog, taken from Chris's summary description. While I guess you could call it fiction, I'm pretty sure that it's true.
He'd gotten out of class at four. Nobody was in the house, and this was part of his problem. Chris wasn't in any clubs or organizations. He spent crushing amounts of time just hanging out. Everybody else I knew threw themselves into causes or activities. It was like, you went to class, and then worked an unpaid part-time job, going to meetings and parties and speeches. Chris just had the people who he lived with, and all of our respective friends. He didn't have an independent social life. This magnified everything.
That afternoon he tried to study, thinking somebody would come home soon. He got bored and decided to go for a run, and then decided that maybe I'd get home and we could go for a run together. It wasn't enough of a big deal to call and ask me -- he could wait while he watched PTI.
At about six, he put on his running gear and went for a good one -- six miles. It was cold but with no wind. When he got back, Trevor was there, eating Subway and watching a Seinfeld rerun. They said hey, but by the time Chris showered and came back down, Trevor was in his own room, napping.
Chris ordered a large pepperoni pizza and ate three-quarters of it. He then slept for an hour.
He was lying awake on the couch when Sam came home.
"There's my big boy," Sam had said, and slammed himself down on the love seat. "Looks like you're having another spectacular night."
"Nah," Chris said, "just watching football."
"All of your rowdy friends are not coming over tonight," Sam said.
"What were you up to?"
"I was at the bar with Jeremy Bernstein," he said. Jeremy Bernstein had a fake ID and was an extension of Sam's personality. Sometimes I hated Jeremy and then he did something hilarious and I liked him again. He was like Sam without the warmth. "Pieces, once you're 21, I'm going to take you out to the bar and get you laid."
"You should worry about getting yourself laid," Chris said. "You're obviously not doing a good job."
You already know that this was a bad response. Chris thought that he was defending himself. Sam heard an invitation to play. Sam, in fact, didn't get laid that often, and it invited running jokes that no one took seriously.
"Don't worry, Pieces," Sam said. "You know I'm just joking. I know all about you and what you want." Sam would have kicked off his shoes and put his feet on the coffee table, his socks leaving sweat smears on the black surface. "You have that whole thing with Michelle. This deep, highly sexual passion."
"Shut up, Sam," Chris would have said, and creased his face in a way that would have signalled to anyone else that it was time to stop.
"You're too shy, you big beautiful bastard," Sam said. "You should hear the way girls talk about you when you're not around. They're like, Chris is soooooo hot.'" Sam would have done a good vocal fry, the Long Island/New Jersey/Southern California sorority dialect that spread through certain girls like an esophageal virus. "They're all like, What's Chris's stooorry. He's so hot and funny,' and I'm just like, `Ask him yourself! I'm not his fucking keeper.' And then I look over and you're staring around the ceiling while some girl is trying to rub her tits up against you. These girls fucking love you, brother. I'm serious. You need to boost your confidence."
"Whatever, Sam," he would have said. "My confidence is good. I don't have to explain my life to you or everybody else."
"Oh, come on," Sam said. "No need to be so shy about everything. I'm on your team."
"Trust me. Don't worry about it."
"Is it with Michelle?" This wasn't a real question. "And you don't want people to know because you think it would make things awkward here? Like the Trevor-Katie stupidity?"
"Shut up, Sam."
"It is!" Sam said, even though he knew it wasn't. "You're porking Michelle!"
"Why do you have to talk about Michelle like that?" Chris said. "Why do you have to bring her into stuff?"
"She's lovely. There's no reason to be embarrassed about Michelle. It's not like you're humping Joni Chang. Or do you have an Asian fetish?"
Joni Chang was one of Michelle's best friends. She had a weight problem.
"Dude, I'm pretty sure that you're joking," Chris would have said, at this point his palms sweating and a tremor in his voice, "but just so we're clear, nothing's going on with me and Michelle. Yes, she's an awesome person, but absolutely, positively, nothing's going on there, and you shouldn't go around telling people that."
"Is it," Sam said, dropping a prolonged pause, "Joe? I mean, that's cool. I get it. I'm kind of sorry to be left out, but I see how you and Joe hover over each other."
"Dude, shut off."
Sam would have cackled.
"I can relate, Pieces. Joe is a beautiful man. As you know, I shared a room with him for a year. I could barely keep my hands off of him. Who could, with an ass like that?"
"Oh my God, dude," Chris would have said.
He would have angrily pushed himself off the couch to go to the kitchen, thinking that Sam would get the message. Sam skipped after him. Chris ran the kitchen tap, pretending to ignore Sam while he filled a smudged glass with cold water.
"Look, Pieces, love between two men can be a beautiful thing," Sam said. "The love that dare not speak its name. I've always known that the two of you share a special bond. A fire-and-ice thing. You guys go out on these long, mysterious runs, and you're both so sweaty and happy when you get back. He's so fucking protective of you that it's endearing. Has the thought crossed my mind before? I'd say yes, but only in a hypothetical way."
"Shut up, dude. This is seriously offensive. I'm not even joking."
"I'm not either!" Sam said, although of course he was.
Chris slammed his glass on the counter. Water splashed up and out. He grabbed Sam by the collar and shoved him against the refrigerator, making it wobble. Because he was drunk and weighed not more than 150, Sam stumbled back. He laughed again, but it was more of a nervous laughter this time. At this point, most of us might have retracted and apologized, but Sam was drunk, and there was a point of pride in not backing down against Chris Riis. I mean, if you back down to a small tantrum by Chris Riis, what kind of a dude are you? Because in Sam's world, he wasn't being a dick or a bully. He was bantering and having a good time. Chris took it all far too seriously and was killing Sam's buzz. But it was worse than that, because he wanted to intimidate Sam with physical force, and there's nothing a skinny guy with a quick mouth and a large brain resents more than a bigger, slower guy trying to intimidate him.
"Jesus, Pieces, Jesus," Sam would have said, playing with his contrition. "You can calm down. You know I didn't mean anything by it. But in all honesty -- and look me in the eyes here -- can you please describe to me, for my own pleasure, in technical and non-obscene terms, what it was like the first time that you took Joe's cock?"
This was immediately followed by the bad punch, the bitch slap, the imperfect contact between Chris's sweaty hand and Sam's sweaty head, a gurgled bark by Chris, a flicker of clarity on Sam's part that they had not, in fact, been having the same conversation, and that his charming, harmless banter, the kind of rhetoric that he shared with guys in 70% of social conversation filler, had badly misfired, and that his friend and roommate -- a dude who he liked a lot -- was raging for no reason. In his confusion and hurt, Sam stopped to consider his next best gesture, but by the time that he decided to commence remorse, Chris whipped shut the front door.
When Chris explained this to me, in details more halting and shadowy than I've written them tonight, I felt the fogginess and confusion lying in their heads. I mean, at some point, we've all committed the same sins -- the jokes that went too far, the drunk social misjudgments; the wound of your secret sore spot, the unearned insult brought by a friend. Sam had been the prick in the situation, yes, but he didn't know that he was jabbing at such unreflective repression.
But it maybe was worse than that, because you probably recognize what I did when Chris told me the story: that for him to become so emotional maybe signaled to Sam that he was onto something real. Sam's drunkenness was the only reason for doubt.
"Dude, I'm being serious when I tell you this," I told Chris, lowering my voice on the chance that someone could hear me over the jukebox. "Whenever guys banter about that, you can't shrink back or stress out, no matter how uncomfortable it makes you. I know you didn't play on a bunch of teams and didn't come from the most macho background, but guys joke about that all the time, and it's not because they're prejudiced. It's just something guys joke about, because they think it's funny and kind of gross."
"I think it's kind of gross," Chris said.
"Okay, right," I said, my heart blurring, "but don't worry about that for now. I'm just saying, when guys joke about that, the only thing you can do is joke back. If I'd been in your shoes, I would've said something like, `But you give such awesome head that I don't need anyone else,' or whatever, something like that. You don't have to be that crass. Flip the joke back on him. Play with it. You don't have to be funny or articulate as long as you treat it like a joke. You're not being accused of anything. He's not saying it because he thinks it's true. Nobody would talk like that if they thought that it was true, so, number one, you shouldn't stress out this badly because he hit a mark. He doesn't know that he's hitting a weakness, so don't freak yourself out a make it a bigger thing.
"But this is key, too. Girls are different." Now I was starting to roll. I wished I had a cigarette. "Girls will never joke with you about this kind of thing. The problem with girls is when they try to set you up with their friends. It's easier to shut them down, though, because girls are so sensitive. Every girl is scared, deep down, that they're not good enough, and that no guy will like them. So, like, Katie spent a month trying to get me to go out with Andrea, and I kept saying no. It was pissing her off but I stayed polite. Eventually she was like, Andrea's really hot and fun, and I don't know why you think she's not good enough for you.' So I said, It's not that. She's just not my physical type.' This pissed Katie off more, so she was like, Oh, right. What's your physical type?' and I said, I don't mean this in a rude way, but since you asked, maybe a bigger rack and fitter legs,' and Katie never brought it up again. I said that because I knew Katie couldn't respond, because these girls, man, they're all so physically self-conscious. Saying something a little critical about a girl's body, even if it's not their own, it freaks them out. If you say something about liking fitter legs, or legs being a little big, that'll shut them up right away. It's perfect because it doesn't sound crass, but it rattles them. It implies other things.
"I mean, fuck it, I'm rambling a little, but I'm just saying, there are ways of handling uncomfortable situations that are pretty easy, and nobody's going to suspect anything. Take a couple of breaths and keep cool next time. Am I making sense?"
He'd been staring intensely while I explained, occasionally glancing around to reassure himself that no one eavesdropped.
"You've thought a lot about this stuff," he said. "You know, you're actually pretty good at manipulating people." It wasn't an accusation -- more like he was slightly surprised and impressed.
"It's not manipulating," I said. "I'm sure you agree that my personal life is none of their business. If they're going to be annoying or put me on the spot, I have to defend myself, right?"
"Yeah."
"I'm making sure that they respect my privacy the way I respect theirs, right? It's not like I run around trying to set them up on dates or acting like it's gross that Trevor hooked up with some girl."
"Yeah," he said.
"So there's nothing manipulative about this, at all. It's a matter of staying independent and keeping your personal life to yourself."
"That's a good point."
"I know," I said.
"Remember that time we were running and I asked you about that thing Michelle said, and you went crazy?" he said.
"Yeah. That was embarrassing."
"Why was that different?" he said.
"I don't know. I flipped out pretty bad. I was pissed at both of you. When I did that, did you think it was because you were right?"
"No," he said. "I just thought I'd offended you."
"Okay, so that's probably what Sam will think," I said. "Goddammit. He's so high energy, sometimes I think he's got a thyroid disorder or something.'
"Dude," he said, "sometimes all of this stresses me out big time."
"I know it does," I said.
"It's not your fault." He said it to remind himself, not to reassure me. "Sometimes there's, like, real me, and then there's these times where I give into this other thing, and it's like I'm taken over. I don't know if that makes sense."
"Kind of," I said. "You don't have to talk about it anymore if you don't want. It's been a weird night."
"I'll be hanging out and living my life, and everything's normal, and then what I'm doing hits me out of nowhere. It seems crazy. Like, completely crazy, and I can't stop it."
"Do you want to stop of it?" I said. "I mean, if you want to stop it and it's causing you this much stress, we can just stop it. We don't have to do any of that."
My heart throbbed as he considered this for several seconds. I thought that he wouldn't answer. He looked at me in a way that seemed knowingly sexy -- it was a smirk and a squint with his head angled just right. He probably didn't mean it to look so impish.
"I want to stop it, yeah. I can't. I wish I could," he said.
"Okay, because I don't want to stop it," I said. "It doesn't have to be all terrible."
"That part's not terrible," he said. "The rest of it's terrible."
"Don't think about the terrible parts," I said. "You have to block it out. They'll never know as long as you don't want them to know. No one would expect it from you. No one would expect it from me, either, but for different reasons."
"Why are you so sure? Just because you don't seem like it? Because I'm not that. That's not a part of who I am. This is a unique situation and it's never going to happen again. Once this stops it's over. It's one of those experiences, and it happens, and it moves on."
"I just mean that nobody'd ever guess that somethings going on. They won't guess it from you because they'd think you're waiting for the right kind of girl. With me, they think that I'm with girls that they don't know about. It's not as complicated as you think. Sometimes you have to give some fake signals to keep it all sane. You can't think about it too much."
"That's probably easier said than done," he said. "I keep waiting for everything to go back to normal."
"Well, it's normal if you find the right way of thinking about it," I said, leaving it intentionally vague, and not surprised when he didn't ask what I meant.
We left about twenty minutes apart. Chris went first. By then Katie was at the house and Sam was asleep on the couch. Chris shoved his shoulder to wake him up, and then did what I suggested: He told Sam that they were cool and he was sorry that he flew off the handle, that he'd been in a quieter mood, and it was one thing for Sam to make fun of him but another to talk about their friends like that, and this is part of why he lost it, because Sam was trying to pit him against their friends, and that was an unfair thing to do.
From what I heard through Katie, it was an effective performance. Still not quite sober, Sam sat hunched over, holding his head in his hands, partly of shame and partly from grogginess. He apologized for any bad feelings. He'd been drunk and hanging out with Jeremy Bernstein, and you know how that gets. I definitely took it too far, and look, Pieces, brother, I fucking love you, and I love everybody. It was a bad joke and I'm a prick and part of the reason I need you as a friend is that you're the kind of person who makes me less of a prick, right?
By the time I got home, Sam had gone to bed. Chris and Katie were on the couch watching Conan. I waved hello and went upstairs.
The following night I woke up at three in the morning. Chris was sitting at the edge of my bed. I woke because he was stroking my hair and my cheek stubble. He was already hard in his basketball shorts.
"Is this okay?" he whispered.
I'd been in deep REM so it took a few seconds. I reached over and tugged down his nylon shorts until his dick popped out, hugged halfway down by his waistband. I kicked off my boxers and got rid of my tangle of T-shirt. Just half-awake, he felt warm and apparitional. He kissed me so hard that it hurt. The skin on his face smelled like he'd just left a coffeehouse. He breathed from my mouth.
That next weekend, Chris got drunk and made out with a girl for the first time in a year. They were near a wall in a dark living room where the hosts played late-90s rap. Sam was with us. You might think that this stressed me out, but what I thought was, Good. Let him get this out of his system. It'll even things out with Sam, and he'll feel better.
Sam danced a couple of feet away from me. I tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to where Chris leaned forward, kissing this girl.
Sam grinned and raised his arm for a high five. I shook my head but softly hit his hand and we went back to dancing with our random girls.
If you think that my approach was crazy and destructive and enabling a bunch of bullshit, I'm not going to argue back too hard. At that time, I was still haunted by how I behaved after that weekend where Andy Trafford and I first got off together. How I'd turned on him, and fought to shut it off completely, thinking that it would end in good time. My priority was to avoid that with Chris. If he struggled to articulate his thoughts or he insisted that it was a minor stage, we could reorganize those items over time. He'd admitted to me that he couldn't stop, which was more affirmation than I'd heard from him before.
I mean, shit, it was only about a year since the first time that Chris and I did anything. He handled his first year better than I did. That he couldn't stand hearing the g-word or needed to make out with a girl to reassert his masculinity seemed like modest problems. He still slipped up to my bedroom at three in the morning, whimpered when we came, and looked me in the eye the next day. Do you think I was going to get anywhere with a heart-to-heart about coming out or acknowledging his gayness? He would've closed it all down, gone into the shell, and who the hell knows what kind of mess he'd be making a few years from now. If it kept him in the fold, I wasn't going to discourage his low profile.
It was maybe thirty minutes later when I was on the front porch having a cigarette alone. Chris's makeout partner departed in a black down jacket. She was with two other girls. They were comforting her. In a brittle voice, I heard, "He seemed so nice. What a fucking asshole."
They walked into the cold, dark, fucking night.
Seeing Chris a few minutes later, I leaned forward and shouted over the music, "What happened to your girl? I just saw her leaving. She looked upset."
"Yeah," Chris said, matter of fact and deep of voice. "She asked for my number and I did what you told me. I was like, `Look, you're really cute and seem extremely nice, but you're not quite my type. Your legs are a little bigger than I like them.'"
"No!" I shouted. I laughed and grabbed his shoulder and spoke in his ear. Against the din of 50 Cent, my mouth was so close to his ear that I could have licked it. "You don't say that to the girl. You say that to the girl who's setting you up with another girl."
"Either way, she really didn't like it," he said. "I don't think I'll do it again."