Joe College

Joe College, Part 22

"It must be frustrating that you don't write as much as you used to," Russell said.

He'd invited me to dinner that night in December, which, for Russell, meant going to a bar that served food. The fact that I still wasn't old enough to get served didn't bother him.

"That's your fault," I said. "Now I spend all of my time editing freshmen.

But, like, at this point, trashing people who like Kelis and jizzing over The White Stripes has gotten predictable."

"Fuck your youthful cynicism," Russell said. "You never get tired of jizzing over The White Stripes."

"Probably not," I said. "White Stripes, Black Keys."

"Is that about race?"

"Race, like, permeates society."

"I don't hear music in terms of race. I like Elvis and Dave Matthews," he said, lighting a cigarette and swallowing a quarter of his pint. "I don't have hipster tastes."

"You have moronic tastes," I said, "but basically, I'm on your shitlist because I don't write enough."

"Fuck you, you're not on my shitlist," Russell said. "You get your pages in on time and your work is never sloppy. I'd give you a blowjob just for that. Do you know the shit that I get from the sports boys? At least once a week, I'm rewriting one of their articles at two in the morning."

"Give me a cigarette," I said.

"How much does it piss you off that they banned smoking in New York City?" he said. "What a fucked-up, pussy country this is becoming, with the goddamned nanny state, and these fucking health nuts. This country was founded on three things: tobacco, whiskey and unprotected sex."

"And slavery," I said.

"Only in the South. And they banned that, too! Politically sensitive cocksuckers."

"You shouldn't talk like this in public," I said. "Somebody might overhear you, and then you'll get protested again."

"Thanks for bringing me back to my original point," he said.

"Why you love slavery."

"Why you need to write more," he said.

"I mean, I obviously like it. Maybe I could do some movie reviews or only pick artists that I like."

"I'm thinking of something else," Russell said, smoke slipping out of his lungs, leaning forward gesturing toward me with both hands, like a tarmac worker guiding an Airbus to the gate. "Our columnists always suck. Ever since I was a freshman. They're a joke. A token conservative who writes talking-point horseshit, a fat girl who writes about the crisis of date rape," he rolled his eyes to go with his air quotes, "and sexism in the media, a douchebag who pisses everybody off about Israel and Palestine, an earnest minority, and blah blah blah. And then every so often one of these geniuses concocts grandiose shit about nuclear proliferation or social constructs of family or moderate Islam -- shit they know nothing about -- and do you know what I do?"

"You have unprotected sex with them."

"No, they're the one's fucking me, daily and raw, in long, pretentious strokes." He made a masturbation gesture for longer than comfortable.

"Yeah," I said. "I can't remember the last time I looked at one of the columns past the headlines."

"And you read everything."

"Even stories on women's volleyball," I said.

"Pervert," he said.

"Can I cover women's volleyball?"

"You dirty, dirty pervert," he said.

Russell planned to fire the newspaper's columnists and replace them with his slate, which was to include me, Russell himself, and a half-dozen others. "We're not the Times," he said. "We're not the Wall Street Journal. No one wants to read a twenty-year-old psych major getting sanctimonious about America's struggle toward equality."

"Man, you should have seen this thing Eddie Caserta tried to write about Foucault and Jessica Simpson," I said.

"Don't distract me," Russell said. "We're going to not be fucking celestial. Funnier, more campusy. Rip the provost and the trustees, go to a student government meeting and make Charlie Curtis look like a douchelord. But also stay away from that `Sex and the City' shit. You ever get online and look at the papers at Penn or Texas, and it's horny shit-for-nothings pontificating about hook-up culture and roommate drama."

"Dude," I said, taking another cigarette, "I could never come up with something original once a week."

"Of course you can," he said. "If you of all people can't come up with four or five hundred words once a week, all of us are fucked."

"Every time you compliment me, it's like, I need lubricant."

"Fuck yes, handsome," Russell said. "And I'm not even making eye contact."

And part of what happened was my photo. When I showed up to get the headshot snapped, the photographer sent me and my gray hoodie home, saying to come back in a white dress shirt. She posed me against a brick wall and commanded my face through a range of expressions. My top two buttons undone, my lips curled to a slight smirk, eyes looking into the lens. She shot my jaw at the proper angle of defiance, like I wanted to fight you and then kiss you on the mouth, you son of a bitch.

Russell wanted columns to have running titles. He thought of it as good branding.

We pondered some cliches -- Regular Joe, Average Joe, Cup of Joe -- and joked about a name like Joseph's Stallin'.

Joe College isn't a great title: just more apropos than the other options.

Anachronism from a lost time where a young man played football in a leather helmet and snuck a flask of gin in his jacket pocket before he left to pick up his girl for a dance at the DKE House. Joe College took the train home to Allentown, picked up the sports pages to read about Joe Lewis, tried not to knock the communal spittoon, and assumed a junior management position at the factory when his varsity days ended.

Because of how they designed the pages, the paper ran self-promoting ads to fill corners of open space. Once or twice a week, they ran an ad, usually a couple of inches squared: READ JOE COLLEGE EVERY THURSDAY, with my sexy-beast headshot, my full Christian name in eight-point type.

READ JOE COLLEGE

My first couple of efforts were shit. My inauspicious beginning was a lament about MTV's abandonment of music videos and political reporting.

The second was a contrast between boy bands and The Rolling Stones circa 2004. Pathetic, desperate stuff, not at all what Russell wanted, even though he was decent enough not to tell me that.

My third try was headlined "Howard Dean does a kegstand." Dean had lost the Iowa caucus to John Kerry, and I, like, everyone else, felt devastated.

(Michelle actually cried that night.) And I still think that this column was fucking good, man. The premise wasn't Oscar Wilde (just Howard Dean at a college house party) but my execution was spot on, with hallmarks that you might recognize: addressing the reader directly, in a cocky, confessional, conversational prose. At the end of the column, the partiers look on in horror as John Kerry hooks up with the hot girl and Dean passes out on the front porch: The sincere party guy who everyone loves took it too far and embarrassed himself; the rich kid who nobody likes walked off with the hot chick.

I knew that I'd hit my trick when I checked my e-mail before class the next morning and had a half-dozen messages from strangers. By the end of the day, I had about 30 e-mails. One just said, "typical liberal faggot" and meant the epithet in a generic sense. Online, my column was linked on a couple of blogs -- not to any big-traffic sites; just small places where sad Dean fans commiserated -- which, again, didn't make me Nick motherfucking Kristof, but I was psyched nonetheless.

The response was addicting.

In the next weeks, I found myself thinking up ideas, throwing them away, jotting phrases in the middle of studying or even when drunk and hanging out. Parts of my brain no longer belonged to me. I could not summon these voices or kill them when they came -- these phrases, ideas, images, they announced themselves, and it didn't seem to matter whether I was drunk or sober, overcaffeinated or on the verge of sleep, alone or in a crowd of hundreds.

I had battled into my voice.

That February, from the 60 resumes that I'd sent over Christmas in search of summer internships, I found myself on the phone with a music magazine in New York. I did two twenty-minute phone interviews and gave them the requested reference -- limited to Russell, and the phone number of my dad's buddy, the law-firm partner who'd set me up with an internship back in the summer of `02. After 48 hours of distraction and anticipation, the kind where I couldn't sleep until five in the morning or focus on a word in lecture, I got a call asking if I'd be one of four interns that summer.

It didn't matter that the decision was made by a pair of staff writers who'd been given a task that no one else wanted. Barely trying, my future had come into shape. I'd become Michael Lewis, or maybe Tom Wolfe ingratiating myself to the next Ken Kesey. My indispensable voice would account for an era, I imagined as I couldn't fall asleep. I resolved to be kind of a big deal.

"Now that your picture's all over the place, you must be terrified that somebody's going to out you," Matt Canetti said.

"Nah," I said into the phone. "Nobody knows."

"Nobody except for the dozens of homos who saw you go berserk at that house party last spring."

"Yeah, right," I said. "Nobody would remember that."

"I was there and I wasn't very drunk," he said. "Trust me, it was memorable."

"They'd never put it together."

"You're, like, typically delusional," he said. "I grant you that they might not ever out you because they might not give a shit, but that doesn't mean that they're idiots. Not everyone is as demented and compartmentalized as you."

It seemed like Matt called me at the worst times, but there weren't good times for his long, digressive conversations. I was studying, at the newspaper, drunk or working out. Calls to my parents, I mentally scheduled in a 10-minute window when I was walking from the newspaper to the house.

Half the time neither of them was home anyway.

Matt mostly called when he left work, during his own walk home from the Hill to his apartment. He relished any detail about my classes, house parties, boring shit in campus politics. Even if he missed me as a person, what he mostly missed was college. If conversation ended too abruptly, I'd call him back later, at 10 or 11, but by then, he was worn down.

Even now that we were away from each other, we rarely said anything direct.

I suspected that he didn't want me to know how much he hated his job. His immediate supervisor was a Yale Law grad in her 30s whose competence and efficiency he doubted. He never expressly said that he wasn't getting substantive work, but it sounded like his tasks focused on office logistics. I'm pretty confident that when he'd gotten the job a year before, he pictured himself drafting legislation, sitting in the back row of committee meetings and advising the Congressman. Instead, he was another body.

He reached me on a Saturday when there was snow on the ground and rain that froze when it hit the sidewalk. Trevor and some of his friends were watching college basketball in the living room. I'd gone upstairs to study in my room but I wasn't inspired enough to read. I alternated between half-completed efforts at masturbation and occasional glances at a Chris Farley movie running on USA; the two distractions had nothing to do with each other.

"Do you ever hook up with that guy Wally?" Matt asked.

"Nah."

"You should."

"Why?"

"Because he was cute and you liked each other."

"I was drunk and he was there."

"He seemed like he'd be a bottom," Matt said. "I bet he'd let you, like, sodomize him."

"Gross. I don't want to have this conversation. It creeps me out."

"Who else can you talk about this with?"

"Andy Trafford?"

"You don't have that kind of relationship with him. Anyway, isn't he still doing study abroad in Italy?"

"Yeah. How do you know that?" I said.

"You told me a couple weeks ago, dumbass, but I knew already. You know that we e-mail a little."

"Yeah, that creeps me out, too."

"Everything creeps you out. `Don't drink coffee! It creeps me out.'"

"Shut up."

"`Don't buy bread! Bread creeps me out.' Your column should be called Gay Joe Is Creeped Out."

"You're being annoying."

"You know you miss it."

"Yeah," I said, "you know I do."

"Don't worry. I'm never going to hook up with your high school boyfriend."

"Actually, I'd probably like that," I said.

"Liar."

"No, I just mean, it'd be nice for you both. You're both good people."

"Half the time you say the opposite of what you mean, because that way, nobody will think you care. So you say you don't want to hook up with Wally even though you do, or you say that you'd like it if I hooked up with Andy, even though you'd probably hate that more than anything, not because of jealousy but because it would be something that excludes you, and you hate being excluded. You don't want anyone to know that, so you're all, `Go ahead!'"

"That's not correct. I love being excluded."

"You get neurotic when people go to dinner and don't invite you."

"I don't want to miss anything good."

"You should, like, sodomize Wally and then write a newspaper column about it," he said.

"No."

"That's how Thomas Friedman does things."

"I'm prettier than Thomas Friedman."

"True," he said. "Whoever airbrushed your jawline, I hope you paid them well."

"So are you going to come up and hang out in New York this summer?" I said.

"Are you going to come down and hang out in DC?" he said.

"Nah," I said. "DC is muggy and boring."

"True," he said. "Maybe I'll go up to the city and just hang out with Andy and not tell you."

I didn't tell Matt that I ran into Wally a couple of times that year. At a block party in September I was in line for the keg with Trevor. Wally appeared in front of me, grinning, and rapped me on the shoulder. He was with a giggling girl.

"Hey Joe," he said.

It was so incongruous seeing him that I didn't know how to respond. Even now, I still have a tendency to assign people their categories -- party friends, work friends, gay friends, college friends -- and not fully consider them in other respects. Wally was a totem that I associated with Matt, almost as if he'd graduated with him.

"Hey," I said, dazed. The girl with him giggled.

Apparently unoffended, he said, "I'll see you later," and walked away with the flash of a smile and a pert eyebrow.

"Who was that?" Trevor said.

"I don't know if he's from the newspaper or if we had a discussion section," I said.

"I think he likes you, dude," Trevor said.

"Who doesn't?" I said.

In November, Wally pulled up the chair next to me in the library reading room.

"What are you reading?" he whispered. I could smell the mint on his breath.

"Walt Whitman," I said.

[Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams, [Now I wash the gum from your eyes, [You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.

"The king of the gays," he said.

"I guess," I said, thinking that he was being reductionist.

"Did I make you uncomfortable at that party?"

"No," I whispered. "I was just confused."

"Abby thought you were hot and I told her how I knew you," he said.

"Who's Abby?"

"It doesn't matter," he said.

"I'm sure she's nice."

"She's a sweetheart."

"What are you studying?" I said.

"Ugh, astronomy. So annoying. I need my science distribution."

"What's your major?" I said.

"English."

"Me too. You take anything with Kavanaugh?"

"Um, yes. She's wonderful."

"I'm in Max Steiner's seminar on America before modernism."

"That must be brutal."

"He's intense but he's kind of a genius. Maybe even more than Kavanaugh."

"But he gives D's."

"If you're lazy, yeah, but he really respects smart people. He doesn't fuck around."

"I'm not that smart," he said, trying to be funny.

"I'm sure you're not entirely retarded," I said.

"Maybe not," he said. "Maybe we can get coffee sometime. You can tell me about Walt Whitman."

It's nice, being flirted with. When I walked home from the library, I thought that I'd e-mail him in the next day or two. I missed Matt; I needed a new gay friend. Wally was still cute. I wouldn't sodomize him, no, but unguarded company could be nice.

Once I got home, I was distracted, and I thought about it the next day and was distracted, and then I played out what would happen if we met, all of the reasons we wouldn't become friends and why I shouldn't hook up with him, all of the ways that he would have fallen short of Matt as my designated gay friend, how I'd be able to walk all over him, the discomfort of a stranger's yearning and emotions, and the concern that if I encouraged this guy, I'd never be able to shake him. I'd get hang-out e-mails for the rest of college when my social life was already so overstuffed that I could barely prioritize. A few days passed and the concept of Wally seemed stupid.

I mean, I could barely handle Chris.

And Chris could barely handle himself.

In his senior year, my buddy Doug rented a house a block down. He lived with four of his frat brothers. I liked them all. Doug managed the sports section by then. We must have spent 20 hours a week together.

One of Doug's housemates was a six-foot-two former high school quarterback from a suburb of Charlotte. Jamie Calmet had high cheekbones, hard forearms and tight jeans; he'd gotten into Duke and UNC but ultimately wanted to go out of state. He was better than hot, and because he wasn't a dick, he seemed more accessible than he actually was.

I mean, he's a really good dude. He works in finance now. We hang out once in awhile. We've gone to Dylan shows on back-to-back nights, and a couple of months ago Sam and I went to his engagement party in Tribeca.

He's getting married to a hot Asian girl next summer. I suspect that they're too young and attractive to get married and that it will end in divorce, but what do I know.

Back then he was only a party acquaintance. Jamie was personable, slightly soft-spoken and unquestionably straight. If you were talking to him at a party, his eyes looked past you while scanned the room for the hot girls.

He wasn't a player, he was just a dude with unlimited options.

But if you were talking to Chris at a party, and Jamie was there, Chris's eyes scanned the room for Jamie. They first met the weekend before classes started in September. We were grilling on the front porch and I invited Doug and his housemates over. Chris's behavior was a small revelation.

When talking to Jamie, he struggled to make eye contact and utter complete sentences. Then he got wasted and made a mess. It was like the start of freshman year.

"What do you think of Jamie?" I asked, after the syndrome was well underway.

Annoyed. "He seems like a good guy." Defensive. "Why?"

"No reason," I said. "He's kind of hot, though."

Disgust. "If you say so."

"You don't think so?" I said.

Impatience. "I told you, I don't notice that kind of thing. I'm not that way."

Of course he wasn't.

"Just don't embarrass yourself," I said.

I knew how much that comment would bother him, but then I immediately regretted it. I didn't even say it in a confrontational, snarky way -- slightly quiet, concerned for his welfare, patronizing, yes, but not, like, mocking. He glared and curled a lip but didn't have a reply ready.

The next time we were at a party with Jamie, Chris was conspicuous about not talking to him. He avoided me the whole night, too.

A week later I stepped out of another party, going to the front porch for a cigarette. Chris was with Jamie. They were talking about workout routines, which -- I mean, for fuck's sake. Chris halted when he saw me, staggered on a syllable. He scowled in defense and drew his shoulders back.

I said hey as I walked past, fiddling with my lighter.

Later that night: "You know, fuck you for trying to make me feel bad for making friends with new people," he said.

"Whoah," I said, "you know I wouldn't do that."

"You think you can control me," he said, "so when I'm just, like, talking to someone else, you try to make it something it's not."

"Whoah, dude," I said. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"You're a liar," he said. "You're a liar and you manipulate people."

"Hey. No," I said. "Meeting people and hanging out is what it's supposed to be all about. I'm not, like, going to make fun of that."

"Like I need your permission," he said. "Like you know what it's all about."

I was prepared to talk him down, to embarrass myself if he needed that, but he was drunk and staggered off into a crowd. I knew he was drunk but the look on his face and the edge in his voice disquieted me. I told myself that it was good to see him assertive -- he was so unhealthily willing to please, even when it didn't make sense -- except for the severity in his voice. My party mood disappeared. I just wanted to go home to my futon and play GTA and fall asleep.

A little later, Michelle asked me if something was wrong. No, I said, I'm just tired. She seemed to take it at face value and then asked me if I was sure. I smirked and nodded my head to the bass of the music. Yeah, yeah, I said. I'm good.

I left by myself twenty minutes later.

The next morning Chris was hungover, drinking coffee and eating a bagel.

The tired cheerfulness in his voice didn't sound like an act.

He looked so disheveled and vulnerable. I wanted to do something like sit next to him on the couch and, like, cuddle with him, spend all afternoon wrapped up with him and napping while he slept off a hangover and I caught up on my sleep debt. I'd had a couple of days like that with Matt, when he'd exhausted himself and took a day off from organizing things and chattering.

It's possible that he'd been so drunk that he didn't remember. Drunk shame is the worst. You wake up with that crimson fog, not sure how much you said or how much you merely felt, knowing that your personality had gone places it shouldn't and hoping that no one would hold it against you. For all I know he'd been lashing out all night, and he woke that day confused and mortified by himself, not knowing whether his embarrassment was real.

"I'd only do this for you," he said a night later, not looking me in the eye just before he guided my dick into his mouth. He almost took it all in, almost to the back of his throat. If he didn't give head as well as Matt, it was maybe more of a turn-on because I knew what a big deal it was for him.

"You're so good," I said to him, my fingers in his hair, looking down at the sight of his bare ass arched upward, cleaved in the air. "You don't know how good you are, I promise."

When I came he was above me, kissing my neck, air between our torsos while he was on his knees and elbows, his hard-on glancing against my stomach while I jerked myself with one hand and kept the other at the downward arch of his back.

"Chris has a weird man-crush on Jamie Calmet," Katie said.

"You think so?" I said.

"Do you see how he acts when Jamie is around?"

"Don't give him a hard time."

"Oh, I know," Katie said. "I'd never tell him this. He's so sensitive.

Do you know how sensitive he is?"

"I'm pretty aware."

"It can be painful," she said.

"It's hard to even make fun of him."

"I'm not making fun," Katie said. "I'm, like, totally perplexed.

Sometimes I wonder if he's gay."

"Seems unlikely," I said.

"Chris is so hot. Like, he's full-on, totally hot. He never hooks up. He freezes completely with girls but has elaborate complexes with guys."

"Dudes can be shy, too," I said.

"No, this is more than shy. It's at least deeply repressed," she said.

"Do you ever talk about it with him? What do you guys even talk about?"

"Movies, sports, books now. Video games. Classic rock."

"Guys are so frustrating," she said.

"No. I told you this before. It's boring. Guys never, ever talk about relationship bullshit."

"But what if Chris is gay?"

"Seriously, Katie."

"Just accept the premise, for the sake of argument. What if he's gay and he's completely tortured by it, and that's why he's tense all the time?

Wouldn't that be awful? It's, like, tragic. Like Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day."

"Chris is not gay," I said.

"Does he ever mention girls to you?"

"Yeah," I said. "He has a thing for Britney Spears in the Hit Me Baby One More Time video."

"Oh, yeah," she said. "I've heard that like a thousand times. That's his go-to. That video's like a century old now."

"It was early in his adolescence," I said. "Things make a big impression then."

"Like, you never talk about it, but you definitely hook up," she said.

She made this assertion so casually and confidently that I almost denied it. It also immediately relaxed me, because she wasn't about to steer discussion toward me. My own complications hadn't registered. And then I felt weirdly proud and confident, that I had this baseless reputation as a secret ladies' man. "I mean, you don't date, but you definitely hook up."

"Who do you think I've hooked up with?" I said.

"Uh, Samantha? Allison Peters? What's her name -- Mindy Barkley?"

I kept my face blank.

"See, exactly, and that's just from our, like, party circle. You have all of these other cliques. Who the hell knows what else you're up to, fucking Joe College."

Blank face.

"Chris, though, does nothing. Doesn't it seem like he should be with some cute Midwestern girl, and they'd, like, hold hands on the couch and go to movies and seem super-embarrassed the next morning when she slept over?"

"Maybe that's not his type."

"Exactly. Maybe you're his type. Maybe Jamie Calmet is his type.

Because that's the other thing, the way he seems to idolize these guys, and they happen to be of a similar look and personality type."

"Don't compare me to Jamie Calmet," I said. "I'm much cooler and better-looking than Jamie Calmet."

"Yeah, right, Happy Gilmore," she said.

"I don't think you're accurate," I said, ignoring the slam. "Chris is the same way with Sam and Trevor. He's the youngest kid. He was always the youngest brother, right? And there's obviously some kind of religion thing mixed up, even if he's not a fundamentalist. Right? So it's like, he's the youngest brother, and he kind of defers to people and emulates them because of that, and he's got a Christianity hangup with sex. I agree that he worries about my approval more than he should. He's not like that just with me. And he's not exactly smooth, but a lot of guys aren't, right?

Like, this criticism isn't directed at you, because I know what you mean, but it's kind of unfair to hold all guys to a standard where if they're not players or complete horndogs, there's something wrong with them. It's like you're damned either way. Hook up a lot, and girls think you're a dick.

Be shy or modest, and girls think there's something wrong with you, or, apparently, gay."

"Maybe," she said.

"Right," I said. "Don't worry about him. Let Chris be Chris."

"I know," she said. "It's just something I think about. As a friend. Not in a mocking way."

"I get it."

About a minute later, she put her book down and said, "Just one more thing though. He really doesn't look up to all of you in the same way. He is significantly different when he's around certain people. He doesn't react to Sam or Trevor the way he does to you -- or honestly, I think, to Jamie.

Jamie mentioned it once. He thinks it's funny. Maybe you're too close to the situation to realize that but I see it all the time."

This was as sincere as Katie got when she talked to me. She wanted me to know that she wasn't fucking around. I understood that she'd been debating whether to mention this to me, and that she felt bad for even raising it.

"And I guess I brought this up in part," she said, "because I don't think you realize that. You kind of look out for him already, but I thought you should be conscious of this, because I didn't get the sense that you were."

"Hey, I don't mean this in any kind of obnoxious way, but when was the last time you went out with a girl?"

"What are you saying?" he said.

"I'm not saying anything. I just wondered."

"Why?" he said. "Because if I haven't gone out with a girl lately, that means I'm some kind of freak?"

"No. Christ. Chill out."

He smacked my futon. "You wouldn't ask if it wasn't a setup. That's not the kind of thing you'd ask."

"Okay, right," I said, "it's not a setup, I promise. Just, you know, somebody was asking about your dating life."

"Why is it anybody's business?" he said.

"I mean, I agree that it's not. It's definitely not. She might want to set you up or something, though. So there's that. That's the only reason I'm asking."

"Who?" he said. "Is it Katie?"

I half-rolled my eyes.

"I knew it!" he said.

"People are annoying," I agreed.

"She wants to make me go out with some chick friend of hers? Pathetic."

"She didn't say for sure. They were just indications."

"I don't understand why it's anybody's business. It would never occur to me. Like, I don't care who Katie sluts around with."

"Dude, this doesn't need to turn into a thing. You shouldn't call her out.

All you do is go out on one date. Just one, with somebody we all know, like maybe Allison Peters or Mindy Barkley. They're fun. Nothing bad will happen. Mention it to Katie before you go. Go out once. She'll leave it alone."

He got off of my futon. He'd been happily watching Almost Famous. He stomped a few paces, exhales flaring through his nostrils.

How else could I have handled it? I had to give him cover from Katie but if I told him that she thought he might be gay, he would have exploded.

Wasn't it better to gracefully maneuver him away from her suspicions, even if it prompted a mini-tantrum at the beginning?

"So what am I supposed to do? Go out on a date with some idiot just so Katie doesn't bother me?"

"These girls -- like, Mindy Barkley is really fun, right? She's pretty awesome. You can spend three hours with her."

"Yeah, obviously." As in, What was I, a moron? "I can spend three hours with anybody but that's not the point. I shouldn't have to conform to Katie's expectations."

"Okay," I said, "then don't. You don't have to."

"But like you said, she won't quit."

"You can ignore Katie if you want. Like, who the hell is she to try to control anybody?"

"I thought you just said that I should go on a date to shut her up."

"I did, but only because I thought you'd want to shut her up. If you don't care, just fucking ignore her. She thinks she should meddle in everything.

You can be who you really are without worrying about Katie."

I selected the wrong phrase -- be who you really are. He heard a code, a taunt. With that phrase, I wasn't talking about defying Katie. I was sending him a signal about me, and about my crack about Jamie Calmet. He saw two options: surrender to Katie and go out with some chick, or surrender to me and admit to himself that he had a thing for guys.

"I just wanted to chill out and watch a movie tonight," he said, whining.

"I tried to watch downstairs but I couldn't because Sam was drinking and he kept interrupting, and then I come up here and all you do is start, like, throwing all of this crap at me."

"Dude, just watch the movie."

"I can't concentrate anymore. All anybody does is try to make me crazy all the time."

"I'm sorry."

"No, you most of all. You and Katie. Michelle is the only one who's nice to me now, and she's barely ever around anymore."

"I'm not trying to provoke you, man, but please, stop stressing out.

Nobody's out to get you. I was trying to do you a favor by defusing Katie, and even Katie's not trying to be a bitch, she's trying to be a friend, but it's, like, manifesting itself somewhat awkwardly. She's only concerned to the extent that she's trying to, like, facilitate your happiness, and I'm only involved because I'm trying to keep you out of an awkward situation."

Even as I said this, I was confused about my story. I'd forgotten the original conversation with Katie. In my head, I wasn't lying to Chris. I was a terrific method actor. I'm not trying to be cute. I found myself truly believing my background story about all of this

My poor, overwhelmed, confused friend. It wasn't the last time that I thought he would have been better off if he'd never met any of us.

Now I look back on this and realize what an asshole I was. I thought that I was protecting Chris but really, I was protecting myself. I didn't want any suspicions. Combine Katie's theory about Chris with his blow-up over Sam's drunk wisecracks, Michelle's apparently dormant theory about my own sexuality, and the evidence would come into place. To my knowledge, they didn't have those kinds of conversations with each other. Sam was an amusing entertainment to the two girls, and Michelle and Katie, even though they got along, they came from different planets. Katie will tell a stranger to fuck off if she's in a bad mood; Michelle was gracious and mature, even back then. Michelle would have known better than to kick around personal speculations with Katie or Sam. I don't think there were a lot of late-night chat sessions about me or Chris.

I mean, I fucked up here.

I should have let Katie continue to think that Chris was gay. He trusted her. If he'd gotten to the point of wanting to talk to someone, he would have picked her. I didn't need to lurk like an avenging angel, controlling what people thought about Chris or how he conducted himself.

There should have been a story where he got blackout drunk and tried to grope Jamie Calmet, or where Katie knew he was gay and waited it out. He would have had to confront the question.

If I hadn't been so intent on showing off my savvy and control -- paranoid about any slight hint that life existed beyond bros hanging out over Grand Theft Auto and going to football games -- there would have been a story that turned out cleaner and easier. As you figured out a long time ago, this isn't that story.

He didn't tell much much about his dates, but he got off on the attention.

It wasn't a sexual thing. There were nights when he came home, walked up to my room, and took down his jeans, already hard. I knew he'd been out with a girl because he smelled like cologne. He used put on cologne before his dates, and then eventually someone told him not to.

"How was it?" I'd ask.

"It was, whatever," he'd say.

Chris could handle approaching a girl and asking, "Do you want to go see Hellboy this weekend?" He liked taking them to movies, but if there was nothing he wanted to see, hanging out at a coffee house -- or after he was 21, a bar -- would be okay. It must have been weird for these girls, but I think that Chris's looks gave him a lot of leeway. He probably did a lot of listening, which gave them the misapprehension that he was taking a deeper interest in their lives.

I don't think he ever saw a girl more than two or three times, dropping them before there was any strong pressure to get physical. His style changed at parties. He no longer tended to hang off of me, or Trevor, or Katie. He'd sort of hold court in a corner with two or three girls talking to him. They laughed a lot. He wasn't so oblivious: he had to know that each of these girls wanted to be the one that he'd pick to go home with him, not knowing that, if they hit the jackpot, the most they'd get was an invitation to see Kill Bill, and that he wouldn't even share a popcorn because he thought it was too salty.

Chris and I went to this party with Michelle, which was the kind of crowd where other random nerds recognized my headshot. Trevor's friends and Sam's friends probably didn't look at the paper except to do the crossword puzzle before lecture, but the student-government types and activists read everything, and especially the opinion page. Some of us imagined that we lived part-time in a brainier, powerless version of The West Wing.

I was in a basement, filling my cup from the keg, when a guy on my periphery, sweaty and sloppy, loudly said a version of "whoah."

"You're Joe College," said the kid with a JewFro.

"What's up," I said.

"Dude, your stuff's fucking hilarious, man," he said.

"Awww, thanks, man.."

"Are you going to be, like, a real writer when you graduate? Like a journalist?"

"Maybe. That's the plan but I don't really know."

"So are you, like, friends with Marty or Dave or Brett?"

"Nah, man," I said. "I don't know them. I came here with one of my roommates."

"Cool, man," he said. "I'm Rob."

"Nice meeting you, man," I said, spilling a tranche of beer when we shook hands. "I have a brother named Rob."

"We're related!" he said. "I have an uncle named Joe."

"So, like, the Soviets, and Stalin," I said, briefly getting tangled, "there were people who called Stalin Uncle Joe."

"What?"

"Stalin's nickname was Uncle Joe."

He laughed and leaned against the basement wall. "You're a weird, funny cat, man."

"True," I said, hitting his shoulder. "You too."

It was only April and not really that warm, but a night in the 60s felt sordid after single-digit temperatures in February. The house felt stuffy.

Everybody was sweating. I looked around for Michelle and her friends.

Chris was in the kitchen talking to a couple of girls. He wore my goddamn orange hoodie that night. When I walked past, he literally collared me, hooking his fingers into the back of my T-shirt. I spilled more beer.

"Hey," Chris said.

"Hey."

"We were just talking about you," he said.

"I'm Joe," I said, shaking the girlhands.

"Your thing about Dick Cheney was so funny," said a girl, "and I'm kind of a secret Republican."

"I'm so sorry to hear that," I said.

"No, no, not like that, just on, like, foreign policy stuff."

"Oh no."

"Joe's, like, an Arabic scholar," Chris said. "He's fluent. He has very strong views."

"I'm not fluent," I said.

"Arabic must be hard."

"My Arabic isn't that good," I said.

"We don't need to talk about politics," Chris said.

"No, that's right. I'm looking for Michelle."

"I'm so excited to meet you," said a drunk girl. "I always read you before class."

I could've gotten blown by her within 90 seconds.

"That's so awesome, because who am I? A drunk asshole, writing a bunch of bullshit."

"No, you're hilarious. You're so talented."

I want to say that it was annoying or that I didn't care, but these compliments got me so high. Campus fame at a decent-sized school was intoxicating. I don't know how quarterbacks or starting forwards cope, because once every week or two a drunk, nerdy kid would recognize me, and I'd think I was blessed and brilliant and renowned.

"You should talk to Chris," I said to the girls, playing straight wingman to the guy whose dick I loved sucking. "He's more fun. I'm, like, competent on paper but lame in person. Chris is awesome."

Michelle and her do-gooder friends were near the front door. "I want to play flip cup," I said.

"They don't have it set up," she said.

"I'm in a competitive mood."

"Yeah. You can be annoying when you get like that."

"Chris has two girls hanging off of him," I said.

"He's a player now."

"Yeah, I guess," I said, pretending to be proud and mystified. "It's good for him to loosen up."

"You're sweaty," Michelle said.

"Glands."

I was bored by this party, you can tell, but I liked the attention from strangers, and floated under the impression that additional people recognized me but were either too polite or unimpressed to say anything.

By 1 a.m. the party was unwinding. About eight people who knew each other danced in the dark. Chris's two girls had left him.

"They seemed nice," I said.

"Yeah, they were okay."

"Kind of cute," I said.

"Yeah, they were cute," he said. "Whatever. It's, like, not really worth talking about. It's boring."

"I know," I said. "Let's not talk about it."

We leaned against a wall, talking to each other with that posture that didn't signal gay but that was closer than I would have allowed other people, where we could smell the beer on each other's breaths and occasionally sense a brush of heat from each other's bodies. Michelle was talking about going home, anyway, but her attempt at good-byes evolved into lengthy conversations. It seemed like she was networking, but for what purpose, I had no idea.

My new buddy Rob -- the fan with the JewFro -- popped in front of us. He wore a denim jacket. He seemed more sober than before.

"Hey man," he said, raising his hand to shake mine, "it was cool meeting you, and I don't mean to be weird or anything, but some friends and I are going to go back to my house, maybe smoke a bowl and hang out for awhile.

Nothing crazy. Just some good people hanging out."

"Okay, cool," I said, picturing that scene where Billy Crudup jumped from a roof into the swimming pool in Kansas.

"So, like, if you feel like coming over and hanging out, I just thought I'd extend the invitation. You can obviously bring your friends if you want," he said, gesturing at Chris, "but no pressure. I'm not being gay or anything. You just seem like a cool guy."

"Yeah, well, that's just because you don't know me yet," I said. I looked at Chris. "You feel like hanging out for awhile?"

"I mean, why not?"

"Yeah." I wasn't sure if I was excited about the possibility of new people and getting stoned or kind of bummed that I'd have to delay my sudden horniness for Chris.

We ended up in this real Atlantic City of a college house. There were these houses in college with cigarette burns and mysterious stains in the carpets, plaster patches in the wall that covered punches and mars, tan discolorations in the ceilings. I know that in most stages of life, a place like that would connote deprivation or addiction, but houses like that were common, and the people who lived in them were always the most untamed. They were the places where nobody cleaned the spilled beers and the kitchen linoleum made sticking sounds under the soles of your sneakers.

I don't remember the names of Rob's roommates or friends and girlfriends and I never hung out with any of those people again. There were about a dozen of them. They didn't know who I was but this guy Rob was eager to make a good impression. Within minutes of getting to the house he'd packed a bowl and handed it to me to take the first hit.

Chris's smoking reminded me of the first night we got together, when we were up in my room on the floor, listening to "Will Cove," how nervous and tense I'd been when we did it. That night alternated between the euphoria and excitement of being with him, the belief that I'd never get off with him again so I should enjoy it as strenuously as possible, and the fear that he'd hate me the next day for it all. He made eye contact with me when he breathed in from Rob's pipe, and smirked when he exhaled and coughed. I imagined that he too was thinking about that night when he looked me in the eyes, but I never mentioned it for fear of a contradiction to my imagination.

About a half-hour after that, the night tilted. There were a bunch of East Coast kids in that house. Another lesson I learned in college is that when you get a bunch of upper-middle-class white kids from the Northeast drunk or stoned, at least one of them will want to play Springsteen. They started with "I'm Goin' Down" and by the time "Glory Days" started, most of the room was on its feet, shouting and stumbling over lyrics, dropping and inventing words, pointing to the ceiling like we were summoning his spirit.

This scene -- triumphant or sorry, but definitely energized -- carried for about an hour, into the highlights of Born to Run and into some of the deeper cuts from the 70s like "The Promised Land" and "Blinded By the Light."

"Rosalita" triggered it. It must have been playing that one night, that spring night in my freshman year when I was with Canetti, at that party in his apartment with Hot Erin and that gay redheaded guy Charlie, the one who came out to me while we were having cigarettes on the balcony, and the kid with the guitar was playing acoustic frat-folk songs, when Matt touched me in front of all of those people, putting his arm around my shoulders and squeezing me against them, the terror and confusion and release of that moment. It was the only time that other people would have had visual evidence that I was down with dudes, being touched like that so casually by the guy who may or may not have been my boyfriend but either way the only person who I found myself fully believing and trusting.

Deja vu braces you like a moment of clarity, especially when you're stoned.

I was shouting to "Rosalita" and people stomped the floor into tremors.

Matt was in D.C., probably home from a bar, maybe already asleep for hours, but there had been this moment that existed that had seemed so real and vital, when I had been with this guy who I liked, who had made everything better, and now all of that was gone, the thinnest memory.

Maybe that memory wasn't even real though, not in the sense that it was something concrete and verifiable, it was real only because of what existed in my mind, my affection and faith in him, which isn't something that you can ever know for sure, it exists only because you think it, and maybe all of our memories are fictions, emotional apparition, something that only came back when I shouted out those Springsteen lines --

"Hey," I half-whispered to his voicemail five minutes later, "I know it's really late and you're probably asleep, but I'm with these people, and this Springsteen song, it just reminded me of that night a couple of years ago with that guy with the guitar, when there were a bunch of us in your apartment. I don't know if you remember that." I suddenly felt stupid.

My call had no purpose. "Anyway, it was a good memory. I wish you were here. And what's Erin up to?" I reassured myself that my voice sounded normal. "Let's talk soon."

I lit a cigarette and gathered my thoughts.

"Hey, I'm kind of stoned right now," I told his voicemail in my second call. "So I'm sorry if that message didn't make sense. I was just thinking about that night. I miss hanging out with you. I'm not being gay or anything. It just all came back to me from that song and I'd forgotten all about it. But that's it, so bye."

I went back inside. Throughout all of this, Chris had been sitting on a couch, looking stoned and happy and calm. Midwesterners don't have the same appreciation for Springsteen. It was about 3:15. I sat on the couch next to him and leaned my elbow on his shoulder, not like I wanted to jizz on his face but like we were just bros.

"These guys' pot, it's better than the stuff Trevor gets," I said.

"It is?"

"Yeah. Trevor must buy shit," I said.

"It doesn't feel that different to me."

"Are you bored?"

"No. This is pretty funny. You guys really like Springsteen."

"Do you want to go?" I said.

"We don't have to go," he said.

"I mean, I'm good to go. We can just go home," I said.

We didn't, though, and then we were in the basement of this ridiculously messy house. It was something about how "Tyler knows how to DJ" and rapping, and Rob is a rapper and Rob is a wrapper and Rob is a robber.

I must have been pretty stoned because when I listened to them, I thought that the performance sounded good. I thought something about how these guys could make it big: the suburban white rapper with the JewFro and the other suburban white kid being a DJ on his MacBook. They connected the computer and a microphone to some tattered speakers. Their friends hooted and cheered on Rob's lines. In my memory he was a weirdly confident performer, playing off of his friends reactions, his verses full of graphic-but-benign sexual imagery, occasional references to getting high.

You could picture a cleaned-up version of his routine winning a talent show in high school or summer camp. I mean, it's not like Asher Roth is any good, either.

He handed me the mic. "Dude," I said into the mic, my voice amplified through the speakers, "I've never done this."

"Do it!" he shouted.

"Uh." His DJ buddy on the laptop had left me hanging with a sample from "Come on Eileen." "Dude, this is a really tough beat to just, like, jump into."

"Stop being a pussy!" Rob shouted at me. A couple of his friends jeered.

It didn't matter that they were joking. Pushed in the spotlight, I felt like fight or flight. I looked to Chris, like I thought he'd intervene, but he just tugged at my orange hoodie and gave me a look like, This thing was your idea, Vanilla.

So the first and only time that I freestyle rapped, it was to this edited loop from Dexy's Midnight Runners, mumbling embarrassing, hacky lines that you'd expect from any untalented white douche pretending to be a rapper. A couple of minutes in, Tyler switched to the famous bassline from "Walk on the Wild Side," the one that A Tribe Called Quest used in "Can I Kick it," a track that I must have played several hundred times when I was in fifth or sixth grade.

I found my pace. It wasn't good, but it was enough for these guys to get enthusiastic. It was 3 a.m. and the long winter was over. Everyone was drunk or stoned. The basement smelled like weed. It was not a tough crowd. I strung together loose rhymes and threw my body into it. Tyler the DJ transitioned to the sample from "Ms. Jackson." Even easier. I kept going.

"Joe College, ladies and gentlemen," Rob said into the microphone when my turn ended. "Joe College, famous newspaper journalist and hip-hop sensation."

I went upstairs to take a piss. The bathroom smelled like urine. Trimmed pubes dusted the porcelain rim. I decided not to wash my hands.

Chris lingered outside the door.

"Oh, hey," I said. "All yours."

"I don't have to go."

"Oh. Should we leave?"

"I just don't know anybody downstairs."

"Yeah. I don't really know them either."

He reached out his arms and pulled me to him. He hugged me.

I started to pull away because it seemed risky and he was too stoned to know better. But he felt too good. Chris is still the only guy I've been with who's taller than I am. When I remember how it felt with him, I understand why so many gay dudes have a preference for taller guys. He could feel so solid.

"I love you," he said. "You're my best friend."

I tightened around his shoulders. "You're just drunk and stoned."

"No," he said. "Yeah, I am, but even so. All the fun I ever have in life is because of you."

"Thanks man," I said. [he's just stoned he's just stoned he's just stoned he isn't being deep [don't let yourself think that he's being too deep he's just just stoned "You know I love you too," I said.

"I know," he said, leaning into me more. "I'm sorry that I keep flipping out at you."

"That's okay. I can be kind of a dick."

"Yeah, I know."

I turned my face toward his head. I pressed my forehead and eyelid against his hair. My nose was at his ear. My dick was already cutting at my jeans at an uncomfortable angle.

"Let's go home now," I said. "I've been wanting to go home for at least three hours."

"Really?" he said. "We should have left."

We were still hugging. The rest of the party remained in the basement. It sounded like someone was euthanizing Nate Dogg.

"I wanted to see what happened next," I said, "but I've been wanting to go home with you for hours."

"Really?"

"Yeah," I said. "All night all I've wanted is to go home with you."

I pressed closer against him. He was hard, too. I kissed his right jaw and let him go.

We left without saying anything to our hosts. It didn't matter, I said.

They were fun but we'd never see them again. Let's just go home.