Joe College, Part 28
"Omar Little: Gay Avenger"
The Collegian, page A-13, col. 1, Jan. 11, 2005
"When you come at the king, you best not miss." – Omar Little
If you're like most people I know, you've made the mistake of never watching The Wire, which means that you don't know about Omar Little.
Omar is one of the show's anti-heroes. He makes his living by violently robbing drug dealers. He lives in Baltimore. Omar is black, and he is gay.
It's the last adjective that makes him revolutionary in popular entertainment. If you consider yourself gay, you cringe at the minstrel depictions in popular culture. It seems like, when writers want a madcap character with no psychological heft, they insert a stock gay man and let his most superficial characteristic (sarcasm, nervous energy, mincing) do all the work. Gay dudes are sassy best friends, functionally asexual, incapable of exercising power or displaying a glimpse of menace.
Except when they're serial killers.
We're sashaying sidekicks (not that there's anything wrong with that) or cheap punchlines for lazy stand-up comedians. Or maybe we're given the dignity of heroic suffering – dead and martyred at the hands of violent, redneck bigots, or struck down by a viral menace, from an era when being gay must have felt like a death sentence.
Omar takes a lighter to these tissue-paper tropes. He is the most fearsome character on a show packed with killers and corrupt cops. He wears a trenchcoat, wields a shotgun, and, although every drug gang in Baltimore wants him dead, seems practically untouchable.
It would be easy for the writers to treat his sexuality like an eccentricity. Instead, they give him the dignity of a fully realized emotional life. His sexuality isn't sensationalized, stigmatized, or exaggerated. In season one, they show his sincere emotional and physical affection for a guy named Brandon. After the Barksdale crew takes vengeance on Omar by leaving Brandon's mutilated body in public, Omar goes to war.
In this labyrinthine show, with its dozens of characters and subplots, Omar propels the story as much as anyone.
This was never truer than in the next-to-last episode of Season Three, when Omar kills the show's other principal, principled anti-hero, Stringer Bell. It often seemed as if the entire series was building toward a redemption arc for Stringer, who, like Omar, connected so many disparate themes and storylines.
It was remarkable to have this gay character, capable of moral violence and stop-in-your-tracks intimidation, be the one to kill Stringer. In the process, he also shot down pop culture's universal stereotype of a gay man's defining traits and the conventional narrative structure of a television drama.
True, few gay, lonely teenagers would look at Omar and see a reflection of themselves. But it isn't always about concepts as easy as role models. I'm going to assume that, whatever the age, when you're gay, you're desperate for any thread of pop-culture redemption. And if you're not a high-pitched fashionisto whose idea of a good time is drinking fine wine with your best girlfriends (again: not that there's anything wrong with that) you recoil and flip the channel.
The Wire is rightfully praised for its grit, complexity and moral outrage, but near the core of that is its clear-eyed gay avenger. Omar may not be a role model or a superhero, but I'd rather take sides with the forceful, decisive, flawed schemer with a scar on his face and righteous fury in his heart.
It's all in the game, yo. All in the game.
STEPHANIE: You'd sent me this attachment and said something like, "I just sent this in to Edwards for tomorrow. Meet me at Charterhouse. My phone is off and I'm not leaving until you come." My first read through, I didn't understand what you were saying. I thought possibly the column was sarcastic. Like it was a tone experiment that went over my head.
MARK EDWARDS [then-editorial page editor]: I knew you were being serious.
I understood your writing style. It would have been in a different voice if you'd been insincere. From the first paragraph, I had sensed what I was about to read. When you got to the paragraph that referred to gay guys as "we," I was still stunned. Just on a personal level, not editorially.
Like, "Is Joe actually saying this?"
STEPHANIE: It seemed extremely strange that you sent it to me specifically and asked me to meet you. I had no idea what to expect.
ME: Why did it seem strange that I sent it to you?
STEPHANIE: There were so many other people that would have made more sense.
ME: Well, number one, you're a girl, and it seemed easier to have a girl around than a guy. Number two, you knew Chris and Trevor, but you weren't that close to my housemates, and I wanted separation from them. Number three, we were reasonably close by then.
STEPHANIE: Yeah, it's funny though. Maybe this sounds strange. I obviously had a crush on you, and we'd get lunch and e-mail, that kind of stuff, but I thought that I was more a person who you tolerated than someone who you liked being around.
ME: No, really? That's sad. I thought of you as like my little sister.
STEPHANIE: It was partly a self-esteem thing. I was a nerdy little girl doing poli sci and writing newspaper articles about academic revenues, and you were Joe. And you had your Joe thing, where you were [deep voice], "Hey, I'm Joe," and you'd act obnoxious about obscure bands and sports knowledge and difficult novels. We weren't that much alike.
ME: Shit, kid. So you must have had no idea what to think when you showed up and I was a drunk insane person.
STEPHANIE: You were alone in a booth, chainsmoking, already drunk, doing the crossword. You looked away from me, like you got caught doing something bad. And I was at a total loss.
MARK EDWARDS: Antonio and I wanted to talk to you before we published. He thought someone was possibly pulling a joke at your expense, which seemed absurd to me. I insisted that no, this was Joe's writing and what he's saying is real. As a friend, I wanted to talk to you before we ran it, to make sure you thought through what you were saying, both as a personal matter and as a point of substance.
ME: Like what?
MARK EDWARDS: You were too harsh about gay stereotypes that I knew were sensitive for people, and I thought that you were too positive about Omar as a character. I watched The Wire, too. I didn't think he had heroic qualities. I was going to suggest softening the edges. And plus there was the fact that you were apparently coming out by way of this particular column. Just as a friend, I wanted to talk to you about that. Which was presumptuous of me. We were friends, but we weren't that close.
If I'm being totally honest, looking back on it now, I wanted to talk to you for the gossip. I didn't actually care about lofty editorial concerns.
I wanted a scoop.
ME: That kind of conversation was the exact reason that I turned off my phone and wasn't checking e-mail.
MARK EDWARDS: I figured as much.
ME: I made my decision and needed to disappear.
STEPHANIE: You were just all [impersonating], "Hi," and didn't look at me.
I asked if you were okay and you said, "Nah, I'm pretty fucking far from okay," like in Pulp Fiction, and slammed down your pint glass.
ME: That's so ridiculous.
STEPHANIE: Right. You looked extremely serious. You told me that I was the only person you trusted, and that you wanted to stay with me while the situation calmed down. It was like you internalized the rhetoric of mob movies or spy movies. I thought that meant you didn't want to live with your roommates anymore, or that your parents were upset. Like something severely, externally bad was happening, that went beyond the stress of coming out as gay. You were being apocalyptic.
ME: I felt apocalyptic.
STEPHANIE: And of course Charterhouse wouldn't serve me, because I was only 20 and looked 16. That made you angry. You had a lot of anger. The theme for you that day was that everything was over for you now, and as soon as the paper came out the next day and people read it, you were doomed. You were swearing the whole time about how Charterhouse refused me, which was the last thing I cared about.
MARK EDWARDS: It wasn't malicious gossip, but by 5 p.m., probably everybody who was in the office had heard. I told Melissa [then the newspaper's editor in chief] under the premise that she should be prepared for this once I got page proofs to her. But, again, with about nine years of hindsight, I think I just wanted to tell her, because I had exciting information. Antonio was telling people too. It wasn't mocking -- it was just news. You know how everyone gossiped.
ME: Of course.
MARK EDWARDS: We loved to gossip about each other. Somebody like David Jacobs, of course, everybody figured he was gay since freshman year. You, nobody sensed it. We all thought that you were hooking up with sorority girls. So people were very into this, in a nerdy, excitable way. Nobody was malicious.
STEPHANIE: I'd seen you drunk how many times before? You were usually a good drunk. Pretty fun. It made me nervous that you were so intense. For real, I think that I was the worst possible person for you to call at that time.
ME: No way. You were perfect.
STEPHANIE: I'm glad that I was able to be there for you, and it made us closer. I think of you as one of my closest friends, and I might not if it hadn't been for those 24 hours, but at the time, I was frightened. You have to understand how different you were for me, in terms of how you present yourself, phrase things, your physical size. Intimidating might not be the right word. But you were a foot taller than me. You probably weighed eighty pounds more than me. I didn't understand how guys talk.
I'd never seen you in a bad mood. So you were like, "Fuck this," and "Fuck that," smoking all of those cigarettes -- which I hated -- and getting drunker. I'm wondering to myself, "What if somebody has to restrain him?" or, "What if he gets angry and turns on me?"
ME: Jesus, man. I never thought of it that way.
STEPHANIE: You were severe. I debated whether to get in touch with Chris or Trevor, because this seemed like something they would have been better at handling.
ME: They were two of the last people I wanted to be around.
STEPHANIE: Yes, you were clear about that. I called my roommate while we were on the way to my place to explain to her what was going on. So she cleared out for the night. You stopped and bought a case of beer and another pack of cigarettes.
ME: Was I even incoherent? I remember how I felt, and I remember feeling glad that I was with you, but I don't know what I was saying.
STEPHANIE: Just that it was all over. You kept using versions of the phrase. As in, "When I wake up in the morning, it's all over. I'll never have my life back. I'll always be on the outside now." Or, "It's all over for me now. I'm throwing it all away. For what?"
ME: Yeah, I see why that seemed unsettling.
STEPHANIE: Right. And like I was saying, you were scary. You weren't like yourself. Then you got so drunk that your mood turned around. You became a clumsy child. Impulse and enthusiasm. You got very, very into music. You downloaded Rosalita and that one -- that, like, sappy Jack Johnson song from the 90s, it's very California frat. Talking about this great party you went to when you were a freshman and this guy was playing songs on his guitar, and how everybody claims to hate it when that one guy breaks out a guitar and starts playing, even though everyone secretly loves it -- but not you, you don't pretend to hate it, you love when people do that, and there was a night your freshman year when a guy did that and it was the most fun you've ever had at a party.
ME: I still remember that party so clearly.
STEPHANIE: Then you did a handstand against my living room wall, and I stopped feeling so concerned.
TREVOR: I was at Endzone and got a text from Patti Chang. It said something like, "Have you heard about Joe?" I wrote back, "What about Joe?" She wrote back, "OMG!!! Read The Collegian first thing tomorrow!"
Honest to God, bro, my first thought was that you'd gotten some kind of award. I texted you asking what was going on, and you didn't respond.
Texted Katie, and she was like, "I have no idea. It's probably something annoying." I was all, "Hmmm." Later that night I run into Tim Cohen [who wrote sports at the newspaper] at the bar, and was like, "Bro, do you know anything about a Joe situation at the paper?", and he says, "Holy shit dude, your boy Joe is gay!" And I was like, "Shut the fuck up," and Tim says, "Honest to God. He comes out in his column tomorrow." He grabs some guy I don't know by the collar, pure frat, and says, "Yo, this is Joe's housemate. Tell him about the column." And the guy is like, "The Wire turned Joe gay, yo."
ME: It was classy that you didn't turn around and tell everybody at the house. That's what I would've done.
TREVOR: Wasn't my place, and I didn't know what they were talking about.
Seemed like a weird inside joke, because of what that guy said about The Wire. Maybe because I was up to more sketchy shit than anybody in that house, I didn't need to gossip like that. The rest of you loved trading stories. I thought of it as shit bored girls do. I thought, "Wow, maybe Joe's gay now," and went back to drinking and macking on -- what was her name -- Avida? My instinct wasn't [in a Valley Girl voice], "Oh my God.
Sammy is never going to believe this."
SAM: I didn't believe it. Stunned.
MICHELLE: I almost didn't read because I saw that it was about The Wire. I was soooooo sick of hearing you guys talk about The Wire. It took me years before I could watch it. I looked at the first couple of sentences and thought to myself, "Seriously? More of this shit?" But I also think, maybe more than anyone else, I had this vague sense from the headline of what was coming, and about two paragraphs in, I got chills.
ME: I'm not insulted by this the way that I used to be, but it still seems crazy to me that you thought I was gay.
MICHELLE: Please! It seems crazy to me that no one else did, and that they were all shocked! Are you kidding me? You spent all of college avoiding girls and barely paying attention when they tried to talk to you!
There was a baseless myth that you were secretly a ladies' man. Everyone thought that you had girls we didn't know about. The way you compartmentalized your social life, I see how they might reach that conclusion, but the answer was always Occam's Razor. I suspected it within two months of living together. If your personality had been different, I would have approached you, but I understood, correctly, that you would have gone berserk if I suggested it, no matter how respectfully or warmly.
ME: I probably would have found a girlfriend. For real. I definitely wouldn't have come out in college. I would have lost my mind.
MICHELLE: That doesn't make sense to me.
ME: Most of the time I couldn't stand even thinking about it. If you asked me about it, it would have been all-out war. We might not have stayed friends. I'm not telling you that because it makes sense. That's just how it was then.
KATIE: This is a completely childish, self-indulgent exercise about a ridiculous episode in your life. I mean, seriously. Get over yourself.
ME: It's hilarious how much you hated how I handled that.
KATIE: It was ridiculous! You're such a drama queen! Okay, first off.
You come out in a fucking newspaper column about Omar from The Wire, which was beyond nuts. You didn't think, "It might be good to tell my parents and my close friends and go from there." No, it was, "Omar is the man because he killed some guys! Guess what? I'm gay too!" Which is fucking psychotic. So adolescent. As if, yes, you, Joe, are from the Baltimore projects and Omar Little is the person who validated your sexuality. Give me a fucking break. But then it wasn't enough that you came out in this insane way, but you had to go into hiding for 24 hours. Your mom starts calling me and Sam because she's freaking out and can't reach you either, and we can't tell her that we don't know where you are. She's calling the fucking newspaper, and they don't know where you are. So now there's this slight panic that's building, where people think that you've hung yourself or something. Everybody starts getting completely dramatic-
ME: Don't blame me because everybody else got dramatic.
KATIE: Oh, really? Says the king of all drama. There was a day of our life where there were probably like literally two dozen people who spent an afternoon going nuts because we thought you were dead or something.
ME: That's your own self-manufactured drama. Seriously? Because you're the only one who's said anything that extreme. You're the only person who thought that way. Don't blame me because you're prone to paranoia.
MOM: It was maybe not the greatest day, but I understand now what you were thinking and am just glad that you're healthy and happy.
SAM: I felt lied to. Not that our friendship had entailed chasing pussy or tag-teaming Pi Phis. To be clear, there was zero aspect of our friendship that was built on an assumption of shared heterosexuality. But if it had been me, I certainly would have been comfortable sharing that part of myself with you, and would have trusted you not to tell other people. I believe that, as your good friend, I was entitled to know, and not find out in through some weird meta critique of The Wire and gay culture.
ME: Dude. You are the most vulgar, ruthless conversationalist I've ever met. We didn't have heart-to-heart chats like that. One crack from you, and I would have lost it.
SAM: Lost what, the cock that was down your throat?
ME: Dude. See-
SAM: Give it up, Nancy. All freshman year, you were sneaking around so you could hook up at night with Matt Canetti, when I thought that you were out partying and sleeping over with girls in Center or whatever.
ME: Well. You don't even know the half of it.
SAM: No, I'm sure that I don't. You were probably sucking an outrageous amount of cock without my knowledge. Which is fine! I don't tell you every time I cunniling a woman. But when you're good friends with someone, you are, in fact, sharing important parts of your lives with one another.
Perhaps not like in a marriage, yet one still assumes that you are witnesses and aides to one another's existences. That's the foundational premise of friendship. And then I wake up one day, go to Econ 453, flip to your column, and that's how I find out you're a big homo?
MOM: It was extremely difficult.
DAD: Your mom was upset. I think that I understood what you were going for.
MOM: I understand that we might not have a lot of difficult, personal conversations, but I still thought that we were close enough that you could talk to us about something that important.
DAD: I respect why this would have been difficult for you to talk about and why you needed to go about it in your own way.
EVAN: I seriously don't want to talk to you about this.
ROB: Great work giving Mom a nervous breakdown, you stupid homo.
MOM: I wasn't upset that you were gay, although I certainly was surprised.
It was surreal, getting up in the morning and going online, and learning this about you. I was just flabbergasted.
ROB: To be clear, I don't judge you for being a homo. I'm not a Republican. I judge you for being a demented loser of a homo.
ANDY TRAFFORD: My mom called me at like 9 a.m. I wasn't barely awake.
She's like, "Andy, did you know Joe was gay?" And I was kind of like, "Whaaat?" And she was like, "Meredith just called me in a state.
Apparently he came out as gay in the newspaper today?" This floored me.
And I wasn't totally awake. I wasn't thinking strategically. So I said to her, "Well, I guess you might say that Joe was my first boyfriend? So I knew he was gay in high school."
ME: Yeah, great move. Thanks for that.
ANDY: I know. And we were never really boyfriends. I didn't know how else to describe it to my mom. I couldn't say to her, "Yeah, he was the first guy I hooked up with." That sounded tawdry to me. But I guess my mom immediately called your mom back.
ME: Yeah, that's when she truly lost it.
MOM: It was this terrible feeling. You think you know your kids. I'm not a prude. You think we didn't know that you smoked pot and drank in high school? That used to keep me up at night. Your dad is a very sanguine person. You don't know how fortunate you are. He said that you were good kids, that you looked after each other, that he did those things and worse when he was in high school and that as long as it was in check, I shouldn't worry about it so much.
ME: Mom, this wasn't like smoking pot or drinking in high school.
MOM: Of course not! I'm not an idiot. Do you think I'm an idiot? I only said that because there are things that I knew that you didn't think I knew. I'm saying, sometimes, I know more than you think. Do I think I know everything? Do I think I'm entitled to know everything? Of course not! You get to have your own life and be your own person. This wasn't a minor thing. This was a very big and important thing. And we loved Andy so much. There was no reason for you to hide this part of yourself from us. It was hard to learn it on the internet, in the context of you praising a drug dealer on TV.
ME: Omar wasn't a drug dealer. He robbed the dealers.
MOM: I still don't care about Omar. I'd be happy if you never said another word about Omar.
STEPHANIE: I was hung over, pretty horribly. When I got up, you were already drinking again, chain smoking on my little balcony.
ME: But I made us fried eggs.
STEPHANIE: You drank all day. You made me promise not to tell anyone that I knew where you were. It was like harboring a fugitive.
ME: While you were at class, I snuck out and bought more beer and cigs. I went through your closet to find a scarf to wrap around my face so nobody would recognize me. The whole time, I was paranoid that someone would talk to me. Had my hood up, this white scarf around my face, looking down while I walked to Party Barn to buy beer at 11 a.m. I felt like I was doing something really shady, going out in public.
STEPHANIE: You have this idea that people were freaking out, but it was more like light confusion. No one was actually freaking out. By the time I got to the paper, people had talked to your roommates. Or at least Trevor, I guess. People knew that you hadn't gone home the night before.
Kippings was saying that you weren't at lecture that morning. Melissa was like, "Joe is an adult. He's more than capable of handling himself."
MELISSA SHADID [the paper's editor-in-chief]: Everybody was on instruction that if your mom called again, the call had to go to me. I didn't know what some of those idiots might say. Joe, dude. I felt bad for your poor mom. I could tell that she was stressed that she couldn't reach you, but she sounded so embarrassed to be calling.
MOM: You weren't returning e-mails or texts. Texts! Usually you reply to a text within 30 seconds. Your phone went directly to voicemail. I didn't know. I thought you were dead in a ravine.
ME: It's not like I went to Cornell. Thank God.
MOM: It wasn't not funny. I still don't think it's funny.
TREVOR: Katie sent the house a text, said something like, "Have you read this? What the fuck is this shit he just pulled?" And fucking Pieces, he writes back right away, and he's like, [impersonating] "Exactly. This is an outrage."
MICHELLE: I didn't see where they were coming from at all.
TREVOR: I sort of loved the chaos of it. They were hilarious cats sometimes. I had fucking astronomy class that morning. Astronomy!
Because I needed science credits. I couldn't wait to read this thing. I got to lecture 20 minutes early because I wanted to read it and settle in.
When I finished, my reaction was like, "Yes! That's my fucking boy Joe!"
I'm looking around the room, thinking that randoms are, like, reading it and high-fiving each other and shit. I felt like you'd pulled off this great trick, like it was almost performance art. Then Katie and Pieces got each other worked up, and then fucking Sam jumps in. They were fueling each other. I guess they felt hurt or angry, but that didn't make sense to me. There was no reason for them to think that way.
MICHELLE: Some people who wanted to incite a conflict. I had an image of you facing a confrontation from three people who felt like it was their place to be aggrieved.
SAM: You have to understand -- I don't think you've ever fully appreciated this -- the complex that Chris had about you. He had an extremely inflated regard. If you weren't around, there were times when he'd talk about how much better it would have been if you were there. Or you were there and he tried to impress you, to act like he was a cool guy. His need for approval from you was very sincere. It might have been sweet if it hadn't been so persistent, which is why I found it a little creepy. In a benign way, of course.
KATIE: He piggybacked onto what Sam and I were saying, about why you should have told us. In retrospect, he lost his shit about the fact that you came out. The whole gay thing. Nothing else.
SAM: I'm quite sure that he'd never had any gay friends. He may have never socialized with a gay person. He didn't have the social context to understand. It wasn't personal toward you. Or it was, but you happened to be the vessel for Chris to confront his own ignorance.
STEPHANIE: I went home in the afternoon to check on you. You were way too drunk, way too early. And I was just like, "This is enough. It isn't healthy. It's bullshit. Your mom is calling the paper now and no one knows what's happened." And you said, "I can't. It's too soon." I said that was ridiculous and you were making this worse than it needed to be.
You became argumentative and manipulative, said that if I made you leave, you weren't sure what you might do or where else you could go.
TREVOR: Poor little Stephanie. It must have been like giving a little kid a German Shepherd and telling her to take it for a walk. I would've dragged you by the collar and frogmarched you home.
STEPHANIE: I felt like somebody's mom. I said something like, "Look, the reason they want to see you and talk to you is because they love you." You sneered and rolled your eyes and said, "I don't want to be loved. I never want to be loved. I only want respect." Like, again, the macho, mob-movie bullshit. That pissed me off. I said that you could stay and that I'd be back later to talk about it, but that we were getting to a point where I'd have to tell people that you were with me, if only so they wouldn't worry.
TREVOR: Katie used the phrase "emergency house meeting." I was thinking like, "Fuck your emergency, bitch." I swear to God, man.
MICHELLE: There was no reason for her to be that dramatic. It made it worse for everyone.
KATIE: What if you were dead, you fucking idiot? I must have texted a hundred people that afternoon. No one knew anything.
ME: I'm flattered by your concern, but wouldn't the most plausible inference be that I was shacked up with a secret gay sex partner somewhere?
KATIE: Oh, right. No, that would not have been a plausible inference at that time. Are you being serious? Remind me, what is this whole dumb exercise about again?
ME: Justin and those guys asked me what it was like when I came out. He's got this charming story about telling his older brother, and how his brother brought him to a house party afterward. I told them that I wrote a column and got in some arguments, but mostly didn't remember or know how people reacted.
KATIE: So you're actually assembling an oral history of your coming out, just so you have an anecdote. Okay, narcissist.
ME: I mean, it's not like I'll ever get married or have kids or shit like that. For a lot of gay dudes, coming out is their major rite of passage in adulthood. Yes, I realize that my approach was unconventional and possibly self-defeating, but I'd like to know something about how it all went down regardless.
KATIE: Settle down. I'm just giving you shit. It's weird behavior, but I'm not judging you.
[She has no idea that I'm writing this story. God help me if she ever learns.]
SAM: Katie was entertaining the idea of calling the police to report a missing person. Even Pieces knew that was a fucked-up idea. When Pieces thinks you're being crazy, check your head, Katie. I wasn't personally concerned about your health or safety. I figured that you were fine, only that you were just a bit of a jackass.
MICHELLE: The real problem was Chris and Katie. They were unstable elements. Sam was being Sam.
STEPHANIE: I pull Melissa Shadid aside and tell her, Look, here's the thing. Joe's been hiding out at my apartment for the last 24 hours and all he's doing is drinking and chainsmoking. Her eyes bugged out. She's like, "Jesus Christ, I'm calling his mother immediately." And I said, "No, no, no, he made me promise not to tell anyone," and Melissa said, "Well, you broke that promise, and I have someone's mother calling every couple of hours because she's worried sick that her son has disappeared after coming out as gay. Right now, my first obligation is not to you or to Joe."
MELISSA SHADID: I did things in that job that I never would have expected.
I put vomiting freshmen into cabs home to their dorms. I got into a screaming fight with a moron lawyer for a fraternity who was bluffing us on a libel lawsuit. An assistant football coach in his 30s asked me out. One time I went 72 hours without sleep. The weirdest thing was calling your mom to tell her that you were safe and hiding in Stephanie Eisenberg's apartment.
ME: I still can't believe that she sent you flowers at the office.
MELISSA SHADID: It was so sweet! I think that was the only time in college that someone sent me flowers.
MOM: Of course I sent her flowers. She was the only one who told me anything. More communicative than you were. Why, did you want me to send you flowers?
ME: No. DVDs of The Wire would have been fine.
TREVOR: Stephanie Eisenberg texted and asked me to call. She said it was about you. Then I'm saying to Michelle, "We need to get Katie and Pieces the fuck out of the house. If they're here when Joe gets home, it's going to be some Real World bullshit."
KATIE: They thought they were so clever. Michelle is a terrible actress.
She could never lie. She talks about blowing off steam and how maybe if some of us go out to the bars, we'll find you. They were patronizing me, but by then Chris was becoming a major nuisance, so I was like, "Fuck it, yes, let's go to Endzone and get pitchers."
SAM: Pieces was all, [impersonating] "He's a fucking liar. He's a fucking fraud. He's a fucking con artist. We can't believe anything he tells us from now on. We can never trust him again." Which was lovely. If I saw you, I would've hugged you and told you what a dumb cocksucker you were.
Chris wasn't like that. Katie wasn't like that.
STEPHANIE: Trevor texted me an all-clear. You were so drunk. You were glassy-eyed, like you were barely awake still, and it was only six at night.
ME: Right. I knew it was time. I drank and smoked myself to exhaustion.
Like, I no longer had it in me to be mad or scared. I just wanted to go home, shower, sleep in my own bed.
STEPHANIE: I didn't want you to walk home by yourself. I thought you might do something stupid, like hide in a bar and throw up.
TREVOR: Honestly, dude, it was hilarious. Door opens, you stumble in.
Little Stephanie Eisenberg is trying to steer you. Michelle and I, sitting in the living room like mom and dad waiting for our unruly teen.
It's a cliche, how people sigh in relief? You step through the door, you're off of her hands, Stephanie leans against the wall, closes her eyes and sighs. Like she just landed a 757.
MICHELLE: You were so drunk. So drunk.
TREVOR: Slurring your words. You drop on the couch, kick off your shoes, lie down. Reeking. I could smell you ten feet away, dude. Like you washed your clothes in beer and used cigarette ash for fabric softener.
MICHELLE: You're trying to ask where everybody is, kind of confrontational, like you came home ready to fight. Which was weird, like you knew that they'd be pissed. I tell you they went to the bar. You asked if they were mad, and I said no, not mad. I said some of us were a little too emotional. And you snarl, "Fuck emotions. Does Chris hate me because I'm a faggot now?"
TREVOR: I'm like, "Shit, dude, did he send you a nasty message?" You're like, "No, I'm not checking my fucking messages. I don't need to. I know what they'll say about me. I know what everyone thinks." Michelle was so smooth, man. Talking about how Chris still loves you as a friend even if he says something that he'll feel bad about later. She was a cool mom, dude. This totally peaceful voice, telling you that it was going to be okay, that everyone would still be your friend and everyone would still love you, that it will be better than before because you won't have to worry about hiding from anyone.
MICHELLE: You were lying on your back, sighing loudly, pulling at your face while I was talking. It was histrionic and rude, but I didn't care.
You had the right to be childish if that's what you wanted. You interrupted and said something sarcastic about Chris, about how it was a terrible shame that this upset Chris so much, how it must be so awful for him to hear that you're gay.
TREVOR: I was cracking up the whole time. I knew how nuts all of you guys were, but that day, people distilled to their purest form -- Katie enraged for no reason, Sam using it as an excuse to be belligerent and hilarious, Pieces wounded and babyish, Michelle super-poised, you being hyper-articulate and crazy.
SAM: Pieces was so irrational that it had a calming effect on Katie.
ME: Yeah, but why was he so upset? What was he saying?
SAM: He said you were a liar. How you lied to all of us and can never be trusted with anything again.
KATIE: He would jump on anything negative that we said and amplify it. If I said that you were a jerk for leaving your mom hanging all day, he'd say, "He doesn't care about other people or his family. He only thinks about himself. He thinks caring about your family is a joke." And then he rambled about what a disappointment you must be to your parents.
SAM: This very tight, very mean stare. If we tried to defend you, he didn't want to hear it. Because we picked sides against him. He wanted it to be the three of us against you.
KATIE: At one point, I said to him, "Dude, we all have legitimate criticisms for how he's handled this, but let's not get carried away.
You've got issues with homophobia that run way deep. Maybe this can be a way for you to deal with that." He got his back up about that, said that homophobia isn't a real thing, it's just a politically correct label used by the thought police to silence people. I started to lose it with him then.
SAM: It went from being a bit of a Joe problem to a Chris Riis problem.
KATIE: He wasn't going to hear it. I didn't have the energy to fight. I loved that fucking guy like he's my little brother. I still feel that way about him, at least a little. Like, we all sort of do, right? But he was so whiny and loathsome. And maybe I had a little twist of sympathy for you then. Like, maybe you'd gone MIA to avoid those things.
SAM: At that stage of our friendship, he was scared of me. You probably don't remember it, but there had been incidents where I really let loose on him, probably more than he deserved. It rattled the shit out of him. He had no sense of verbal flair. Do you remember that he somewhat punched me once? I intimidated him at will. I told him that if he stirs shit with you, he and I are going to have major problems. That we can all feel angry and hurt about how you've handled your situation, but that he wasn't permitted to be abusive toward you about the fact that you were gay. I told him not to talk to you for awhile, if that's what it took, but if I got so much as one fucking hint that he was mocking you or judging you, I was going to wreck him. I would've done it.
Let's reflect on this briefly: at a certain point, that kid started dressing like you. He read the books you liked, borrowed your music, followed your movie recs. He was fixated with you. Beneath his homophobia, I suspect that there are certain unresolved issues. Not that he's gay, or that he had same-sex impulses toward you, but that he felt a closeness to you that he knew was unusual, and that it perhaps unsettled him. A lot of males have friendships like that at some point in their lives -- these very intense bromances. We had a little of that ourselves in freshman year. It mostly happens when we're children or adolescents, but not necessarily. To some extent I had it a couple of years ago with Foreman, when I started practicing with his rugby team and going to those skanky clubs in Meatpacking. Dudes have platonic crushes with other dudes, and Chris's for you was especially strong, and maybe all the more unwieldy because it seemed not to be fully reciprocated on your part. So when he found out about you being gay, it shook him severely. Does that make sense?
ME: Kind of.
SAM: I'm just riffing! I have no idea. It's speculation. Anyway, he seems mostly fine now. From what I can tell on Facebook. When was the last time you talked to him?
ME: Not since Trevor's wedding.
SAM: Yeah, same.
MICHELLE: Getting them out of the house worked perfectly. When they came back you were already asleep upstairs. Even though they were drunk, they'd calmed down a lot.
ME: Sam said that you gave them this speech about respecting other people and sensitivity, or something.
MICHELLE: Definitely not a speech. All I said was that you were fine but that things might be a little sensitive for you, and that we should all be careful about what kinds of jokes we thought were funny, or about saying anything that might sound confrontational.
ME: Sam said that it was more than that.
MICHELLE: I don't know, man. That was years ago. I don't remember exactly what I told them. I thought that I'd have to body-block people because they wanted to call you an asshole for not paying more attention to them.
MATT: I'm skeptical that you remember as little as you say you do.
ME: I remember how I felt. I felt awful. It was an overwhelming amount of stress. It was the only way I knew how to do it.
MATT: I thought the gesture was sort of awesome and punk rock. Also, that it was sort of lame and childish. It was a microcosm of your personality.
ME: Right. Thanks.
MATT: It was legitimately shitty of you not to get in touch with your parents though. The rest of it, I find understandable, if a little unnecessary. I probably could have helped you take the edge off things.
ME: I didn't want to take the edge off things. I was angry and unhappy, and I wanted to make other people angry and unhappy, too. At least a little. Like, if I had to be miserable because I was gay, I wanted to make other people a little bit miserable, too.
MATT: Yeah, maybe I'll include that in my next edition of Coming Out of the Closet for Dummies
ME: Dude, you should definitely write that.
MATT: There's no money in selling books to a gay audience. Diet vodka, maybe. Not books.
ME: Were you mad that I wasn't communicating with you?
MATT: Not really. I wasn't imagining these extreme scenarios. I knew you didn't think that way. I read it and thought, "Oh." And then I thought, "That was weird." And then I left you some texts and voicemails.
ME: That was the craziest thing. Like, after Sandy hit the City and the power went out downtown, I went a couple of days without a cell signal.
When I eventually walked to Williamsburg and charged my phone, all of these texts flooded at once. Like, 80 or 90 of them. The phone vibrated once a second for a couple of minutes, each time it registered a new text.
And back in `05, when I finally turned my phone on, it was like that times five. So many texts. And my inbox had like 200 new messages in 36 hours.
MATT: It must have felt nice to be so popular.
ME: It actually did. It was kind of comforting. I told everybody I knew at once, and it was very impersonal, and maybe that hurt people who were close to me, and that sucks, but they got over it, for the most part. But there was no slow rumor spreading, no wondering who knew and who didn't.
This was all before Facebook, and at the time, it was trippy to hear from all of these far-flung people. Guys from my high school baseball team, seniors who'd been at the paper when I was a freshman. Random gay dudes I'd never heard of who'd read the column online. I mean, it didn't change my immediate circumstances, but it felt pretty cool.
MICHELLE: Like, I remember how the next day, you skipped all of your classes again and just slept all day. I was in my room with the door open, and Chris had his door open, too. And I called to you when you walked by, just, "Hey!" Just to talk to you. I wasn't going to say anything deep.
ME: And Chris made a point of loudly walking across his room and closing his door.
MICHELLE: Yep.
ME: Yeah. That stung.
MICHELLE: Your face dropped.
ME: I wasn't surprised. I knew what to expect from him. Literally everything he did, it was exactly what I knew he'd do.
MICHELLE: Yeah. Even so.
TREVOR: Everybody was all fragile and shit, like they went from being pissed at you to treating you like some kind of magic, breakable homo. And I was like, fuck it, I'm going to just hang with Joe and get fucked up with him.
ME: Dude, you were the best. Just the fucking best.
TREVOR: Do you remember that weekend?
ME: When we got baked at Greenblatt's and did the Pink Floyd with Wizard of Oz thing. Then you made me drop acid the next day.
TREVOR: You chose to.
ME: How did you come up with that idea?
TREVOR: Billy had the acid. I'd been wanting to go over and do that. I read this essay online, about tests where they gave LSD to soldiers with PTSD, about how it helped people past mental obstacles. So, as an amateur psychologist and LSD-curious individual, I thought I should prescribe some to you. We got to Billy's, then it wasn't hard to persuade you.
ME: Yeah, I'd always wanted to try it. The idea of a bad trip is why I'd never done it. But I have this thing with drugs, where I know I'm on drugs and reason through what they're doing. If I get paranoid or claustrophobic on pot, there's this voice that reminds me to calm down, that it's the pot messing with me. That never happens with alcohol. When I'm drunk, I never think, "Chill out, Joe, you don't need to hurdle over that bench. You're just drunk right now."
TREVOR: Alcohol is the most irrational substance.
ME: It was snowing. Not super-hard. When a snowflake landed on me, it felt like burning. Not in a funny way. Like, snowflakes were burning me alive. Every time one hit my skin, it was like this tiny piece of fire burning into me. It hurt, but I knew it wasn't real. Like, you know when you have a hot pepper, and it hurts so much, but you also know that it can't actually harm you? It's this isolated reaction happening, and there's nothing actually burning? It was like that. And I knew how I was tripping, and that this wasn't real. It was only snow.
We were walking through the quad and I had this revelation of, like, billions of molecules, how every piece of snow was water that evaporated from somewhere else. Like how every snowflake had water that had been in the Indian Ocean, the Nile, the Amazon, at some point in its existence, that this water had been around since before the time of Homer, before human life existed, and it was everywhere, that it only changed its form and location. Every bit of water was a history of the world that we took for granted.
TREVOR: LSD is just the best. Hearing you talk about that makes me want to trip right now. I would love to trip so hard with you tonight.
ME: And then we went to Lovell's and looked at the books, right? Like, are we the only two assholes that would go look around a bookstore when we were on acid?
TREVOR: I'm sure other people have done it. It was winter. It's not like we could stare at flowers or leaves.
ME: And I had kind of the same revelations that I was having about the snow, except that it was about, like, time and words and people. Like, you look at all of these books, and you think about Plato, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Proust, Faulkner. Fucking Dante, my favorite. And that centuries had passed and there were all of these great minds and the only reason we know them is their words. I started thinking about how people's personalities are mostly words. And how when we judge people -- whether we think they're a nice person or a bad person, if we think they're funny, intimidating, difficult, whatever -- it mostly comes down to the words that they use. Maybe that wasn't the case 3,000 years ago, when maybe someone was good or bad based on whether they chose to beat you over the head with a club or steal your food. But now everyone does things through words -- command a war, donate to charity, pass a civil rights law, bully some kid.
Like, I don't know how long we were actually browsing in Lovell's, but I had this feeling like I could experience literally all of history when I was standing there. The flood of Gilgamesh, the Battle of Agincourt, Columbus on Hispaniola, Auschwitz.
TREVOR: [laughing] Fuck, dude. You're still so fucking insane. I love it.
ME: And, like, as everything I know about human history is playing out in my thoughts, like eternity is happening in real time, I understand that all of this shit that I'm stressing over is complete illusion. It doesn't matter if people are upset with me today, or whether I'm attracted to dudes' cocks or chicks' tits. Like, the Greeks were all gay, and who gives a fuck? And what kind of insane pussy was I going to be, if my life got ruined because I thought, like, Colin Farrell was hotter than J. Lo?
Because those were both appropriate polestars for hotness in 2005.
But then, I snapped from that to this thought, where it was just kind of like, "Oh my God, other people!" Like, there was this dude at the cash register. I wasn't attracted to him or anything. He was some grad school type, a little older, maybe some M.F.A. guy, I don't know. He wasn't paying attention to us, but I had this conviction that he was a good and virtuous person. He seemed extraordinarily wise and understanding to me.
And then I started thinking about all of the other people, how there are just, like, these billions of people out there waiting, just like there's all of this water and all of these books and all of these words, and how amazing it is that there are so many people, that there are so many awesome people alive that it would be literally impossible to meet them in my lifetime, that out of the billions of people living contemporaneous to us, there are at least a hundred thousand who should be my best friends and how I'll never know that most of them exist.
You know how on reality shows, there are these assholes that say shit like, "I'm not here to make friends," or, "I don't care what anyone else thinks of me?" Like, what a bunch of fucking psychopaths. We're all here to make friends; obviously people care what other people think of them. They can't help it. If they actually don't care, they're worthless. People are meant to be social. And it's like, we only exist and understand who we are based on the people around us, and how they make us think about ourselves. It's why inmates in solitary confinement go insane, and why that poor kid, Tyler Clementi, how he threw himself off that bridge? I mean, fuck, man. All of the biggest parts of our identity are based on how other people understand us. And how do people understand us? Like, at least 80 or 90 percent of it is based on words.
TREVOR: You're beautifully crazy. I want to be a part of this cult.
ME: Body language, how we dress, attractiveness, that stuff counts. Money, maybe, but money is just a function of words now. Money only has value because we use words that give it value but money doesn't actually exist.
But we also know, like, ugly fat people who are shitty dressers, who are awesome, and who everybody loves, and who have girlfriends or boyfriends, and it's because they're so good with words. We talk about how awesome they are, but mostly we mean that they're good with words.
As I'm thinking about this, I'm finding it all incredibly profound. It's like I've discovered that I have a magical power that I never understood before, and I've unlocked a secret for how the world works, even though it's been hiding in plain sight my entire life. I picked up the first volume of Proust, which I'd never read, and it felt like words were all floating up off the page. Then I started reading it aloud to you, and I wanted to cry because I found the words so beautiful. They probably weren't; I probably only thought they were because I was on acid and because of Proust's reputation. We just stared at each other for a few seconds, and you were fucking radiant, like there was this orange halo behind you.
TREVOR: You and I were meant to be shamans. Prophets.
ME: We would have been so huge in the `60s, dude. You and I would have opened all every door to perception. And for that moment in Lovell's, I understood that all anyone was, all of this shit that we spend our entire lives freaking out about, all of it amounted to words and water. That physically, we're all highly organized systems of water, and internally, we're just assemblages of words. That's all people are. Articulate systems of water.
TREVOR: I don't remember you sharing these epiphanies.
ME: It was just washing over me. In these waves. Talking about it would have ruined it. All of these insights overwhelming me at once, as you stood in front of me with a orange halo and words flew out of these books.
And I understood that everything I was freaking out about, everything that anyone cared about or fought over or loved, was a vessel of articulate water coming into contact with a separate vessel of articulate water, and that none of it matter at all, but also that it was beautiful and awesome in part because it was transient and trivial.
And I couldn't let myself worry about nonsense. Of course, I continue to worry about nonsense. But there's this little voice, when I started getting wild, I just think, "Chill, Joe, all that's happening right now is talking water."
TREVOR: Did you buy that book?
ME: It seemed too complicated and irrelevant to buy a book in that moment.
TREVOR: And then we went to the espresso place for hot chocolate and chocolate chip cookies.
ME: And they were glorious.
TREVOR: The best hot chocolate and chocolate chip cookies I've ever tasted.
ME: I can taste them in my dreams.