The first time Sam Frost appeared, he rescued me from my mother.
"You only have two," she said, "and you don't have a car."
"So?"
"You'll run out and won't have a way to get more."
"That's retarded on many levels. First, I don't need more than two towels." The room's door was open. Strangers would hear me yell at an insane woman; I would withstand their judgment and win. "I can go weeks using the same towel!"
"That's just -- that's incredibly unsanitary," my mom said.
"Besides, I'm sure there are places within walking distance that sell towels. I mean, God damn, mom."
"I'm questioning whether you can be self-sufficient and live unsupervised."
I groaned through my teeth; I kicked the floor with my heel. I think she was manufacturing topics for dispute so that when she finally left me alone, irritation would hit her stronger than my absence. If so, her strategy was working for both of us.
My dad and eleven-year-old brother Evan paid no attention. They sat in desk chairs staring at a men's doubles match on ESPN.
From the hall, I heard tell-tale voices and accents. They sounded lighter and calmer. Apparently embarrassed by her own madness, my mom quieted at the approach of other middle-aged voices.
I laughed at the Frosts when they walked into the room (a nervous reaction to exposing strangers to my family bickering) and if it was an odd greeting to a new roommate and his parents, Sam laughed too, and put out a sweaty hand to shake.
"My mom and I were just fighting about towels," I said.
Sam Frost -- one of the great collegiate socialites of our era -- first looked to me like a jam-band fan. I calculated the merits and drawbacks of rooming with a hippie. He'd grown a thin, scruffy beard and his hair was slightly messed. His height was about 5'7 or 5'8, well below my own, which I noticed with relief because I've got a minor complex about needing to be taller than other guys. The heat left a shine over his face and a dampness at the middle of his chest.
It was a minor relief that I didn't consider Sam Frost an attractive guy. My freshman year predated Facebook and even Friendster (I'm barely that old, shit, I swear) so I arrived to school with no idea of my roommate's appearance. In our phone calls he'd mentioned playing soccer and hockey, so I assumed a certain fitness, which, if combined with a British accent and attractive face, might have become easy fantasy fodder and a precursor to misplaced tensions.
He would instead prove to be the most consistently outgoing and good-humored person I know, someone who effortlessly and happily drew friends to his orbit and didn't seem to lose touch or forget about them, someone with chameleonal ability to cross-plant between overcooked fraternity guys, earnest student-government types, and misfitted arts kids, never missing a cue. Again, I attribute some of this to the force of a British accent (if the American Revolution were imminent today, the British would send Kate Beckinsale, Prince William and Anthony Hopkins on a goodwill tour, and the whole thing would drop) but much of it to a general enthusiasm for people, a true curiosity about their personalities, a kind of undisciplined, spontaneous love and excitement that I myself lacked.
When Sam Frost appeared and my mom finally shut up, one thing ended and something new began. I don't mean this in terms of anything gay or a voyage of self-discovery or anything grandiose or 19th Century, but more a sense that my family and parents were now about to take a back seat to other things. The argument with my mom wasn't our dumbest or our most vitriolic -- it was the standard-issue fare between a middle-aged control freak and a guy obsessed with defiance -- but she was also right to question my ability to live self-sufficiently and unsupervised. Fortunately, when my family left me on that day, I didn't become self-sufficient or unsupervised. My friends became a separate (and mostly equal) family for me. Even if this is a story about the things that happen when you like dudes, it's also a story about my friends, who continue to save me when I do stupid shit and help me clean up the next day's mess. The first person who took that role happened to be Sam Frost, and for that I'm lucky, too.
Sam and I came to an efficient, no-bullshit style, in conversation as well as in living. We seemed determined to spend as little time as possible loitering in our dorm room. Guys in neighboring rooms arranged the construction of sturdy, elaborate lofts. They had expensive sound-systems, video game consoles, thick carpets that felt good on your bare feet. Sam and I kept our room like an Eastern European hostel, and would all year: the TV was small and outdated; our only soundsystem was a speaker set that attached to an old boom box; the metal-frame bunk-bed was not replaced with a loft. We had no plush rug, only tile that felt cold on our feet in winter. The one poster on our wall depicted the sports mythology of our school's past, chosen because it seemed like something should get slapped on the walls and neither of us cared what.
Our hallmates' lifestyle accoutrements were available if we wanted them, and really, our spare living conditions were not the product of principle or cheapness so much as laziness and distraction. The TV gave us ESPN, "Real World" marathons and small doses of CNN: we didn't need more. Video games at college would be like playing hopscotch instead of going to the orgy.
Instead we were out drinking, reading, studying, running, shouting, smoking -- together and separate, in large groups and solo. My school isn't known for a Greek scene, but the frat houses and their parties were the anchor of our social lives between move-in days and the start of their formal rush, when the open cattle calls stopped and the fraternities became a limited social niche. It blew my mind to be crammed into these packed, humid houses, reeking of cigarettes and sweat, with literally hundreds of people my own age pressed tight against each other and in pursuit. If the market for sex wasn't organized for a pairing that I wanted, it hardly mattered, because I was excited to be part of it all.
Even a couple of years out of college now, when the air cools in September and I walk outside at night to meet up at a bar, I get this rush of how it felt that fall of my freshman year when I got to be on my own for the first time, heading out to some party with my new friends, where everything seemed to have potential for disaster or surprise.
At night some small collection of us would gather in a dorm room to drink as much alcohol as an hour or two permitted. In a loud, clumsy group, we stumbled down sidewalks, sometimes literally arm in arm, past the rental houses of our student ghettos toward the massive, crumbling frat houses. By the end of the night some of us would get sick; others would hook up with strangers. Most of us walked back to our dorm in the same large group, drunk and loud but no worse off, smelling like beer with the air cool against the cigarette-stinking sweat of our faces.
Sam was a nucleus for that early social cluster. People liked him; they wanted his company. Sam decided that we should end a pre-party and go to the frat house, so we did. He decided he wanted to go home, and most everyone followed along. "Let's get a slice of pizza," he'd say; seven or eight others would gather to the line.
Sam and his family moved from London to Canada when he was twelve. His dad had been vice president at an English investment bank, he said. "They were dicking him over," Sam said. "Passed by for a couple of promotions. A Canadian bank wanted to beef up its investment banking group. 'Why not?' my dad thought. London's expensive as balls. He was working like a dog and exhausted with his situation. That was pretty much it. When we left London, I wasn't old enough to appreciate everything it had to offer. It's a great city for sure, obviously more exciting than Ottawa, but I myself prefer Montreal and New York to London. There's a ton of finance work done in Montreal. It sucks that my dad didn't move us to Montreal instead of Ottawa. I guess if he did, I'd have herpes and be a freshman at McGill."
"Why the fuck would Montreal give you herpes?" I said. "Is Montreal known for herpes?"
"God, you're so literal," he said. "And medical. I was just search for a silver lining. What I mean is that if I'd grown up in Montreal I'd probably love it so much that I'd fuck the city itself, just fuck it to death, which is how I would have gotten herpes, practically from the law of averages. I bet I'd know how to speak French, too."
This is an artless but necessary interruption of my story.
Since you and I both have a stake in your enjoyment of my writing, I would like to give advance notice as to several things you won't find in it. It's mostly common sense, but you never know what the people will want; some of the expectations can be too kinky for my blood. If you demand the following scenarios, themes, or fetishes, this might be a good time to put my account aside and find something else.
This story contains none of the following:
1.) Sex with my roommate.
2.) Sexual tension with my roommate.
3.) Sex with straight guys, str8 guys, or stray guys. Friends have reliably informed me that such things actually do happen, particularly in elite universities and certain social cliques of Brooklyn and Manhattan, but they never happened to me, and I lack the imagination for them.
4.) Orgy at the secretly gay frat house.
5.) A secretly gay frat house, or even one that's homoeroticized.
6.) I do not become a towel boy.
7.) Or bang a towel boy.
8.) Or a prof.
9.) I do not make a varsity team my flock of sex boys.
10.) I do not use sex toys.
11.) Or other inanimate objects.
12.) I don't even hook up with a scholarship athlete.
13.) Much less Brady Quinn or Riley Skinner.
14.) Who I personally suspect might be open to the idea, though I lack the DNA evidence to prove it.
15.) If I obtain my proof, that will be a separate story.
It seems like I was just settling into a comfortable routine when Christian Riis accidentally stumbled in, like a drunk bird of peace crashing through the stain-glassed window.
Down the hall lived two guys we christened the Florida Boys (one from Tampa, one from Miami; apparently they put in for a room together because their fathers were friends, or something like that) and their abbreviated label tells you all that's necessary. Chris Riis lived two floors above us. Someone invited him to the Florida Boys' dorm room for a pre-party. The Florida Boys did not want extra male competition in their hunting grounds. Drinking an ugly mix of rum and powdered fruit juice, I was sharing a beanbag chair with a pretty girl named Jenny when Chris Riis knocked at the door and entered.
He looked to me like the ideal of a Southern California surfer, except that he was from Grand Rapids, Michigan, of all fucking places. In those first seconds I believed that Christian Riis was the best-looking guy that I'd ever seen. He was six-one or six-two, with sun-bleached hair that could have used a trim. His bangs drooped toward his eyebrows. He had heavy blue eyes with lashes that looked beautiful and pretty and very nearly girlish; his skin looked smooth and tan and creamy and very nearly girlish; his lips were large and full, and I thought to myself how nice they must feel. He wore jeans and a three-button golf shirt; his arms looked thin and lightly muscled, and it seemed like the outline of his collarbone was discernible through his shirt. If my descriptions so far have used words typically associated with a feminine kind of beauty, he also had a commanding, square jawline, giving him a look of authority, like a cartoon admiral, and a strong brow that seemed to connote something between disapproval and amusement. The overall effect was that his somewhat delicate features balanced out with his angular looks, leaving an impression that he was at once powerful and fragile.
"You bring anything of your own to drink, bro?" asked one of the Florida Boys.
"Nah," he said. His voice was deep but had a nervous tightness. He was self-conscious. "No. Should I have?"
"I dunno, bro," said a Florida Boy. "We went to a lot of trouble to put all this together, dude."
"I don't need to drink anything then," Chris said. "Do you want me to just take off, maybe?"
The Florida Boys were poised to encourage the idea when Sam Frost jumped to the rescue. "Oh, don't worry about it," he said to Chris. "I've got my private vodka here and you can drink as much as you want."
I would have let him drink out of my bottle; I would have let him share my beanbag chair, even if it meant pushing off the very pretty Jenny. With the appearance of Chris Riis, I turned quiet and cloudy, turned on by a real-life guy for the first time since I parted ways with Andy Trafford a couple weeks before. I'd been so busy (and drunk, and hung over) in those first days and weeks at school that I'd barely thought about guys, aside from occasional, shame-faced glances at strangers around campus. My masturbation sessions were brief and unglamorous, and they relied on my memories of Andy.
Now I was stuck with this image of Christian Riis from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and in the Florida Boys' suburban-chic room, was confronted again with my unwieldy, uncomfortable desires.
An irritating Beck album played. One of the girls left to smoke. The room was feeling stuffy, and Chris's presence suddenly had me uncomfortable, both for my own interested response, and for the Florida Boys' passive-aggressive reaction toward him. He didn't even say much until we left the dorm room and headed out to the frat party.
While the Florida Boys walked ahead with girls of their own, a few of us hung back for the small talk about geography, family and upbringing that ruled every conversation in that stage.
Chris didn't volunteer much information. He had three older siblings who'd gone to our same college, as had his parents. He thought that he wanted to go to med school, and said it like the plan embarrassed him.
"It must be amazing to be from New York," he said.
"Well, it's just Westchester," I said, "but yeah, the City's great."
"I've never been there," he said. "I've never even been on the East Coast."
"Seriously?"
"Well, Florida," he said, "to see grandparents."
I'm still unclear about whether that night was the first time that Chris became seriously drunk, or whether it was the first time that he drank, period. That detail must have been disclosed at some point in the adventure, but once the adventure completed, no one was anxious to re-live it.
The first sign of trouble came just an hour after we arrived to that night's frat party. Our group scattered on arrival. This was typical. Sam and I tended to stay on the periphery of the dance floor, or occasionally planted next to whatever staircase led upstairs. We flirted with strange girls (the only action I wanted was a little innocent flattery) and kept the circle alive as others in our group drifted by to talk, drink and gossip.
"Get a look at our new boy Christian," Sam said.
On the dance floor he jumped straight into the air, arms stiff at his side, with no connection to the music's timing. His hair bounced. It was athletic, noticeable and completely out of place.
"That's what I call piss-poor dancing," I said.
"That's what I call demanding calisthenics."
"I call that dance The Dance of the Retarded Nike."
"Am I missing a retarded pop-culture reference from your childhood?" Sam said. "I'm relieved to know the floor in here is reinforced."
An hour later, Sam and I were chatting with two attractive sorority sophomores ("You guys seem pretty mature for freshman," they said; "Do you know Joseph here hasn't hit puberty yet?" Sam answered.) when one of our dorm-girls, Alicia, ran to us.
"Chris was outside puking in the bushes," she said. "Then he came back inside and I can't find him."
At orientation, they had filled our heads with the sorrows of binge drinking, alcohol poisoning and its painful deaths. Alicia must have taken it to heart. Sam's sense of chivalry and my sense of attraction led us on a small journey to find Christian Riis.
After 90 seconds, we found him pale and sweating, standing alone on the front porch of the frat house, holding the railing while he smoked a cigarette alone.
"Hey man," I said, "you doing okay?"
He looked at us with confusion and relief. The cigarette made him cough. His eyes watered.
"Holy fuck, dude," he said, "I think I'm really drunk. I've never been so drunk in my life." He pointed a finger at me. "You're the guy from New York, and he's the British one, and that's Alicia. She's from Toledo?"
"We're taking you home now," Alicia said. She was sweet and frightened. "Are you okay?"
"Holy fuck, man, I'm so fucking drunk," Chris said. "Holy fuck, I can't be president of the United States with something like this on my record."
"You could snort a pound of cocaine and skip National Guard duty and still be president," I said. "You can probably stab some guys and still be president."
"Don't tell him that," Sam said, "because no one should want to be President of the United States in the first place. He'll never be president." He pointed at Chris. "You'll never be president! You're finished!"
We decided to shepherd him home. His paces were nearly manic -- faster than any sober, normal walking speed. He leaned forward in long, quick strides. His pace required Alicia to half-jog. If his toe hit a crevice, he would sprawl.
"Oh, fuck, man," Chris said.
With that warning he took off sprinting, making a dash into the cool September night.
"We've got to go after him," Alicia said.
"You're in heels so you can't run," Sam said, "and we don't even know him."
"I don't think he's used to drinking this much," Alicia said, now on the verge of tears. Christ, her crush must have been substantial; based on his looks alone, I didn't blame her. "What if he runs in front of a car and gets killed?"
"He's not a yappy dog."
"C'mon, Sam," I said, beginning a slow jog, "let's chase him down. We'll do it for Alicia."
I began running at an even stride. Sam hung back at a pace to comfort the distraught Alicia. When I passed a collection of stumbly drunk girls, one wooted. I turned to wave and smile. For the moment I didn't even care about finding Chris Riis or how good he looked to me.
It was a simple joy to run through our still-unfamiliar campus neighborhoods, past strangers who I already loved, alongside three-story rental houses where upperclassmen drank from kegs on front porches, some of them shouting gentle taunts at me.
"Sorry to bother you," I asked a nervous-looking group of likely freshmen, as I stopped to run in place, "but my friends and I have lost a tall, very drunk guy with blond hair. He was sprinting. Have you seen him?"
"Maybe, bro. We just saw a tall blond guy puking in some bushes while people at a party chanted."
"It was really disgusting."
"Was he in a white golf shirt?"
"Yes!"
"Just up ahead?"
"A couple blocks down."
"Sweet guys, thanks," I said. (I wanted them to walk off with a better story, so I added that he was an epileptic and needed to receive immediate medication. This stunned them. Then, I kept running.)
I found Chris Riis before the half-crowded porch of a mellow house party, his white golf shirt splashed with dots of vomit. Chris was pale and sweating, and his hair stuck to his forehead. His athleticism had been drained: now he was holding a tree-trunk for stability. A good-samaritan party host coaxed him to drink water from a red Solo Cup.
"Does he belong to you?"
"I think he probably does," I said. "Did he ruin much?"
"Just, like, his shirt, his shoes and his breath," said the friendly party host. "He ran up to the lawn and started puking in front of everybody. We were all cheering him on."
"You did what any of us would have done," I said.
Sam Frost and the distraught Alicia almost passed when I shouted their names. The three of us started walking back to the dorm.
"I can't believe you're all seeing me in this condition," Chris said. He was staggering now. The physical difference between him, pre-sprint and post-vomit, was huge. His head dragged, like his neck muscles had weakened. Now he walked like a George Romero zombie. "This is fucking horrible. The only reason I ran was because I knew I had to puke and I didn't want you guys to know about it."
"Calm down," I said. "We're getting closer to the dorm. Don't make a scene or else you might get written up or something."
"Are you serious?" Chris said. "This is the worst thing I've ever done."
"No it isn't," Sam said.
"This is the worst thing I've ever done," he said. "I'm so sorry that you're seeing me like this. You don't even know me and you're seeing me like this. I wanted to make a good impression on people, and now you're seeing me like this."
"You've made an excellent impression."
"The best."
"Your impression is positively epic."
"Like Virgil."
"Or Homer."
"Longfellow."
"Oh, God," Chris said, his syllables jumping out extra-fast and then rolling together, "you're the so-called sophisticated ones from huge cities, and now you're going to hate me. Everyone's going to hate me because I got too drunk. If my mom could see this she'd cry."
"They don't hate you," Alicia said. "They're just joking."
"Your mom would just want you to have fun and live for the moment."
Our dorm was getting close. I admonished Chris to calm down.
"What's your room number?" I said.
"Sixth floor."
We took him to the sixth floor. He slumped in the elevator; he smelled horrible, something like a block of blue cheese dropped into tomato-basil soup. His face was shiny in the fluorescent light of the elevator. Sam and I both required discipline not to make a mean remark.
"We need to get your roommate to take care of you."
"What's your room number?"
Chris mumbled. "842?"
"6842?"
"8400," he said.
"7-11," said Sam.
"I'm not sure he knows," I said. In fairness, I hadn't yet memorized our room number. I navigated by sight, and by the dry-erase board that our door housed: I believe the most recent message read, "Joseph is a cunt." A female hand then crossed out the word "cunt" and corrected it to "hottie."
Somehow, I suspected that it was going to come down to Sam and I taking custody of Chris for the night, which was both an irritant and an enticement. (And no, in his semi-conscious, vomit-stained condition, nothing sexual is about to occur, so chill.)
Alicia made a brief argument in favor of taking him into her room.
"Goddammit, Alicia, that's absolutely wonderful and charitable of you," Sam said, "but no man wants to wake up in this condition in the room of a girl he might conceivably find attractive, or perhaps worse still, in the company of a girl he does not find attractive. I'm sure that you fall into the former category because you are a beautiful and intelligent young woman with a very kind heart, and I mention the latter only to illustrate that we should not leave any man in so severe a condition in the company of a female, probably not even if it's his wife or mom. If we go with your plan, he'll never look at you again. And whatever you do, it's imperative that you don't disclose awareness of the vomiting issue. I say this to help you both."
Back in our room, Sam procured a garbage bag. He made Chris remove his vomit-splotched shirt and place it in the bag along with his socks and shoes. Then Chris removed his jeans, even though he hadn't been ordered to do so. "Just as well," Sam said, "because there's puke on them too. I'm not a fussy man, but I don't want our room to smell like vomit. Take note, Joseph"
I don't care how horned you are -- no guy who smells like puke and booze-sweat, his eyes wild and unfocused, holding onto the bunk bed pillar for balance, can be construed as sexable, even if he owns the most attractive face you've seen and he's dressed just in boxers. It still felt nice to get a look at him. Getting to stare and admire (even in a tense, discreet fashion) seemed like my reward for rescuing.
After all, what if the fears had been valid and he sprinted in front of a car? Maybe I deserve credit (or blame) for saving his life.
Sam tied Chris's quarantined clothes in the garbage bag ("Biohazards," he said.) and then made Chris drink more water and eat a couple of room-temperature pop-tarts ("Dude, they'll help soak up the alcohol," Sam said. "We should have stopped for pizza but you were in no condition to behave yourself.") before dropping the futon mattress on the floor and giving him a blanket.
Chris landed down the futon, curling up in a fetal position under the blanket while the lights were still on. I think he fell asleep within seconds; when he inhaled there was a click in his throat, like a small bubble was popping.
Sam and I turned on the TV and watched a few minutes of college football results and baseball highlights. I grew up in a platonic male culture in which passed-out guys were written on, photographed or desecrated; my newfound maturity spared Chris that embarrassment.
That night, while I lay restless on the top bunk, I glanced down at our awkward, drunk, handsome friend, sleeping peacefully beneath the blanket.
I heard the groaning and the shifting on the floor.
"Oh, fuck," he said, in a half-shout, half-whisper. I could tell that his mouth was dry and his tongue was sticking by the hissing lisping of his words. "Was I running around in my boxers last night? Oh, fuck."
Sam whispered: "No. There's puke all over your clothes and they're filthy. They're in that garbage bag. I put your keys and wallet on the dresser."
"Oh, fuck," he whispered. He had his elbow over his eyes. "What dorm am I in?"
"You're back in the quad, on floor four," Sam whispered. "You just couldn't figure out how to tell us your room number."
"This is, like, fucking humiliating."
"You're fine," Sam whispered. "This happened to me once a month in high school but it was worse because we had to hide from parents the whole time."
"My mom would murder me," Chris said.
"Yo guys, I'm awake," I said. "You don't need to whisper."
"I'm whispering to make it easier for Christian," Sam whispered. "You can go back to sleep if you want, Christian, or else I can make Joe loan you shorts and a T-shirt so you can go up to your room with dignity. I'm sure mine wouldn't fit you."
Chris groaned and kicked a foot. He shielded his eyes with his arm. "What did I even do? How'd I end up in here? Was I saying anything horrible?"
"No, you just drank a lot," Sam said. "It was either crash here or probably have a run-in with law enforcement, the way you were headed."
"You challenged me to a foot race," I said.
"Christ, I'm sorry."
"You took off sprinting and I chased you."
"Was anybody else there?"
"No, just us," I said. "There were some randoms around, but you weren't doing this in front of a huge crowd."
"You need some water but not too much," Sam said. "If you drink too much water with a really bad hangover, it will just make you puke again. Does it seem like the room is moving?"
"If I concentrate on one object, no, but if I let my mind wander, yes."
"You're still messed up," Sam said. "You can go back to sleep if you want. Whatever's easier for you, sir."
"What time is it?"
"Only about 8:45."
"Oh, fuck." He let out a long sigh and pulled the blanket back over his head. The lower halves of his legs were kicked out and exposed. I rolled over so that I faced the wall, waited for my morning hard-on to die, and went back to sleep.
I woke up a couple of hours later when Chris was back on his feet, delicately trying to piece himself together. He inspected the trash bag containing his clothes and didn't like what he saw or smelled. It appeared that was confused, unhappy, and felt like hell.
By this time -- perhaps due to my still-salient morning boner, or Chris's new sobriety -- I felt comfortable taking a good look at him. He had some dark blond hair on his chest, and spreading out of his stomach at the navel and treasure trail. His back and shoulder muscles looked strong and developed (from kayaking and rowing, I later learned) but the rest of him was thin, not particularly well muscled but not bad. He was fit but he didn't have the body of a year-round athlete. His legs and chest were lightly tanned, but he was sufficiently fair that it would fade by mid-autumn, you could tell. I got myself a vision of Andy Trafford, so intense that it was almost deja vu. Chris Riis was wearing light-blue boxers that looked threadbare, and I could see the top of his ass-crack above their sag, just like I'd noticed so clearly on my first night with Andy.
"Hey man," I said, whispering because Sam still slept on the lower bunk below, "you can take a pair of basketball shorts and a T-shirt from the top-left drawer. Just bring them back later today or tomorrow. Whenever."
My voice startled him; he looked sullen and embarrassed. He pulled my spare clothes and stepped into my basketball shorts with the top of his pale, skinny ass still hanging out of his boxers.
"Thanks so much man," he said, not making eye contact. "I can't thank you guys enough. Tell Sam that I said thanks too."
"No problem," I said. "Let's do it again next weekend."
His face was pained and guilty as he slung the trash bag over his shoulder, just like a younger, thinner Santa on a delivery of puke-marked dirty clothes.
And that was the first night that Chris Riis and I slept over together.