Party of One (7 page)

If he talks to other people, he might find that he likes them. He might even like them better! This is simply too big a risk. In between classes, at lunch, after school, be there. Be the guy he talks to. Be the
only
guy he talks to.

Bryan Ferry's “Slave to Love.” The majestic ache of Heart's “Alone.” Belinda Carlisle's robotic vibrato in “I Get Weak.” Alison Moyet's “Weak in the Presence of Beauty,” which is pretty much the same song. Put them all together—and many, many more!—on a Maxell ninety-minute tape and always have it on. Expert level: don't be aware that this mixtape is actually about him, just tell yourself that these are your favorite songs all of a sudden.

People love this, teenage boys especially. It's just a fact: when you meet someone and you enjoy spending time with them, label it as quickly as you can. Everybody feels more secure that way. Do it!

Everyone is starting to get their driver's licenses, and you and the other Candy Store Boys are starting to get invited to girls' school dances, because girls love boys who aren't afraid to be the first one on the dance floor and won't ever be sexually aggressive with them. Your social life is opening up. He'll want to know! When the dance and the after party are over, go throw pebbles at your very best friend's window, get him out of bed, and tell him everything that happened over late-night Fruity Pebbles and
Night Tracks.
Who needs sleep? Not him, probably!

Your best friend might not be much of a talker. He might be the strong, silent type—a beguiling, mysterious, confident fellow who doesn't need to be making a sound at all times to prove his worth. Fuck that! He probably just doesn't know what to say. Casey Kasem can be a big help here; you can spit back some of his most useful facts: “Terence Trent D'Arby was born Terence Trent Howard in New York City!” “You know, Roxette is a duo now, but just a couple of years ago, they were successful solo artists in their native Sweden.” “Huey Lewis calls his new album
Small World
a real departure!” Just fill the air with noise. Fill it!

Say his parents go to bed early so you can't ring the doorbell. Say he tells you to rap at the TV room window when you come to pick him up. Imagine the TV room is situated in such a way that the couch faces the window and when you go to knock on it, he's facing you. His perfect legs are up on the coffee table, his blue eyes are on the TV, but they're close enough to where you're standing that you can imagine he's looking
at you.
You can let yourself feel how it might feel to be this close to him, just a few feet away, the two of you staring at each other, feeling the same way, thinking the same thing. All around you, there's a whole world of social activities, but this is where you truly need to be. Right here, imagining. Do this for as long as you feel like. This behavior falls under the umbrella of activities we will come to refer to as “stalking,” but that's not important right now. Stay. Take it in.

Everything that is painful about homosexuality still being the love that dare not speak its name can actually work in your favor here. What in the twenty-first century would immediately be recognizable as a young gay boy with a massive, awkward crush on a beautiful straight boy can now just look vaguely inappropriate in ways nobody can quite articulate. You don't even need to tell yourself what you're doing or why you're doing it. Just do it.

I mean, it's not like you have a choice.

I had originally had my heart set on Boston College, based on its name alone. It was college, it was in Boston, and that was pretty much all I needed to know. Plus it was close enough to Colgate, where Jim would be. (The East Coast was all one ten-square-mile mystery to me. I hadn't gotten out of St. Louis much.) I had visions of ivy-covered buildings and touch football games on grassy quads. I had no idea what to study, but I knew it was time for me to grow up and get practical, which I did by making my top college choice based on theoretical plant life and imaginary roughhousing. I visited BC and it seemed fine, and then my father suggested we make the forty-five-minute drive to Worcester to visit Holy Cross, a place a few kids from Priory had gone in the past.

It was love at first sight. The campus was gorgeous. Dramatic. Set up from Worcester on a massive hill, all stately buildings and spires and columns. And as we took the campus tour, the students simply beamed. They shouted hello to one another. They were freshly scrubbed and glowed with love for themselves, one another, and, we have to assume, God. I immediately developed a crush on this place and everyone in it. I thought about autumn mornings and tailgate parties and visiting someone's parents' house on the Cape. It was a superficial connection we had developed, this place and I, but it felt real. What I was feeling, I now recognize, was the desire to
be
one of these people. To be proud and to beam and to look good. To have no issues with my identity. To put my love of popular culture in its proper place, behind more practical matters. To be a good Catholic and a grown man.
Holy Cross is the place for me,
I decided.

Boston College accepted me, Holy Cross put me on the wait list, and because the object of my affection indicated that it didn't feel the same way, I suddenly became obsessed with making it want me. I wrote letters and asked the monks who liked me to do the same, and in August, HC relented and accepted me. I was all about it. (Michael Damien's cover of David Essex's “Rock On” made it to number one in July, so, really, all of America was making questionable decisions in the summer of 1989.)

As my parents and I pulled up at my dormitory and a squadron of chipper sophomores in matching T-shirts unloaded our station wagon, the new Tears for Fears boomed out of a fourth-floor room. It was the first time I'd heard it, and it was sweeping and majestic and matched my feelings. I was starting over. We all were. We were all hitting the reset button. We were going to find out who we were, together. From scratch. I'd never be on the outside again.

And then I went to my room and met my two roommates, Brian and Mike, lifelong best friends from the same hometown just outside of Boston.

Our first event was a tailgate and barbecue down by the football stadium, and we mingled. I learned quickly that Holy Cross draws almost exclusively from New England, and New England is a big small town. Everyone seemed to know one another, or know someone from one another's hometowns. At the very least, everyone spoke the same language, which is the language of abuse. Mockery, I learned after many confusing and unpleasant months, is how people from New England show affection. It's how they show they like you, which is very confusing, because it's also how they show they don't like you, and they're just never going to tell you which it is.

A local cover band played the hits of the day, and the one sort-of hippie girl in our class danced blissfully. She had brown curls down to her breasts and looked a little like Edie Brickell, and she twirled and she smiled and her paisley skirt caught the sunlight. She was happy.

I watched. A group of kids from my hall walked up, watched me watch her, and then watched her. Rich, an ROTC guy, spoke up: “What is she,
retahded
?” And everyone laughed. Twirling, even from a hippie girl, was not a thing that would be tolerated here.

Situated as it was on the side of a massive hill, the campus received two radio stations, the college radio station WCHC and Worcester's hair metal station WAAF, and 90 percent of the students opted for the latter. The two most significant bands in my life as a freshman became Toad the Wet Sprocket and Warrant.

The campus was full of the kind of people I wanted to be and devoid of the kind of people I was, and if anyone else felt the same way, they were hiding it better than I knew how to. This was the kind of place where people got dressed up to go to class, and then went home, showered, and changed into a nice clean outfit for dinner and study. Everyone was putting his or her best foot forward, and I had forgotten how to walk.

It was this kind of place: once a month, someone would run out from the student center, where our PO boxes were, and shout “It's here! It's
heeeeere
!” And people would sprint inside to get the hot item of the day: the new J.Crew catalog. The students were generous and thoughtful: if someone knew their roommate would already have brought one home, they'd leave theirs out on a table near the mailboxes for someone less fortunate. Everyone would make their selections, and eight to ten business days later, everyone would model their new barn jackets or wide-wale corduroys.

Holy Cross was homogeneous to the extreme, and everyone seemed to know the rules of survival except me. I got a weekly DJ shift at the campus radio station WCHC and I was there all the time. Music was my drug and I needed relief, so I was always using. I worried I had made the wrong choice, and I didn't know how to go about fixing it.

Freshman year, our social options were limited unless we had fake IDs, and mine was questionable: I was David Knight from Simsquix, Montana, standing in front of what is clearly a posterboard backdrop in the rough shape of a Montana driver's license. It only worked in the most rugged of townie bars that were the most desperate for business. You didn't want to go there unless you were in a pack, and you couldn't assemble a pack because most people didn't have fake IDs. So unless there was an off-campus party and the news trickled down to us, we were stuck watching Blockbuster rentals in our rooms. When we finished our movies, we rewound (because we were kind) and we left them by our front doors, just in case anyone else wanted to watch them during the three-night rental period. The first time I did this, the guys across the hall grabbed my movie, and then two hours later there was a knock on my door. I answered, and they were all there, wearing faces of agitation. “What is
wrong
with you, Holmes?”

“Excuse me?”

“That is the weirdest movie we have ever seen.” They handed it back to me and left, and I looked down at it. It was John Waters's
Hairspray.

I was on a campus full of eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds who had never seen—and never would—a weirder movie than
Hairspray.
Oh, dear God,
I thought,
what have I done?

I was afraid and lonely and I was tired of being afraid and lonely, and I needed a plan, because I couldn't spend every waking moment at the campus radio station numbing out to music. So I made a decision. I decided to
be
one of these people. I pasted a smile on my face and I joked around with people; I was always on. And then I decided I was not only going to be one of these people, I was going to be
the best one of these people.
Light on my feet. Quick with a quip. At every party, at every event, in every bar. I went through a disposable camera a week, making people take photos of me with all my new friends as proof.
Look, I belong here! Look at my friends! Wheee!
I was the last to leave every party because I was afraid that if I left anyone behind, they'd talk to each other and piece me together.

I had an impression of an effeminate gay man that I did a lot. A
lot.
Generally, when people do impressions of gay men, which in the twentieth century was a popular thing to do, they give their character a lisp: “Oh, Thergio, thtop it!” they'll thay. This is simply incorrect, from a linguistic anthropological standpoint. The gay accent—the sound some men make with their voices that marks them as homosexual whether they actually are or not—has no lisp. What it has is a hissing sibilance in the
s.
A sharpness. It is unmistakable, and it is not a speech impediment, and every gay man I have ever met who does not naturally use it in his speech does a spot-on impression of someone who does. It's necessary for survival in the years before you come out. To do a flawless stereotypical-gay-man impression is to distance yourself from stereotypical gay men, which for all you know means “all gay men.” It is to say: you may suspect me of being homosexual, but here, let me take care of that. Let me do an impression of how ridiculous a real gay man sounds, and then go back to my serious, respectable normal voice, thereby giving you a comparison that proves conclusively that I am not
that.
You see the difference?

It is a thing many of us have done, but it doesn't make it any nicer to look back on.

Being everywhere and everything to everyone took energy, which I replenished by sleeping all day, every day. I never went to class. I skipped lectures, I didn't read books, and I had no idea what my professors looked like. It was a clear cry for help, but you weren't supposed to need this kind of help by the time you got to college, so nobody answered. I took a logic class, and I never went, and because I never went, I flunked it, and I failed even to see the perfect logic in that.

These were my two speeds: socializing and sleeping. Either I was manically trying to dazzle or I was unconscious. I was doing nothing academically because I had no idea what to do. I changed majors three times: pre-med, pre-law, English. Nothing took. I was sinking in quicksand.

By the end of my freshman year, I met a couple of people in my Acting 101 class, and they invited me to hang out on their hall across campus in Wheeler. These guys were more relaxed, more accepting, and I felt like I could breathe around them a little bit. Finally, I began to feel like I was finding my footing. But the die was cast: I'd let things go for too long to catch up academically. The Wheeler guys invited me to share their house when the whole campus went to Hyannis the week after spring finals, and I went. It was lovely, and they were lovely, and I was beginning to think that I belonged just as I was beginning to realize that I wouldn't be allowed to come back.

Back in St. Louis in May of 1990, I went to check the mail and there was a notice for a piece of certified mail from the 01610 area code. I knew in my heart what was in that envelope and all of the blood ran out of my head and into my stomach. I'd been kicked out. I could apply to come back after one year. My parents were furious and I was mortified, and we were all ignoring the clear message the universe was sending us.

In the 1990–91 school year, I lived at home with my parents and took night classes at Washington University in St. Louis. I was in with the retirees and the extension students, and I put my nose to the grindstone because I was determined to get back to Holy Cross and finish what I had started. I did my studying in the Wash U library, made a few friends just from striking up conversations there, and I started getting invited to fraternity parties. I went, because I had nothing else to do, and it wasn't until I got a couple of bids that I realized that what I'd been doing was “rushing.” Nobody knew I was a night student, or if they did know they didn't care. I pledged Kappa Sigma. I went through ritual and became an active brother, and they asked me to direct the spring musical they did each year with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority—so it was clear they not only knew whom they were dealing with, but wanted me around anyway. At the end of the year, I had a fraternity house to live in if I wanted to, and my grades were good enough that I could fully matriculate to the regular, daytime Washington University. Things were going well for me in St. Louis. I was succeeding, and I was succeeding as myself.

But I was determined to win back the favor of the one who had rejected me, so I reapplied after that year to Holy Cross and they let me back in and I went.