Robert Schwoch

Genesis

I met him at the Campus Catholic Center. Sounds like the start of a bad pop song. And it made about that much sense. I wasn’t religious.
          Eighteen-year-olds could drink legally back then, but I couldn’t. I’d get sick on beer before I’d get drunk. That was a problem for a shy, sheltered suburban kid at the University of Wisconsin. We’re talking 37,000 undergraduates. Join a pub or join a club, they used to say. I was more athletic than my reedy body would betray, but aside from a bit of pond hockey I was more of a sports watcher than player. It was a bad time for campus politics—what would a college kid protest in the Carter administration? After Nixon and Ford it was like the country was being run by a hippie. There was a leftover anti-war organization waiting for another war (and drinking to pass the time). I tried caring about the environment but I couldn’t care enough to hold a sign in the cold. Martial arts: too martial. Brazilian dance: sprained ankle. A gay club had been formed, but joining didn’t occur to me. I wasn’t gay. I just had this thing about guys sometimes.
          Still clubless and mostly friendless at the start of my sophomore year, I blundered into the Catholic Center, thinking it was the bookstore—it was a new block and all the new campus buildings looked the same back then, molded concrete and square windows, institutional adobe. I started to leave but there was a nice lounge with pit furniture and my backpack was heavy. The guy who would turn out to be Michael was sprawled in there studying, with his shocks of gold hair and his glittering blue eyes and his gym-addict physique. He looked like Odysseus in sweatpants. Then I thought, wait a second. I’m, technically, Catholic.
          My grades and spirits rose as I began spending about three hours a day studying in the lounge, spying out Michael or waiting for him to show. I thought I caught him looking at me, once in a while. But I wasn’t sure enough to make contact without some excuse.
          In the lounge, I overheard that what passed for a good time at the Catholic Center was a phenomenon known as Weekly Bible Discussion. Near the start of the semester, Father Tim, the junior member of the pastoral staff, would gather everyone in said lounge, and each student would pick a study group to join for the upcoming term, based on a Biblical book or story or theme. Michael showed for the organizational meeting, as I’d hoped. I positioned myself in the back of the gathering to let him pick his group first, and tracked him down at the door afterward.
          “Hey, you’re in Romans,” I said. “Me too.”
          He nodded. “It sounded the most depraved.”

​

Romans

Father Tim himself led the Romans group. He had blinding red hair, hexagonal wire-rimmed glasses and a porcelain complexion. He looked barely old enough to drive, much less save souls. We called him “Father” only ironically.
          Counting Tim, there were nine of us in Romans, six men, three women. Two of the women lived in a veggie co-op and we met on torn furniture at their big, decrepit house. Tim quoted the same few Bible commentators over and over, referring occasionally to the Catholic Left. The sixties weren’t long past, but we couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. Catholic and liberal didn’t seem to overlap. Someone finally asked about it.
          “It’s like this,” Tim said. “Everyone at the party is smoking up. You’re the only Catholic left.” It was probably an old line but we all laughed. Marijuana was illegal everywhere but decriminalized in Madison back then, common as jug wine. The penalty for using was a five-dollar citation and you had to blow a smoke ring in a cop’s face to get one.
          Someone said, “Do you light up, ‘Father’?”
          Tim said, “Let’s look at verse 16.” He was blushing like a papist rag doll.
          The next meeting, pipes were going around and soon the Romans group was nicknamed Toking With Christ. “The center better never find out,” Tim would say, coughing. Michael and I would sink into the concave couch and soon the side of my shin would be resting lightly against his and everything he said sounded like it was coming straight down from Olympus. I’d float back to my room, eat half a pound of M&Ms, crank Elvis Costello in my headphones, tumble into bed, make love to Michael with my mind and one hand, and fall asleep. That’s what passed for sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll in the college days of Patrick McBrady.
          Until Michael started walking me home.
          It was everything you’d expect from a Catholic infatuation between nineteen-year-old males in 1979. We took it slow—real slow. Slow enough for the Church to catch up someday, or at least that’s the way I was imagining it. In the meantime, there was rough-housing. I’d snatch him a Coke out of the fridge. He’d push me in the chest and say, “I wanted Pepsi.” I’d push him back and go, “That’s tough man, you’re getting Coke.” Next thing we knew we’d be wrestling around with each other on the carpet laughing, and a little later we’d still be wrestling around but not laughing quite so much. 
          Michael and me. We were electrons, endlessly orbiting, never connecting. Our scarlet letter would’ve been C for Coward. It was the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name, But Isn’t Above Dropping Broad, Teasing Hints About Its Name At Every Opportunity. You could hear Jesus yawning in the wind.
          Then the storm hit. It was a lesson. Don’t bore the Lord.

​

Lamentations

Friday night, my place, winter break, sitting too close on the futon couch, mildly stoned, hockey beaming in on my ten-inch Sony Porta-Color. We didn’t care who was playing; Cable TV, with its boutique channels devoted to a single thing such as sports, was new enough to be entertaining by its mere presence. Michael hadn’t gone home for break, and I hadn’t because he hadn’t.
          As usual we’d had our fill of horseplay and amateur philosophy by midnight or so. Michael’s flat, shared with three roommates, was a couple of miles across campus from my solo studio in a student high-rise. He liked to run home from my place. He ran a couple of miles like a regular person goes down the driveway for the mail. 
          He lingered at the door. “So, then. Bye, I guess.”
          “Yeah. Tomorrow?”
          “Yeah.” He looked me up and down, gave a salute and left.
          A few minutes later, there was a knock. It took me a second to recognize it was Michael dripping in the hall, still wincing from a wind-whipping. The blond spikes that normally jutted out in an arc from beneath his stocking cap were dark and dangling, streaked with rime. His ice-caked brows and stubble gave him a faux-elderly air. There was a quarter-inch of snowy crust on his shoulders and cap, and the rest of him was drenched from the melt on the elevator ride up.
          “Looked outside lately?” he said, digging ice crystals out of one eye with a purplish knuckle.
          He walked me to the window, drew the drapes. There it was: the Blizzard of ’79. Of course we didn’t know that yet; in Wisconsin it takes a decent showing to be the Blizzard of Last Week. But this one was making quite an entrance. It’s one thing for the flakes to be coming sideways. It’s another thing when the sky is flashing behind them, like a giant cannon firing blasts of white pellets. Any Wisconsin kid can tell you that snow with lightning means trouble.
          I said, “I guess they weren’t kidding about that chance of precipitation.”
          His nose was to the glass. “There is no way,” he said, darkly.
          My studio had a single main room with a tiny open kitchenette, and a three-quarters bath taller than it was wide, barely sufficient to turn around in. There would be no stripping down and drying off in discreet privacy. There would be no fresh clothes—he would’ve busted out of mine like a superhero. I had but one quilt to wrap him in and I needed it to sleep under; I had but one couch to lend him and I needed it to sleep on myself—it flattened into my bed, with its futon top as the mattress. He said he’d crash on the floor. What was left of the floor once the couch was opened would hardly accommodate a spaniel.
          I did my best not to look as I handed him the towels, but what little I saw sent my heart nearly out of its cavity. A crucifix bounced on his bare chest; I’d figured Jesus was at the end of that chain, keeping guard. I spread Michael’s clothes across the heat register to dry, put the sheets and quilt on the couch, and let him figure out the rest as I shut myself into the bathroom, brushed my teeth and wriggled into what would have to pass for pajamas—boxer shorts, wool socks, and a Bucky Badger t-shirt.
          When I returned the lights were out. Michael was on his back corpse-like, mummified in half the quilt and taking up somewhat more than half the bed. I slid in gently on my side, with my back toward him and the fold of the quilt between us.
          “See you in the morning,” he said to the ceiling.
          “G’night,” I said to the wall.
          I knew I wouldn’t fall asleep until he did. But there wasn’t a stir from him—not a snore, not a breath, not a budge. I measured twenty minutes in the glowing digits of the wall clock. Then I twisted slowly onto my back, one shoulder jutting over the edge of the futon. The drapes were still apart, and in the snow-dappled streetlight I could see his eyes were wide open, staring upward.

          I tugged gingerly at the quilt, raising the fold. He stayed stock-still. I let myself settle into him, our arms and knees touching. Still no movement, but now his heartbeat was practically shaking the bed. As was mine.
          I turned on my side to face him, reached over and rested a hand on his chest, brushing aside the chain. He inhaled sharply through the nose and put his hand on mine, guiding it back and forth with a sigh. Then he picked it up and tucked it where it came from, under my chin.
          “We can’t,” he said.
          “I know,” I said. “Sorry.”
          I lay there watching him a long time. It was evident he would stare at the ceiling all night.
          “I just want to kiss you,” I said. “That’s all.”
          He cranked his head to face me. “Did you read Romans? Or are you waiting for the movie to come out?”
          “Tim said it might not mean that. The Greek words and everything.”
          He laughed. “Yeah, sure. The Catholic Left. We don’t have any Catholics like that where I come from.”
          “Not in Chicago? Where else would they be?”
          “Tim’s imagination, I think.”
          He faced the ceiling again. Sleep was an absurdity. Morning seemed a month away.
          “I’m not sure I believe a hundred percent of that stuff,” I said. “Romans and everything.”
          “Really?” Michael said, with what sounded like genuine curiosity.
          “My family only goes to church on Christmas and Easter. Sunday is busy at the restaurant. We’re usually working.”
          “So why did you join the center? Why did you sign up for Bible discussion?”
          No lie came to me in the ensuing moments, nor did a reason for one.
          “Because of you,” I said.
          He let out a wicked chuckle.
          “What’s so funny?”
          He said, “I knew you’d pick Romans.”
          “You did?”
          “Patrick. We peeked at each other in the lounge two hundred times. I knew what was happening. Believe me, I wish I didn’t.”
          “So you buy all that Bible stuff? Every word?”
          “If you don’t believe all of it you might as well believe none of it. People can’t just do whatever they want. There has to be some plan. Or we’d all just . . . ruin ourselves. What if all guys got it on with each other instead of the regular way?”
          “But all guys don’t.”
          “Lots of guys might. If it was okay with God and everyone. Then the world would be screwed, wouldn’t it?”
          I thought about it. I liked the idea of there being a plan. The notion of God as some superhuman controlling the world from the sky was ridiculous to me; I was surprised it wasn’t ridiculous to everyone. But the notion that there was some logic to the universe, that we weren’t just a bunch of atoms shooting randomly through space, was comforting to me in a way I’d never felt and wouldn’t have been able to put into words. If there was a plan, these feelings I had for men, for the man in bed with me, might be part of it, not against it. Maybe God or nature or universal consciousness or whatever had reserved out a percentage of men from procreation as a check on population, or to pay attention to other things than raising families. Or something.
          “I refuse to believe we’re normal,” I said.
          He said, “I have to believe it.” He pulled the quilt tighter around him and rolled to face away from me. “And I go to Mass every single day,” he added. “For your information. Since grade school.”
          I got out of bed, made an eye-shade with my hand and peered out the window, dancing in place from the chill.
          “Not tomorrow,” I said.

Revelation

I did eventually sleep, soundly and late. Michael, I don’t know. When I awoke he was sitting at my two-chair dining table in his gym shorts and a hockey jersey he’d found in my closet, reading my battered lit-survey copy of Wuthering Heights. The jersey fit me perfectly with thirty pounds of pads underneath. It was nearly tight on him.
          “This book isn’t bad,” he said, waving it.
          “What’s it like outside?”
          He shrugged, nodding over at my one square window, which had frosted over and was allowing only a pale grey glow into the room. “I decided to stay in,” he said.
          I flicked on my clock radio. The news station was listing accidents and road closures. Then the forecast: eighteen to twenty-five inches of snow in total by evening, with the temperature dropping after nightfall to minus twelve and wind chills to fifty below. If you didn’t get where you wanted to be yesterday, the weather guy was saying, it could be a while.
          Michael folded up the bed and its covers while I fixed breakfast with what was on hand: four eggs, scrambled in nothing, with a side of Hostess Ho-Ho snack cakes, and two cans of cola. We chit-chatted about the usual: the Badgers’ powerful hockey team, the unpaid writing gigs we’d landed at one of the student newspapers, the latest Catholic gossip. Then, as if to confirm the night had altered nothing—or perhaps happened only in our imaginations—he crept up behind me as I rinsed the dishes and clamped me around the torso in a one-arm stranglehold.
          “That breakfast sucked,” he said into my ear.
          “What’re you going to do about it?”
          I elbowed him in the ribs and we tumbled backward onto the strip of carpet between the couch and the table. It started out the same as always, with him pinning me, letting me escape and get the upper hand, then making a dramatic reversal with a show of strength. But the rulebook had changed now; out-of-bounds lines had been erased. My lips brushed his ear and lingered there for seconds on end. His hands traveled across unfamiliar and mountainous terrain. We eventually came to a grinding halt, literally, doing a horizontal vamp against one another, him crushing me into the shag carpet. The match would’ve ended with guns going off in their holsters, but as that was about to happen he popped to his knees, chest heaving.
          “No more,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he meant for now, or ever. I let my head plunk back against the carpet, shut my eyes tight. Then I heard Michael gasp and leap to his feet. I sat up.
          The door to the apartment was ajar and a head was peering around it.
          “Christ!” Michael said, trying to tug the jersey down over the front of his shorts.
          “I was knocking,” said the head.
          I scrambled up and swung the door open. If I’d ever seen the man I’d have remembered him. He looked at least two decades too old for our glorified dormitory, though he did have some of the proper accoutrements, like a batik shirt, torn jeans cinched with a rope belt, straggly black beard to his chest, and a dense ponytail to match behind his head. But his face had the pocks and freckles of middle age, his eyes were dull, and his hairline was receding all around—the ponytail seemed to be dragging the rest of his hair off his head.
          “I was wondering if I could borrow some food,” the man said, scratching behind his beard with the backs of his fingers. Michael and I were mute from puzzlement and embarrassment. “So hungry,” said the visitor, with an illogical grin.
          “Do you live in the building?” I asked.
          “Uhhmm, no, it was such a nice day, I went out for a walk.” He punctuated the wisecrack with a long, nervous laugh that sounded vaguely like the idling of a lawnmower. “I’m Bud,” he said, sticking out a hand. “Bud Weiser.” (More lawnmower.) “Not really. It’s Rick. I’m in 4A. One floor down, two rooms over,” he said, pointing at the floor.
          “Are you a student?” Michael wanted to know.
          “You don’t have to be a student to live in this building. It’s a private building. Anyone can rent here. You don’t have to be a student.”
          “Okay,” Michael said.
          “Yeah, I’m a student.” Rick ventured in a step, cased the room, then us. “Are you guys homosexuals?”
          “Michael lives across campus,” I said. “He’s stuck here.”
          “We were just horsing around,” Michael said.
          From Rick we learned the one convenience store reachable on foot was closed, and that the apartment building was mostly empty, with the start of second semester still not in range to take seriously. He’d started panhandling down on the first floor and had worked his way up to five; ours was the first door he’d heard anything behind. He apologized for disturbing us, but he was out of food and needed some, particularly because he had a painful stomach condition that was worse when he didn’t eat. “My appendix is infected or something,” he explained.
          “Infected?” Michael said. “Do you need a doctor?”
          “Doctors don’t listen,” Rick said.
          There wasn’t much we could do to help him. My kitchenette was stocked like most student kitchens in Madison, with only enough to plug the gaps between fast-food burgers and the campus meal plan. “A couple of fudgesicles would be perfect,” Rick said, as I dug futilely into my freezer, which was filled mostly with frost. The best we could do for him was a can of Mountain Dew, a quarter-bag of oyster crackers, and my phone number in case of emergency. His thank-yous were fervent nonetheless.
          “You guys should lock the door when you’re just horsing around,” he advised, as we escorted him to the hall.

​

Judges

The boredom was crushing. There was no TV now, with the cable probably having snapped off in the ice and gusty wind, and me having done away unwisely with the antenna; we felt fortunate to have electricity. We were never into each other’s music, him favoring country-flavored rock and me into the New Wave. Madison was such a lively town that most college kids didn’t think of staying in for anything but schoolwork. I didn’t even have a deck of cards.
          Smoking marijuana wasn’t the brightest idea for two sexually frustrated nineteen-year-olds stuck inside without food. But pot was the only staple I had in impressive supply. I understand that these days it’s sold by the gram. Back then in Madison it was thirty dollars an ounce, and the Catholics had a diligent pusher. It’s hard to describe how much fun you could have with an ounce of marijuana, even the weak variety common back then. It was like a keg of beer in a baggie.
          So out came the hand-painted wooden pipe, a prized possession, rainbow-striped around the stem and engraved beneath the bowl with a peace sign. My memories of the next several hours are out-of-focus, but they become clearer after we re-flattened the couch into the bed and landed on our backs atop it, hands behind our heads, talking and laughing, our intimacy deepening by itself.
          “Your eyes are really something,” he said, leaning over for a look. “So dark. And your hair too.” He fingered a lock of my curls, examining it like a scientist. “I thought Irishmen were supposed to be fair.”
          “I’m black Irish. I’ve got Spanish blood.”
          “Black Irish,” he said. “Sounds deadly.”
          I put a hand around the back of his neck and tried to reel him in. He didn’t budge.
          That’s when I went for the Bible. I stood at the foot of the bed, turned to Romans and began to read aloud from the beginning, pausing at what I imagined to be the critical points. Michael would fill in with commentary, which in our condition sounded more illuminating than anything Tim or the Catholic Left had come up with. I would probe and argue and ask for clarification; he was always ready with an answer. It might’ve gone on for hours. Fortunately the relevant part of Romans was only twenty-six verses in.
          “The females exchanged natural relations for unnatural,” I said, peeking at Michael. He sat up, anticipating what was next. “And the males likewise gave up natural relations with females . . . wait a second!”
          “Tell me, tell me,” Michael said, begging for a cogent argument.
          “What natural relations?” I said.
          I admitted it for the first time, to Mike and myself. I’d never had any feelings for women. I’d tried. I’d dated. I’d managed grim sex exactly twice, with partners who didn’t pester me for more. I’d pretended the next time would be the charm. But it was a joke. There weren’t any natural relations for me to give up. Not with women. And there never would be. 
          Michael said he didn’t know. He had some of those natural feelings. Maybe not as strong as the unnatural ones. But maybe enough to get by.
          “What do you mean, you don’t know? You’ve never, like, done anything?”
          “I’ve kept it pretty clean,” he said. “I haven’t been all the way.”
          I sat on the edge of the futon and held my head to think.
          “Look,” I said, flopping the book in my lap and pointing at the verse. “Romans isn’t talking about you and me. This is  . . . a party. An orgy. It’s Rome, right? This is a bunch of normal guys who had so much sex so many ways they got sick of women. They’re perverts looking for a new thrill. They’re not, like, in love.”
          That froze Michael. Then I realized what I’d said.
          He said, “You wouldn’t call this . . .”
          “A pervert probably wouldn’t care about my eyes.”
          We contemplated that in silence until the phone started to ring. It rang and rang, as phones did before the world digitized them. It would stop a little, then ring some more. After a few minutes we figured we would have to answer it or hang it outside to freeze.
          I snatched up the receiver. “Hello?”
          “I sure as hell wasn’t going to knock,” said Rick.
          He’d struck food and was willing to share. “Come down right away,” he said. And we should bring some of what we were smoking. He could smell it all the way down in 4A.
          “I don’t think so,” Michael said. “That guy was creepy enough when we weren’t stoned.” But our weed-fueled craving for food was impossible to ignore. Michael walked over to the heat register, gave his sweats a test squeeze, and told me to help him get out of my effing hockey shirt.
          Rick’s apartment was its own blizzard, of clothes and papers and un-taken-out trash. I expected it to smell, but it didn’t, perhaps because his diet appeared to consist of nothing but beer and fudgesicles. Aside from the cans and wrappers the mess was mostly academic, like a professor’s desk emptied on the floor.
          He had indeed scored a lot to eat. Searching for a vending machine in the neighboring apartment buildings, whose automated front doors were unlocked for fear of a power failure, he’d found something even better—a charity honor box, full to overflowing. He’d stuck a ten-dollar IOU with his phone number in the contribution slot and made off with as much as he could carry, a staggering variety of candy bars and wrapped mass-bakery and salty snacks, spilled onto the foot of his stripped-down bed. In our state it all looked mouthwatering.
          “Have a seat,” he said, perching on the bed and gesturing at two metal folding chairs nearby. “Or maybe you two prefer the floor.” (Lawnmower.)
          As I filled the pipe Michael checked Rick’s teetering plywood shelves, which held an odd mix of philosophical treatises, foreign novels and anatomy texts. “Pre-med?” Michael asked.
          “Sort of,” Rick said.
          Rick turned out to be one of those people who know a little something about everything. He apologized for not having a TV or stereo, saying he mostly read books. It showed. He was up on all the inevitable topics: hockey, meteorology, even religion. “Oh, the Catholic Left,” he said. “They were never relevant.” At one point Rick snatched an old course syllabus off the floor, back when such a thing was a single, simple page, and diagrammed the entire storm on the blank back side, just from what he could see out the window and on the barometer and thermometer beside it. “The low is probably passing over your hometown, Mike,” he said, drawing the outline of Lake Michigan and marking a big L where Chicago would be. “The air spins like this and what we have out there is wraparound snow.” He drew sweeping arrows in an eddy around the L. “Wraparound,” he said. “You get it northwest of the low.”
          We might’ve enjoyed Rick’s company if he hadn’t kept trying to draw us out on the subject of our sexual orientation—as if we understood it ourselves—and if his stomach condition hadn’t started acting up. At first I thought his sour faces were from surprise or disagreement, but as the conversation wore on he began breathing harder, then grunting and moaning softly. Michael asked if it was his appendix.
          Rick nodded. “It’s burning a hole right through me,” he said.
          When a pang came that was enough to put him flat on the bed, I jumped up to call emergency, even as he said not to bother.
          When I gave the apartment number to the dispatcher, she said, in a bemused monotone, “Tell Mr. Williams to take his antacid.”
          “The antacid doesn’t worrrk!” Rick whined from his bed, not needing the receiver to be in on the conversation.
          “He seems pretty bad,” I told the dispatcher.
          “We’ve responded there before. He’ll be fine if he has his medication. All right, sir?”
          We had Rick tell us where the pills were and we brought them with water. On the label it said they were effective within one hour. He was perspiring with pain. In the kitchenette Michael and I agreed quietly that he needed some real food. Rick saw us plotting something and called for us to leave him, that he’d be okay before long.
          “We have to do something,” I whispered.
          Michael brooded. Then something out in the room caught his eye. “Oh my god. Look.”
          He pointed at the window. It wasn’t quite so frosted over as mine, and not too far outside it, in the descending darkness and snowy haze, a speck of neon twinkled. He ran over like a sailor spotting land.
          “Something’s open!” he said. “A bar.”
          I put my head next to Mike’s and squinted out. “The Frontier,” I said. “It figures.”
          “Have you been there?”
          I shook my head. “It’s a dive. Or worse. Our housefellow last year said it was one of the places you don’t go into. Unless you’re looking for trouble.”
          But I knew they had a kitchen of some sort; I walked by every day on my way home from campus and I remembered having smelled something. It wouldn’t be fine dining. It would probably be fried something-or-other, the national dish of Wisconsin. But it would be hot. It would be in a major food group. And it would be somewhere other than the Kensington Studio Apartments.
          “We’re getting you something to eat,” we told Rick.
          “Forget it,” he said, deliriously. “I’ll be better by then. Don’t come back.”
          “Hang on,” we said.

​

Exodus

My eyes had been closed most of the excruciating run to The Frontier and they were slow to acclimate in the long, dim room. The lights were red, the carpet was red, the booths were red, the walls were red—deep, sinister red, not the spirited Wisconsin Badger red of the student bars. In a squat rear corridor I could make out a condom machine and a payphone with the receiver dangling. There were no customers and no music.
          “Gentlemen,” said a stout, bow-tied figure gliding toward us, behind a low barrier that had to be the bar. “What took you so long?” We groped for a couple of crinkled-vinyl bar chairs. The bartender dealt two coasters. We asked for menus. “Cheese and sausage or cheese and pepperoni. That’s the menu.”
          We ordered one pizza for us and one for Rick, figuring we could rewarm his. On his way to the freezer I saw the bartender snatch the receiver of a wall phone, dial three digits, talk for two seconds and hang up.
          Five minutes passed, then ten, and still our putative dinner lay thawing on the bartop. The bartender propped himself on locked arms between the bar and back counter, looking out into the empty room and making forced-air squeaking noises through his lips.
          “Are you going to put those in?” Michael asked as politely as he could, pointing at the pizzas.
          “Oven’s gotta warm up,” the bartender said.
          Then, out of nowhere, another customer materialized. The door hadn’t swung, there’d been no whoosh of arctic air, she was just there: a young woman, though certainly older than us, wearing more makeup than you’d expect in a blizzard, clad in a shiny black skirt and a white blouse with frills lining its deep front U. Her figure was noticeable even to me, and her blond hair was brilliant enough to shine in the bar’s stingy light. She walked right over and rested her hands on the backs of our bar chairs.
          “What’s happening, guys?” she said, in the bright, assertive tone of someone talking over a jukebox when the song ends. “It’s a bruiser out there. That never stopped us, right?” She leaned back, checked the chair next to me and the one next to Michael, and chose the latter. “Phil!” she called to the bartender. “You keeping these two in line?”
          “They’re a challenge,” he said, brushing something off his vest.
          “Sonia,” the woman said, patting her chest. We introduced ourselves. She guessed freshmen; sophomores, we said. “Well, then, you’re all settled in, old pros! First time I’ve ever seen it like this on a Saturday,” she said with a wave. “But heck. All the better for us.”
          I checked my watch, then the pizzas, still not baking. The bartender was doing something with the till.
          What followed was sort of like being guests on our own private talk show. Sonia was interested to know all about us, what we were studying, how we liked it, what we did for fun. “The gym, oh, I can tell!” Sonia said, tickling Mike’s arm. “Writing for the paper! I’ll have to look for your names!” We were fascinating, suspiciously fascinating. A woman trying to pick up Michael didn’t seem too extraordinary, but both of us? At once?
          A pizza finally arrived. We inquired about the other pizza. Phil said he could do only one at a time. We dug in. Phil brought some water.
          “So, which of you fine fellows would like to buy a girl a drink?” Sonia said.
          Michael and I checked each other. Had we been rude? Being the better Christian, Michael fumbled in the deep pocket of his sweatpants for his wallet, saying he’d get it, and I let him, being the poorer in-state kid. Phil brought a tinkling glass of what was apparently Sonia’s usual. He set it in front of her, then turned to us.
          “Thirty dollars,” he said.
          We laughed, at a quoted price of roughly nine cocktails anywhere else at the time. But Phil was not the kidding kind.
          “What’s in a thirty-dollar drink?” Michael asked.
          Sonia touched Mike on the knee and said, “You and me can figure that out upstairs.”
          Here was something we didn’t get in freshman orientation. We looked at Phil. He raised his brows as if to ask, well?
          “I can spill it out if you like,” he said. “It’s not thirty-dollar booze.”
          “Probably a good idea,” I said. Phil began to take the glass away.
          “Wait,” said Michael.
          I said, “Huh?”
          Michael excused us and pulled me by the elbow out of earshot, toward the back hall.
          “I want to,” he said.
          “Are you kidding?” I said in a desperate whisper. “You won’t with me? Because of the Bible? And now—”
          “I know, I know. But I gotta find out. About the natural relations. An experiment. Just once.”
          “Uh-uh,” I said, ablaze with fear and jealousy, swiveling my head as far as it would turn. “You said there weren’t any exceptions. No special cases. All of it or none of it.”
          “Don’t fight, you two,” Sonia called over. “There’s plenty for everyone.”
          “Listen,” Michael said. “I’ll make you a deal. If I get upstairs and I can’t, if there’s nothing with me and her, then tonight . . .”
          He gave me a knowing look.
          “You and me?” I said.
          “As far as you want to take it.”
          I looked over at Sonia. She was touching up her lipstick in a compact mirror. “I can’t believe this,” I said, as I led Michael back to the bar.
          He had twenty-three dollars in his wallet. I rolled my eyes and produced the other seven. “Now that’s a friend,” Sonia said, winking at me and snapping the lipstick into her purse. She downed her drink in two swallows, jumped off the stool, stood at attention and offered Michael an arm. “And I thought it would be a bad night,” I heard her say, as they made their way to the stairs.
          Any amount of time would’ve seemed interminable, but as I hit the bottom of my glass even Phil was casting a perturbed eye at the ceiling and saying, “That’s more than one drink’s worth. Sonia must like your friend.”
          For a moment I thought I might be sick. I dashed to the men’s room, but it passed. When I returned, Michael was at the bar, alone.
          “Well?”
          “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

​

Acts

Michael was half a block in front of me most of the way home. I figured he was either having an attack of post-coital shame or planning to renege on our deal. By now I hardly cared. For the first time since I’d known Michael, I was tired of his company, wishing he could go home, wishing I could be alone. A couple of cars crept past through the blowing snow as we charged down the sidewalks. Maybe the buses will run tomorrow, I thought, my heart lifting a little at the possibility.
          We baked the pizza at my place, still not saying much, then brought it hot to 4A. After The Frontier the idea of going back to Rick’s place for more conversation and junk food felt almost quaint.
          But we couldn’t rouse him. It wasn’t even ten o’clock; we doubted he was asleep. He had to be inside. We knocked harder. Nothing.
          “Okay,” I said, “I’m worried.”
          “Me too,” Michael said.
          “Should I call emergency?”
          “You know they won’t come.”
          “We have to get in that room,” I said. “I won’t be able to sleep. I feel bad enough we left him.”
          Michael said, “You don’t want to know how I feel.”
          The night manager was in his apartment just off the lobby down on one. He was probably the only other resident of the building close to Rick’s age, a small, thin, meticulous man of indeterminate nationality, perhaps from the east of Europe. He was dressed in spotless denim overalls atop a pressed and starched white dress shirt. His black-and-white TV was coming in loud and clear, mainly loud. It was the local newscast. Areas of the city were losing power now, was the report, with the lines going brittle.
          At the mention of 4A the manager stiffened. “I would not become involved if I were you,” he said, in his proper but thickly accented English. “The gentleman shan’t be in his unit much longer. The owners are taking steps.” We insisted. Michael stuck out his chin and chest. The manager relented. “As you wish.”
          When Rick’s door popped open it was evident something was wrong before we looked in. We were hit with an antiseptic gust, a thick odor like rubbing alcohol, but stronger and sweeter. The manager went in first and I heard him pant, “Oh heavens, oh heavens.”
          Rick was splayed on his back atop his bed, unconscious, one leg dangling over the edge and his foot on the floor. On his nightstand and the floor around it were an assortment of dark bottles, piles of gauze, and several steel implements with sharp blades. His shirt was raised to his chest, and the side of his abdomen was deeply wounded. Blood was running out of the crescent-shaped incision in cobweb shapes down his sheets and onto the carpet.
          “What the hell,” I gasped.
          “Mother Mary,” Michael said, forcing himself to look. “I think he tried to take care of that appendix himself.”
          I ran to the phone, not waiting for Michael to shout, “Tell the fuckers from emergency to get the fuck over here!”
          He held Rick’s wrist as I made the call, my hand shaking so badly I could barely hit the phone buttons. “Alive,” Michael said. “But tell them to hurry.” The manager retreated to the hall and hovered there, a hand on his cheek.
          The response was as fast as anyone could expect, given the conditions outside. I didn’t think it was fast enough. I was waiting all the while for Mike to tell me the pulse had disappeared. But as they carried Rick out the ambulance crew hinted he’d be all right. “He didn’t get to the important parts,” one of them said.
          Back in my room, we fell into the two dining chairs, exhausted. Michael spent a long time with his head in his hands. I brought water, and a roll of toilet paper in case he was shaken up enough to cry, but he wasn’t.
          As we were about to go to bed, I suggested we pray.
          “For what?” Michael said.
          “For Rick, what else?”
          “I’ve been praying all my life. A lot of good it ever does.”
          “All right,” I said. “Let’s just go to sleep. Let’s just get to morning.”
          We crawled under in our t-shirts and shorts. I carefully pleated the quilt between us and lay facing the wall. He was on his back as usual and I knew he was awake. I dropped off quickly. But before long I was roused by the covers shifting and the pleat lifting.
          Michael slid an arm under my side and rotated me flat on my back. “I owe you something,” he said.
          “Mike, no,” I said, groggy. “Some other time.”
          He landed atop me. I felt nothing but skin on him. “This is what you want,” he said, chin to chin. “Isn’t it?” His breath was faintly alcoholic. Perhaps he’d tried to drink himself into heterosexuality with Sonia.
          “No, Michael. This isn’t the night.”
          He nodded and said, “Yeah it is,” securing my chest with one arm and inching the waistband of my shorts downward with the other. “A person should never break a promise. It says so in the Bible.”
          “Please, Michael. No.”
          It was a match he was destined to win. There would be no letting me escape this time. He got my shorts out of the way, flipped me over, and pinned me fast. “This is what you wanted,” he said, burning it into me. “Take what you wanted. Take it.”
          In his semi-inebriated state he wasn’t getting as much of me as he seemed to think, but enough to cause a few stabs of unimaginable pain. When he finished he fell onto his back for a moment, chasing his breath. Then he bolted out of bed, threw on his sweats, and left. How he got home or where else he might’ve ended up, I don’t know.
          I went to the bathroom, ran hot water, tended to where he’d been and the drops of blood coming from it, trying to gather myself, trembling. In the mirror I still looked like me. I told myself I’d be all right. What choice did I have? Who would I tell, at a time when “I’m gay” was monumental? In my mind I latched hard onto the pale ray of good news: my longing for Michael was over.
          I knew I couldn’t avoid Michael once school started, that I’d have to face him. It happened in the newspaper office. I was looking at the second-term notices on the bulletin board when he came up behind and laid a hand on my shoulder. As soon as I heard my name in his voice, I spun around and shook him off.
          “Touch me again,” I said, “and I’ll find someone who can do something about it.”
          He gave me a skeptical look. “Come on, Patrick.”
          “Don’t think I wouldn’t say anything. I’ve already been to confession.”
          “You what?”
          “You heard me.” 
          He looked around. “But you didn’t do anything wrong,” he said, quietly.
          “I like to err on the safe side,” I said.
          He never came back to the Catholic Center. He dropped the class we’d planned to take together. When we’d catch each other’s eye criss-crossing campus, we’d speed up and stare straight ahead.
          I didn’t come out of the closet until college was over, though I did eventually help Father Tim break his vow of chastity a number of times, in my little cube of an apartment, with the door carefully bolted. He was a fine, gentle lover, better than I knew. I think I felt worse about it than he did.
          “We’re lousy Christians,” I said late one evening, as we lay shoulder-to-shoulder on the futon.
          “Jesus’s favorite kind,” he said.
          I let go a sigh. “Do you think this is part of God’s plan?”
          His head turned to face mine. “You want me to do theology right now?”
          “Yes please.”
          He took a moment, gazing ceiling-ward. “How else can we know except how it feels?”
          “Crime feels good to criminals.”
          He shook his head. “Criminals aren’t listening to the God channel. Maybe it’s mostly static. But at least we’re tuning in.”
          The semester before graduation, late in the afternoons when classes had ended, my daily route converged with Michael’s. I would spot him striding across the high hill at the center of campus, often with a slight, dark-eyed male companion, though not always the same one. One of those afternoons was the last time I saw him.
          A few years later I got word from a friend that he was gone. He had picked a spectacularly bad moment in gay history to be getting all the sex he wanted. I was still a lousy Christian, as I remain to this day. But not lousy enough to stop me from driving down to Chicago, finding his resting place, opening a book, and saying a prayer.