Jeff was smart, dark-haired, lanky and melancholy, a delicate Heathcliff. We’d become roommates after a quick-switch in the first week with our assigned roommates. They were night owls, and we were nerds. He just didn’t seem at home in himself. So I was drawn to him, and we left.
Sometimes we’d walk into run-down Worcester, Massachusetts, an East Coast version of Cleveland, hunting Strawberries Records for something in the cutout bin. Sometimes we just studied, evading the complicated effects of alcohol (the screaming, the fists hammering on doors and the broken windows), bearing down on the simple difficulty of homework.
One night, three of us — Jeff, our friend Phil and I — climbed the hill at the top of our college. The lights from the city below glinted with a clarity that was the opposite of how we felt. Phil and I climbed a wheeled observation tower used for filming football practices. Jeff looked on.
The team was undefeated, the cocks of campus. So we envied them. In an act of madness, Phil and I rode that wooden tower down a small embankment, where it turned, tipping over and crashing. We ran down the hill, our lungs on fire with fear and joy. It was scary, how delightful it was to destroy something.
That school year, 1988-1989, Jeff and I lived in a room with a cardboard wall separating us from two football-brontosauri nicknamed Bundy and Nass. They were friendly enough, but occasionally and inexplicably, they’d begin to wrestle, slamming their 300-pound bodies against our shared wall, shaking everything off our shelves. I started wearing earplugs, and Jeff would go home many weekends, he said, to make out with his girl.
Somehow, we drifted apart. Jeff was so nervous that he’d puke before every exam and isolated himself in his studies. Something was wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. Toward the end of the year, Jeff came in the room and announced that he’d found a new roommate for our sophomore year. I was stunned. Had he tired of my own sadness, my music, my food-mooching?
The next year, I barely saw him. When I did, I could tell that there was something all blocked up in him, as if he were fighting himself. Guys on the hall had a joke that whenever he’d start talking, in his slow affected way, everyone would pretend to go narcoleptic. I thought it was mean, but I said nothing.
Two years later, a friend who’d become his roommate, tracked me down. “I found a Playgirl under his bed,” he said.
I was confused, thinking of his long descriptions of making out in his truck with a high school sweetheart.
After college, we both fled the country on fellowships. He went to Egypt, living among the homeless in Cairo’s City of the Dead. I heard he’d found a people much like himself — trying to make a home among ghosts, because the living would never understand. Just a few years later, he published a book about it. An aspiring writer, I was so jealous of his success that I couldn’t bear to read it.
After living in Egypt for years, he moved to Washington, D.C. In 2012, I got news that he’d died suddenly in a house fire. Witnesses said that the house quickly went up in flames, but he ran back into the blaze for some reason.
Why had he gone back in? What could possibly seem worth risking his life? I couldn’t help wondering: Who or what had set the spark?
A couple years ago, my wife and I watched the musical Fun Home, based on Alison Bechdel’s poignant comic about her closeted father and her own coming-out. It reminded me instantly of Jeff, the way the musical’s father couldn’t settle into his own skin.
I remembered how I didn’t want to attend the local all-boys Jesuit prep school, since I kept hearing that only “fags” went to Loyola. I didn’t even know what a fag was, just that you didn’t want to be one.
If anything, students were even more homophobic there. A movie was “gay” if it was uncool, a class was “gay” if it was tedious, a person was “gay” if they didn’t fit in. Fags, gays, queers, flamers. Why flamers? I wondered. Even in college, I knew no one who was “out.” It was too risky.
This summer, our teenage daughters asked to march in Cleveland’s Pride in the CLE parade. My wife Amy and I decided to make it a family affair. We wanted them to know where we stood. Not just because we have so many beloved friends and family who are LGBTQ, but because it’s the right thing.
That day, I felt tears welling up in me to see the rainbow flags and smiling faces in Public Square, knowing that the parade took the courage of many people who stood in the truth of their own lives and publicly said who they loved.
But looking back, I wonder if something I said could have made it harder for someone to live and love as they desired. That my words could have sparked a terrible fire inside someone, or have driven Jeff to go back in.
