Love Is A Palindrome, Part IV: Empty Adjectives

“Hey dude!”



Marcus Kramm was calling me from the hall. He hadn’t called me by my name once in the two weeks we had lived together. I think he’d forgotten it, which is to be expected when you spend your weeknights drinking 12-packs of Red Bull and doing Whippits, and your weekends perpetually stoned. Silly me, I only used cans of whipped cream on apple pie and hot cocoa. One man's topping is another man's upper.



“You seen my lacrosse stick?” Of course, I had not seen his lacrosse stick. You could barely see anything on his side of the room, which was covered with dirty laundry, junk food, and marijuana paraphernalia. The whole room smelled like a combination of pot, sweaty gym socks, and $3 cologne, giving it a vague aura of masculine desperation. It was strikingly different to the smell of my mother's house, which vascillated between potpurri and rubbing alcohol.



Marcus had revealed his massive pot addiction our first night in the room (though not every pot smoker is an "addict," when your lungs have more narcotics in them than oxygen, the label seems apt), when he took it upon himself to teach me how to roll the "perfect" joint.



"A good joint is like a good woman," he said, bestowing what I'm sure was years of knowledge on his unwilling protege. "Thin and tight." And here I thought a good woman was one who didn't berate you for leaving the toilet seat up.



The lesson went on for several hours, mostly because he got so stoned during it that he kept repeating himself. I would have interrupted him, but he conducted the lesson in his underwear, and who was I to argue with his beneficience. Later that night he tried to teach me how to construct a bathtub bong, even though our bathrooms did not have tubs. I tried to convince him it wouldn’t work in a stall shower, but he didn’t see the difference.

“I’ll just hang it upside down,” he said.

Marcus's pot addiction extended far beyond just smoking it. To Marcus, smoking pot wasn't just the easiest way of squandering the exorbitant weekly allowance his parents sent him (conversely, my father sent me a monthly allowance, which was about equal to Marcus's weekly one -- perhaps it was my father's preemptive attempt to keep me away from drugs, as if poverty and narcotics are mutually exclusive). To Marcus, smoking pot was a lifestyle.

"Did you know the Greek army smoked pot before a battle?" he asked me during our lesson. When I said I thought it might dull their motor skills, he objected, and proceeded to show me how his motor skills were in peak form by dunking the nerf ball by his bed in the hoop over the door, even though he was bombed. Again, I would have interrupted him, but he did the whole thing in his underwear.

In fact, Marcus was almost always in some state of undress during those first few weeks. At first I hoped it was a subtle indication that he might be interested in more than a Jack and Chrissy relationship, but then I realized that every other guy on the floor wore as little clothing as they could get away with without accidentally brushing their genitals against each other. This made little practical sense to me; with its cold cement walls and linoleum floors, the dorm was consistently well below room temperature, and apparently our $30,000 per year wasn't enough for the university management to crank the heat up a notch. After chattering through one particularly nasty Nor'easter, I called up the university to complain.

"I just measured the temperature of my room, it's 56 degrees," I told the operator.

"The university is legally required to keep your rooms above 55 degrees," a chilly voice told me on the other end.

"So, this room is one degree away from being a tenement?" I replied, channeling my mother. Apparently she had taught me more than I knew. "Do you really think that's a sufficient baseline for one of America's top universities?"

The operator thanked me for my call and hung up. I doubted the sincerity of her gratitude.

So while Marcus and the other boys were always in various states of undress, I was rarely in any. This need to be constantly clothed caused a semi-crisis early on, as I quickly realized that if I wanted to survive this year, I would have to dispose of any Muppet-laden accessories, including my Kermit the Frog socks. Within a week I had blown my first month's allowance at Sears and begrudgingly tossed Kermit in the trash. Sure, plain white socks might keep your feet just as warm as the Kermit ones, but a plain white sock never made anyone smile. At least, not while on someone's foot.

"Dude! My lacrosse stick! You seen it!"

I glanced around the room a bit, and then stuck my head out the door, where Mark was jogging in place next to his new best friend, Shawn. Shawn was the son of a prominent Republican leader in New England (I didn't know they grew Republicans in New England -- I figured they all moved to South Carolina as fetuses), and vaguely resembled the product of a sexual union between Jerry Seinfeld and a horse, without the former's sense of humor or the latter's shiny mane.

“No, I don’t see it, sorry,” I said, avoiding eye contact with both of them. Shawn slapped Mark on the back. His hand lingered on Mark’s back just a second longer than necessary, but Mark didn’t notice. Shawn couldn’t be a homosexual. He was the captain of his high school wrestling team. That would just make no sense whatsoever.

“Dude maybe he used it to give himself a ride, ya know?” Shawn replied to Mark as I went back in the room.

From inside the room, I imagined Shawn was miming just how that sort of a ride would play out, though I suspected he knew more about it than I did. But Shawn's internalized homophobia aside, I was never quite sure how to react to these kinds of comments, which were freely thrown around by the guys in the dorm, not only in my direction, but in each other’s as well. Apparently the best way to reinforce your heterosexuality was to call your friends homosexuals, which made it exceedingly difficult to determine whether they were actually impugning my sexuality or just making small-talk. And it didn't stop with verbal teasing -- there was so much physical assaulting and mock gyration going on in these halls, I wondered whether my dormmates were practicing for later romantic interludes with women, or whether those interludes themselves were practice for when they got back to the dorm. There is a thin latex line between gay porn and horseplay.

But since I wasn't actually friends with Shawn, something told me he was implying that I had actually stuck a large wooden pole up my butt (which as a practical matter sounded both painful and unnecessary, as Mark also owned smaller phallic-shaped sports equipment that would have done the job better). The heterosexual obsession with anal sex goes far beyond anything homosexuals actually engage in, just as heterosexuals tend to think that homosexuals have much more sex than they actually do. When I first came out to my friend Marsha, her fiancee Ian expressed his own extreme disappointment that he had not been born into this particular discrete and insular minority.

"Man, I wish I was gay!" he confided in me, after Marsha left the room. Ordinarily this kind of comment might have given me pause that perhaps Ian was actually gay, but I doubted that. Gay men just don't allow themselves to develop a unibrow that Bert would have envied, even closeted ones.

"Why would you say that?" I asked him, restraining myself from finding the nearest razor and doing the world and Ian a much-needed favor.

"The sex!" he said, excitedly. "You must have so much sex! I mean, it's two dudes, right? No one to say no!"

I didn't have the heart to tell him that, yes, indeed there was someone to say "no." The night before, that someone was me, when my 6'2" 190 pound shaggy-haired ex-college-athlete blind date turned out to be a 5'2" 250 pound no-haired ex-high school-dropout. But Ian was so convinced that I was the most sexually satisfied person since Caligula, I didn't want to rock the boat. Thanks to queer eyes and not-so-straight guys, gays were making millions convincing straights that our lives are so much more exciting than theirs; if I revealed the truth, Elton John could show up at my house and force-feed me Olestra-laced potato chips.

"Hey man, I hope you used protection!" Shawn shouted in my general direction, though I suspect he wasn't really concerned with my physical health. Still, I didn't object to his comments, as that would have only invited additional disparagement. Better to be silent and thought a homosexual than open your mouth and remove all doubt.

And silent was what I had typically been, since the day we moved in. Indeed, I had been so quiet for two weeks, I wondered whether I had developed some rare form of late-onset mutism; usually, I only spoke when spoken to, and since most days I wasn't spoken to at all (Mark and I appeared to have the same tolerance for small-talk, which is to say, none), most days I didn't speak at all. In fact, since our Philosophy of Marijuana class, Mark had not made any further efforts to shape my social education. He must have been disappointed by my decision to save my joint "for a rainy day." Pot addicts are not usually the plan-ahead types.

Unfortunately, my particular brand of mutism was not going to lead to a successful career in pantomime, or a dining room floor fracas with Anne Bancroft. My mutism was purely situational; the less I said, the less likely I would be singled out for ridicule by closeted Republican homosexuals and the frat boys who love them. Perhaps this is how Buddhist monks get started, I wondered. Maybe the Dalai Lama also had a run in with a palindromic jock from Nyack, New York. This could be the first step towards Nirvana. Though I suspected the closest I was going to come to Nirvana living in this dorm room was the CD Mark played on constant repeat.

Mark and Shawn came back in the room, thereby establishing, once again, that there is not a God. Mark started throwing his stuff off his bed onto my side of the room. I laid on my bed, pretending not to notice them enter, covering myself with my plaid K-Mart bedspread like an invisibility cloak.

"It's got to be here somewhere," Mark said, tossing things left and right, covering my side of the room with his junk. Not that it mattered. I didn't have any of my own decorations up, anyway. After meeting Mark, I sent all of my potentially objectionable personal items back home with my father, which is to say, everything that I owned. There were no stuffed animals, no Cher posters, no Broadway soundtracks or Cabbage Patch Kids in sight. I even sent home my "Got Cookies?" poster, which featured a number of dairy cows pondering the existence of their favorite dessert treat. My personal affects were now limited to a table lamp and a snow globe I had bought in Cape Cod the previous summer. I didn't think a snow globe would be objectionable or a source of ridicule; straight people like snow globes, and it was too big to fit up my ass.

The phone rang. It was on Mark's side of the room, as usual. I never answered the phone, because it was never for me. I specifically had not given out my number to any of my friends, which were mostly girls and boys with girlish voices and lisps. I wasn't building up a reputation as the dorm's resident Marcel Marceau, only to be ruined by my friend Scott asking for "Jonah Hathlap."

Mark dug the phone out from under a pile of beer cans, and answered it.

"Hello?" He tossed the phone on my side of the room. "Dude, it's Stacy."

Great. Someone had found me. Now I'd have to talk, with other people in the room. I might as well shove the snow globe up my ass.

"Hey Stacy," I said, careful not to modulate my voice too much, though an overly modulated voice could be a sign of Jewishness as much as homosexuality, thus the general confusion between middle-aged hen-pecked Jewish husbands and true homosexuals. "What's going on?"

Stacy and I had gone to school together since we were 11, and we had a long, Beaches-type history, except I'm pretty sure Bette Midler didn't ask Barbara Hershey to be her date to her Bat Mitzvah. Smartly, Stacy declined my invitation, subconsciously aware that I was only using her as a pre-pubescent beard. But once I'd recovered from the rejection -- which happened as soon as I realized I appreciated Stacy's full bosom more for its cushion potential than aesthetic beauty -- we developed a lifelong friendship based largely on our mutual misanthropy and matricidal fantasies.

"OHMYGOD!!!" she shouted, loud enough for Mark, Shawn, and all of the sixth floor to hear. "BARBRA STREISAND'S NEW ALBUM CAME OUT TODAY!!! LET'S GO GET IT!!!"

I quickly searched for the volume button on the headset, before Stacy could do any more damage to my already flailing reputation. In the background I heard Stacy's new best friend Greg singing along to Funny Girl. Greg lived down the hall from Stacy, but as far as I could tell he had actually moved into her room at this point. I think they were even sleeping in the same bed together. Not that I blamed him. She did have some nice cushions. Though I knew that eventually some man would see them as more than just homemade pillows, and Greg would be forced to lay his effeminate head elsewhere.

"I can't," I replied, as visions of Babs duetting with Neil Diamond danced in my head. "I have homework. Take Greg." I was slightly jealous of Greg; after all, he was stealing my hag. But I wasn't putting up much of a fight. Greg could give her so much more than I could. I wasn't much of a fag anymore, and he was a full-fledged queen.

I hung up the phone, and stared at the grey concrete wall where my "Got Cookies?" poster should have been hung with care. The emptiness mocked me. I did not have Barbra's new album. I did not have Miss Piggy. I did not have cookies. I had a plaid K-Mart comforter, a textbook about the Polypennisian War, and a snowglobe that might or might not fit up my butt. I suspected that this was not what college was supposed to be. It was much too lonely, and insincere. I wasn't going to find myself, covered in my roommate's dirty laundry.

Mark finally found his lacrosse stick behind a stack of Penthouse magazines. Shawn grabbed an issue off the floor and started flipping through it. It must have been a Springtime issue, because I spotted a woman posing in a field of brightly-colored daffodils and riding a small plastic windmill, while a man dressed as Don Quixote gave her a good tilt.

"Man, she's fuckin' hot," Mark said, grabbing his stick. He held up the magazine in my direction. "Don't you think, dude?"

"How would he know?" Shawn replied, tossing the magazine on the bed and chuckling his way out of the room with Mark, leaving me alone, just as I had been before they left.

How would I know indeed? Daffodils make my nose itch, and I didn't bring myself flowers anymore.

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Coming Soon: Love Is A Palindrome, Part V: The Porcelain Beauty