The Book of Joe

enhanced. This was not the popular view embraced by late-night cable television, but that very fact proves the point that pool sex is a primarily visual phenomenon. It looks much better than it feels. But for a seventeen-year-old virgin, pool sex felt just as good as all of the other kinds of sex I wasn’t getting, just another entry in my expanding journal of the unattainable.
    Aside from my immense sexual frustration, which threatened to cross the line into obsession on a daily basis, I was having a pretty good summer. To have two friends is to have something greater than the sum of its parts. Sammy’s introduction into the mix meant that I now had a group. A crew.
    “The guys.” I reveled in our easy camaraderie, in the running jokes and understandings that developed among the three of us as the summer progressed. Me and the guys. I developed a spring in my step, a quicker grin, a wider eye. I was suddenly, unaccountably happy.
    And for as long as I could, I ignored the larger, unspoken thing that was happening ominously on the periphery, the stray secret looks and the nonverbal signals that I was inadvertently intercepting with increasing frequency. I was determinedly unwilling to rock the boat. We listened to Springsteen and watched MTV, drank too much beer and went swimming, raced golf carts across the Porter’s campus in the dark of night, talked back to the screen at the Megaplex, ate burgers and pizzas at the Duchess Diner, and very occasionally scored some weed from Niko, who ran the Sunoco station downtown. And somewhere, in the middle of it all, Wayne and Sammy became something far more than friends.
    How long can you remain oblivious to a love affair going on right in front of you? It’ s all a question of determina tion, actually. On some level, I must have registered the furtive glances and knowing smiles, the disappearing hands in the movie theater, the quick, jerky redistribution of bodily masses when I entered the room suddenly, and the slow general thickening of the atmosphere surrounding my two best friends. But I clung steadfastly to my oblivion, determined to ride out this new insanity like a powerful virus. I naïvely believed it was nothing more than a bizarre behavioral phase, a rebellious experimentation they would outgrow.
    This was 1986, after all, and we hadn’t yet been trained to deal with this sort of thing. We knew about homosexuality the same way we knew about god; we’d heard it existed, but didn’t necessarily accept the reality of it. We speculated about Michael Jackson’s alleged use of female hormones, and Boy George’s lipstick, and we labeled them fags, but we didn’t really believe, deep down, that they truly were gay. It was all just marketing. There were widespread rumors about Andrew McCarthy, but he made out so convincingly with Ally Sheedy in St. Elmo’s Fire, he couldn’t possibly have been gay. We derided one another with terms like “cocksucker” and “faggot,” but we never meant it literally. We took our cues primarily from Hollywood, and they, too, denied the reality. For the suburban boys we were, homosexuality existed on a purely conceptual plane, like algebra or the corkscrew shape of the universe.
    So for a while I was able to pretend not to see what I saw, and remained convinced that the best policy was to treat it like a stray dog: as long as I didn’t make eye contact, it would eventually go away. I needed badly to believe this, not only because the alternative was unthinkable to me but because these were my best and only friends, and I desperately feared losing them. Their homosexuality, viewed head-on, might have been offensive to my sheltered sensibilities, but even that paled in comparison to the suffocating loneliness I had known since my mother’s inauspicious plunge into the Bush River.
    So I knew, and they knew I knew, and without ever discussing it, we arrived at a collectively silent acceptance of the situation. It was amazing, really, how quickly it grew to feel normal in the vacuum of that hot, empty summer. It was understood that I might sometimes arrive at Sammy’s to find Wayne already there, or that at the end of a given night Wayne might stick around at Sammy’s for a while after I went home. Somehow I never made them feel the oddness of their relationship and they never made me feel that three was a crowd. I suppose we all had separate reasons for minimizing the magnitude of what was happening and maintaining the