Part 14 — Out of Bounds
Saturday, July 23, 1972
“So how about we grab some chow and then maybe go bowling?” Steve suggested. We’d just gotten out of the weekly research symposium, and it was time for lunch.
“Sorry guys, but I need to take advantage of the weekend to log some time on the computer,” I replied. “Wait times are much shorter when it comes to getting results back. It takes over an hour on a weekday afternoon. On Saturday and Sunday, it takes only ten or fifteen minutes. I hope to polish things off this weekend, and then I can start writing up my report and getting my presentation ready.”
“You still gotta eat,” Larry pointed out.
“I figured I’d get a quick bite at Burger Chef and then get to work,” I replied.
“Would you mind if we join you?” Kyle asked. “But how about going to George’s Buffet or Hamburg Inn? Why settle for crappy burgers at a fast food joint? Afterwards, you can go to work and we’ll go bowling.”
“Sure,” I responded. “I thought of Burger Chef ’cause there’s one near where I live back home in Indy. I haven’t tried either of those other places. Lunch is always better with friends.”
“Let’s make it George’s for lunch,” Larry said. “It’s a dive bar, and if we’re lucky, they’ll let us order beer.”
“You can order beer if you want, but I need to stay sober,” I noted.
“I don’t think they’re open for lunch,” Gary said. “It’s a bar, after all.”
“Hmm, you might be right,” Larry responded.
“How about lunch at the Hamburg Inn and dinner at George’s?” Kyle asked. After we go bowling, maybe we could all meet there and then you wouldn’t need to worry about stayin’ sober.”
“Somehow, eating hamburgers twice in one day seems wrong,” Brandon complained.
Shaking my head, I replied, “Sorry, but Paul and I are going to The Sanctuary Pub tonight. I promised him a nice dinner if he’d do my laundry for me while I work on my research project.” Then turning to Paul, I added, “But if you want to go bowling with the guys, you can do my laundry tomorrow instead.”
“You mean you’re going out on a date?” Larry asked.
“No, it’s not like that,” Paul responded. “Jeff and I have two weeks of laundry piled up ’cause we went on the Amish trip last week. When he complained about not having the time to do it and work on finishing his research project, I offered to do his laundry when I do mine.”
“And I offered to treat him as a thank you for doing my laundry,” I explained. “The Sanctuary Pub’s a new place that’s like a real British pub. Supposedly, they have great pizza and sandwiches, and something like 25 beers on tap.”
“Why don’t we all go?” Kyle suggested. “We can go to the Hamburg Inn for lunch, and then meet up at, say 7:00, after Jeff finishes his work and after we go bowling.”
“That’s a great idea,” Greg chimed in. “You guys up for that?”
“Why not?” I agreed and everyone else voiced their approval.
Truthfully, I had considered my taking Paul out for dinner to be a date, but that was out of the question now. I couldn’t help but reflect on how it was Larry who’d asked if Paul and I were going out on a date. Larry tended to badmouth queers more than anyone else.
However, it was his roommate, Kyle, who suggested we make it a group event. Kyle was queer and he was the only one who knew about Paul and me. I couldn’t help but wonder if Kyle knew something we didn’t. Might Larry suspect something? If so, it could be a disaster.
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“Hey guys, I called out as they approached the entrance to The Sanctuary Pub, where I was waiting for them. I’d just gotten there a few minutes before. “How was bowling?”
“Frank is forever banned from playing,” Paul answered. “He bowled one strike after another. Me, well, most of my balls ended up in the gutter.”
“Your balls are in the gutter?” Gary quipped and Paul cuffed him.
“Let’s go inside and get a table,” I suggested. We didn’t have long to wait, even though there were ten of us. We’d gotten there pretty early for a Saturday night.
Opening our menus, the selection of beers on tap was extensive. “Why don’t we ask our server to bring us a sampling of their beers,” Greg suggested, “and a couple of orders of the Supreme Nachos, one with black Beans and one with grilled chicken?”
“That sounds fantastic,” Brandon said and everyone agreed.
“What about pizza?” Steve asked. “They have some great sounding pizzas. You guys want to get a few pizzas to share, or maybe we each get our own pasta dish or a sandwich.”
“The pizzas sound good,” Greg said. “How about a Balboa, a Sanctuary Special and a Santa Fe Barbecue?”
“Yeah, that sounds good,” Larry agreed.
“Sounds good to me,” I added.
“Think they’ll let us order the beer?” Greg asked quietly.
“Doesn’t hurt to try,” Steve chimed in.
When the server arrived, we ordered the appetizers, the pizza and four pitchers of a sampling of the beers on tap. She was happy to make some recommendations and didn’t card us. I wondered if lax enforcement was the norm in college towns. She returned in short order with the beer and not long after that with the nachos, which were excellent.
While eating our appetizers and waiting on our pizza, we drank beer and engaged in idle chatter about anything and everything. At some point we got to talking about the recent Democratic convention and the extremely liberal platform that came out of it. Larry said, “Thank God gay marriage didn’t pass.” Although I’d heard Kyle use the word ‘gay’ to refer to himself, to me it still meant ‘happy’ and I didn’t connect it to anything else. Why would anyone oppose a happy marriage?
It was then that Larry said, “But then he’s the head of women’s lib,” as he pointed to Kyle, his roommate, “and he’s the president of the Gay Liberation Front,” as he pointed to me.
Kyle responded right away with, “Do I look like a woman to you?” and everyone laughed. However, not understanding the significance of gay liberation, I kept my mouth shut rather than say something that would make me look stupid. It was a grave error.
We continued our banter until our pizzas arrived, but it was evident something had changed. Oh, I contributed to the conversation as much as anyone, but my friends weren’t meeting my gaze and my comments weren’t being addressed as much as before. What was going on?
It wasn’t ’til we got back to the dorm that I found out why. It was in the privacy of our room that Paul explained that ‘gay’ was a new slang term for queer. It was a word promoted by queers themselves that was starting to spread in the wake of the Stonewall riots. Holy fuck. What had I done?
Paul reassured me that it would all blow over and that my lack of a response would be forgotten by the morning. I wasn’t so sure. Not only was I worried for myself, but I was worried for Paul, who stood to be labeled as queer by association. He was in discussions with his parents and with the university about staying after the SSTP was over and starting as a freshman in the fall. The last thing he needed was to have a reputation of being gay to follow him here for the next four years.
Paul said he’d stick with me through thick and thin. I told him he might need to keep his distance from me in public for his own sake. Tellingly, he didn’t disagree. I loved Paul enough to sacrifice my reputation to save his. That he might be willing to take advantage of that was perhaps the first sign of a chink in the armor of our relationship.
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Sunday, July 24, 1972
“Thanks, Dad, I really appreciate it,” Paul said as he hung up the phone, and then gave a loud, “Whoop!”
“I take it that was good news?” I asked.
“The best news,” Paul answered. “My parents have agreed to allow me to start college here in the fall. I won’t hafta take a bunch of high school courses I’d need for graduation, like two more years of Spanish that I’ll never use again. Who the hell speaks Spanish anyway?”
“Ah, just about all of the people who work in the hotels and motels where my mom and I stayed on our trip through Michigan, Ontario and Wisconsin,” I replied. “It’s a hell of a lot more useful than the Latin I’m taking.”
“More importantly, I won’t hafta deal with all the assholes who pick on me every day,” Paul went on. “I know I’ll face some of that here, but nothing like what I face in high school.”
“Undoubtedly,” I agreed. “I’m happy for you.”
“I can’t wait!”
“I can,” I replied. “I have a hell of a lot more work to do on my project. Besides which, in two weeks, we’ll go our separate ways. I’ll miss our after-hour activities, but more than that, I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you too, Jeff,” Paul responded. “I doubt I’ll ever find a girl who’ll do for me what you do, but I don’t want to end up like Alan Turing.”
“Alan who?” I asked.
“Alan Turing, the father of modern computing,” Paul answered. “He was a code breaker during the second world war, and he broke Germany’s Enigma code. That likely changed the course of the war. However, he was an unapologetic homosexual and because of that, the Brits considered him a security risk. After the war, they threw him in prison, where he died under mysterious circumstances.”
“Yikes!” I responded. “Well if it’s a mental illness, then surely it’s something I can overcome.”
“Likewise,” Paul agreed, then added, “It’s about time to go down. Let’s go meet our friends for Sunday brunch.”
“Yeah, let’s,” I chimed in. As we locked up our room behind us and headed down the hall to the elevator, I reminded Paul, “Now remember, you’re gonna do my laundry, including my sheets and towels.”
“I will,” Paul said, “but don’t complain if your white sheets come out pink, or your shirts come out wrinkled. I don’t do ironing.”
“I don’t either,” I said with a laugh as we boarded the elevator for the trip down to the ground floor.
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“Hey faggot, what’s up?” Larry greeted me as our group walked underground to the Quad for our Sunday brunch. I cringed at the word but lacked the fortitude to respond.
“I’m talking to you, faggot,” Larry reiterated.
“Lay off, Larry,” Greg responded. I could’ve hugged him.
“Are you a faggot, too?” Larry asked.
“Hardly,” Greg replied. “I have a girlfriend and we had a scare last year when she was late for her period, if you know what I mean. I just think you’re being hard on Jeff. He’s our friend.”
“But he’s a faggot,” Larry stated once again. “He doesn’t even deny it.”
With no choice but to respond, I replied softly, “I’m not queer. I’m still getting used to ‘gay’ meaning something besides happy. I didn’t realize what you were saying last night.”
“That’s utter bullshit,” Larry countered. “Pure unadulterated bullshit.”
I wanted to say more but didn’t know how to respond. Fortunately, Gary interrupted by saying, “Did you guys see this? They’re renaming the Rienow residence halls. Rienow I will become just plain Rienow and Rienow II will be called Slater Hall.”
“I’ll give you three guesses,” Larry replied. “Slater’s colored, Slater’s colored or Slater’s colored.”
“The word is ‘black’ or ‘Afro-American’,” Gary countered, “but yes, there’s a picture in the paper and he was in fact black. Duke Slater played football for the Hawkeyes from 1918 to 1921. In 1921, the team had a perfect 7-0 season and they took their first Big Ten championship in the school’s history. He went on to become the first black lineman in the NFL and played for the Rock Island Independents and the Chicago Cardinals.
“What the fuck?” Gary went on. “The NFL instituted an unofficial color ban in 1934… how could they do that? In his retirement, he coached the Chicago Negro All-Stars, the Chicago Brown Bombers, the Chicago Comets and the Chicago Panthers.
“But get this… While playing in the NFL, he attended law school here in the off-season, earning his law degree in 1928. He began his law practice in Chicago in 1933 and was elected to the Cook County Municipal Court, serving two six-year terms. In 1960, he was elevated to the Cook County Superior Court, becoming the first black judge on Chicago’s highest court. Four years later, he became one of the inaugural judges on the Circuit Court of Cook County.
“Oh shit… He died in 1966 from stomach cancer.” Looking up from the paper, Gary stared right at Larry and said, “That’s one hell of a legacy for a white man, let alone an Afro-American. What about that story don’t you think makes him worthy of having a building named after him?”
Wisely, Larry remained silent, which meant he didn’t say anything more about me, either.
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I spent all afternoon on the Fourier program. I had several algorithms to choose from, each with its own set of limitations. I started by writing the common code I’d need, regardless of the Fourier algorithm chosen. That included a base program as well as a pair of subroutines to generate a square wave and a triangle wave. I tested those with a dummy Fourier algorithm that merely returned the original values back, unaltered. It took me a few tries, each with a trip to the submissions window, but I got everything to work perfectly.
Next came the hard part — taking the mathematic formulae from a book and turning them into a series of Fortran instructions that could be punched onto a series of punched cards. I started with the simplest method, but even that involved a twenty-step algorithm with twice as many cards. Of course, the first two times I attempted to run the program with that algorithm, there were errors and the program didn’t even finish compiling.
When I finally got everything to compile, the results weren’t anything like what I’d been expecting, so I went back through the algorithm, step by step, and found two careless mistakes I’d made in punching the cards. Once I fixed those, I got plots that looked somewhat like the theoretical results I’d have expected if the waveforms were continuous and infinitely long. Some of the other approaches outlined in the textbooks I read in the department library involved more complicated computations that helped compensate for using real-world data, but they involved a lot more steps.
I settled on trying a Fast Fourier Transform algorithm that was in wide use. I ended up with over a hundred individual steps, which translated to more than twice as many lines of code. Just punching that many punched cards took hours and the full program filled a small box.
In spite of the care taken to make sure every card was correctly formatted and every step was in proper sequence, it took several attempts before the cards compiled, and several more to eliminate mistakes I’d made in implementing the algorithm. I finally got the program to run at just after 7:00 PM with results that looked reasonable. It wasn’t perfect, but I could tidy up the printout tomorrow.
Perhaps there’d even be time to revisit the issue of improving my graphics algorithm, but that would have to wait for another day. In the meantime, my hunger hit me with full force. I’d last eaten in the morning at breakfast, which was more of a brunch. I’d filled my tray with oatmeal, French toast, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage and hash browns. While it was a substantial meal, that was nearly eight hours ago and I was starved. Furthermore, unless I hurried, everything would be closed.
After putting all my work away and making sure my cards were safely stored, I rushed over to Burger Chef and ordered a Super Shef Meal. For $1.49, I got a quarter pound burger with cheese, tomato and onions, fries and a small Seven-Up. It wasn’t enough, though, so I splurged on what they called an apple turnover. With my appetite satisfied, I returned to the dorm to shower and get some sleep.
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Tuesday , July 27, 1972
“This looks great, Jeff,” Dr. Ellis exclaimed. “I’m curious, though, how did you get the graphs to print horizontally rather than vertically?”
“I’m embarrassed to say I used a brute force approach,” I replied. “I’d originally planned to do something more elegant, like using matrix inversion, but that turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. Instead, I calculated the range of the results and determined, line by line, if something needed to be printed on each line. It’s terribly inefficient, but it works.”
“Sometimes it works out that way,” Dr. Ellis explained. “When you’re up against a deadline and the entire design team is waiting on your software, you have no choice but to sacrifice efficiency for expediency. Other times you have a very limited amount of computation space in the hardware and an inefficient algorithm is the only way to make it fit.
“At the other extreme, you may have to design an algorithm in which every microsecond counts. Then, you have to be creative and might even have to sacrifice accuracy for speed. Commonly, software engineers use iterative approximations to arrive at successively better guesses for the result. Your algorithms to compute the values of π and e are great examples of that, but you had the time to allow them to go to completion. In the real world, you might have to settle for a more limited number of iterations. You’d be surprised at how often that’s done in rather critical situations. For example, air traffic control.”
“Wow,” was all I could say to that.
“It looks like you’re coming along nicely, Jeff. I couldn’t be more pleased with your work. So tell me, did you conclude that the computer is a practical means to solving simple problems?”
“Are you kidding?” I responded. “Between the hassle of using punched cards and the time wasted just waiting to find that my program didn’t even compile, I could’ve done everything with pencil, paper and a good old slide rule in far less time.”
“That’s kind of what I expected,” Dr. Ellis said. “My next victim will use Algol instead of Fortran, and he or she will run it in real time using an emulator. They’ll get the results back much more quickly, which should make a huge difference. Plus Algol’s a structured, dynamic language that allows for a modular approach to programming. You can do things like recursion, which is where a subroutine calls itself.
“Even with those advantages, I expect their conclusion will be the same. There are a lot of developments on the horizon that will change that. Mini-computers will soon replace mainframes like the 360. They’re already smaller, cheaper and faster, so instead of a university having only one computer, each department will have their own. That will mean a huge improvement in availability.
“The 360 uses magnetic core memory, but the cost of solid state memory is coming down, and with it, the memory density will skyrocket. The concept of a computer on a chip is out there and within a decade, we’ll have entire computers that will sit on a desk. I have no doubt that one day you’ll carry a computer around in your pocket, much like the HP35 calculator of today. It’ll be orders of magnitude more powerful than the mighty IBM 360, and you’ll be able to talk to it, just like on Star Trek.
“I know you’re not sure what you want to do, but computer science is a field that’s wide open.”
“That’s a lot to think about,” I replied. “And thanks again for the lunches you’ve been giving me. Today’s lunch was excellent. I’ve never had Japanese food before.”
“This was just an introduction to Japanese food,” Dr. Ellis explained. “Just some yakitori, tempura and rice. In California, sushi is all the rage. That’s a Japanese delicacy made with raw fish.”
Scrunching up my nose, I replied, “I’m willing to try almost anything, but I think I’ll pass on that.” We both laughed, and then I added, “I really enjoyed the food and the conversation.”
“I enjoyed it too; it was my pleasure. Speaking of which, I won’t be free for lunch on Thursday, so let’s make next Tuesday special. It’ll be our last lunch together. There’s a very nice Indian restaurant in Cedar Rapids and the food is exceptional. I’ll take you there in celebration of your success.”
“That’s very kind of you,” I replied. “I’ve never had Indian food before.”
“I think you’ll love it. So until next time…”
I’ll see you next week,” I chimed in, and then I left Dr. Ellis’ office to return to my desk and start working on writing my final report.
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I dreaded going back to the dorm for fear of what I’d find. Ever since I’d failed to deny being gay, there’d been a constant barrage of verbal attacks. There had been graffiti in the bathrooms for the past few days. Slogans like, ‘Jolly Jeffrey Lindsey, looking for his next butt fuck,’ were scrawled in marker above the urinals and on the shower stall walls. Those were always gone by the next day, undoubtedly washed off by the cleaning staff. The graffiti on the toilet stalls, however, remained in place. Perhaps that wouldn’t be dealt with until the start of the fall semester, when it’d be painted over.
The worst one was a list of things ‘Jerk-off Jeff’ liked to do with young boys. Each time I took a dump, the list was longer as other boys added to it. I wasn’t sure if those boys were targeting me specifically or just taking advantage of the chance to write something anonymously. Regardless, it hurt. I’d thought about going to the floor supervisor about it, but since he used the same facilities we did, he had to be aware.
At least Larry was the only one who was attacking me verbally to my face. I still went to breakfast and dinner with the same group of friends and I still hung out with them. To have done otherwise would have only made things worse. Unfortunately, Larry was still part of the group and he wasn’t backing down any more than I was.
At least no one else was making snide remarks. But homophobic comments were common now, especially from Raj. At least he never said anything directly to me, nor did he say anything to tie his comments to me. The thing that hurt the most was that no one stood up for me. No one tried to make me feel welcome. Everything had changed and I’d become a stranger amongst my friends — an outsider who wasn’t really part of the group.
Even Paul treated me differently when we were with our friends. Behind our closed door, it was another matter. We remained affectionate when we were alone, but the intimacy that had been a part of the nightly routine was much less frequent than when we’d first fallen in love. In all fairness, that was probably as much my fault as Paul’s. I’d been so busy with my project that often, I returned to the dorm too exhausted to do anything else. For his part, Paul was busy with his own term paper and with preparing for the final exam.
As soon as I opened the door, I knew someone else had been inside. Scrawled on the mirror in big black letters was the word, ‘FAG’. It was written in marker and almost certainly, it would wash off. However, the cassette tapes I’d brought with me were lying on my bed and the word ‘FAG’ was written in marker on the playlist of each and on the cassettes themselves. Those I’d have to throw out, or at least I’d have to replace the labels.
I was about to go to fetch the floor supervisor when Paul walked in with the supervisor in tow. Looking at me, Paul said, “I got here just a short while ago, but I needed to use the restroom, so I set my books down and didn’t even bother to lock the door. After all, I’d just be gone a few minutes.
“When I entered the restroom Larry was already there. It didn’t dawn on me at the time that this wasn’t even his floor, so I went about my business. We nodded at each other and I went into one of the stalls. I guess he realized he had enough time and he must have headed right for our room and done this.” Paul said as he gestured to the graffiti on the mirror.
Grabbing the ruined cassettes from off of my bed, I said, “He did this too.”
“So we have vandalism as well as graffiti,” the supervisor noted.
“Surely you’ve seen the graffiti in the restrooms,” I added.
“Yeah, but the university doesn’t treat that as vandalism,” the supervisor explained. “It’s so common. We just clean it up and repaint the stalls at the end of the semester. Unfortunately, unless you actually caught Larry in the act or saw him entering or leaving your room, we can’t assume that he did this. It’s circumstantial. The most I can do is go talk to him and put him on notice that we’re keeping an eye on him. I’ll also let Dr. Ratcliffe know, and perhaps he’ll say something tomorrow night before the seminar.”
“For some reason, I felt obligated to add, “I feel so violated, and it’s all bogus. I’m not even gay.”
“Jeff, even if you are gay, that’s not what matters,” the supervisor, replied. “You’re going to meet people who are gay in college — maybe even have one as a roommate. Despite what you may have heard from your minister, your parents or your friends, or what the law may say, there’s nothing wrong with it. More and more of us are coming out all the time, he added with a wink. If you’d like to talk to me about anything at all, my door’s always open, and anything we discuss is confidential.”
Holy fuck! The floor supervisor was queer.
“Thanks for doin’ what you can,” Paul responded. “We really appreciate it.”
“Any time, guys,” the floor supervisor said before he departed.
“We don’t hafta hang out with Larry,” Paul said once the door was closed. “We have good reason to leave the group under the circumstances.”
“Yeah, but that would almost be like letting him win,” I replied. “And there’s your future to think about. If you leave the group, there will be rumors. You can count on it.” I could sense the turmoil Paul was feeling and so I took the decision out of his hands. “Let’s go wash up and meet our friends upstairs, so we can head to dinner.”
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Wednesday, July 28, 1972
I had a week left to wrap up my project and to prepare a scientific report on it that included a statement of the problem, background on other research previously done, the research method used to test the hypothesis, the results, a discussion of the results and the conclusion. I’d also have to prepare a ten-minute presentation that I’d have to give in front of the entire group of SSTP participants. The presentations would take place next week on Thursday and Friday, the last two days of the program. That would be followed by a farewell dinner, and then we’d have two days to pack up and head home.
Looking back over all of the printouts, I realized that some things could be formatted more concisely for inclusion in the report. Making those changes wouldn’t take long, but I’d leave them until everything else was done, just in case I ran out of time. Otherwise, the research was essentially complete.
The first step in preparing my research report was to do the background research that would usually be done at the beginning of a research project. Basically, Dr. Ellis had already done the research for me, but now I needed to obtain it on my own the way any research scientist would. I needed to read the literature and cite references to support or refute my research plan. Therefore, I ended up spending nearly all of my Wednesday in the engineering library.
I had some experience with searching literature from my high school education, but searching the engineering literature was a whole other ballgame. I knew how to use the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, tedious as it might be, but it didn’t include the engineering and technical journals that were central to computer science. The Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, maintained a comprehensive index of all of the journals they published. It was extensive, but not comprehensive. There were other engineering indices and compendia, but they required a fair bit of engineering knowledge to peruse. I did my best with what I knew and what was available.
Kyle, in contrast, was working on a biology-based project and for that, his review of the literature was so much easier. He was able to use MEDLINE, a comprehensive database maintained by the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. The entire database was computerized and accessible via teletype over the telephone lines. The search procedure used a highly-specialized search algorithm with very specific search terms that only a librarian could handle. However, working with a librarian ensured that Kyle’s searches yielded productive results. It took a day to get the results back, but the list of citations, which included abstracts, allowed him to home in on the specific articles he needed.
It was a glimpse of what the future might hold for other scientific fields. How ironic it was that I was searching the literature on computers, but it wasn’t yet searchable by computer. Eventually, it dawned on me that I might have an easier time of it if I searched by author rather than by subject. Starting with the citations Knuth used in his books, I searched for newer papers published by those authors, and then repeated the process using their citations. I also used the Citation Index, to find other papers that cited the same references cited by Knuth. All of the cross-referencing took time, but I was finally getting what I needed.
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“’Sup, faggot?” Larry said as Paul and I met with our friends to head to the Quad for dinner. “I got a visit from your floor supervisor,” he continued. “I didn’t appreciate it. You better watch your back.”
Sighing, I said, “Larry, you fucked up my tape cassettes. I had to report it. Calling me names is one thing. Vandalism is a whole other matter. I’m gonna hafta replace those tapes.”
“They still can be played,” Larry countered. “And now you’ll know exactly what you are every time you play them.” Gees, he wasn’t even denying that he did it.
“What did he do?” Greg asked.
“He marked up my cassette tapes,” I replied. “He wrote ‘fag’ all over the case labels and on the tapes themselves. They’re totally wrecked.”
“And now there are witnesses to you admitting it,” Brandon pointed out. Bless his heart.
“Are you guys gonna stand by a faggot, or are you gonna stand with me?”
“Do your really want us to answer that?” Greg responded.
Larry just stared at all of us for a moment, and then he stalked off. I breathed a sigh of relief.
“So, Jeff, are you?” Steve asked.
“Huh?” I asked. Not that I didn’t understand what he was asking, but I really didn’t want to answer. It would have been easy to answer ‘no’, but I wasn’t sure I could do it with a straight face.
“Are you gay?” Steve clarified. Fuck!
“So what if he is?” Gary interjected. “That’s his business and his alone. He hasn’t hit on any of us that I know of, so why is it our business? He’s a cool guy. A little weird, but cool.”
“What do you mean I’m weird,” I asked with a bit of humor in my voice.
“We all are, one way or another,” Kyle interjected.
“That is so true,” Frank agreed.
“Guys, we gotta get goin’ if we don’t wanna be late for the seminar,” Brandon pointed out. “It’s the last one.”
“Yeah, let’s head to dinner,” Greg chimed in.
As we made our way to the Quad, Raj said, “I saw that A Clockwork Orange is playing at the Englert Theater. What do you say we all go this Friday?”
“Doesn’t that have an X rating?” Greg asked.
“So?” Raj asked. “If we can get away with ordering beer, what are the chances that they’re gonna turn away a group of sixteen and seventeen year olds who could pass for eighteen?”
“And then there’s me,” Paul added. “No way I look like I could be eighteen. In a restaurant, I’m just one of a gang and since we order pitchers for the table, technically I’m not ordering beer. Goin’ into a movie theater, however, means getting in a line and the ticket taker hasta admit each of us, one by one. I’ve been stopped for going to R-rated movies in Omaha, even with my parents.”
“Just stick with the group,” Raj responded. “You’ll get in.”
“I think I’ll pass,” Paul decided.
“I’ll keep you company, Paul,” I chimed in. “Not that I’m not willing to see an X-rated movie, but I read the book. If the movie’s anything like the book, I can find better ways to spend my time.”
Actually, it was my mom who read the book and she hated it. She told me what it was about and told me I wasn’t allowed to read it. She’d never forbidden me to read a book before, so I snuck a look before she returned it to the library. I was only fourteen then and the plot was just plain weird. I skimmed through the first few chapters and gave up on it.
It might have been interesting to see the movie version, but I’d have felt self-conscious about seeing an X-rated movie behind Mom’s back. Besides which, by staying behind, it would be a chance to go out on a real date with Paul.
