My room smelled of woodsmoke. Wes and Stacy were chasing a car with her kids in it through the city. Mandy and I would wait up for him all night. And someday soon I’d sit at this desk and try to freeze it all in place with words.

Jeb held out his hand to me. “C’mere.”

HOTEL SEATTLE

In college, Paul would buy a fiesta-sized bag of Doritos on Sunday after Mass and lie stomach down on his bed with his textbooks and notebooks propped up against his pillow and do all his work for the week ahead. He didn’t stand up for hours at a time. A cup of coffee and a bag of Doritos was all he needed. Our dorm beds made an L in the room. Every Sunday I could look at his body for as long as I wanted.

We were best friends because we were roommates. I never deluded myself that he would have chosen me otherwise. Socially we balanced each other out. He was the guy who came into the room and everyone was relieved. I made people deeply uneasy, myself most of all. If we hadn’t shared a room I would have been one of those guys on our hall that got a nod from him in the stairwell, maybe a bit of banter at the sink shaving, but no 2 a.m. arguments about transubstantiation or Bret Easton Ellis.

You grow up Catholic (mass, CCD, youth camps) with six brothers, a megalomaniac father, and a mother who is on her knees in prayer whenever you try to find her, it’s hard to scrape through all the voodoo layers to recognize you’re gay. “Sexual urges,” Father Corcoran used to say through the permanent crust of his lips, “are the maggots at the feast.” We learned to zap our urges the minute we felt them. And homosexual urges got snuffed even quicker, before they made it to the brain. They left a mark, though. I knew I was off somehow. For a long time I thought it was just religion I needed to flush out. That the girl in my arms was just not the right girl. I tried another and another. So many willing girls. And none of them quite right.

But on Sundays in college, with hours to trail my eyes up and down the length of Paul, who was quite narrow, with small, compact muscles in his calves and little fins for shoulder blades, the unearthing began. Proust had his madeleines and I my Doritos. Even now I can stick my nose into a bag of them and travel swiftly back to our corner room, the New England gloom and what felt at the time like a great tangle of feeling but was merely a boyish lust.