The rest happened very quickly. Frankie was still in the act of falling (his somewhat stewed body rolling down to the floor with a harmless finesse no sober muscle horse could have ever achieved) when I dropped my beer and shoved Margolis as hard as I could. He stumbled backward only half a step, but it was enough to lock one of his sneakers around a leg of the nearest barstool, and when he started toward me, the stool went with him. It tipped and slid up his shin; he went down with a crash. Frankie was on his back, laughing. Margolis thrashed about and cursed and brought down several more stools.

A bouncer who looked like a circus strongman appeared out of nowhere, hauled Margolis and Frankie to their feet, and walked the three of us downstairs to the front door. Margolis got mouthy, and after he’d been tossed outside, I pleaded with the bouncer to let us stay or we’d surely be pummeled as soon as we stepped onto the sidewalk. The bouncer asked me if I had any money. I told him yes, thinking he wanted a bribe, but he called us a cab, which took nearly thirty minutes to arrive and cost a relative fortune, but got us home safely. On the way there, I told Frankie about my library men’s-room encounter with the trapeze artist and my subsequent obsession, and he just laughed, and continued laughing all the way to McGarry Hall.

Within a year, Frankie picked up his colored pencils and compass and protractor again, and resumed designing spaceships on his exam sheets. After one very bad night spent on a sub-par gelatin dot of acid, he abruptly stopped taking drugs of any kind, eschewing even aspirin and caffeine. When the appearance of German measles rocked the campus, Frankie was one of the few students suspended from classes because he wouldn’t get immunized. Ultimately, this antidrug resolve brought on his refusal to take AZT in the early days of the AIDS crisis (before anyone knew that taking AZT alone could kill you). In short, his weirdness saved his life.

I endured another half a semester in McGarry Hall until I could get myself transferred to one of the older dorms, where it should have turned out that no matter where you lived, there were troublemakers, but where, in fact, it only confirmed that McGarry was full of degenerates. I walked around campus with a mortal and eventually dwindling fear of running into Margolis, until, one evening during my senior year, I found myself sitting next to him in a gay discussion group (he pretended not to recognize me; I didn’t bring it up). In terms of romance, during our college years, neither I nor Frankie would have any relationships that lasted longer than a month.

We did, however, become pals for a while.