This story is a fantasy based loosely on actual events and real people. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
Growing up I was what you would now call straight-edge. No drinking, no drugs, no sex. It wasn't because I was deeply religious; it was just the way I was. I remember times in my teenage years that I wished I was more like the cool kids, but eventually I found my own niche, and I stopped caring about them. Most people would have classified me as a geek or a nerd. I got good grades, I played the cello, and I was involved in theater. I joined a Sunday morning bowling league with my friends. Everybody talks about discovering themselves at some point in their lives. That was who I was, and I was content with it.
College turned out to be more or less the same. I sought out my own crowd. I was placed with a group of clean-living, hard-studying types clustered together in a section of the dorm for freshman who requested an alcohol free dorm. I found out that I didn't really mesh with most of them. Some were deeply religious. Others studied so much they rarely saw the light of day. Then there was one girl who had requested an alcohol free dorm because she was basically an alcoholic and she hoped that it would help her stay away from it. It didn't. She would disappear for days at a time. It was a diverse group with many different backgrounds, and in the end none of us really had all that much in common.
Eventually I found myself running with a bunch of different crowds. In high school people seemed to be involved in many different things. In college it seemed like everybody tried to focus on just one thing, so I made some friends that were into music, some friends that were into theater, some friends that were into bowling, and so on. At times I felt like the only person out to experience everything that college had to offer.
I knew the "party" crowd was there too. I would hear some of the other kids talk in some of the elective classes I was taking. They talked about partying, booze, women. I listened impassively, finding myself getting a vicarious thrill listening to their crazy stories, and yet feeling somewhat glad that I didn't have those crazy impulses.
I found myself struggling in college academically. I guess since I was basically a dabbler I had never really decided what I wanted to do once I got to college. At the end of my freshman year I sat down with my advisor and he asked me what I thought I might want to concentrate on. I didn't want to be a music major, I thought to myself. I enjoyed it but I wasn't really good enough, and what kind of living would I make anyway? I didn't want to be a theater major for similar reasons. I really enjoyed the creative writing class I took in my senior year of high school. I suggested that maybe I could be an English major. I enrolled in British literature for my third semester and promptly flunked it. I enjoyed writing my own stuff but epic poems written in Middle English didn't interest me at all.
It was kind of a shock to me. I had never really failed a class before. Being an English major wasn't going to happen, obviously. I was a great mathematician growing up, I thought to myself before my third semester was even half over, maybe I should give math a try. I was granted a meeting with the head of the math department. I was great with numbers, I remember telling him, but I had struggled with trigonometry. Maybe you could become an actuary, he suggested. Unfortunately I would still have to get through calculus. I signed up for calculus 101 and probability and statistics for my fourth semester.
To my horror I didn't understand calculus at all. I think my aggregate test score was in the 20's when I finally decided to drop the class and take an Fx halfway through the semester and cut my losses. I was demoralized, lost and adrift. I didn't know what I was going to do next. I was open to suggestion, ready to go off the rails of the life I had built for myself.
From time to time I would meet somebody who would hear that I didn't drink, smoke, party, have sex, or whatever, and decide that they were going to corrupt me. I usually laughed them off. I was strangely impervious to peer pressure. I knew what lines in my personal life that I would and would not cross, and stuck to them. Eventually these people would get bored or frustrated and leave me alone. It was possible that Seth just came along at the right time, when my life seemed like it was over at 19.
I had never met anybody like Seth before, but few people ever will. You just don't come across many people like him. He had a black father and a Jewish mother. He was also gay, or bi-sexual, I wasn't really sure. I had seen him with women once or twice, but Seth was very open about the fact that he liked men. He was somebody who used to push the fact that he was different on everybody. In my head, I used to call him the poster boy for discrimination. I forgot how I even met him. I think he might have been in one of my third semester classes. He lived in a different dorm, but I would still see him around campus or in the dining hall every once in a while. He was hard to miss, a black man wearing a yarmulke, dressed like a punk rocker.
He became the latest person to start telling me he was going to take me out and corrupt me. I always wondered about the possibility that he took an interest in me because he thought I was gay. Frankly I had no doubts about my sexuality. Even though I had virtually no experience with women up to that point in my life, I knew that it was women that I was attracted to and not men. Whatever the reason, my life was spiraling downward, and for once I relented. Yes, I told him, I'll hang out with you on Saturday night.
My first indoctrination to how the 'other half' lived was that we weren't even meeting up until 10pm. I rarely went to bed before midnight in college, but those evenings were spent with friends in the dorm watching movies, playing video games, or just sitting around talking. If I left campus it was during the day to go shopping for groceries or to the local mall, or out to dinner or the movies when my tight budget allowed it. It was a blustery March evening, and I wore my heavy winter coat to meet up with Seth. He led me to the park and ride area where we met up with his friend Toby, a white man probably in his 30's who introduced himself to me as gay. We piled into his boxy old Chevy and headed toward the city.
We headed straight to the waterfront area, a section of the city dubbed fraternity row, full of bars and clubs or whatever. I had never been there before, I had only heard about it from overhearing stories from my classmates. Toby drove us straight through a crowded and well-lit area full of partying kids from all of the area colleges. Soon we were driving down a darker, quieter street. Toby parked in front of a dilapidated, boarded up building. I glanced around nervously. We were getting out here? Seth and Toby were already out of the car and walking away, so I leapt out and hurried to keep up with them. Despite the run-down neighborhood, the street wasn't deserted. There were some people milling about, people who looked like they might have been extras in the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
"Do you think we'll run into your mom tonight?" Toby asked Seth. I thought maybe it was a joke but he sounded serious.
"No, I already talked to her, she's not coming out tonight," Seth replied. I tried to picture my own mother hanging out in a neighborhood like this, and failed.
We walked a couple of blocks. Between the buildings were dark alleys that seemed to lead nowhere. I shuddered when I thought about what might be awaiting me if I ventured down one of them. I felt completely detached from reality, like we were walking on a movie set or something, and there really was nothing beyond those dark alleys. Finally we arrived at a two story building at the end of a block. The building was completely nondescript. I couldn't make out its color in the darkness, and it had no signage to identify itself as whatever it was. We walked inside and I found it was a little bar. The entire left half of the room was the actual bar and a narrow row of tables were along the right side of the wall. I could make out pool tables in the back. I got a quick glimpse of leather jackets, and rough-looking people of both sexes, and then set my gaze at the floor. I was determined to not draw any attention to myself.
Toby and Seth led me to a table and sat down. They ordered drinks. I told them I didn't want anything. I sat there silently, just trying to stay out of everybody's way. The drinks arrived and Toby and Seth drank and chatted. Occasionally they would say something to me, but for the most part I just sat quietly. Eventually a friend of theirs came over and they chatted with him for a few minutes. I didn't even listen to the conversation. I was too busy trying to be inconspicuous, even though I probably stuck out like a sore thumb in the place.
"Hey," Seth said, breaking me out of my stupor. It must have been obvious I wasn't paying attention. "We're going to go to a friend's place across the way. They're having a party. Are you coming along?"
