May, 1980

My friendship with Tom, it can be fairly argued, began as a self-imposed sleep deprivation experiment. For no discernible reason, except maybe to see if we could do it, we stayed awake for a solid forty-five hours. And when it was over, we were best — and extremely tired — friends.

This was during our eighth grade class trip to Washington, D.C., the crowning event at Pine Forest Middle School. For months, our teachers waxed enthusiastic about how much fun the trip would be, to the point where even I, who was skeptical of authority figures in general and the promise of fun in particular, was genuinely excited. But then, when we got to the nation's capitol, they spent all their time berating us for not taking it seriously enough. At every monument and memorial, they bludgeoned us into respectful silence, reminding us of all the brave patriots who had died to make this the best country on God's green earth.

So shut up and appreciate your damned freedom!

After we had appreciated our damned freedom to the faculty's satisfaction, the charter busses dropped us off at our no-frills hotel, where our teachers patrolled the hallways all night, self-importantly talking to each other on walkie-talkies to prevent what Vice Principal Hudac vaguely referred to as "shenanigans."

Which I was pretty sure was code for "smoking pot and fucking."

I was in a room with three other boys. A room, we were horrified to discover, that had only two queen-sized beds. This created quite the conundrum. We needed to figure out a way for four boys to equitably share two large beds. How on earth would we disentangle this Gordian knot?

Now, I'm sure that some smug math major out there is chuckling to himself: It's so simple! Four boys divided by two beds equals two boys per bed. Voila!

Sorry, Professor, your fancy "division" may work in the lab, but those of us who actually lived in the real world of 1980 know something that you apparently don't: sharing a bed with another boy is gay.

(So, for that matter, is saying voila!)

Gay, queer, homo, fag. These were the words that we used as weapons. These were the words we feared. And it didn't really matter if you were gay; even the appearance of gayness — based on the crudest stereotypes — needed to be scrupulously avoided. It was enforced masculinity and it was wearisome for me; I can only imagine how exhausting it must of have been for my classmates who actually were gay, and felt compelled to hide.

I now know that Tom was one of those people. Not gay, exactly, but he knew there was something wrong, something different. He didn't know what he was — he, like the rest of us, didn't even know the word for what he was — but he knew that he couldn't let anyone find out.

All of which is to say, there was no way in hell we'd be sharing beds.

Instead, under the somber gaze of oil-painted Founding Fathers caged in absurdly ornate gold frames, we engaged in a series of contentious coin flips to see who got the beds and who got the floor. The result: I had one bed and Tom had the other. Neither of us, I must say, were very gracious winners. This was another teenage boy trait: rubbing peoples' noses in their misfortune. Because compassion was also gay.

Sleeping on the floor then was a huge, open-mouthed snoring mass named Nico Santangelo and a happy-go-lucky dullard with a crew cut named Ricky Wood. From kindergarten up until he fell asleep that night, Ricky had been my best friend. We played baseball on a cul-de-sac, hockey in the street, basketball in his driveway and Atari in his rec room. We threw snowballs in winter, raked leaves in the autumn, ran through sprinklers in the summer and most assuredly did something equally idyllic in the spring, although I don't remember what. Whittling, maybe. Or flying a kite at our lemonade stand while humming God Bless America. Something like that.

It was a classic young boys' friendship, with all the superficiality that implied. Except for the rare occasions when I insulted the hallowed Philadelphia Phillies or the much more frequent occasions when I used profanity within earshot of Ricky's Puritanical mother, it was frictionless, uncomplicated and fun. But in the waning days of my pre-adolescence, it was no longer enough.

Enter Tom Gilmore.

My first clear memory of Tom was in Spanish class, where he was getting beaten up by a girl named Leslie. As part of some abstruse, longstanding feud dating all the way back to nursery school, Leslie had knocked over Tom's combo chair-desk, with Tom in it, and by putting her considerable weight on it, pinned him to the floor.

He was trapped.

To the class's howling delight, Leslie kept slapping Tom in the face as he haplessly struggled to fend her off, until finally our teacher, Señorita Krenetsky, came in and yelled at Leslie in Spanish, "Déjalo en paz!" But Leslie had no idea what she was saying. None of us did. Señorita Krenetsky was a terrible Spanish teacher. Frustrated, she switched to English — "Leave him alone!" — and that did the trick.

Tom stood up, red-faced, and righted his chair-desk. He did his best to show us that he wasn't the least bit bothered by what had just happened. He ran a plastic comb through his tousled hair and attempted a carefree smile that came out sickly and weak.

I sympathized.

Pine Forest Middle School was an unforgiving place where humiliations were savored and memories were long. I had some firsthand experience with this myself in — where else? — gym class. We were wrestling and I was paired off with Carmine D'Amelio. It was a tremendous mismatch in size and strength. Toying with me, Carmine wrapped his thighs around my abdomen and squeezed. And I farted, loud enough for everyone to hear.

Dubbed "The Fart Heard Round The School" — which, I grudgingly admit, was kind of witty — I had still not completely lived it down two years later.

"Don't fart on me, Aaron!" someone would occasionally say, when they were too lazy to come up with an original insult.

"No promises!" was my standard reply.

But what Tom went through was so much worse. Being manhandled by a girl (girl-handled?) was the single most embarrassing thing I had seen at Pine Forest. And since Leslie was a girl, Tom's retaliatory options were decidedly limited. Because when a girl hit a boy, everyone thought that was hilarious. But when a boy hit a girl, he was an instant pariah.

Truly, I couldn't imagine how Tom would ever bounce back. As far as I could tell, his life was over. His only sensible recourse now was to crawl away, die and hope for kinder karma in his next life.

But I had underestimated Tom. Because the following day, he returned to class to wreak his revenge. And this time he was armed.

(Relax, it's not what you think.)

Tom had purchased a romantic greeting card for Leslie at a local pharmacy. It was pink and lacy with looping calligraphy and he announced that he'd be reading it out loud in front of the whole class. I leaned forward, intrigued.

"For the lady I love," he began with a mischievous grin. Immediately Leslie let out a throaty yowl. Tom opened the card and she turned crimson as he read its description of her beauty and grace, so scathingly at odds with this lumpy pig-faced girl.

It was genius.

Leslie weighed her options and concluded that her best option — her only option, really — was brute force, so she charged at him like an enraged wildebeest. Tom ran around Señorita Krenetsky's desk, laughing, as she chased him, cartoon-style, in futile circles.

The class was in hysterics. And I was enthralled.

The trip to Washington, D.C. proved the perfect opportunity to see if my instincts about Tom were correct. We needed a fourth for our hotel room and I suggested Tom. Ricky and Nico were not keen on the idea. They thought he was weird and obnoxious and had unfortunate sweating issues. I didn't think he was weird; I thought he was brilliant. I didn't think he was obnoxious; I thought he was hilarious. And as for the sweating... honestly, they had a point, but I was willing to put up with it.

Ultimately, it was my relentlessness combined with the exponentially worse alternatives — like Neil Hughes, who had recently lost two fingers playing with explosives and John Gerber who liked to leap on peoples' backs and yell, "Giddyap!" while kicking them in the ribs — that made them acquiesce.

While Ricky and Nico dozed on the carpet, a slash of moonlight cutting across their faces, Tom and I spent that entire night talking. We made merciless fun of our classmates and our teachers. We talked about our comedic heroes: Monty Python, George Carlin and Bill Cosby (yeah, well, we didn't know back then). We talked about our love of scifi: Asimov and Heinlein, Star Trek, Star Wars and its retarded stepchild, Battlestar Galactica.

And we talked a lot about girls: lustfully about the ones who had developed; dismissively about the ones who were still flat-chested. Which ones we wanted to see in a bikini or, better yet, naked. We never discussed which ones would make good girlfriends. I guess the reason was that while we had no problem picturing them naked, we couldn't imagine them actually liking us.

This bonded us, too. We shared the belief that while we were currently at the bottom of school's caste system — literally Untouchables, at least as far as the girls were concerned — we also believed that it would not last, that eventually time would vindicate us. That while our peers might snub us now, they would envy us some day when we left them in the dust.

More important than all of that, though, was this: we made each other laugh. And that, more than anything else, is what would keep us in each others' lives for the next thirty-five years.

By the time Ricky woke in the morning, Tom had deposed him in a bloodless coup. Ricky didn't know it yet — and we would remain cordial, slowly drifting away during high school — but as a friend he had outlived his usefulness.

With Tom, I felt that I shared a connection, a wavelength, a worldview. Really, I felt like I had found more than just a friend. I had found a soulmate.

And yes, I know how gay that sounds.