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In 1983, when I was about to graduate from high school, Kelson was one of the most popular kids in our class. Sun-tanned from playing on the tennis team, he wore pastel Izods with the collars turned up and had perfectly styled blonde hair. He drove to school in his mom's beige Cadillac.
I didn't understand why he gave me the time of day, but suddenly there he would be in the hall next to me, chatting in that sarcastic but over-friendly manner of his. With him I always swayed between total humiliation and wondering if he was actually interested in what I had to say. I was Kelson's opposite: a pudgy, white-trash kid who liked to draw pretend album covers and had a C- average.
Kelson's parents were upstanding small-business people. He was their oldest, a shining example of upward mobility in a small town, and — unbeknownst to them — a great big hungry faggot. We'd met at the high-school radio station when we were sophomores. He was already the big cheese there, doing a sports show. One day, when I was getting ready to sign on for a shift and he was waiting to do his sports-show promo, we got into a conversation about Talking Heads and David Bowie. He was so impressed I knew who the Ramones were that he patted me on the back like we were smoking cigars in a drawing room.
Eventually conversations at the radio station turned into going out for pizza some nights, or to the movies — but never as a part of any group. That way we could talk about cute guys, and he could tell me how he had sucked off a fellow tennis player in the backseat of his mom's car. At the time, I had my own secret boyfriend, some doofus who would butt-fuck me during sleepovers and pretend it was some kind of hypnosis.
Kelson was the homecoming king. After we graduated (me barely, and him top of the class), Kelson traveled to Miami for an extended vacation all by himself. In August, he came back with Archie. They were staying at some guy's apartment downtown because Kelson's mom wouldn't let Archie and him stay there together. In Miami, Kelson had gone full-tilt homosexual. He called me one night and invited me over.
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He was so ecstatically alive it was scary.
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When I got there, Archie and Kelson were in the bathroom fucking. Roger, the fat, bald, middle-aged guy whose place it was, was smoking pot and eating a ham sandwich. MTV flickered in front of him. Roger told me that Archie and Kelson had been fucking since Kelson called me.
"They took a can of Crisco in there," he said, laughing. "I shit you not."
I sat there with Roger and watched Taco sing "Puttin' on the Ritz." We could hear Kelson moaning above the techno sadness. A half-hour later Archie and Kelson came out of the bathroom, dewy from their shower, the soap smell and heat filling the whole apartment. Archie was even more beautiful than Kelson, tall and lean and tan with long black hair and thick lips. He wore a pair of shorts and nothing else. Kelson was in jeans and a t-shirt, barefooted.
"Banner!" Kelson said. "Lookie here, it's Banner!" He was so ecstatically alive it was scary. Archie was rolling his eyes. He didn't even want to be introduced to me. Archie sat on a chair adjacent to Roger, displaying the nonchalance of someone who didn't speak the language and had no desire to learn, as if just existing in the same universe as a ham sandwich was beneath him.
"Hey Banner, this is Archie. He is my homosexual lover. Fuck everybody, I'm out and proud," Kelson said. Even though what he proclaimed seemed rote, his voice had a thunderbolt inside as he said it. He came over and shook my hand like an overexcited businessman.
"Isn't Archie beautiful?" Kelson said even more loudly.
Archie said, "Shut up, Kelson."
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