My physics final was today. I studied so hard for that test and came out of it feeling really good.

Unfortunately, everyone in this class has their crap together. Everyone. I think there were two people who screwed around and they both withdrew. I've never been in a situation where everyone got all the points all the time. And that's what I'm dealing with here.

Without the benefit of a curve, my grade adds up to 89.18%. If I get a B+ because I happened to take physics during the summer when all the fuckups were getting stoned at the beach I'm gonna be PISSED.

 

hehehe.

 

Someone said "Well fuck you!" to me tonight. I can't decide if it was justified or not, but I did not react well to the aggression behind this statement. I adopted a how-fucking-dare-you glare and walked away. And then I decided that "Well fuck you!" is definitely on my list of things I will not tolerate.

Other things I won't tolerate:
- name-calling
- friends who bond with my other friends by making fun of me in front of me
- "Shut up" or any variation (e.g. "shut your piehole"/"shut the fuck up")

And I do honestly try never to say or do those things to people I care about. I'm not saying I'm perfect -- I've definitely still got the patina of the true American asshole. But there's a difference between how I am in general and how I act towards my inner circle. What... you think that makes me a hypocrite? Yeah well [predictable ending deleted].

 

Frank was mean, wasn't he? Those were some nasty comments. Ugh. Fuck. I just did a google search for Warren B_____ and my site still popped up. I swear to God I'm trying to fix that. Google said it would take five days.

Clearly, I'm drunk. Whatever. I was studying physics until 10:00 tonight. I can drink if I want.

I honestly think Warren wouldn't care about what I wrote. It's funny, because I was trying to pay tribute to him and say how important he was to me and my life and my acceptance of myself as a gay man. He was special to me. Why would Frank (whoever the fuck that is) say that shit? Eh... I'm sure he misses his friend. And if I re-read my entries from his point of view I'm sure I'd be pissed off, too.

Good news, though! Maybe that dream last night was a premonition. I got a call this evening for a catering job tomorrow and Sunday. I'm gonna make some $$!!

I should go to bed now.

 

I should be in the library right now, but I was there until 10:00 last night working on a problem that I still haven't solved. I'm not too excited to go back and jump into the same confusion.

I woke up this morning feeling amazing. Then I realized it was because in my dreams last night someone handed me a paycheck. I spent the rest of the dream reminding myself to deposit it so that my July bills would be covered. Sadly, that dreamtime money didn't cross over with me when I woke up.

The anxiety over never getting a paycheck when I'm working so hard is more intense than I thought it would be. I thought I was prepared to be poor, but apparently I wasn't.

It could be worse, though. Drew woke up and said "I had a nightmare. I dreamed I was taking a physics class."

At least I didn't dream about that unsolved problem.

 

My physics final is in nine days and I'm nowhere near prepared. I've done everything possible to avoid cracking that book. I've just lost my focus completely. And, on top of that, I'm also broke.

Why can't poverty be more of a motivating force?

Last night we watched L'Avventura. Monica Vitti is the perfect woman. And relationships are nothing but demoralizing compromises. That's what I took from that.

Physics. Book. Mocking. Me. Must study now.

 

Warren's last name was removed last week. I honestly didn't realize it would show up on a search engine. The problem now is that those pages were cached; I'm taking care of that but it will take a few days.

If you're a friend of his, I appreciate that you're upset that he died and that my entries weren't something you wanted to read. On the other hand, I really didn't say anything hurtful. I don't think there's anything wrong with experimenting with drugs and sex. I didn't call anyone a freak, either. It was a term at my high school for that whole group of people (including me).

 

I've put off concluding this story because I don't want to seem flippant about it. I meant these entries to be a memorial to Warren and what he meant to me. Reading over what I wrote, I can see that it might sound like our relationship was rather shallow and one-sided. At the time, though, it was a lifeline. And he was my first, which also makes him special.

I went several years without hearing anything about him. He moved a couple hundred miles from our hometown to Columbia, Missouri. I think he was working at a Pizza Hut for a while. Two Christmases ago I was told that he'd lost some hair and several teeth, which made me suspect methamphetamine. I don't remember who told me that, though, and I have no idea if it's even true.

I hadn't seen him in three to four years when my friend Krissy wrote me an email saying he had committed suicide. He had a lot of problems and a lot of hurtful things were done to and by him... but he was a good guy and I'm going to miss him.

 

Getting on Warren's good side turned out to be pretty simple. He and his friends liked that I had a car, I think. Soon I was bussing Anna, Warren, Heather and their friend Eric home after school pretty much every day.

Warren still intimidated me, and so I was meek and pliant at first. But when I found a mysterious pattern of cigarette burns on the back of my front passenger seat I wasn't scared to point the finger at him. "You're the only one who sits behind that seat, Warren." His eyes welled with tears as he swore he would never do something like that to me. We were friends, he pleaded. I knew he had done it. He knew I knew he had done it. But he also knew how happy it would make me to hear him confirm our friendship outloud.

Months earlier, when Warren had finished high school, his life had come to a screeching halt. The boy just had no ambition. He seemed pretty content doing nothing. He and Anna were on-again/off-again, although they always remained good friends. He would stay at her place or in Heather's treehouse during the weekends. During the week he stayed at his dad's place in a lake development outside of town. He had no car, and so Anna's grandmother used to drive him home on Sundays. She was relieved when I offered to take him for her. "It's on my way," I lied.

One night, as we sat in his dad's driveway, Warren gave me a kiss. I don't remember how it happened, only that it was soft and sweet. And I remember being terrified that his dad would look out the window and see us, and wondering if that's why he had done it. I knew his dad was a royal asshole. My friend Marti's mother had told me, "Warren's parents may as well have just thrown he and his sister in the garbage. It couldn't have been any worse than what they did to those kids."

Sunday evenings soon became my favorite part of the week. We wouldn't always kiss; sometimes we would just talk. He started telling me secrets. He told me about Paul, the man who lived up the street from Warren's dad's place. Paul, who was in his 30s, was the grown son of my Methodist preacher. I had always thought he was a bit creepy. Warren confessed that he had had sex with Paul several times. "The first time we did it, I woke up the next morning and he had already left for work. And he'd left a bottle of wine and twenty bucks." He said it made him feel so dirty that he drank the whole bottle of wine and cried.

One Sunday night, Warren suggested that we go to Paul's house. "Paul always has weed." I agreed, although when he turned out not to be home I was secretly relieved. We sat in my car in Paul's driveway. With no fear of Warren's dad looking out the window, our makeout session got more heated than usual. Warren put his hand on my crotch. He unzipped my pants. Before I knew what to say, he was giving me a blowjob.

Clearly he knew what he was doing. It was the most amazing, exhilirating thing I'd ever felt in my life. It would have been perfect if I hadn't been so concerned about reciprocating. I didn't know how to do what he was doing. I was certain that if I tried, it wasn't going to feel the way it did when he did it. I was scared, I guess. So I did something I'll always regret: nothing.

"It's okay," he said after it was over. But I could tell that it wasn't. Eleven years later, I still feel guilty for not at least trying to explain myself. He naturally assumed that I was using him. In a way, I guess maybe I was.

We never talked about that episode after that. And we never made out again. After that night, whenver I would drive him home he would just jump out of the car and run into his house. Months later, when I went away to college, my little sister had a nasty accident while driving my old car. It was totaled, but amazingly she escaped without a scratch. I was talking to Anna on the phone from my dorm room in New York City when Warren got on the line and asked if my sister was all right. "We had some good times in that car," he said. It seemed like our friendship was going to survive.

(To Be Concluded)