Homerun

This excerpt is from Chapter 2: Our hero Alan Macklin gets to know his roommate.

At the end of the day, I did what any self-respecting person does after a difficult time, I sat down at my computer and sent emails. In the old days, at home, I'd just IM people because our lives seemed like they were all connected. Now I was way out on the coast, so we were down to mail, even if it was electronic.

The person I emailed first was Maggie, my dating advisor during our third year of high school and my kind-of girlfriend during our final year. She was still, despite my best and sometimes very frustrating attempts to take our relationship to another level, my best friend. At some level, Maggie knew she was destined for prime time, starting with heading east to the prestigious Sarah Lawrence, while I was destined for afternoon soaps, heading west to the undistinguished BU. Prime time people don't have sex with soap people, it's as simple as that. But they do send and receive emails.

From: amacklin@BU.edu

To: maggiemac@sl.edu

The first day has been awful. No, worse than awful, it's been spectacularly awful. My roommate is a born-again something, my mother thinks this place is disgusting and my father thinks I'm a sex maniac. It's enough to make me feel nostalgic for high school. Only bright spot on the horizon is that my parents are gone and have left me in peace. Please tell me not to jump off a bridge.

From: maggiemac@sl.edu

To: amacklin@BU.edu

Don't jump off a bridge by yourself. But if you find a good one let me know and I'll join you. I feel like the proverbial fish out of water here: I don't have the right clothes, the right attitudes or the right pedigree. My roommate has such a dizzying social life that I've only seen her for twenty minutes since arrival, and that was twenty minutes with her looking down her nose at me. This borders on excruciating.

My life became more complicated the next day when Kirk decided to become my friend. It's very difficult when someone decides to become your friend to say, no, thanks, but I'd prefer some other friend, especially when the prospective friend is very polite. The next morning began with a cheerful wakeup suggestion from my roommate, “Hey, Al, let's have breakfast.” I groaned and went back to sleep. That afternoon, when we met our dorm counselors, it was Kirk who plopped down beside me and listened cheerfully while we were warned about the evils of drinking, drugs, sex and failure to keep up with the course work. And it was Kirk who said, afterwards, “Let's get dinner over at Slavin,” when I had no reason to refuse.

So we stood in line at Slavin Hall – alias The Slop House or Sloppy Joe's – waiting for the elderly cafeteria ladies to put some appropriate slop on our trays. Tonight's dinner consisted of roast-beef slop, mashed-potato slop and something that looked like carrot-and-turnip slop, all looking like they had been shaped with an ice cream scoop.

“I love this kind of food,” Kirk said as we moved along the line.

“You do?”

“Sure. It's great down-home cooking, just like the ladies group does for our church. What's not to like?”

“The flavour,” I said, “or lack of it.”

“Al, I think you've got to perk up,” he said, looking quickly in my direction as he took a second slice of apple-slop pie. “School can be a wonderful experience if you just learn to embrace it.”

Kirk actually spoke like that. It was a mixture of high-school guidance counselor-speak with enthusiastic poster phrases that you might see in a dentist's office. I thought, at the time, that Kirk might actually see life like that, but things turned out not to be so simple.

We sat down with a bunch of other first-year students to the right of the entrance. Somehow, second and third-year students find a way to avoid dining in Slavin even if they're still on meal plan, but first-years cluster together like the pathetic little souls they – I should say we – happen to be.

“So, Al,” my roommate began, “tell me about yourself.”

For a fleeting moment, I was tempted to tell him feign illness and try to escape, but then my voice of reason reminded me that he was my roommate, my only visible roommate, and I was stuck with him for at least a semester.

“Hmmm,” I began instead. “How about white, non-smoker, sometimes-drinker, occasional thinker. That kind of sums it up.”

“Hey, that's good,” he said, flashing those pearly teeth. “You're funny. That was the first thing I noticed about you. I wrote a letter to my mom last night and said that I had a really funny roommate.”

“Funny ha-ha, I hope. Not funny queer.”

A perplexed look came over his face. It was as if he had to translate what I had just said into his own language before he could get it. Then he laughed, not a lot, but enough. “See, you are funny.”

“And you?” I asked. My mouth was full of congealed roast beef gravy, potatoes and mushy beef, so I couldn't say much more.

“In high school, they used to say I was a pretty serious guy,” Kirk replied. “But I'm not sure about that. Some people think you're a wet blanket just because you don't want to shoot squirt guns at Bible camp.”

“Right,” I said, not because this made much sense, but because right is a very good thing to say in almost any circumstance. It suggests (a) that I'm listening, (b) that I agree, and (c) that I want to hear more.

Kirk went on to tell me about the rest of his life: the wonderful family back home, his wonderful girlfriend, the ranch where he grew up, the small religious school he'd attended. It was a touching story, really, like an episode of Little House on the Prairie . Kirk was going to be a preacher, and had come to BU to broaden his experience of the world. I was moved.

Kirk was the kind of person who gestures with his hands when he talks. This brings some attention to his fingers, which are long, and the ring on his left fourth finger. I had to stare hard, but then I could read the words: “True Love Waits.”

“Interesting ring,” I said. “It almost asks a question, like, waits for what?”

Kirk smiled and didn't miss a beat. “Waits for marriage,” he replied. “I got it after the pledge.”

“The pledge?” He'd said this before, but this was my chance to find out what it was about.

“The abstinence pledge,” he went on. He told me this with an absolutely straight face, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. “Everyone in my high school did the pledge, so I went a step further and got the ring.”

“Abstinence meaning what?” I asked him. “Abstain from booze, drugs, sex?”

Kirk smiled. “All of the above. We made a commitment to a life of purity,” he looked at me because I had frowned, “I mean, clean living. So we've got to abstain from all that. No corrupt images and no sex before biblical marriage.”

Once again I had to translate. No corrupt images=no porn; no sex before biblical marriage=no sex for an eternity. Now I understood why Kirk had a computer without email or an Internet connection. I nodded my head in appreciation. Kirk had pledged to give up a lot.

“So can you, like, look?” I asked him. At that moment a particularly striking blonde was coming through the slop line and waiting at the cashier. “Can you look at a girl like that one over there, or would that be too much lust.”

“Oh, no, we can look,” Kirk said, following my gaze. “We just can't touch.”

“Right,” I said, repeating myself. “You're saving yourself for marriage.”

“That's the pledge,” he replied. “It's a goal I've set for myself. Kathy and I both pledged that we would wait.”

“Kathy?”

“My girlfriend. Almost my fiancée.”

“ Almost because you haven't asked her.”

“Right,” Kirk replied. Now it was his turn to use the word. He did seem a bit embarrassed at this question, though. It was the first time I'd seen him look a bit embarrassed, a bit less than perfectly self-assured.

“But you're going to ask her.”

“Right. As soon as I graduate, or maybe before,” Kirk replied.

“Hmmm,” I said. Hmmm is a cut up from Right on the response chart. Hmmm is the kind of thing a doctor says when you're describing the funny tumor growing on some private part of your body; Right is what guys says to acknowledge that something is correct, unless there's an extra i, as in Ri - ight , which mean that something is obviously not correct. Is it any wonder that English is so difficult for people to learn?

“So that's your goal, then, to abstain?” I asked.

“No, I want to get my degree and then go on to divinity school. I'm going to be a preacher,” he said, pausing. “No, I'm going to be one of the great preachers.”

“But why here? Why did you come to this wretched hive of scum and villainy?”

Kirk looked at me with a raised eyebrow. He must have been impressed by the vocabulary, so I didn't bother to tell him that the line was borrowed from Star Wars .

“So I can learn about the devil where he lives.”

Talk about conversation stoppers! A guy who says he's come gunning for the devil and then looks you right in the eyes, well, it makes you begin to sweat just a little.

“And what about you, Al? Why are you here?”

“I … uh … I'm kind of interested in Keats and Shelley. You know, the poetry.”

He was still looking at me. Kirk has very penetrating eyes, very dark and direct. Guys rarely look at each other directly, or even indirectly for more than a second or two, but Kirk just kept staring at me. Obviously he hadn't believed a word that I'd said. This wasn't surprising, because I hadn't either.

“Okay, that's just a line,” I admitted. “Mostly I'm just interested in sex.”

“What's that?”

“Uh, sex,” I repeated. “Mostly, I think, I just want to get laid.”