Will Schwalbe - We Should Not Be Friends: The Story of a Friendship

By the time I was a junior at college, Id already met everyone I cared to know. I was friends with most of the other gays and lesbians; this wasnt difficult because, in the early 1980s, not many of us were out of the closet. I was also cordial with most of the lesbians and gays who were still in the closet; it was pretty obvious who they were. I knew the theater people, a group that overlapped almost completely with the gays and lesbians, uncloseted and closeted. I knew many of the people who styled themselves writers. I knew absolutely everyone in my majorthere were only a few of us who had chosen to get degrees in Latin and Greek, so it would have been Herculean not to. And I knew a splattering of visual artists, a handful of comparative lit majors, the odd philosopher, and three mathematicians, along with an assortment of other obsessive, quirky characters with whom Id fallen into conversation in a dining hall line or bonded over the cinnamon toast at Naples Pizza when we should have been studying.

I also knew those I didnt want to know. The jocks. And they didnt seem to want to know me. In the dining halls, they filled boisterous tables. They wolfed down epic platters of scrambled eggs. They wore baseball caps backwards and moved in packs. The jocks and I were like planets in different orbits, circling one another but not colliding. I felt that if we did, I would be obliterated.

During the spring of my junior year, Id taken to wearing a turquoise acid-washed blue jean jacket, and I wore a studded leather wristband that served as a walleta souvenir from Los Angeles, where Id spent the previous term away from school, working in the realer world. I had my hair permed down the center but cut shorter on the sides, in a recent fit of enthusiasm for the artist who was still then known as Prince and also for the look of a singer named Adam Ant. Despite my stylists valiant efforts, my hair looked nothing like theirs. But I did look like someone trying very hard not to look like everyone else; I was elaborately disguised as someone who didnt care what other people thought of me.

I now cant be sure the jocks gave me much thought at all, but I assumed they didnt like me or considered me ridiculous, as was suggested by the occasional sneer directed my way. Certainly, many of my women friends, especially the very out lesbians, as well as my more feminine gay friends had contended with derision, menace, and worse from the college jocks. There was good reason to leave space between myself and anyone wearing a letter jacket.

All that dramatically changed at the end of my junior year, when I collided with one jock in particular: Chris Maxey, known to just about everyone as Maxey. From the start it was clear that Maxey and I should not be friends. What was less obvious was that I was much more prejudiced against him than he was against me. Yet we became friends and have remained so for the next forty yearsright up to the present day.

Perhaps I didnt care to know Maxey, but fortunately the matter was taken out of my hands. Because if I hadnt met him, my life would have been less rich and less fun. Had it not been for Maxey, the me that is here today wouldnt be me. Also, I never would have learned how to breathe. He tells me I had a similar effect on his life. Except he figured out how to breathe all by himself.