The next party that I went to I ran into Rich, whom I hadn’t talked to since our first meeting a month earlier. Rich ended up talking to Denise after they found out they were both Long Islanders. Rich confided in Denise that I would always go out of my way to say hi to him, even though we only spoke once. I started talking to Rich, and even though Rich told me that he had a girlfriend back home, he tried to pursue other girls at the party. Then he asked me, “So have you gotten any pussy since you’ve been in college?” I was a virgin at that point and hadn’t even kissed a girl, but I would never admit it. I thought it was strange that Rich would inquire about my sex life so soon after meeting me, but Rich mainly talked about girls and ways to get laid. The following week, I went home for the Thanksgiving break.
Thanksgiving 2001 was one of the first times I’d been home since August. I rejoiced in the freedom of not having to attend class for a week, but coming home wasn’t what I had hoped it would be. Every visit home reminded me of Eric and his friends and all those dark memories that haunted me from high school. I would spend most of the weekend with my family, and my cousin Alex would bring up all those former classmates that I never wanted to talk about again.
One strange thing happened that weekend. My older cousin Bob had a strange response to one of my stories. I was telling him about the time I was embarrassed about purchasing a Penthouse magazine, and Bob said, “You should have just said you bought it for the articles about telepathic conversations.” Bob’s comment made me paranoid. The only people that I had ever talked about the voices that I heard were my mother and Dr. Roberts. My psychiatrist and mother had spent all this time trying to convince me that the voices in my mind were only my brain playing tricks on me, but I had always felt that the voices I had heard were real.
On my last night before going back to Geneseo, my mother and I decided to go out to eat at Friendly’s. Typically we would avoid talking about sensitive issues; it was hard for me to talk about my feelings, to open up and talk frankly about what was bothering me. This was one trait I adopted from my mother. Living all of her life with my grandmother’s illness, my mother knew how to cope with things and avoid certain topics. However, our conversation that night was different.
She mentioned to me that when she was at church last week she saw an advertisement in the church bulletin for Saint John’s. She even laughed when she noticed Mr. Ramone’s name in the advertisement, the assistant principal that my mother had to argue with for me to take honors courses. Then she started telling me how much she hated dealing with Saint John’s, then worrying about my depression and having to take me to a psychiatrist. Finally, she ended her rant by saying, “You put me through utter hell.” My mother’s comments left me speechless and dumbfounded. Normally, as a teenager, I would get defensive and try to negate what my mother was telling me. This was the first time I realized that my mental illness not only took a toll on me, but also put an enormous strain on my mother.
The next day I boarded the train back to Geneseo, where I could hang out with my new friends and my new life and not worry about old memories. The following Friday night, just before my friends and I were about to go out to a local party, I stopped at the laundry room and ran into Shannon and Diana, the two attractive girls I had met two weeks earlier at a frat party. I went up to them and said, “So your name is Diana, right?” Diana replied, “Surprised you remembered. You were very wasted that night.” The three of us started talking, and Diana took Shannon and me back to her dorm room. As Diana would remark months later, “He never left.”
My main way of making friends was just to tell my wacky stories to anyone who would listen. I would tell Diana and Shannon about the time I bought the issue of Penthouse or about my grandmother and how she always walked around in a bathrobe. I also talked to them about Nite Moves, an Albany strip club, and I would act out how I got lap dances from the strippers. They found me to be entertaining.
The first time Shannon and Diana went up to my room, besides observing that I didn’t have sheets on my bed, that it was very dark, and had a strange odor, Diana noticed that I was from Colonie, according to the sign outside my door. She remarked that her father was Mr.
