Tap. Tap. Tap. Is this thing on?

Testing. One, two, three ...

(sound of cleared throat)

OK, see, this is the reason I don't drink.

I got drunk once. Wayyyyy drunk.

And it changed my life.

Cal Tech. I had just – and I mean just, like in the past month or so – turned sixteen. And I was the combination joke-freak-threat around campus. Not the only one, but the fact that there were a couple others did nothing to ease my personal misery.

Anyway, a bunch of guys had a keg and they couldn't care less how old I was, so I had more than I thought I could handle. And they had this Secret Desires box where you wrote down your secret desires, I guess that kind of figures, doesn't it? And I thought that was a pretty much a girly thing, but there they were, this bunch of frat guys, all grabbing index cards and writing away.

And I was just drunk enough that I took one of the damn cards and poured out my soul. I mean, it was anonymous, right? I thought maybe it would be interesting to see what the other guys said. Nobody much actually confided in me, so hearing some Secret Desires from some of the so-called normal guys might give me a clue how far on or off center I was.

So this is what I wrote: "I want to have complete control over somebody, I want to control what they do and say, every aspect of their lives. Not all the time, just for a couple hours here and there. Especially their sex lives. They don't come unless I let them."

What can I say? I was an angry kid. I was barely sixteen and I was having some serious parental issues and everyone else around me was driving and drinking and getting laid on a regular basis. And I was getting straight As. Not the same thing, folks. Not at all the same thing.

Then I got so sick I left before they started to read the cards.

Now, let me tell you about Julian. Julian was two years older than I was, almost exactly. He still is.

That was a joke. OK?

He looked like a tall, slim Gene Simmons. Gene Simmons like he might have been at 17, but with his regular face on, not his KISS makeup. He thought that he looked like Robert DeNiro. He didn't. He had this annoying way, way out there country-boy accent that made him sound like a total goober. He was the first in his family to even finish high school, let alone go to college.

Give you an idea of it, he pronounced "high school" as "hah stoo." That kind of goober accent.

Julian was gifted, too. Not quite as gifted as I was, but he was still in that daunting-his-peers groove. And he was like a human vacuum cleaner for languages. I have no idea how his goober accent played with the languages, but the folks there thought he was pretty damn hot stuff.

Next day, he comes and sits down next to me at the library.

"Did you mean it?" he asked.

"Mean what?"

He had his book open. Far Eastern symbols all over the page. His left hand (he's a south paw) was tracing little circles in the margin. "You have to understand that I'm serious, Reid," he said. "Serious as a fucking heart attack. I'm not just talking to hear my head roar. You got that?"

"Yeah, OK," I said.

"I'm not a fag," he continued.

"OK," I said. I wanted to say that I wasn't one either, but I wasn't positive that I wasn't. I mean, my fantasies were about 65% female, 35% male, and I thought that anyone who was straight, that 65% would probably be closer to 95%. So I didn't know what the fuck I was.

"Are you?"

I shook my head.

"I don't know what I am," Julian said. "I like 'em both. Women better, but I definitely like 'em both."

I found myself nodding.

Three years at Cal Tech, heading into graduate school, and this is the first honest-to-God conversation I have ever had in my whole life about sexuality. With anybody. Anybody. And it's with this countrified language geek who can't stop fiddling with his (I finally read the spine) Advanced Korean text.

In the library.

At ten in the morning.

"But I have this fantasy," he began, his voice dropping way down, and getting tense. His cheeks were going dusky. "About getting tied up and – well, messed with. Against my will. Except that I love it. Or I think I will. I'm pretty sure I will. Does that make me crazy?"

I cleared my throat a couple times. "Why are you asking me?" I said finally.

He leaned a little closer. "Recognized your handwriting," he said. "Thought, damn, finally somebody who's gonna understand me." His fingers went suddenly still. "Tell me I didn't just make a big old ass out of myself."

"God, did everybody–?"

"No. No, hell, no. Most of 'em were too drunk to read, let alone recognize anybody's block printing. Nobody else knew who it was."

I looked at him and there were no mockery on his face, He was still and serious and just a little afraid.

Of ... me?

No, I realized. Of the truth.

I had the power to crush him like a bug there, and I thought about it. God knows I'd been crushed often enough for trying to be honest with people. It would even satisfy some of my fantasies of control, smooshing the heart out of the country boy.

But in the end, I swallowed a few times and said, "That was me."

"Would it fuck up your scenario if the dude you were messing with liked it?" Julian asked.

"I – I don't know how to answer that," I admitted. "I never really gave it much thought. I think that ... maybe it would be fine. Maybe it would mean, like, being able to do it more than once."

By now my face was burning, too.

"I've been looking stuff up," Julian said. He reached into his bag and pulled out a fistful of photocopies and pages torn from alternative newspapers. He gave a self-conscious laugh. "Been looking it up for a while, obviously. Not much of a life. You want to look some of this over, see if it's what you're thinking about?"

And it was pure geek-to-geek speak. What do you do? You look it up. And what do you do then? You run it past a peer.

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, I can do that."

And that's how stuff starts.

Thanks for listening.