I realized what had gone on—Chris was drunk. I figured after the party he'd had Saturday, and with him not even coming home the night before, that he'd had enough. Apparently not, though, much to my disappointment. “Hey, Chris. Yeah, great day. What have you been up to?”
“Oh, this and that,” Chris said with a laugh. He came in and took the chair opposite of the sofa, kicking his muddy shoes up onto the coffee table. “I see you got a new book. Good story?”
“Kinda,” I said with a shrug. “It's a book on famous architects. So there isn't exactly a lot of plot to the thing. Still, the story about some of them, it is kinda interesting to see where they drew their ideas from, stuff like that.”
“Sounds boring as shit,” Chris dismissed with a laugh. “Tell you what, let me tell you a story instead. I promise—you're going to love it.”
I knew that in this condition, Chris wasn't someone I wanted to fool with. Even drunk, I'd seen him fight three men and kick their asses like it was nothing, walking away without a scratch. While I could probably take him, I didn’t want to hurt the one man that had given me a lifeline. Better to humor him, let him get it out of his system. Then I could look at maybe deflecting his attention somewhere else. Besides, getting into fights with my roommate was not the sort of person I wanted to be anymore. I set my book aside and sat up, paying attention. “Sure, go ahead, man.”
“Well, it's about these two boys, so it's kind of a buddy-buddy story,” Chris began, leaning back in the chair and crossing his hands over his stomach. “These two boys, oh, let's call them Tris and Boyd, they grew up together and raised a lot of hell together back in the day. Now, both Tris and Boyd were from well-to-do families, but deep down inside, both of them were disgusted by the boring nature of their lives. They tried the normal stuff that boys do, sports and games and toys and whatever, but life was just bleh and in tones of gray to them. It was only in each other that they were able to find some real fun.”
I had a growing sense of disquiet as I listened to Chris talk. He was obviously talking about him and Lloyd, telling me about them growing up. There was something else he was trying to say, but I couldn't tell what yet. I decided it was best to listen carefully. “Go on.”
“Well, starting in high school, Boyd and Tris found something that could at least partially relieve some of the tedious boredom that was their lives. That was sex. Now, before you start thinking anything, it wasn't with each other—they weren't into that. On the other hand, both of them absolutely had high interest in women. They developed this sort of game of one-upmanship, seeing who could score the greatest accomplishment. Oh, the two boys, they ran through the normal gamut. Boyd was the first to get a girl to give him a blowjob, Tris was the first to do some ass fucking, Boyd had the first threesome, stuff like that. By the time they were juniors in high school, they had reached a sense of boredom again. So, one day Tris said to Boyd, we need to up the game. Now, Boyd was an adventurous spirit, so he was more than willing. They started betting each other, seeing what the other one could pull off. At first, the bets were for real money, a hundred bucks or so, but soon enough, that same hundred-dollar bill had been passed back and forth so often that it became a symbol, a trophy more than an actual bet amount. The first challenge that Tris gave Boyd was to see who could screw their math teacher—a soon-to-be married young woman of twenty-four who'd just started teaching the year before and gave just about every boy in her class a nice set of blue balls along with his homework. Tris was able to bag that one, along with video proof, of course.”
Chris grinned, and I was starting to feel sick to my stomach, not liking where this was headed.
“Even after Boyd had to move away, the two boys kept up their little game, emailing proof back and forth. Some of the proof ended up on the Internet, of course, but the boys were careful, making sure that their faces or voices were never identifiable in the videos. Some of the games were dangerous, but both of the boys eventually found a prize that they both enjoyed. That was in finding a woman or girl who at first would say no, then with some convincing, whether a little or a lot, would end up on her knees, begging for it. Then . . . well, then it went up a notch.”
“Like how?” I asked, my throat dry and parched as I saw the true Chris. I'd seen him before, of course, but it’d been in firefights—in combat. I thought it was just the side of him that every soldier had. As Shakespeare wrote so much better than I could think of putting it,
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility,
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage,
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect.