I had a dream the other night about my undergraduate roommate, Richard, the first "openly gay" person I'd ever known.  And about his early death in 1983 from AIDS.  For undergraduate school I went to the University of Northern Iowa, which was, while I was there, known as State College of Iowa, a change from its longtime name, Iowa State Teachers College.  I've never been one to think about what-if scenarios, since even the smallest change would, like the butterfly effect, alter the rest of my life, and I've been happy with my 67+ years.  (Henry James's "The Jolly Corner" is perhaps the best literary representation of what happens when the protagonist, somewhat dissatisfied with his life, confronts a ghostly and at first unrecognizable representation of what he might have become.)  But the one exception is that when I graduated from high school, I won a National Merit Scholarship and received letters from universities around the country.  I really had no context to make a judgment.  Since the guidance counselor at school said "we was" and "he don't," he wasn't going to be much help.  The few of my classmates who went to college went to either Iowa State, because it was ten miles away, or Luther, because that's where Lutherans from Story City went.  My choice of SCI, ninety whole miles away, seemed to me adventurous.  Still, I allow myself occasionally to wonder what if?

SCI/UNI was still primarily a teachers college.  We were all inculcated with one "truth": there were three great schools of education in the U.S.: Columbia, Chicago, and ISTC.  Like almost everyone else, I signed up for education.  I remember taking two courses.  The first, Teacher and Child, was a five-hour course that met every day from 4-5.  The professor, Dr. Thompson, told us that since we were all honors students, we should just meet on our own every day and produce a paper at the end.  He never came to class, and soon neither did we.  As I remember it, at the end of the semester, he gave us all B's as punishment for being slackers.  The second was another five-hour course taught by Dr. Nelson, a tiny, red-haired woman, who had a temper tantrum in every single class.  After those two classes, among the most worthless I ever took, I dropped education, also having learned that to teach in college, you didn't need a teaching certificate.

The first year I was at SCI, there was a housing shortage, so there were three of us in a room designed for two: one bunk bed, another single, one closet with four drawers underneath, one desk, and a sink.  The telephone was in the corridor, and the communal bathroom and showers were at the end of the hall.  There was no TV, no mini-fridge, none of the conveniences that students today take for granted.  But the three of us all got along and had a great time.  Richard, his identical twin brother, and another guy were in another dorm, but the six of us did most things together.  The fact that Richard and I were gay went unspoken, but at the end of that year, when housing opened up, the six of us split into three rooms with Rich and I living together.  Neither of us had the sine qua non sexually that the other demanded, so there wasn't a sexual subtext; we were just great and inseparable friends.  I was still closeted.  Richard was definitely not.  He was among the funniest people I've ever known.  Once, when he came to visit me in Story City, where my house was on a dead end street with no curbs and no traffic, as my mother and I watched from the living room window, he spent a good ten minutes pretending to have difficulties parallel parking--backing in, pulling out, trying again, maneuvering the car between other imaginary vehicles.  My mother was a giggler, and Rich had immediately found a fan.  I remember a letter he wrote when he was in the hospital in Los Angeles suffering from AIDS.  A nurse gave him a cup of liquid and told him to take it in his mouth and swish.  Richard wrote, "She obviously had never seen a gay man swish before." 

Rich and I often played bridge (very loosely speaking) in the Commons during breaks from classes.  The games were never very serious because Rich's favorite bid was seven no-trump, no matter the strength of his hand.  Another friend, Phil, and I, however, began going to duplicate bridge sessions where the play was much more serious.  We entered tournaments and won master points, and we took bridge very seriously.  After undergraduate school, I played bridge exactly three more times in my life, all three with couples who made the experience unpleasant by screaming at each other and, in one case, with the wife throwing the cards at her husband/partner.  One of the participants in the duplicate clubs was the Dean, and he and his wife occasionally invited Phil and me to their house for more casual Sunday afternoon games.  Someone--we never knew who--had told the Dean that Richard was gay, and the Dean called Rich into his office to tell him he was expelled from the teacher education program because gays should not be allowed to be teachers.  (So much for nostalgia about the good old days!)  I think I went one more time to the Dean's house, but I felt too hypocritical to continue.

After graduation, Rich, who had been a theater major, went to San Francisco, where he was convinced he'd be accepted by the American Conservatory Theater.  He wasn't.  He made do with part-time work, and after many struggles, he became a male prostitute.  I went to visit him once.  He lived in the Tenderloin in the seediest hotel I'd ever seen.  The hotel resembled a movie set for a depressing hotel: my room had a single, unadorned light bulb.  The bathroom was down a dark hallway.  I was scared to use it after dark, but luckily there was a sink in the room.  I didn't see Rich much because he "worked" nights and slept during the day.  I've never had a sadder visit, and I never saw him again.  Rich hung on this way for several years, and then one his friends got him a job in Los Angeles.  But by then it was too late: he had AIDS.  He didn't have much money, so he stayed at Los Angeles County Hospital until his parents finally took him back to the small town in Iowa where he grew up.  It's hard to remember the fear and shame that accompanied AIDS in the early eighties.  I wanted to visit him, but Rich kept putting me off: he didn't want me to come until he felt and looked better, though of course both of us knew that that was just an excuse since he was never going to be better.  I was fearful enough, I'm ashamed to say, that I pretended to buy into it.

In my dream, it is the present day, and I enter a restaurant in a sunny setting, and there is Richard as the maitre d'.  Although it's the present, we are still in our twenties, and the reunion is a joyous one.  Don't worry: I'm not getting soft.  The dream isn't a presentiment of some future meeting.  It was just a dream, but a pleasant one that reminded me of one of the most important and formative people in my life, somehow who died nearly thirty years ago, but whose presence lingers happily on.