but for most of the rest of the year, it sat there empty. Zero and I used to sneak off to the shore house during the off-season. Over the course of almost fifty years, we’d assemble there now and again to listen to the ocean, to stare into the fireplace, and to take the measure of our lives together.
We went there as teenagers, where we smoked pot and drank Mateus Rosé. The place had an amazing smell: of sea salt, and suntan lotion, and hot sand.
We went there as college students, where we read Robert Pirsig and Rabelais in front of a roaring fire.
We went there in the lost years after college, with our girlfriends: Rachel and Tonka Pooh and even a girl named Colleen, whom Zero saw for a little while. On one occasion, Colleen claimed that she’d had a visitation by the Virgin Mary. For a while it looked as though Colleen was going to have a whole transformation in the wake of this miracle. But it didn’t take.
I went to that house with Deedie the New Year’s after we got engaged. Years later, when I came out as trans, I gathered there with Zero and my other best friends from high school, John and Link. I sat before that same old fireplace as the boys I had known since childhood took a good long look at me, a little cupcake at last.
We went there the year we turned fifty. We went there when we turned sixty. When I am dead, I will be hurt if my friends don’t gather there once more and tearfully raise a couple of jars to my insufferable genius.
For many years, there’d been one constant during our debriefs at the shore, and that was Alex. He had come there when we were all a bunch of wild-eyed hippies baking Duncan Hines yellow cakes while listening to Elton John. He had come when it was Zero and his young wife, Eve, and me and my girlfriend, Rachel; he had come when Zero was single again and it was me and my wife, Deirdre.
And on many occasions, he had been there when it was just me and Zero, two boys (sic) who had met each other on the first day of summer school, June 22, 1970. It had been my twelfth birthday. There we were, at two desks next to each other in the large study hall, in a room with long cords dangling from the window shades, each one hilariously tied by the schoolboys into a noose.
On Saint Stephen’s Day 1978, I had sat in the living room of that shore house as human skulls emerged from the flames in the fireplace and circled around my head like orbiting meteors. Then they asked, How much longer do you intend to remain content?
Alex came over, concerned. He put a tennis ball in my lap and then gave me a look. Remember, he said.
I held the tennis ball in my hands, then looked at the flaming skulls. A little longer, I told them. Then Alex and Zero and I had gone outside and walked along the crashing ocean. I threw the ball. Alex brought it back.
In some ways, what I learned about love from Alex was the same thing I had learned from his master: that the truest measure of devotion is not complexity but constancy. It was as if we’d given each other tenure. Even during times when we were mad at each other, even not speaking for a few months in 1984 (Zero and Rachel didn’t get along), we always knew we would eventually find our way to each other once more.
Alex was like that, too. If the wandering hippies started to drift too far from the shore, he’d bring them back. If you stared too long into the fireplace and dancing skulls emerged from the flames, Alex would appear and drop a tennis ball into your lap.
He was good at retrieving, to be sure, and he’d bring you back a stick or a ball or anything else that you threw. But, like his master, Zero, a man I have loved for almost fifty years now, he was a retriever of people, too. Because of the grace of both my friend and his dog, I always felt that I could not be lost for long.
* * *
In 1983, Zero and I walked with Alex up on the high hill behind his house in Tully, New York. I was still working in New York and