Little Joe stopped still on the bottom step and looked up at these spectres, his ebullience and gaiety sucked back into tense reproach. The wolves positioned themselves at the top and bottom of the Currier House steps, huddling into their packs; a couple and a mob.

"What did you call me?"

"A faggot. So what," the preppie said indignantly. "You sure look it."

"You can't call me that. You fight me, pig," Little Joe retorted, obviously taking the whole incident far more seriously than his enemies. "You meet me here at midnight and I'll beat the shit out of you, you understand? Little Joe ordered, and the men across from him agreed with amused nods.

Too bad, I thought. This was the American conflict I had prayed someday to see: little guy in drag wheeling and kicking and crippling his clean-cut detractors, nylons ripping, wig flying off onto the ground, neck-ties shredded and doffed underfoot.

Little Joe went back to his room and prepared for the battle, shedding his clothes for t-shirt and jeans. He practiced crotch kicks into his door and smashed light bulbs with his Chinese numchuks. He took up his boxing gloves and pounded the tree out in the House courtyard for half an hour. "I'm ready," he sighed.

He awoke his roommate and summoned him to accompany him in case his enemy brought "friends." Little Joe's roommate was Big Joe, and Big Joe was 6 ft. 11 in. and 245 pounds. Big Joe told his roommate that it was all so silly, all these wolves grinding their teeth over an ill-founded sexual speculation. But he went anyway, wiping the sleep from his eyes.

Little Joe stood perched at the top of the steps and kept his eye open for a mob of black ghouls to come prowling out of the darkness with whips and chains. He waited half an hour. An hour. An hour and a half. And then he kicked at the asphalt as he had been doing all his life and retreated to his room.

He found his enemy sitting in the House lounge with his latest honey, Barbara of my green past. Barbara was giggling and laughing at her scrub-clean mate when Little Joe cuffed him on the back of the neck and told him to apologize. This time, the wolf sent the man scrambling up the tree, tottering uncertainly from a limb.

"What for?"

"You know what for. Apologize or fight me."

"Why should I apologize--it was just a comment."

"Look...I don't know what the trouble's about, but I don't see why I should apologize...I don't see any reason..."

"Oh eat it out, you fuckin' preppie wimp," Little Joe blurted and stomped away to his room where he would play Ramones and smoke dope until he was lulled to sleep.

IT KEPT rolling, on and on, like a juggernaut out of control. Traumas and ecstasies and illusion and disillusion, friends and lost friends, and then I heard someone call it "an emotional roller-coaster." While the most certain and directed subjects approached the maze with unswerving confidence and determination, others cried when they had to decide on their field of concentration, on their course selections, on what play they would audition for, on what publication they would "comp" for.