Chapter XII: Grover Holds His Head High

All of the residents that lived on campus for more than five years had all been associated with the school back when Morgenthau was one of the most respected universities in the region. Winston had studied art history, The Professor was born and raised on the campus and Grover Ellis had been a sociology major. In fact, Grover had taken classes with The Professor, and the old man had taught him the most important lesson of his life.

Grover was a legacy. His grandfather and father were both Morgenthau alumni, and having achieved great success in their professional careers, they donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the school. The uninhabitable science building was named after Grover’s grandfather, who had started a successful medical practice in Grover’s hometown of New London, Connecticut. His father followed in his grandfather’s footsteps and joined the family practice after earning his degree from Morgenthau. Two generations of successful doctors had come from this college, and as an only child, Grover was expected to do the same.

But there was something about Grover that was never quite right. He knew it long before his parents knew it. He could never understand why certain things were expected of him. He had grown up in a very nice house, and had learned that he should always do as he was told. He was expected to get a job, so he started working at the family practice the day after his fourteenth birthday. He got his license the day he turned sixteen. He scored high on his SATs and was a permanent fixture on the honor roll. He didn’t have to do these things to get into Morgenthau—who only needed to see his last name to grant him acceptance—but he did anyway.

There were other things about life that never made a lot of sense to Grover. He ran with the overachievers in high school, and he kept participating in extracurricular activities when the rest of his friends were too busy hanging out with their girlfriends. His parents asked him who he was taking to homecoming, but Grover didn’t have a date, or for that matter, a girlfriend.

Grover didn’t like dances and he was already jealous of his friends and the amount of time that they spent making out with girls at the movies. He didn’t see having a girlfriend as a necessity, he thought of it more as a distraction. After he turned 17, things began to become clearer for Grover, and this sudden clarity had left him with terrified insecurity and increasingly crippling paranoia. He was becoming more aware of who he was, and more importantly, who he wanted to be with. He was not attracted to his friends’ bombshell girlfriends. Rather, he was attracted to his overachiever friends themselves. He tried desperately to deny it, but the more it became clear to him, the more he began to assume that everyone could see it, as if it were tattooed in bold-faced type on his forehead.

But nobody suspected anything out of the ordinary from Grover, who was a lanky, but not Lurchy teen that had a bright smile, a nice voice and pleasant demeanor. As Grover got increasingly paranoid, he started trying to overcompensate for the insecurities that he was experiencing. When his friends went out and chased girls, Grover chased along with them. If one of his buddies threw a party, Grover would put on his dancing shoes and have fun, being careful not to drink too much and let his guard down. He acted tough, he talked wise and he charmed the hell out of every girl that he met.

He graduated at the top of his senior class, accepted a big scholarship from Morgenthau and spent the entire summer before college pretending to be somebody that he was not. Two weeks before their respective universities would separate them, the overachievers headed out on a road trip to The Hamptons, where they had rented a beach house for their final week together. Armed with trust-fund bank accounts, realistic fake IDs and hefty allowances, they barnstormed through the yuppie paradise and invited dozens of club-hopping girls back to the beach house every night. His friends drove faster cars and wore trendier outfits, but in his weeklong, alcoholic haze, Grover was the life of the party.

Grover had always enjoyed being the wingman, distracting the ugly and annoying friends of the pretty girls long enough so that his friends could swoop in and steal them away. He was damn good at it. Over the course of their last year in high school, Grover had racked up more assists than John Stockton. Although he primarily did it just so that he could always be seen talking to a girl, his friends viewed it as selfless sacrifice. He had always taken one for the team, and they respected him greatly for it.

On the final night of the Hamptons road trip, Grover’s friends set out to reward their friend for his gallant service in getting them serviced. Each girl that they came up to was pushed onto Grover. He was not used to being pursued and he began to panic, fumbling his words, trying hard to be as quick on his feet and not let the cat out of the bag.

“Relax baby,” said one of these high-class party girls, “Take it easy, let’s get a little more comfortable.” Before Grover knew it, he was doing lines of blow with some of the most beautiful women in the world, and started getting very affectionate with a blond-haired bimbo in a slinky black dress. She kept rubbing his knee as they sat next to each other on the couch, and leaned into him, kissing his neck, tonguing his ear and whispering all kinds of filthy nonsense.

To his friends, that night was a celebration of their friendship. They had set out to make faithful, dependable Grover a man. To Grover, he felt like he was under attack. He had to perform and perform well. Any slight slip-ups might lead to rumors, to assumptions, to gossip and humiliation. As the blonde dragged Grover up from the couch over to his bedroom, his friends clapped and hollered in celebration. Although they assumed the bewildered expression on his face was a result of the beer or the coke, Grover was utterly terrified.

But Grover was always the overachiever. Faced with the possibility of being outed and exiled from his group of friends, he sucked it up and rose to the occasion, albeit drunk and clumsily. It didn’t matter anyway, he was never going to see that girl again, and her opinion was not as important as the conquest itself, at least as far as his friends were concerned. The night was just another performance in his long line of false representations. It was an afterthought. He didn’t think about it until years later.

Once Grover got to Morgenthau, he was a lot more comfortable with himself. His hallway was populated with art majors and actors who didn’t care who Grover was, so long as he was himself. He felt a lot freer, as if the giant weight he carried on his shoulders had been lifted. He was still coy, just not as paranoid. When he visited home, he never spoke of any of his friends at Morgenthau.

He had met a few men through classes and others at parties. He had gotten drunk once or twice and had kissed a few of them, but he remained steadfastly prude when it came to getting more physical than that. At the time, AIDS was still a very real fear, especially in gay communities in colleges across America. Grover knew that. He had to; he was pre-med.

Although he secretly wanted to be an adolescent psychologist, Grover was a quickly rising star in Morgenthau’s School of Medicine. Some of these accolades were based on the fact that his knowledge of anatomy and biology was legit, but for the most part, he was the rising star because his name was literally on the front of the science building. His life had all been scripted, and he was simply running through the scenes.

So, on the day that the prestigious internships were to be awarded to the top students in the program, Grover was not at all surprised to be called into his advisor’s office for what he assumed would be a congratulation and a brief orientation.

Grover, who was always sharply dressed in dress shirts and slacks, took a seat in front of Dr. Roland Salisbury, his academic advisor. He was always modest, but Grover couldn’t help but sport an anticipatory grin on his face, in preparation for the good news that was soon to be delivered. But when he looked at the face of his advisor, Grover saw a disconcerting frown radiating back from the man in the white lab coat. He was holding a blue folder with papers stapled together. He leaned back in his chair, patted the folder against his desk three times and took a few deep breaths. Grover’s grin vanished quickly.

“Grover…” said Dr. Salisbury, who never referred to any of his students by their first name, “I’m just going to come right out here and say it…” High-pressured fear pulsated through Grover. Had they found about the drama major that he’d hooked up with? Had someone accused him of plagiarizing a paper? Had his father been killed in a tragic accident?

“Grover,” said Salisbury grimly, “You’re HIV-positive.”

It was a death sentence. He felt like he had just been shot in the stomach. The bullet had blown a gaping hole in him, and all of his dreams and hopes began pouring out onto the floor and circling down the drain forever.

Before he could even usher out a contentious ‘How could that be possible,’ he immediately flashed back to the night in the Hamptons some three years earlier. Who knows how many coked-up party boys that blond girl at the party could have slept with. Who knows if she was shooting H backstage at rock concerts with drummers and roadies. He didn’t even know her name. He only slept with her so that his friends wouldn’t think he was gay. He had denied himself any pleasures with the men that he was truly attracted to for this very reason. He was going to die. To make matters worse, everyone would now know who he was, even if that girl had infected him that night in the Hamptons. People would know.

A routine physical had caught the virus. Grover could not practice medicine with it. He was out of a job. He was out of a major. He would be lucky to keep his scholarship and declare a new major. He would be lucky to survive at all.

Everything was crumbling around Grover. Word traveled fast. It was the beginning of his junior year when he learned of his diagnosis. He wanted to tell his parents himself, but a colleague of his father’s on the School of Medicine’s board had told his father. It was only a matter of time before people in New London heard about Grover. The gossip caused the family practice to lose a dozen patients. Grover’s hometown friends—who suddenly claimed to have known all along that he was gay—got tested, having slept with 10 times the amount of women that Grover had. They all came back negative. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, rumors began swirling about the impending doom of the college itself. Even if Grover stayed in school, he might not have a school to go to.

He had fortunately maintained his scholarship thanks to his good marks, but it would only last for one more semester. He would have to pay Morgenthau’s staggering tuition and room and board because his parents had revoked all of their financial support in shame. Grover could not afford the drug cocktails he would need to curb the virus. He was finding it hard enough to afford to stay in school.

As the semester wore on, Grover faded deeper and deeper into invisibility. He had a good deal of friends on campus, and a lot of them had reached out to show him their support. But Grover was so ashamed of his condition, and he became increasingly paranoid that everybody was talking about him behind his back. The more he closed himself off, the more friends he lost. In Grover’s head, he was walking around with a giant sign over his head, and a crippling weight on his shoulders.

He had transitioned to sociology after he was shut out by medical school and started taking a few classes taught by The Professor. With the number of academic programs being slashed by the college, a large group of students had packed into The Professor’s lecture hall. Grover understood why some people chose not to sit next to him. On one particular afternoon in The Professor’s lecture hall, a tall, young female student walked around the front of the class looking for an open seat. There was an open seat next to Grover, but she refused to sit in it.

“Miss Hardy, there’s a seat right there,” said The Professor pointing to the open seat. The girl knew who Grover was. She kept looking at the jam packed rows above him.

“Miss Hardy,” repeated The Professor sternly. “There are no other seats, please take that one.” The girl let out a disgusted sign and moved carefully around Grover, making sure not to touch him and holding her breath the entire time. As she sat, The Professor began his lecture, speaking in his bellowing, almost operatic voice.

Grover had finally found his winter jacket, which was buried under a pile of clothes in his room. It was still a little musty from being tucked away for several months, and as he reached in his pocket to pull out a pencil, he let out a big sneeze, which he caught ably with his right hand. Hearing the sneeze, the young Miss Hardy jumped up out of her chair, bumping into the student next to her and letting out a horrified yelp.

The Professor, who was already upset at the late start to the class took off his glasses and glared at the girl. “Miss Hardy, what the hell is your problem?”

“He just sneezed on me!” she yelled, “That queer’s got AIDS and he sneezed on me!” she yelled, wiping her hands on her shirt. With this, a hearty mumble started to emanate around the classroom.

Grover stiffened his upper lip, sat quietly in his chair, pulled a tissue from his bag and blew his nose. He quietly rebutted, “I didn’t sneeze on you Corinne.” Slowly, a few meathead jocks that surrounded Grover started to move away from him, picking up their books and sliding as far as they could away from his seat. One student got up and moved to exit the room.

“Excuse me, Mr. Ricks, where are you going?” asked The Professor.

“I need to go wash my hands,” said the meathead sitting directly behind Grover.

“No!” yelled The Professor. “Sit down!” His voice silenced the mumble among the students in the crowd. Mr. Ricks sat down, but Miss Hardy refused. “Miss Hardy!” he yelled at the girl who grumpily sat back down, but on the furthest edge of her seat.

The Professor wiped his brow with his forehand and looked out at the jam-packed crowd in his classroom. “You two make me sick,” said The Professor in a subdued and disappointed tone. “You have no idea… you have no fucking idea.” The Professor walked over to the front desks and stared at the sour-faced girl. “Miss Hardy, if you do not sit completely in that seat right there, I am going to ask you to leave this classroom and not come back.” With that, she slid fully into the seat. Grover, who was furious at this kind of attention being paid to him, sat in stoic silence.

“The real diseased people in this room are the those of you who have made your classmate an outcast!” said The Professor in a sweeping crescendo. “It is YOU who are dying inside, not him! If I so much as hear one more student in this class make the slightest wisecrack or a sophomoric joke you will fail for the semester and you will have to wait until next year to take it again...” The Professor paused with a sigh, “…If there is a next year.” He looked briefly at Grover who had let a single tear escape the ducts of his right eye.

Grover closed his eyes and hung his head. He could hear the girl next to him get up and leave the class. In Grover’s head, her singular footsteps sounded like a mass exodus fleeing Grover and his terrible affliction. Once she left, The Professor resumed his lecture and did not discuss the issue any further.

Upon the end of the class, The Professor instructed Grover to stay in his seat as the students departed the tense atmosphere of the lecture hall. The Professor stood over him, looking at the shattered young man who had sat quietly in the front row taking notes.

“Don’t you ever hang your head in front of me,” said The Professor sternly. “Don’t you ever hang your head.” With that, The Professor exited the class.

Seven years later, as he wept at the bedside of The Professor the morning after he had taken his own life, Grover found the courage to hold his head high. He was tougher than his disease. He was tougher than his grief. He was tougher than his fear. He hadn’t lasted this long because he was on a series of virus-impairing medications, he had lasted this long because he refused to hang his head. If he had, it wouldn’t be the virus that killed him; it would be The Professor.