Big Brother is Watching You

‘Big Brother Is Watching You’ probably doesn’t mean the same thing to me as it does to you. Usually it has a political connotation, but to me it refers to a big brother in the family sense, nothing to do with what goes on in Washington or the global politics. Given my own family experience, I am a big advocate of getting to choose who we have in our family. Some of us got blood relatives we didn’t deserve. I count myself in that group.

Now to my story.

Gino and I almost met over a period of about four years. Really. Almost. By that I mean that we were in the same buildings, especially Crosby Hall, crossing paths on a weekly basis. However, meet as in meet face to face, we were close but no cigar. The most almost (is that grammatical?) we got was during the year I had class in Diefendorf Annex. The class was taught taught by Gino’s roommate, and both were teaching assistants. Meanwhile, Gino was teaching a couple of doors down the hall. It was a long, narrow building, somewhat like a trailer. 

We should have run into each other, should have met, but splitting hairs, you’d have to say we didn’t actually meet.

I didn’t know it of course, and had no way of knowing it because of that detail that we had not quite met, but Gino had gotten a job and moved eastward to a college in New Hampshire. I still had several years left, but I worked hard and was finally, dissertation in hand, ready to apply for jobs. I took a one-year position in the Midwest, just to see what that part of the country was like. I hated it. Felt land-locked. Less than a year and I was thrilled to move on, to another state that was just a little less midwestern. It was still not eastern enough, but I went anyway. That position was not going to be permanent either, I knew, so soon I found myself applying once more for teaching jobs in higher ed. 

Gino and I had still only almost met. I never thought about him because of that very reason, obviously.

There were many schools interviewing at the national conference. Fortunately, I had a good number of interviews lined up. Among the interviewing universities was the one in New Hampshire that had hired Gino. Of course I didn’t know Gino no matter how often we could have met. For that same reason I didn’t know where he’d gone. This is all very logical, right?

The interview was what revealed the two of us had almost crossed paths for four years and that my instructor for two years had been Gino’s roommate. The other two people also conducting the interview kind of threw up their hands and let us ramble on and on about the good old days back on the westernmost Edge of Pennsylvania. Pollution and all. 

I left the interview pretty sure they’d call me for an on-campus interview. Gino had already impressed me as very loyal to his roots, which in our case was a shared university. It meant we knew so well the same college kid haunts. (Were we sure we hadn’t met?) The call wasn’t many days in coming.

The on-campus interview at Gino’s university was in January. Northern New England from December 25 to March 25 can be similar to a refrigerator, as most know, and it did not underperform on this occasion. Nevertheless and despite the frigid weather that should have scared me away, the interview went well and I was offered the job before it was half complete. (Not really kosher, but that’s what happened. I think the chair didn’t want to pay to bring in another person for interviewing, frankly.) The chair’s offer didn’t surprise me because I felt like I had an ally in the Department already.

Then the official offer came. I turned it down because I was still waiting to hear from another college, closer to Boston. Maybe less snow, maybe not. There really wasn’t a lot of cultural activity where Gino’s university was, and it was boredom I feared rather than cold. They went on to hire number two on their list. I didn’t think twice about it.

A few weeks later, I was at a conference in Baton Rouge. Since we were in the same discipline, it was logical that I would run into Gino again. We went to each other’s sessions, then decided to have lunch together. It was over creole style stew and grits that Gino told me how another position had opened up in his Department. He couldn’t help himself: Was I interested?

“I might be.”

I am still not sure why I answered that way. Perhaps I feared having to take a job west of the Midwest I had not liked the first time around. It would seem like the edge of the world. I might slip off the edge at any minute, ocean or not.

“Let me know.” Gino’s expression was still friendly.

Yes, he was just an all-around nice guy. Straight-talker, optimistic, no pressure. I liked that about him. That and our shared college history. It really did seem like we had met before, in Erie, Pennsylvania, but even if we hadn’t, we were starting to invent, to sculpt that encounter, with the memories we managed to splice together. At lunch we had continued to scrabble for stories. (Later I would find out that Gino had gotten ill from something in his shrimp dish. We didn’t see each other again at the conference.)

The second offer from the small university in New Hampshire came by telephone, not as the more traditional paper document you used to receive back then. The Dean wanted to know if I was playing with them or serious. It would be embarrassing to be turned down twice by an applicant, of course.

The second time around I accepted and was hired in record time. It seemed that in less than a month, although it was just over three months, Gino and has wife were welcoming me into their home. They had invited me to stay with them while I looked for a place to rent. It was a small town, but it took several days. They fed me and had people over to meet me.

It should be clear by now that Gino and I were on our way to becoming fast friends. It was a slow but steady development. We were quite different in many ways, but the idea of ‘nice’ never faded; it only became stronger. Gino’s humble self-confidence was a special quality. Nobody could resist it, even in a cut-throat group like our Department. He probably had them all confused, because he wasn’t going to get involved in the pranks those educated adults pulled. Hurtful, damaging pranks. Ones that drove at least one person mad. 

Gino’s willingness to ask for ideas or assistance was also a rare quality. He might be self-confident, but there wasn’t a milligram of arrogance in him. He had also failed to learn deviousness despite already having been there for several years, while I was elsewhere trying on jobs that were also a bad fit. This one was, too, but it was different, because I had Gino.

I learned a lot from my big brother. He was passionate about theater, about the concept of acting, of being on stage and playing a role properly. I had never thought much about that, but so many quotes started to slip into our conversations. That was another of Gino’s talents: He could pull quotes out of the air at the perfect moment, with precision timing, and a couple of times I’d burst out laughing, my coffee splattering back into my cup. We shared many cups of coffee.

I wasn’t very experienced in dramatic quotes, but did insert a few of my own at times. As the years went by, one became more and more meaningful. When in doubt, turn to Shakespeare:

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts

The world, our world, was the building where we taught most of our classes and went to meetings. It was a world that turned threatening and vicious after only a couple of years. As the wolves closed in, we two fast friends became even faster friends. As that happened, we spent more time together. That included e mails. We laughed as I, the night owl, would read an e mail from Gino just as I was going to bed and he, the lark, was getting up. Those exchanges were important; they were part of the armor we’d created to save our skins.

We went to lunch at least three times a week. Those were the days he taught but I didn’t. However, I’d go to campus just to see him, making sure he didn’t have to have lunch alone. The days we went over to the student union were chained together, you might say, by alternating “It’s my treat” - his term - or “My turn” - as I called it -. Somebody always owed the other a sandwich or soup or sushi, and so we kept the chain going for years. We never forgot to say it’s my treat or it’s my turn, though. That was the little thing that kept renewing the bond.

Gino had a nickname for me. He used my first and middle initials, although I never signed my name that way. Nobody had ever called me that. He might have done the same with his wife, but maybe not. I guarantee you there was nothing intimate in his calling me GA; it was like brothers and sisters might make up names for each other.

The best part of our fast friendship was our pantomime through the halls. It was like street theater and developed slowly, encouraged by our thrice-weekly promenades to the union at noon. Everybody saw us; we had nothing to hide. The students knew and admired our friendship. Too bad members of the Department with degrees didn’t.

We used to stick our heads in each other’s classes and we occasionally did a kind of improv theater for students, which was popular. The interruptions were never to take time away from teaching, but rather were inserted into whatever the other person was doing. They livened things up and got the classes to participate. They might last one or two minutes, then were over.

“Did you meet with So-and-So?” I might ask. We got into the habit of looking for each other in between classes, several times a day.

“Yes. We talked about…” 

We needed to check in like that. Information was what saved us. Comparing notes, knowing where the next stab in the back might come from. The threat was real, and we tried to be ready for whatever came our way. Occasionally someone else might be in on our exchanges, but not too often. When we passed information along, we sometimes would shut my door or his, deliberately and obviously. We wanted to let people know we were communicating. We hoped that would make people think twice. 

All we ever did was share information, I swear, but we consciously acted like we knew we were being observed, as if we had an audience. People needed to think we were up to something, even though we weren’t. We were simply huddling together - please, never touching, I mean it - to strategize, to survive. Funny how most people had no idea there as to how friendship and, just as important, solidarity worked. They really didn’t. I learned about those things to a good extent from Gino, who never wanted to hurt anybody. He just wanted to shield himself from evil.

Something about Gino that still makes me chuckle was his use of nicknames for everybody in the Department. I never would have come up with anything like that. Probably it was a good Macedonian custom of giving everyone an ‘alias’, something he’d learned from his parents. They were first generation and had taught him some great things from the old country. Well, mostly great, but some of Gino’s family had connections that were not to be laughed at. His descriptions of those people were hilarious. Good thing none of them heard him…

I don’t know exactly when the rumors about our supposed affair started nor who told me. I was stunned. With my big brother? And he was married. Say what you will, and we did talk a lot when we were both at work, but it was unthinkable to both of us. We were just drawn together by the almost-meeting back in Erie. And by what was going on around us. We never even touched, except a couple times. Oh, see, you say, I knew it. There was something between you two. Right. The touching was in the form of a hug when, after months of driving hours to see my ailing mother, she died. It happened again when his mother passed away and he had to tend to matters at home, also many hours away.

There was one other time we touched. It was when he had an episode at a solstice party organized by one of the good people in the Department. Gino and his wife were there. People were mingling, pretending like everyone there was nice and normal, and then somebody noticed he had turned ashen. Gino’s wife, since she was in a wheel chair, was unable to react quickly. He was toppling forward, all color now gone from his face, no expression, just a far-away gaze.

Our hostess, bless her heart, got on the phone to call the paramedics. I looked at Gino’s wife and we silently agreed. Aware that people would start looking at me, that rumors could pop up, I, we, ignored them. He was still, and all I could do was to go stand on the other side of him, across from his wife, and clutch his shoulders. I moved my hands lightly, as if trying to get blood circulating. I was determined not to lose my big brother, my best friend. He survived, but never mentioned it again.

The examples of our friendship span quite a few years and don’t all need to be included in this already long list. Let’s just say that one birthday I asked him what his favorite color was. He sad red, so I painted him a picture and put it in a cheap frame. He hung it in his messy office (worse than mine) right away. Some of Gino’s clothes were a tiny bit odd, but I can’t tell you which ones. I think he had only three pairs of pants, by choice. He did have a salmon-colored shirt that he said he wore so the creeps in the Department would accuse him of being gay. He wasn’t, but he knew the closeted fellows were big on calling out the ‘out’ men. Neither of us could stomach their hypocrisy.

Family stories were fun. We told true ones and exaggerated or made up others, always aware of where the truth lay. Complete trust had settled into our friendship. We were incapable of betraying the other, we felt safe saying anything. Like I said, Gino was a big brother, the one I never had.

Also a big brother who helped replace the father I had lost too young. The people around us could never understand or accept that. We didn’t care. 

The day both of us left for other positions (we had never thought that would happen) was one of the darkest days of my life. We were going to miss each other and having had each other’s back for so long, we were fearful of knowing how to make it on our own. There had been an important lesson, however, a lesson we’d taught each other. I got the better end of the stick, though, because Gino had taught me, through his own love of drama and comedy, that on the stage we could fake it, be somebody else, escape, survive. Shakespeare had already said it, and we said it to each other as we both left for other pastures, greener or not:

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts

Big brother, years later, is still watching over me. That is a part he will never give up. I also checked once or twice to see if he still does his emails at 4 A.M. He does. He always answers me. 

Still.