Men of the Skull Prologue 2025 draft.

 

Prologue (2025): “Let me tell you a story…”

Wednesday, July 2, 2025:  Trump administration restores $175 million to Penn after deal reached on trans athletes

 

Right.  This is the revised, updated, all-new, now with Pine-scent! prologue of a revised book you never read in the first place. 

 

Everything in this book happened. Or most of it did. The memories are real, even if the edges blur a bit with time. The names have been changed—some out of respect, some out of mercy, and some to protect the guilty. I haven’t exaggerated. If anything, I’ve softened some of it. It all depends “on a certain point of view.”

 

Last week

This is the story of my college years—two universities, two fraternities, two lives. One of them was real. The other was the one I tried desperately to live, with mixed results and bad hair.

 

In the original prologue, reproduced next, I wrote:

“Anyway, why in the world would I write about my college years? Who gives a damn? Is it a therapeutic assignment? Is it an attempt to exorcise old demons and ghosts and move on with my life? Is it an attempt to recapture the 1980s of my quickly ebbing youth?
Maybe a little of them all, I guess. I’m doing this because I think it’s a story worth telling- if only so I can get it all straight in my head. I want to learn from it."

        Well, that was Truth as I understood it in 2008.  I was in Pain- a deep, howling psychological pain- and I didn’t know why.  I tried to drink it to death.  Didn’t work.  So I’d write it to death.  I finished the first draft in summer 2008.  I sent it to editors, agents, and publishers and received some polite rejections.  Some were not polite.  Mostly though, I heard nothing.  I also circulated a few printed copies to friends for their feedback.  Still, there was that Pain I couldn’t drink away.  Not even my newborn daughter’s smile could assuage it.  (Ooo big word!) 

Then on Halloween 2008, it all changed.  Long story short, I dressed as Lois Lane (accompanied by my Wife’s Clark Kent) for a party.  I knew what was trapped inside me- my dark secret- but I’d managed to control it, erase it, for twenty five years.  I would be fine.

 

I wasn’t.

 

The psychic wall I’d built crumbled.  Driving home after drinking way too much (Wife and daughter drove separately), I felt at Peace.  All the pain, the anger, all of it… gone.  I looked down at my chest, expanded by a birdseed filled bra, and knew- I was in trouble. 

 

Fast forward to March 2014.  I’d been to therapy, support group meetings, thrown out of the house, lost a dear friend to suicide, almost followed her, I stopped lying, and Lance died.  What emerged from the ashes of a ruined life was Sophie- the person who had been silently screaming for decades.  I’ve also done a LOT of writing, for a blog detailing my transition, online columns, even the New York Times.  The voice I found writing the book was honed a bit.

This isn’t a trans memoir in the traditional sense. I don’t come out in Chapter 3 with a triumphant montage and a power ballad playing in the background. There’s no makeover moment, no wise mentor, no tidy resolution. Most of the people around me back then would’ve laughed—or worse—if I’d said the truth out loud. So I didn’t. I joined a fraternity. I chased girls. I learned how to chug beers and bury feelings. I tried very, very hard to be what I thought a man was supposed to be.

 

Spoiler: I wasn’t very good at it.

 

I didn’t write this book to make myself look good. I couldn’t if I tried. I was insecure, needy, petty, cowardly, and cruel when I thought it would keep me safe. I hurt people. I ghosted people. I threw good things away because I was afraid someone would see through me. And I hated myself for it.  For lying.  To everybody.  For my silence.

 

I hated myself a lot.

 

But that silence, that pretending—it’s part of the story.  It shaped every relationship, every misstep, every small triumph. If you read between the lines, you’ll see the cracks. You’ll hear the longing. You’ll understand the “shame” I couldn’t name because I didn’t have the words.  Or the courage.

 

And if you were there—if you knew me then—I hope you’ll read with grace. I don’t write this to embarrass anyone. I write it because the past deserves to be told honestly. Because I’m tired of pretending. Because, for all its flaws, this story is mine.  And if you deserve an apology, as some do, please know how sorry I am.   

 

The story is about brotherhood. About desire. About trying to belong in a world that felt like it was never built for someone like me. It’s about growing up in the 1980s, under Reagan, AIDS, and the eternal war between cassettes and vinyl. “Tastes Great” and “Less Filling.” It’s about Skull House and Crow House, about parties, betrayals, and those tiny moments of connection that made everything bearable.  It’s about the people who shaped me, whether they knew it or not—and probably wish they didn’t.

 

It’s about a college boy who thought he was writing a coming-of-age story searching for answers, and a woman who finally found her way back to finish it decades later.

 

And yeah, there’s music. Always music. If you want to understand the 1980s, you need to hear the beat. The Devil Inside that moved us all. 

 

What you’ll read is what I wrote Before, with a needed heavy edit, and with commentary and observations from After.  That After solved the puzzle.  That After has no more secrets.  And that before- that after- that’s where the Truth awaits.

 

Let me tell you a story.