The Red Bandanna

by Tom Rinaldi

  Instead, he was going to Boston College, a place he’d come to love quickly and play for proudly. The Ivy League would have conferred a prestigious degree, sure. But BC would lead to invaluable connections and memories, and, perhaps, to a hell of a lot more fun.

  Before going, Welles left behind that quintessential snapshot of a student’s high school experience, the senior yearbook page. His stated ambition? “To make the best of everything, to sail around the world with the woman I love, and to paint my bumper.”

  • • •

  Historic. Idyllic. Gothic.

  Private. Sheltered. Favored.

  Whatever the archetypal college campus image, Boston College fills out the picture handsomely. The stone towers watching over quadrangles of green, the ivy climbing in witness, the residue of aspiration covering every bench and footpath with dew, it was a place founded through religion and endowed by success. A walk across its campuses reinforces that notion—in the beauty of its buildings, the silence of its libraries, the solemnity of its museums.

  Six miles west of downtown, the Chestnut Hill campus covers 175 acres, with more than 120 buildings and halls, draped across a hilltop overlooking its namesake reservoir. Known locally as The Heights, on a fall afternoon or football Saturday its property is as intoxicating and alluring as youth itself, when youth has opportunity to explore, and advantage to exercise.

  The class of 1999, more than two thousand strong, arrived on campus in the late summer of 1995 as most freshmen tribes do—high on autonomy, terrified of freedom, and hoping to fit in. There were mixers and orientation, academic registration and class sign-ups. And there were housing assignments, the single largest lottery piece in a student’s arrival. A freshman dorm floor is a periodic table, a social experiment governed by forces not yet charted, the interactions impossible to forecast.

  Welles was assigned to Duchesne East, not an ideal spot geographically. Duchesne East and West sit among a cluster of dorms on the Newton campus, separated from the heart of the college grounds, and typically requiring a shuttle ride to classes. It was widely seen as the worst of the freshmen spots to draw, and many there put in for housing transfers as quickly as they could, hoping to move to the lower, middle, or upper campus by second semester, to be closer to all things academic and social. Welles wanted to move too, but understood he was stuck for the first semester, at least.

  There was an advantage to having a precast identity to rely upon as an incoming freshman. In the first meetings and initial impressions and sizings up that formed the first few weeks of life in college, Welles possessed an answer to the question that came after Where are you from? He knew what he was into, and at any given moment, he was usually carrying the evidence. Welles came to Boston College to compete in Division I college lacrosse, the sport he loved most and played best. There were other pursuits, of course—earning a degree, finding a girlfriend, building a ramp to a career—but as a freshman those were in the ether, across the other side of four unshaped years. Playing a sport at the highest college level was immediate. Its demands would lend shape to his schedule, purpose to his days, and progress to the calendar. It would also provide a ready-made batch of friends. With sticks.

  Johnny Howells, a classmate who would live with Welles in his senior year and become one of his closest friends, remembered the first several times he saw him across campus outside a quadrangle of dorms. Each time, Welles was carrying a lacrosse stick across his shoulder, twirling and spinning it by reflex, its webbing in constant rotation. Howells knew little about the sport, but figured Welles for a good and speedy player, given his lack of size. Welles was still small, five six or five seven and barely 150 pounds. If not dwarfed by many teammates as an incoming freshman, he was certainly in their shadows.

  The Eagles’ program wasn’t in the same strata as Hess’s Princeton, it wasn’t a national power, but it was Division I. Despite his size, Welles’s tenacity earned him the chance to continue playing.

  “Welles got it,” said Ed Moy, his lacrosse coach at BC. “He considered it a privilege to play for the Eagles, even though he wasn’t on scholarship or on the front page of the Boston Globe.”

  Not everyone cared about lacrosse, of course, or about where Welles was from or what he was into. Different elements, different orbits.

  Two orbits collided late on a Friday night in Duchesne East in November of Welles’s freshman year. By all the obvious signs, Welles was adjusting to college life well. He liked a lot of the guys on his floor, was excited about the spring lacrosse schedule, and was handling his class load well. As for the freedoms on campus, he was starting to explore. Drinking was a pastime for the majority of BC students, and the bars in Chestnut Hill teemed with underage students carrying fake IDs most weekend nights. It was a college hobby for many, including Welles. There was no VAASA pledge to honor, and no one watching if or what he drank. In the first few months of his freshman year, he joined friends and teammates, finding his preferences and his limits.

  Some classmates didn’t find theirs.

  On one Friday night, Welles and a few others were crowded into a dorm room on the floor, hanging out, playing video games plugged into the television, aglow in the light from the small screen. It was late, the room was loud, the door was open.

  Another freshman, coming back from a night of drinking at a nearby bar, walked inside, drawn in by the gathering. Looking around, Welles was easy to mark as the smallest guy in the bunch. Even sitting down, he looked slighter, thinner, without the muscle he’d pack on to his frame through training over the next four years. The interloper was drunk, loud, and aggressive. He started to mock the video game players.

  “Look at this bunch of pussies,” he said.

  The others looked at him. Someone suggested he go back to his room.

  “Go to bed,” one of his classmates said.

  The suggestion went ignored. The freshman continued and, looking around the room, he seized on the smallest guy there. He started in on Welles. For whatever reason, whatever the exact gibe or the precise posture, he got physical. The drinker reached over, grabbed Welles by the shirt, and lifted him up.

  That was it.

  Without bothering to say anything, Welles punched him across the face, pulled him to the floor, and got on top of him. He pounded him, at one point grabbing him by the ears and bouncing his head off the dorm room’s floor. He opened cuts on the other freshman’s face, knocked out one of his teeth, and in the process managed to break his own hand.

  Which was the reason for the phone call to Upper Nyack. It was past three A.M. Jeff answered.

  “Hello,” he said, only half awake.

  “This is Officer Gay, I’m with the Boston College Police.”

  Jeff’s mind rushed to every dark place a father might find in the middle of the night.

  “Oh, my lord, what happened?”

  “I just want to let you know,” the officer said, “I’m at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital with your son, Welles.”

  The hospital? He’s in the hospital!

  “They’re putting a cast on his hand,” Jeff heard. “He broke his right hand.”

  “Oh, my God . . . how?”

  “Well, apparently he was in a fight in the dorm.”

  Jeff asked right away, “Was alcohol involved?”

  “Not your son, but the other boy, yes.” Then the officer asked, “But we want to know if you want to swear out an order of protection?”

  A what? Against who?

  “Can I talk to Welles?”

  Welles got on to explain what happened, making sure to bring his father’s words back.

  “Dad,” he said, “this kid started the fight and you always told me, never start a fight but if someone starts with you . . .”

  There was a pause.

  “I finished it.”

  “Okay. Well, all right.” And then Jeff reme
mbered the officer’s question.

  “You want an order of protection?”

  “Dad,” Welles said, “I don’t need an order of protection. That guy is going to stay the hell away from me, as far as he can.”

  • • •

  After six semesters and three lacrosse seasons (he loved the guys, the practices, the games; a middling record and lack of championships was a whole other thing), Welles decided it was time to take a break. Not to relax, but to explore. Not on a different campus but another continent.

  Welles first met Chuck Platz in the summer of 1998 in Madrid.

  A business student at Quinnipiac College in Connecticut, Platz had already done a semester abroad in the city, where his family owned a small apartment, and decided to stay on through the summer, as part of an international summer program run by Syracuse University.

  For Welles, the move was a more surprising one. After spending his college summers working and hanging out in Boston and Cape Cod, New York City and Nyack, fulfilling the expectations of all around him—parents, coaches, friends—the chance to break the pattern of school/sport/job was appealing, even thrilling. He’d be far from the firehouse and the lacrosse field, separated from those who already had his identity sketched and measured. It was a chance to draw a different picture and discover another self. He’d talked some about studying abroad since arriving at BC, and the Madrid program seemed the right opportunity, as a business major, to study the concepts and functions of international markets.

  That was the academic mission. If there were also chances to dine on tapas and sip wine, to smoke the occasional cigar, and to experience the mysteries of Spanish women, this was all part of learning the culture.

  The first time the two met was at a program reception in a hotel across the street from the university. The group was chatting in a loose circle in the lobby. Most everyone was dressed casually. Having spent the previous semester there, Platz was dressed like a typical Spaniard. “Jeans that were way too tight,” he recalled, “with too many buttons.”

  Not Welles. He was in a navy blue Brooks Brothers suit and brown shoes, as if he were headed to a job interview or a board presentation after the reception. He was at once more formal and more forward than anyone else there.

  The two hit it off immediately. They were matched up as interns, and assigned to work together at Midland Gestion, an investment bank in the city. They spent their days learning the rudiments of financial research, learning how to evaluate companies. They reported to the president, Javier Carral Martinez, who met with the two young Americans without a set schedule, and appeared to listen to them earnestly, or, at least, good-naturedly.

  At night they spent time in the ancient practices of the student abroad: pondering their future paths in the States, and wondering where the next best bar stop might be.

  Both shared the desire to find a job in New York City after graduating, preferably in finance. What that job would be mattered less than where. Manhattan was not the setting; it was the point.

  All too soon, the program was ending.

  Uncertain when they’d see each other again, Welles and Platz downplayed their parting. Platz was staying in Spain for another month, and Welles was returning to his last year in Chestnut Hill, his final season with the stick in his hand.

  “I’m not really a fan of good-byes,” Welles said.

  It wouldn’t really be good-bye, as it turned out.

  • • •

  For the more than eight thousand undergrads at BC there were more than a dozen on-campus housing options—limestone halls or brick-faced dorms with names like Greycliff and Vanderslice, Thayer and Walsh, befitting the school’s architectural aesthetic. “The Mods” didn’t have the same ring to it, nor did they deserve it.

  Originally constructed as modular housing, the rectangular-sided boxes had a strange appeal despite their unsightliness. They were coveted by students wanting the off-campus house party experience while still living on campus.

  In the housing lottery, they were a prized pick for seniors of all stripes, and seemed to attract certain athletes in particular, like lacrosse players, and the friends of the players, and their friends a couple of times removed.

  As for what the accommodations were like inside, one resident summed it up:

  “They were . . . junky.” Cruddy also came up.

  Six students shared the same unit in a Mod, which connected to another unit, for a total of twelve housemates. It was an unwieldy but useful number, large enough to be a force for chaos, a gathering in itself, but also a gang big enough to allow for factions and subsets. You could join in or break off, depending on your mood or agenda. If the solitary pursuit of academic transcendence was the goal, this probably wasn’t the place to gain it. But if you wanted an experience that shouldn’t be replicated once the degrees were conferred, you were home.

  So it was for Welles and eleven others during their senior year, living in the Mods units 22A and 22B. There were Chris Gangloff and Ben Gird, Justin Patnode and Robb Aumiller, Scott Dunn, and George Leuchs. Leuchs remembered the first time Welles made a clear impression on him. After getting the housing assignment at the end of their junior year, the group had already put together eleven guys, and over the summer still needed to find a twelfth. Someone mentioned Welles, a known quantity as a lacrosse player, familiar to some in the group but not all.

  Welles planned to come by the off-campus house where a few of the guys were living, to talk. He came in, a sheepish look on his face, and immediately asked a question.

  “Um,” he began, “does anybody own a car out front?”

  The guys looked around the room. Why?

  “Well, because . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he held up a large car bumper. He’d just sheared it off trying to pull his van into the driveway.

  “He was driving around this big passenger van,” Leuchs recalled, “like one of those souped-up vans you drive around the country for the entire summer. It probably had a little bed in it.”

  The driveway next to the house was barely large enough for a small sedan. Trying to pull the van in, he miscalculated, failed to adjust in time, and in one seamless motion caught the bumper of the parked car and ripped it clean off. The aggrieved owner didn’t live in the house, which perhaps explained why Welles was unanimously accepted as the twelfth member of their senior Mod.

  In each unit, the six mates were split into three bedrooms. Welles bunked with Johnny Howells. They’d met as freshmen, crossing paths in dorm hallways or at parties. Howells, who’d grown up in Atlanta, was a bit of a Southern transplant, a rugby player. Not until the group formed in the Mod did any real bond grow. Quickly enough, they were friends—honest and close, needling and protective of each other.

  “Just spending that much time,” Howells recalled, “getting to know him day in and day out, and getting to know his family, that’s when I came to appreciate him.”

  But . . .

  “There were definitely times when . . .” He paused, and spoke in the blunt tongue of a friend. “He was annoying.”

  The irritation usually came from spontaneity. Welles was rarely more than a few moments away from the next idea. Let’s grab the T. Let’s head into the city. Let’s go to Newport. Let’s get a martini at a bar downtown. Late Sunday mornings were ripe times for these suggestions. To a hungover roommate, the proposals landed somewhere in the space between unwelcome and abhorrent.

  Let’s go horseback riding.

  Howells rolled his eyes and put his head under the pillow. Come on, dude. Leave me alone. Welles was rarely deterred.

  Looking back on some of those irritating moments years later, Howells had a different, almost doleful, view.

  “He always wanted to do more,” he said. “I just look back and I’m like, I shouldn’t have given him a hard time.”

  • • •


  He went out in style.

  Welles’s senior year.

  One January night in 1999. Holiday break was over; the final semester of his college career was upon him.

  The back end of that January had seen a stretch of fourteen consecutive days with higher than normal temperatures, peaking on the twenty-fourth at a balmy 62 degrees. But the stretch started after a turbulent cycle of temperature changes in the middle of the month. At one point, there was rain followed by snow followed by rain followed by a sudden 40-degree plummet across Boston and much of New England, the drop coming in a matter of hours, before the melt could be absorbed back into the saturated ground. The result that January 15 in the space around the Mods was a winter miracle.

  The grassy courtyard between the buildings had completely frozen over, into a two-inch-thick sheet of ice. In one day, a perfect rink appeared outside the back door. It was a freak occurrence. It was a pedestrian danger. To a hockey player, it was an invitation.

  But skating on the ice of an otherwise grassy yard was not adventure enough. To raise the stakes, Welles decided to take off his clothes, all the way down to the boxer shorts, the better to complete the scene. Out the back door he went, into a frigid midnight, gliding in easy loops and cutting crisp circles.

  Howells and a few others in the unit nearly fell down laughing at the sight. They also couldn’t help but wonder how far Welles would be willing to go. One opened the door and called him over. Welles, skin red, smile bright, fog blowing out of his mouth, made a sharp stop near the door. The next step was obvious.

  Bet you won’t take the boxers off . . .

  Done. It was no easy maneuver in subfreezing temperatures to remove one’s underwear while wearing blades on one’s feet, but soon enough, Welles was buck naked.