Coming of Age

Epilogue

So much has passed under the bridge in the four years that have elapsed since that summer after our high school graduation.

With Troy out of the house that fall, Sarah Mazure, his mother, accepted a marriage proposal from Rob and moved to Switzerland with him. When she is not globe-trotting with her dashing husband, she devotes much of her time consulting with the World Health Organization, based in Geneva.

Johnny’s parents and mine remained in Hilldale, but Carlos took over management of the day-to-day operations of the farm, and Sam took up residence in the bunkhouse after his parents moved back to Philadelphia. He replaced Johnny as first-string wide receiver and burnt up the field. He’s now being touted as the next Heisman Trophy Winner.

Johnny, Troy, and I went off to our respective colleges, Johnny to Stanford, Troy to Julliard, and me to USC. When Johnny told me of his intent to complete his degree in three years instead of four, I took it as a challenge and pledged to beat him. For a fleeting moment I even considered daring to graduate with a higher grade point average (GPA), but I quickly realized that such a gamble would be foolish.

Johnny’s college football career started off much like his high school career. In high school he was put in the game when the starting wide receiver got injured. At Stanford he got put in when the starting wide receiver crapped out. The team was trailing 35-0 at the half, and even though Stanford still lost to Oregon, Johnny was able to pull his team to within 7 points, so he took over as the first-string wide receiver for the rest of the season.

At USC, our starting halfback just mysteriously disappeared halfway through the season. He later turned up at a small Baptist college back east. I never really knew what had happened, but practically every man on the team congratulated me on becoming the starting halfback. Apparently, even though the other guy was a pretty good player, for some reason he wasn’t really very well liked.

Johnny, Troy, and I used our Thanksgiving breaks to fulfill modeling and recording commitments. About the same time, Troy released his first album, Ben Cohen released his calendar, and Armando released his book Men of the World just in time for Christmas gift shopping, and all of them broke sales records. Armando told me later that whenever he would travel and see his book on display, it was usually opened to my page, probably because I had the biggest dick of all the models.

Troy was already a star and was well on his way to becoming a super star. Johnny and I were not yet considered celebrities as far as the advertising and marketing worlds were concerned, but that was about to change.

When Armando’s book came out and people started realizing that two of the models were now freshmen football players at Stanford and USC, a group of fundamentalist preachers went berserk. They demanded that we be removed from our respective teams and even expelled. But when early sales of tickets for the next season’s home games spiked, the presidents of Stanford and USC issued statements pointing out that their art departments often hired people to pose nude for courses in sketching, painting, and photography. They also said that they found nothing distasteful in Armando’s work. Finally, they pointed out that Johnny and I were adults and fully capable of making our own decisions about our modeling careers, and they implied that we had demonstrated more maturity than the complaining preachers.

The protest from the preachers actually accelerated our drive toward celebrity status. Sports Illustrated featured us on its cover with the heading “Big Men on Campus.” Of course, that phrase is usually applied to college men who are deemed to be very popular and perhaps even influential, but much of the chatter on social media also suggested that the term referred to the size of our dongs, especially mine. My teammates at USC never let me hear the end of that.

With our newly emerging stardom, Mike went straight to work renegotiating our modeling contracts. Volkswagen had initially intended to use me as an extra in commercials for Volkswagen and basic Audi vehicles, but after the release of Men of the World and our cover story in Sports Illustrated, they decided to feature me in ads for top-of-the-line Audi models and even Porsches.

Fiat rushed out a series of TV commercials featuring Johnny as a cowboy promoting Ram trucks. (He’s from Texas, so he must be a cowboy, right?) The first series followed a basic format in four parts, what were called Work, Motion, Play, and Emotion.

Work consisted of Johnny—shirtless, of course—performing a variety of tasks on a ranch (loading or unloading hay, firewood, fence posts, or other supplies or gear).

Motion showed him driving a Ram truck over rough terrain, dirt roads, or muddy trails or hauling a horse trailer. A segue flipped between shots of another cowboy (played by Sam—also shirtless) washing down the truck and Johnny showering—with the camera focusing alternately on close-ups of Johnny’s bare muscles and various features of the truck.

Play featured Johnny, now all cleaned up and dressed appropriately, picking up his beautiful date and taking her in the now-shiny truck to a line dance, the opera, a restaurant, a campground, or the beach.

Finally, Emotion showed Johnny retrieving a blanket from the truck and wrapping it around his date on a cold night in front of a campfire, lying in the bed of the truck looking up at the stars, or parking the truck in front of her house and kissing her goodnight on the doorsteps.

The commercials all closed with the tag line:

Whatever you want to do.
Wherever you want to go.
Whatever you want to be.
Ram!

Initially, Fiat had intended to limit Johnny to Ram and Jeep ads—especially since they already had Troy and Alessandro promoting their Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, and Maserati lines—but then Armando came up with another unique and creative idea.

In that commercial, a parking valet pulled up to the front door of an exclusive restaurant in a flashy Ferrari. When the valet stepped out of the car and held up the key, Johnny and Alessandro, approaching from different directions, reached out simultaneously for the key, which led to an argument about whose car it really was. Then the conflict turned to who was the better ball player and which food was better, Italian pasta or Texas barbecue brisket. Finally, as the two athletes debated which country had the most beautiful women, Troy walked up behind them, took the keys from the valet, and drove off in the Ferrari. That ad proved highly popular not only in Italy and the United States, but went viral on the Internet all over the world.

Based on the success of that ad and Johnny’s appearances on Silvana’s TV show as a knowledgeable person, if not an expert, on the intersection of sports and the arts, Armando created a three-part TV ad series featuring Johnny. The first ad showed Johnny pulling up to a museum at twilight in a Maserati convertible with his beautiful date in the passenger seat. The young couple sneaked into the museum after hours, and after Johnny showed his lover various paintings and sculptures of couples in the throes of romance, they began shedding their clothes. That commercial faded out on that lustful scene and closed on a shot of security guards inspecting the empty Maserati in the parking lot.

The second commercial in the series, which began airing about a month later, picked up where the first one left off, with the security guards at the museum questioning where the owner of the Maserati had disappeared to. Security cameras spotted the nearly naked couple making out on the floor behind a statue. When Johnny, now completely naked, heard the guards approaching, he urged his girlfriend to run to the Maserati and wait for him there while he distracted the guards. The camera followed her to the car and followed Johnny as he ran through the museum naked, evading the guards by hiding behind nude sculptures, Roman columns, and draperies. At the beginning of the chase, the bundle of clothes that he carried shielded his jewels from the camera, but when he accidentally dropped them and had to keep running, his junk was concealed only by the angle of his legs in motion. That scene closed with a shot of the girlfriend sitting in the Maserati and looking nervously at her watch.

The third and final commercial in the series, appearing about a month after the second one, picked up with the beautiful girl fretting in the Maserati and then more shots of Johnny running naked through the museum to escape the pursuing guards. Finally, he stormed through the exit and leaped (like a football player) into the waiting Maserati, speeding away from the scene. The series closed with the tag line, “Art Appreciation.”

The series was so successful that the company decided to add a fourth commercial. It starts out the same as the third commercial, but near the end we see the beautiful young woman leaving the Maserati and re-entering the museum to look for Johnny, who is still running naked through the museum with a security guard hot on his heels. Then, the camera focuses on a marble statue of a man and woman standing naked in a passionate embrace. As the camera pans down to the sounds of rapturous love making, we see two pairs of bare legs, one male and one female, sticking out from behind the pedestal. Finally, we see Johnny escaping in the Maserati with one of the handsome security guards, shirt unbuttoned, seated next to him, laughing and flying a pair of men’s briefs in the wind. The couple making love behind the pedestal were Johnny’s date and the other security guard.

By the end of spring semester, Johnny and I were millionaires with more endorsement contracts than Mike had and almost as many as Troy. That summer, we could barely keep up with the demands on our time. Of course, Troy was always in demand, and we rarely got to see each other.

Between football, classes, and posing for magazine ads and making TV commercials, I found the time to write a few short stories that received critical acclaim if not much else. All of that left little time for sexual escapades, so I used my engagements with other models on photo shoots to make up for lost time.

The spring of Johnny’s third and final year at Stanford and my final year at USC, was marked by several major announcements. Johnny was drafted in the first round by the Dallas Cowboys, but he announced that he was going to take a one-year leave to accept a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, where he planned to begin his pursuit of a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering.

It probably came as a surprise to everybody but those who really knew me when I announced that I would not be entering the pros but would spend the next year studying Irish literature and creative writing as a Fulbright Scholar at Trinity College in Dublin.

And most shocking of all was Mike’s announcement that he was retiring from football to marry Maria, with whom he would be opening a talent agency for entertainers and athletes, and that he would be enrolling in law school at Columbia University. Mike now sits on the board of Ben Cohen’s StandUp Foundation, and Maria and Troy continue to participate in fundraising activities for them as well as other organizations for gay youth.

Johnny and I both graduated from college in three years as we had committed to do. I should have bet him that I would graduate with a higher GPA because, much to my shock and amazement, I actually did. I graduated with a perfect 4.0, but Johnny fell just short because one professor gave him a B in a physics course. Many people speculated that the professor had a grudge against athletes because he had proven to be a poor one himself in his younger days, but the scuttlebutt around campus was that the professor retaliated against Johnny because Johnny refused to have sex with the man and his wife.

Our busy schedules don’t allow us to get back to Hilldale very often, but when we do, we try to get together with the guys from our old team. Their girlfriends and wives know all about the underwear parties and circle jerks, but they don’t seem to mind. Once, Johnny and I even had a backseat reunion with Cindy and Debbie.

During my year in Dublin, I wrote my first novel, which became a number one best seller and won several prestigious literary awards. Mike negotiated the rights to the movie, which won an Oscar for me for best screenplay and three for Troy, one as best actor in a supporting role, in which he played a sex-crazed night club singer, another one for the title song, which he wrote and sang, and for best music score, which he shared with Maria. Sam had a walk-on role and worked on the film crew.

In successive years, Troy and Johnny followed Mike on the cover of People magazine as the Sexiest Man Alive. When reporters asked if I felt snubbed, I replied, “Of course not. With the greatest brother and the two best friends in the whole wide world, I am the Luckiest Man Alive, and what could be better than that?”

When Troy graduated from Julliard the following year, he and I bought a villa in Tuscany and a penthouse in Manhattan. Our homes are filled with all sorts of honors and works of art, including sculptures and paintings as well as photographs from Armando’s gallery. My favorite of these is a painting that Mike commissioned for me. It depicts me as Captain America—Patrick Captain Fuckin’ America Murphy.

But the one item that means the most to me, the one I will always cherish is a triple-panel box frame that hangs in my bedroom. On one side is a photograph of the old oak tree back on the farm, on the other side is that very, very special blue bandana, and in the middle rests the note that Mike left for me that remarkably memorable day: “Tie a yellow ribbon ‘round the old oak tree. Your Bandana Bro.”

Final Thought: We all come of age through our experiences, not just with sex but with all of our relationships. How we handle these relationships defines what kind of person we are and what kind of person we grow to be—no matter our age.

Namaste,

Brock Archer