Andrew and Jeff O’Bannon (Redmond)’s Relationship

Andrew’s relationship with Jeff O’Bannon, later known as Redmond, is shaped by an earlier act of homophobic violence that returns with devastating force when Andrew recognizes his attacker. The scar O’Bannon left on Andrew’s neck is both a physical consequence of the assault and evidence Andrew can point to when his identification is doubted.

The Assault and Its Aftermath

Nearly thirteen years before the cabin confrontation, Andrew was at a Boston bar with his friend Ritchie. Their teasing had turned into a playful negotiation over whether Ritchie would dance with a woman, despite there being no music; only the muted broadcast of a Celtics game played on the television. The lightness of the exchange ended when O’Bannon came up behind Andrew and called him a slur. Andrew turned toward the speaker, but did not see his face before O’Bannon smashed a beer bottle over his head. The blow cut a gash that required almost thirty stitches to close.

Andrew remembered the sound of breaking glass, a cold sensation across his head and neck, and then the floor rushing toward him. He was found facedown as people shouted. He did not remember getting into the ambulance, though he remembered insisting on sitting up during the ride. At the hospital, seeing Eric brought an unexpected sense of shame. When Eric asked what had happened, Andrew began to answer that he did not know, then stopped himself before he could turn the question into an accusation against himself.

O’Bannon later pleaded guilty. In court, he claimed he had been drunk, that Andrew had accidentally spilled a beer on one of his friends, and that he and his friends were looking for a fight. Andrew understood that account to be false. O’Bannon also repeatedly insisted that the attack did not represent who he was, a denial that could not erase either the violence or the scar it left.

The Assault’s Long Afterlife and Recognition

The attack continued to shape Andrew’s routines long after the wound had closed. Before boxing lessons and workouts, and before trips to the shooting range, he thought about what had happened. For the first couple of years afterward, sleepless nights often became hours of searching online for his attacker. Once he had exhausted the information about Jeff O’Bannon, Andrew looked through the lives of unrelated people with the same name: an art-department worker in Los Angeles, a middle-school social-science teacher in New Mexico who held monthly Looney Tunes parties for students, and a man listed in the 1940 census as living in Mississippi with his wife, three children, and mother. The searches became so consuming that Eric once woke to find Andrew asleep in a desk chair and gently led him back to bed.

Andrew eventually stopped searching and became less urgent about watching his surroundings in public, but the vigilance never disappeared entirely. In unguarded moments, he still turned over the question of why O’Bannon had chosen him. The slur had made the hatred behind the assault unmistakable, yet the specific act of selection remained opaque: Andrew wondered whether O’Bannon had recognized that he was gay, whether Ritchie might have been attacked had he been standing differently, or whether the choice had been a terrible coincidence. O’Bannon’s courtroom explanation—that the word meant nothing to him and was not intended to identify Andrew as gay—only sharpened the gap between his account and the violence Andrew remembered. The uncertainty was not about whether the attack was hateful, but about how O’Bannon had fixed on him.

That unresolved history returned when Andrew recognized Redmond as Jeff O’Bannon. Redmond’s shaved head, greater age, added weight, and swollen face had initially obscured his identity, but Andrew said he had never been more certain. Eric responded cautiously, saying Andrew might be right. The hesitation made Andrew press the distinction between a possibility and recognition: he knew the man who had attacked him nearly thirteen years earlier.

With the others present, Andrew identified the earlier assault and named Redmond as its perpetrator. Wen watched as he spoke; her blank expression broke, and she flinched and blinked hard. Adriane reacted with shock, then questioned whether Andrew might be inventing the story to influence their decision. Andrew considered pointing out the scar running from the base of his skull down his neck, but held back because the ropes had loosened enough for him to work his hands free, and he did not want the others inspecting him more closely. Instead, he insisted that they check Redmond’s wallet and license, which would identify him as Jeff O’Bannon. Adriane recognized the scar as evidence, while Sabrina said she believed Andrew had been assaulted. The old injury thus became more than a private reminder: in the cabin, it anchored Andrew’s identification of Redmond and forced the group to confront the history behind the man they had treated as one of their own.

Memory, Denial, and Recognition

The relationship is radically unequal in what each man carries forward. O’Bannon’s later account recasts the assault as a drunken fight and separates the act from his sense of himself; for Andrew, the attack remains an enduring fact whose motive cannot be fully explained away. Its original slur was delivered clearly and dismissively, not as an uncontrolled outburst, making the violence feel less like an accident than an assertion of who could be marked as a target. The contrast between O’Bannon’s effort to disown the act and Andrew’s continuing need to understand it leaves the two men joined by an event they interpret in incompatible ways.

Andrew’s repeated searches for Jeff O’Bannon’s name show how the assault persists beyond the scar. He pursued information about the attacker through sleepless nights, even after exhausting what he could find about the man himself, and the search reached into the lives of strangers who shared the name. That fixation gave the attacker an unwanted claim on Andrew’s attention, while Eric’s quiet act of leading him from the desk chair back to bed marked the violence’s effects as something carried within their household as well as by Andrew alone. Andrew later abandoned the searches, but not all of the vigilance they had accompanied.

When Andrew identifies Redmond, the private history becomes a claim made before witnesses who have their own connection to the man. Andrew does not rely only on certainty: he points the others toward Redmond’s wallet and license as a way to verify the name, while the scar supplies visible corroboration. The group’s reactions make the recognition consequential beyond the two men. Wen’s flinch, Adriane’s suspicion, and Sabrina’s distinction between believing that Andrew was assaulted and accepting who committed it reveal how testimony must compete with the trust Redmond has already acquired. Andrew’s history therefore alters the group’s understanding of Redmond, even as it cannot resolve the question that has followed Andrew since the attack: why he, in particular, was chosen.

The Relationship’s Asymmetry

The connection between Andrew and Jeff O’Bannon is not a mutual bond but an imbalance: O’Bannon’s single attack becomes a recurring presence in Andrew’s memory, while O’Bannon later tries to treat the violence as an episode that says nothing about who he is. Andrew’s recognition of Redmond collapses that distance between past and present, but it offers no explanation for why he was singled out and no assurance that O’Bannon’s account can be trusted. The scar makes the history legible on Andrew’s body; it cannot make the attacker’s motives transparent. Their relationship therefore remains defined by both what Andrew knows—the identity of the man who struck him—and what the assault left unknowable.