The Gilded Razor

by Sam Lansky

  I was awkward. I had no natural athleticism. I didn’t want to go outside—I wanted to stay indoors and read. I fantasized about being kidnapped, held captive by the brawny protagonist in whatever book I was reading. I liked to alphabetize my books and grow my coin collection, the latter of which my parents happily indulged. I subscribed to a trade publication for numismatists and ordered bags of old Lincoln pennies by the thousand and fished through them, looking for rare dates.

  Eventually I moved into my own bedroom. As my stockpile of coins grew, I began to worry that this would make us a target for neighborhood thieves. I envisioned armed gunmen padding silently up the stairs to my room, wanting to steal a valuable century-old penny. For my eighth birthday, to placate my anxiety, my parents purchased a large fireproof safe, which was installed in my bedroom closet. I was ecstatic. Hours flew by as I obsessively organized my coins into durable leather books. On blithe sunny afternoons while children laughed and played in the street, I closed the venetian blinds over the bay window that looked out onto the neighborhood and sat on the floor of my bedroom, counting my money.

  That was the same year I became friends with a boy who lived in the neighborhood, Brooks. He was a little overweight, like me, but built of stronger stock; I was malleable and too keen to please. One night, after my parents had gone to sleep, he wanted to sneak into the hot tub that had just been installed in the backyard; I said yes, not knowing how to say no. It was there that he put his hands, and then his mouth, on my groin. He was aggressive, and I was afraid but aroused, too, some fumbled fight-or-flight impulse turned erotic. His mauve nipples were buoyant on the sea of his suntanned chest, and he dipped beneath the water, grabbing my wrist, twisting and snickering. My hands scrabbled at the pebbled shelf of the hot tub, and he held my head down in the chlorinated depths, the slippery surface of a hairless thigh, and I came up from below to stare at a canopy of browning leaves and papery twigs swaying beneath a spooky-bright moon, gasping for air, his fingers like sea snakes.

  Maybe I yelped or my mother heard the splashing of water, but suddenly, I heard her voice calling to me from across the yard as she stood at the side door.

  “You boys okay out there?” she called sleepily. It was late.

  Brooks gripped my thigh.

  “Yes!” I called back in a high, strange voice that didn’t sound like mine. “We’re fine!”

  He let go.

  The next night, my mother came to tuck me in for bed. She tried to give me an Eskimo kiss, as she always did, but the secret burned in my chest, hot and shameful. I couldn’t look at her. I tucked my chin against my chest.

  “I’m too old for that,” I said. Something flashed through her eyes—some quick pain, as though I’d cut her—then faded to a lower-frequency sadness. Surely she had studied childhood development enough to know it was normal.

  Only it wasn’t normal. Brooks came over one more time that I recall, and my parents weren’t home; we were downstairs in the basement, where there was a side closet that housed my toys. We were in the closet together, Brooks and I, and I had fallen to my knees in front of him, and I wanted it to happen again, although I didn’t know why. Maybe it was the physical pleasure, even though it made me feel ashamed, or the attention—the thrill of being desired. I was telling him that I would give him anything, any of my Lego castles, any of my Disney movies, even this—anything from my coin collection—anything he wanted, he could have. I just wanted him to do it again—to violate me again, to validate me again. He looked at me. He was confused, disgusted. So was I, with myself.

  I had night terrors. When I closed my eyes I saw dark, murky tides of amorphous gray water. I sweated through my sheets. I wet the bed. I stayed up until dawn reading under the covers. One night, I heard my father returning home late from a business trip; I ran to the top of the stairs and asked him to come read to me until I fell asleep. I could see the weariness in his eyes, the exasperation.

  “Just go to sleep, Sam,” he said. I couldn’t trust him, either.

  My mother took me to a doctor; she didn’t understand why I couldn’t sleep. They pestered and prodded me, but I believed instinctively that this thing was too private to share, that neither of them would understand.

  My mother saw that I had changed, even if she didn’t know how to identify it. One afternoon, we sat together on the teal sofa in the living room. There was an art deco painting I always liked hanging on the wall, women depicted in rigid geometric lines. On the other side of the room, an unplayed grand piano sat beneath a window that framed a view of a pair of trees. She faced me while I sat cross-legged. She took my small hand and held it up to hers, and I felt the pressure of her slender fingers against mine, the cool gold of her wedding ring. Her skin was soft, and she smelled like lavender from the bath she had taken.

  “Sam,” she said, “I want you to remember this moment for the rest of your life. I want you to remember how small your hand is against mine.”

  I did remember, still, but the memory had grown more difficult to access over time. There were moments where I wasn’t entirely sure if it had ever happened at all.

  Quickly, it felt like there were so many secrets. I could feel what had happened with Brooks growing in my belly, rotting and tumescent; I had not known that I could have a secret life from my mother, experiences to which she was not privy, and it exhilarated and horrified me in equal measures to learn that this was possible. There were moments of thrilling joy in this newfound autonomy—the winter afternoon when there was a blizzard and I was walking home from a friend’s house and the streets glowed white and empty and I stopped on the lawn of a nearby church and made a snow angel, alone, laughing, just because I wanted to and because I could.

  And then there were secret moments that chilled me in another way, felt connected to the Brooks thing through some imperceptible webbing of dark matter that lurked just beyond my field of vision. Another day, after school, by that same church, when I was nine or ten, I walked past a parked car with the passenger-side window rolled down. Inside, I could see a man, his hand in his pants.

  “Hey,” he called to me. “Come here.” I had read a novel where something like this happened; the main character (a bright young boy—like me, I thought) was kidnapped and held as the sexual captive of a charismatic pedophile. It had sounded thrilling, but the unglamorous reality of this sad old exhibitionist was much less so. The idea of having a man’s undivided attention for that long was appealing. But not appealing enough.

  “Come here,” he hissed, exposing himself to me. “Come here.”

  I kept on walking.

  If I’d had fantasies about being kidnapped as a child, by the time I was seventeen, equipped with a fake but convincing New York State ID, I had no trouble finding men who would play along. With girlfriends or alone I would go to gay bars in Chelsea or Hell’s Kitchen. I flashed my ID to the bouncer, already spun out on painkillers and uppers. My rangy frame was compressed in skinny jeans, my face gaunt, my eyes gritty with sleep deprivation and hunger. What could be sexier than looking sick? I thought, sickly.

  I felt safe there, in the dim light of the glittering club, against the glossy backdrop of sinewy oiled men gyrating in G-strings, getting accidentally-on-purpose groped by men in white patent leather heels who gave names like Elvis or Stealth, deafened by the thundering clatter of trance music. One night, a suit—dusky blond, in his thirties, with Wall Street hair—clasped my shoulder.

  “Are you a model?” he asked.

  I laughed theatrically. “No,” I said, smiling, fawning, flirting. I looked at my reflection in the mirror above the bar. I got higher off the fantasy. I could be a model, I thought. (I couldn’t.) But my clavicle jutted from my chest, emerging from the V of a too-small button-up. My head teetered disproportionately atop my blue-veined neck, rosy cheeks pinched taut against my jaw. I was tall enough, over six feet. And this particular pickup line was so banal that it had transcended its own banality—he had to be using it in earnest.
r />   He couldn’t possibly think that I was stupid enough to fall for a line like that.

  “You should be,” he said. “You have that face.”

  This is the single greatest moment of my life, I thought. It’s all downhill from here.

  I held my clammy hand against his cheek.

  “You’re so sweet,” I said. “Buy me a drink?” And he did, and so I went back to his hotel, and it would not have occurred to me that there was any other option.

  I met men in bars. I met men at the gym. I met men through friends. But more than anything, I met men online.

  I had tired, by early in my senior year, of going through my own doctor for my prescriptions—I wanted a doctor who would prescribe me anything I wanted. One ad on an online hookup message board was titled “In Search of a Deviant Doctor.” In it, I wrote:

  I’d like to emphasize the fact that I’m not interested in engaging in a fantasy relationship predicated upon a weary doctor/patient cliché. I want a real doctor: Can I be the Rimbaud to your Verlaine? Smart, sensual Manhattan private school senior looking for a sexy doctor. Note “sexy,” which to me means no older than, say, 45, preferably clean-shaven, fit, charismatic, etc. I’m not into fetishistic role-playing, per se—but there is something indelibly attractive about a doctor, especially a doctor with a perversely sexual streak. Maybe it appeals to the repressed, idealistic Jewish girl in me.

  I concluded, “I live in Manhattan and so should you—preferably close to the park.”

  I was disappointed when this message didn’t field many responses.

  Had I been too glib? I wondered.

  Maybe it had just been too subtle. I needed to be more specific. The crystal meth epidemic ravaging the gay community was in full force, but “T,” as it was euphemistically called, didn’t really interest me. I’d run across enough tweakers to know to steer clear, and more importantly, I was abusing enough Adderall that even on the handful of occasions where I had taken a toot from the freebase pipe—the first time when I was fifteen, with a guy I’d met online, red-eyed and skeletal, and then a handful of other times when I was too drunk to say no—I hardly felt anything. Never mind all the hand-wringing about how addictive it was. Prescription amphetamines were a cleaner high. “Skiing,” or partying with cocaine, was risky, too—it often made me impotent. Increasingly, I was fascinated by the effects I could produce with cocktails of more obscure drugs: amphetamines and benzodiazepines, imidazopyridines and opioids.

  In a later ad, I wrote:

  I know everyone’s all crazed about T and hitting the slopes but you know, I’ve got more than enough energy to fuck all night—what I’m looking for are pills. Barbiturates, Valium, Xanax, Klonopin, Ativan, Halcion, Ambien, ’ludes (rare as they are), Darvocet, codeine, Vicodin, Tramadol, Percocet—not looking for anything specific, not looking to develop an addiction, just looking to experiment with all of those funny colorful pills. Am I the only one who just loves a safe night of off-label fun?

  It was this ad that produced a fling with a skinny artist in his midthirties who lived in Hell’s Kitchen and introduced me to the uniquely euphoric cocktail of cocaine and Ambien. The two synthesized to produce almost complete retrograde amnesia: a state of perfect, regretless bliss. Over a period of several months I saw him four or five times that I remember, which means that I probably saw him at least five more times in blackout.

  In our last encounter, I have foggy memories of falling down a flight of stairs at Grand Central Terminal and coming to in the elevator of an Upper East Side building in which I didn’t live.

  I told that story to my friends the next day and nobody but me thought it was funny.

  That should have been a bad omen.

  But still, I needed more drugs. Walking home after posting that ad looking for pills, I checked my email from my phone, awaiting more responses. Eagerly, I opened a new message.

  “I am a doctor if you care to chat, but I won’t supply any pills,” it read. “Just talk to you about addiction if you want.”

  I bristled. How presumptuous, I thought.

  There was a much more promising reply, though—from a guy who didn’t identify himself by name but wrote that he was a psychiatrist. “I know you said you didn’t like role-play,” he said, “but that really turns me on.”

  “I am many things,” I wrote. “Difficult to persuade is not one of them.”

  The next day, after school, I went to his office, in a brownstone on an Upper West Side street. He was fortysomething, stocky, with a reddish beard. I locked the door behind me and stripped down to my briefs, standing before him.

  “Get on all fours,” he said.

  I dropped to my knees and put my hands on the area rug, gripping its fibers in my fingers. He sat down on the couch and unbuckled his belt, then slid his hands in his trousers. Behind him, there were walls of bookshelves. I recognized a few of the titles from my mother’s library. She had been a mental health professional, too, but that felt like a very long time ago.

  I crawled across the floor toward him.

  “Just tell me,” I whispered. I put my hands on his knees. Suddenly, inexplicably, my eyes welled up with tears. I blinked them back.

  It didn’t feel good, this situation, but it felt necessary, for some reason I couldn’t yet identify.

  He looked down at me. “Tell you what, baby?” he said.

  “Tell me,” I said, gazing up at him. “Tell me who you want me to be.”

  By the time we left Princeton that evening, the drugs had worn off. A headache was beginning to pulsate behind my eyes. I felt weak and weary. I had buckled to the pressure and eaten a slice of pizza at a pub, some hole-in-the-wall my father had thought would be fun. I wanted the pizza out of my body, urgently, but I couldn’t get away from him for long enough to throw it up. It was too late, now, anyway.

  “Have we been here before?” I asked, standing with him at the check-in desk of a roadside hotel, a midscale chain where my father always had points. I had a feeling of dizzying familiarity, some déjà vu—the plastic wood paneling, an all-glass elevator overlooking a courtyard viridian with artificial plant life, perimeters of identical doors stacked on top of one another. I steadied myself on the countertop. My father looked at me funny.

  “No,” he said. “Not with me, at least. All these hotels just look the same. We stayed at one in Chicago last year, remember?”

  But the feeling was so powerful. Had it been Chicago? Or had I been in one of these hotels in the Financial District a week before with a guy I’d met online? I remembered the dimly lit lobby, the musculature of his back, his hands around my waist.

  Everything was starting to look the same; everyone was interchangeable lately.

  I shook it off.

  In the hotel bathroom, I changed into a T-shirt and the shorts I’d bought at the Princeton gift shop, black and orange and made of mesh, hitting just above the knee. I swallowed two Ritalin, then slipped a Xanax under my tongue, letting it dissolve slowly. My father was at the desk, working on his laptop.

  “I’m going to go work out,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, excited. “Is there a gym?”

  “No,” I said. “But there’s a pool.”

  “That’s nice,” he said. His eyes were glazed. Away from work all day, he had the look of a gambler returning to the slots after a too-long hiatus. He turned back to the computer. “I’m glad you’re making your physical fitness a priority.”

  I forced my face into a smile. My stomach gurgled.

  The pool was empty, solarium windows and an inky sky overhead. I swam a few laps halfheartedly, but I was exhausted. As I bobbed my head back up to the surface, I heard a noise coming from the steam room. I wiped my eyes and squinted. I could see an outline through the misted glass.

  I pulled myself up the ladder, spitting chlorine, and walked in that direction, leaving a trail of wet footprints on the cement. My heart was pounding. I opened the door.

  There was a man inside, a towe
l wrapped around his waist. He eyed me. I sat down next to him.

  “Water’s nice,” I said. He didn’t say anything. I smiled at him. My body temperature was rising. Suddenly, I felt liquefied, smooth and flirtatious. The drugs were hitting in exactly the right way. My heart was a hummingbird, its wings vibrating in my chest. I was not the boy I had been sitting in that car with my father, a petulant teenage waste—nor was I the overeager aspirant I had been on the Princeton campus. I was not myself. I was someone who surged with confidence, someone fearless and bold. I pulled off my wet shorts and stretched out, naked, extending my limbs like a cat awakening from a nap. He was probably forty, brunet, a broad freckled chest dewy with perspiration. He met my gaze.

  He opened his towel.

  My feet squished in my shoes as I walked quickly down the hallway leading back to the elevator. The Princeton shorts, after being wadded up in a sweaty ball on the floor, felt dank around my thighs. I rubbed my neck; he had put his hands around my throat at one point and choked me, not so much that it scared me but enough that I was gasping when he let go.

  Too rough. I knew my limits.

  I stepped outside from a side door and fumbled in my gym bag for a pack of cigarettes. It still amazed me that I could get away with this—that the kinetic escape of sex was so available, so ubiquitous. I lit a cigarette. My whole body felt tender. There was something running down my leg—was it water or blood? I checked. Water. He didn’t finish inside me. I had to go get tested, stop being so irresponsible. I had more Xanax upstairs, right? Sure. The night was too cold to be outside, sopping wet in just a T-shirt and shorts, the cherry of my cigarette glowing. I could see my breath. It all hurt.

  I shouldn’t have done that.

  Back upstairs, I slid my keycard into the door of our hotel room and entered. The room was darkened, my father reading by lamplight.