by Sam Lansky
In the bathroom, I did another few lines, and that familiar metallic clarity coursed through me, and I felt a surge of power, of numbness and virility, but I was already thinking about the next lines that would necessarily follow, and I wanted to freeze the instant, distill the high into something that I could take home with me and keep, but I could already feel the intangibility of that palpitating rapture slipping through my fingers—never graspable, almost like sand but not as gritty, the moment’s texture was wispier and more powdery. Like the texture of cocaine.
On the dance floor, a man with red hair whose name I didn’t know put his hands in my back pockets, the bulge of his erection suddenly pressing into me. I jerked like a marionette.
“Baby,” he whispered, and I felt his tongue caressing my earlobe, slimy. “Baby, let’s go to my car.”
I’d lost Kat. Where had she gone? Whatever. It had gotten crowded. All these gays home for the holidays, their miserable interactions with the families whom they hated, sneaking out for an escape, a fumble in a nightclub with a stranger before they went home to their childhood bedrooms. How sad, how awful. The man pulled me toward the door and I didn’t feel good about him, whatever darkness inside him was trying to take me away, or maybe it was the other way around. My heart was hammering in my chest in a way that felt alarming, even to me, and I turned back around to catch one last glimpse of the club. I wanted to etch the image into my mind, to remember what it had felt like to be there. I looked for someone I knew and thought with the same halfhearted resignation as always that if we got too coked out and he threw me down a flight of stairs or cut me up and left me in a dumpster, I wanted a witness, but Kat had gone and I didn’t know anyone there. I didn’t know anyone, and that was so much more frightening than the threat of whatever might happen, because if nobody saw us leaving together, what would people think if they never saw me again? Would they think that I had run away to start a new life in some godforsaken flyover state? Would my friends in New York talk about me over cocktails, thinking of the bright young spirit I had once been? Would they even remember me? This fear was so primal, the fear of being forgotten, the fear that I might be forgettable.
Would Dean even remember me?
And then, with a bubble of hope catching in my chest, I recognized someone through the crowd, silhouetted against the deep-red crushed-velvet curtains up onstage. It was Jerick. He was in drag, wearing full makeup, ivory concealer crusted under his eyes, his cheeks a violent fuchsia rouge, his lips drawn into a smile.
Cocaine stung in my throat.
I pulled away from the man with the red hair and threw myself into the mass of writhing bodies, swimming toward the stage to get a closer look. Jerick was skinnier than he had ever been before, his clavicle jutting out above his torso and his bow-legged stems miles long beneath a pink tutu. I waited for him at the base of the stage as he howled an off-key Shirley Bassey rendition.
Hey, big spender . . . spend a little time with me . . .
After his set, he tottered down the stairs and stood before me. I reached out and caressed the indications of his androgyny: his mouth outlined in garish pink lipstick, the fine hairs along his neck, the protrusion of his Adam’s apple. I hadn’t remembered that, I realized. His smell flooded my nostrils, clenching my knuckles and locking my jaw in place.
“You look like shit,” I said.
Jerick looked down at his battered high heels, then back at me with wounded eyes. “Some things never change,” he said.
For Christmas, my grandmother sent me a hundred-dollar bill with a note that said, “Please don’t use this to buy alcohol or cigarettes.” I laughed when I read it but still felt a twinge of sadness; it wasn’t who I wanted to be.
I finished my college applications on New Year’s Eve, the night they had to be postmarked, frantically printing out final drafts. I couldn’t ask my mother to take me to mail them—she would know how irresponsible I had been and judge me for it—so I called Kat.
“You’re always doing shit like this,” Kat grumbled as she maneuvered her car toward downtown, the hood of her sweatshirt pulled up over her messy blond hair. I took a swig of vodka from a bottle in a paper bag.
“I know,” I said. “What’s wrong with me?”
“You’ve got to be the only kid in the world mailing your Ivy League applications, drunk, the night they’re due,” she said. Then she looked over at me, more compassionately.
“It’s not my fault,” I said.
“I know it’s hard to come back here, dude,” Kat said. “There’s way too much history. I don’t blame you for needing to be, like, numb.”
I was silent.
“At least you got to leave,” she said. She sighed. “Sometimes I worry about you out there. Remember when we first met? You were such a sweet kid. The city is changing you.”
“It’s not like I was doing well here, Kat,” I said.
“No, I know,” she said. “It’s just scary to think of you. All alone in New York.”
As I dropped those manila envelopes in a navy-blue mailbox, a shudder rippled through me. One more milestone I could cross off my list. Would I get in at any of them? Or all of them? I deserved to celebrate.
Back at my mother’s house, I railed lines of Adderall in my bedroom off an oversize square of mirror before a group of friends came to pick me up: two stoner girls I was friendly with and their friend Seth, with whom I’d had English class sophomore year. Then, he’d had bad acne, pink and red against his fair skin, and his blond hair was shaggy. He was quiet and withdrawn and a little off-kilter. That summer, his mother had sent him to a wilderness therapy program in southern Oregon, and he came back clean-cut and almost militant. Now, he stood up straight, and his creamy complexion was marred only by a dusting of freckles. He still smoked pot and experimented with other drugs, but it all seemed pretty harmless—psychedelic mushrooms and painkillers.
I distributed to the group the remaining tabs of Ecstasy that I had bought, and we took them in the basement of Seth’s house, then drove to an apartment complex downtown where there was a pool. Laughing, swathed in moonlight, we jumped the fence and stripped off our clothes, the undulating waves, rolling on euphoria. I had wanted everything to go away, the hazy shame of Jerick and that club, but now, high and blissful, I wanted to stay forever in the glory of the instant.
In the pool, I bobbed up to the surface and stood in front of Seth, both of us waist-deep in the water. We gazed into each other’s eyes and I saw him for the first time. His chest was thin but strong, freckled, his shoulders a little sunburned, his eyes glacier blue. He was wearing briefs in the water, a V of pelvic bone jutting from the calyx of his groin. I could see the outline of his bulge, could feel his heart beating from three feet away. The moon tattooed its fingerprint between his nose and lips; the water glistened in the indentation there. His torso looked like sculpture. His cheeks were winded-breath mauve. I reached out and touched his groin. He gasped.
And then, abruptly, we were back at home, in my bed. He had a girlfriend, but this registered somewhere deep and unreachable. Our bodies stretched out, infinite. His musk was different from Dean’s—no cologne. Instead, pine needles and dirt. I felt the hair on his muscular calves. His hands were cold, but my body was warm. I felt as bonded to him as if we had emerged from the same womb.
As the sun came up, we smoked sticky green marijuana out of a bright red apple. The colors were too bright in the light, too vital.
“What does this mean?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Neither of us had expected it; he was straight, I thought, and I was strange and damaged and in love with someone else. I was always convincing myself that I had fallen in love with guys while I was on drugs, fusing with some relative stranger, yet there was something different about this.
We passed out on the floor. I curled up against him. All the pain I’d ever felt was unimaginably far away. I didn’t know if any of it was real or if it was just the drug
s, but it didn’t matter.
“I think there’s a you-shaped hole inside me that I didn’t realize I was missing until just now,” I said.
“Don’t go back to New York,” he said. “Don’t leave. Take me with you.” I couldn’t place where I had heard it before, but it felt like an echo, ringing out in the trees.
Five
It was January, and Dean’s friend was having people over to some loft, so I agreed to tag along, although I was loath to leave Manhattan. The streets of Brooklyn were glossy black, bleeding into the winter sky. We slid along side streets into Greenpoint in Dean’s car, then squealed to a stop before an unassuming industrial building.
I checked my reflection in the mirror: my eyes glassy-pinned, bones jutting from my chest.
I hadn’t known Dean very long, but I felt like I had known him a lifetime. And suddenly, there were so many things that I hated about him. I hated that he was divorced. I hated that his purported bisexuality seemed to be the last vestige of a hip youth instead of an actual preference. I hated that he was old money, just like everyone else I knew. I hated that he managed to do nothing, all the time, lucratively. I hated that he was always unshaven. I hated that all of his friends were artists and writers of considerable repute, none of whom I’d ever heard of and all of whom I claimed to be fans. I hated that he wasn’t Seth.
In the morning, waking up in his place to the smell of coffee in the kitchen, I didn’t want to be myself. I didn’t want to be with him, but I didn’t know how to stop. I was too much of an adult to feel properly victimized by the relationship—the power differential in the decades between us—but I was too much of a kid to know how to extricate myself from it gracefully. But most of all, I had grown bored with him, in the same way I grew bored with everyone. Not that I could have admitted this at the time.
Upstairs in the loft, a limitless sprawl of hardwood floors. Red wine in a paper cup. Twee pop tinkling in the next room. A miasma of smoke and the damp, earthy fragrance of marijuana. I made small talk with a dull woman named Cecilia. She was thin, rouged, severe like a ballet teacher. She had an asymmetrical bob and a shrill laugh.
“This is my protégé,” Dean said, referring to me. I hated this, too; he never called me his lover. “He’ll be at Princeton next year.”
“Hopefully,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “If all goes according to plan.”
“We’re not all that worried about that,” Dean said. He winked at me. Hope made me catch my breath. Was that still a possibility? I wondered.
Later that night, after he had sex with me, I counted the wrinkles on his face, hating myself for doing so. I went to the bathroom, turned on the water, and left it running. I knelt over the toilet and stuck my fingers down my throat. There was nothing to throw up. I choked, gagged, retched.
Eventually, I gave up and flushed anyway.
I took the elevator downstairs and went out onto the street. I called Seth.
“What are you still doing up?” he asked.
“Stupid question,” I said. I hesitated. “How’s your girlfriend?”
“Sam,” he said.
“Come to New York,” I whispered. The winter chill was cold on my arms. My nose was running. “Remember when I did too much Oxy over New Year’s and you just stayed there in bed with me until it stopped? Remember how you promised not to leave? Didn’t that feel good? Don’t you want to do that again with me?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“I don’t know how many times I’m going to wake up in the morning with my skin irritated from an older man’s stubble on my face before I realize how much it’s hurting me,” I said.
I’d been rehearsing that line for a while; I thought it sounded poetic. Saying it to Seth, though, made it feel real.
“I’ll see you over spring break,” he said.
I stayed on the phone with Seth for hours, walking through Riverside Park and chain-smoking, high on Adderall, using the same lines on him about love that Dean had used on me. I didn’t feel guilty for this act of plagiarism. The love that Dean had given to me I could now give to someone else. Someone, I thought, much more deserving.
“What happened with Princeton guy?” Daphne asked me one afternoon, smoking cigarettes down the block from school.
“I dunno,” I said. “I’m over it.”
She shook her head. “Last month you were telling me you were in love with him.”
It was odd: I could vividly remember being certain that I loved Dean, but I couldn’t even project myself back the few weeks to the point when I had felt it. “I got swept up, I guess,” I said.
“What about Princeton?”
I shrugged. It seemed less important now than it had before. “I mean, I got deferred. How good are my odds, really? Is there really anything he can do for me at this point? Like, I’m still hopeful, but what can I do?”
Daphne shook her head. “You’re infuriating.”
“What?”
“I can’t keep up with you,” she said. “One minute it’s Princeton, then it’s some closet case you met in Oregon. You’re always looking for the next thing that you think will tell you who you’re supposed to be.”
She was right, although I hated to admit it. “I’m on a journey of self-discovery,” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “Well, can you discover some self-respect, please?”
“I think we both know that ship has sailed,” I said.
Seth and I stopped for gas only an hour south of Portland, in a one-pump town where the wind sang in the fields and the sunlight was obscured by clouds. While the station attendant filled up Seth’s old sedan (“Oregon,” I remarked, “the only state where they let you kill yourself, but not pump your own gas”—I had heard someone say this once, a commentary on the controversial legalization of physician-assisted suicide in the state, and I’d found it pithy; Seth laughed dutifully), I spotted what looked like a high school track off in the distance. I pointed toward it, and Seth followed the direction of my finger. “Let’s go there,” I said, “and get high.”
The air streaming from the open car window felt good on my bare arms.
By the time we got there, the sun had moved in the sky so it beat hot on our heads. We parked at the top of the bleachers and took a seat in a row halfway down. Seth lit a joint and passed it to me. The Adderall I had taken had me feeling sparkly, lean. I put my arm around his shoulders. We were alone.
“I’m happy,” I said. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, man,” he said.
It was March now and we were driving from Portland to Los Angeles, to visit friends along the way (my friends, mostly) and, I thought, to be young and free.
Things were going to be different.
We’d left Portland early in the morning, stopping for brunch with his mother at a café; she had given Seth extra cash for gas, looking at him worriedly, reminding us to be safe, to be good. We headed south on I-5; I played bad pop music that Seth hated but tolerated for my benefit. Three other friends had been supposed to join us, but they had pulled out of the trip at the last minute, and the journey as we had originally conceptualized it—the five of us taking a long drive down the coast, taking as many drugs as we could and crashing wherever we landed along the way—had been eroded, so suddenly it was just me and Seth. I had never learned to drive, which meant he was stuck behind the wheel the whole way. Whatever tension there was between us over what had happened that winter went unarticulated. I knew that we loved each other, and in my head it made a funny sort of sense. Seth and I had slept together that first time when we were both on Ecstasy, and subsequently on other combinations of drugs, but those moments when our bodies seemed to collide felt more like the natural expression of a powerful friendship than any genuine romantic sentiment. I only dated older men, and Seth was straight, ostensibly, and his off-again, on-again girlfriend, Marissa (a bulimic cheerleader with a gritty complexion and a rigid smile; once I’d seen her vomit into her handbag while driving on the freeway
as I sat frozen in the backseat, paralyzed by fear), was always sort of in the shadows. It didn’t matter who I was sleeping with in New York, or that he wasn’t interested in men in the first place. We wrote each other long, emotional letters trying to decode the nature of our friendship, this bond between us that I was so certain was immutable.
When it came time to make plans for spring break, the rest of my class at Dwight was going to the Bahamas, and I wanted to go but more desperately than that I wanted to see Seth, to feel the rush and calm of his presence, to get high and be happy.
It wasn’t about sex, but it was about something sexual, some tether to a sense of my own youth. Sex with Seth was different. I loved sex with older men: their confidence, their experience, their mouths that always tasted like Listerine, musk, and stubble, orgasm noises in a rich baritone, the delight of seeing strange apartments, Hell’s Kitchen walk-ups and Park Avenue duplexes, the unromantic decadence of entering these lives for a matter of moments, these men who were lawyers, doctors, executives, husbands, fathers, bachelors, their bookshelves and family photos, and getting each other off—eyes rolling back, toes curling, semen and spit—and then I would leave and they would remember me or they wouldn’t, and I loved that, this intimacy shared that faded away, the rapture that ended as quickly as it began. There was shame after, of course, an urgency to leave, to stumble into a taxi and get home and take a shower and forget that it all had happened. As right as it felt in the moment of consummation was exactly how wrong it felt as soon as it was over.
