High in the Hills

I fell in love for the first time at 25. We were carving pumpkins for Halloween after a barbecue in Hollywood. This young and famous photographer had invited me to meet some of his friends: CEOs and directors and pop singers and songwriters and so on. What exactly he saw in me, I wasn’t sure, but he could make me laugh — literally — for hours without trying, and he was incredibly handsome. Sitting on his couch, holding his hand, listening to two of his friends singing live: I felt the most smitten I ever had in my life. There was nothing more I could want or ask for. Surely, I thought, this is what love feels like. It wasn’t for a year or so until I realized it’s what being high feels like. At 25, I fell in love. It was with drugs.

I never thought I’d do that — fall in love. I grew up in West Virginia, and from a very young age, I knew I was different. I knew I liked guys in a way I knew other people thought I shouldn’t. I didn’t know that, one day, a group of guys my age would jump me because of it. But I always feared they would. So the day it finally happened, I wasn’t surprised. Growing up Catholic, I almost thought I deserved it.

It happened after a dance in 7th grade. I wore sweatpants to that dance, because I was twelve and clueless and kind of poor, too. A slow song came on as I headed to the concession stand to get a cherry cola. The captain of the cheerleaders saw me. With a big smile on her face, she asked me to dance. I thought that was quite nice of her, because she was pretty and popular, and as far as I knew the guys were supposed to do the asking. I said sure. I wasn’t really attracted to her, but I did want to dance, and she seemed like a nice girl to dance with. She reached out her arm, and I took it, but then she pulled me in close, and stuck out her leg, and sort of sweep kicked me. I tripped and knocked over a table, and she laughed at my sweatpants, and Ryan Grobe pelted me with ice chips.

Ryan Grobe could throw a fastball at 60 miles per hour in 7th grade. He looked like a full-grown man throwing ice chips at a child. He hit me with a couple right in the face. For the rest of the night, anywhere I went, he and a few others — some of whom were my friends — would find me and hit me. It didn’t hurt that badly, the ice, but I kept crying anyway, probably because everyone was calling me a faggot, which wouldn’t have bothered me, except I knew it was true. Earlier in the day, Rachel Strong had told a few people on AIM that she’d seen me “do things” with boys. She really had. Later in the day, after the dance, she saw four boys crowd around me in the parking lot, by the dumpster, and hit me with more ice chips and kick me in the ribs a lot. She told her mom she hadn’t.

When we weren’t dancing in the gym — during lunch — there were long rows of tables where we sat to eat lunch. If you were cool, you got to sit in the middle. The less cool you were, the farther off to the end you sat. And if you were really not-cool, when you tried to squeeze in at the end, even the losers would tell you there wasn’t any room, and you had to sit at a small circular table off to the corner — by the fire exit.

My biggest goal in middle school was not to be one of those kids eating lunch in the corner. Now that I was out of the closet, the corner seemed like the least of my worries.

When I got home, it wasn’t like the movies. I didn’t have any black eyes or broken bones. I didn’t cry myself to sleep. I didn’t sleep at all.

One of the boys that jumped me was my cousin — and also my best friend, one of my only friends, really. I kept thinking about what this could mean for me.

The next day at school, I found out.

Someone had scratched out my name on my locker and written “GAY” on it in red permanent marker.

My classmates were called into the principal’s office to investigate the matter. We had to write down the word on a piece of paper so some handwriting specialist could determine who wrote it.

Two years earlier, something similar had happened. At the time, West Virginia was like 98% white. There were only 2 non-white kids in my fancy private school. One day, someone wrote “N*****” in big red letters on Jamie Walker’s locker.

After we got out of the principal’s office and it was time for lunch, my cousin waved me over to eat beside him. I always ate lunch next to my cousin. But it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to crack this case. I was pretty sure my cousin wrote that word on Jamie Walker’s locker, and I was positive he wrote on mine.

I decided to to put my lunchbox down beside Jamie Walker that day. He said, “Did you really write it?” as I took the seat beside him.

The principal had determined that I wrote on my locker to get attention.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Get outta here,” he said, laughing. He pushed me aside jokingly. We ended up becoming instant friends. I was waiting for the right time to pop a question, but it seemed awkward, and maybe a bit racist. But when the bell rang, I couldn’t hold it in any longer.

“If you could press a button and be white, would you?”

He side eyed for a second and then said, “I’d slam it.”

But there wasn’t any button for him. He couldn’t just pretend to be white. For me, though, I could pretend to be straight, and so for the rest of middle school, I spent all of my energy doing that.

At the time, everyone I knew in West Virginia was poor and miserable. I thought I always would be, too. At the very least, I never thought I’d fall in love — with gay marriage being illegal and all.

Little did I know that I’d later work for the President that would make it legal, or that I’d make friends with celebrities and travel the whole world, or that I’d maybe find true love.

When I was nine, Rachel Strong and I used to watch Aladdin all the time. She had a crush on Aladdin, and so we had a lot in common — enough to became quick and close friends. When the two of us weren’t together, I was playing in the woods with Clay. Clay was 13, and Clay liked to be naked with me. He liked for the two us to do a lot of questionable things naked together. One day, all three of us got together — Rachel, Clay, and I — and we played Truth or Dare. Rachel dared Clay and I to do some forbidden things together. She didn’t need to Double Dare.

Rachel always had a crush on Clay, and in 7th grade, when Clay didn’t like her back, she took her anger out on me. She told some people about the things we’d done, only she didn’t tell them about Clay, because she wanted to blackmail him into liking her. So I took the heat alone. And Clay and I never really talked again after. He lives down the street from my mom now, in his parent’s basement. My mom eats eggs for breakfast every morning. Clay eats Oxycontin.

A couple months before the Halloween I fell in love with Crystal Meth, I went to Salt Lake City with a girl I came scarily close to proposing to in college. I had been pseudo-dating this photographer for a couple of months, and I felt a little guilty about “cheating” on him by going to Salt Lake, with some girl, even though I was sure I didn’t “like her like her.” In Salt Lake, driving home from the most memorable date of my life, Maddie gave me an edible. I’d never been high before, and I was 25. Everyone else I knew had been, so I thought I should probably try it out. I’d been reflecting on our day together, and how it was everything I’d ever wanted in a date, from the picnic, to the flower picking, to the mountain hike, to the impromptu game in the library. We’d been in the car for an hour and hadn’t said a word until Maddie turned to me and said, “HOLY SHIT! WE’RE HIGH!” I laughed so hard my stomach hurt. I laughed for five hours straight — literally — without stopping.

We got fro-yo together, which was another first for me. She tried to get me to stop laughing before we went into the store. She tried for an hour and a half, but I couldn’t. So we waltzed in together, hand and hand, giggling continuously, as we filled up our bowls with candy pieces. The cashier rang up the bill, and we looked at him in horror, both of us having left our wallets in the car. We giggled harder than before. He said, “how high are you?” We pointed to the candy stacked up in our bowls and said “This high!” and gasped, and then we said, “Jinx.” I’m pretty sure we just walked right out of the store without paying.

We drove up the mountain, at full speed, to catch the sunset before the fro-yo melted. When I finally stopped laughing, I started crying. I had this guy back in LA, who was so much better than I ever imagined dating, and here I was in Salt Lake with this girl, having a day infinitely better than anything I’d ever had with him or anyone. Maddie had just been proposed to. She asked me to Salt Lake to do a trial of the date she planned to take her fiance on. She started crying, too. And it was obvious for both of us why. I loved her like I’d never loved anybody, and maybe I was just high and vain and narcissistic, but it became apparent to me in the middle of the day that this wasn’t a trial. By the time we were high, it seemed painfully obvious.

In college, I always wanted to love her as deeply as she deserved to be loved, but I knew I couldn’t. Even though she made me feel better than anyone ever had, I always felt terrible spending time with her. But after what seemed like every time I touched the basketball in high school the opposing student section shouting “FAGGOT FAGGOT” and pointing right at me, after spending all my time trying to be as ugly and bad as I felt, after spending too many nights alone in my room — in college I wanted something different. I wanted to be just like my brother: the star athlete at school, the life of the party, the man of the town.

I drank my first beer in Maddie’s dorm room, at the second real party I’d ever gone to in my life. I was a freshman. My brother was back in town, on a break from playing professional basketball in Europe. He got me to drink. He tried hooking me up with Maddie. He knew I liked guys, but since I hadn’t told him officially, he hoped maybe he was wrong. I hoped so, too. Maddie was really nice. And damn was she beautiful. All her friends treated me like family. Nobody was asking me about my sexuality. People were asking me about what I thought about the new Transformers movie. I liked that a lot better.

My first crush was on a girl, Chelsea Dade, in 2nd grade. She reminded me of Peppermint Patty. She knew all the presidents, the 50 states and their capitals, the Declaration of Independence, and how to make me smile. We grew up as next-door neighbors, basically, on a farm.

I used to shower Chelsea with gifts — mostly Big Red bubblegum. My mom would drive me to the front doorstep, and usually she’d be the one to ring the bell and deliver the gum because I was a little chicken. Chelsea didn’t like little chickens as more than just friends, and even if she did, she didn’t want to get emotionally involved, she said, because she was nine and had the whole world ahead of her. Chelsea Dade was going places, and I wanted to go with her.

My parents really wanted me to go with her.

They knew about Clay and me. When I told them about Chelsea Dade, that was much better received. They bought me Big Red and drove me to Chelsea’s front doorstep to give it to her. When they found out about Clay, they told me my wiener would fall off if we kept playing together in the woods.

We kept playing together in the woods.

In 7th grade, I developed a strategic liking for a girl named Julie.

Julie and I messed around a lot, and I made sure everyone knew about it. Julie wanted to have sex, but I didn’t like her — at all, to be honest — and definitely not enough to lose my virginity. I was saving myself for marriage, even though it was illegal to marry a man at the time. I felt bad about using the cheerleader, but I felt good not getting kicked in the ribs or stuffed in any more lockers. Still, I broke up with her after a couple of months. She was devastated, she said, but three weeks later she had sex with Frank House, and I mailed them both congratulations cards from Hallmark.

I broke out with acne a little bit after that. My mom thought it was from the stress. It wasn’t. It gave her a lot stress, though. My mom was really into appearances. She won Miss Elm Terrace as a girl, which was like Miss America on a molecular scale.

She wanted me to be the next Mister Elm Terrace. It seemed plausible. Growing up, I was cute as a button. I remember feeling sad for my cousins my age, because everywhere we went my grandma and my Great Aunt Deloris would tell everyone to look at how dapper I was, and they never did the same for my cousins. The girls always thought I was cute when I was younger, which was fine, because all they wanted to do was sled ride and let me walk their wiener dogs and shoot basketballs at the Y. But it started to get annoying when they stopped telling me how funny I was and started asking to see my wiener instead.

At the time, I had my first real crush on a kid named Thomas. But all I ever wanted with Thomas was to stay up late with him and learn all his secrets. Really, I just wanted to be slightly closer friends with him than I was with my best friend. I didn’t want to have sex with Thomas. And even if I did, I knew it wouldn’t happen.

It really frustrated me that all these girls I used to be friends with now didn’t really seem interested in friendship. I thought maybe they never had been. Maybe they always just found me attractive, even though I thought they were funny and kind and good people and worthy of friendship. The worst part was that if I turned them down, I worried that someone would start kicking me in the ribs again and throwing ice, 60 miles per hour, right at my face.

My mom tried to get me on Proactiv and maybe a new girlfriend. Instead, I sabotaged my face with oil to make the acne worse. Luckily, my acne never really got that bad, and I don’t have any scars from it. But at the time, I didn’t see it that way. I needed something to scare off the girls. I couldn’t get fat, because I really liked basketball and wanted to play in the NBA. I let my lips get wicked chapped, but that didn’t do much. My only hope to be ugly was growing a curly blonde afro, which I did. After that thing grew to full length, only a few girls ever asked me out.

It wasn’t until later I realized I wanted to be ugly less as a cover and more because it felt natural. Here I was, constantly lying to everybody. I hated lying. It made me feel terrible. But basketball was the only thing that made me feel good, and more than anything I wanted to be in the NBA. There wasn’t ever anyone gay in the NBA in 50-some years, and I doubted there ever would be. The truth seemed mutually exclusive with my dreams.

In high school, I tried to keep the lies to a minimum. I never pretended to like any girls. People were always asking me if I was gay or was a virgin or liked some cheerleader, and I got pretty defty at dodging those questions. So it came as a surprise when I was nominated to the homecoming court. I was living a double life, but feeling like half a person. I couldn’t have a serious conversation with anyone, because all anyone talked about in high school were the things I was dodging. My friend circle was small, and I only went to one “rager” party. I had this fear that if I went to any more parties some girl would try to hook up with me, and I wouldn’t do it, and then my teammates would stop defending me, and they’d kick me in the ribs and off the team.

In college, my freshman year, Josh came out to the team. He wasn’t at the next game, and after that he transferred schools.

My freshman year was a really confusing time for me. I’d spent four years feeling isolated in an attempt to be honest, and then here I was, a year later, falling in love — I thought — with a girl named Maddie. She played on the women’s basketball team, so we spent a lot of time together on the bus and at away games sharing earplugs, and locked up together during winter break on campus with just the two basketball teams, practicing, in misery, while everyone else was enjoying their breaks.

Josh was missing a lot during the breaks. No one ever knew where he went. Later, we found out he was hooking up with some guy. I wasn’t surprised. I always knew he was gay. And I was grateful for everyone to be consumed with his sexuality rather than mine. He looked exactly like Michael Jackson in his Thriller prime. Josh was godly attractive, so all the eyes were on him. I had a yellow afro and chapped lips and acne, so only Maddie’s eyes were on me, and damn did I appreciate that.

As the year progressed, and I became inseparably close with one of my teammates, Sean — my confusion hit its peak. Like Josh, Sean was also godly attractive. He looked exactly like Brad Pitt in Fight Club. I was really attracted to him from the first time we played basketball together, and I dunked on him. We had an instant rivalry. And he could make me laugh even more than Maddie. But best of all, he was a really good kid: always helping people out and being nice and inclusive.

The night Josh came out to the team, Sean and I spent a few hours sitting in my car overlooking the soccer field, sharing pizza. Sean went to great lengths to tell me how much he thought Josh was really brave to be honest with us, and that he’d still be friends with Josh, and that he didn’t find anything wrong with someone being gay, even though some guys on the team might, he wasn’t one of them. I was positive that Sean knew I liked him as more than a friend. To me, this was his way of letting me know it was okay, which was a relief. A couple weeks later, Sean shocked the hell out of me when he sort of came out.

Sean was the star of team, as a freshman, so he was a big deal. Toward the end of the season, I weaseled my way into the starting lineup alongside him, and after my first start, I felt on top of the world. I felt like I belonged in the same sentence with a guy like Sean. To celebrate, we headed out for a party at Colt Street’s house. In the car on the way was when Sean tried to come out to me. He kept telling me over and over that he didn’t like girls, not one bit. That he just really liked spending time with the guys, me in particular.

Sean advanced on me, but I turned him down. I had wanted to do things with Sean like nothing I had ever wanted in my life… Except for being his friend. I loved being friends with him, and I had this fear that if we got sexually involved, it wouldn’t be the same. Despite him being the one to come out to me, I sensed he was far less comfortable with his sexuality than I was. I had admitted to myself in 7th grade that I was gay, even though at 20 I was really confused in the car with him. It was clear Sean was really struggling to accept himself in the way he selectively chose his words. My biggest fear was that we’d do something, and he’d regret it and never talk to me again.

Sean and I had been together basically every second since the first time we met when I dunked that basketball on him. People were calling us boyfriends, and neither of us ever denied it. We wore each other’s clothes, had a million inside jokes, and spent a lot of time together in our underwear. Custom ring tones were a cool thing at that time, and when he called me, Crush by David Archuleta played, and the same thing when I called him. It seemed obvious at the time that we were both yearning for someone on the team to say, “Look guys, we know you both want to have sex with each other, and that’s totally okay.” But no one ever did. They just said really mean things about Josh instead.

In the car when Sean was telling me he didn’t like girls, it was obvious he wanted me to do more than tell him it was totally okay — which I did. What he wanted was a kiss, strong and passionate, and for me to rip off our clothes, take him into the backseat and have sex with him like in Titanic, his favorite movie, which I know about, because he was the closest friend I probably ever had. I knew all those things about him.

Once we arrived at Colt Street’s party, Sean got the drunkest I’d ever seen him. Not once the whole party did he talk to me. High school was repeating itself. The entire night, I sat in the same chair and did my best to avoid attention. When the party was over, Sean and I left together. It was an hour’s drive back to campus. He pretended to be asleep in the car. We never really had a deep conversation again.

That pumpkin-carving, InstaFamous photographer I dated in Hollywood looked eerily similar to Sean. They had the same nose. They were about the same height and build. And most importantly, they both had magnetic and addictive personalities that drew me in.

Was I in love with Sean or the photographer? I didn’t know for sure, and it haunted me always until one night at the Sheats-Goldstein Residence when I realized it was neither. I was in love, deeply, with drugs.

The photographer and I had done some sort of amphetamine 14 of the 17 weekends we’d been dating officially. 17 weeks is a pretty long time for a 25 year old. It seemed like an entire lifetime, and I was hooked. It was so magical my old one couldn’t even compare. It had been the best time of my life by a longshot, like how I always imagined falling in love would be. So it was a terrifying experience to count out just how often I’d been high during this time.

I was in the middle of a comedown, and my boyfriend was trying to get me to take a picture of him and a ladybug for his Instagram. It triggered an existential crisis. Depression set in for the second time in my life when the question popped into my head: Was I in love with my boyfriend or amphetamine?

It didn’t help that Lady GaGa’s Perfect Illusion was the number one hit on the radio. It felt like the universe was talking to me. Everything does when you’re high on amphetamine.

I touched my first boob in 6th grade. I was at the Y shooting basketballs with Thomas. Earlier in the year, he won the state free-throw competition. My brother used to always win that. I didn’t even make it out of the county.

Thomas and my brother had a lot in common. Everyone was always talking about them in good ways. People only really talked about how I was funny, sometimes in a bad way, like the way I looked at boys, or did backflips, or had a lot of girl friends, but not any girlfriends.

Hazel Brown was one of my girl friends. She was really good at basketball in 6th grade — better than all the boys in town, even Thomas. She marched into the gym that day and challenged Thomas and me to a three-point contest.

Thomas said, “Oh yeah, and what do I get when I win?” Thomas liked Hazel because she was one of the only girls with boobs in sixth grade, and he really liked boobs.

Hazel took a dollar bill out of her sock and put it in her bra. She said, “A dollar.” Thomas jumped onto the three-point line and told me to rebound for my life. He made 11 out of 25 threes.

Hazel went next. She made 13.

I was just starting to get athletic and all that. Somehow I made 14. Thomas was mad he lost to a girl, but glad at least someone beat her. He eagerly followed Hazel Brown and I into the racquetball court. With no adults in sight, I put my hand in her bra and fished for the dollar. By the look on Thomas’s face, I could tell I should do something more, so I kept my hand in there a while longer and fished for a nipple. It wasn’t any different than sticking my hand in the pool to check the temperature.

Hazel didn’t really talk about it after. Thomas wouldn’t stop asking about it for weeks. Hazel ended up being a lesbian. We knew about each other after that day I touched her boobs, but we never talked about it. She asked me to Sadie Hawkins in high school. She was the star basketball player, and so was I. It was the most fun I ever had at a dance. She asked me to the rest of the dances. We ate fast-food before the dance and wore matching stunner shades and basketball shoes. We looked like idiots, but we had a lot of fun, and we never had to kiss each other. Everyone thought we were dating. It was nice they left us alone.

For Prom, she was supposed to take this kid she knew that was gay from a few towns away, and I was supposed to take this girl she liked from the public school. All four of us chickened out. She had an iPhone senior year, and when the DJ played Champagne Supernova, we snuck down stairs and Skype-danced with our real dates.

On the way back upstairs, Hazel played Two Princes on her phone. I said, “Two Princes? Two colors. You’re two colors, Hazel Brown.”

She sang, “Marry him,” and pointed at her gay friend in her phone, then she pointed to herself and sang, “Or marry me. I’m the only one that loves you, baby, can’t you see?” I pulled her into the crowd and sang, “But I know what a prince and a lover ought to be!” And together we danced the night away.

In 4th grade, my mom fist fought a nun. The nun was my teacher, Sister Snow, and she was every bit the villain she sounds like.

Clay and I had stopped playing in the woods by this time. And that whole situation was really starting to bother me. I had made some healthier relationships, at least, and was about halfway up the social ladder. I wasn’t homecoming king material yet, but the girls were starting to give me their Hershey Kisses at lunch and tell me about their wiener dogs. All of them except, of course, the girl of my dreams, Chelsea Dade. I was heels-over-head in love with her then. She had the cutest laugh in the world. She would put her head down and cover her mouth and kind of duck a little, like she was embarrassed, but she’d let out this intense giggle that was adorable. She would kind of push me away and say, “Stop it,” but I never would. I’d keep her laughing as long as I could.

One day, on the paddle boats at the Wheeling Park Pond, I kissed her, just on the hand. I had paddled us out into in the middle of the pond, alone, underneath the setting sun. I pointed to the water on my side, and said, “Lookee here. It’s beautiful.” She craned her neck over my lap and looked. I said, “It’s your reflection.” I thought I was smooth at the time. Chelsea sort of did, too. She pushed me like always, but this time I held onto her hand, and I put it to my lips, and I kissed it. It was my first kiss. She giggled really hard but didn’t tell me to “Stop it.” I really lost it.

Looking back on it, her giggle was my first addiction. I had a constant itch for her laugh, and to get a hint of it, I would clown around in class. Sister Snow couldn’t stand it. Especially my whoopee cushion.

When I wasn’t cracking jokes, I was trying to sidle up next to Chelsea, and whisper little somethings in her ear, and pass her notes. I was always drawing her maps. I had this plan for us to ride away on my bicycle and go down to Orlando and open a lemonade stand. Dadenade, we would call it.

Chelsea said it was ridiculous. Sister Snow made me look ridiculous. She sat me in the corner, facing the wall, and put a dunce cap on me.

My mom wasn’t having any of that. She stormed into the classroom one day and said, “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size you goddamn witch!” and she socked her.

My brother and I used to fight, constantly, growing up — fists to the face ’til our noses were bloody. We had nothing in common. He won the spelling bees and the science fairs, the state foul shooting contests and the home run derbies, and everybody wanted to be his friend. My parents thought I was dyslexic, and I only ever hung out with Clay, in the woods. My brother was everything any parent would want in a child. I wasn’t. I didn’t understand, at the time, that I was just five years younger and needed some time to figure myself out. It took me a while to figure myself out, because it seemed like there was nothing to figure out. This perfect blueprint of what to be stood in front of me everyday. I needed to be exactly like him, except I couldn’t be exactly like him.

I did end up a lot like him, though. We played basketball for the same school in college. We both won state championships in high school. We both left West Virginia as fast as we could.

One day, when I was eleven, like the flip of a switch, we went from arch-nemeses to best friends. It was late at night, our parents were asleep, we were supposed to be asleep, too, and he whispered to me, “Wanna watch Jurassic Park?” I said, “Sure!” We were best friends ever since. The next day, he showed me how to shoot a basketball the right way. A year later, I was beating Thomas in a three-point contest to touch Hazel Brown’s boobs, and everybody wanted to be my friend, too.

I always wonder what my life would be like if my brother never asked me to watch Jurassic Park. Probably, I’d be eating Oxycontin for breakfast in my mom’s basement.

Just after my trip to Salt Lake with Maddie, my other best friend on the team in college got married. Sean was going to be at the wedding, too, and I was really excited to see him, even though I was dating the photographer. I brought drugs with me to the wedding, which I thought was pathetic, but that was weekend number nine, if I remember correctly. My drug-induced weekends had hit habitual heights, so it seemed like the natural thing to do, like taking socks or a razor, packing that bit of Los Angeles Snow.

While I was nice and iced out, Sean asked me if I wanted to leave and go back to my room. He was married to a girl at the time, a good one, too. It was actually their anniversary. I found that even more pathetic. I said I was sick. I went back to my room and cried for the rest of the night. Sean and his wife got divorced a few months later. I don’t wonder why.

We had a club on campus at my college. The team went every weekend, and we took over the stage. We invited up the volleyball girls and the basketball girls, because they were the only girls we didn’t look ridiculous next to, us being giants and all. Maddie liked that I actually liked to dance rather than post up awkwardly on the wall like the rest of my teammates, but she had her suspicions when I never asked her back to my room. One night she asked me back to her room.

My greatest fear in life at the time was that my dick wouldn’t work with some girl when it should, and it would give me away, and my teammates would stop liking me, and start hating me, solely based on that. The whole walk back I kept coming up with excuses, and Maddie kept shooting them down. She snuck me into her building, and I thought my fate was sealed. Every step down the hallway seemed like a walk on the plank. Her room was in a corner, at the end, and so too my life. She backed me into her door and kissed me, really kissed me, for the first time in my life.

Her left hand was around my neck, crawling into my hair, her right, around my waist, and now sliding into my jeans. To my surprise, my dick had come to my rescue, hard as a rock when I needed it most. Maybe it was working under pressure. Maybe it was just happy to get some attention for the first time in its adult life. Maybe I really liked it, or a little of all three. I’ll never know.

Maddie said, “Thank God you’re not gay,” and took me into her room. I thanked him, too, even though my beliefs had long since ceased. Inside her room, she confessed that she originally liked Sean, tried something similar, but nothing happened when she reached down there. I said, “That doesn’t surprise me?” She said, “You think he’s gay, too?” I said, “No, that you liked him. Sean’s very handsome.” She said, “Nothing like you.” That really turned me on. I really messed around with a girl for the first time that night, and I liked it.

My constant fear vanished. I cut off my afro, like in V for Vendetta, but way less dramatic. My skin cleared up. I drank every night with the guys and talked about girls and even though I was pretty sure it was all pretend, it was the happiest I’d been in my life.

It would be easy to say my innocence was taken from me by Clay in the woods as a child. I always felt aware of the situation, but never guilty about it. Sometimes I told my parents what we did, and they told me I should feel guilty about it. I have no recollection whatsoever of what happened in those woods. Whether I suppressed it or it just wasn’t significant enough to remember, I’m not sure. But I do remember distinctly Clay asking me once about how it felt with him inside me. My parents were watching my brother play baseball, in the Mustang league. He was 10. Clay was 9. I was 5. Clay was inside me then, or at least he asked me what I thought about it. I don’t really remember. How I felt about it, I couldn’t say if you put a gun to my temple. I don’t remember it happening. My response is anyone’s guess. Mostly, I felt nothing. I was too young to enjoy it, I assume. Clay wasn’t.

One Halloween in middle school, when I reached Clay’s “maturity”, around 12 years of age, Thomas invited over a bunch of basketball players to stay the night. If sugar highs are a real thing, we were deep in the midst of one, pillowcases filled with candy, scarfing it down by the mouthful. We stayed up all night, and as it got late, the conversation got sexual. We started talking about jerking off. A lot of us hadn’t ever done it before. Thomas had a computer in his room, which was rare at the time, and soon there were a lot of naked girls on the screen.

We stayed up all night playing with ourselves. I wanted desperately to look at Thomas instead of at that screen, but I couldn’t. He didn’t want me looking at him in that way, and I could relate.

A couple of weeks later, I went to the first real party of my life. Thomas and I got invited to hang out with a group of girls from a different school for a birthday. We played Truth or Dare. The girls dared Thomas to grab me by the back of the neck and lick the inside of my ear. Thomas pulled me toward him, my back to the girls, and he did it. With his tongue still in my ear, he said, “We are turning them on so hard right now.”

What Thomas didn’t know is just how much he had turned me on. I was stiff as a board. My dick could’ve sliced right through the Hope Diamond. To this day, I still get weak in the knees when someone licks my ear. From then on, Thomas would pretend to be gay with me pretty often to get attention from the girls. He didn’t really need my help, though. He went on to be a model for Rue 21.

By the time we reached high school, it became mandatory to shower together after practice and games. The guys were really curious why I wouldn’t shower with them. At 14, I couldn’t even think of showering with Thomas without immediately getting hard. And if I did get hard, all those “fictitious” rumors would quickly become fact, and I’d never make the NBA.

I told myself I’d never check out any of the guys naked. But in the middle of the first practice, Thomas kept saying he couldn’t wait to get naked and shower. All the guys seemed so giddy to do it. The whole situation seemed really strange to me. Thomas was out of his clothes before we even got to the locker room. I tried not to look, but I’ll never forget the way his naked body was framed perfectly in the doorway of the shower. The Statue of David paled in comparison. I remember admiring Thomas with my mouth wide open for what seemed like eternities, but might’ve been only one second. At some point, he saw me. Red handed, I jumped backward like a scaredy cat. I thought he’d be mad. I thought he might kick me in the ribs and call me a faggot like my last best friend did. Instead, he just said, “Are you getting in or what?” I played it off cool. I said, “Shit, T, I would, but I gotta split.”

That night, I jerked off the most I ever have in my life. I felt terrible about it. Thomas and I could be friends only and nothing more. I knew that. I tried to want that, too, but after his naked body was burned into my mind, I needed more.

The guys started speculating why I wouldn’t get naked with them. First they started teasing me for being uncircumcised, then for having a small wiener. I found it strange how much they talked about dicks, especially mine, which they hadn’t even seen. Finally, after our first away game, Thomas got me naked. We had to wear a suit and tie to our away games, to rub it into our opponents’ faces how snobby and private our school was. Thomas said, “Look, nobody cares about your dick, okay?” I continued pulling my suit out of the locker in protest. Thomas tackled me and said, “I’m not letting you ruin your goddamn suit.”

I showered beside Thomas that night. When I was washing my face, he whispered in my ear, “Shit dude, that thing is huge. What were you afraid of?” I didn’t get hard. I couldn’t believe it.

A year later, in chemistry class, Thomas was trying to hook me up with the hottest girl in school. He was drawing illustrations of my wiener and showing her, really exaggerating the size of it. He wrote my number on it, and put the drawing in her chemistry book. Thomas and I were shooting basketballs at the Y when she texted me. He snatched the phone out of my hand as soon it dinged, and when he saw who it was from, I think it was the widest I ever saw him smile.

A week later, that girl’s boyfriend hanged himself on the back porch of his house. Apparently, he’d been going through a lot at home, and after an argument with his mom, he just walked out back, tied a noose around his neck, and lifted his feet of the ground until he suffocated. Maybe I was just vain, but I always felt awful about it.

I think that’s when I lost my innocence.

Shortly after Thomas showed us all how to jerk off, I “stumbled” across gay porn on the family computer. I always knew gay was a word, and people got called that, and it was bad. I always thought Clay and I were the only people in the world that did the things we did. I found out there’s a lot of people that did the things we did, and a lot of other things, too. I wasn’t sure about a lot of the other things.

My dad walked in on me in the middle of this. It was probably the most traumatic moment of my life. My family always knew I’d end up looking at gay porn on the family computer. They just hoped they were wrong. I was proving them right. I was angry.

My dad said he’d tell my mom about me on the computer. So I told my mom about him on the computer, too. I saw he had a profile on an online dating site. It’s one of my clearest memories. We were at The Alpha, the best restaurant in town, and The Chain by Fleetwood Mac was on the radio. I’d never heard the song before, but it instantly became a favorite. Every time I hear it, I feel like I’m in two places at once, back in that booth beside the window at The Alpha, talking to my mom, back when she was really pretty and young and funny and energetic, back when she used to say “race ya to the car” and I always won and got to celebrate all innocently like the cute little button of a boy that I was.

I asked my mom what was the name of the song. She was singing it. She was always singing the songs on the radio. She knew every one of them. She said, “The Chain, by Stevie Nicks”. My mom looked like Stevie Nicks. I said, “Mom, dad’s cheating on you.” My mom looked like a ghost.

My parents got a divorce. They always wanted one. I’m not sure how I feel about it.

After I turned Sean down in the car on the way to Colt Street’s house and simultaneously ended the closest and strongest friendship I’d ever had in my life, I was deeply depressed. The rest of the year didn’t really seem to exist after basketball and without Sean. Our texts which had been constant, slowed to once a week, just asking if I was going to this party or that, and how we would get liquor. The two of us started getting incredibly drunk off Everclear. At the end of the year, when he was leaving for Summer, we kissed each other, on the cheek. I wanted desperately to text him that entire night, telling him to come back, but I didn’t. I spent the night with Maddie, and he kept telling me to man the fuck up and give it to her already.

My chest was in physical pain that night from heartache. It stayed like that for most of the Summer. Sean didn’t really respond to my texts again until school started. I thought maybe I misinterpreted that situation in the car, and Hey, it’s the 21st century — it’s totally socially acceptable to peck your guy friend on the cheek, European-style, goodbye, right?

It was the only Summer I ever counted down the days til it was over. When it did finally end, and Sean came back to school sophomore year, he had a tan, and a new haircut, and was wearing all new clothes. I had never seen so many girls hanging on a single guy in my life. It made me sick. It distorted my vision. The walls in the room seemed to collapse in on each other, like in a garbage compactor. I felt like I couldn’t breath. I backed out of the door and into the hallway.

Sean followed me. He caught up to me and grabbed me by the shoulder. He said, “I haven’t seen you all Summer, and you leave right away?” He was really drunk and laughing, even though what he said wasn’t a joke or even funny. He turned me around and pushed my head into the wall and grabbed my waist and kind of started humping me out there, for anyone to see. It seemed like the type of thing I might like, to be honest, but it wasn’t turning me on. It was making me sick.

He asked me back to his room, to drink. I went. I hoped it could be like before, when he made me laugh so hard I couldn’t feel my face the next morning. More than anything, I wanted to see that smile of his again, the pure ecstasy of it. He’d invited me to sleep in his bed plenty of times before, but this time, the intentions couldn’t get more obvious. The door hadn’t even shut yet, and already he was unzipping his jeans.

I’d never touched a man before, except that sort of kiss goodbye we had. I wanted to talk to him about what we were going to do in this room, when he was really drunk. He didn’t want to. He just wanted me naked. His words were, “Shut up and be a good snuggle bunny.” He lifted up the cover, and sort of fanned it, calling me in, like I was a bull and he, a matador. It should’ve been tempting. His jawline was straight as a razor, high cheek bones, blue eyes, his body a work of art: the chest, the eight pack abs, the shredded serratus anterior, and above all, his ass, which by itself could start the Gay Trojan War. And yet, in that moment, I found him repulsive. On one hand, I considered getting naked and crossing my fingers that things would go back to normal. But that didn’t line up with my Disney fantasy of losing my virginity, so I left. Sean and I didn’t really ever hang out again after that.

A month later, eight minutes into the first scrimmage of the year, I went up for a dunk. Some kid ran under my legs and tackled me. I landed right on my head and suffered a severe concussion. The doctor said I had brain damage. I had to change majors to something easier. I wanted to get a PhD in statistics. I was always calculating the odds of someone being gay and liking me back, or finding love. They were never good. My odds of playing in college again were zero.

The only way I could fill the void of losing Sean’s friendship and basketball at the same time was with a delusion. I had lived in my brother’s shadow for so long, and with my college career over, and his far eclipsing mine, I needed to do something. My answer was drugs, alcohol specifically, and more parties than one can imagine. I became the man on campus, everybody’s friend, even if I wasn’t the star athlete any longer. And thus began my life as a Gatsby.

I always wanted to be in love with the person I lost my virginity to. I always wanted it to be with a guy. I was living off campus with this girl I grew up with in an apartment just off the river. We had a huge party at the house. She stole some of my electronics and sold them to buy prescription painkillers. Since high school, she’d been doing painkillers a lot with that girl whose boyfriend hanged himself. I was sad because I thought drugs were for losers, and I didn’t want my friends to be losers, and I felt like they were, and I had something to do with it. A lot of people crowded into our apartment that night to eat painkillers, and I wondered why. What kind of pain were they in? They all seemed perfectly happy.

I went back to my room to get away from it all. One of my childhood neighbors followed me to my room. She said she’d wanted to be in my room for about a decade now. She got naked and on top of me. I hadn’t been in this situation in a while, so I wasn’t as defty at dodging it. She asked if I had a condom. I didn’t. Why would I?

I figured it was easier to lay there lifeless and just let her enjoy herself than to hurt her feelings. So I did. After a while, I got pretty annoyed and pretended to be asleep. I rolled over. She said, “Fucking really!?” and walked out.

I had been texting with this guy my age from Craigslist for a while. He was supposedly also a virgin, and he only lived about 30 minutes away. I asked him if he had a condom. He did. Despite my Disney dreams, I lost my virginity that night to someone I’d only known in person for about 20 minutes. I was 21. He was a college athlete, too. Neither of us was a virgin any more. If I had any confusion as to my sexuality, the second I felt the stubble of his beard brush against my face erased all that completely.

I had always imagined losing my virginity to be some magical moment, like it was a portal into a different dimension. Like after I’d had sex, I’d sprout wings like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. And from then on, the world would be one big parade and my favorite song would forever be on. Maybe it would have been like that if I lost it with Sean. I spent the half hour driving home considering that, thinking I’d made such a terrible mistake, that I’d ruined my sacred moment, that I should’ve been just down the street, experiencing this with Sean.

I returned to my apartment feeling a healthy mix of fulfilled and empty. I opened the door to a mess of empty beer cases and garbage strewn across the floor. My roommate was in the kitchen, and she looked like the walking dead. Her eyes were so bloodshot she didn’t even have pupils. Even though she was talking, her face was too paralyzed to move. It was haunting. The image of it still gives me chills to this day.

In high school, my roommate and I were really good friends with that girl whose boyfriend hanged himself. One night, that girl overdosed on Xanax and alcohol, and she died. My roommate looked worse than that girl did when she was frothing at the mouth and dying.

The first time I got really high was at Out on the Mountain at Six Flags. I went with my photographer boyfriend, a pornstar, and a pop singer. We all took a pill of some mystery substance they all swore was 100% MDMA. Everyone swears everything is 100% MDMA. It’s hardly ever even any percent MDMA. It’s usually Meth.

I played a lot of Rollercoaster Tycoon growing up. A dream of mine had always been to visit the coaster capital of the world, Magic Mountain. I never thought I’d get there. I also never thought I’d do Meth. It felt surreal. It was more fun than every trip to Kennywood in my life put together times a million. I thought it was because I was in love. It was because I was iced out of my mind.

We left the park around midnight to do some more drugs. They all wanted to blaze. I’d never smoked weed before, just that one edible on the best night of my life. This night was getting close to that. I considered smoking, but my boyfriend found an edible in the car and gave that to me. I ate it.

Our plan was to move the car closer to the entrance so that when we left for good, the car would be closer. When we got out, I said, “I thought we were gonna move.” They said we did. I asked when. They said like 30 minutes ago. I thought I’d only been in the car for maybe ten seconds.

On the way back into the park, everyone took a second pill. I started hallucinating. I’d eaten a 150-mg edible of THC, which if you don’t know, is a metric fuck-ton of the chemical in weed that makes you high. Normal people tend to get schizophrenic on 25-mg. I went batshit insane.

The party lights started shooting balls of color like water balloons that exploded and turned everything in the path that shade of blue. I turned to my boyfriend to ask if he could see it. His head exploded. I panicked. Everything turned into a cartoon. The universe started ripping apart at the seams. We had to leave the park. I was causing a scene. Everyone was mad.

The whole ride home, I kept hallucinating that I was running out of the car into oncoming traffic, or taking the steering wheel and driving us off a bridge. After I died, I went right back to us leaving the park. I got back in the car again and again. I couldn’t stop myself from repeating it. I was stuck in a loop of death. I probably died a thousand times in that car ride. I kept hallucinating like that until late the next night, at another party, in the hills. I thought I’d gone insane and would never recover.

For weeks I was confident that I died and travelled to a different dimension. I honestly still consider it. Without doubt, it was the most influential and formative night of my life.

I was high on amphetamine.

I didn’t touch drugs again for several months, until the same group of us went to a music festival. It was my first music festival. I thought I fell in love with music festivals. Really, I just got high on amphetamine and rode a ferris wheel for three hours. That night, I couldn’t sleep, so I read All the Light We Cannot See in one sitting.

With all the holiday parties at the end of the year, the four of us hit the crystal almost every weekend for the next three months. I finished a lot of books when I wasn’t able to sleep. I pretended like this was somehow productive. I made myself believe there was nothing wrong with taking a toothpick into that pill, breaking off a shard, and eating it before going out.

For New Year’s Eve, we went to this swanky home a billionaire owned in Palm Springs. We were by far the youngest and least successful people at the party. We were getting a lot of attention, though, because we were also on the more attractive end of the guest list. It seemed like everybody came over and talked to us at one point — even the billionaire, for quite a while. I don’t think a single person talked to us without bringing up what drugs they’d eaten that night already, and which ones they had saved up for later.

When the party wrapped up, the TV exec that put us on the guest list came over and invited us to an afterparty. It seemed like he was just inviting us back to his house to do drugs. We turned him down. Later we learned we only got invited because the TV exec thought we’d have a threesome with him.

In West Virginia, it was snowing and cold, people were mostly poorly educated and closed-minded, and everyone I knew was overdosing on painkillers. In Hollywood, it was hot by the pool and everyone was rich and beautiful in this hundred-million-dollar compound. They were all on Crystal Meth, too.

Growing up, I had no desire to do any drugs. I thought drugs, even alcohol, were for losers. Sometimes, I pretended to do drugs just to piss off my teachers and my parents. But not so much as a drop of beer ever touched my tongue until I was almost 20. I felt like society forced me to be phony and pretend to be straight. I didn’t want to take some drug that made things even less real.

By the end of my sophomore year, I was blackout drunk every Saturday with Maddie. Everybody was asking us when we were going to get married. I lied so much that year that telling the truth made me uneasy. I couldn’t state simple facts without exaggerating some detail, or else it felt like it used to feel when I was lying. I knew I had a problem. I arranged to graduate a year early. I couldn’t stomach being at that school without basketball or Sean, and all those lies to Maddie.

I told my team that I liked guys. They didn’t believe me. Maddie did. But we still spent almost every night together, sleeping in her bed, with Paul — my new best friend from the team — and Kerry — her roommate — in the other.

I was so grateful to be out and not a single person caring at all.

The photographer broke up with me on my birthday. He did it through an Instagram DM. He didn’t realize it was my birthday. I never thought I’d get broken up with over Instagram.

The party at the Goldstein was a red carpet event. I never thought I’d get invited to a red carpet event. I spent most of the night with this group of models the photographer used to shoot. One of them in particular was the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen, without a doubt. She and I seemed to really hit it off. We were laughing and dancing the entire night. On the way out, on the step and repeat, with the cameras flashing, she invited us on a ski trip with that group of models. The next day, she rescinded that offer. She said I wasn’t pretty enough, and I’d mess up all the pictures.

I told my boyfriend to go without me, but he didn’t want to. A month later, his group of friends from West Hollywood went for their annual ski trip to Big Bear. They, being actual friends, extended an invitation to me. Still, I declined. I had a sour taste in my mouth from the last offer, and I didn’t know how to ski anyway. It didn’t really matter, my boyfriend said, I could just go to hang out — which was code for get high, like everyone else, the entire weekend.

I made up my mind after the Goldstein to end all the confusion, to figure out if I loved the photographer or the drugs. I cut them out completely: caffeine and alcohol and supplements, too. Our relationship went from a dream to a nightmare during that month.

On his way home from Big Bear, he broke up with me. It was my birthday. We’d been dating for over a year. I told him we should probably talk about things. He said he thought we probably shouldn’t see each other anymore.

I convinced him to meet me for dinner a few days later. He told me he wanted to do drugs from the second he woke up til the second he went to bed, and he didn’t want me around, bringing him down. He told me I wanted to be a writer, but I was terrible. He told me I wasn’t any fun. Basically, all I had going for me was my college basketball body. I believed him for a minute. I cried harder than I ever had in my life.

In 7th grade, my grandma died. Both of my parents worked pretty long hours, so she picked me up after school and cooked me dinners and played Rummy with me all the time. She was like both of my parents in one. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She lived 4 years with it. The last I heard, she’s one of like eight people to ever make it that long.

When my grandma first went to the hospital, the doctor told her she’d be dead in a month. After a surgery and six months, they thought she was in remission. She was healthy for two years, and then she got sick again. A few months after, she was in bad shape. She was sucking down morphine like a drain pipe. My extended family had flown in from all over the country, knowing she could die at any second.

With everyone in the house, she asked me to get her some ginger ale. I ran down the street to get her some. My family was really into health, and so I looked to see if maybe I could find a ginger ale that didn’t have any high fructose corn syrup in it. I looked for about 30 minutes. I got a call from my aunt telling me to hurry it up. I did. My grandma screamed “WHAT THE FUCK TOOK YOU SO LONG, GODDAMNIT!?” when I got back. I’d never seen her scream at anyone, ever, in my entire life.

I felt bad and went into another room to be alone. Everyone in the house came in to comfort me. When we walked out, my grandma was dead. The last thing she did was scream at me. Nobody was there for her because they were there for me instead. I felt terrible. I cried. It was nothing compared to when my boyfriend admitted to me that he actually didn’t like me.

I think that’s what a broken heart feels like. I think I loved him. I’ll never know because I was too high to tell. I didn’t want our relationship to end, though, so in desperation, I told him I could do drugs again, sometimes. We ended up getting back together that night.

I celebrated my birthday two weeks later, when my best friend was in town. I ate the most amphetamine I ever have in my life. It was the best night of my life. I don’t wonder why.

The next morning, I was mildly suicidal at Disneyland. I ate a tranquilizer before going, completely by accident. It was easy to do something like that with all those drugs lying around.

The photographer and I hardly spoke. He took a picture of the Magic Castle and mostly edited that for his Instagram the whole trip. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. My best friend was bored stupid. So was everybody else sweating to death in the queues. I never thought I’d get to Disneyland — it was a stereotypical childhood dream of mine — and there I was, with my best friend and my boyfriend, miserable.

I haven’t done drugs in about a year now. The last time was in Palm Springs. My best gay friend, Chance, was celebrating his birthday. At the time, I hadn’t done drugs in months, wanted them out of my life, but we were getting ready to go out, and everyone was bumping on snow, so I said what the hell. I snorted some cocaine.

It was a swell night.

The following day, we went to a pool party at The Saguaro. I had a couple sips of a drink and the most fun dancing I’d had in months. I suspect someone slipped something into that drink. I’ll never know.

That night, some other guys met up with us, the ones deep in the scene, the self-proclaimed circuit queens. We were out late the night before, so I didn’t sleep much, and we danced the day away out in the desert sun. I’d had my fun. I was beat. Still, the guys convinced me to party with them ’til close. I’d skip on the after hours and the drugs, I said. They were real disappointed. I didn’t care.

When we got to the club, they started fiending for drugs. They found a dude with some 100% MDMA, or so he claimed. They bought 20 pills. They cost $400. The car Sean came out to me in on the way to Colt Street’s party cost $400. I made $400 a year ball-boying for the soccer team in college. It seemed absurd.

I went back to the hotel. It was trashed, and I felt kind of pathetic staying in conditions like that. I cleaned up the area around the couch and tried to get some sleep, but the guys followed me back. The pills, they said, were duds. One guy was cracked out of his mind. I suspect he ate all the Meth out of all 20 pills and then gave everyone else empty ones. I’ll never know.

They said they needed some more coke, but couldn’t find anyone dealing. Earlier at The Saguaro, their dealer was talking to me when he got busted with a fuck-ton of drugs in his bag. I think he put some of them in the drink he bought me.

One of the guys looked like his motor skills were gone. He was breathing weird. I was worried he’d die. I said we should call 911. They said he just needed some coke. They started looking around the hotel for drugs. We could’ve flipped over any one of those queens and turned up drugs. Of course, one of them found a little bag of cocaine in the bathroom. I’d never seen people more excited in my life, not even after I won the state championship in basketball.

I said it was dangerous mixing drugs like that. I recalled that girl who Thomas drew a picture of my penis for, and how her boyfriend hanged himself, and how she overdosed on Xanax and alcohol. They said, “Girl, shut your mouth. We know about drugs. You don’t know shit.”

Someone was rolling around licking the carpet. Someone else was in the bathroom, douching, with explosive diarrhea so loud it sounded like the T. Rex from Jurassic Park was in the building. Someone else was shoveling coke into that nearly-dead guy’s nostrils.

He jumped to his feet right after that and ended up fine. I guess they did know their drugs. I decided I was done with drugs. I decided to make new friends, too.

I haven’t done any drugs since. I haven’t made any new friends either.

I had no desire to visit LA growing up. It was the city of celebrities, who I thought were all phony. Little did I know I’d end up dating one, an Internet one at least, surrounded by even more of them in the Goldstein, eating amphetamine.

The photographer and I were iced out of my minds, chatting up an old supermodel and the guy who made Michael Jackson’s jackets. He was showing us pictures of him making them, years back, on his phone. The supermodel said, “weren’t they so beautiful?” And the old designer looked at us and said, “What’s the point of being beautiful if you’re not young?” And I looked at the supermodel and said, “What’s the point of being young if you’re not beautiful?” And the four of us clinked our glasses together, and from the view by the pool, we looked down on all of LA and we laughed and laughed. We looked like the super villains of a Disney movie. It sent a chill down my spine.

When a chill goes down your spine, it’s your brain releasing dopamine. It happens pretty often when you’re on drugs, with all those chemicals sloshing around in your skull. In those days, it was happening to me a lot.

Back when I was a smiley little kid, I couldn’t have cared less if I had a drink with an old Pepsi model and the guy who made Michael Jackson’s jackets. It’s funny how living in a city can change you. That night, life seemed like a game that I was winning. I felt on top of the world, so smitten with where I was, looking down on the city.

And yet, did I really belong? What was I doing by the edge of the pool with all those social media influencers? I didn’t even have a Facebook, never did. Growing up, I never had even so much as a MySpace. I told people it’s because it causes depression, which it does. I told people it’s because it’s all fake, which it is. I was fake enough already. I couldn’t stomach being any more. And I definitely didn’t want a digital trail of it.

Right after the photographer and I ended it for good, my best friend, Chance, came over to my apartment. He said he wanted to make sure I was okay. I told him I was. It wasn’t like the first break up when the photographer caught me by surprise and told me he didn’t even like me. We’d been trying to make things work for six months, and it’d been going quite terribly.

Chance arrived at my apartment anyway. I met him at ground level, and as soon as the elevator door closed on the way up to my place, he backed me into the wall and started making out with me. When it became apparent that I wasn’t into it, he stopped and said, “What!? Can’t you kiss your friends? We’re just friends!”

I should’ve called it off then, but for some reason I let him into my apartment. He stood inside like a lost three-year-old. I should’ve known then that something was wrong. Chance had just eaten enough muscle relaxers to knock out a dinosaur, but I didn’t know it yet. I looked at him funny and said, “Are you alright, dude?”

He snapped to life and said, “Let’s do some yoga!” I’d recently gotten hooked on yoga because it affects the brain in similar ways to amphetamine. What a surprise. Chance scurried into my living room and then into my bedroom. When I made it to the living room, he was stripped down to a thong. “It’s hot!” he said, parading around the room. “I mean, I’m hot,” he corrected.

He asked me to name him some yoga poses to do. I thought this was about me — and the photographer — but I went along with it anyhow. I sat on the couch and called through the warrior sequence. Chance was a dancer, so he was really flexible, and he started off great. I was really impressed with his balance. But then he “fell” and ended up on my lap. He started bouncing up and down, in only that thong. I was unimpressed. He tried making out with me again. I said, “I gotta take a massive shit, dude,” and hauled wind to my bathroom.

I stayed in there for a few minutes to make it seem realistic. When I returned to the living room, Chance was butt naked, on my ottoman, with his legs spread wide as they go and all the way behind his head, touching the floor on the other end. He saw I wasn’t pleased. He said, “If you think I came over here to fuck, you’re crazy!” Meanwhile, his butthole was gaping so wide I could’ve played Skee-Ball with it.

The whole situation was absurd. But it ended up hitting harder than the breakup. It was tough making friends after college. I didn’t really have any until I was 25 and joined a gay basketball league. I thought I had made a lot of friends pretty fast, but the photographer was always telling me that they were only interested in sex. Chance was proving him right. I told Chance maybe he should go.

As soon as the door shut, I started crying. Despite all the drugs, I tried my best to be a good person. Still, it seemed like all anyone ever saw in me was my abs. First the girls in middle school. Now the gays in mid life. I felt alone and confused and pathetic. Why is it so easy for someone to want fuck you and so hard for them to be an honest friend?

We won the jump ball every game in high school, except one. I was 16 and starving and decided to eat a piece of pizza on the bench instead of start the game. It was a bad idea. When I subbed in, someone elbowed me in the face and broke my nose pretty gnarly.

My mom wanted me to get plastic surgery. She was really into appearances. I didn’t want to be any faker than I was already, and also, I didn’t want any more attention. After all, the fastest way to get jumped for being a faggot seemed to be getting a nose job. And, on the bright side, this crooked one could keep the girls away.

A different elbow broke my nose for a second time in college. This was right about when I started caring about my appearance for the first time in my life. I had met Sean, and with our ring tones and all the time we spent together in bed in our underwear and Maddie telling me about how his dick didn’t work, it was obvious he wasn’t straight. But I kept telling myself it was wishful thinking. Still, I hoped, maybe if I was attractive enough, he’d like me.

I spent all the money I made for two years on facial reconstruction surgery. After I healed, he humped me in the hallway and asked me to be his snuggle bunny.

Before the broken noses, back in the button-cute days of my boyhood, back when my mom was knocking out nuns left and right, she and I were best friends. We used to laugh, the two of us, together, basically all day. She spoiled me rotten and took me to the mall often. On one occasion, there was a booth setup that took your picture, and then applied this effect to it that made it look like someone sketched it. It was pretty nifty at the time.

In those days, I had a habit of walking around with my arm around my mom’s shoulder. After we got our picture taken, she said, “Could you stop hanging all over me? Jeez.” It really hurt my feelings. I felt like I thought we were best friends, but she didn’t even want me around. I felt like when I thought I loved the photographer, but he didn’t even want me around.

My mom and I didn’t get along so great after that. At one point, in college, we weren’t even speaking. It was Christmas Eve, and the dorms were shut down. Everyone, even the basketball team, was at home enjoying the holiday with family. I was holed up in my $400 car in the parking lot of a Walmart trying to keep warm and get some sleep. I was homeless that Christmas.

I never thought I’d be homeless.

I asked my coach if maybe he could get permission from whoever so I could stay in my room during the break. He could have, but since I didn’t turn out to be the star that my brother was, he didn’t really give two shits about me. He said, “I can’t. Go be with family. It’s Christmas. Why are you so mopey?” I wanted to say, Gee, coach, I dunno, maybe cause I’m in love with Sean, and he’s a trainwreck, because I can hardly multiply two numbers together when I used to solve differential equations in my head, and because Christmas is tomorrow and I have nowhere to go. But I didn’t say any of that. I just said, “I’m gonna graduate early and move to California.”

My mom’s never seen me in California. That’s probably for the best. We’re pretty close again, and I buy her some nice things for Christmas sometimes, but I make pretty good money, so it’s not exactly like I’m going out of my way or anything. I always wonder what my life would be like if she never asked me to stop hanging all over her at the mall after we got our picture taken.

My dad came to see me once. He and I are closer than ever. I didn’t really like him growing up. It seemed like he wasn’t around much. As a kid, it’s easy to take your parents for granted. He never missed a single sporting event of mine or my brother’s — even when I got to compete in the State Track Meet my freshman year, and it was just one event, and he had to drive 5 hours each way, by himself, just to see me jump over a pole for 5 minutes.

It’s kind of sad because his dad never went to any of his games. But as a kid, you don’t really understand that. All you understand is that after every game, even when you have 39 points in 8th grade — which is a lot of points for 8th grade — your dad never once tells you one thing you did right. All he tells you is that you could’ve stolen the ball on this play, or if you would’ve breathed more you would’ve made that one foul shot.

I knew he was just trying to help. I just wished he would’ve high-fived me and said, “Good job, sport” like Thomas’s dad. I didn’t realize that he might’ve done that if his dad ever said anything to him after his games.

Like most kids, growing up, I thought my parents sucked. Now I realize they were some of the best parents in the world. They wanted me to be one of the best kids in the world, so they sent me to fancy private schools with some of the best teachers in the world.

I was born in a freaking trailer! They didn’t have money to send me to a private school, but they did, because they cared about me.

Back home, my parents brag about me every time they get a chance — about how I’m out in California, where it’s sunny, making all kind of money. Of course, they leave out the part about me being gay and eating meth. But even if they didn’t, the other parents would still be jealous. Most of their kids either ODed or are eating painkillers in the basement.

I still like the photographer to death. He was infinitely interesting, as proven by the half million people from around the world that came together to click the follow button on his profile. I was just this guy who shot a lot of basketballs at the Y because he was afraid of girls and getting kicked in the ribs because of that. I happened to have nice abs because my brother asked me to watch Jurassic Park. I still wonder how that was enough to afford me the opportunity for all this to happen.

The hardest I’ve ever laughed in my life was in Europe, with the photographer, stone-cold sober. I woke up from a jet-lagged nap to that goober, dancing in his underwear, camera around his neck, the happiest I’d ever seen him, possibly anybody, because he captured the perfect shot of our cruise ship departing. That image of him I have forever in my head makes me burst out laughing any time I recall it.

A year, to the date, before our relationship ended — when the drugs were still new — the photographer invited to my first pool party in the hills. It was the Fourth of July, and we were sky high, on the edge of infinity, in this swanky pool. Our group was huddled together at the edge, watching the fireworks. I hadn’t met the host yet, this hot shot director — you can probably guess who — and he swam up behind me. He charmed me to pieces. In less than two minutes, he’s got me scooped up in his arms, and he’s swimming me around in his pool. Some of the boys start stripping down and hop in the hot tub, and out come the poppers, which seems like a strange drug for the occasion. The director asks if I’d ever done them. I say I haven’t. He says I have to. I’m still in his arms, floating around in a pool worth more money than I’ll ever make in my entire life. I look up at the sky, and the grand finale is in full force, ten thousand different colors. So I think to myself, “You only live once”, and he puts this tiny bottle next to my nose, and I take a little sniff. “Do you feel it? Do you feel it?” he asks, all giddy. “No,” I say. It takes a second. And then I gasp, and I say, “I do,” and he dunks me underwater. And when I come up he goes, “Now the other nostril.” And obviously I did. My boyfriend and I left the party a few minutes later. Everyone else had an orgy in the hot tub.

That group of friends and I still kick it occasionally — the photographer, individually, as well. He showed me the world, literally. I’d never been out of the country before I met him, and he took me to Canada and to Mexico and on an all-expenses-paid $60k Viking Cruise across Europe. He opened my mind. I’m no longer naive. I understand, fully, what all these pop songs are about. I understand why all the lyrics are about the same two things, love and drugs, which are really just one and the same.

A few weeks after the Goldstein, when I realized I should probably take it easy on the drugs, my old roommate from home sent me a text message. She had just had a baby, and wondered if maybe I could Venmo her some money. She was addicted to Fentanyl, and if she couldn’t buy Methadone or Suboxone or something, she’d get back on the F, and it’d get in her breast milk, and the baby would die.

A lot of those girls that liked my abs ended up doing Fentanyl with a lot of those guys that kicked me in the ribs in middle school.

I ended up doing Crystal Meth.

Sean ended up dead, at 27.

He hanged himself in a gym in South Florida. He and I had started Snapchatting shortly before he died. He commented on a picture I took with another guy a week before. A big publication had just agreed to publish this story, and I thought he should know beforehand. But I didn’t tell him about it. I decided to put it off.

I know he always knew how I felt about him, but I hate that I never told him.

Maybe all those weird situations with him were just wishful thinking on my behalf. We might have been close enough friends for him to kiss me goodbye, I guess. And it could’ve meant nothing when he put his hand on my thigh and told me he really didn’t like girls on the way to Colt Street’s party.

I remember the beat of my heart that minute more than my favorite song. I remember the exact spot where I stopped the car, the look on his eyes, the way he leaned into me. And I’ll never forget how he responded when I said, “Why are you telling me this, Sean?”

Confusion crept into his face until he slowly came to the conclusion: “Because we’re friends.”

What did he mean by that? Why did he keep repeating it and laughing and laughing? Questions like these make me feel like Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut. How did I get chosen for this role — to be high in the hills? I’ll never know.

***

The above is a true story. In the interest of the narrative, the names of places and people have been changed and merged together.