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2009
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1
MAY 16, 2009. The day had been marked in my calendar for weeks. RICHARD was all it said, his name scrawled across the white box devoted to the sixteenth, the anxious loop of my D enclosing the date like a promise. Beneath his name, a time: 8:00 p.m. It was 7:15, and I was already late. Richard had no idea I was coming. He didn’t even know who I was.
I couldn’t find my tie. I scanned the cramped quarters of my apartment, my claustrophobia mounting. There were only two rooms — a kitchen and a bedroom — and it seemed impossible that I could lose anything in such a small space. The bathroom was down the hall, shared by other residents in a building that had been advertised on Craigslist as a “hip artist loft in the heart of Bushwick,” although “gutter-trash shithole in the ass-crack of hell” seemed a more apt description. The apartment was a sublet, normally home to the lead singer of Ghost Dick, a minor indie band, but leased to me for the length of the group’s seven-month dive-bar tour. The ad called the place “furnished,” a rather generous word for a queen-size mattress occupying the majority of the splintered bedroom floor, a giant sound system crammed into the remaining square footage, and a single Ghost Dick poster featuring a crude rendering of a floating, phantom penis ejaculating over a crowded graveyard.
The rent was eleven hundred dollars a month, a sum I could barely afford and one that was currently sixteen days past due. Daily e-mails from Mr. Ghost Dick piled up in my in-box unanswered, their demands increasingly capitalized. WHERE THE FUCK IS MY MONEY, the subject line of today’s missive shouted. IF I LOSE THIS APARTMENT, I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU, read yesterday’s. I ignored them all. My anxiety grew exponentially. The truth was, I had spent my money for the month. Spent it on my plan for tonight.
Tonight. I ripped the mattress from the floor, desperate to locate my tie, losing valuable time. I’d been in the apartment for four months but still felt like an intruder in someone else’s space, like a burglar who’d decided to spend the night. The only evidence of my existence was the bag I’d been living out of since moving to New York. Every day, I plucked my wardrobe from that massive duffel I’d carted all the way from grad school in Ohio; I couldn’t use the bedroom’s tiny closet because it was still stuffed with my sub-landlord’s clothes. His kitchen was similarly unwelcoming. The photos he’d magneted to the fridge mocked me daily with scenes from an active social life — the rowdy keg party, the packed concerts, the kiss from a girlfriend or groupie or both — scenes that stood in stark contrast to my friendless existence as a recent transplant to the city. I’d developed an irrational attachment to my single piece of luggage — subtract it from the apartment, and I was erased.
I dumped the contents of my battered duffel onto the floor in the continued hunt for my tie. Everything I owned tumbled out and landed in a heavy pile. As I picked through the mess, my phone began to vibrate. I knew who it was — so few people had my number — and I debated whether to answer it. I was already late, and tonight was too important to miss. Still, this was one call I had to take.
I picked up the phone and braced myself for a familiar threat.
“Where’s the money going, Jonah?”
“Hi, Mom.” I sighed.
“Well?”
“New York is expensive.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” she snapped.
“What — am I supposed to have, like, an itemized statement for you?”
“Don’t you make money waiting tables? Why do I get this same e-mail from you every two weeks asking me for five hundred bucks, sometimes a thousand? You don’t even call me anymore, you just shoot off an e-mail.”
“Mom, I have bills, I have rent, I have . . . groceries —”
“Groceries?” she spat. “How about grad school, Jonah? That’s the bill I’m still stuck with on top of everything else. Why did I ever agree to let you go there? So you could become — what, a waiter?”
“Come on, Mom. Things take time. I’ve only been in New York for four months.”
My mother knew exactly which punches would land. My very expensive master’s degree in playwriting had paved the way for an illustrious career as a New York waiter. The job had been a blow to my delusional pride, but it paid at least a portion of my bills. My dream was to become a playwright, but I lacked the one thing most aspiring playwrights possess: rich parents.
“Jonah, just come home,” she pleaded, her voice softening. “This New York lifestyle isn’t healthy. You can live with me in Illinois, start going to church again —”
“Oh, because we all know how well church turned out for everyone the first time around,” I sneered.
“If only your father —” She stopped midsentence, startled by the word we had tacitly banished from our conversations. The subject of our family’s absent patriarch unearthed far too much hurt. Money was a much simpler fight.
“Please.” I sighed. “Can you help me out a little?”
“Do you know how much you’ve cost me?” she snapped. “Fifty thousand dollars. Spent on you. You think you’re in debt? What about me, Jonah? Where am I going to get fifty thousand dollars?”
Silence hung on the line. This was a new one. Never before had my mother calculated the cost of my existence and placed the blame squarely on my shoulders. Like I was a bad investment. Like I amounted to nothing more than the balance due on her credit card statement.
“Well, I’m sorry that I’ve come with such a hefty price tag. You sure you don’t want to trade me in at Walmart for a cheaper model?”
“And you have the nerve to keep asking for money.”
“Stop it, Mom. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t have a relationship with you if this is going to be the conversation every time.”
“Jonah — wait. I —”
“No, Mom. I’m done. Don’t call me again.”
“Jonah!”
I hung up and threw my phone onto the mattress, then reached for my laptop, shaking. Praying. I opened the browser and went to my bank’s website. My mother had access to my account, which allowed for the urgent, last-minute bailouts I needed far too frequently.
I exhaled in relief. The money had been deposited, as it always was, and would be available on Monday morning. The reward for fighting with my mother. Her apology, until our next argument. But this fight felt different, final in a way our others had not. I feared I’d never talk to my mother again simply because there was nothing left to say. I choked back tears as sudden panic seized my body; I felt like a skydiver with a faulty parachute looking over his shoulder to watch the thing that was supposed to save him flap uselessly in the wind, leaving nothing but the lonely hurtle toward death.
The ache in my heart turned into rage, strengthening my resolve. If I hurried, if the trains were on time, I could still make it. I grabbed my phone and shoved it in the pocket of my suit jacket. As I did, I felt something brush my knuckles.
My tie.
I lassoed the fabric around my neck as I made my way to the door. I would not be late, not now.
Richard was waiting.
* * *
I was lucky — the L train was on time. I sat down, surprised by the emptiness of the well-lit car. But then it hit me: the smell. An unholy cloud of sweat and trash and shit invaded my nostrils as the doors closed, sentencing me to ride in the stench. My watering gaze searched the car for the source and quickly landed on the only possible culprit.
He was homeless, of course — that was expected. But his age shocked me. I struggled to make out his sleeping face, veiled by a curtain of long, oiled hair. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen, his cheeks still swollen by youthful fat, his forehead a blank slate not yet creased by worry. The duffel bags piled at his feet seemed new, their load ambitious. I wondered how long he’d been on the streets, what tragedy had banished him from the world of the sheltered. Wondered what it would be like to let the city forget you, to disappear in plain sight. Wondered — heart quickening in my chest — where was his mother?
His eyes snapped open and caught mine in a hostile glare. I jerked my head forward, focusing on the rushing tunnel outside the window, suddenly eager to leave the car. Guilt kept me fixed to my seat. I didn’t want to join the countless others who’d already exited this train car in horror, looks of disgust aimed back at his hunched figure. I wanted to be kind, even if it meant holding my breath until the next stop. The train shrieked against the track as we barreled through darkness. I did my best to turn my thoughts to the task ahead.
I was on my way to Queer Film Voices, a cinema series in which famous LGBTQ artists hosted screenings of historically important queer films. Two months prior, I’d come across an advertisement for the event online and simply thought it might make for a nice break from the nightly monotony of nursing microwaved burritos by myself. I had no real friends during those early days, and I possessed a fresh-off-the-bus desperation for any opportunities to ease the constant loneliness that plagued my new life in the city. My calendar became spotted with a pox of cultural happenings: free readings at the New York Public Library, free gallery openings in Chelsea, free concerts in McCarren Park — anything free, really. Free was all I could afford. Somewhere, maybe in the trampled grass as I suffered through a mediocre rock band’s pro bono performance, I hoped to discover my “tribe,” that group of fantasy friends who’d been waiting in the wings, ready to rush toward me with open arms and giddy laughter. It never happened; these events always had the opposite of the intended effect. I would feel my isolation harden into bitterness as I watched groups of people from afar, gawking as they clung to one another with baffling ease, jealous of the joy on their faces. I carried a flask whenever I went out — insurance against my dread — and it was inevitably drained by the end of each evening. At that point, I usually made my way to a nearby gay bar, where I knew that at least my body could be exploited for companionship, muscled arms and chiseled stomach exchanged for an hour in someone else’s presence — a whole night if I was lucky. Rarely did my sexual encounters last much longer than that; my lovers always flinched at the subtle desperation that crept into my tone when I asked if we could “hang again soon.” My loneliness was a disease no one wanted to catch.
And so it was without much hope that I first considered the prospect of attending the Queer Film Voices cinema series. I sat on my mattress distractedl...
