French Roast
Category: French
Neighborhood: Greenwich Village
When you’re trying to form a life while living in Manhattan, restaurants become the stage on which all sorts of scenes can take place. It becomes so much more than going out to grab a bite to eat to sustain yourself; it becomes so much more than nourishment. Restaurants become memories, and it can be hard to break free from some of the ghosts that linger in your local diner. For me, it was evident that I would never return to French Roast without thinking of that day. French Roast would never again be that place where I ate French onion soup and frisee salads at four in the morning. Now it had become French Roast where I spent Thanksgiving that year he broke my heart.
I hadn’t eaten a thing in days. Perhaps it was all of the cigarettes I had been chain-smoking, or perhaps I had just lost the will to go on. I was a wreck. How could I not be? It was Thanksgiving, and he had betrayed me so deeply that it felt like the world was coming to a screeching halt. I had never believed Him before when he said that he wasn’t sure if he could only be with me, which of course was what I was pushing for. I had tricked myself into believing he would change for me. Our love was that strong. Or so I was led to believe.
I’m famous for acting irrational when hungry—some may call it my greatest character flaw as I am constantly, ravishingly, devastatingly hungry. I’m not a violent drunk, and I don’t fly into fits of rage when I imbibe in anything mood altering. But hunger does something to me that I still can’t get a hold of after all my years living on this planet. After not eating for days and wallowing in my own misery on a day that was meant for bountiful, gut-bloating binge eating, I began to feel like I was going to lose my mind. However, nothing even sounded good to me. If I could never eat with Him again at “our place” on St. Mark’s, then I would gladly lie down and savor the exquisite pain of my hunger.
Earlier that day, I had called my family in a state of utter panic. Mom picked up the phone, and I began to sob and wail hysterically in the kind of cacophony that is usually reserved for infants or the mortally wounded. Through gurgling agony, I choked out the words “This day is my favorite. I just want some turkey.” Translation: I can’t believe he ruined everything. If he really loved me, then why would he do such a thing to me?
French Roast was the first place I ever had a drink in New York City. It was the year 2000, and it seemed almost a lifetime ago. The irony was not lost on me, seeing as how it looked to be the last place I might have a drink in New York City as well. It certainly wasn’t planned that way. It just sort of happened. After writhing in pain on the couch all day crying, I finally gave in to Him as he had asked to see me before I left. Being the sucker that I am for punishment, I agreed to take a walk with Him.
It was freezing cold and late at night, and several places had already closed. French Roast is but a stone’s throw away from my apartment, so when we passed by it all aglow with flickering candlelight and abuzz with life, it seemed like a no-brainer. We had been there together a few times for late-night dinners and the occasional glass of wine at the bar. Instantly, I began to get vivid and debilitating flashbacks of happier times. I remembered how we sat side by side in the booth on one of our first dates and how hard I became as my hand grabbed his knee under the table. It’s so easy to remember all the good sometimes. It’s a blessing and a curse.
Thanksgiving 2013 will always be remembered. Every little detail will forever be burned into my brain like a tattoo. I can remember the taste of the pumpkin ravioli that I ordered because it seemed like the most seasonally festive thing to have. I’m sure it was delicious, but it tasted like sawdust to me. He ordered the boeuf bourguignon and couldn’t get more than two bites down at a time without breaking into tears. It especially upset Him when I handed Him the basket of sliced baguette to sop up all of the delicious sauce that was left in the bottom of the bowl. He knew that I knew exactly what he liked. It was devastating. It was the worst night of my life. It was probably the worst because we both knew that after that meal we would never be allowed to return to being ourselves again.
None of this is French Roast’s fault. It was all just us being us. Me, drinking corked burgundy, and Him, having a total emotional meltdown that was making the two girls dining next to us totally uncomfortable. I can only pity the poor, sweet waiter who had to pretend to not notice the two guys crying and holding each other at table 15. The air was so thick with tension that it seemed to disturb the mood of the entire room.
That being said, French Roast will forever hold a place in my heart. It was the first and the last, the alpha and the omega, of my once whimsical heart.
Then I went to California.
Nathan’s Famous
Categories: American (Traditional), Hot Dogs
Neighborhood: Coney Island
“Stop!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
The cab came to a screeching halt in the middle of 6th Avenue. It was early in the morning, so this was okay. We hadn’t made it more than a few blocks from my apartment, but I already needed to go back. I made the driver circle around and instructed him to leave the meter running as I dashed hastily into my building, nearly slipping and toppling over on the ice that dressed the curb. I ran up the five flights to my apartment. Out of breath and light headed, I threw open my door and ran to the shelf.
I stopped to marvel for a moment at the little shelf that was right above my bed. There, sitting front and center, was the thing that I had forgotten. My lucky charm. My prized possession. The one thing that was going to guarantee that the plane I was about to board would not fall out of the sky in mid-flight and end my sordid affair on this planet. How could I have forgotten it, especially on this important day when I was traveling across the entire country? I had remembered to put it in my pocket every day when I got dressed, so what was so different about today? I snatched it out of its shrine on the shelf and secured it in my fifth jean pocket, where it lived most of the time. At least when I was wearing pants.
My lucky penny was my newest obsession. It’s a stupid little thing—one of those things you get when you go to an amusement park or a fair and you place a penny in the machine and turn the crank. It flattens the penny and stretches it out and embosses a little picture on it. Mine? It’s a jellyfish. It’s from the Coney Island Aquarium. And it reminds me of the best summer of my entire life.
See, I’m no hoarder, and that’s what’s weird about this whole ordeal. Most of my prized possessions are simple memories, and these are the things that will never weigh me down or make me feel trapped should I ever get the sudden urge to move to Europe. Or California. Or become a missionary or a monk who lives in a monastery somewhere on a big, snowy mountaintop in Tibet. That’s why it’s so strange that I’ve started to keep things that he gave to me.
On the shelf in the shrine is where the penny lives when I’m not wearing pants. Next to that are a few flimsy pieces of paper from fortune cookies that we ate together. Nearby are a few black-and-white photo strips from happier times and the stupid plush dog he won for me on that trip to Coney Island where the penny was born. Like any scar or tattoo or chemical burn, these trinkets were now a permanent fixture on the topography of my life. He had always had such a thing for “things,” and perhaps I did now, too.
These days, I didn’t feel much like myself. I knew that the summer, and our relationship, had ended in an utter disaster of epic proportions, but I was determined not to let it get the best of me. That’s why I kept these things, and instead of setting them on fire or mailing them back to Him like I probably should have, I decided to make them into something far less sinister.
These were my new motivation, my new reason to carry on. These things were a reminder that I wasn’t dead inside and that I had lived and loved and felt like the person that I had always wanted to be. Even though it was long gone, I would never let myself forget how alive and happy and loved I felt that summer. Sure, he was a scumbag that lied to me constantly a
nd cheated on me and used me and emotionally abused me—but that’s where the real glory lies. Those would not be the things that defined our love, as dead and distant as it was. I chose a new memory and let all of those bad ones just melt away. I had thought I found The One, and this propelled me to become the best version of myself that I had ever met.
We had destroyed each other fully. No one can contest that. But none of that would ever erase that day on Coney Island. It won’t erase my penny or my stuffed dog or that feeling I get when I think about eating at Nathan’s Hot Dogs with Him. There was hardly anyone on the boardwalk, and it felt like we were the only two people that even mattered in all of New York. It’s that kind of stuff that I’ll take with me as I go—not all of that nasty stuff that mired us down and made us into ugly, hateful people.
I decided to take the penny with me wherever I went for the rest of my life. I would keep it in my pocket as a reminder that I had the ability to love unconditionally. It wasn’t a reminder of love lost, but rather a reminder that love existed. Someday, someone would take me and my weird little rituals seriously. I knew that the summer of 2013 wasn’t the last time I would go to Nathan’s and be wildly and hopelessly in love. I’d go back there. In a heartbeat. Even if only to savor the best damn hot dog in all of New York. Even by myself.
As the plane took off, I held the penny in my hand and squeezed it. I could feel my heart lighten, or perhaps it was just the altitude rushing blood to my brain. It was time to let go.
Sunset Tower Hotel
Category: Hotels
Neighborhood: West Hollywood
The bathtub in the Sunset Tower Hotel was roughly the size of my apartment back home in the arctic tundra of Manhattan. As I lay back into the scalding hot water, I could feel the weight of the world slowly melt away from my skin. Across the bathroom was a floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the boxy totality of Beverly Hills, and it just sat there. For a moment, I was silent, and the big marble room seemed to fill with the deafening cacophony of nothing. I mused on the iconic words of Brett Easton Ellis from his opus Less Than Zero: disappear here.
Perhaps someday I could. For the time being, I was more than content with my sick love affair with New York. She was the bane of my existence in the wintertime, but I knew that soon I would be taking long walks through the tree-lined streets of the West Village with a smile on my face, an iced coffee in my hand, and the soundtrack to Amelie blaring through my headphones reminding me of my truest self. Now, in Los Angeles, I almost felt the same sense of ease. Being here brought me a kind of whimsy that seemed almost like it was borrowed. As I sat in the huge tub, I skimmed a handful of bubbles from the surface and fashioned myself a bubble-beard and a Kiehl’s shampoo mohawk. I looked at myself for a solid five minutes in the mirror above the tub and wondered who I was and who I was going to become because of this trip.
Los Angeles is not a place to go and “find yourself.” I’d known this for most of my young life, as I was raised not far from these very palm trees lining the boulevard beneath my hotel window. After living in New York City for so long, LA was a place where I went when I needed to lose myself. It was a place where I could go and shed my dour demeanor that I wore like a bawdy velveteen sports coat. It was so loud, and so blatantly worn on me, that it felt heavy and emotionally cumbersome. When I needed to remind myself not to take myself too seriously, I would always have this strange little oasis of sheer vapidity and vanity to put things into perspective.
I woke up early on the second day of my trip and watched the sun rise. The balcony of the room was one of the most stunning views I’d ever taken in. To the east I could see (and nearly hear) the hustle and bustle of Santa Monica Boulevard—the epicenter of gay West Hollywood. To the west lay downtown LA, a big cluster of sharp looking skyscrapers huddled together on the vast flat canvas of city. Further west I could make out the Griffith Park Observatory up on the hill, and I began to reminisce of happier times when I was there with boys who thought they loved me at one point or another. This place was not my home, but the histories that I had written here spoke volumes and felt oddly familiar and comforting.
As I said, it was not my intention to find myself here. I already felt as if I had a very firm grasp on who I was and what I wanted. I was here because I wanted to reaffirm that I was doing the right thing. At thirty-one years of age, I felt lost in the tangled mess of Manhattan and what had become of my personal life. Manhattan was so blatantly cumbersome that it was taking over my entire body’s equilibrium. It was just too much sadness and hurt and happy memories turned sour by deceit. While I was here, basking in the bastard sun and taking in unseasonal rosé, I could shed that skin and just be.
I knew I had to return shortly, but I just reminded myself to breathe and remember who I was. I had lost myself somewhere deep in a snowdrift, but being thawed out was helping me remember all that had been before. I would return to Manhattan not a new person, but the person I had always been before all of the pain and all of the sadness. I’d still crave Him and want Him endlessly, but I’d crave myself and my once-ardent life more. When I returned, I’d plant palm trees in my heart. I’d wear emotional flip-flops and bleach the tips of my soul. I’d think of the morning view from Sunset Tower and pray that I could be a better person. Change is good. Change is vital. But I would never, for any man, city, or situation, change the truest desire in my heart to celebrate and revel in the power of true love—for myself and for others.
Chapter Four
IT WAS WITH FREAKISH BRAVADO that I carried around my heartbreak. As they say about wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve, it means to be wide open and honest with one’s feelings. It made me wonder if wearing a broken heart on one’s sleeve was even a thing. Why did I do it? Why couldn’t I put on a fake smile and drink my way through the recovery period like a normal person going through a breakup? Why was it that instead of holding my head high and realizing my self-worth, I just wore that sour feeling of misery like a scarlet letter?
I did my best to hide it when I was forced to leave the solitude of my warm little cave of an apartment. I kept melodramatic Facebook posts to a minimum, and when asked by friends how I was doing, I was able to feign a quiet “fine” and change the topic. As much as I tried to play it off that I wasn’t slowly rotting inside, I still had to deal with it in my own way. Between bouts of writhing around in tear-soaked fits of release that escaped every now and then, I would sit at my laptop and wait for the strength to churn out some of the caged emotions onto Yelp. Like a flasher in the streets, I got a momentary kick of validation as I streaked my way through the random corridors of the Internet with my emotional dick hanging from beneath my metaphorical trench coat.
Then I’d have irrational freak-outs that would sideswipe me out of nowhere. Maybe I deserved it. Maybe he was right in saying that if I would have just given Him some space, and maybe took a little better care of myself and gone to the gym a little more, he wouldn’t have even wanted to cheat on me. It was something he swore upon every time we fought—it was clearly my fault that he cheated on me. Because I wasn’t being what he wanted, he wasn’t being what he wanted as a result. That and, of course, the fact that I was too much “fun.”
He hated how much fun we had together, and I figured this must be a result of some kind of fucked-up upbringing of his. Perhaps it said a lot about my character that I do, in fact, love to take life far less seriously than it should be taken—at least when I’m in a good mood. My ideal life goals include finding a way to stay in bed all day watching funny movies with a man, only taking breaks to run to the freezer for more ice cream or to take a sexual intermission. Given my way, I would spend every afternoon walking through the park sipping coffee, reading the newspaper, and picking my nose with wild abandon.
I believed in working to live, not living to work. He was always so pissed off when I was just sitting there wearing only pajamas and a shit-eating grin with my pint of ice cream in hand—he had to be out fixing his life, ch
asing his dreams, and making himself a different kind of person. He had to be out there making a name for himself and getting “liked.” He hated me because my life was secretly how he wished he could live his life, but he had been hardwired from youth to work hard and change or he’d never “make it” in the end. Me? I thought I’d already made it. I thought I had it all—love and happiness and fun and all of the time in the world to just sit and exist without wanting anything more from the beast that Manhattan could be.
I never asked for much: just a best friend, some good snacks, a few laughs, and dick on the regular. It’s the New American Dream.
Although I was only four years older than Him, at times I felt like I was completely out of touch with his entire way of looking at the world. The small gap of age was the difference between someone who existed in the age of the Internet versus someone who remembered living life before the age of the Internet.
He was always so obsessed with getting “likes” on everything. If it were a picture of Him (usually topless and flexing his bulging biceps or chest) he would check his phone manically as to make sure all of his followers were impressed. I’d sit by his side all the while and try to pet his arms IRL, and he’d swat me away.
The Yelp Page 5