The Gilded Razor

by Sam Lansky

  But with Seth, it wasn’t like that. That sex seemed pure, somehow. He didn’t know what he was doing, and there was a symmetry to our bodies, the feel of his ribs against mine, the tautness of his skin. I had forgotten what it felt like to be with someone my own age, but more importantly, I had forgotten myself that I was young. With the older men I slept with, from message boards or shitty gay bars, we were two men coming together to do something quick and dirty; with Seth, I was suddenly aware of my own boyishness, my youth, the feeling of our lives stretching before us, time yawing forward like an ocean of untapped possibility. Whatever happened between us was sacred.

  Or maybe it was just the drugs—it was always the drugs.

  People who loved to take drugs as often and with as much variety as I did were hard to come by, but Seth—ultimately a scratchy kid from Oregon who had a certain outdoorsy, freewheeling, psychonautically curious streak—loved the numbness and the electricity, the escape of chemicals, with the same zeal that I did. Half the goal of the trip was to get as fucked up as possible as often as possible, so I had brought a litany of pills from New York—Adderall and Ritalin, Xanax and Klonopin, Ambien and Vicodin and Percocet—and he’d been on the ground in Portland stockpiling a solid ounce of weed, some muscle relaxants that Marissa had given him, hallucinogenic mushrooms baked into chocolates, and we’d buy more in California. I’d asked him whether he could get any ketamine, which was my favorite drug but was so hard to find, but when he’d called the dealer, his voice mail message had said, “I’m in fuckin’ jail!” which made us break into peals of laughter.

  I still took more pills than he did, of course. I knew that he knew that I was in danger, but I also knew that he couldn’t say anything, too complicit in it to offer any kind of judgment or warning. After going through wilderness rehab, he had the vocabulary of recovery even if he didn’t really use it. It was easier to just get high and run away from it all, to be at once less and more present in our bodies and in the moment, to be happy and voluble and full of only the good feelings, to chase away the monsters until the drugs wore off and the next ones kicked in.

  And that was the mood as we drove south through the brush of central Oregon, the pastures and scenery, as I packed bowls from the little wooden pipe that he had brought, nothing but the open road and the Xanax hitting my system, serenity flooding through my body. I looked over at him as the sun illuminated his face, handsome and spangled with freckles, his tawny hair going white in the light, his laughter and delight at how happy I was, at making me happy. I thought that was the happiest I’d ever been, that I could ever be.

  Our first destination was Ashland, Oregon, a resort town near the California border where my father’s sister lived with her husband. They had bought the property a few years earlier, moving up from Orange County to escape suburbia for something more remote. My father had told my aunt that Seth and I were driving to Southern California and she had offered the small guesthouse on their property as a stop-off.

  By the time we arrived, just as the sun was setting, after about six hours on the road, the Xanax had worn off and I was feeling tense, but I didn’t want to take any more downers. I hadn’t eaten; Seth was hungry. I wasn’t in the mood to see family.

  “Sam, you’re so thin,” my aunt said to me. I loved when people said that. “Have you boys eaten?”

  “Yes,” I said quickly. Seth shot me a look.

  We dropped off our things and drove a few miles into the town. I had fond memories of Ashland; when my parents were still married, it had been an annual vacation destination for our family; we would stay at a bed-and-breakfast and go see shows at the Shakespeare Festival. It never felt particularly natural—things in my family never did—but it had been the site of some of our happier memories, and being back there (the smell of the air and the grass, the small-town charm) made me a little sad.

  The water in Ashland was unusually high in naturally occurring lithium. “There are no bipolar people in Ashland,” my mother had said once, laughing. “Maybe if we all moved here we’d level out a bit.”

  We went to a brewpub, brick-walled and rustic, and I sat nursing a Diet Coke while Seth wolfed down a burger. He knew better than to ask me whether I wanted to eat anything.

  That night, we smoked a joint in his car down the road before we went up to bed. It was colder than I’d expected, and—sharing a bed—I curled up next to him for warmth. I inhaled the smell at the nape of his neck and wrapped my arms around his thin chest.

  It felt like he was a million miles away from me.

  Somewhere outside of Bakersfield, we stopped for the night and took mushrooms, rolling around on the threadbare carpet and looking at the coffeemaker with slack-jawed wonder; then, on the comedown, we began to argue about something, a fight that continued for hours. I was so frayed from all the Adderall it felt like my brain was made of putty, and Seth wanted some, too, so I shared it with him. Then I realized that I was going to run out if I didn’t pace myself, so I started hoarding them and taking them in secret.

  On the third day I got a terrible head cold (probably from taking so many pills) and my nose wouldn’t stop bleeding. We drove through the desert in the darkness, past the fields of wind turbines, like ghostly figures waving their arms. We crashed in Palm Springs, where Kat’s mother had a home; I tried to convince Kat to steal some of her mom’s Ambien for me.

  She looked at me strangely; I knew she wanted to ask me to leave but couldn’t.

  The next day, as we drove toward Los Angeles, the rain started. At first it was just a drizzle, and then out of nowhere, the downpour was torrential. The windshield wipers on his old Corolla swished back and forth swiftly, but it was hard to see, and he was squinting, hunched over the steering wheel, the way my grandmother drove. I could tell he was scared.

  “Go toward Claremont,” I said. “Just get on the 10.” I fished around in my bag for an Adderall, but the prescription bottle made a sinister rattle—it was nearly empty. Shit, I thought.

  My phone was ringing; it was my father. I didn’t want to talk to him, but I picked up anyway.

  “The mail came,” he said. I stopped breathing. “There’s something from Princeton. Do you want me to open it?”

  I made an indistinct moaning noise.

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Is it big or small?”

  “It’s medium-size,” he said.

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I turned to Seth. “Pull over.”

  He hit his turn signal, preparing to get off at the next exit.

  “Dad?” I said into the phone. “Yeah, open it.”

  I heard the rustling of papers, pictured him sitting at the kitchen table with the mail, tearing at the envelope. I could almost feel it in my own hands. Seth pulled into a fast-food restaurant.

  “You didn’t get in, kiddo,” my dad said.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later.” I hung up the phone. I felt numb. I turned to Seth. “I didn’t get in,” I said.

  “Sorry,” he said. “That sucks, man.”

  I exhaled. There was a buzzing in the back of my head. It was getting louder.

  “You still got into all those other schools, right?” he said. “I mean, that’s good. I wish I was going somewhere besides U of O.”

  “Kiss me,” I said, and he begrudgingly complied.

  “What do you want to do now?” he said. We were still at least a half hour from my friend Hanna’s house in Claremont, where we would be staying the night.

  “I want champagne and foie gras,” I said. “I want to get some coke. I don’t want to feel this way.” I half realized I was shouting. “I don’t want to feel anything.”

  “You never want to feel anything,” he said.

  I looked out the window. It hadn’t even registered with me that the rain had stopped.

  Once we got to Claremont, the mood improved a bit. My friend Hanna took us to a dealer
who sold Himalayan opium, and we spent all our money on an ounce, then drove around in her car, filling it with fragrant white vapor and giggling. In a parking lot, we fell asleep; when we woke up, the gauzy white smoke was so thick we could hardly see. It took a mile for all of it to clear out of the car, streaming in big white clouds with all the windows open. We spent a week in California, and we did not go to the beach once.

  Seth dropped me at the airport in Long Beach to catch my flight back to New York.

  I knew he was growing tired of me, that his patience had dwindled to the point of no return, that I’d run him into the ground, and the ways in which I made my life appear fast-paced and thrilling and glamorous while his was rather average and staid, this sweet stoner boy from Oregon whom I’d suckered into getting caught up in the madness of my universe, the slick shellac of all that glitzy adolescent posturing—it had all just turned him cold. He’d been tricked by how dazzling I could be and then gotten close enough to see the bracing emptiness of it, how ugly it was when exposed to the light. I knew he wouldn’t want to get high and make out with me anymore, which was all I’d really wanted anyway—that, and to feel good all the time.

  We smoked the last of the opium from a pipe in his car. I was out of money and out of drugs. The sky was a grim shade of gray.

  “I still love you,” I said. “You know that, right?”

  “I love you, too, man,” he said, but I could tell it was only out of obligation.

  He was just another person I’d worn out.

  Back in New York, Dean called me and wrote me, but I didn’t reply—I felt strange and empty. I hadn’t gotten in to Princeton. What was the point? I’d failed in my pursuit of becoming the person I’d hoped I might become. I started taking even more pills than I ever had before, going home from school early to lie in bed in the dark, dreaming strange benzodiazepine half-dreams.

  Although I’d been rejected by Princeton, I had been accepted to several other schools to which I’d applied. It seemed likely that I would go to Vassar, though that was based solely on its ranking. It was hard to imagine myself going off to college—hard to imagine where I would end up, who I would turn into.

  I began spending more time with Ronan, a boy from school who lived a few blocks away from me in a town house in the West Nineties. He was Irish, with shoulder-length, oily brown hair that he raked his fingers through anxiously as we waited for the dealer to come. We smoked pot or drank bottles of cough syrup and sat on his balcony, tripping and looking at the light in the trees.

  I had a fling with a television producer who lived in the West Village; I took his Ambien and sprawled in his body heat.

  I went on several dates with Evan, an NYU student whom I’d met on Fire Island the previous summer. He was blond and good-looking and, for once, not so outrageously old that I couldn’t introduce him to my father. We took Ecstasy and wandered around the East Village, making out on the street. Some nights he crashed at my place; my father brought us coffee in the morning, which felt refreshingly normal. He was the closest thing I’d had to a real boyfriend in years.

  But I was listless and lost. At school, they called it senioritis, but my case felt somehow more urgent than that. It was spring now, after a long, cold winter, and the flowers blooming should have felt like the start of something good. But I felt empty.

  I took more pills, and the more pills I took, the emptier I seemed to feel.

  “You’re looking thin,” Dr. Chester said. I hadn’t seen him in two weeks. Why did everyone keep saying that to me? Did I really look that much thinner than I had two weeks earlier? Was that possible?

  I thought of all the things I could say in response: “Thanks. You always give me the best compliments.” “Thanks. My target weight is ‘sickly.’ ” “Thanks. I haven’t eaten since the ’90s.”

  But I didn’t say any of those things. I just laughed. I could feel my jaw working, some telltale twitch betraying me.

  “I know, and, like, people keep telling me that, you know?” I laughed again. “But, like, I remember you telling me this, back when we started with the Ritalin, right, that it’s, like, a side effect of stimulant-based medication that it often causes weight loss but it’s not necessarily a problem because maybe your body is just restoring itself to the weight where it was supposed to be because maybe you were eating for other reasons, like stress or emotional problems and so you were eating more than your body needed, like, nutritionally or whatever, but now you don’t have to anymore, so isn’t it probably, like, a good sign that I’m thin?” I laughed a third time.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Right,” I said. “Yeah, so.”

  “This is the last time I’ll see you before you head home for the summer,” he said.

  I nodded. “I think this is going to be a really great summer,” I said. “I’m excited to, like, work on repairing my relationship with my mom or whatever.”

  “And Vassar in the fall.”

  “Yeah, Vassar,” I repeated.

  I didn’t tell Dr. Chester that Vassar felt very far away. I didn’t tell him that the very idea that I would ever get there was laughable.

  “I’m writing you some prescriptions,” he said, pulling out his pad. “For the summer. Ninety days’ worth.”

  “Okay,” I said. My mouth, which had been sticky-dry a few minutes earlier, was suddenly filling up with spit. I wanted to grab the prescription pad from his hand and run for the door.

  What a stupid little man, I thought, suddenly filling up with contempt, an odd and distant rage that I couldn’t entirely name. I knew I hated him, but I didn’t know why. I didn’t know if I hated him because I believed he had turned me into a monster or because he couldn’t fix a monstrosity in me that was innate.

  “This is for—” He laid them down on the coffee table one by one, scribbling on them with a silver pen. He had a jaunty mode of expression that often made him seem younger than he was, but his hands were dotted with liver spots, and I suddenly felt food I hadn’t eaten coming up in my throat. I choked, disguising it as a cough.

  “Ninety Adderall XRs,” he said. “One hundred and eighty short-acting Adderall.”

  “Fives or tens?” I said, my heart pounding.

  “Tens,” he said, smiling at me. “And then—ninety Lexapro. And ninety Ambien. I’m going to stick with the original formulation since you didn’t tolerate the CRs. And ninety Xanax.”

  “Two milligrams?” I said.

  “One milligram,” he countered.

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s probably good. I don’t want to take too much.”

  “I’m glad you’ve been able to maintain a moderate relationship with these drugs,” he said.

  “Me, too.” I looked down at the prescriptions. They were levitating.

  I took a cab back to my apartment and went straight into the Duane Reade on the corner to drop off the prescriptions. The lights inside were suspiciously bright. I felt dizzy.

  “It’ll be about thirty minutes,” the pharmacist said.

  “I’ll wait,” I said.

  I walked up and down the aisles, studying competing brands of toothpaste. I picked up a tabloid and flipped through it. Everyone was too fat or too thin. I took a pack of candy off the shelf and began to eat it mindlessly without paying for it. I stood by the pharmacy counter and checked my phone.

  Then, a tap on my shoulder. I turned around. It was my father.

  “Hey, Sam,” he said.

  “Dad,” I said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Picking up some prescriptions,” I said. “Just came from seeing Chester.”

  “Oh, good,” he said. He took out his wallet and handed me his credit card. “Use this.”

  I woke up two days later in a hospital bed. Everything hurt.

  A nurse, her scrubs sea-foam green, her expression grim, was seated across from me. She had a clipboard in her hand. She was asking me questions. I knew that I had been answering them for a while, but I also
knew that I hadn’t been conscious while that was happening. Consciousness, like everything else, was so ephemeral.

  “Were you trying to harm yourself?” she was asking me.

  “No,” I spat. “Of course not.”

  “Then why did you take so much?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It was an accident.”

  Then everything went dark again.

  The next flash of memory was getting out of a taxi with my father in front of our apartment building. He held my arm as he walked me up the stairs into the lobby.

  Later, I pieced together accounts from various friends about how I had met them in Central Park, where I had been handing out pills from my freshly filled prescriptions, taking too many myself. We’d gotten drunk there, but they said I didn’t seem normal. Eventually, I stumbled off toward Fifth Avenue.

  Nobody saw me after that until Jesse found me lying under a bench, in the middle of the night, my face cut up and bleeding. He figured I must have been hit by a car, he said, and I needed to go to the hospital; this wasn’t something I could just sleep off. He called my father and dragged me into a cab.

  My father came downstairs at four o’clock in the morning and I fell out of the cab, my figure wraithlike, my skin luminescent in the lamplight. He took me to the hospital and waited for me to wake up.

  “You were comatose,” my father said, his voice threatening to break. “I was so scared.”

  The doctors said I’d taken probably twenty Xanax over the course of the evening. It was only my high level of drug tolerance that had kept me alive. It was funny, almost—the tolerance that had been such an annoyance to me as I’d had to take more and more pills to achieve the same effect had turned out to be my life raft.