The Gilded Razor

by Sam Lansky

  He rode his bicycle there, and wore a sporty windbreaker that felt so quintessentially Portland, and I remember thinking about how I used to date men in suits, how those days had to be all gone now that I’d escaped to the damp Pacific Northwest, with its grand old western red cedars and its quiet nights, its restaurants where drinks were always served out of mason jars.

  Michael was taller than I was, which was unusual. He was broad-featured and athletic, handsome in an old-fashioned, slightly goofy way. Graying at the temples, which I liked. Although he was thirty-seven, and very much an adult, he did not remind me of my father, and I was grateful for that.

  Later, when Kat’s mother met him, she took to calling him Super-H. He looked like a superhero, she said.

  Michael took me back to his house, a two-story Victorian in a gentrifying neighborhood, not far from where Jerick had lived. Then crackheads had ambled the streets, frightening me; now the sidewalks were clotted with little restaurants with rustic decor and prix fixe menus, cocktails made with muddled huckleberries, cocktails I didn’t drink. We lay on a brown leather couch that smelled like tobacco and the woods, and my pulse throbbed in my ears when he kissed me. We ate hors d’oeuvres naked in the kitchen. We made love. He read me his favorite passages from his favorite books. We talked about Tobias Wolff, Frank Conroy, Vivian Gornick.

  He was an English teacher, after all.

  It was a big house for a single man, but he wasn’t single, I learned, not really—or at least, he hadn’t been, because it was the house he had shared with his wife and son. The marriage was over, he said; it had been for a long time, but the divorce was slow. The house was on the market. He had custody of his son some evenings and every other weekend. He’d gotten sober for his son, he said.

  I was certain that I could not handle meeting him, this child that was a product of a marriage that predated me. This tousle-headed, apple-cheeked kid in photographs on his dresser. I imagined his laughter streaking the walls, his footsteps on the hardwood floors, haunting as a horror-movie ghost. I put my hand on Michael’s heart, and it felt unimaginable that he could have made another person.

  We spent the weekend together in that house, and when I left, I was so hysterically full of feeling that I wept in my car. I smoked a cigarette anxiously. My breaths were short and panicked.

  “Is this how it feels?” I asked my sponsor. “Is this how it’s supposed to feel? Is this just what being human is like?”

  I stayed with Michael for nearly a year.

  Michael and I had been together for about six months when my father came to Portland from San Francisco; he was in town on business, and it happened to coincide with my birthday. We were not on good terms, but we were not on bad terms, either, and I appreciated that he was there at all. My older brother, who was now in graduate school in central Oregon, came up for the day. The three of us had breakfast and then drove out to the coast. I was wearing a maroon sweater that hugged my arms too tightly. The sand and ocean were all washed-out gray, a saltwater taffy dream. My father took a picture of my brother and me standing on the beach, and in the photograph, I am squinting at the light.

  I look like a little boy, but more than anything, I look like my father’s son.

  That night, the four of us went to dinner—Michael, my brother, my father, and me—at a restaurant in Portland with an outdoor garden. It was a clear, bright autumn evening, and the sun was going down. Michael was nervous, and he didn’t say much, but I loved him for being there, even though things had grown difficult between us by then.

  Those lusty nights and indolent espresso mornings had yielded so quickly to a temperate, sexless familiarity, but he had been drinking in secret and lying about it, and that terrified me. The alcohol was hot and sweet on his breath—how badly it made me crave a drink, even as I loathed him for his recidivism and resented his willingness to anesthetize the often-excruciating clarity of sobriety. That was something that I wished I could do, too.

  But he was sober at dinner, and my father was graceful and inclusive, considering that Michael was closer in age to my father than he was to me.

  I held Michael’s hand under the table. His leg was shaking. I put my palm on it, felt the smooth texture of his jeans on his knee, the vibrations of his muscles, the anxiety that rippled through his body.

  I loved that he cared enough to be afraid.

  Later, I asked my father, “What did you think of Michael?” There was silence on the other end of the telephone.

  “I don’t know,” my father said. “He seemed like a good guy.” Perhaps it was too strange, that situation, for him to take in much more than the age disparity. I told myself it didn’t matter.

  A week later, in the interest of reciprocity, after Michael told me for the hundredth time that it would mean a lot to him, I went to meet his son, at a pizza place.

  I tried to connect, tried to bond over school and dinosaurs. He mostly ignored me, which I didn’t mind.

  I never knew how to talk to children, even when I was one. It was all overwhelming, to be that age, with my boyfriend who was twice my age and his son who was half my age, and I felt in that moment that there were so many roles I had never learned how to play: How could I possibly be a stepfather? I was no defter at playing a father than I had ever been at playing a son, no better at playing an adult than I had ever been at playing a child.

  Michael had all of the qualities I had listed in my inventory, and some flaws, too; some grievous ones, even. I was too young to be able to interrogate our age difference fully—what it meant that we desired each other. I told myself that there was little chance that I could align my interests with those of an age peer; or, more arrogantly, that I was too mature, had too much life experience to be with someone my own age. But the simple truth was that I loved Michael for who he was, his strong arms and quick wit, and because, since I had told him once, shortly after we met, that I had an insatiable need for validation, he sent me a short email every morning telling me something that he loved about me. Something new, every day, for months on end.

  From the outside it might have looked creepy, but it didn’t feel abnormal when we were together. At moments I wondered whether this was just the same old dysfunction, but when he looked at me, the lines of his face would soften, and I knew that it was real.

  Those emails stopped after he started drinking again. We began to fight, bitterly. “I would never do anything to jeopardize your sobriety,” he said.

  “I know that,” I said. “But the risk isn’t worth it. And neither are you.”

  I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave him just yet, even though I knew the relationship was going to fail because of it. The ship was flooding—I could see it—and there was only room on the life raft for me. And it was strange, too, to be in pain because someone else couldn’t stay sober, and mostly when I cried as Michael was driving home, not knowing whether he was drunk or not—whether he might crash and kill himself or someone else—I thought of my parents. I finally tasted one drop in the ocean of pain and fear they must have felt all those years.

  But what I could never tell him was something more complicated—that there were other times, too, when we were having sex, that I would close my eyes and pretend that he was a stranger, that the breath on my face belonged to a man who wouldn’t think to ask me my name, who would just leave cash or drugs on the nightstand.

  I would imagine that familiar heaviness in my arms, the fever burning in my chest, the acrid taste of chemicals in my mouth, and I would tell Michael that I loved him, not even sure if that was the right name for the emotion that, sometimes, just felt like a resignation to the way things were now, and a longing for a life I had left behind. And when I saw zombie gays on the street with locked jaws and fidgety hands and red-rimmed eyes and instantly knew their secret, I envied them, and hated myself for it, and something, too, swelled inside me when I saw young people staggering out of bars.

  As time passed and my life began to change, soon there were
happy hours and corporate retreats and birthday parties and lonely evenings—all those markers of adult life that felt so funny without alcohol. I weathered them sober and sometimes even gladly, but even at my best I never felt quite normal. Maybe “normal,” I thought, wasn’t the point.

  I reminded myself that I was lucky to be sober, lucky to be healthy, lucky to be alive. Lucky. That was the word, wasn’t it? But it was remarkable to me that I bore no mark of Cain—that my features hadn’t changed, that my history wasn’t written all over my face. When people told me that I had my whole life ahead of me, I said I was just grateful to have survived the whole life behind me.

  “You never have to go back there.” I heard people say this in meetings about their addictions, and it always confounded me. There was so much of me that had never really left. There was so much of me that I had lost there that I knew I could never get back.

  At night, lying in bed with Michael, I had strange, vivid dreams where everything sparkled—a gilded razor, a mound of shimmering powder, a golden handgun that gleamed in the light. When I turned to look at my reflection in the mirror, there was glitter streaming from my nostrils, clinging to my lips, dripping from my chin.

  But then I would awaken to find sunshine pouring through the window, and I would turn to feel it on my face. After spending so much time in the darkness, my eyes had adjusted. It got easier over time, but there were still mornings where it was the most frightening thing—to step out, blinking, into the sunlight.

  Eventually, I moved back to New York. Michael stayed behind in Portland. After a few years, we lost touch.

  Yet there was one moment at that dinner with my father and my brother and Michael when I was caught somewhere between a child and an adult—grown-up enough to get things right from time to time but still young enough not to know that wouldn’t always be enough. Where the amber glow of that affection felt like all the nourishment I could have ever craved, where the world and all the people in it spilled over with so much possibility, and it felt likely, not just possible but likely, that things would be different for me.

  Fathers and sons and brothers, all of us tall and strong and failing.

  But all of us trying.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my passionate and diligent agents, Andrew Stuart and Jason Richman, my tireless manager, Jon Klane, and my patient and wise editorial team, Mitchell Ivers and Natasha Simons. I am most grateful, too, for the early mentorship and support of thoughtful teachers and editors Debra Gwartney, Tom Bissell, Anna David, Josh Kendall, and Sarah Hepola, who helped me to tell my story better.

  To dear friends, trusted readers, sharp-eyed colleagues, and everyone who carried me through the writing of this book in ways both big and small: Kelly Stone, Bradley Stern, Kendall Storey, Eden Sher, Allyn Morse, Debby Ryan, Stacy Waronker, Matthew Scott Montgomery, Jessica Newham, Kipton Love Davis, Bethany Skeen, Cady Groves, Ryan O’Connell, Esperé Nelson, Daisy Bell Mellors, Nile Kohli, Dan D’Addario, Kelly Conniff, and George Henry.

  And to my family, who bore with me through my darkest years and through this revisiting of it, I am most fortunate that you love me anyway.

  SAM LANSKY is an editor at Time. He has written for New York magazine, The Atlantic, Esquire, Out, and Grantland.

  FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: authors.simonandschuster.com/Sam-Lansky

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  Copyright © 2016 by Sam Lansky

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  First Gallery Books hardcover edition January 2016

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  Interior design by Jaime Putorti

  Jacket design by John Vairo Jr.

  Jacet photograph © Photolibrary/Getty Images

  Author photograph by Kyle Krieger

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lansky, Sam.

  The gilded razor : a memoir / Sam Lansky.

  pages cm

  1. Lansky, Sam—Childhood and youth. 2. Teenagers—Substance use—United States — Biography. 3. Drug addiction—Treatment—United States. 4. Gay teenagers—United States—Biography. 5. Authors, American — 21st century—Biography. I. Title.

  HV5805.L36A3 2016

  362.29092 — dc23

  [B]

  2015015092

  ISBN 978-1-4767-7614-9

  ISBN 978-1-4767-7616-3 (ebook)