MYSPACE DATING
When I was twenty, there was an amazing website called Myspace. It was the bastard child of AOL, geared at horny early-aughts internet users. One could create a profile, “friend” people, search local users, join groups, assign music to one’s page, and create a Top 8 friends list. All in all, it was another way to feel alienated while pretending you’re making friends.
At the time, cell phones only made phone calls and sent rudimentary text messages, composed using the keypad of your phone. There was no Grindr. I repeat, there was no Grindr! As a gay man under the age of twenty-one, where the hell was I supposed to find a date? Or a lay, for that matter?!
Enter Myspace.
I had a string of Myspace victims. The first person I went on a date with after breaking up with Mason was a Bulgarian college student named Orlin. He invited me to a Harvard mixer and I agreed to join him. I was very out of my element at Harvard, because I had barely graduated from high school and felt inadequate. (Ironically, a decade or so later, I would return to Harvard as a participant in Harvard Business School’s Crossover into Business program. Hair flip.)
Orlin was about nine feet tall, with very plucked eyebrows. I don’t know why the eyebrow pluckers flocked to me. He had acne-scarred cheeks and the oiliest skin I’ve ever seen. I have oily skin, but Orlin was a glassy mirror. He was nice, but we had zero chemistry. I still don’t think I had met anyone I really wanted to have sex with yet, other than my seventh-grade science teacher, Mr. Dillon, who was ex-Army and wore tight polo shirts, close-cropped hair, and pleated khakis, and would press his junk up against the lab tables while lecturing. Orlin didn’t stand a chance.
Next was another Myspace guy named Michael Anthony, a philosophy major at Harvard. He was very short and had a great face. I was almost attracted to him, but I found him insufferable. I enjoy philosophy, just not twenty-year-old philosophers.
During the time I was seeing Michael, my friends and I hosted a “Disney Princess Power Hour” party in which I cut sixty Disney songs down to one minute each and spliced them together to make an hour of brilliant nostalgia porn. Each time the song changed, one was required to drink. One famed drink we created was called a “Tangula.” It consisted of Tang, vodka, and peach schnapps, and we sometimes made it as an icy blended beverage with a Tang rim. The hangovers were incredible. Another blended dumpster fire was the “Dirty Girl Scout,” and it called for Baileys, vodka, and Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookies. Our Disney Princess party was not only a drinking party, it was a costume party. We wore whatever we had that made us feel like princesses.
Michael Anthony and his friend showed up in skimpy tennis garb. I was not sure of its application to our theme. While my friends and I reenacted scenes from The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, they sat dourly on the sofa. Michael Anthony’s friend had tucked his feet up preciously so that his testicles were hanging out the side of his tennis shorts. My friends and I were mortified and confounded by his lack of humiliation. We were singing along to “Part of Your World,” getting sloshed, and giggling at a stranger’s nut sack. Shortly thereafter, I sacked Michael Anthony. Nuts.
My next victim, JR, was a fine-boned, effeminate thing with beautiful eyelashes, like a pretty doe. I wasn’t into him. Then there was one my friends nicknamed “Butter Tooth” because he was butter soft and his teeth had been whitened so much that they looked silver. I brought him back to my apartment after a night out. We were making out and he was trying to remove my belt (I wore a belt in those days). He tried and tried but couldn’t get the damn thing undone, so I dismissed him.
Phil was a sweet gentleman, a quiet, corn-fed beefcake who studied at MIT. He was one of the first people I was truly attracted to. Unfortunately, he wasn’t that into me. He ignored me, and I got the point. I heard a year or two later that he had died of a drug overdose at a circuit party.
My final Myspace venture was named James. I refused to date a person named James because that’s insane, so I called him Jimmy. He was six foot five and pale as a ghost, with a handsome face and good proportions. He was a graphic-design student and seemed intelligent. It turns out that being intelligent and acting intelligently are two very different things. Nevertheless, I liked him very much. In hindsight, I think I just wanted to have sex with him. Isn’t that what “liking” someone means, when you’re in your early twenties?
I was now twenty-one or twenty-two, and until that point I hadn’t really had sex with anyone. I had enjoyed plenty of hookups, laden with heavy petting and foreplay, but no good old-fashioned intercourse. I behaved as though I were this sexual goddess, when in fact I was a prude, a puritan. Jimmy was the first guy I really wanted to have sex with. Anal intercourse is kind of scary. I poop out of there!!!
But where there’s a Jimmy, there’s a way. He spent a week essentially living at my apartment, as school was out and he didn’t want to go back to his parents’ house somewhere in northern Massachusetts. This was essentially when I lost my virginity. I was the top, a Lilliputian mounting a giant of a man. It was fine—nothing to write home about, as virginity losses tend to be underwhelming.
We kept seeing each other intermittently until one fateful day when I went to visit him at his parents’ house. We played Halo and made out in his room. But when it was time for me to drive back to Boston, there was a blizzard looming. Jimmy’s parents invited me to stay over, but my ballet guilt kicked in. “I can’t!” I told them. “I have rehearsal!” Waving goodbye to Jimmy, I got in my little beige 1995 Toyota Corolla, which I had named “Showbiz.”
It was already coming down something fierce when I left their driveway. By the time I got on the highway, it was whiteout conditions. I was listening to Janet Jackson’s All For You album and talking to a friend on my new, ultraslim Nokia phone when Showbiz began to drift in the blizzard. I was going only about twenty miles per hour, but my little stick-shift tin can began spinning down the Massachusetts highway in search of something to smash into. There was no automatic braking system—computers had not yet been integrated into cars—so my life slowed down into a cinematic time stop, Janet Jackson whisper-singing “Doesn’t Really Matter” as I careened in a snowy spiral into a Subaru SUV down the road.
I hit their rear bumper with my driver’s-side headlight, and Showbiz crunched up. The SUV was completely unscathed, not even a ding. I was able to get out of my car and carefully approach the SUV to maniacally ask if everyone was OK. “We’re fine,” the driver and passenger said, “but your car is not.” Then they drove away.
I was sitting in my dead car, in a Massachusetts blizzard, when the tow truck arrived. The intimidating tow truck man told me, “It’s totaled. I can drive you into town, but that’s it.” The town was Wilmington.
“But I don’t have any friends in Wilmington,” I whined.
“Not my problem,” he said. We silently drove to town in his huge truck, with Showbiz dangling off the back like a vagabond’s carryall.
He dropped me off at a Dunkin’ Donuts, which people from Massachusetts are obsessed with. It was the only thing lit up in the whole town, with Christmas lights adorning every edge, as the blizzard whipped about in the bleak night outside. I called my friend Joel, who owned a large pickup truck, and begged him to come rescue me in Wilmington. Like a saint, he agreed to leave his Boston apartment in the dead of night to drive through a blizzard to fetch me.
I ordered a coffee and a Boston cream doughnut and sat down at a table for the long wait until Joel’s arrival. The local radio station was blaring Coldplay’s “Fix You,” mocking me as I cried into my watery hazelnut coffee under cheerfully blinking Christmas lights.
When I finally told Jimmy what had happened, he texted me that his feelings toward me were platonic. I had to Google what that meant. We never saw each other again.
THE CHICKEN MAN
Finally I decided it was best to leave Myspace dating behind in the Jurassic period. My dear friend Tony, whom we called Teena
after his drag name, Nicoteena Patch, was the Samantha to my Charlotte, and he taught me everything I know. He grew up in South Carolina and used a rifle as his first sex toy, inserting the barrel into his Dixie anus. Teena had names for all of his “bops,” as he called them: Blue Hat, Lines Meth, Central Park Meth, Old Scary, and Indian Nice Apartment. He had been hooking up with this gentleman he called “Tremont Teacher” and decided Tremont Teacher and I would be a good match, so he introduced us shortly after Jimmy had friend-zoned me.
Tremont Teacher was in fact named Keith. He lived on Tremont Street and was, yes, a teacher. He was shorter than me, with black hair, a vaguely Italian look, and dark chupacabra eyes whose shadowy irises filled almost the whole eye, leaving no room for the whites. He clearly worked out a lot and had a fit, buff body, but unfortunately, he had horrendous posture. Keith waxed his chest and stomach regularly, which left him mottled with red bumps. A cartoon monkey was tattooed on his stomach. He was very attractive but made poor aesthetic choices.
Sex with Keith was like watching a critically acclaimed movie but still not enjoying it. I understood that he was technically hot, but I wasn’t attracted to him. We didn’t have “that thing,” trite as it may be. We never actually had intercourse, even though he desperately wanted to. I was apathetic. It has taken me a very long time to realize that I should not have sex with people I’m not fully attracted to, even though society makes me feel like I should be having sex. Throw gay society in there and you’ve got yourself a haunting mix.
I don’t remember much about my time with Keith, with the exception of two things. We both considered ourselves tops, and, much like Michael Anthony, his fate was decided at a party with my friends. At the time, Boston Ballet was absolutely wild for a costume party, and we went all out for Halloween. I was a brothel madam Wicked Witch of the West that year. Keith didn’t have a costume, so I dressed him up. He was terrified of drag and didn’t understand it (red flag) so I put him in an appropriately “butch” costume. I dressed him as a chicken, in a tight white shirt and white tights. I had a knit chicken hat complete with googly eyes that I had bought years before in a market in Helsinki, Finland. As a finishing touch, I secured two small red water balloons to an elastic and tied it around Keith’s head, effectively making a testicle-like wattle under his chin. My friends hadn’t met Keith before, because I knew how vicious they could be, and this really tickled them. “HE’S A GODDAMN CHICKEN!” they squealed.
What on earth as I thinking? How was poor Keith supposed to integrate into my friend group dressed as a chicken? A tiger, maybe, but a chicken?
From that point on, they called him “Chicken Man” and asked me what I saw in him, which I really didn’t know. I wanted it to work. I had had such a string of failures that I was so ready for something to work.
He took me to Red Sox games and to a Kelly Clarkson concert. (I preferred Kelly.) He cooked for me. He introduced me to his parents. I really tried with Keith the Chicken Man, but ultimately failed. When I broke up with him, he was truly angry. He had tried quite hard to win my heart, which I appreciated, but not even Kelly Clarkson singing “Behind These Chupacabra Eyes” could produce the desired feelings.
Weeks later, I received a text from Keith saying that we should remain friends and that there were no hard feelings. I went over to his apartment one night for dinner. At first, things were civilized, and we ordered a pizza. But shortly afterward, Keith went off the rails, delivering a vitriolic diatribe about all my many shortcomings and essentially telling me I was a horrible, selfish, shit person. While this may have been true, I certainly wasn’t going to hear it from Keith the Chicken Man. I took twenty dollars out of my wallet, dropped it on the floor, whispered, “This is for the pizza,” and walked out of the apartment.
MILK
Dick College was grueling. Boston was home to many prestigious universities, but Dick College made them all look like preschool. I struggled, as many do, to find my path, my major.
As it so happened, my major, for a time, was Dan Donigan, a figure skater later turned drag queen named Milk from Syracuse, New York. I met Dan in 2008 at a gay Boston nightclub called the Estate. I was very drunk and called him “Don” all night. We spent twelve years together . . . but that is another story and shall be told another time.
Turns out Dan had frequented my Myspace profile back in the day. Maybe Myspace wasn’t so bad after all.
ALL MY PETS ARE DEAD
Growing up in a middle-class family affords one certain luxuries. My mother’s house was always inhabited by a mélange of furry ruffians. There, we were a Hallmark family, riding on the backs of enormous golden retrievers and snuggling with floofy kitties. We dodged enormous mountains of feces that settled into high-pile carpets. We slipped on slimy, viscous pools of cat vomit on olive-green linoleum kitchen floors. We loved, tortured, and maimed the plethora of American Family standard-issue furballs that entered the revolving door of my mother’s home.
On the other hand, my father’s house was home to D-list pets such as gerbils, mice, and a rabbit. Snuggling was absolutely out of the question. I still bear a long white scar and unspeakable trauma from Babs the bunny. Scraping bepooped cedar chips out of a small cage became my lonely pastime. This sums up my dichotomous childhood perfectly: flagrant flippancy versus austere pragmatism.
ALICE
When I was very young, my mother had a beautiful golden retriever named Alice. Living with Alice was like living with Maria von Trapp. Her singsongy benevolence was unmatched. She had her patient au pair schtick down pat. Alice was essentially our mother, and she took care of us five children effortlessly, even without the whistle-wielding, babelicious Christopher Plummer.
I remember Alice getting out of the shower, her paws dripping wet, all six of her nipples completely ravaged by her many children, and turning on the Today show while putting her ears up in a Turbie Twist. Once she even asked me, a five-year-old, “How does Katie Couric get her eyelashes so voluminous?”
“Human mascara works so much better than dog mascara,” I told her.
Alice was hit by a garbage truck. Or was it my brother who was hit? I don’t remember anymore. Alice, however, refused to die, even though she was mauled beyond recognition. My human mother, Nancy, made the call to put our suffering dog/nanny/mother Alice to sleep. Isn’t that insane? That we call it putting them “to sleep”? Sleep, by nature, indicates that a creature will wake up. Hell, even Rip Van Winkle woke up. Even Sleeping Beauty! I was faintly sad, as though someone had eaten the last yogurt. It wasn’t the same type of devastation that I would feel later, over the death of a pussycat.
MOOKIE
A year or two later, my mother brought home a German shepherd named Mookie, a name that now sounds vaguely racist to me for some reason. German shepherds look like doomsday devices compared with golden retrievers, and I, at six or seven, was wary. I gave Mookie the benefit of the doubt until one night, I awoke to find him sitting next to my bed, the whites of his eyes glowing in the suburban Connecticut dark, the way you’d imagine Jeffrey Dahmer staring at a little boy he was about to rape and dismember. I startled awake and leaped out of my bed, tore down the stairs, and dashed out the door to the backyard with Mookie in vicious pursuit. I could hear his growls. He was saying, “Little boy! Little boy! I’m gonna eat your face!!!”
I had made it to only the middle of the backyard when Mookie tackled me and began snapping at my face, saliva dripping off his menacing jowls. I was screaming bloodcurdling screams when my mother burst from the door and grabbed Mookie’s collar, trying to forcibly rip him off me while he kept shouting, “I’m gonna freeze your head for later, little boy!” His teeth caught on my footie pajamas and tore them, exposing my arms to the frigid winter night.
Finally, my mother pinned down the beast and managed to cage him. The next morning, she phoned Animal Control. They picked Mookie up that day and, I imagine, put him “to sleep.” No trauma here
, though. I’m all good. Fucking fuck. Damn you, Mookie.
CHERRY MERRY MUFFIN
Shortly after Mookie’s farewell, on a sunny Connecticut morning, a pristine white cat sauntered onto our back deck. Beholding it with God-fearing awe, I exclaimed, “Michelle Pfeiffer is on our back deck!” My mother decided to investigate. “No collar!” she said happily. We kids knew what that meant. Michelle Pfeiffer was ours now.
My mother had the temperament of a seven-year-old vegan girl who loves ponies. Any animal that wandered up to the door, she’d take in.
Sven, for example, wandered up to our door one day shortly after Michelle Pfeiffer’s arrival. Sven—I’ve no idea why we called him that—was a very befloofed bichon frise with the temperament of a jacked-up coke fiend. Nancy knew that this dog had to belong to some unknown neighbor, but we kept him all the same, until about a week later, when someone knocked on the door and said, “Give me back my dog, you psychopath!” Nancy obliged.
Back to Michelle Pfeiffer. Because I was basically an adorable little girl, my mother let me name the absolutely stunning white pussycat. I decided to name her Cherry Merry Muffin, after a doll that I was desperate to own but would never acquire. This doll had a manic 1980s commercial that aired incessantly during my youth. Little white girls would shout, “SHE BAKED CHERRY MUFFINS FOR HER PARTY!” and “THEY SMELL LIKE CHERRIES!” and “SO DOES CHERRY MERRY MUFFIN!!!” Thus, Michelle Pfeiffer became Cherry Merry Muffin. Who in their right mind bakes muffins for a party? If I had a party and someone brought muffins when I’d asked for vodka, I’d sic Mookie on them.
Cherry Merry Muffin replaced Alice as my caretaker. I loved her more than anything, perhaps even more than television or my mother. She’d mutter glamorous things to me, such as “Let Muffin finish her martini before we go to Hermès” and “My favorite Disney princess is Cruella de Vil.”
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