Blackouts and Breakdowns (4 page)

“I can’t, I have to study. I have exams coming up,” I replied.
School was definitely getting in the way of my social activities, but that was what I was in New York to do in the first place so I had to put forth some effort.

“Fine,” Jason said, defeated.
“Call me this weekend, and we’ll go out.”
I hung up with Jason and got to work.

A few days later, I was beginning to worry because I had not heard from Greg.
It had been three days and I had not so much as heard a peep from him on instant messenger and began wondering what was going on.
Finally, after five days of not hearing from him, I gave him a call, but it went straight to voicemail.

“Hey Greg, it’s Mark from the other night,” I said into his voicemail box.
“You know, like Mark from
Rent
, ha, ha, ha.”
What the hell is wrong with me?
“Just calling to see if you wanted to get together sometime soon.
Maybe we could catch a show or something. I would love to see
Chicago
or even
Annie Get Your Gun
.
You know, that was the first show I was ever in and now Bernadette Peters is doing it on Broadway.
I love the story of Annie Oakley.”
I would continue with the rest of the message I left him, but I am afraid it gets a little too embarrassing even for me.
I had no idea what I was doing so I continued rambling on until his voicemail cut me off.
I could not remember whether or not I told him to call me, so I called him back and left another message reminding him to call me back.
After a few days of not hearing from him, I began to worry so I called Jason and the two of us met at our favorite piano bar.

“I don’t get it,” I said as I sipped my Manhattan.
I had upgraded from Whiskey Sours to Manhattans in a matter of weeks.
“Why hasn’t he called me back?”

Jason looked at me as if I was a child who was just told the Easter Bunny wasn’t real. “Mark, honey,” he said, cocktail in hand, “I’ve been doing this a while and I have to let you in on a secret.
What you did last weekend was a meaningless hook-up.
Greg is not going to call you back because he was not interested in anything more than a hook-up.
That’s how we gays do things.”

“Wait…what?” I replied.

“Mark, it was a hook-up. Get over it!”

Jason and I drank our cares away.
We drank Goldschlager and White Russians for the rest of the night and I got sick off of alcohol for the first time.
After getting loaded that night, I woke up the next day vowing to get over Greg and move on.
He was my first hook-up after all and I felt it was going to take some time to get over.
However, Greg had left me with a little present that was going to forever ingrain him in my memory.

“You have scabies,” Dr. Huxtable said to me the next day.
My doctor in New York barred a striking resemblance to Bill Cosby and every time he walked in the room I thought he was going to do a stupid dance or offer me Jell-O.

“What the hell is scabies?” I asked as I itched every inch of my body.

“It’s like body lice,” Dr. Huxtable said with a smile, although I did not find his response charming or funny.
“I will give you a cream that will get rid of it.
You have to go home and wash everything.
Every towel, every sheet, every article of clothing must be washed.
Clean everything and use the cream I give you and it will go away in no time.”

I shrugged. Of course the first time I hook-up with a guy I get an STD.
Just my luck.

“Just use the cream to make key lime pie,” Dr. Huxtable then said.

“What?” I asked quizzically.

“Just use the cream and you’ll be fine,” he said.

“Oh.”

I sat and stared at the doctor wondering what Phylicia Rashad was doing with her career.
How had I come to this?
That afternoon, I called Greg and told him to go fuck himself for giving me scabies and to lose my number, which he apparently already had done as I had not heard from him in two weeks now.
And so, the Great Scabies Debacle of 2000 kicked into high gear.

I went home and washed everything in my dorm room.
As I was doing this, my straight pot-dealing roommate looked on.
Probably because he was high.
I washed everything and used the cream and felt relieved.
However, the next morning, when I woke up, I saw that my roommate was itching all over.

“What the hell is wrong with me?” my roommate asked.

“What’s up?”

“I am itchy all over.”

Oh shit
, I thought.
I had somehow given him scabies. Then I remembered when we first moved into our dorm room, I commented on the fact that we both had the exact same towels and we had better be careful not to mix them up.
Apparently, someone had and now my roommate had scabies as well.
But, it didn’t end there.
He had given it to his girlfriend, and she had given it to her roommate Meegan (pronounced Meegan. Not Megan.
Upon meeting her, I told her that I thought her name was ridiculous and that I would be referring to her simply as Megan or Sara.
I thought she looked more like a Sara anyway).
For a week, the four of us sat around my dorm room, scratching ourselves like monkeys in a cage. Everyone wondered where the mysterious scabies outbreak originated, but I kept mum.
I did not need everyone knowing I had slept with a dirty boy on the Upper East Side.

After the scabies outbreak calmed down, my best friend from high school, Evelyn came up to New York to visit.
It was time for me to come out of the closet to her.
I always suspected that Evelyn knew I was gay and was just waiting for me to come out, but nothing prepared me for her response to me coming out of the closet.

“So, I got us tickets to go see
Chicago
,” I said as Evelyn and I were walking down Broadway with the lights of Times Square upon us, “oh, and I’m gay now.”

Evelyn stopped dead in her tracks.

“What?” she asked.

“I’m gay now.”

“Gay?”

Apparently Evelyn had forgotten how to speak English in the two months we had been away from each other.

“How are
you
gay?” she asked.

Had she forgotten the night that we drove around D.C. singing every single lyric to the entire CD of ABBA Gold?

“I’m gay, Evelyn,” I said.
“We all knew it was only a matter of time before I came out of the closet.”
Evelyn’s face went lax.
I could see she was extremely disappointed by this dramatic revelation.
“Seriously Evelyn, the signs were always there.
For God’s sake, for our tenth grade English project on
Othello
I wrote a script for a play and based it off of the characters on
All My Children
.
How is that
not
the gayest thing anyone has ever done?”

“I know Mark, but I thought,” Evelyn paused.
“I thought you would always be my back-up guy.”

“Come again?”

“My back up guy,” she said again, “you know, if I couldn’t find a husband by the time I was thirty, you would be there for me.”

“Well, let me just put my life on the backburner and wait twelve years to see if you do or do not get married.”

“Oh, Mark, you know what I mean.”

After about an hour of explaining to Evelyn that I not only liked musical theatre, Britney Spears, soap operas and ABBA, but also dick, she finally got the message.
Since then Evelyn has become the perfect fag-hag.
Accompanying me to weddings, galas and pretty much any family event I needed her to go to with me.
Coming out to Evelyn was an easy segue into coming out to my parents, which was made even easier by my sister who decided to come out the same night.
That was a memorable Thanksgiving for everyone in the Rosenberg clan.

Freshman year of college was a really enlightening experience.
Not only was I exploring the many possibilities of what academia had to offer (i.e. beer funnels, beer pong, etc.), I was also on a personal mission to try just about anything anyone put in front of me.
I had gotten over my fear of hooking up with a guy, and although I contracted an STD, I was no longer afraid.
After that, I tried every type of booze imaginable and then moved on to bigger and better things.
November of my freshman year of college, I had the pleasure of meeting my new BFF, Alex who would become a staple in my life for the next year or so. Alex and I were very much alike.
He lived on the sixteenth floor of my dorm building and the two of us quickly bonded over our mutual love of Ace of Base.
We became fast friends and began hanging out almost every evening.
We had even found a new hang out, Club Blue.

One night after we had been pre-gaming in Alex’s dorm room we headed down to Club Blue with full intentions of getting blackout drunk.
Upon entering we did the usual shooters and began flirting with guys for free drinks.
We were eighteen and poor college students, so we had to work with what we had. I ended up befriending a really hot guy, whose name I do not remember, so I will refer to him as “the hot guy.”
We were flirting pretty hardcore until he pulled me aside and took me to the bathroom.

As we entered the bathroom, he emptied his pockets and pulled out a small plastic baggie and a rolled up twenty dollar bill.

“What are you doing?” I asked the hot guy.

“Coke,” he replied.

“Oh,” I said as I watched him put the twenty-dollar bill into his left nostril and snort up the cocaine he had laid out on the toilet paper holder.
Suddenly, the allure of doing coke was lost on me.
It wasn’t nearly as glamorous as when they did it in
Boogie Nights
and Julianne Moore flipped out on Roller Girl and told her she would be her mother.

“Want some?” the hot guy asked as he whipped his nose.

“Ummm…ok,” I replied.
And why not?
What is the worst that could happen?
“Can you just give me just a second?” I asked.
The hot guy left me alone in the bathroom to contemplate whether or not to do the drugs that sat before me.
I really wanted to look cool in front of the hot guy, but was nervous about doing coke.
I then wondered what life would be like if I started doing drugs.
Was I to end up like a junkie or someone fabulous like Liza Minnelli who was pretty much coked up throughout the 70’s?
As I pondered what do, an apparition appeared in the bathroom.

“Say no to drugs,” the figure said.

I could not see who was standing before me.
I had so much to drink that I was not sure if I was hallucinating or seeing a real person.
As the figure came closer, I knew exactly who it was.

“Say no to drugs!” the figure said again.

I wiped my eyes and saw a little old lady in a red pantsuit approaching me.

“Damn you Nancy Reagan!” I yelled.
She had come to me again.
Nancy first came to me in a vision when I smoked weed for the first time, and now she was back.

“I warned you that pot was the gateway drug, and look at you,” Nancy said as she gestured toward the pile of cocaine that was sitting on the toilet paper holder.
“Now you are about to take cocaine.
Shame on you Mark.”

“But Nancy, I really want to hook up with that hot guy,” I said.
Surely Nancy Reagan understood the ins and outs of gay life in New York.
She was kind of like a fag-hag with all of those power suits.

“Oh, you homosexuals and your drugs,” she said with a laugh.
“I have come to so many of you and no one ever listens.
Look at what happened to Paul Lynde for Christ’s sake!”

“Maybe you are right Nancy,” I said.
Then suddenly, I remembered why I had not listened to Nancy Reagan in the first place.
“Wait a minute, Nance.
I remember why I didn’t listen to you before. You stole Ronald Reagan away from my beloved Jane Wyman, star of
Falcon Crest
, the best show ever on television.
I’m not listening to a word you say. Don’t tell me not to drugs after you went around stealing another woman’s man!”
And with that I took the rolled up twenty dollar bill and snorted the cocaine.

“Remember my dear, crack is wack,” Nancy said.

“Whatever,” I replied, “your husband’s administration was a joke!” And with that Nancy disappeared.