I’m Special (18 page)

After college, things changed, and it was no longer chic to be a random shit show. You couldn't drink two-dollar wine and pee in the street or scream at your boyfriend anymore. Everyone is too paranoid they don't have their shit together that life has become a pissing contest over who's grown up the most. “Oh God, the things I used to do in college . . .” your friend will tell you, sipping some white wine at happy hour. “Wow. Just wow!” Hold the phone, sister. College wasn't that long ago! Why are we trying to pretend that we're reformed soccer moms? Everyone is still a hot mess. Don't tell me about how great your job is going. Tell me about how you cried last week in a Duane Reade because you were taken off health insurance. That's more relatable.

A few years ago, I met up with a friend whom I used to party with back in college. When we saw each other, he immediately tried to do damage control. “Man, those were some crazy times. I don't rage like that anymore,” he insisted. Meanwhile, I was thinking, “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. You're about four drinks away from calling your coke dealer.” And I was right! A few drinks in, coke got mentioned, and in the blink of a twitching eye, he called his guy to score some blow. “Oh God,” he sighed, hanging up his phone. “I can't believe I'm doing this!” Um, I can. You're a twenty-four-year-old buying coke in a Lower East Side bar. The world is not going to fall off its axis.

When his coke dealer came, I got into a time machine back to 2007 and found myself doing bumps in the bathroom at some disgusting bar I hadn't set foot in in years. Then, to add icing to the very mature cake, we ended up getting caught by a bouncer and escorted out of the bar. My friend looked at me with a sheepish grin on his face, apologized for the night going south, and quickly said good-bye. I never saw him again. That night I learned that the more someone tells you they've changed, the more likely they are to still be getting kicked out of bars for doing coke. You can only really grow when you start being honest with yourself about who you are in the first place.

Don't treat life like it's a race. Also, don't ever do coke. Maybe it was the shit back in the '70s and '80s, but now it just
makes you shit. You might already know that, though. Millennials have pushed drugs like coke back in the closet, only allowing them to reappear occasionally in a discussion about recovery, but everybody still does them. People aren't supposed to know that your road to adulthood has been paved with eight balls instead of long-term relationships and cute brunches with your friends. Go on the Facebook page of a heavy drug user and you'll see an online identity that's been carefully curated. There are pictures of her smiling with her family on vacation or hiking some canyon in Los Angeles. Then you meet her in real life and discover that she's a wild partier who's snorting pills in her living room and getting wasted every day. My generation is the first to be in charge of their image. We call the shots and tell you how to feel about our lives. It doesn't matter if what we're projecting is phony. If someone believes it, that makes it true.

When I go on Instagram and see people at SoulCycle or snuggling in bed with their dog and significant other, I feel like an insta-loser. I know they're doing what everybody else does, which is cherry-picking the brightest moments while hiding the dark parts, but it still makes me feel bad about myself. I want to institute an Internet honesty day where people tweet and post pictures of what they're really doing. “Just had a delicious brunch (you saw the amazing photos earlier, right?), but now my hangover and IBS have set in, so I'm lying in bed feeling vaguely depressed. Here's a photo of the weed I'm about to smoke . . .” I think it'd be a cathartic exercise. Everyone could see the giant disparity between the lives we feel like we're supposed to be living and our day-to-day reality. Then maybe by realizing that we're all secretly struggling, we wouldn't feel like such failures.

I used to do a fair amount of drugs. It was during a time when I equated coolness with self-destruction. I thought that if something didn't hurt me, it wasn't worth doing. It took me years to realize that not only was this a terrifying way to live but I also should stay the fuck away from mind-altering substances because the two of us don't get along. I was the person who smoked pot and then became paranoid that UFOs were going to come down to steal my soul. I was the guy who took Adderall to study but got distracted looking at his desk lamp for six hours. Nothing demonstrated my ineptitude at taking drugs more clearly than the time I took Molly. I had tried this “pure” form of Ecstasy once before, but it didn't work. I just felt kind of warm and dumb, which is how I feel most of the time anyway. Never one to get discouraged, I bought some more from another dealer and decided to take double the dose at a friend's birthday party. This is a stupid, stupid thing to do—each batch of drugs has a different level of potency—but I wasn't thinking. Like my deceased queen Aaliyah once sang, “If at first you don't succeed, dust yourself off and try a lot more Molly again.” So, the night of the birthday party I dissolved a ton of Molly in some water and drank it up in the bathroom of a bar. Then I waited to feel different. And waited. Twenty minutes passed and I still felt sober.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked my friends who had also taken Molly. “Why isn't this working?”

“I have no clue,” my friend Jenny said, her eyes rolling to the back of her head. “I feel AMAZING.”

I looked over at my other friend Angela, who was googly-eyed and talking animatedly to a stranger. I was the only one who wasn't rolling!

“I don't get it,” I said, throwing my hands up in defeat. “This drug is one fickle diva.”

Molly must've heard me talking shit about her, because at that moment everything started to feel like fireworks. My brain turned into an orange that was getting its pulp squeezed out, my skin glowed like an orb, and anything I touched felt like someone was fingering my prostate.

“False alarm, guys! I think Molly's here!”

“Yay!” Jenny giggled, sounding like an excited toddler. “Let's go mingle.”

Jenny and I bounced around the bar like two pinballs, talking to everything and everyone. It was like Molly had pressed the fast-forward button in my brain and given me the attention span of a gnat. At first it felt spectacular, but then it got a little too cray cray. I was over the music creeping into my bones and banging pots and pans against my brain. I just wanted life to go back to the way it was before. Unfortunately, when you take Molly, it's about a six-hour trip back to normal. Putting that pill in your body means you've made a commitment to being fucked-up.

Frazzled and growing more anxious by the minute, I hopped into a cab without telling any of my friends and hightailed it back to my place. The drive back felt like I was on a magic carpet ride. The seats turned to mush, the radio tickled my ears, and the big New York City skyscrapers looked like dancing Legos. I had no sense of time or place. Before I could lick my lips and grind my jaw, I was already around the corner of my apartment.

“Okay, Ryan, you made it,” I told myself in a soothing voice. It was Saturday night in the East Village, which meant that
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magazine subscribers and their bozo girlfriends were everywhere. I tried to escape them by going into the bodega to get a bottle of water, but walking was proving to be a difficult journey for me.

“Must. Get. Hydrated,” I whispered, making it through the entryway of the bodega.

“Hey,” the bodega guy, Tommy, grunted at me from behind the counter.

“Hi,” I whispered, grabbing the nearest bottle of water and plopping it down at the checkout.

Tommy took one look at me and said something you never want to hear when you're on drugs. “Do you need to go to the hospital?”

Even though I was sweating off half my body weight and could barely walk, it never occurred to me that I might actually need medical assistance. But if someone wants to call you an ambulance, it seems unwise to argue.

Tommy came out from behind the counter and made me sit down on a milk crate while he called 911. I couldn't hear what he was saying to the dispatcher, but I did catch the words, “I don't know. He just looks really bad.”

Freaking out on Molly is confusing because part of you is going nuts with worry and the other part is just really high and happy and wants to suck on a lollipop. Your thought process is, “OMG, I think I'm dying. This totally sucks. Wait—who does this song? I want to dance!” As I waited for the ambulance to come, random drunk people stumbled into the bodega and saw me bopping my head and smacking my lips on a milk crate and burst out laughing. You know shit's bad when people who are barely conscious look at you and say, “Wow, that dude is fucked-up.”

A few minutes had passed, and there was no sign of an ambulance. Growing impatient, I asked Tommy what the holdup was.

“I don't know,” Tommy shrugged. “You try calling them.”

I found the concept of having to call my own ambulance deeply offensive. “No, Tommy,” I scoffed. “You do it. It was your idea!”

Tommy sighed and called 911 again. This time I was able to catch the entire conversation. “Yeah, hi. I just called for an ambulance fifteen minutes ago to come to East Seventh and First Avenue. Where is it? It'll be here soon? Uh, okay.” Tommy hung up the phone and told me to hang tight.

I was horrified. I had ordered pizzas that came quicker than this ambulance. Luckily, my phone rang and jolted me out of my half-rage, half-Ecstasy spiral. It was my friend Carey. I answered as a wave of love and appreciation crashed onto my brain.

“Hey, Carey, I'm so happy you're calling me right now! How are you?”

“Hey, Ry, I'm around the corner from your apartment. What are you doing?”

“I'm sitting on a milk crate in my bodega rolling on Ecstasy.”

“WHAT?”

“The bodega guy thought I needed an ambulance, so he called me one. It should be here soon.”

“An ambulance? But you sound fine!”

Carey was right. I did sound relatively fine. Sitting on the milk crate for fifteen minutes had chilled me out, and now I was actually feeling pretty good again.

“I know, but it's already been called. I can't just leave.”

“Yes, you can. Ryan, ambulance rides cost, like, $4,000. Just leave now and I'll meet you at your place in two minutes.”

Seemingly on cue, I started to hear sirens. This was it. I could stay and spend the night in a hospital or I could go home and watch Carey give me a DIY light show in my living room. I stood up from the milk crate.

“Hey!” Tommy shouted at me. “Don't go anywhere. Your ambulance is almost here!”

“Ryan, don't listen to him!” Carey yelled into the phone. “Go!”

I took a deep breath, mouthed an apology to Tommy, and sped out of the bodega. As I exited, I exchanged a knowing glance with an EMT who was coming out of the ambulance that was meant for me, and then I ran like hell toward my apartment.

“I'm running from the ambulance!” I screamed into my phone. “I did it!”

When I got home, Carey came over and gave me back massages and showed me fun visuals on YouTube. I went to bed as the sun was coming up and woke up later feeling like Molly had taken a giant shit on my brain and body. Trying to shake off the weirdness, I met up with some friends and tried to turn my terrifying experience into amusing brunch fodder. I was good at this: processing something humiliating and painful and then turning it into everyone else's pleasure. My friends laughed uproariously at my story, especially when I told them the part about running away from the ambulance, but I couldn't laugh with them and mean it. This fuckup had left a mark. When I made mistakes in college, they didn't hit me very hard, because everybody else was falling down with me. Things were different now, though. It had been a while since I peed my pants laughing as I watched a friend fall down drunk in the street or partied with a friend who made every amazing thing seem possible. Now it seemed like I was just trying to destroy my life. I didn't understand that if you keep daring your life to implode, it eventually will. I would, though. There comes a time when it no longer makes sense to do things for the story. All of the instances in which I tested my life by literally running into oncoming traffic, drinking excessively, and experimenting with drugs were going to reveal their consequences to me, and it was going to make everything leading up to it look like a piece of insignificant cake.

The Rx Generation

ONE OF THE HALLMARKS
of being young is feeling like you're invincible. A twenty-three-year-old does an eight ball of coke in one night and chases it with a tab of acid because he can't conceive of a bad outcome. A young gay man has unprotected sex because he's convinced an STD will elude him. This, of course, isn't a sustainable attitude. Eventually you see the negative effects of your actions, and once that happens, you're officially on the last legs of your youth. It dawns on everyone—that moment where your life becomes something real rather than something for you to ash your cigarette on.