Party of One (11 page)

“Um…Amy? Yeah, hi, my name's Dave and I'm gay just like you and I'm sort of about to come out to my family and see I'm here for this conference and I tried to talk but they do the angle and they don't know who Elvis Costello is and…”

“You know what,” she stopped me, “I'm Emily.”

“Sorry!” I gritted my teeth and sucked in air. “That happens a lot probably, right?”

“Not really,” said Emily. “But I get you. Been there. Coming out is hard, and it's something you have to do on your own. You gotta trust yourself.” She patted my knee. “You're okay. Just trust yourself.” And then she turned to Amy and got down to the business of choosing an Appeteaser, her work having been done.

And I'll be damned if that wasn't the best advice I'd ever gotten. I flew home to St. Louis the next day and stood face-to-face with my parents and took a deep breath and immediately waited a couple more weeks and then came out to them. It was awful, and it took some time for things to be okay, but they were, eventually. I trusted myself, and I got through it.

I went back to school, ready to spend my fifth year prostrate to the higher mind, get my paper, and, finally, be free.

As graduation loomed, I decided that I needed to escape the Holy Cross of my mind. Enough of small places where everyone knows one another, enough of homogeneity. I was going to move to the biggest, greatest city in the world: I was starting over in New York City. I had enthusiasm, a poor understanding of how the world worked, a 2.4 GPA, and no job skills. I couldn't fail.

In the spring semester of my senior year, I started sending out cover letters and résumés to advertising agencies in New York. I decided that Madison Avenue was the place for me: There was creativity, proximity to media, and suspenders, plus, a lifetime of pretending everything was fine when it wasn't would seem to make me a natural.

A few agencies got back to me to set up interviews, the first of which was Saatchi & Saatchi in SoHo. I drove down from campus and spent the night at the Best Western in the South Street Seaport. And as is customary when I travel, I forgot one major item. Sometimes it's a basic thing like toothpaste or deodorant; this time it was socks. I had a brand-new, early graduation present Brooks Brothers suit, which without socks would simply be too jaunty. Unacceptable. My interview was at 9:00 a.m., and so, bright and early, I hunted the Seaport for a pair of socks. Nothing. All that was open was a Walgreens, and their offerings were limited, but I was a hosiery beggar and therefore could not choose. I grabbed, I paid, I donned, I ran.

And so it was that I received my first big-boy job offer while wearing a gray, glen plaid suit and opaque women's black thigh-high drugstore stockings.

I accepted. I got back in my car for the drive back to campus and Z100 was playing Collective Soul's “Shine.” My new life had begun. I was an ad guy now. And a L'Eggs gal. Heaven, let your light shine down.

I began looking for apartments right away. My perception of New York apartments and their size came mostly from Janet Jackson's “Pleasure Principle” video and
Big:
I envisioned massive, untreated warehouse spaces with floor-to-ceiling windows and exposed pipes. The heavy-doored elevator would open right into my place. I'd wait a tasteful few months before getting a trampoline.

The first place I saw was an $800/month jail cell in Chelsea with no kitchen or bathroom, shown to me by an angry man of indeterminate ethnic origin in a tank top. “Is shared bethroom. Is New Jork, is always shared bethroom. You sign liss? I am very busy.” I gave that guy a firm maybe and kept looking, settling on a place on the Upper East Side, right above Elaine's on Second Avenue. It had wood floors at a 15-degree angle, so that if you opened the refrigerator, you had to keep a hand on the top of the unit so that it wouldn't topple and crush you.

I signed the lease, bought a pillow and a blanket from Bed Bath & Beyond, and stayed the night. New York City! As night fell, I decided to go see what was what, the only way I knew how: by hailing a taxi, getting into the backseat, and telling the cabdriver, “I'm new here. Take me somewhere gay and awesome.”

What was cool was that he didn't stab and rob me. Instead, he broke it down. Fahad had been there for sixteen years and he told me: “It's going to be hard to live here at first, but after a few weeks, you won't be able to live anywhere else.” I believed him. He dropped me at a West Village bar called The Monster that was apparently popular with Middle Eastern gay men at the time, wished me luck, and sent me on my way. I made some new friends there, tourists whom I accompanied to the Duplex for cabaret, where I met people who took me to Squeezebox at Don Hill's to dance to punk music with drag queens. There I met people who brought me up to Club USA, where I made out with someone after talking to him for five minutes, and then rode “The K-Hole,” a three-story slide whose name I was too green to understand. It was an adventure. It was what I was moving to New York for.

I stumbled out of Club USA into a sunny summer Saturday morning, raised my arm to hail a taxi home, and—I'm not joking—Fahad pulled up.

“Well?” he asked.

“I love it.”

I never had the same cabdriver twice again in the eight years I lived there. My first real night in the city made it seem ordained, like God wanted me to be in New York City.

It got a lot less glamorous, pretty much right away.

When you live in New York City and you have an entry-level job and you are in your early twenties, you know every draft beer and chicken wing special in town. This is how you feed yourself, physically and emotionally. You meet and make your friends in these places because you are all there for the same reason. Every bar on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is a singles bar where all of the singles are also interviewing potential friends. Everyone is twenty-two and fresh out of college, missing a dining hall with a meal program, or their fraternity brothers or sorority sisters, or their actual families. Everyone is at the bottom of the corporate ladder and has been hollered at earlier in the day by a boss who is twenty-seven. Everyone has big plans and nice new clothes and a little bit—a very little bit—of folding money. Everyone wants to find the people who'll be there for them.

This is what
Friends
gets right about living in cities in your twenties: for at least a little while, you live as a tribe. You're out of your parents' house, and you're not yet settled down with a spouse and kids and a house in the suburbs, but you still need family. You still need to feel like you belong to something. So you pull a family unit together out of what you find in the places you haunt. You have your hangout where you meet to complain about work. You date people and run them past your friends. You have keys to one another's apartments, and then you move in together. You travel as a pack.

My official move to New York happened in the summer of 1994, and by the time
Friends
premiered that September, my posse was established. We rolled six deep, just like on the show. I saw myself as the Chandler of the crew, but in a time before
BuzzFeed
quizzes it was difficult to know for sure.

The gang started coming together right away. I drove down to New York the day after I graduated, with my parents in a rental Buick right behind me. They moved me in and bought me a Jennifer Convertible and some pots, pans, and plates, and together we furnished my three-hundred-square-foot home. They got me settled and told me that their last graduation present to me would be to drive my car out of the city and back to St. Louis. (I didn't understand why that was a present and not theft, and they told me: “Wait.” Sure enough, by the end of my first week, I was grateful not to be burdened with an automobile in New York City; I could barely afford to park my body there.) We said goodbye and all of our chins trembled but we kept it together. “Three to five years,” I told my mother. “Three to five and then I'm back in St. Lou.” And they got in the cigarette-reeking Jetta with the front bumper duct-taped on, and I watched my car and the two people I loved the most in the world chug down Second Avenue, getting smaller and smaller as my youth receded into the distance. I wanted to cry, but I am Catholic and Irish, so I started drinking.

It was around 4:00 p.m., and the few acquaintances I knew in the city were still at work, so I went to my local bodega to buy a stack of tabloids—the
New York Post
would be my tabloid of record at last, with a dash of the free weekly
New York Press
for when I was feeling intellectual and contrarian—and took myself to Kelley's Korner, a pub at the northwest corner of Eighty-ninth and Second. It was completely empty. After thirty minutes or so, after I'd managed to read about every MURDER HACK and PSYCHO GALPAL and made an honest attempt to learn the names of the good socialites of the moment, a woman about my age walked in. A Jewish beauty with a “Prove Your Love”–era Taylor Dayne mane seated herself a few stools down with her own stack of reading materials. A
Daily News
and
Village Voice
kind of gal, she was. It was just the three of us: bartender in Yankees T-shirt, Taylor Dayne, and me, as Seal played in the background. (When you are drinking in the early '90s and the sun is up, Seal is always playing in the background. Especially at brunches. To this day, if you play me “A Prayer for the Dying,” my body will naturally point toward the nearest source of hollandaise sauce. Ditto for Crash Test Dummies' “God Shuffled His Feet” and “Bamboleo” by the Gipsy Kings.)

Finally, the bartender spoke up. “Okay, you two have to start talking to each other.” We agreed. Her name was Alicia; she was just starting a gig at the Food Network; and she, too, was waiting for her friends to get out of work. We made the bartender, Johnny, fire up the NTN bar trivia machine, and we faced off in movie trivia. She did not stand a chance, but she was a good sport. Afterward, I invited her up to my place, which was basically upstairs and furnished with only my CD boom box and my steamer trunk full of mixtapes and CDs. We were young and open and confident that the other was not a murder hack or a psycho galpal, and we listened to the
Reality Bites
soundtrack and talked about ourselves. We've been friends ever since.

The group grew from there. A few days later, we grabbed happy hour at The Launch—a place up on Third Avenue that sold $2 cheeseburger-and-french-fry platters before it was troublingly shut down by the Board of Health—and were seated next to Louise, a refined New Jersey girl with British parents, and Aimee, a wild-haired New Orleans debutante with a massive smile, a ready laugh, and the tolerance of a girl who grew up in New Orleans. After a few $5 pitchers of happy-hour draft beer, our conversations overlapped, and then our two-tops joined into a four, our phone numbers changed hands, and it was
on.
Soon after, a female friend from college went out on a date with a prepster from Philadelphia's main line and brought him by The Launch to show him off, where he hit on me kind of unabashedly, and thereby I lost a female friend from college and gained an on-and-off boyfriend named Jim. My friend Mike from high school moved to New York because he did a thing called “writing code” and got a job at Sony working on something called their “website.”
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