One of the bars I frequented the most early in my New York City days was this place called Eastern Bloc, at East 6th St. and Avenue A, in the East Village. It’s not there anymore — it’s now a cabaret club owned and operated by Alan Cumming, Club Cumming — but when I was living in Manhattan, it was a small, Soviet-themed gay bar, packed to the rafters on Friday and Saturday nights.

Eastern Bloc was a tiny, narrow place, with a bar on the right, a D.J. booth in the back, a dance floor in the middle, and a long banquette on the left. It was dark, with vintage gay porn playing on a few retro televisions, some Tom of Finland–type art, and a jukebox.

I first started going there because I heard the guy who owned it, Ben Maisani, was dating Anderson Cooper. I figured that probably meant it was a hot place to see-and-be-seen-being-gay. It was really more of a dive bar, though A.C. 360 did come in every once in a while. It was before he had publicly come out, and I remember one night giving him a long list of reasons why he should.

Anyway, I liked the atmosphere of the place, and the guys were hot. So, I made it my regular weekend haunt.

I would always go there alone. People often compliment me for my ability to do things alone, and tell me they wish they could do it themselves. I’ve always thought settling for inferior company for fear of being alone, or staying housebound because all your friends are busy, to be much worse alternatives than maybe experiencing a little bit of self-consciousness going out alone. And that self-consciousness fades over the years as you get used to it.

Plus, when I went to a gay bar, I was on the hunt. I didn’t need a wingman, and I didn’t need the baggage of a group. I’d done a lot of work on my body and invested heavily in my wardrobe in the year before I moved to New York, and I felt hot. I would play Queen’s “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy” on my way downtown, psyching myself up, filled with anticipation for the evening’s hunt.

Sitting at the bar, drinking a Stella Artois, or a gin and tonic with lime, or a double vodka Red Bull, whatever it was on a particular evening, it wasn’t long before I would home in on a hot guy sitting nearby or on the dance floor and make my move.

In the few years that I had been out of the closet, I had gotten used to being the pursuer. I would see a hot guy, I would go after him, he would submit to my charms, hopefully. Rinse, repeat. So, it always felt a little strange when a guy approached me. I typically didn’t like it, because the guys who approached me were usually not my type, and it’s always awkward turning people down. Some guys won’t leave you alone, either.

One night, though, sitting alone at the bar, drinking, texting people on my iPhone, waiting for the evening to develop, I started to hear a couple of guys at the other end of the bar have a conversation that sounded like it was about … me.

“Did you see that guy in the grey Irish sweater?”

“Yeah. Hot.”

“Why do you think he’s here by himself?”

“Maybe he got stood up?”

People always think they’re talking quietly enough not to be heard, that people can’t hear them — but people can hear them. And there was only one guy wearing a grey Irish sweater in the bar, and that was me.

So, they thought I was hot. I wondered what they looked like. I couldn’t look over at them without being obvious, so I was planning on moving seats to get a better angle. Before I could, though, the shorter of the two guys was right over my shoulder.

“Hi, I’m Andrew,” he said. He was about 5’9”, with dark brown eyes, neat auburn hair, and a five o’clock shadow. White, looked kinda Irish, maybe Jewish. Cute.

“I’m Charlie.”

“Are you here by yourself?”

“I am!”

“Why’s that?”

“I always go out by myself.”

He asked me if I wanted to join him and his boyfriend, Colin, at the other end of the bar.

Now that I was able to get a good look at Colin, I saw that he was quite hot — tall, muscular, ginger. Gingers are not my type, but Colin was very much pulling it off.

“I’d love to join you guys.”

Andrew introduced us, and Colin said hello. He had a lovely English accent.

“Are you from London?”

“I am.”

I don’t remember much of the rest of the conversation from that night. Andrew and Colin were curious about me, so I told them a little bit about myself and what I had been doing for my first few months in New York. Andrew was a lawyer who had grown up in Beverly Hills, and Colin was a graphic designer for a free city newspaper who was working on a green card. They lived together in Union Square.

Andrew insisted they give me a tour of Manhattan’s gay bars. I was game. They took me all around the Village and Hell’s Kitchen, to places like Marie’s Crisis, the Duplex, Industry, and Therapy. I had a great time, a blurry one by the end of it, and shortly after 4 a.m., Andrew asked me for my number. I gave it to him, and then kissed the boys goodnight and headed back to my apartment, between Central Park West and Lincoln Center.

When I woke up in the morning, I had a text from Andrew, apologizing if he had embarrassed himself the night before.

“Why would you think that?”

“I dunno … dragging you around to all those bars. Were you even having fun?”

“Of course I was; it was great!”

I can be adorably naïve sometimes, and I honestly didn’t realize Andrew was embarrassed because he had a crush on me. My first few months in New York were filled with dinners and drinks and meet-and-greets and lots of new people, and there were lots of enthusiastic invitations being made, so he hadn’t come across as thirsty at all the night we met.

But as the weeks went by, and his invitations to hang out again began to pile up, I started to get the idea. I put him off the first few times, being busy with law school, my friends, and the dozens of other guys I was planning on having sex with.

Right around Halloween, though, Andrew invited me to a Halloween party he and Colin were throwing at their apartment. A bunch of their friends from this photography app called Instagram were coming. I hadn’t heard of the app (yes, there was a time when Instagram was new and indie and cool!), but agreed to drop by.

I showed up in a charcoal-colored suit and black shirt. I’m like a chick in that I don’t do costumes unless I can also look hot, so I was “charcoal” that night. I could tell that Andrew was pleased that he had finally gotten me over to their place, and that he thought I looked hot. Colin was always more taciturn, but he was obviously happy, too.

I stayed for an hour or so and chatted with the Instagrammers, most of whom were from Scandinavia. I could feel Andrew’s eyes on me, and I wanted to stay and see if the evening was going to narrow down to just the three of us. But I also had plenty of other friends, and it was Halloween, and F.O.M.O. was slowly starting to creep in along with their cascading texts, so I said goodbye shortly after midnight. I could tell that the boys were disappointed I was going so soon, but I knew I’d see them again.

A few weeks later, Andrew and Colin invited me over to dinner, just the three of us. They lit candles and poured delicious wine. We ate something yummy that they cooked — the boys were both gourmands — and talked about our holiday plans. Colin talked about hating his job, but feeling stuck because it was the only thing allowing him to stay with Andrew and live in the States.

But mostly, they flirted with me, and before long, I could feel both pairs of their feet rubbing up against mine.

I grinned. “I knew this is what you guys were planning.”

“We weren’t planning anything,” Andrew said, with his own grin.

Andrew was a lawyer and I was a lawyer-in-training, so Colin dropped some cheesy line, like, “Shall we adjourn to the bedroom, counselors?” And then we did.

I think we were all wearing cashmere. I remember tearing layer after layer of soft and expensive clothing off while the other two covered my lips and neck and chest and arms with kisses. I pulled Andrew on top of me and made dirty faces while I tweaked his nipples. He slid down to my cock and started sucking me off, and I stared into Colin’s green eyes before he kissed me, deeply.

We rolled around like that for a while, kissing and touching each other everywhere. I was truly intoxicated by how hot it was, totally present, completely lost in the moment.

When it got to the point where we were all ready to come (the agony) and wanted to come (the ecstasy), Andrew said he really wanted to watch me suck Colin off. I was so down for that. Colin was a strong, quiet guy, with a bit of an air of sadness and anger to him, and he had a big, beautiful uncut cock. I thought he was really fucking hot. Like, chafe-your-dick hot.

I got down in between his legs and kissed him in the spots between his legs and his balls. I slid my tongue down his balls, and then enveloped his cock with my mouth. I went slowly, then quickly, then slowly again. I swallowed the entire thing, feeling the head of his cock jam against the back of my throat. I made effective use of my hands. Andrew had a look of holy fuck, this is so hot on his face the whole time.

Before very long, Colin was ready to come, and he pushed me down on my back, and he and Andrew jerked off all over me while I jerked myself off.

Andrew’s face was right. It was so. fucking. hot.

Our romps continued over the next few months. Colin was planning on taking the U.S. citizenship test at some point, so one night, we played strip trivia on facts about the U.S. government and Constitution until we were completely naked and exploring each other’s bodies. Andrew always liked to end the evening watching me and Colin together. I didn’t know the word for it then, but he liked to be cucked.

We soon took our relationship outside the bedroom. I invited them to dinner downtown with a big group of my friends one night, after seeing Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson on Broadway. We met for late-night slices at Artichoke Basille’s Pizza. I got to know cute things about them, like how Andrew wanted to be a pop star when he was a kid, and had his parents rent out studio space so he could produce an album under the name Andrew Robert. #BeverlyHillsKid

Unfortunately, as the months wore on, it became clear Colin’s job and green card issues weren’t going away. And the one solution that might seem obvious today — getting married to Andrew — wasn’t an option. The battle for gay marriage was still raging across the land, and while two men could get married in New York, the Defense of Marriage Act — D.O.M.A. — was still in effect. That meant that even if the boys were married, Colin wouldn’t be eligible for any federal benefits or recognition — including a green card.

One night, we were hanging out with my English artist friend, Carla, who didn’t know about Colin’s immigration woes. She was ecstatic, as she’d finally gotten her U.S. citizenship, and when she merrily announced her good news, it was too rough for Colin to hear. I gave him and Andrew hugs and kissed them goodnight, watching them walk away sadly, into the night.

Witnessing the pain that D.O.M.A. caused the two of them anguished me. It tore at my heart and boiled my blood. But there was nothing I could do to help. Andrew had worked as a publicist before going to law school, and was able to get him and Colin on M.S.N.B.C. and in The Guardian, The New York Times, and a bunch of other media outlets, bringing attention to their plight. There was a pro-gay Democrat who read as bisexual in the White House, and a couple more liberals had been added to the Supreme Court, and it did look like the Court might overturn D.O.M.A. sometime in the future.

But not near enough for the boys. One afternoon late that winter, Andrew texted me. Colin couldn’t take it anymore at work; he was quitting his job, and Andrew was moving back to London with him. It was time for the three of us to say goodbye. One last night.

Our season had passed by so quickly, and although it had taken a while for me to match Andrew’s enthusiasm for the whole thing, I was really going to miss them. I was going to miss having our naked bodies splayed across each other and tasting their spit and come, but I was also going to miss their company. The brotherhood and camaraderie that went along with the sex. My first guest-starring arc.

On the day of our last night together, I went to see Martha Marcy May Marlene at the giant A.M.C. on the Upper West Side with my friends Lindsay and Krishna. One of them brought a flask, and we ended up getting really shitfaced. Like, fucked-up. The girls psyched me up for heading downtown.

I had this green T-shirt from Nantucket, with a smiling whale shooting water out of its spout, that Andrew really liked, so I had worn it to the gym the day before, so I could give it to him all sweaty and soaked in my musk. I gave them a little mixtape on a thumb drive, too. One of the songs was “Drive,” by the Cars. I don’t remember why that song was on there, but I do love the Cars, and it’s romantic. Andrew made “Who’s gonna drive you home tonight?” his Facebook status that night.

I really wished I could drive those boys home — make sure they were safe forever.

I was quite drunk for our last time together, so I don’t remember much of it. But I do remember that it was sloppy and sexy and bittersweet. I majorly got into Colin’s armpits, the one bit of territory I felt I hadn’t sufficiently explored. (I’m really into armpits. But who isn’t?)

As much fun as I was having in New York, a part of me really wanted to get on that plane to London with them. I had never felt so connected to two people in that way before.

Not too long after we said goodbye, Andrew and Colin headed to the United Kingdom. They made a life there, and eventually married in kilts in a beautiful wedding that Andrew called The Scottish Plunge.

The Supreme Court struck down D.O.M.A. in 2013, and two years later its landmark Obergefell v. Hodges ruling legalized gay marriage nationwide, but the boys have opted to stay in London. We’ve talked a few times over the years, but more or less lost touch.

I keep telling myself I’ll look them up the next time I’m in London, and maybe one of these days I really will. I’ve been in lots of ménages à trois since then, but not another throuple. And not anything nearly as special.

There’s nothing like the first time. ♦

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“In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It’s important to combine the two in just the right amount.”

— Haruki Murakami, After Dark

As a city, Tokyo (東京) surprises you. You arrive expecting an urban blob — to be buffeted by vast walls and towers of glass and steel, flashing LED lights, blinking signs advertising businesses in Japanese and bad English, hordes of people rushing at you from every angle.

And you are. But Tokyo’s vastness is much more complex and interesting than that. In person, you are struck by how small the city can be, by its crampedness — the narrow doorways and tight passages, the way the closeness and the height of the skyscrapers can make walking outside, especially at night, feel like walking through an underground tunnel.

Adding to the subterranean vibe, the city’s rolling hills sometimes give you the feeling that you are wandering down an actual rabbit hole, wondering what exciting new vistas you might encounter down the way and around the bend.

Crowded, frenetic pavements give way to exquisitely manicured, placid parks, dotted with cherry trees and koi ponds; banks of vending machines, selling anything you can think of, become office towers, spewing salarymen out into the streets — off to the izakayas (居酒屋), hotel bars, karaoke joints, and pachinko parlors — like herring on a run; alleys of mom-and-pop sushi and ramen shops with signs reading NO ENGLISH eventually lead to huge plazas of American chains, selling deliciously bizarre food items you could never get at the McDonald’s back home.

Yes — just like New York’s hottest club, Tokyo has everything. Everywhere. And it stretches far over the Kantō Plain (関東平野), making it big not only in population (37 million), but also in its sheer size. This can make the city a disorienting place — especially if you don’t speak Japanese. (Like those signs on the izakayas and sushi places suggest, most denizens of Tokyo do not speak English.)

The disorientation this landscape can inflict upon anyone in Tokyo, especially an outsider, makes it the perfect setting for the magical realist, hardboiled detective fiction of one of the city’s most famous (at least internationally) writers — Haruki Murakami (村上春樹).

Murakami, who early on in his life owned a jazz club in Tokyo, turned to writing in his 30s, as he writes about in his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (走ることについて語るときに僕の語ること). His plots, blending real and surreal events, typically feature loners and those who feel disconnected or alienated from society. His protagonists encounter mysterious strangers and go on otherworldly quests, having out-of-body experiences and meeting surprise after surprise, as they pursue the answers to vexing questions, grapple with existential concerns, fall in love, fuck, and have their hearts broken. The novels often leave us, the reader, on an ambiguous note, with more questions than answers.

Murakami achieves the uncanny voice and disconnected vibe of his novels in a particular way — by writing his stories in English first, then translating them to Japanese. The practice gives his characters a placeless, aphoristic patois, and makes his books perfect reading for backpack-carrying travelers making their way through airport lounges and subway platforms.

♦

When I visited Tokyo fifteen years ago, I was living in Seoul, South Korea, teaching English at a hagwon, and my friend and colleague Cortney and I were both deep into Murakami phases. I had started with his novel Norwegian Wood (ノルウェイの森), a perfect representative Murakami text, bearing all his hallmarks — the pop art, hardboiled detective fiction plot, Western musical references (the Beatles song), and healthy amounts of explicit sex.

(Everyone at Georgetown had to read Murakami’s book of short stories After the Quake (神の子どもたちはみな踊る) the summer before matriculating. Murakami came to campus to speak about it, and when somebody asked him why he had so much sex in his novels, he replied, “I just like sex.” I loved that answer. Japanese minimalism at its finest.)

Because the hagwon I was working at did not give us very much time off, my Tokyo sojourn was to be a lightning-fast 72 hours. Nevertheless, I was determined to venture down some sort of Murakami-esque rabbit hole, and have my very own Tokyo adventure, during my trip.

I wasn’t traveling solo on this journey, though. And, at the start of the trip, there was a bit of tension with my fellow travelers, my friends Annagret and Arash, about our lodgings. My voluminous emails about booking a hotel had gone unresponded-to for weeks, and so we had all arrived in the city, as tired and blinkered as Bill Murray in the opening scenes of Lost in Translation (2003), without a place to stay yet.

I was left in the exact scenario I had hoped to avoid — the only affordable options left for me, places that my two fancy and precious af friends (a gay Persian man and a pharmaceutical heiress) would never agree to stay at; the only options they liked, four-figure-per-night luxury hotels.

Tired and disoriented at this pre-smartphone time in my life (I wouldn’t get my first iPhone until I arrived back stateside in summer 2010), and wanting to ensure I had somewhere to sleep, I booked myself a bed in the closest budget place I could find: a capsule hotel (カプセルホテル).

Capsule hotels, hostel-like places where you sleep in your very own futuristic pod/coffin, and use communal bathrooms and showers, are pretty common nowadays. You can find so-called luxury versions of them — tricked out with high-speed internet and charging docks for your devices — in cities all over the world. But they were a novelty back then. Media outlets did stories about them, typically with a what-dystopia-are-we-living-in slant. I knew there was no way my friends were going to stay there.

Perfectly, on their end, my friends had chosen to book a five-star hotel on the other side of town. A standoff of sorts began. Our ability to catch up and experience the trip together would have been severely hampered by staying in disparate parts of the city. But, I wasn’t paying $500 a night for my one-third share of a bougie hotel room. And Annagret and Arash definitely were not going to stay in my proletarian pod prison palace.

Without too much unpleasantness, we finally compromised: I would stay at the hotel with them, and pay whatever I felt was fair. For my share, I ended up paying for a few of our activities while we were in Tokyo.

And we ended up seeing quite a lot during our three days there.

On our first day, we checked out the Mori Art Museum (森美術館), located on the 53rd floor of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower (六本木ヒルズ森タワー). I loved the Mori, which is focused on large-scale, international contemporary art.

The Mori reminded me of Tate Modern in London, with its almost amusement-park-like vibe, where interacting with the exhibits is an expected and integral part of your visit. Also, one of the reasons we all love Japan is for its beautiful design, right? And how weird they like to get with it sometimes? If you agree — then the Mori is for you. The museum was probably my favorite place we visited in the city, overall.

We got lunch at the nearby Gonpachi (権八), the restaurant from the bloodbath scene in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003). Which was probably a mistake. It is not a particularly good restaurant, nor is it particularly interesting in its own right. The most striking thing about the place was the fact that it is so tiny. (Like everything in the movies really is, including the actors.)

And just like everything in Tokyo is, too. The famous Shibuya (渋谷区) crosswalk that Scarlett Johansson emo-walks across with a clear umbrella in Lost in Translation? Tiny!

On the night of our first full day in the city, we did another bit of film tourism, making the necessary pilgrimage to the New York Bar at the Park Hyatt Tokyo (パーク ハイアット 東京) — aka the famous Lost in Translation bar.

We had to go all the way to the other side of Tokyo, where there is not much else to do, and which necessitates an expensive taxi ride to get there, but I am still glad we went. I have written about my love of Lost in Translation many times. It was part of the reason I moved to Asia to begin with.

I ordered a Suntory (サントリー) whiskey, and Arash took a great photo of me, alone at the bar, sipping my drink, looking contemplative, like Bill Murray in the movie. I wore my nice suit and everything. I have to track down a copy of that (and many other) photos from over the years.

The most memorable thing about the bar? Its tininess!

Unfortunately for future travelers, the Park Hyatt Tokyo is currently closed for renovations.

For relaxing times, try the Four Seasons?

♦

On our second day in the city, the three of us ventured to Yoyogi Park (代々木公園), located in Shibuya, near Harajuku Station (原宿駅). The busy park was radiant that day, with cherry blossoms blowing about like confetti.

While in the park, we visited the Meiji Shrine (明治神宮), a Shintō (神道) shrine dedicated to the deified spirits of Emperor Meiji and his consort, Empress Shōken, where tourists and visitors are encouraged to leave their wishes. In an early nod to MAGA, some New York–based family, the Fiorellos, had left a virulently xenophobic, anti-migrant message, tied to the bridge with a beautiful, hateful bow.

Nearby in the park, Annagret, Arash and I participated in a private ancient green tea ceremony, known as chanoyu (茶の湯). The three of us squeezed into a tiny wooden tea house, or chashitsu (茶室), where, while we sat cross-legged on tatami mats (畳), a woman in traditional dress explained to us the historical and cultural significance of the tea ceremony, and explained the role it plays in Japanese life today.

The green tea we drank was strong, almost like matcha. I have to say — the tea ceremony was beautiful, and I am okay with tea, but green tea has never been my thing. I just cannot with the taste. Which kinda sucks, because it is so healthy for you. But even repeated attempts to train my palate and acquire a taste for it over the years have failed.

We also did some shopping in Ginza (銀座), where we got a special tour of the Chrome Hearts store, as Annagret was close with one of the owners and wanted to say hello.

♦

I knew that the evening of our second full day in the city was my best chance to have an adventure. And I doubted that adventure would involve my compatriots, Annagret and Arash, who had been low-key, early-to-bed presences since we had arrived.

And, in fact, that night Arash and Annagret decided they wanted to eat dinner at the five-star Italian restaurant at our hotel, which I decidedly did not want to do. So, I used that as my excuse to take off on my own, and ended up at a small, informal tonkatsu (豚カツ) place. Tonkatsu is breaded and fried pork, and it comes with a very delicious Japanese-style barbecue sauce called katsu sauce (とんかつソース).

As I downed Asahi Super Dry (スーパードライ) beers and began the opening stages of my lifelong love affair with tonkatsu, I got a text from Arash. Being gay as well, he was a bit more game for a bit of nightlife than Annagret. So, he joined me at an LP bar near the tonkatsu place, and we drank a few cocktails in its smoky, dimly lit, wood-paneled environs, as American soft rock and Japanese surf rock spun, and we pored over the gay bar listings I had printed out and brought with me.

I was not sure what kind of adventure I was up for yet. But, a gay bar seemed like a good place to start.

For a city of its population size, and as cosmopolitan as it otherwise is, Tokyo has a surprisingly small number of gay bars. Most of them are clustered in area two of Shinjuku (新宿区), a ward of the city known for its restaurants, red-light district, shanty-style bars and clubs, and gayborhood, which is colloquially referred to as Ni-chōme (新宿二丁目).

Arash and I were not looking for some wild club night, considering we had done a full day of sightseeing, and had a full day of it ahead of us the next day. So, we were hoping to find somewhere vibrating at around the same level as the LP bar — somewhere we could chill, chat and people-watch. Reserving our (profound) judgment over its name, we settled on the nearby Arty Farty (アーティーファーティー).

Arty Farty, located in Shinjuku, is pretty much your standard gay bar, with banquettes, a dance floor, generously poured, disgusting well drinks, and Top 40 playing way too loud. Arash and I arrived just as the salaryman (サラリーマン) crowd was popping in after work, and we settled at a banquette in the back with a good scope on the rest of the place.

As we were sipping our cocktails and checking out the crowd, we soon noticed that a guy was looking at me. No, staring at me. No — gazing at me. Like I was a comet flying through the cosmos, or a Greek god brought down to earth. The guy, cute but nothing special, was dressed like he had just gotten off a shift as a line cook at an izakaya, and young-looking, around 19 or 20 or so. I was only a year or two older than him at the time, and I look pretty young myself, even now, but I felt older looking at him.

After catching my glance, he came over to us, wordlessly took my hand, and began gazing into my eyes intensely. His eyes were opened really wide, like he had traveled to Tibet and walked all the way up that insane mountain in order to speak to the Dalai Lama. The man, who later introduced himself (via an electronic translator) as Akari (あかり), held my hand in his hands, as though he was waiting to receive great wisdom from me, but said nothing — only peering into my soul with those eyes, so wide and intent.

A few minutes passed, and still Akari had said almost nothing to me (and literally nothing in English). Yet, his eyes and his body language communicated the very clear message of: FOLLOW ME. And so, I decided to oblige.

Why did I decide to follow Akari late at night, in a strange city, with zero information? The kids these days have a great term for the answer, the ethos that has powered me throughout much of my life — doing it for the plot. While I now subscribe to the Danny Glover line “I’m too old for this shit!”, back then, I wanted a great story out of Tokyo — and Akari was my rabbit hole.

Winking goodbye to Arash, I followed Akari to the Tokyo Metro (東京メトロ), where we boarded a train headed to God-knows-where. As we zipped further and further away from our station of origin, cramming into the car as more and more passengers filed in at each station, I began to wonder how the fuck I was going to get back to my hotel. Akari, for his part, was silent the entire ride.

After almost an hour, we arrived at our stop, and Akari guided me — by hand — to our ultimate destination, which was (perhaps predictably) a love hotel (ラブホテル).

Akari was clearly enamored of me. And, when he initially took my hand, I figured there was a decent chance he wanted to go to a love hotel with me. It was a request I got quite often.

But, I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed in his choice, as a mere trip to a love hotel did not strike me as a particularly inventive or noteworthy adventure to go on.

My thoughts on this changed immediately, however, when we approached the hotel and walked up to the speaker you shouted into to reserve a room. That was when Akari took the money to pay from me and, placing our order, began speaking into the intercom in the most high-pitched woman’s voice you have ever heard — like a fuckin’ Japanese Mrs. Doubtfire.

The voice came out of nowhere, and deeply amused (and confused) me. I understood the move as Akari being nervous about our same-sex situation — he wanted to make the attendant think he was a woman, so he would not know that we were about to go in and do a bunch of gay stuff together. This made sense, as Japan’s record on gay rights and acceptance of homosexuality is spotty, even today.

But, there were also cameras everywhere, so what the attendant was in fact seeing and hearing was two dudes, one of them frantically screaming, like an elderly woman at 3 a.m., that they needed a room. Admittedly, it could have been just me, but that struck me as an incredibly faggoty display.

Nevertheless, I was grateful to Akari for furthering the plot and giving me that little nugget. And, as it turned out, the attendant was far more interested in his manga (漫画) than in enforcing traditional values, waving us in with zero fanfare.

When we entered our room, we quickly discovered that we had been given the Peter Pan suite, with pukey yellow walls, covered in off-brand Disney drawings of scenes of Peter, Wendy, Tinker Bell, and Captain Hook. It brought me back to my childhood bunkroom at my grandparents’ lake house, where my twin bed had a Peter Pan–themed comforter.

The room even came with an en suite Jacuzzi, located in a bathroom with overhead fluorescent lighting that flickered on and off, giving off a slight the-shower-from-Psycho vibe. There was not much lovely about this love hotel, and it certainly did not put one in the mood.

Fortunately, it did not seem like Akari had much interest in lovemaking, anyway. We definitely made out for a while. But, the room was also filled with video games and vending machines (they really are ubiquitous there), selling things like condoms and lube and premade seafood sandwiches, and after I gave him some yen to start some gameplay and grab some snacks, Akari was perfectly okay to jam on his own. Which was fine with me, wanting, at 4 a.m., nothing more than to go to sleep.

When I awoke a few hours later, surprisingly refreshed, the mysterious Akari had departed. He had left behind his wristband for me, and a note with a giant heart drawn on it. Aside from the haunting memory of the sound of the fluorescent lights buzzing over that Jacuzzi, the note would be my only souvenir from the evening.

♦

When I stay at nice hotels on vacation and they have a good free breakfast, I make a habit of getting back in time to enjoy it, even if I have been off fucking somebody the night before. And, I did the same thing on this trip. Do not ask me how, but I managed to find my way back to our hotel, navigating the jumble of colors and lines and swoops and swirls that is the map of the Tokyo Metro, without a smartphone or guide, or the ability to speak or read Japanese. I was pretty pleased with myself, on that score.

Splashing some water on my face to properly wake up, I soon found Arash and Annagret, grinning at me, from across the breakfast room, sat down, and began to tell them all about my adventure.

♦

Every year, about a dozen Japanese tourists become afflicted with Paris Syndrome (パリ症候群), a psychological condition caused by extreme disillusionment and disappointment when visiting Paris. The stinky reality of the city does not live up to their romantic expectations, and a severe form of culture shock results, leading to symptoms such as delusion, hallucinations, hostility, derealization, depersonalization, tachycardia, and vomiting.

Paris, je t’aime.

I cannot claim to have experienced a Tokyo version of this syndrome. While Tokyo certainly surprised me again and again, each rabbit hole only made me more excited and curious to venture down another.

On our last morning in the city together — before I was due to fly back to Seoul and work — my friends and I got up early, to see the morning catch at the Tsukiji Fish Market (築地市場), mother of the world’s sushi. (Nothing snaps you back to the impending reality of work like the pungent smell of fish at 4 o’clock in the morning.)

After hugs and kisses and speculating on how the Fiorellos’ trip was going, I bid farewell to Arash and Annagret, who were on a longer journey, and bound for Kyoto (京都). Alone for a bit, I spent the rest of my yen at a pachinko parlor, and bought some souvenirs.

And ate some tonkatsu. Of all the things I encountered on my magical mystery tour, I think I loved it the most of all. (No offense, Akari.)

SAYONARA (さようなら)! ♦

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A NEW ADVENTURE

As far as life choices go, my decision to move to Seoul in the fall of 2009 was like taking an album off the record player, mid-spin, and putting on something completely different. Beethoven to Beastie Boys. Motown to Metal. Salsa to Sade. You get the point.

I could practically hear a record scratch each time I’d tell a friend about my plans. I was on my way to law school someday. I was a budding politico. If anything, I was a Euro. So, why was I going to Korea?

I had my reasons.

My first postgrad year living in DC, from the summer of 2008 to the summer of 2009, had been an endless series of parties and celebrations mixed with agonizingly long days at my law firm, Kelley Drye & Warren. Also, it had only been a year or so since I’d come out, and I’d been spending a lot of money, drinking a ton, and doing a lot of whoring around — things which my Catholic guilt was starting to kick in over.

So a year away from home — one in which I could slow down, live healthy, and really hunker down and study for the LSAT — seemed just the ticket. And my interest in having an Asian adventure had been building since I was in high school.

During my senior year at BC High, the National Honor Society took a trip to Europe with EF Tours — a whirlwind tour of Rome, Paris, and London over 10 spring days. The trip was my first time in Europe, and it made an enormous impression upon me.

But one of its most memorable nights, on our last, in London, could have easily happened at home. Tired of sightseeing, my buddies Ryan and Nick and I went to the cinema in Piccadilly Circus to see this movie they were really excited about, called Lost in Translation.

I hadn’t heard anything about the movie, but I loved Bill Murray, and Ryan and Nick were film snobs — in fact, they both work in film/television today — so I trusted their judgment.

Long story short, I was absolutely captivated by the movie, and it’s no exaggeration to say I left the theater a changed man.

My idea of what a movie is and could be had been completely transformed. I had fallen in love with the beautiful, captivating blend of ancient and modern that is Japan. And I suddenly detected a thirst for spiritual connection — like the kind Bob and Charlotte find at the Park Hyatt Tokyo — that I hadn’t known I had before.

I carried this interest in Japan with me to college, where I took a bunch of Japanese history and culture classes, learning about things such as the era of the samurai, ancient Edo’s development into the modern metropolis of Tokyo, and salarymen, and read great Japanese novels, like the classic The Tale of Genji (源氏物語), by Murasaki Shikibu, and the transgressive Naomi (痴人の愛), by Junichiro Tanizaki.

Most of my Japanese history classes were taught by Jordan Sand, one of my favorite professors at Georgetown, and the man who introduced me to Studio Ghibli, via a class screening of Spirited Away. (Jordan also used to give us Altoids at the beginning of class to wake us up. Pretty smart guy.)

Jordan encouraged me to let my wanderlust take me to Japan as soon as the opportunity presented itself, and when I was trying to figure out what to do post-graduation, I briefly thought about doing the JET Programme, which places English-speaking college grads with teaching jobs throughout Japan.

JET is prestigious, but it came with one huge drawback — little control over where exactly in Japan you were placed. You might get Tokyo or Kyoto, but you also might be placed in a rural village in the snowy northern island of Hokkaido, population 85.

That possibility was a nonstarter for me. And as it turned out, teaching at a private school in Japan, while not impossible to do, required lots of patience and paperwork, and didn’t pay very well, whereas, right across the Sea of Japan, in South Korea, private schools were champing at the bit for English teachers.

Cram schools, or hagwons (학원), as they are called, provided English-speaking college graduates with free plane fare; free housing in modern, well-equipped accommodations; and a generous salary — particularly if you had a degree from a prestigious school like Georgetown.

I was sold on the idea of working in Korea instantly. I found out about a school, the Seoul Language Institute in Bundang (분당), from Nick, a friend of a friend who had taken a job there after graduating from Emory. Nick put me in touch with his recruiter, Don, I submitted my materials, and within a few weeks, I was hired.

The plan was set: I’d fly to Seoul, earn some cash, travel around Asia — including to the majestic country of Japan — and spend a good chunk of time resting and studying for the LSAT. I wanted to get into law school somewhere in New York City, so I needed a good score, and I had been too distracted to properly study in DC.

As my departure approached, I felt the familiar butterflies announcing yet another adventure. On one of my last nights in DC, I had dinner with a friend at my beloved Hunan Peking. My fortune cookie read, “You will soon arrive in a wonderful new home.” A serendipitous message — and one that turned out to be true, too.

As I boarded my plane for Seoul, by way of San Francisco, I thought about the year ahead. I figured it would be fun but productive, adventurous but relatively tame.

I was partially right.

I arrived in Seoul the day after my 23rd birthday, and woke up the next morning to two pieces of horrible news.

The first was that one of my favorite musicians — Jacko, the King of Pop, Tommy Mottola’s sworn enemy, the dangler of Blanket, the collector of the Elephant Man’s bones, Michael Jackson — was dead. Heartbreaking. Another music legend shuffled off this mortal coil much too soon by drug overdose.

The second was that I was now under a 10-day employer-imposed quarantine for swine flu — because that was a thing then, and Korean parents assumed every American had it.

A lockdown? That’s so… un-American!

LOCKDOWN

I thought back to the Air China flight from San Francisco, where they had screened a health and safety video that depicted all Americans as morbidly obese and diseased. It was as comically over-the-top as a Saturday Night Live skit. I was starting to get an understanding of the paranoia around the disease.

I was put up in a temporary apartment and left with nothing except what my Korean hosts figured was 10 days’ worth of food for an American and a (mercifully) fast and reliable Wi-Fi connection.

I had nothing to do but surf the web. I got a belated happy birthday email from Chris, who was in Africa. He wanted to know how I was doing. Did I feel invigorated? “Not exactly,” I said, explaining my plight, but expressing confidence things would improve.

Unfortunately, those ten days in captivity were enough time spent isolated and bored to become severely depressed, resentful of my hosts, and questioning of whether I had made a massive mistake in coming to Korea.

I slept a lot, and listened to sad music while I thought about Kris and Owen. During my incarceration, I also tried a kiwi for the first time. It was in the welcome basket my captors had left for me. Even though the outside of the kiwi did not seem like something I should be eating, I wasn’t sure how to properly peel it, either, so I just ended up taking big, furry bites out of it.

Not bad, to be honest.

WELCOME TO LEADERSVILLE — WHERE LEADER IS READER

When I was finally released from captivity, I was brought to the school, where I began to meet my colleagues.

Some hagwons have an array of English speakers from countries all over the world, but our school — which had recently changed its name to the laughably absurd Leadersville English Institute, with the ungrammatical “Leader is Reader!” as its slogan — only hired Americans. (The fucked-up slogan was an apt metaphor for the whole operation.) There were native Korean teachers at the school, too. They more or less kept to themselves. None of the American teachers spoke Korean, which was by design. We were there to be the solid wall of English against which our students could practice and attain fluency.

I took an instantaneous dislike to most of my male American co-workers at the school. Nick, who had put me in touch with the recruiter who hired me, was a nice guy, with anime eyes, apple-red cheeks, and dimples. But the other guys were incel types who I heard loudly speculating about my sexual orientation — within earshot of me! — on one of my first nights out with them.

And I wasn’t even acting particularly gay! They were simply jealous of all the attention I was getting from the girls as the new guy. They were nerdy straight dudes who were all in search of submissive Asian girlfriends (which, I believe, they all eventually found, too).

Most of the girl teachers seemed sus, too. One of them, Christina, a graduate of the all-girls’ Smith College, got really shittoed on the first night after I arrived, when all the teachers took me out, and savagely hit on me, groping me repeatedly and saying “hello friend,” over and over, which terrified me. She was clearly mortified of her behavior the next day, and although neither of us ever mentioned it, she backed off of me for the rest of my time there, most likely sparing me many more uncomfortable moments.

As is always a question for a gay person in a new place, I wasn’t sure whether or not it was OK to come out. And when it came to my Korean colleagues, I figured that conversation was a nonstarter. So for the time being, I planned to keep it to myself. It also became apparent over my first few days that this was a hard-drinking crew, and that worried me. I had come there in part to mellow out, spend time studying, and give my body a rest. It didn’t seem like I was going to connect with most of my coworkers. Thankfully there was one teacher who I connected with. Her name was Cortney.

Cortney, a beautiful, leggy, long-haired blonde from New Jersey, lived right down the hall from me at Paragon. We were the only two foreign teachers in the building; the others were housed in an older high-rise, the Royal Palace — which was anything but, compared to Paragon — about a half mile away.

When I arrived, Cortney’s boyfriend Chris had just left Korea — I took his spot, in fact — and she was depressed. It took her a while to warm up to me, but we eventually developed a great rapport.

It turned out to be great living so close to Cortney — it was like we were back in college again and living in the same dorm. We could hang out all the time, but also always had our own private space to go back to.

Over time, Cortney and I grew extremely close. We were attached at the hip — practically married — and everyone else at our school was convinced we were sleeping together. It made me think about that Bonnie Raitt song “Something to Talk About.” Cortney and I shared a flippant sense of humor, and developed all sorts of inside jokes and our own special vocabulary:

We called ourselves Mommy and Daddy and “nothing if not survivors.”

We’d call people we found charming absolute dolls, emphasizing every single syllable for effect. “Haeshin is an ab-so-lute doll!”

People who displeased us got alliterative putdowns: “Well, I didn’t know I was hanging out with Petulant Patty!”

We called hot guys bombs who had no right to be so hot, and hot blue-collar guys rough trade.

We had no difficulty complimenting people on their outfits, even as we took issue with other aspects of their behavior: “How dare you come to my apartment, in a great coat, and criticize my life choices?”

We even bent the Korean language to our purposes. Yogiyo (여기요), which means over here, instead became a jaunty way for us to say hello. Yogiyo! we’d yell. Cortney wasn’t exactly what you’d call a girls’ girl, but every once in a while, we’d hang out with a few of the girls from our office.

Sometimes we’d hang with this teacher named Giuliana, who was one of Cortney’s friends from New Jersey. We called her Giuliani, because Cortney’s dad Mark always called her that when he was drunk. Giuliani had a really hot British teacher boyfriend named Mike, who she is now married to. Mike was a huge alcoholic with great taste in music, like many Brits. He’s the person who introduced me to Grizzly Bear. Giuliani had her hair done really up, and she kind of looked like Snooki to me. When we were at school, she did what I called “stationing,” which was just staying in one place, making barely any noise or moving. Giuliani was repeatedly yelled at by our bosses for reading “megazines” during class, but I don’t think she ever stopped.

Going out with Giuliani and Mike and the British boys always intrigued me, because even then, back in 2010, they were always getting drunk and making out with each other. I have a lot of artistic straight male friends who I’ve made out with over the years, but to see a bunch of British lads, with tattoos and antisocial behaviour written all over them, sucking face was really hot, and something that I wish more American straight dudes (and straight dudes in general) were comfortable with.

I wonder if in another ten years the British dudes are all going to be cool with outright sucking and fucking with other guys, too. If so, I’ll be making my booking on British Airways toute de suite.

Another coworker we sometimes hung with was a Korean American girl named Heather. Heather was a kind person with a bright smile. We once played a game where each teacher was assigned a drug that corresponded to their personality, and Heather picked coke for me, which she said she picked because it was classy. So I liked her. Cortney sometimes got annoyed with Heather for being too nice, though.

Case in point: we had another coworker, a girl from Indiana named Alex, who was a little bit of a drunken mess, and prone to make funky fashion choices, like wearing a watch around her ankle. She annoyed us.

We made up a song (a techno remix of sorts) of her whining, “I don’t want a mojito” (I d-d-don’t want a mo-mo-mo-jiii-toooooooo…) on one of the few nights we went out with her. Cortney loathed Alex, so as a practical joke, I once left her a prank note that I made look like it came from our Korean bosses, written in their brand of broken English, admonishing her for telling stories to the students that they and their parents found terrifying. (FWIW I would not condone this sort of bullying today. But back then, I thought it was hilarious.)

We let the note hang over for a whole day (yes, cruel) until Heather, being Ms. Goody Two-Shoes, ruined things by telling her.

Every Tuesday, all the teachers went to this hole-in-the-wall place where they served raw tuna, slice after slice, for a fixed price. This was one of the few group events that Cortney and I attended. We would drink Korean beer and soju (소주) and shoot the bull and hope that we were not slowly developing mercury poisoning. (I would have taken a little mercury poisoning, though, for how cheap and delicious the fish was.) The only other big group event I remember was a disastrous faculty basketball game that I organized and then performed horribly in. I have no coordination and can’t play basketball. I simply needed an excuse to create a spectacle and shit-talk the other teachers. #gayrights

The students at Leadersville were made up of elementary, middle, and high school students from wealthy families, who wanted to master English so they could apply to elite colleges in the US (and to a lesser extent, the UK and Canada). Leadersville wasn’t their primary school — they came to the hagwon after school for several extra hours of study. Including Saturdays.

This meant as teachers that our days started, typically, at 4 p.m., with the final bell ringing at 10 p.m. And every other Saturday, we had a half day of school, which lasted from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Typically, we would teach three to four 50-minute classes per day. A group of Korean high school students who were called Supervisors (and who Cortney and I called “the Supes”) was there to assist us. They wore red vests.

GETTING TO KNOW YOU…

The Leadersville administration was made up of a very mysterious Oz-like figure named HuiJang-Nim (회장님); our managers, a couple of younger guys named Jaemo and Seungha; and two underlings, Haeshin and Soo Jin. Soo Jin was pretty and nice, and I called her Cat Eyes, after what Cortney and I called the popular emoticon people would make on their phones — ^^.

Jaemo, our primary boss, was tall, with a pompadour and a bored expression on his face. Seungha was a bit shorter, and had thick black Ray-Ban sunglasses. He once told me I looked like Jude Law.

Seungha was hot and standoffish, and I used to jerk off to him sometimes. A few times I even fantasized about him and Jaemo tag-teaming me. You have to do something to fill those free periods.

I didn’t learn until several months in, when I was arguing with a lobby attendant at Paragon over some repairs that needed to be done in my apartment, that HuiJang-Nim meant “owner,” and was not in fact someone’s name. But it goes to show what a mysterious figure this HuiJang-Nim was. I only met him once the entire time I was at the school — even though his visage was plastered on the side of the Leadersville building like a North Korean dictator.

THE FRESH PRINCE OF BUNDANG

The area I was teaching and living in, Bundang, is a planned district just outside of Seoul, in the city of Seongnam (성남시), a wealthy enclave with a large number of high-rise luxury apartment buildings, and home to a large number of Koreans who have lived abroad.

I was put up in a bright studio apartment building called Paragon, which had a gym and other modern amenities.

My particular neighborhood, Jeongjadong (정자동/亭子洞), was filled with charming cafes and other picturesque brunch spots. The street behind the building I lived in had a bunch of cute places, where Korean soap operas often filmed episodes.

Seoul has four seasons and a climate similar to my hometown of Boston. There are cherry blossoms in spring, and the fall offers crisp, cold air and colorful foliage that give way to snowy winters. It made for a perfect environment to walk to school dressed in my academic-chic J. Crew finest — tan corduroys, maroon shawl-collar cardigan with leather elbow patch, and Chelsea boots.

I dressed Cortney similarly. (Basically, like Diane Keaton in Annie Hall.)

South Korea is a highly developed, modern country, with high-rises dotting busy highways up and down the peninsula. Unfortunately, many of its ancient temples and monumental buildings were destroyed during the Korean War in the ’50s. But the city of Seoul still has some historic places remaining, and also boasts lots of gorgeous contemporary architecture and design.

I WANT A COFFEE FROM THE SLOW HAND

For my first month or so in Bundang, I mostly kept to myself. I had brought a stack of 13 TestMasters LSAT prep books with me to Korea, and I would park myself at one of Bundang’s many coffee shops and spend hours doing practice tests. Koreans love a cute Parisian cafe moment as well as a theme cafe moment. I remember one place that was rainforest themed.

I considered it to be a time of spiritual renewal and wholesomeness for myself, so as a joke, in my head, I started giving all of the coffee shop workers I encountered Biblical names.

One coffee shop I frequented was called The Slow Hand, and I named the owners Isaac and Rebekah, from Genesis 24.

Isaac was younger and darkly handsome, with a mop top like a Beatle. Rebekah was older and matronly, with cat-eye glasses.

I eventually brought Cortney along to The Slow Hand, and she and I couldn’t figure out what Isaac and Rebekah’s relationship was. Mother and son? Brother and sister? Friends? Lovers? Merely business partners?

Eventually, Isaac and Rebekah got so used to seeing Cortney and me in the coffee shop that they would give us study snacks, like fresh apple slices, and leave notes for us in English letting us know when it was their day off (we hadn’t been able to read the signs written in hangul).

Once we had gotten a personalized note from Isaac and Rebekah, Cortney and I knew we were basically local celebrities, and we acted the part.

I jerked off fantasizing about going down on Isaac a few times. He was so kind and polite, and thinking about him being dom and slamming his cock down my throat, as the smell of coffee wafted over from the counter, was extremely arousing.

I always wondered why I was so anxious in Korea. Maybe it was my massive coffee drinking habit, where I was slamming americano after americano, day after day? No way to tell, really.

I would switch up coffeeshops each day, taking in a different scene and a different vibe as I escaped my studio apartment and did a little bit of exploring around Jeongjadong and the surrounding area. I oftentimes stood out as the only white person around.

Once, at a place called Cafe Selah (when I went there instead of The Slow Hand, Cortney called me a “Selah-out”), I was studying, and left a tube of foot cream behind by accident. (I had wanted to smooth out my feet, which were getting banged up from running.) The following week, when I passed by the café, the proprietress, a middle-aged Korean woman I had blessed with the English name of Bathsheba, came out yelling at the top of her voice, “Foot cream! Foot cream! Foot cream!”

I guess I was the only white guy who had lost foot cream in there.

After the first few weeks, which I spent mostly on my own, I started to get depressed. I even considered going back to the States. I had left a nice life back home, and now I was stuck in a place where I had no friends, didn’t speak the language, and had to keep my sexualité a secret.

After a month of little to no drinking, and zero exploration of my sexuality, I gave in and went online to look up the gay community in Seoul.

CRUISING ON HOMO HILL

As it turned out, the community was centered in the neighborhood of Itaewon (이태원), which was also known as the foreigner neighborhood, and the neighborhood where U.S. soldiers stationed in Korea would go out and party in.

Itaewon was a bit seedy, with its central Hamilton Hotel serving as the unofficial headquarters of the LGBT community. There were street vendors, narrow alleyways, and neon signs all over. (You’ve probably heard of Itaewon, due to the horrifying crowd crush that happened there on Halloween 2022. I was devastated when I heard the news, and worried for all my gay brothers on the Hill.)

One very steep, narrow street wound its way up a hill in Itaewon that was affectionately (or pejoratively, depending on who you ask) referred to as Homo Hill. It had three or four gay bars, the most popular and well-known one called Queen.

Queen was no bigger than most studio apartments, with a bar in the back and a large slab of granite in the middle that functioned as a platform for dancing. There was a small porch out front where you could go to smoke cigarettes and chat.

Queen was probably the nicest and liveliest of the gay bars on Homo Hill. The others — Always Homme and Why Not — were a bit seedier. They were also almost always empty. When I think of Queen now, I can hear the beginning of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” start to play, and see people going crazy. The music they played there was a pretty even mix of Western top 40, dance music, and K-pop. Some of the K-pop songs still ringing in my ears are “Abracadabra” by the Brown Eyed Girls and “I Don’t Care” by 2NE1.

The very first night I went out in Itaewon was quite a weird journey. I went home with this guy Hyuk — or to what I thought was his home, at least. As it turns out, it was a friend’s place that he was staying at.

When we arrived at the apartment, he gave me a towel and some toiletries, and asked me to take a shower. I had never had someone ask me to take a shower before sex before, and I found it strange and somewhat insulting. Plus, a bit lame — what a great way to wash away all the sexy pheromones right before the big event.

Hyuk also didn’t want to take a shower together; he simply waited for me to be done and then took his shower.

Before we had time to hook up, his friend, who was overweight and had glasses and lots of acne, came home. Hyuk explained to me that he needed to talk to her, because she was suicidal.

So I sat on a mat on the floor, waiting for him, while they sipped beers, and she broke down in hysterical tears about not being able to find a boyfriend. Their faces were lit by candlelight, and the whole scene felt kind of spooky, like a séance. And for some reason, it also made me think of the song “Norwegian Wood,” by The Beatles.

The friend eventually cried herself to sleep, and Hyuk and I had awkward sex on the very thin mat.

We’re not talking a tatami or even a yoga mat. We’re talking about something rubbery and about half an inch thick.

After we came, Hyuk turned to me and asked, “Are you gay?”

I was like, “You’re asking me now? …Yes.”

But it turned out that was quite a common question in Korea — at least a decade ago, when I suppose some of them had the old Roy Cohn attitude toward homosexuality.

Adding to the fun of the whole experience, that morning, I also realized, just in the nick of time, that I had misread my schedule, and had to teach classes on that morning — my first Saturday morning classes.

So after my very bizarre evening of squeaky-clean domestic drama by candlelight, I had to throw my clothes on and take an ₩80,000 (~$80) cab back to Bundang in order to be at class on time at 10 a.m.

I never got my Saturday schedule wrong after that — nor have I had such a hilariously sad and awkward sexual experience. At least that I can remember.

Over the next few weeks, I went to Itaewon a few more times on my own, and one night, I saw a cute Korean guy, clean-cut, shorter, with dark hair and glasses. His name was Minjun. He was Korean American and spoke English fluently.

Minjun didn’t want to come all the way back to Bundang with me — it was about a forty-minute bus ride or ₩50,000 (~$50) cab — and he couldn’t bring me back to his parents’ place, where he was staying. So we ended up going into Tapgol Park (탑골 공원) in the dark of the night and having a really hot hookup there, where I got covered in leaves and dirt. My jeans burned my ass cheeks from all the friction of sliding around with him in the dark of the night.

The lingering adrenaline and euphoria from my hookup gave me the confidence to come out to Cortney as we were having brunch one Sunday morning, at a place around the corner from us with a cute French theme that served a traditional American breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, sausages, and orange juice. We would go there to eat, sip coffee and trash talk our fellow teachers.

Telling Cortney about my sexual orientation was a risk. I knew there was a chance my being gay would be a problem at work, if it got back to my bosses. But I also wanted to get closer to Cortney, and I wanted to dish about the hot sex that I was having. So I decided to trust her.

She didn’t seem quite surprised — but it didn’t seem like she had expected it, either. I don’t know if Cortney had been entertaining thoughts of us hooking up or not — I could be oblivious where that was concerned — and she later denied having an interest in me at first.

But at brunch that day, she definitely became intrigued by what she was hearing of the gay scene, which she hadn’t yet explored in her time in Korea, from me.

After a few more weekends of my raunchy stories from Itaewon, Cortney started to get jealous.

Cortney’s ex, the American teacher I had replaced, had left Korea, and she had been in a prolonged depression and sexless phase since. I had seen it myself — many of her nights would end in drunken tears, with her throwing a glass from the deck of a bar onto the plaza below, letting it smash into a million pieces, just like her shattered heart.

Fortunately, as it happens, I’m a great wingman, and this was one area where I knew I could make a difference. So I swung in with a proposal:

“Tonight is your night, baby! I am going to take you out and get you laid.”

And since it was a Saturday, we went out that very night. We hit up a variety of clubs in downtown Seoul, mostly straight places.

There were a combination of chic, high-end places that attracted a crowd of international white-collar professionals, and then there were the bars that attracted more of a bro element and had a lot of American, British, Canadian, and Australian teachers at them. Those bars would play pretty good indie music — songs like “Chelsea Dagger,” by The Fratellis, “Fluorescent Adolescent” by the Arctic Monkeys, and “All These Things That I Have Done” by the Killers were the kind of tracks that played heavily at those places back then.

HOT DOG!

Out in Seoul that night, feeling good on soju and cocktails, Cortney and I were passing by a group of hot Korean guys in line at a hot dog stand, and one of them, who was particularly beefy and lizard-brained, basically woofed at Cortney.

“That guy’s hot,” I said. “You should go for it.” (At that point in my life, I would one hundred percent give a friend the advice to fuck a complete stranger that they knew nothing about. I still might, in fact.)

Cortney said goodbye to me, turned on her heel, and went off to get fucked. Wingman mission accomplished.

Cortney saved the guy’s number in her phone under Hot Dog. That night gave her a renewed sexual confidence. Suddenly, we were like two pumas on the prowl. And we made quite a pair.

At first, Cortney and I agreed that we would switch off, weekend to weekend, which bars we went out to. One weekend, we’d go to the gay bars, and another, we’d go out to the straight bars in Hongdae (홍대) so she had a chance to mix and mingle with fellow breeders.

However, Cortney took to having so much fun on Homo Hill, and at Queen specifically, that she would say we should just go out to Homo Hill and party there.

This did not necessarily stop Cortney from getting laid, though. There was one night where there were two bartenders working, one of whom was straight and the other who was gay. Cortney and I worked our game on both of them, and we ended up making plans to go home with both of them at the end of the night. So we fully waited for them to sweep, wipe down, and close the bar, and then the four of us headed back to Bundang to fuck. ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤

Cortney had beautiful long legs, and we always pictured her as Mrs. Robinson from The Graduate, with that black stockinged leg stretching out seductively in front of Dustin Hoffman.

She and I were both only in our early 20s. But one night, Cortney bagged a guy who was 18 or 19, and they went to a love hotel together.

When Cortney woke up in the morning, the boy was gone, and he had left her a haunting note, apologizing for leaving before they could enjoy the morning together.

“You say I am a young. Is true. I am a young. And I afraid.”

Cortney saved the note. Not even 30, and already a cougar par excellence.

COME TO MY HOME

Cortney would make fun of me for thinking that I had really smooth pickup skills.

“All you ever say is, ‘Come to my home,’” she said. She was right, and I cracked up. But it usually worked.

One late night, I took three guys back to my apartment to watch Gossip Girl. (Netflix’s streaming catalog was still limited and I was starved for American series to watch.) I poured us all whisky — my go-to was Johnnie Walker Black in those days — and we snuggled up on my twin-sized bed to watch.

It wasn’t long before one of the guys left. It’s kind of par for the course in most group sex situations that someone gets nervous at the beginning and begs off, so it didn’t particularly faze me. Part of the process.

That left the two other guys, Jiho and Hajoon, who were boyfriends, and me. Jiho was the beefier of the two, with a serious expression and narrow black eyeglasses. Hajoon was shorter and shier and was irresistibly adorable.

Jiho and Hajoon sat on each side of me, and we started kissing, then taking our clothes off. Korean guys were always wowed by my body hair, because the men there are generally smooth. They sometimes had a little patch of hair on their chest, and very rough, wiry pubic hair that would scratch your face when you were getting facefucked, which was very hot.

Before long, Jiho had his head between my legs, and started sucking my cock. I watched as his head bobbed up and down, his face painted with that deeply satisfied look that only a baby sucking a breast and a man sucking a cock have.

But after a few moments, the two of them started to get into an intense argument with each other in Korean. They went back and forth, hurling epithets, until Hajoon left. As it turned out, Jiho had been going down on me a little too enthusiastically for Hajoon’s taste, and so he took off in a huff.

Jiho ended up spending the night anyway, and we continued hooking up. I told him to sit on top of me, and I stuck my raw cock in his smooth, tight ass, watching his black Ray-Ban glasses bounce up and down on his nose as he slid up and down my dick. I didn’t even bother asking what had happened with Hajoon until right before we fell asleep.

In the morning, he used the translate feature on his phone to explain to me what had gone down.

“Fuck,” I said. “I feel kinda bad.”

It didn’t stop him from wanting to hook up some more, though; we made out, he sucked me off, and then we took a shower together before he said goodbye.

Not long after he left, though, Hajoon texted me, and said he wanted to come back over. I texted him okay and made myself some breakfast.

No more than an hour after Jiho had left my apartment, Hajoon was suddenly back. I was happy to see him again. He was cuter and sweeter than Jiho.

I asked Hajoon for his side of the story, which he also relayed via the translate feature on his phone, because he didn’t speak a word of English.

I wasn’t able to make complete sense of what was going on with the two of them. Either they were fighting or just sneaking around on each other. But Hajoon also made it very clear that he wanted to hook up with me and did not want Jiho to find out. So I chose not to mention he had just left my apartment an hour earlier.

I had some tutoring to do that afternoon, so I left Hajoon in my apartment for a couple of hours. I let Cortney know about the entire thing, and she was tickled. When I got back from tutoring, she had already let herself into my apartment, and had been having a grand old time with my little paramour. They went out for coffee together and discussed all sorts of things while daddy had been at work.

Cortney said Hajoon was chatting a mile a minute with her, but that he turned into a bashful and quiet geisha girl the moment I walked into the apartment — as though he were leery of doing anything to displease me.

Hajoon and I spent a couple of days together, mostly in each other’s arms in my bed, kissing each other all over.

Unfortunately, he was also texting with Jiho and his family the entire time, coming up with excuses for where he was and what he was doing. He felt guilty about all the lying, and this made him forlorn. He looked quite cute when he was forlorn, but I felt bad. While I found the entire situation and series of events to be hilarious from my end, I didn’t want the lil’ cutie to feel so sad.

It was time to let him go. I took him to a shabu-shabu (しゃぶしゃぶ), or Japanese hot-pot, restaurant I liked, and I said I thought he should go back to Seoul after dinner. He agreed, so I put him in a cab and waved goodbye. That was the last time we ever got together. I hope he and Jiho have both found happiness in life, whether together or not.

Despite arriving thinking that I wasn’t into Asian guys and that I wouldn’t be having any sex while I was there, I ended up having a boatload of hot sex in Korea. I got really into getting facefucked while I was there, and would love to feel a guy’s rough pubic hair scratching my face as he pounded away at my face, his smooth Korean cock sliding down my throat.

In fact, I ended up having so much sex when I was there that I bought toothbrushes and other toiletries in bulk so I could offer them to my guests in the morning. We would usually shower together, playing with each other’s cocks, and making comparisons of our white and Asian bodies.

When we’d dish about our hookups together, Cortney would get jealous of this kind of male camaraderie. She felt straight guys just clammed up and closed off after sex and things couldn’t be footloose and fancy-free like it was with the homosexuals. Which is probably true.

HEY, PLAYBOY…

Sometimes, she and I played little games with guys. Cortney would write bizarre and seductive messages on their mirrors in lipstick, and I would sometimes tell my conquests that it was an American custom to keep a guy’s underwear after a hookup, sending a series of very confused boys from my apartment, free-balling it, while I amassed a collection of boxer-briefs I kept as trophies.

I didn’t take most of the dates or hookups I had in Korea particularly seriously, considering the fact I knew I’d be returning to the US at the end of the year. But I did go on some serious dates with this Korean American guy named Chris, who was a photography student at RISD and at home in Seoul over the summer.

Chris and I had tender hookups with lots of kissing, me running my mouth all over his smooth body, gently tickling and scratching him with my five o’clock shadow. I loved hearing his low moans as I fucked him from behind, looking at the view from my window at Paragon, feeling the warmth of his smooth ass pounding against my crotch. When we weren’t fucking, Chris would drive me around pretty areas of Bundang and take pictures for his school projects.

And we did some shopping. He had good taste. In fact, he was the guy who had the beautiful green coat that Cortney and I complimented. Cortney called Chris “The Doll” because of his perfect porcelain features.

I don’t quite remember how Chris and I ended things in Korea, but I ended up running into him the next year in New York, at Industry in Hell’s Kitchen. We exchanged phone numbers and made vague plans to meet up, but I never followed up on them. I never really felt a relationship connection with Chris. But the few short weeks I had with him were nice.

CONCRETE JUNGLE FOMO IS MADE OF

Except for the goal of having no sex, which I abandoned with aplomb once I realized how hot Korean guys were, with their deep voices and beautiful skin, I stuck with most of my goals while I was in Korea.

I studied for the LSAT a lot, spending hours in coffeeshops. I ended up taking the LSAT twice, at Hosei University, one of the top universities in Seoul. It was one of the few places in the country where the test was administered.

After doing all my practice tests, I was psyched, because I was getting scores of 172-3 or so, consistently. I wanted to go to a good law school in New York City, and I considered only three acceptable: Columbia, NYU, and Fordham.

Fordham would be the easiest of the three to get into, and my third Jesuit school. Fordham had more of a working-class reputation than the other two schools, but put out plenty of white-shoe law firm lawyers. Columbia and NYU were what are known as T-14 schools — the best of the best. A score of 172-73 would make me competitive at all three schools.

Unfortunately though, test day jitters meant that my practice test scores were seven or eight points higher than my ultimate score. I heard from several law school admissions counselors that this was a pretty common phenomenon, the test-day score dropping considerably from a person’s practice score average. My eventual score wound up a 165, which is a decent score, but not enough to make up for my also just-OK undergraduate GPA of 3.6 or so.

The anxiety of getting into law school and being able to go to NYC hung over much of the year. I had legitimately no idea if I would get into an acceptable law school in New York. I had a big fear that my best option was going to be BC Law, which is a great law school, but also represented going back home to me. I didn’t want to do that at all, at that point.

And I was already experiencing preemptive FOMO knowing that so many of my friends were going to be in New York.

Chris was getting an apartment in Union Square in NYC. Arvand was in law school at Cardozo in NYC. Annabel lived right around the corner from Fordham, at the Trump International in Columbus Circle. Lindsay was applying to grad school at Columbia, and my best friend Matt had just accepted a job with a white-shoe law firm there, after graduating from Harvard Law. So there was going to be a whole crowd that I wanted to be a part of.

SALARYMAN

Thankfully, it was very easy for me to make and save money while I was in Seoul, another of my goals I was able to meet that year.

While I was working at coffeeshops, I would invariably be approached by a Korean mother, who would ask if I was available to teach her son or daughter or a group of students. I always said yes, and charged ₩50,000 (~$50) per hour.

In addition to my tax-free monthly salary, which was about ₩2,700,000 (~$2,700 USD), this added up to quite a bit of money. I didn’t have to pay rent, there were minimal transportation costs because I lived near school, and eating in restaurants was a bargain compared to the US or the UK.

When I think of Korean moms hiring tutors for their kids now, I think about the unlucky family from Parasite, and how so many of the tropes about Korean society in that film are true.

Over time, I was tutoring about four students one-on-one, and also teaching outside classes a couple of times per week. My students ranged from elementary schoolers to high school students. It did not take much work to plan lessons, and it was fun to walk to class in different parts of Bundang, taking in the scene and getting little slices-of-life as I went from apartment to apartment, removing my shoes and opening my eyes and mind to new people.

At one point in the year, a guy who ran an English school stopped Cortney and me on the side of the road, and asked us if we would be interested in doing recordings of English lessons for him to use with his students. We enthusiastically accepted, and could not shut up about our new “recording contract.”

Cortney and I would show up to “the studio” looking the part, wearing dark shades and jaunty scarves, and sipping at our hot tea with lemon (to preserve our voices, of course). We sat in a makeshift recording space, and read from textbooks about people like Dick and Jane and the adventures they went on.

Our boss was incredibly pleased, particularly with Cortney. He said Cortney had “a golden voice,” which I was jealous of at the time, because he did not similarly compliment mine. But years later, I sent in a listener voice note to my favorite podcast hosts, and they both agreed, on-air, that I have a sexy voice. So I feel like I ended up doing okay in the voice department, too.

Between all my jobs, I probably made close to $80,000 while I was in Korea, quite a bit more than I had made as a paralegal at the law firm, even with overtime. The financial windfall of teaching English in Korea ultimately allowed me to pay off about $12,000 in credit card debt, and save another $7,000 for the following year.

And I wasn’t scrimping on my rock ’n’ roll lifestyle in Bundang, either.

DARK SARCASM IN THE HAGWON

At Leadersville, morale among the students was very low. But Cortney and I were relatively popular with the students. They called me Charlie Teacher and Cortney, Cortney Teacher. One day, our colleague Keith asked the students which American teachers at the school they thought were the best looking. And the consensus choice, he said, was Cortney and me. Badges we both wore with honor.

I would do things to try to brighten the mood in class. Sometimes I would pretend we were in Dead Poets Society or The Cider House Rules, and yell “Goodbye, you princes of Maine, you kings of New England!” as the students funneled out of class. Other times, when the bell rang, I would drop my whiteboard marker, and abruptly yell, “Get out!” Which always cracked the kids up, the boys particularly.

The high school classes were more fun for me. Their English was very good already and we could have actual lessons. One of the classes was designed to be like an AP English class. We read a few books together, like Animal Farm by George Orwell, and The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

I also had characters that I made up and drew to use as examples when I was teaching lessons. Yvonne was a busty woman, with a high pony, tight sweaters, and pencil skirts, and she came out in so many different scenarios that soon, the students knew when I began drawing that Yvonne was coming out to play.

“Yvonne!” they would yell, when they saw me beginning to draw the high pony or the tits.

One time, with some of the middle school students, I held a fashion parade (inspired by Ja’mie King), where I played an instrumental version of Eminem’s “We Made You” and the students strutted down the middle of the classroom with their best runway walks. We would then repeat the English word for the item of clothing: “Sweatshirt. Sweat-shirt. Shhh. Shhhiiirt. Thank you, Joon Woo. Now, sashay away!”

The elementary schoolers were cute little kids, and their lessons were simple enough. The kiddos were pretty docile and well-behaved, and they mostly just smiled and laughed at everything I said. The vibes were good.

The high schoolers were already burnt out, and just wanted to get through the day, so they were generally pretty compliant, too. But it was depressing to talk to them, because their days were so heavily scheduled. For them, it was up early to get to school, then sports or extracurriculars, then hagwon, then doing homework all night. There was no time left for going outside or playing or being human.

I felt bad for them because of that, and it reminded me of one of the reasons I came to Korea — to get off the treadmill. Granted, I was still very much on it, too, with all of the studying for the LSAT that I was doing, and all the hours I had put in at my law firm and in getting into Georgetown before that. But at least right now I had time every day to simply exist and reset. My students didn’t have that. And many people don’t.

Sometimes the students were just so burnt out that I gave in and let them watch a video. I tried to keep the videos at least somewhat relevant to the lesson, showing children’s movies such as Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with the subtitles on, so they could hear and learn dialog.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the middle schoolers were absolute nightmares to deal with. To this day, a class of middle schoolers at Leadersville are part of a select group of people to see me completely snap, after I lost all hope, patience, and willpower, after nearly an hour of trying to get them to quiet down and pay attention, or at the very least, just quiet down, and failing.

I would quiet the class down, finally get back to the lesson, and then suddenly, once again, the din would return, and it would be as deafeningly loud as before.

After what felt like the fortieth time asking them to quiet down, I finally screamed, at the top of my voice, “QUIET!” Completely involuntarily. It scared me a little.

My entire class went silent, and next door, I could hear Cortney’s class erupt in laughter over my meltdown.

“It’s not funny,” I heard her say.

Thank you, Cortney. It’s not. funny. at. all.

I stepped out of the classroom for a minute to collect myself. Cortney came outside to check on me.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

“Yeah, I think so,” I said. “But, holy Mary, mother of fucking God.”

“I know,” she said.

I went back in and apologized for losing my temper. Kids that age truly do not know better, no matter how awful they are, and I knew that, even then. But I also decided that day that that year would be the last time I ever taught middle school students, and I haven’t to this very day.

Boys at that age have boundless energy and very limited attention spans. They would constantly interrupt class, making loud noises, taunting their classmates, blatantly playing video games with the volume on, and the like. You had to reprimand them again and again.

Sometimes I would do what one of my English teachers at BC High, Mr. Collins, did, and make them leave my classroom and wander the hallways.

Inevitably though, one of the Supes would scoop them up, bring them back to me, where they were told to apologize, and then they would return to their seat and behave for about five minutes, before acting up again.

But the girls at that age are worse. You could scold the boys, and they would be upset for a minute and get over it. But the girls, who would interrupt class by talking, doing their makeup, and complaining incessantly about the boys, would hold a never-ending grudge against you if you said anything to them. So you had to tread carefully, because one wrong move could mean your relationship with, and ability to get through to them, was kaput.

One particularly dastardly middle school nemesis of mine went by the English name of Joanne.

One day, I had her class write pen pal letters to my friends back in America, asking them questions about their lives. Joanne was selected to write to Elspeth, who she proceeded to ask, “Do you have baby?”

I feigned shock. “First off, Joanne, you’re once again blowing off the article. It’s ‘do you have a baby.’ And no, she doesn’t! Elspeth is a sophisticated, modern, professional woman who has a career and goals that are more than just being home and popping out kids!”

Joanne was incapable of not talking during class. Finally I took her aside and said that I was going to dock her grade if she did not stop talking during my class. She called my bluff, and when I stunned her by reading her C out loud to the class, she knew I wasn’t kidding around. The look on her face was ghoulish, like an Edvard Munch painting.

Usually, when I gave my students the grades that they numerically deserved, their parents called in to complain. So the administration started intercepting my papers and boosting the students’ grades, typically from B/Cs to As, before they were returned to them. Leadersville was a for-profit institution, after all. Money talks.

Overall, I think I did pretty well my first year of teaching, considering the circumstances. I don’t know how much the students were really learning at the hagwon, considering how tired and distracted with other responsibilities they were. I also don’t think it’s particularly humane to keep kids cooped up in classrooms like that for so much. Let the children play.

DIPLOMAZIA INTERNAZIONALE

I had another friend in Seoul, Nicole, who lived downtown and worked for a public relations agency.

I didn’t actually meet Nicole until I got to Seoul. She was a friend of my friend Chris’s, from high school in Atlanta, and he put us in touch with each other. Chris was great like that. And Nicole and I had an instant rapport. With her, I got a more professional experience of Seoul, which I definitely would not have gotten otherwise. (If there was one thing that the English teacher crowd was not, it was pro-fes-sio-nal.)

Nicole had a lot of cool friends in the city. One of her closest friends, Jean, was a reporter for the AP, who grew up in Korea and reported on the North. Nicole also had a group of Italian diplomat friends, who we hung out with from time to time.

I learned a lot of interesting things from the Italians. One of them was that Italy considers South Korea to be a hardship posting for its diplomats — a category I would have thought reserved for places such as sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. But when you consider the pace of life of Italy and Korea, and the fact that it is hard for white women to meet men there, it makes sense. One of Nicole’s Italian friends, a woman, would say, “Korea is a graveyard for white women.”

It was fascinating to hear Jean talk about North Korea, especially since, at the beginning of my stay in the country, American journalists had been taken hostage by Kim Jong Il, and Bill Clinton had been flown in to negotiate their release. (I believe he went on a State Department plane, and not on an Epstein plane, this time at least.)

I never made it to the DMZ while I was in Korea, and this whole incident may have been a subconscious part of the reason why. I had read the fascinating and terrifying book The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Kang Chol-Hwan when I was in college, and I really didn’t want to fuck around and find out about a North Korean jail.

(I did, however, greatly enjoy the eventual 30 Rock arc that dealt with the North Korean hostage situation. And you can see Jean talking about NK in a Netflix documentary called How to Become a Tyrant.)

Nicole and I spent a lot of time one-on-one, too. We would go have martinis and vodka tonics at the Park Hyatt Seoul, which, like its counterpart in Tokyo, had a sleek, modern piano bar looking out over the glittering lights of Seoul.

Quite close to the Park Hyatt was LP Bar, a dark, wood-paneled bar that served beer and cocktails, and spun old jazz and classic rock albums. These bars are now quite common throughout East Asia (and elsewhere), but at the time, they were a new concept to me, and I found them really cool.

Nicole and I would smoke cigarettes outside and talk about dating, or our friends back home.

One time, I introduced her and Cortney over lunch, at this place in Seoul called The Flying Pan (a great spot with a hilarious name that is sadly now closed). We had a nice time, but after the lunch was over, Cortney was cross with me because I acted differently around Nicole than I did when it was just the two of us together, back in Bundang.

It’s true — I am a social chameleon, and I will adjust myself to fit my surroundings. Nicole was a lot of fun, and had a good sense of humor, but she did not share the same raunchy and outrageous sensibility that Cortney and I did. So when Cortney was making obscene comments at lunch and I did not go along with her, her feelings were hurt.

Apparently, the concept of reining it in to make someone else feel comfortable was new to Cortney. She initially thought this was inauthentic, and that I was judging her by changing my attitude around Nicole. It took her a while to come around to my point of view that what I was doing was a totally normal thing to do.

A few years later, I mentioned the incident in therapy and John, my therapist at the time, said that the argument was more about Cortney’s feelings about how I felt about her than anything I did. Which I suppose makes sense.

For the record, I continue to be a social chameleon, and I still think that it’s completely normal to go into different modes, and slip on slightly different versions of your personality, with different groups of people. Gay people are used to code-switching just like other minority groups are, and it gives us practice. I honestly regard it as a strength, and think we’d be better off as a society if more people had this ability.

It’s not that chameleons don’t have cores; being flexible is our core. And of course, we do have a preferred mode. And if we can be unabashedly ourselves around you, then you are likely one of our favorite people.

I believe this was the line of argument that eventually brought Cortney around, after our first real fight of our friendship.

Cortney was not what you would call a girls’ girl. She would take an instantaneous dislike to other women, which cracked me up. Nor did she particularly enjoy sharing my attention with other women. She wanted to be the center of attention.

When she and I would go out to eat, I would often point-blank tell our server that it was our anniversary, and ask what we could get for free. Cortney’s face would always turn red, but we would also always get free dessert.

When there were tables of other girls nearby, I’d prod her by saying, “I think those girls are talking about you.” Or, I’d quickly grab her hands, and say, “We’re just two people who came to Korea and found love,” as loud as I could, mortifying her, and attracting the attention of everyone in the restaurant. I’ve always thought little scenes like this make quotidian life more entertaining and more lol.

SUPE! THERE IT IS

Cortney was always down to hang with Korean guys, though. After she and I got wind of the fact that the Supes wanted to be friends with us, we quickly introduced ourselves. We became fast friends, giving them all American names.

One of them we called Philip, because he was handsome and had a princely demeanor. His buddy was Dan, an artist. Another guy I named Mark — which Cortney insisted on spelling Marc, because the two of them fucked, and her dad’s name also happens to be Mark. The one girl Supervisor we called Annie.

All the supervisors spoke broken English. They wanted to hire Cortney and me to teach them, but I was honestly too burnt out to do any more teaching on the side, so I let Cortney have them all to herself.

But we hung out with the supervisors all of the time. The Supes in tow, we would go out on the town, shopping at Uniqlo (株式会社ユニクロ) or Lotte Mart (롯데그룹), or getting shabu-shabu.

Sometimes, we would go to Japanese bars, which are known as izakayas (居酒屋), and Cortney and I would use our comparative largesse to buy the Supes round after round, spending the night joking around and laughing the Korean onomatopoeia way, kekekekeke, for hours.

Dan did drawings of different characters, and I gave them backstories. One of my characters was an alcoholic pegasus named, yes, Peggy, who went on all sorts of misadventures with me, capers involving the commission of felonies and the possession of substances such as ether.

Based on how popular these tales were with the Supes, I think Korean television is primed for a cartoon about Peggy.

It took the Supes a while to get used to my dry sense of humor, because I would say things ironically that they sometimes took for truth. They were disappointed to learn, for example, that I did not own a fully loaded Mercedes SUV with tinted windows.

♦

You’ll end up really getting on people’s nerves if you’re correcting their grammar all of the time, even if it’s your job. So eventually, Cortney and I adopted an if-you-can’t-beat-’em, join-’em attitude and just spoke broken English with the Supes. (And honestly, we sometimes slipped into it at school, too.)

Koreans often don’t add the necessary suffix to an adjective, so instead of someone being very stylish, they will be very style.

As it happens, our friend Annie was very style, and she ended up completely changing her look one day, from preppy to goth. It wasn’t a gradual change, where the prep gradually disappeared and the goth gradually took its place, it was a wholesale change that happened all at once — there was no looking back to the old Annie after that.

Cortney and I were thrilled with this radical transformation. No looking back.

One night, after the Supes and their families brought Cortney and me to a fancy dinner in Seoul (that I initially thought was a murder mystery night), we gushed over our new friends:

“Did you see the way Philip was acting towards me tonight?! Very respect.”

“Very respect.”

PAGING DR. FEELGOOD

Cortney’s condom-less sex with Hot Dog led to a whole HIV scare, where I had to take her to the hospital to get STI tests, because she was certain that she had contracted it and was freaking out.

Because I was obliviously drinking three or four Americanos per day — sometimes with extra shots of espresso — I was even more jacked up and anxious than I normally was in those days. The stress of studying for the LSAT, and the uncertainty of not knowing exactly where I would be when I got back from Korea, added to it.

So when I brought Cortney to the doctor to get her HIV test, I made my own visit to a doctor, who I pretty much bullied into giving me a Xanax prescription.

He tried explaining to me several times that these were very serious drugs, and suggested that I try any number of other ways of reducing my anxiety — including reducing my caffeine input.

But because I felt invincible those days, and because I was already doing most of the other things on his list — such as eating healthy, getting enough sleep, exercising, and cutting back on alcohol — I felt like I could handle the Xanax. And I wanted the relief that it would bring.

Nicole’s dad was a doctor, and had written her a prescription for Xanax when he was last in the country. She had given me one, one day when I was having trouble sleeping, and the beautiful, instantaneous relief that it gave me automatically hooked me. It was the beginning of a torrid, years-long affair with benzos that would end horribly for me.

I remember waiting for Cortney to get out of her appointment. I got her one of those Japanese stuffed animals that’s just a head with big eyes and no arms and legs, like Bill Murray gets for Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation.

We said their lines:

“Is this for me?”

“It can be for you.”

It can be for you.

When we got back to Paragon, I merrily poured out all of the metal tins, filled with 0.5 mg Xanax tablets, that the man who I was now unironically calling Dr. Feelgood had given me.

I started taking them each day, and it was honestly so liberating to walk the Earth with not a shred of anxiety, only pleasant thoughts and confidence swirling around my beautiful, untroubled mind. I was very good at projecting confidence back then, regardless of how I felt, but being anxiety-free allowed me to take it to the next level, and I truly felt unstoppable. There was no situation I could not handle. There was no romantic prospect I could not seduce.

It was a nice ride that lasted for quite a while before it started getting really ugly.

Cortney had a habit of pacing and gabbing nonstop when she got nervous. I remember her being stressed out about something one day, and doing this exact routine, in her very warm studio apartment, as I sat on her couch watching. I had not taken my Xanax that morning, and her intensity, and the fact that there weren’t any benzos flowing through my system, caused me to have my very first panic attack.

It was so scary. I thought I was having a heart attack. And Cortney was useless during it, laughing because she knew she had induced a panic attack.

She eventually got me a glass of water (eventually — she was not the maternal type at all). But when I think back to that moment now, I realize how quickly my body and mind had become dependent on those drugs. I had only been using them for a few weeks at that point. And that is really scary to me.

Benzo withdrawals sent me to the hospital in a panic a few times over the years. Panic attacks do become easier to deal with once you know what they are, but the first few times they happened, I really did need to be convinced I was not about to die.

And benzo withdrawal can, in fact, kill you. I do not recommend fucking with these drugs at all. You know what? Just be fucking anxious! Meditate. Breathe. It’s better than becoming obsessed with a tiny little bar that will destroy your life.

But when I was in Korea, that destruction was still a few years away. So I will return to our narrative.

TREAT YO’SELF!

Probably the best part of our weeks and our routine together were our Sunday mornings, when Cortney and I would go to brunch, and then go to the jimjilbang (찜질방), the Korean spa.

If you have seen the Japan episode of Girls, where Shoshanna works in Tokyo and goes to the spa with her friends, the Korean jimjilbangs are essentially exactly the same. They are split up into male and female sections. Whole families and groups of friends will go together, splitting up by sex to enjoy the saunas, steam rooms, hot and cold plunges, green tea baths, exfoliating massages, and the like.

There are also common areas, where you can get your hair cut, or get something to eat in your borrowed jimjilbang pajamas and slippers.

Cortney and I went every Sunday. It cost less than ₩8,000 (about $8) to go and soak and luxuriate for as long as you wanted, and we would stay for hours. We would both leave feeling so refreshed, our skin glowing. It was a great way to reset after partying hard on Saturday nights.

I often got stares from the younger Korean guys and the kids there with their dads, due to my body hair. Koreans typically only have a patch of hair on their chest and then, very wiry pubic hair. Occasionally they have some light hair on their legs too. But this Irish boy has hair all over (except on his back, where it does not belong), so they would want to sneak a peek.

One time, I went to the jimjilbang with a Korean guy I had brought home from Queen the night before. I delighted in being transgressive by lovingly soaping and scrubbing down his body, like two very good male friends do, in front of all the Korean businessmen who were there, looking on perplexedly, thinking something seemed a little off about the whole situation, but not quite being able to put their fingers on it, or wanting to deal with riling up a surly foreigner.

I had some fun moments of running my wet and soapy hands all over the smooth olive skin of my beautiful Korean lover, and played with his cock in the steam room, as is all gay men’s right.

Another time, I had a straight Korean American bro named Paul hit me up in the green tea bath. He was home visiting family. We talked for a while, and he said he wanted to hang out and party in Seoul with me.

I wasn’t sure if he was gay or not, and I didn’t feel like coming out to him, particularly in the middle of the sauna. Luckily my friend Erika was visiting that weekend, so we ended up going out as a group. I told her that Paul had a pretty big, nice-looking cock (it was the first part of his body that I saw, when he emerged out of another pool to come say hello to me), and he made moves on her, but she was unreceptive to it.

I would have been down to fuck if he wanted to, but I didn’t get that vibe from him.

There was a huge guy who looked like a sumo wrestler who did exfoliating massages in the men’s sauna. I didn’t get one until one of my last weekends in Bundang, when I figured I should try it. It was the most painful massage I have had in my entire life. And when the sumo guy was done, he showed me a ball of dead skin the size of a tennis ball. It was horrifying. But I did feel catharsis to be letting go of all that was no longer serving me. Very Buddhist.

On Sunday nights, Cortney and I would often get into our bathrobes and do face masks. Koreans — men included — are skincare superstars, and there were very good and affordable skincare shops all over Seoul. One of the best ones was called Skinfood, but there were American places like Bath and Body Works and L’Occitane en Provence, too. Koreans put a lot of care into their complexions, and it shows in their dewy, silky smooth skin.

And they are conscious of other people’s health. I was interested to see sick Koreans wearing masks on the subway, years before the pandemic ever happened. I kind of hope this becomes a thing in the US too.

TWINSIES!, OR KOREA: THE CANADA OF JAPAN?

Obviously, Japan being a former colonial power in Korea, and being so close geographically, the two countries share quite a bit in common. Most of the things that are popularly associated with Japan have slightly different Korean equivalents, like with Canada and the US.

The Korean equivalent of sake (酒), for example, is soju (소주). It’s slightly less refined than sake, and typically comes in green bottles, with a screw-top cap that is often used as part of a drinking game.

Koreans also love karaoke (カラオケ), or as they call it, norebang (노래방). I used to really enjoy norebang when I drank, and we went out to a few places while I was in Seoul. Norebang places are elaborately decorated and sometimes themed — I remember one that looked like a princess castle — and all over the city. I’m a good singer and I am also good at singing in different styles, like someone who has been singing along with the radio his entire life. So I used to have fun singing tracks as diverse as “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes, “Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash, and “So Into You” by Atlanta Rhythm Section (another Lost in Translation reference).

Most people are awful singers, though. And the thought of having to listen to them while sober is too much for me. So it’s been years since I’ve been to norebang.

Like Japan, Korea is also big on convenience store culture. There are convenience stores like 7-Eleven all over the place, and you could theoretically eat every meal, and eat well, between vending machines and convenience stores on their own. There was a convenience store in the lobby of Paragon that Cortney and I used to ransack for premade sandwiches, or what we simply called “premades,” at the end of the night. There were egg salad premades, tuna salad premades, and a seafood mixture premade.

Premades were honestly kind of disgusting, but they hit the spot after a long night of drinking.

One night, Cortney and I went into the Paragon convenience store super blacked out, and the next day, we couldn’t remember how we had acted while we were in there. So we ended up avoiding it for about six weeks or so, after that. If we did act inappropriately, we were most likely tag-team hitting on the clerk in broken English, with a smattering of Korean words thrown in.

ROOKY IS INTOLERABLE

Cortney and I loved to hit on guys together.

We were quite brazen with it sometimes. There was one bar we would hang out at that one of her exes, a guy named Rookie, ran. Rookie was obviously his nickname. I don’t remember why exactly, but it was because he was new at something. But the Koreans all pronounced it wrong, saying it with a long O, Rooky. Cortney and I would sit at the bar, drawing cocks and women with their muffs spread wide open, while Cortney said raunchy things to Rooky.

Cortney and I sometimes liked to pretend that we lived in another era, where women did not have any rights, and so when it was time for me to leave Korea, I “signed” her over to Rooky for protection. They ended up having sex on my bed, in my empty apartment, the day after I left the country. Paging Dr. Freud! Cortney claimed she didn’t want to take him back to her place, because it was filthy, but he thought she wasn’t bringing him there because she had something to hide, and they ended up getting into a huge fight over it.

They dated for a while again after that, though, and Rooky used a really hot line on Cortney during sex that I have been using with guys for years since.

Towering over her, stroking his about-to-burst cock, he asked her, in his deep, husky voice, “Where do you want it?”

What a great thing to say to your partner when you’re about to come. It’s hot, and it also implies that they’re getting it on them, even though they have the option to say no. Cortney asked Rooky to deliver his load right onto her heart. I thought that was super romantic.

So thank you, Rooky. You are not “intolerable,” as one of your colleagues at the bar once wrote about you, on a cocktail napkin that she passed to me. “Rooky is intolerable,” it said. I don’t know what Korean word it had been translated from, but Cortney and I were calling things intolerable for weeks after.

We got wild one night a week, but Cortney and I were otherwise on our game during my year there. We would get up early each morning, and I would make us a smoothie, with orange juice, bananas, and ice. I had a coffee maker that I would brew incredibly strong coffee from, and we would eat a healthy breakfast before I went to the gym and Cortney went about her day. I called it Café Select.

CHARLIE POPPINS

Cortney jokingly called me Charlie Poppins or Henry Higgins, because she said I My Fair Lady’d her by helping her dress better and refine her ways. Her previous boyfriend was a big drunk (an even bigger one than me) who was also from Boston, and they had drunk and partied a lot.

Whereas Cortney and I had planners that we meticulously ticked off our goals in; went to Lotte Mart to go grocery shopping and picked up lots of leafy greens (“roughage,” as Cortney always called it); and made sure to cook ourselves protein- and antioxidant-rich, low-calorie foods.

I ended up losing about 30 pounds or so while I was in Korea, going from 188 to 158 pounds or so. I was quite lean and athletic looking. It was the thinnest I had been in my adult life. (My average in college was about 185, at 6’2”.)

And honestly, I had never felt better in my life, or been eating more regularly. Rather than eating big meals, we would eat smaller meals throughout the day, and also have snacks — things like mixed nuts, grapes and little Babybel cheeses, hummus and crudités, all of which were easy to get in Bundang. For dinner, I would usually make some asparagus and grilled chicken, with some white rice.

One staple that I kept stocked that was new for me in Korea was aloe juice, which was great for rehydrating, and also for nursing hangovers.

I would hard-boil a carton of eggs each week, and put them in a bowl in my refrigerator to have at the ready. Cortney always said that represented having your shit together to her, the beautiful bowl of hard-boiled eggs in the refrigerator.

And it honestly did. For a lot of my life, I’ve struggled to stay on a set schedule, or keep up any sort of consistent routine. But I was very motivated that year, and I don’t know if it was the change of scenery, the more flexible schedule my teaching job offered, my very real hunger to get myself to New York City in tip-top shape, or a combination of all three, but that energy was like bottled lightning, and I wish it were easier to summon all the time.

Having a partner in self-improvement was honestly very motivating, too. Cortney and I could be each other’s champions, comparing notes, staying strong together.

“You’re nothing if not a survivor,” she said about me.

“Nothing tastes as good as thin feels,” I would reply, quoting her favorite, Kate Moss.

Some weekends, rather than getting ready to go out, we would just post up in a cafe for the afternoon, each of us reading our favorite Haruki Murakami novel.

We spent a lot of nights in, doing masks and watching episodes of Mad Men, which I had gotten really into back in DC. I liked to joke that Cortney was like Joan and called her Joanie, which she didn’t like, because she saw herself as more of a Peggy. She got back at me by saying I was like Pete, even though I’m clearly a Roger. Cortney’s mother Marybeth later validated this, saying I was most like Mr. Sterling out of all the characters. (Although I do have a soft spot for Pete.)

When The Slow Hand put some tasteful nude art up on its walls and left postcard-sized samples to take home, Cortney and I covered our studios in them, mouthing Peggy’s line, “They’re not dirty. They’re… nudes” to ourselves.

Cortney and I also liked to watch Anthony Bourdain episodes, and documentaries like Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Cortney would laugh because I was such a busybody, gushing about the wine and the food and doing eight million things, while she just sat, watching the movie.

One night, we drank wine and watched the Academy Award–winning documentary The Cove, about the atrocities of Japan’s dolphin hunting industry. We became obsessed. The moment that cove turned (literally) blood red made our hairs stand up.

We talked about the movie for months afterward, and always had to say its entire epithet, “Academy Award–winning documentary The Cove.”

EAT-’EM-UP

One of the most unforgettable aspects of my time in Korea was the local food, which is incredibly good. I can’t possibly name off all the delicious food I had while I was there, but I am going to do my best to recount my favorites, and some of my other observations about eating and drinking in Korea.

Any discussion of Korean food has to begin with kimchi (김치), spicy fermented cabbage that Koreans believe has magical properties, and is regarded as a necessary addition to most meals. I have to say, kimchi is an acquired taste, but it does grow on you. And it will certainly pep you up and clear your sinuses. It also pairs well with other Korean dishes.

Another staple of Korean cuisine is bibimbap (비빔밥), which loosely translates to “mix it up.” Typical bibimbap is rice, topped with sautéed vegetables, beef or other meat, chili paste, and a fried egg, which you then mix together and eat. It’s delicious, and can be customized to whatever ingredients you have left in the fridge — because they’re all going to become delicious clumps of just a lil’ bit of everything when you’re done mixing ’em.

♦

Koreans drink heavily. It was not an uncommon sight to see red-faced businessmen passed out drunk on public benches at 8 p.m. And Koreans charitably believe that the way you act when you’re drunk isn’t really you — it’s like a ghost taking over your body. This alcoholic always appreciated that interpretation of things, and wished it carried over to the puritanical States.

Koreans love their drinking games. There are a few, including one where you take turns flicking the cap of a soju bottle, until it breaks apart. Whoever flicks it last has to finish the bottle of soju, as well as their beer, or something like that. Then there’s another numbers game, called Baskin Robbins 31, where the player who is eventually forced to call out the number 31 has to take a shot. There are lots of others, too.

Playing these games built camaraderie, especially with our new Korean friends. Korean culture is a bit more buttoned-up than in the States, and the alcohol afforded them a red glow, and the opportunity to cut loose and blow off a little steam. It allowed you to see a softer, funnier, crazier side of your friends and coworkers.

And god bless alcohol for that.

♦

Because of this heavy drinking culture, one of the country’s most popular dishes is haejangguk (해장국), or “soup to chase a hangover.” I had it a few times. It consists of a hearty beef broth, dried napa cabbage, vegetables, and beef. It’s delicious. I didn’t have too many blackout nights while I was in Korea, so my hangovers were generally manageable. But the day after Cortney’s parents’ first night in Korea, when her dad and I got blottoed, we went for hangover soup. And boy, did it hit the spot.

Another popular dish is samgyeopsal (삼겹살), or pork belly, which is a popular meal at Korean BBQs, where you typically sit in front of a small grill to cook your own, with waitstaff bringing you sides, such as lettuce, perilla leaves, and ssamjang (쌈장), a mix of soybean and chili pastes.

One of my favorites was tteokbokki (떡볶이), a ubiquitous, extremely addictive street food with a captivating red-orange color. These delights are steamed and sliced rice cakes, cooked with fish cakes and scallions in a sweet and spicy sauce made of chili paste. The result is a soft, chewy, peppery delight.

A staple at bars and izakayas was pajeon (파전) (scallion pancakes), and haemul pajeon (해물파전) (seafood scallion pancakes), which are tasty, and often served alongside beer or wine. The seafood pancakes are particularly yummy, and can be made with shellfish, cuttlefish, and other types of seafood.

A huge staple of Korean cuisine is doenjang jjigae (된장찌개), a stew made with doenjang (된장), tofu, mushrooms, green peppers, scallions, and anchovies. Koreans typically eat it with rice and kimchi on the side. Koreans eat this meal as much as Italians eat pasta.

One of my absolute favorite meals was the decidedly low-rent dakgalbi (닭갈비), spicy stir-fried chicken. Known as a student food, the dish consists of chunks of chicken, marinated in a sauce of chili paste and other spices, and stir-fried in a large pan with tteok (떡), cabbage, carrots and slices of sweet potato.

There was a dakgalbi place right around the corner from Leadersville that we used to go to a few times a month. We would go in, take our shoes off, and take a seat around a huge pot filled with the delicious delicacy, cooking up. Wearing our protective bibs, we would sit and watch the students and businesspeople passing by, going about their days. It was pleasant.

It’s always nice to have to take your shoes off in a restaurant and sit down on the floor, because it really forces you to engage with the meal in a way you don’t when you go to a quick-in/quick-out place. Don’t get me wrong, I love my convenience, and I’m as antisocial as the next guy — but I also deeply appreciated those moments of communal eating, and would love to have some more of it in my life today.

Koreans eat most of their meals family-style, and to my amusement, this extends to when they visit Western-style restaurants. Seoul has a wide selection of Western-style restaurants, as well as Western chains, and so, going somewhere like TGI Friday’s, you might see a family eating together, a father picking away at his pancakes with whipped cream and maple syrup with his chopsticks, simultaneously taking scoops from his son’s gigantic bowl of spaghetti and meatballs, bites of his daughter’s country fried steak, and little bits of his wife’s sirloin.

My stomach would be confused — and disruptive — over that kind of indiscriminate meal-mixing.

Koreans also love their pastries and baked goods. They favor a bean paste that is quite good and less sweet than most Western desserts. It’s honestly a perfect level of sweetness, a more adult and refined level of sweetness than you get with an American cupcake or donut.

I enjoyed joining the sweet Korean tradition of giving out Pocky candy to friends and love interests on Valentine’s Day. I was also given purple Hi-Chew as a good luck gift from Haeshin, before I took the LSAT. They’re considered a good luck charm.

HELLO / ANNYEONGHASEYO (안녕하세요)

I had a few visitors during my time in Seoul.

There were a few weekends during the year when my friend Erika from Georgetown visited. I don’t remember quite how I met Erika, but we spent a lot of time together senior year, chain-smoking in her apartment, with its walls painted hot pink and covered with clippings from newspapers and magazines. We’d listen to indie music and she’d give me gossip from the House of Representatives, where she was interning for Representative John Dingell of Michigan, and going on dates with staffers.

During my time in Korea, Erika was living in Shanghai, doing what I can’t quite remember. I used to pretend that she ran a high-end hair salon with an international clientele, where she would distractedly cut hair and gossip in Mandarin, while Cut Copy blasted from the overhead speakers.

But I do remember Erika was studying for the LSAT too, and she took it at Hosei with me one time. Another time, she came to visit because she had broken up with her boyfriend, and she thought a weekend with me would cheer her up.

Like Shoshanna, Erika was one of those white people who intrinsically made sense in Asia, even though she grew up in a very wealthy suburb of Miami.

When she visited, Erika introduced me to a lot of her Korean friends, mostly guys from Georgetown, and we went out to a few higher-end clubs. Those types of places aren’t really my scene, but it was nice to see a little bit of the “Gangnam Style” up close.

For most of Erika’s visits, we chain-smoked those tiny little ESSE cigarettes they love over in Asia, looking out over my balcony, and looking forward to what the future held for us. Today, Erika works for a big law firm in London.

♦

Cortney’s parents, Mark and Marybeth, also visited us. I really hit it off with Cortney’s dad, Mark, who was Italian American, worked in investment banking, and was a total loller.

The first several nights they were in town, Mark and I tried to drink each other under the table. Mark tried to blame me for the revelry the next day, but his wife and daughter reminded him that he was an adult capable of making his own decisions — and his own mistakes.

Cortney’s mother visited the teachers’ lounge at Leadersville one day, and in order to show off how thin all three of us were, she, Cortney, and I all fit ourselves through the inside of a wire coat hanger. (It was yet another thing I had seen on 30 Rock. That and Mad Men were my big shows at that time, and remain so.)

It was quite a spectacle watching the rest of the teachers try to do it. None of them could. Cortney almost couldn’t do it, because of her boobs. But she made it through.

JET SETTING

I had hoped to do some traveling around Asia while I was in Korea, and I did. But the school schedule didn’t afford us much time off, and halfway through my contract, they told us they would no longer give us advance notice of time off, which went against what I signed up for.

I threw a screaming fit in the teachers’ lounge after they did this, to let them know that I was a strong-willed American individual who was not going to put up with that bullshit. Back then, I wasn’t very good at being calm or rational when I felt like I was being fucked over.

Korea is a very hierarchical society, and it is a big no-no, and quite ballsy, to speak to your bosses in such a way there. Leadersville had previously put me in touch with potential recruits to talk up the school, but they stopped that abruptly after that day, when I promised to let everyone know that they didn’t keep their promises to teachers.

Thankfully, I did get to take a trip to Beijing, over the Korean holiday of Chuseok (추석), a three-day harvest festival and holiday, which is their version of Thanksgiving. And I met Arvand and Annabel in Tokyo for a whirlwind 72-hour tour in the spring. They were both quite memorable trips that I’ll write about in another essay.

TURN ON, TUNE IN, GET ACCEPTED

Over the course of the year, the law school decisions came rolling in. Most of them were acceptances from schools I had no interest in attending, like BC Law. It was a little bit of a disappointment to my grandfather that I didn’t take the opportunity to become a Triple Eagle (which is a graduate of BC High, BC, and BC Law, and a mark of prestige in Boston), and he always let me know it.

When it came down to the wire, I knew that I wasn’t going to get into NYU or Columbia — my GPA was too average, and so was my LSAT score. I had a very interesting résumé, and a good undergraduate school going for me, but those didn’t make enough of a difference back then, compared to the almighty GPA and LSAT score.

Mercifully, I ended up getting into Fordham. There was a delay in my acceptance, and I remember emailing the dean of admissions every few weeks or so, asking if he had any updates for me. Week after week, he would say he had no update, but to “stay tuned.”

After a couple of months of this, one day, I emailed him, again asking for an update, and he responded, with pep, “Stay tuned… really!” Within a day or two, I received the news that I had been admitted.

I emailed all my friends back in the States, and I remember a bunch of congratulatory emails rolling in, along with everyone saying how excited they were about the growing crew of people who were going to be in NYC in the fall.

In the coming months, more and more of our friends would drop the news that they were coming to New York too. We were going to get to live out our NYC dreams together.

ROADKILL

And then suddenly, one day, everything came to an end.

It was a beautiful April day, and Cortney and I spent the morning doing errands, then took a long walk along the Tancheon (탄천), the large stream that runs through Bundang, on our way to school. We were in excellent spirits as we bounded into the school building, and headed downstairs to the teachers’ lounge to get ready for class.

It was there that one of our bosses, Jaemo, was waiting for me. He asked me to come into the conference room, while Cortney took a seat in the computer room across the hall, looking alarmed and puzzled.

Jaemo then brought up a joke lesson that I had done the previous week, with the middle school students. I had them write a menu for a fictional café that served roadkill. It was based off a T-shirt that said ROADKILL CAFE that a middle school classmate of mine used to wear, that our teacher then gave us the same assignment based off of.

Jaemo claimed the parents were up in arms about it, among other things.

But most of the so-called complaints were of the type that other teachers got all the time, things that were met with a light reprimand, and waved off with warning after repeated warning. I hadn’t received a single warning the entire time I’d been teaching. Something smelled fishy about the entire situation.

It was clear to me, as Cortney began to shed tears from her computer room across the hallway, that she could hear, or at least had figured out, what was happening.

As for me, I felt my stomach drop instantly. I had finally gotten to a place where I felt comfortable in my new home, and had established a healthy routine and a good income stream.

And of course, there was Cortney. After I left Korea, I didn’t know how much time we would have together. That was what hurt the most.

But I also felt a twinge of excitement when I thought about going home. It would mean a summer to do whatever I wanted before I headed down to NYC. I could get an easy job in Boston over the summer, and spend my free time down the Cape, or on the Vineyard.

I knew I wasn’t going to turn the situation around, so I quickly negotiated to cut two months off my contract and still receive my full bonus. It meant that I only had a month left at Leadersville.

I broke the full news to Cortney soon thereafter, and she broke down in tears again. It took her a few days to recover, after which she accepted the reality that I would be leaving with the reserve of a good soldier. We decided to make the best of the time we had remaining.

As far as what really happened with my dismissal, there was a great deal of speculation. Our first thought was that one of the parents must have gotten wind of my homosexualité and complained to the administration, and they were firing me to protect their bottom line, due to the still-very-conservative climate of the time. The climate for LGBT people in Korea even worsened in the years after I was there, especially during the pandemic. I don’t know what the state of affairs is today, but I have been worried about my Korean brothers and how they’re doing. I suspect the conservatism still runs quite deep.

The other possibility we discussed regarding my firing was that the school was not doing well financially, and that I seemed like the weakest link — i.e. the teacher most likely to accept leaving early — who had a contract coming up relatively soon. The administration knew I had a lot of issues with them, and also that I wasn’t particularly fond of working with the middle school students, so they may have thought they could save some money by giving me a slight push out the door. And I would say the reports that I got from other teachers after I had left, about further cutbacks, bear this theory out.

I will never know if I was fired due to homophobia or budget cutbacks or simply because the administration didn’t like me. But I do know that I got a whole lot out of my experience in the ten months that I was there. And I am very thankful for that.

THANK YOU / GAMSAHABNIDA (감사합니다)

When I think back on that year now, I’m incredibly glad that I did it. Did it make sense from a career perspective? No. Did it jibe with what I had done previously? No. Was I always happy there? No — especially not at the beginning. Were there aspects of living there that were uncomfortable for me? Of course — I think the necessary secrecy about my sexual orientation at work, and the fact that I may have gotten fired for it, bears that out.

But in a way, these were also reasons that it was a great decision. Moving to Korea, and navigating life there, presented me with all sorts of new challenges, a different taste of life, and a new set of interests — as well as attractions. My year there added wrinkles and complexity to my personality that would otherwise not be there.

It toughened me up to be able to live abroad, again and again, and be used to, and even embrace, some of the difficulties of establishing myself in new places and new cultures. And I think all of these skills have made me a stronger and more dynamic person.

I am also so grateful for my relationship with Cortney. We laughed so much together that my belly hurt all of the time. It was exactly what I needed at that time in my life. We could turn anything into a hilarious joke together, and we were great at keeping each other entertained, with our banter about everyday life and our private language and perspective on the world.

Korea was also an incredible country to get to know. When I first arrived there, they spoke of Hallyu (한류), or the Korean cultural wave that was supposed to wash over the world, and I chuckled.

A decade later, they’ve had the last laugh. With the international fandom for K-pop bands like BTS, movies like Parasite and shows like Squid Game, Korean culture has entered into, and reinvigorated, mainstream culture. Even Gwyneth is sharing her bibimbap recipe on Goop.

I would love to go back to Korea someday, in grand style, like as United States fucking ambassador to Korea or something. Really show HuiJang-Nim and those fuckers in the Leadersville administration who’s boss.

JUST LIKE HONEY

On one of my last days in Bundang, Cortney and I went together to our Third Place, The Slow Hand, to say a wistful goodbye to Isaac and Rebekah. I finally mustered the balls to inquire about the nature of their relationship.

Rebekah confirmed they were husband and wife. Well-done, Rebekah.

On my last night, we went to Itaewon. Feeling reflective, I was out on the deck of Queen, having a cigarette, wearing a warm bomber jacket with a faux fur-lined collar that I had bought downtown.

A Black girl, around my age, presumably a tourist or fellow English teacher, called out to me to get my attention.

“Excuse me,” she said.

“Yes?” I smiled. I thought she was going to ask me for a cigarette. But instead, she said, “I just need to tell you, you are the most beautiful man I have seen in my entire life.”

Quite a pickup line, huh? I thanked her. It was confirmation that my health and exercise regime and the grooming and dressing habits I had cultivated that year were paying off. Which was a great feeling. Because I had left DC feeling a bit schlubby and bleh.

♦

That night almost ended with Cortney and me taking a guy home for a threesome. My feelings for Cortney had grown deeper and increasingly complex over the course of the year, and I was definitely sexually attracted to her, especially after having a few. Her long legs, big boobs, and extreme confidence were a huge draw for me. As was her sense of humor, and the way I simply felt when I was around her.

It was going to be hard to leave her, and sleeping together at that point would have really complicated things at the wrong time. But I still wanted to go through with it.

Cortney decided against it at the very last minute, though, before we got into the taxi to go back to Paragon. Instead, the guy scurried off, Cortney went home, and I ended up going to the big gay club on the main road in Itaewon, which we rarely went to because it was always too crowded, and didn’t have the same heart and soul as Queen.

I ended up drunkenly fucking a guy who seemed dirty to me even while I was intoxicated, and who I realized, after I got back to the States, had given me crabs. That was a nice parting gift from Korea.

Trust me, kids — when they show up, just shave it all off down there and start over again. Don’t bother with the shampoo — those fuckers will just keep coming back.

♦

On my final morning, Cortney walked me to the bus stop, where I was to catch a shuttle to the airport. We had agreed we weren’t going to hug or do anything too emotional — that wasn’t our style. Instead, we said we’d both listen to “Just Like Honey,” the Jesus and Mary Chain song from the ending of Lost in Translation, and give each other a salute goodbye, while we took a moment to reflect on the year we had together.

I saw Cortney break into tears as the shuttle pulled away, and I did, too.

When you’re in your early 20s, you have no perspective of time. You are constantly on the move, going from one thing to another. Everything feels like it carries so much weight, like it is so final or eternal or something. The truth was, Cortney and I had more chapters left to write, and our relationship would become deeper and more complex in the coming years.

But that year with her in Korea, and those experiences together, are sweet memories today. Just like honey.

Goodbye / annyeonghi gaseyo (안녕히 가세요)! ♦

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Rarely is life just like in a novel, especially one of those English ones, like Brideshead Revisited, where fleeting romances happen against the backdrops of lavish country estates and the grand capital cities of Europe.

But, one summer in my early twenties, my life felt just like that — like it had been ripped from the pages of one of my favorite books.

It was a summer of glamour and romance, of beauty and loneliness, of adventure and angst, and I will treasure it forever.

♦

Contributing to the storybook atmosphere of that bright, balmy June of 2009 was the presence, at long last, of the first Black President of the United States in the White House. Barack Obama had been inaugurated only six months before, and there had been lots of celebrating — glamorous balls (including one where I got to see the President and First Lady dance to Etta James’ “At Last”), endless parties, and lots and lots and lots of glasses of champagne.

The Obama presidency was not a resurrection of Camelot, as some said. It was its own fairy tale, one that had once seemed destined for little more than make-believe, but was now true. People felt hopeful about our country back then, some of them for the first time. The spirit of the times was infectious, and made it seem like anything was possible.

For me, though, there had been a bit too much celebrating. I had spent the year following the election and the new administration like everyone else in D.C., but I had also spent a lot of time at the gay bars and clubs on U Street, at places like Nellie’s Sports Bar and Town Danceboutique, draining my body and wallet as I tried to make up for lost time. I had come out relatively late — my last year of college — and was still deep into my (first) sexual exploration phase.

I brought a guy home every weekend. Sometimes, two guys. I remember being in bed with this Mormon guy one morning, after a one-night stand. He was complaining about his family and popping zits on my back, without asking me first, when suddenly, I got a text from the Obama campaign, announcing Senator Joe Biden of Delaware as his running mate.

“Biden?” I thought. “Okay.”

And then, I got out of the Mormon boy’s bed and went home to watch M.S.N.B.C.

My friends and I had a renovated three-story mansion on Monroe Street in Columbia Heights. All year, it had been a party hotspot, where we threw monthly ragers that my friend Eliot Nelson compared to the last days of Rome.

(I once had a dream that Nancy Pelosi showed up to one of our parties in a crop top and played beer pong while “American Boy” by Estelle and Kanye West played. It was honestly not too far from the reality of things back then. My friend Lindsay dated Senator Chris Dodd’s hot, renegade nephew. We let the R.O.T.U.S. stay at our house the night before she started work at the White House, and we played flip cup with her. Things like that were always happening.)

But I was also planning on going to law school, and I wanted to get into a good law school in New York City, and so I desperately needed to study for the L.S.A.T. I also needed to sock away some money. And I really needed to give my body (and dick) a rest.

So I had decided to raise the stakes, and head to Asia for a year of teaching English in Seoul, South Korea. I didn’t speak the language, I knew almost nobody there, and I had never taught anything before. It was my way of having yet another adventure, while giving myself time to study and slow down a bit, especially after a year of 50- to 60-hour weeks at my white-shoe K Street law firm.

I quit my law firm job, said goodbye to my big group of friends in D.C., and moved most of my belongings back to Boston.

Before I left for Seoul, though, I had two special trips planned.

♦

The first trip was with my friend Chris, an actor who has been on a bunch of network dramas and sitcoms. He had planned a worldwide Hemingway Tour for himself that summer, and was going to spend it hitting all the spots that Ernest Hemingway visited in his novels. He was going to Cuba to fish, to Pamplona to run with the bulls, and to Mt. Kilimanjaro to ascend its heights and see the same sights that Papa had all those years earlier.

And because I was a burgeoning drunk, and a serious devotee of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and had more than a few very entertaining French friends to keep us company, Chris had asked me to come to Paris with him for the second leg of the tour.

We rented an apartment in the Marais, which I was pleased with, as my high school friend Kevin, who had also come out in college, had done his study abroad at the Sorbonne, and had sent me a list of his favorite gay bars and clubs, most of which were in the neighborhood.

Chris and I kept our plans light, the only sightseeing some stops at the expatriate writer hangouts of the 1920s — places like Les Deux Magots, Café de Flore, and Shakespeare & Company bookstore, where Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Stein and other greats had gathered to eat, get wasted, and banter into the early morning hours.

For the first few days of the trip, Chris and I were on our own, and we mostly took long walks along the Seine, while he took pictures and I told him stories from my life.

One day, it felt like I talked from dawn ’til sunset without stopping, telling Chris about being the worst supermarket employee ever when I was in high school. We laughed, we slugged wine, and I pretended we were a couple in front of people to annoy Chris.

Alone at night, I did some exploring around the Marais, especially at this place called Le Dépôt, a hardcore sex club where they made you affirm you knew what you were getting into before they let you in. The place had a simple bar, dark lighting with a red accent, and fuck rooms.

(If you haven’t heard of a fuck room before, that’s exactly what it is — a room to fuck someone in. Typically, they have a slatted wooden bench and a dispenser with lube in it. Yes, boys are gross.)

All of my visits to Le Dépôt over the years have now blended into one another. Like other great places, it is now closed. But I honed my pickup skills there, learning how a subtle wink or raising of the eyebrow could send a signal to another guy, show him that I was down to fuck.

One time I was there, wearing short seersucker shorts, and suddenly spotted a tall guy in mesh shorts with these gorgeous soccer player legs.

“I want to make out with your fucking legs,” I said to him.

And he let me. We slid into one of the fuck rooms, and I ran my mouth all over his beautiful legs, my shorts rubbing against my cock as I crawled around on the floor, worshipping the man who towered above me. I kept going, kept feasting on him, kept letting my shorts rub against my cock, until I came all over my leg and all over the floor.

And then I went back home, to find Chris sound asleep.

♦

One night, my friends Thibaut and Christel, two of The French People from Georgetown who lived in Paris and were in the throes of some Serge Gainsbourg–Jane Birkin–esque love affair, took us to a right-wing cocktail party. It wasn’t a fundraiser for the National Front or anything concerning like that, just a party with students. A Federalist Society–esque thing. I’m sure I didn’t agree with a damned thing they believed, but as my longtime friends will attest, I have been known to cross-dress as a conservative for fun sometimes.

Eventually, Chris and I were joined on the trip by our friends, Annabel and Arvand.

Annabel and I had met in college. She was quiet and literary, and one of the first girls that I had kissed at Georgetown. She had become good friends with Arvand, who graduated Georgetown a year ahead of me and went to Atlanta International School with Chris.

We spent our first night at a cabaret show in the Marais, where one of the performers did a transfixing striptease to Yael Naim’s cover of “Toxic” by Britney Spears, and busted out “Zou Bisou Bisou” on us before Megan Draper ever had the chance.

Paris was beautiful every day while we were there. The sun shone brightly, the sky was a perfect blue, and the wind blew just enough to let you smell the magnolias, which bloomed all over the city, some through the cracks of centuries-old stone walls and façades.

One afternoon, we went to Père Lachaise Cemetery and left a rose on Oscar Wilde’s grave, before heading to the épicerie and boulangerie to put together a picnic to enjoy in the Jardin des Tuileries, one of my favorite spots in Paris.

And it was there I met Owen.

♦

It was warm out that day, and we all had our designer sunglasses on, stretching out to enjoy our wine and feel the sun against our skin, like characters in a Sofia Coppola film.

Every once in a while, someone would recognize Chris and come up to say hello. It was usually a girl who watched one of his shows, but this time, it was a very cute boy.

His name was Owen, and he knew Chris from Los Angeles. Owen was studying in Paris, and he and his friends were enjoying the garden that day, too.

Owen had brown hair and eyes, a big, kind smile, and a bashful, boy-next-door-type demeanor.

Chris introduced us.

“Hi, Owen,” I said. He smiled at me.

Owen was obviously enamored with celebrities; the friend he shared in common with Chris was another handsome network actor. I suppose Owen and I shared this fascination. I was definitely enjoying my jet-setting lifestyle.

What Owen and I did not share, and which Chris told me of later, was an affiliation with some religious group in Hollywood that viewed being gay as wrong. It wasn’t Scientology; it was some New Age Christian group that a bunch of actors Owen hung around with — including the handsome leading man one — were a part of, too.

Owen wasn’t openly religious, but there was clearly something inside of him holding him back, and that was part of it. But I saw the way he looked at me, felt the charge he got when I grabbed his hand to say hello.

He and Chris talked for a little bit about L.A., and Chris invited him to join us later on that night.

“Honestly, I always thought Owen was gay,” Chris said. “But I don’t know. He’s part of this group out in L.A. and everyone in it is Christian, so.”

“I’ll find out tonight,” I said, which made Annabel and Arvand laugh.

They both knew I meant it. Arvand was perpetually wowed by my seductive skills back then, although he thought I was a total disaster otherwise. He thought he would never learn, but now he’s doing okay in the romance department. (Congratulations and best wishes, Arvand and Jeremy!)

♦

That night, we ended up going to this cavernous club, deep underground in the Jewish quarter. It was hot and dark and crowded, and the music was excellent. It reminded me of the Cavern Club in Liverpool, where The Beatles played some of their first shows. There was candlelight all over, and the whisky was flowing heavily.

Our entire crew came, and we drank and danced the night away. The only thing we consumed faster than whisky and tequila that night were cigarettes, Gauloises after Gauloises after Gauloises.

And cigarettes, of course, give you a perfect excuse to get someone outside. So I asked Owen if he wanted to go for a cigarette. He said yes.

“It’s really loud outside the bar,” I said. “Let’s walk somewhere quieter.”

Owen didn’t say anything, just followed me with a slight smile on his face. We made our way to the end of the road, next to an alleyway. It was far enough away, and just quiet enough, to make us feel alone, just for those few moments, in the dark of the Parisian night.

“Are you loving Paris?” I asked him, as I handed him a cigarette and struck a match to light it.

“Yeah,” Owen said. “It’s so much fun. It’s been, like, a nonstop party since I’ve gotten here.”

“That’s what my study abroad was like,” I said. “In London.”

“London’s dope,” he said.

“It is,” I said. “One thing that was cool about it was honestly that it was away from home, you know? Away from the context of the rest of my life. So I felt like it gave me the freedom to explore different sides of myself.”

Owen looked at me, waiting for me to continue.

“Like, it was the first time I kissed a guy,” I said.

Owen stared at me. He looked nervous, but not scared.

“Nice,” he said.

My heart began to race. I felt like it was the right moment.

“Have you ever kissed a guy before?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. His eyes never left mine.

I moved a little bit closer to him, and we slid into the alleyway, so that his back was against the stone wall, and I could see if anyone was coming our way from the direction of the bar.

“Would you like to?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. He said it so softly, like he was ready for my lips to touch his before he even finished speaking. And I lost no time, stomping my cigarette out and leaning in, giving him my best French kiss — soft, tender, and passionate.

We kissed under the sparkle of the Eiffel Tower and a sea of stars, and it felt beautiful and electric. The kiss was filled with so much power, it being Owen’s first with a guy.

I could feel the hunger in Owen’s kiss. But when I leaned in to kiss him again, I thought to myself, Once we go back into the bar, we’re in a different world — one where what we just did didn’t happen.

And I was right.

Our group exited the bar in the early morning hours, and we walked along the Seine under the pale light, chugging from cheap bottles of wine. Everyone was there — Thibaut and Christel, Chris and Arvand, Annabel, Owen, a few others, and me. I started to feel sad. Owen wouldn’t let there be less than a yard between us the entire time.

While the other couples held hands and kissed, savoring the night together, why did my Parisian romance have to be a secret?

I fell in love, or what I thought was love, easily back then. Too easily. And just a kiss, just those moments alone, along with the romance of Paris, made me want to be together with Owen, and with all the other young lovers of Paris, that night. And my exuberance had been snuffed out.

♦

Arvand left early the next day for Africa, where Chris was due to meet him. Chris, Annabel, and I spent a pissy, cloudy afternoon on the lawn by the Louvre, and I tried to call Owen on a payphone at the Ritz — yes, a payphone — a few times. There was no answer.

Annabel, Chris, and I all got very drunk the last night there, and got caught in a rainstorm. The staff at the boutique luxury hotel Annabel was staying at would not let Chris and me stay the night, nor would they let us borrow their umbrella for the evening, so I made sure to throw the umbrella in a ditch and tell them to go fuck themselves. (Another type of thing I was prone to do when drunk in those days.)

And the next morning, in a hungover haze, I headed back to the States. I sat on the plane reading a copy of Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald that I had bought at Shakespeare & Company, wondering if I would ever see Owen again.

I felt alone and melancholy, like I did much of the time back then. But it was not lost on me that I had had my first romantic kiss, with a boy, under the stars, in Paris. (I don’t count the stuff that goes down at Le Dépôt as romantic, per se.) Having been in the closet only a little over a year earlier, that moment felt like an incredible triumph, like fireworks announcing that I had nothing to fear, that my life would be filled with romance and adventure, like I had always hoped.

The closet was a terrible place, and I had thrown open the door into the bright new day and given life a strong embrace, ready to have my heart broken again and again if it meant that I was free to love the way I wanted to.

♦

No sooner had I arrived back in the States than I was headed to Millbrook, New York, where Annabel was throwing me a twenty-second birthday and farewell party at her family farm before I took off for my year in Seoul.

Annabel was an heiress of the Johnson & Johnson fortune, and Lightning Tree Farm, as it was called, was less a farm and more an estate to rival Jay Gatsby’s. It featured an 18,000-square-foot Greek Revival mansion, tennis courts, horse stables, a pool with a Grecian grotto, a helipad, and acres and acres of land for riding horses and driving A.T.V.s.

Lightning Tree Farm was a vast, bucolic wonderland that Annabel was generous to invite us to stay at many times during our college days and after. Annabel’s mother, the late New York City legend Libet Johnson, had bought the place, and partied there with people like her boyfriend Michael Bolton and her friend Cher.

It was a different crew that weekend, mostly people from Georgetown, like my friends Elspeth, Katie, and Kristin, but we gave the Studio 54 crowd a run for their money with our debauchery, playing drinking games amid priceless paintings and antiques, running up and down the spiral staircase, zonking out in the movie theater, skinny-dipping in the pool at night. It was fabulous, every moment of it.

♦

One person arrived a little late that weekend: Kris.

Kris was a friend of some of the girls, from Potomac. He was tall, of Lebanese descent, with dark hair and big, bright eyes, and he was incredibly beautiful.

People were genuinely captivated by Kris’ beauty. It seemed to be the first thing out of anyone’s mouth when they mentioned him. And honestly, they were right.

I remember one night, drinking beers at the Tombs, with Kris sitting across from me. He was wearing a red-and-black flannel shirt, and he looked like a beautiful lumberjack. Every girl in the place had her eyes on him, and many of the guys did, too.

“Damn, Kris is hot,” I thought to myself.

Kris had come out only a month or two before. And because I was out and outgoing, our girlfriends had encouraged me to take him out and show him the ropes of the gay scene in D.C. And I was more than happy to, but I really did it just to be a good friend.

I projected supreme confidence in those days, but in truth, I was quite insecure. I considered Kris too beautiful for me to even think about making a move on, and so, when we had gone out on U Street to the gay bars, I had strictly played wingman, not picking up at all on the fact that he wanted to make out with me.

That fact had come out only a few weeks earlier, on the bare wooden floor of my Columbia Heights living room.

My roommates and I had already started moving out, and we didn’t even have a couch. Kris and I had come in from a long night out, a little drunk, and we collapsed on the floor, talking. Kris was a shy and sweet guy, and had never really let me in, and this felt like a rare moment of intimacy between us.

Looking into his eyes as he talked to me, I suddenly knew to kiss him. I craned my neck towards him, and we shared a long kiss, running our hands all over each other.

When we came up for air, Kris said, “So, that finally happened.”

(There’s a scene in Rosemary’s Baby where John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow have sex on the bare wooden floor of their apartment in the Dakota, after they move in. I always found that scene hot. And even though Kris and I didn’t take our clothes off or go beyond kissing and light touching, I was privately stoked to have had a little shade of that scene in my own life. Bare wooden floor hookups are hot.)

Kris went home that morning, and I thought, That was nice. But it was not something I expected to happen again.

But suddenly, here at Millbrook, Kris was.

I was sitting on the lawn, watching the sunset, when he emerged from the house and sat next to me.

“How was Paris?” he said.

“It was really great. Wish you had been there,” I said.

“Yeah, well, if you want to make out with me this weekend … I’m down for that,” he said. He didn’t look at me when he said it, just looked straight ahead. Poker face.

Wow. For shy Kris to come out and be so assertive like that was really fucking hot. I felt a bolt of electricity coast through my body when he said it.

“Yes,” I said, and I leaned in and kissed him. He had a thick beard, and it scratched me. But it felt so good, the cool wind making his skin feel even warmer against mine.

“That was nice,” he said.

“It was,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say, not that anything else needed to be said. But I was suddenly nervous around him. I was immediately vulnerable, because I had loved the kiss, and now I wanted more.

“Sorry if my beard scratched you. I can shave it off, if you’d like,” he said.

“Only if you don’t mind,” I said.

The next morning, Kris came downstairs to the kitchen, where we were eating French toast and bacon, and sat next to me with a clean-shaven face, smelling of aftershave and cologne.

I felt it immediately. The bareness of his face was like a green light, a starting pistol. We spent the rest of the weekend making out all. over. Lightning. Tree. Farm.

We made out in the library, amid the plush couches and antiquarian books. We made out in the maids’ quarters, among the plaid wallpaper and twin beds. We made out in the playroom, with the pink wallpaper and Tibetan prayer flags hanging all over. We made out with towels around our wet bodies, in the grotto, by the pool, as our friends splashed around outside, oblivious. We made out on the lawn at dusk, in the evening, under the light of the silvery moon.

It was passionate, and we smiled and laughed a lot. I saw a more aggressive, playful side of Kris that I had never seen before, and that I was positively captivated by. There was so much I didn’t know about him that I wanted to know.

But there was also his body, and the setting, and those alone were enough to enchant and hold me. I hadn’t read The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (perhaps my favorite book) yet, but if I had, I would certainly have thought of Nick Guest and Wani Ouradi, a bit like the pair that we were.

Me, like Nick, a middle-class boy intoxicated by the glamour of the new world he now inhabited; Kris like Wani, the stunningly beautiful Oxford classmate Nick loved, so similar in appearance they were.

♦

My friend Elspeth arrived partway through the weekend, and I told her about my tryst with Kris as we rode through the property on A.T.V.s, passing by the horse stables, the hot pink barn, and into the vast woods that cover part of the property.

“He’s really beautiful, Charlie,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

I wanted more, but Kris didn’t. I wanted us to spend the night together, and he said no. Not even the last night, the last night we’d have together before I left for Asia, which also happened to be the night before my birthday.

Not only did he say no, he said it wasn’t fair of me to ask him. I never understood why he put it that way.

After kissing all weekend, I wanted to have a real goodbye between the two of us, but Kris did not give me that. In fact, on our last day, he was cold to me, and wouldn’t allow for a private moment between the two of us, no matter how hard I tried to engineer one.

I was probably a bit thirsty, certainly, but was even a private moment to say goodbye to each other too much to ask? I didn’t get it.

♦

I would probably have forgotten the rest of the weekend, if it weren’t for the fact that on the last day, my birthday — as we were blowing out birthday candles underneath the candelabra in the formal dining room — Bobby Kennedy, Jr. and a seeming baker’s dozen of little Kennedy children came charging into the room.

Elspeth looked at me from across the table and was like, “What world are we in right now?” Like me, she had grown up in an average, middle-class family, and this was all new and wondrous to her, too.

Apparently, Bobby Kennedy, as they called him, lived nearby, and he and Libet were friends. She had told him he could take one of the trailers on the property to use for one of his environmental charities, and so he enlisted me, Kris, a couple of Annabel’s brothers, and a few of the other guys who were there that weekend to try to move a trailer that clearly weighed over a ton.

Elspeth took all the little Kennedys to play at the pool, like a good Catholic nanny, while us boys and Bobby made a few pathetic attempts to move the trailer, before giving up.

I talked to Bobby for a little bit about his uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, who had recently gone public with his brain cancer diagnosis. We had a nice conversation, and he was a pleasant enough guy.

Now that I know he’s crazy, I consider him a bit of a bargain-bin Kennedy, not worth fangirling over; but that day, it felt auspicious to have a Kennedy interrupt my birthday party at the manse.

Was this my life now?

♦

Kris, after avoiding me all day, glanced over at me as we all packed into cars to go our separate ways. I was headed home, and then right off to Seoul. As his car began to drive away, Kris’ glance turned to one of longing, and I saw him wipe a tear from his eye, and then, at last, a stream of tears flowing down his cheeks.

There it was. The emotion I had wanted. That I had known was there, and that he had almost fooled me into believing wasn’t.

I was ticked off at him for that. It felt like such a waste.

It had now been two times in a row in this so-called romance that your protagonist was denied what he wanted so very much — not sex, but intimacy. To be truly close with another guy.

Two beautiful boys had closed their hearts off to me, for what reasons, I did not know.

With Owen, it seems obvious now that shame was at work. With Kris, I think things were more complicated. I don’t know if Kris ever really had feelings for me, or if I just happened to be someone who was there when he needed someone to make out with.

It’s also true that I could say obnoxious things back then that I thought were funny, and weren’t. It was because I was insecure, and I realize now how it put up a wall in my relationships and hurt people’s feelings.

I probably said a few stupid things like that to Kris during the time we knew each other that could have put up a wall between us. If so, I’m sorry, because I always thought he was lovely, even when he didn’t want me.

♦

I wrote Kris from Seoul a few times, and received only one very late, halfhearted response (which Annabel had clearly forced him to write me), so I gave up on the idea of any future relationship with him as I transitioned into my life abroad.

Since we had friends in common, I did see him again, when I got to New York. I learned through our friends that he was dating this guy Max, who was from the Whitney family. As in, The Whitney Museum of American Art.

But if they hadn’t told me, I could have found out in the pages of Town & Country, where Kris was pictured on page after page, with Max, in glamorous poses, on the Woolworth estate in Maine. And there were plenty of other photos of Kris at New York society events online.

New York Kris seemed to be finding his confidence and his place in the world, and I was happy for him.

I would see Owen again, too. Also in New York. We ran into each other in Union Square, at the big costume store, one sweaty Halloween, and went back to my apartment to have sex. The sex was hot. Owen had thick chest hair, even thicker than mine, and a gigantic dick. His body was such a contrast with his babyface.

Owen and I ended up fucking a few times, and we would sit out on my fire escape on W. 65th Street, smoking cigarettes, after. It was nice. He was a bit more relaxed in New York. But it was also like before — we weren’t allowed to say anything about it, or be seen together. (Even though I had already told everyone I knew.)

I remember the very last time I saw Kris. Kind of. It was at lunch at Épicerie Boulud along with Annabel and her then-husband Justin, and I was pilled out of my fucking mind, only weeks away from completely blowing up my life in New York, as well as my entire existence. I was loopy as fuck, Blue Jasmine–style, insisting that Justin take me on a tour of Facebook (it had just bought his startup), and telling Kris that Elspeth had asked about him and would love to see him!

After, we went to the Vanderbilt Mansion on the Upper East Side, which Libet had just bought and moved into. (She was always suddenly buying priceless real estate.)

Libet and I did Pilates together at Equinox Columbus Circle twice per week, and she thought I was an absolute loller, and was therefore very amused by how erratic and peppy I was being that day. But Annabel was not. I definitely embarrassed her and pissed her off that afternoon. And I am truly sorry to her (and everyone) for being in that state in their presence, ever.

It was not the best side of me, so I kind of hope I run into Kris again someday, so he can see that I didn’t become a mess forever.

I don’t remember the last time I talked to Owen, but we texted a bit once, when I was high on Xanny bars at my Nana’s place in Florida, and he was still half-in, half-out of the closet. C’est la vie. I hope that has changed for him by now.

♦

Nowadays, I think about both of those boys, and that special summer, fondly.

Even though they weren’t the perfect romances that I wanted — and that I felt I needed so much, as an angsty twenty-two-year-old — I am grateful now to both Owen and Kris for those moments that summer. Because they both gave me such confidence in myself, made me believe I was someone who could be lusted after, someone who could seduce, someone who a boy would cry over when he went away.

There was a time in my life when I thought I would never have those things, and to have them at last was truly beautiful.

Evelyn Waugh couldn’t have written it better. ♦

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Just like my home-state senator, Elizabeth Warren, I’ve had plenty of family members tell me over the years that I’m part Native American.

But my 23andMe results beg to differ, telling me I’m 100 percent white, and about 88 percent British and Irish.

I grew up in Boston, and there are reminders of the OG country all over the place here — in the architecture, in the names of towns and cities, and in the historical sites, dating all the way back to colonial times, that you see all over.

England is never too far from mind in this place.

And London has loomed large in my imagination ever since I was a kid, watching Mary Poppins sitting on a cloud, floating over the sights of the majestic, watercolor city.

There are lots of other children’s movies with London at their center that I loved, too — Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Peter Pan, and The Chronicles of Narnia are a few that I can think of.

And when I was young, I loved anything to do with knights and castles, kings and queens, sorcerers and magicians. I had every single related Playmobil set you could think of, and would spend hours, alone or with friends, dreaming up palace intrigue, and epic conquests, in the name of king and country.

This led to an interest in British history as I grew older — from Domesday Book to Churchill, from the Norman Invasion to Brexit.

Also, when I was thirteen or so, I fell in love with The Beatles. Falling in love with The Beatles also led to an interest in the other bands of the British Invasion, and with the culture of Swinging ’60s London.

These are all reasons that, despite settling in quite well by my junior year at Georgetown, I was still eager to spend a semester studying abroad in London.

So I applied, and was accepted, to the Erasmus program at King’s College London, which is located in central London, on a central artery of the city known as the Strand.

I signed up to take British history, geography, and war studies classes at the school, which, like NYU, has a decentralized campus that is integrated with the rest of the city.

My best friend Ryan, who I went to both high school and college with, also got accepted to the program. And after arriving, we made close friends with a classmate of ours from Georgetown named Asher, who was tall and handsome, with dark hair, glasses, and a very endearing silent laugh.

Asher grew up in Beverly Hills, the son of an entertainment lawyer. The three of us shared a sense of humor, and a thirst for travel and adventure, and would be partners in crime for most of the rest of our time in London.

I still count Ryan and Asher as two of my best friends today.

♦

King’s gave us a few options of where we could apply to live, some of them more centrally located than others. Asher and Ryan were placed in the Great Dover Street apartments, which were located near Borough Market, and much closer to our classes and the excitement of central London.

But I chose the Hampstead campus, in North London, because it was located in a quiet, bucolic area, with stately brick homes, that had been lived in by people such as Lord Byron, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Evelyn Waugh.

Hampstead has an illustrious literary pedigree, and I thought it would be great to soak up the vibes there. The area is populated by academics, artists, and media figures, who repeatedly returned Academy Award–winning actress Glenda Jackson to Parliament, as a member of the Labour Party.

And the lush, green Hampstead Heath is a notorious gay cruising spot, immortalized in many works, such as The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst and tabloid stories about George Michael.

I didn’t explore the Heath in this way when I lived there, but I made an attempt, years later, when I was visiting London for a long weekend, during law school.

That particular day had the only good weather of the whole trip, and I spent all of it strolling the Heath, trying to find places and opportunities for cruising. I had gone online and looked up some places, like the swimming ponds, but unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any opportunities.

I plan on going back one day, and doing the Heath right. You haven’t really seen the place until you’ve fucked a guy in the ass there. Or had a guy fuck you in the ass.

♦

Classes at King’s were not exactly difficult.

The experience of university is quite different in the UK (and in Europe) than it is in the US. In the UK, you’re basically given a long reading list to complete, and are expected to show up to class a few times over the term, for discussion and some lecture. But compared to the US, there isn’t nearly as much lecturing from the professor, and you spend much less time in the classroom, overall.

It’s more laissez-faire, which is nice, but also a little bit “What is my money paying for here?” too.

And our professors gave us a lot of leeway, as study abroad students, to turn in papers late, or do just-OK work and still get a pretty good grade (that did not count toward your GPA back at Georgetown, anyway).

It was a pretty stress-free situation.

Our geography professor, who had a thick Caribbean accent, was constantly giving excuses for canceling class. She had every illness you could imagine, endless misfortunes, countless relatives dead.

It’s not like we cared; we were happy not to have to come to class. We thought it was hilarious, though. We’d wonder what her next excuse would be, and think of something outrageous. Nuclear attack? Drugs binge? Recruited by MI5 to kill a Malaysian diplomat?

Our British Medieval History class was a bit more rigorous. Our professor was an ex-banker who had become a prominent medieval scholar, and there were only four of us in the class — me, Ryan, Asher, and a guy named Mike, who was on study abroad from BC.

The professor would get pissed at me, and call me out for trying to bullshit, when I hadn’t done the reading. It was extremely embarrassing to be aggressively called out in such an intime setting.

I’d tried in earnest to do the reading at first, going to the magnificent King’s Maughan Library, down Chancery Lane, by Fleet Street.

I spent more than a few hours sitting among the stacks, checking out heavy, dusty tomes, filled with medieval names and numbers, professions, places, and dates.

And it got really fucking boring, really fucking quickly.

I guess I’m not an historian — leave the primary source work to the real heads.

I did spend quite a bit of time in the computer lab of the King’s library, finding sites that were offering illegal free streams of this show I had been hearing about, Arrested Development.

I died laughing to Jessica Walter’s epic side-eye as Lucille Bluth in one episode, and played it, again and again, at 2 or 3 a.m., with tears streaming down my face.

And when it came down to it, I did enough work to write some pretty good papers in British Medieval History. I got an A- in the class — the product of a few intense all-nighters at various points throughout the term.

♦

King’s had a nearly month-long Easter break, which Ryan, Asher, and I added another ten days or so to, to undertake a 40-day excursion around Europe and North Africa.

We visited places in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Monaco, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Morocco, going from city to city, and having a very memorable and majestic trip that made me fall in love with Europe, its culture, and history.

I’ll write about that trip in another essay.

♦

Dining out in London was tough on a student budget, back then.

Pretty much the only places I could afford to eat at, as a student, were chains like Pizza Express, or the rather good hole-in-the-wall places on Brick Lane. I also loved the ham and cheese baguettes at Paul — made with unsalted butter. Simple perfection.

Oh. There was also… Wetherspoons.

Literally every fucking pub that you think is its own establishment in London turns out to be a Wetherspoons — same menu, same sad drinks, same rowdy, alcoholic crowd.

We accidentally wound up at Wetherspoons so many times that we eventually gave up, and stopped trying to avoid them. London may have been able to survive Hitler’s blitzkrieg, but it was not able to avoid the Great Wetherspoons Invasion.

Over time, I started to think maybe even Parliament was a Wetherspoons. But I doubt that, considering how well the company seems to be doing.

I relied on the McDonald’s in Trafalgar Square for many drunken late-night meals, while I was waiting for the night bus to arrive. It was a busy McDonald’s, but a good McDonald’s. The chicken nuggets were always hot and crispy.

When visiting me, my friend Lily fell on the ground drunk, and we hand-fed her Chicken McNuggets, one by one. She loved it.

Aside from the chains I mentioned, we often ate dinner out on Brick Lane, which is famous for its South Asian population and restaurants. It’s almost as though these communities have reverse-colonized their great colonial power, constituting a huge part of the population of the surrounding area, and boasting world-class Pakistani and Indian food.

One time, we went there with a university student who Ryan was dating. She was pre-med and a huge alcoholic, and as we were leaving our huge group dinner, in which she’d drunk everyone else under the table, she got caught by the restaurant staff trying to pilfer the beer stein she’d been drinking from.

She then belligerently argued that she had spent enough fucking money at the place and should therefore be able to take the bloody mug. And they ended up relenting! I was tremendously impressed.

♦

English food doesn’t have the best reputation, but I love it. Some of my favorite dishes are the ones with the fun names, like bubble and squeak (potatoes and cabbage), toad in the hole (sausages baked in Yorkshire pudding batter), and bangers and mash (sausages and mashed potatoes). Meat and potatoes, basically.

Also, fish and chips are a beer-battered delight, and the mushy peas are a cheery bright green addition to the meal. And I love the way that Brits love mayonnaise.

I curtsy to it, as though I were a woman standing in front of Her Majesty the Queen.

♦

One interesting place I ate and drank at a couple of times in London is Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, which sounds like a Disneyfied version of an old English pub, but is in fact its real name. And it happens to be the oldest pub in London, serving pints in a spare, but warm atmosphere, in a tiny, ancient building, among the imposing monumental buildings of central London.

And when Ryan’s parents visited, they took us to Simpson’s in the Strand, a restaurant so old the characters on Downton Abbey once dined there. The servers wear tuxedos, and they roll over an elaborate silver cart, from which they plate warm pieces of beef.

The food was good, but I found the whole thing a bit over-the-top, and Ryan’s dad was extremely disappointed he could not get a good old-fashioned American Budweiser at the place. (They did have Bud, but it was some European version that just didn’t taste right to him.)

♦

Asher is now married to a lovely lady named Julia. I even played a little role in their meet-cute, drunkenly forcing them to share a cab with each other, at the end of a long night, at Beauty Bar, in Union Square, in NYC.

Julia likes to tease Asher about his well-to-do, Beverly Hills upbringing. And one of the stories she likes to tell to give an example of his privilege is how, during study abroad in college, one of his buds (me) rented a suite at the Mayfair Hotel to party in, just for the hell of it.

I now realize what an impression this must have made on my classmates. All the ladies were certainly impressed — and I think the other guys thought that this was the point.

The truth was, Ryan and I had taken to saying “posting up at a plush suite at the Mayfair!” in a posh British accent, either after conjuring it ourselves, or hearing it somewhere, and I wanted to make the line a reality.

That, and the simple fact that I was a gay in need of a luxury hotel moment.

The summer after my sophomore year of college, I lucked out and got a job doing travel writing with this Web 2.0 company, Panraven, that was based in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A decade and a half before working remotely became a widely done thing, I was able to earn very good money from London, writing for Panraven, which I then used to blow on booze, travel, and luxury hotel moments.

Just like the greats, like Keith Richards, had done before me.

We actually didn’t get too crazy at the Mayfair. But it’s a gorgeous hotel, in the Mayfair section of London. I spent most of the weekend in a plush white bathrobe, ordering room service and watching Charles, then Prince of Wales, talk about gardening on the BBC.

♦

But since I was having a luxury hotel moment, I decided I needed to have a posh night out, too. So Asher, Ryan, and I made plans to go to Mahiki — one of the hot clubs in Mayfair where the tabloids were always reporting Prince William, his girlfriend Kate Middleton, and Prince Harry were partying.

I wanted to party with royals, so I went to Topman (the men’s equivalent of Topshop) and got a cool black velvet blazer, a silky white shirt, and a pair of dark jeans. I didn’t have Harrods money, so I had to make do on my budget. But I figured it was enough to get in. It was an early aughts look par excellence.

The first night we arrived, Asher and I were able to get in, but Ryan wasn’t. He was able to get in another time, though. Overall, we went there two or three times, and it was really fun.

It’s small and tiki-themed, and the music and cocktails are very good. Mostly, we chain-smoked, counting on the high we got from the cigarettes to save us money buying cocktails.

We never ended up running into any of the royals, not even Prince Asher. But we were there on the same night as Madonna, once. I like her music, but really didn’t give a shit about meeting her.

♦

The drinking culture in the UK is more ingrained, intense, and forgiving than in the US, and this included King’s having a student pub known as The Vault, on the top floor of one of its main buildings on the Strand.

There also used to be a student-run club called Tutu’s — named after Desmond Tutu, one of the school’s most famous alums.

Our crew would go to the student pub almost every day, and drink gin and tonics, beers, and the campus favourite — the famous Snakebite, a drink made with equal parts lager and cider, and occasionally dashed with blackcurrant cordial. Snakebites are reddish-coloured, sweet, unsubtle, and pack quite a punch.

Another place that the study abroad crowd frequented was this Australian chain bar called Walkabout.

Walkabout is essentially a massive sports bar, with a huge dance floor and DJ booth. It played top 40 music, and catered to what I would call a non-intellectual, alcoholic crowd. But we did not know better, or maybe even care, back then, because we were college students and tourists. So we ended up spending at least part of every weekend there, when I would get drunk, chain-smoke, and sing and dance to songs such as “London Bridge,” by Fergie, and “The Sweet Escape” by Gwen Stefani and Akon.

♦

I’m not sure if it was at Walkabout or some study abroad student event that I met Audrey — but it was at Walkabout that she made most of her moves.

Audrey was very pretty, with short, brown hair, intense eyes, and about average height for a girl. She was a student at the all-girls’ Smith College, back in Massachusetts, and quite obviously regarded her semester abroad at King’s as her one chance to get some dick.

And I can’t say I blamed her — I kind of had the same thing in mind.

But unfortunately for me, she decided that mine was the dick she wanted.

And being closeted, I felt a lot of pressure to reciprocate her obvious interest, and give in to her advances. Ryan and Asher were horny as fuck, and constantly engineering ways to meet girls and hang out with girls, so I’d look mighty sus if I didn’t take advantage of this very easy opportunity with a very good-looking girl.

So I didn’t turn her down. Which was my mistake. I really should’ve thought up some nice reason to turn her down, one that didn’t involve discussing my sexual orientation. We both would have been better off.

But unfortunately, I panicked a bit, and this led me to do nothing. I let her stay interested.

This didn’t mean I intended to let anything happen, though.

And my sangfroid about the entire thing made Ryan and Asher think I was operating on a completely different level, like I was the ultimate stud of all time, or something.

To this day, they still quote me back to me, when talking about a particular night in London.

The three of us would usually get together, at Ryan’s dorm room in the Great Dover Street apartments, and watch episodes of the incredible comedy Peep Show, on which Olivia Colman got her start, while we pregamed.

As usual, Ryan and Asher were also texting with the other guys or some girls about where to meet up later, while I sat around and drank, and thought about sucking off Robert Webb.

Invariably, either Ryan or Asher would ask me to text some girl and try to get her to show up. Once they had seen how seriously Audrey was interested in me, they viewed me as a vital resource for getting her — and thus her friends — to show up to the places we went out to.

So that night, as we downed our lagers and Red Bull and vodkas, they repeatedly asked me if I was going to text Audrey, and invite her to the rock club in Shoreditch we were going to.

To which, to their utter bafflement as two heterosexual, 20-year-old males, they say I responded by flippantly biting off one of my nails and announcing —

“You know what, guys? If she comes, she comes; if she doesn’t, she doesn’t.”

Boom. Whole. ’Nother. Level.

They were flabbergasted. Just how did I achieve that level of chill?

Obviously, the reason was that I really didn’t give a shit if she came or not. In fact, I’d have preferred it if she didn’t. She was a perfectly nice girl, but trying to fend her off was starting to drive me fucking nuts. If she didn’t show up, it would mean I wouldn’t have to spend the evening trying not to get dragged back to her dorm room.

But by the time we would arrive at Walkabout, we had typically already been drinking for a few hours, and my defenses were down. After getting swept up in singing along with “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba, or busting a move to “Pon de Replay” by Rihanna, I would be in an alcoholic, people-pleasing mood, and over time, she wore me down, and I found myself on my way to her apartment.

We got into her tiny room, and she immediately pushed me onto the bed, and started tearing off my sneakers, then my pants. Then she crawled on top of me, and grabbed my dick through my boxer shorts. They were a pair of dark blue J. Crew boxer shorts, with little orange turtles all over them.

She leaned in to kiss me some more — the kissing had started on the dance floor — and began unbuttoning my shirt.

“What was the first thing you thought when you saw me?” she asked me.

I have no idea what I answered.

“Don’t you wanna know what I thought?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, playing along.

“I thought you were the cutest of your friends.”

“Aw, thank you,” I said.

“And I thought I wanted you to rail me,” she added quickly, aggressively.

Jesus, Mary, and Saint Joseph, I was in hot water now.

Audrey was a good kisser, if a bit overenthusiastic. So I enjoyed that part of things. But I immediately started panicking about being able to get it up, both because I wasn’t sexually attracted to her, and also because I was drunk. I might be gay, but I still have my male pride, and I did not want this chick going all over Londontown saying my dick didn’t work.

Audrey had taken all her clothes off, and I could feel her wet pussy on my leg, as she played with her nipples and stroked my cock. It felt nice, and I grabbed one of her breasts, and started gently squeezing it in my hand.

I’m always amazed by how incredible boobs feel, and how fun they are to play with. Even on my gayest day, I do love a boobie. And you can quote me on that.

But despite all this, my dick would stay hard for only a moment or so. Every time we tried to slip a condom on me, I went soft.

And I was sloppy drunk, and ended up accidentally kicking and breaking Audrey’s heater as we were fumbling around in the dark.

When it became clear I wasn’t going to successfully fuck her, she started sucking me off, and as I got close to coming, I pushed her onto her back, and fingered her pussy while I gently nibbled and sucked on her tits.

I wanted Audrey to get at least something out of the night, because, damn, I had never put as much energy into hooking up with someone as she had with me in my entire life.

She asked me to kiss her while we masturbated, and we both came — me, not enough for a big finish, but a respectable showing nonetheless.

When we woke up in the morning, I apologized to Audrey for breaking her heater, said a polite goodbye, and got on the tube to go back to Hampstead, just wanting to be alone for a bit.

♦

I made no effort to call or text Audrey, or otherwise show her that I was interested in a repeat to-do. But she continued to want to meet up, continued to want to go on dates, continued to text and call. I was really starting to dread seeing her name coming up on my phone, or running into her at Walkabout, or the student pub.

I humored her for a couple of dates. We went to a really good Pakistani place on Brick Lane, and took a Jack the Ripper tour with Ryan and some of our other study abroad friends (Ryan was and is still obsessed with Jack the Ripper, and could probably give the tour by himself at this point).

And we wound up back in her dorm room a couple more times, too, under the same circumstances, and with the same basic result.

Honestly, I have problems with wearing condoms even while sober, and even when having sex with dudes. That’s why I have Cialis and PrEP prescriptions, and also get tested for STIs on a regular basis. I have a lot of fun — but I try to be as smart and safe about it as is reasonable.

I never told Audrey “I’m not interested in you at all,” but I showed it in a million ways. She never accepted it, though, and never gave up on pursuing me, including by engineering a meetup with me and Ryan at the Dedham Mall in Massachusetts the summer after we had arrived back stateside.

What that meant was that she spent a lot of time pining for someone completely unavailable, feeling bad, and probably feeling insecure, as a result.

Which I feel bad about. But I was feeling like I was being smoked out of my fucking foxhole, and I was too terrified to tell the truth, and too nice to just tell her to go away. And too panicked to do the rational thing and make up a nice reason to let her down.

As someone who has been on many dates, broken many hearts, and had my heart broken dozens of times, let me give the younger generation some advice: read the signs. If a person does not return your texts or calls, do not reach out more. If a person isn’t excited to hang out with you, then they are not interested in you.

No moves — Audrey tried nailing another guy on our program and throwing it in my face, to which I was more or less like, “You go, girl!” — are going to change the facts.

Delulu is not a virtue in dating.

But I hadn’t learned that lesson at that point, and neither had Audrey. You have to go through these kinds of sad, awkward, and yes — hilarious — situations, and situationships, before you arrive in a place where you have your wits about you with dating and relationships.

It takes work, self-awareness, and the courage and fortitude to put yourself out there again and again, until you meet someone who’s a good match and is interested in you, too.

Ryan told me a few years ago that he’d seen on Facebook that Audrey had gotten married to a tech bro, and lives in San Francisco now. I’m happy for her, because the more obnoxious my behavior seemed to be at Walkabout, the more attractive I was to her. And I’m confident that a tech bro can deliver the kind of sustained immaturity that I put on display when I was 19 years old, and reckoning with alcoholism and my sexuality. Mazel, Audrey!

♦

As I mentioned, I was reckoning with my sexuality in London, and this included having my first adult same-sex experience.

On nights alone in Hampstead, I’d be working on a paper, or listening to music and chilling, and suddenly I would feel incredibly alone. So I eventually took to Craigslist’s personals section, in the men seeking men and casual encounters categories, looking for someone to meet up with who didn’t seem too creepy or intense.

I wasn’t really ready to do anything substantial — just to try something with another guy. And finally I found a guy, about a half hour away by cab from where I was. He was in his mid-30s, average height, not attractive or unattractive, and claimed to be straight and experimenting, which at the time seemed a safer type of person to me.

For the record, it’s definitely not, but nothing bad happened that evening.

I ended up taking a very expensive cab ride to his flat, handing two 20-pound notes over to the cabbie, Queen Elizabeth II’s face glaring back at me like, “Are you sure about this, babe?” and nervously walking up the flight of stairs to ring his buzzer.

He let me in, and was a very non-intimidating but also un-arousing presence, with glasses, and a receding hairline.

After we exchanged pleasantries, he took off his clothes, removing his underpants and letting his hard cock bounce.

He asked me if I wanted to touch it, and I said yes. I grabbed it with both hands, and it felt warm and stiff. And I had never seen an uncut cock before that. Truthfully, I didn’t like the way it looked — it reminded me of the creature from the Sarlacc pit in Return of the Jedi — but I liked the way it felt in my hands.

He then told me to take off my shoes and socks, pants, and underwear, and lie, stomach-down, on his bed.

Even though I was nervous, the guy was polite and respectful enough, so I basically trusted him, and there was something quite arousing about taking orders from another guy. He explained that he didn’t have penetrative anal sex — thank God, because I was not ready at that point to do that — but said he liked the sensation of his penis sliding through ass cheeks, and he wanted to run his cock through mine.

So I let him.

It felt fine. I could start to imagine how having a cock in you could feel quite good. But a few trips up and down were all he desired, and it was all over pretty quickly.

That was it.

As I dressed and left, he kept his eyes on me almost the entire time. He seemed to be wondering about me, or pitying me. It was clear that I had taken a very expensive cab in the dark of the night, to do hardly anything with a total stranger. And it was probably clear that I hadn’t done anything with a guy before that night.

I bet he was wondering what was going on in my head, if I was going to be OK.

And honestly? I don’t remember exactly how I felt that night, but I knew for sure that I was OK. I had taken a tiny little step out of the closet.

The next morning, I woke up in incredibly good spirits. I had planned a long weekend to Belgium with Asher’s friend Naomi, who was also from Beverly Hills, and studying abroad at the London School of Economics.

When I met Naomi at Waterloo Station, she asked me why I was so peppy.

“I don’t know. Just excited for Bruges, I guess,” I said.

For the record, there is absolutely no reason to be excited for Bruges. I was simply feeling liberated by having taken my first baby steps out of the closet. And as it turns out, I liked having a juicy secret that none of my friends, or anyone back home, knew about. It felt radical and naughty, and made me feel alive.

♦

My most memorable gay experiences in London have happened on more recent trips.

A few times, I have gone out to Heaven, the gigantic gay club under Charing Cross Station, in central London. Heaven is featured in many of Alan Hollinghurst’s novels, including the excellent The Swimming-Pool Library.

Heaven consists of several stories, and is packed on several nights of the week, with boys looking to dance, do drugs, and fuck. Many guys go from there, boogeying down to ABBA and Kylie Minogue, to having chemsex well into the next afternoon.

I never joined in on that. But I did once meet a cute, drunk boy there, who I sat next to, and had drink after drink with, while he repeatedly told me that he really liked me, but was not going to go home with me.

I told him that this was perfectly okay with me, because I had fucked guys the previous two nights, and was kind of fucking exhausted and over it, at that point.

But as the night wore on, and I began to collect my things to leave, he grabbed me by the arms and kissed me, and asked me to go back home with him.

“But literally every other word you said was I am not going home with you,” I said. “What changed? Your level of intoxication?”

“No!” he protested. “I have just been absolutely charmed by you, and you’re so sexy, and I really don’t want my time with you to end, quite yet.”

I thought for a moment. He was really cute. But he was pretty drunk. The hookup was not likely to be good. And if he didn’t sober up quickly enough, it might not happen at all. I don’t know why I said yes. I guess because I’m a guy? But I said yes, and soon we were on a night bus back to his place.

We boarded the bus, headed towards Wimbledon, which is almost a full hour outside of London. I had figured we were going somewhere in the immediate vicinity that was on the Wimbledon route, but my friend had neglected to fill me in that he actually lived at the site of the famous tennis tournaments, far outside London, and far from where I was staying.

Fuck my life.

Thankfully, the length of the ride did give him time to sober up, as we passed by the sights of the English countryside, and he said I really like you over and over and over again. He was half English and half French, and his accent would slip into a posh dialect of French every once in a while, as he said you, yewww.

We soon got to his flat. It was spacious, but a total mess, with clutter everywhere. We made our way to his bedroom, which luckily had a very big bed that looked relatively clean.

We got in it, and stripped down to our underwear. He was wearing one of those stringy numbers that turn me off, but when I saw his cock come swinging out, all my doubts about whether or not it had been a good idea to go there were assuaged.

The thing was almost eight inches, with a beautiful, slightly curved shape, and about two inches around.

I took it into my hands and held it, like it were Excalibur or something. I slowly stroked his shaft and tickled his balls, and he quickly began falling asleep.

I tried sucking him off for a bit to wake him back up, but it was no use. So I gave up, and joined him to get some sleep.

In the morning, I woke up feeling very hungover. He was still drunk, but a pleasant, conversational drunk. He asked me all sorts of questions about myself, while I held his cock, passing it back and forth between my hands and my mouth.

It felt like having a cute new kitten or puppy dog around. You want to hold it and play with it forever, it’s that much fun.

But I did have to get back to my friends in London, and so I had to bid him farewell. I took a long bus ride back to the city, and when my friends guilted me over what they correctly assumed was a one-night stand, I smugly lied, and said, “I got up really early to check out Wimbledon, and then I went to put a rose at Princess Diana’s grave.”

Oh, they all said, looking like they felt like assholes.

♦

One of the highlights of any visit to London has to be the museums.

London’s museums have artifacts from all over the world, many of them brazenly stolen. And they are almost all free to visit. You could spend days visiting each one, taking in history from the BC era to today.

Some of my favorites are the Tate Modern, which is housed in an old power station along the Thames, and features prominently in one of my favorite films, Match Point; the Imperial War Museum; the Victoria & Albert Museum; the National Portrait Gallery; and the British Library.

This Playmobil boy also loved checking out the crown jewels at the Tower of London, and touring Buckingham and Kensington Palaces. They both strike you as run-down and slightly disappointing, even as a kid. Still, the pomp and circumstance of things like the changing of the guard and the elaborate costumes and ceremonies were captivating to me.

I think my favorite educational place overall was the British Library, where you can see an original copy of Magna Carta, and also things, like cocktail napkins and airline sickness bags, that the Beatles wrote lyrics to their songs on.

But the National Portrait Gallery is also a great place to spend an afternoon, reflecting on the lives of greats, and then back on your own life. And it is right in Trafalgar Square, a beautiful central location, with a famous monument to Admiral Nelson.

One time, my friend Lily, who has the same last name as me, and I humped on the lions in Trafalgar Square, to freak out an acquaintance of mine, who thought we were actually brother and sister.

And we never told him the truth, either.

♦

There are plenty of other things to do in London.

I liked to go shopping at the street market on Portobello Road, the subject of one of my favorite songs and dance scenes from Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

I also went to Abbey Road, several times, with visitors, and took pictures on the famous crosswalk, from the front of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album. I always took Paul’s spot, because he’s my Beatle. I even took my shoes off, the couple of times I could. The cars on the road are incredibly patient with the picture-takers, although their patience does have its limits.

Get it in one shot.

Ryan and I are both huge nerds, so sometimes, we went to Anglican services at night, at St. Paul’s Cathedral, just to hear the choir singing Evensong, or hear the preacher give the sermon.

The sermons in Anglican services are much more secular-feeling than those that I’ve heard in Catholic masses over the years. One time, there was a reading of selections from Shakespeare’s works, in partial reflection on the then-raging war in Iraq that Tony Blair saw his popularity disappear over, overnight.

♦

Every Sunday morning, I’d go somewhere on the high street in Hampstead, buy all the tabloids, order a full English breakfast, and read away, while I gorged myself on the delicious black pudding, baked beans, tomato, fried eggs, ham, and sausage. So good.

And the UK tabloids are just so entertaining. They’re trashy, but they can turn a phrase, and they are ruthless in attacking the establishment, and in making complete fools out of the royals. Back then were the Waity Katie days, when everyone was wondering if the hottie par excellence Prince William was going to propose to his longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton.

The coverage wasn’t particularly flattering to Kate, making her look desperate and dependent on Wills for validation.

What ended up happening before I left London, though, was that William dumped her. Cad! There she was one day, on her way to her job at Jigsaw, a sullen expression on her face, as she stared down life as a mere commoner.

At the time, I joined along with everyone else in feasting on the drama of her downfall. I was probably a little jealous of her, to be honest. Fortunately for her, though, Kate, like me, is a survivor, and of course, she got him in the end.

For the record, I’m not jealous anymore — who would want to be in that family? — but I still think she’s killing it.

♦

The tube closes earlier in the evening than many bars and clubs, so night buses provide much-needed transportation in the after-hours. And boy, can they be rowdy places. Trust me, I’ve seen some shit on the T in Dorchester. And I’ve been scared by whackos screaming Lord knows what on the subway in NYC. But it’s only in London that I have seen a bus driver stop his bus, get out, and refuse to continue on because the passengers were so drunk and rowdy.

I was drunk myself, but even I was scared.

After that, the bus driver literally never returned to the bus. It wasn’t the end of the line, that was for sure. So I was forced to go find another night bus to make my way home.

On evenings when there wasn’t a mutiny, I loved sitting on the top floor of the bus and taking in the sights of London by night as I made my way back to Hampstead. London was my gateway to Europe, and I was seeing and experiencing so much, so fast, I practically had stars in my eyes. Those moments, listening to music on my iPod, taking in the nighttime city, I could reflect on how far I’d come from my hometown of Weymouth, Massachusetts, and how I had grown as a person.

They were beautiful, gin-soaked moments, the feeling of which I tried to recreate for years, to no avail.

♦

I had a great moment of connection with a Beatles song in London, once.

I was in the city the morning news broke that Amy Winehouse had died, in a house not too far from the place I was staying. I had spent the previous night out at a club, doing coke with some rich guys from South Africa I met, and taking one of them back to my room to fuck.

I was ragingly hungover, and the agonizing struggle Amy had with alcohol had always haunted me, considering my own troubles. So I was really feeling it that day.

It was a grey, drizzly afternoon, and I decided to take my mind off things by going to Notting Hill to see a movie. The dampness brought alive the colors and scents of that cheerful neighborhood, setting for many people’s favorite rom-com. Through the mist, you could see the cheery, pastel-colored rowhouses, and smell coffee wafting out from one of its many quaint cafes.

I walked up to the movie theater, an old theater, with a grand lobby and a massive marquee out front. I bought a ticket for Beginners, which I was interested in for two reasons: it was about someone coming out, and it starred Christopher Plummer, Captain von Trapp from my beloved The Sound of Music. It was a wonderful movie, and Plummer ended up winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for it.

The theater mercifully sold booze, albeit expensive booze; but what does money matter when you have a hangover and existential dread to deal with, right? So I was given a fairly generously poured glass of good whisky, and took my seat right in the middle of the empty theater, on one of the red velvet–covered seats.

No one else ended up coming in for the movie, and I took in the beautiful red and gold wallpaper and gilding of the ornate theater, while steadily downing my whisky, as various British rock classics played over the house speakers.

I had arrived kinda early, as is my tendency, so this went on for a while. I ordered another whisky, double this time.

And I took my seat again. Sometime in the next few minutes, the Beatles’ song “Because” came on, and the combination of the hair-raising harmonizing, haunting guitar, and beautifully simple lyrics of that song, from Abbey Road, combined with the buzz I had from all the whisky, put me in an incredible state, where I felt my soul leave my body, and ascend to the sky, surveying the beauty and majesty of all of existence, as the long notes and the Fab Four’s synchronized voices sent chills down my spine.

It was sublime. I don’t think you need drugs or alcohol to reach this state, either. I’m sure there is a spiritual or creative process that can bring this sort of divine communion with art.

♦

Traveling outside of London is nice, the pretty countryside scattered with old villages and grazing sheep. I really enjoyed seeing Bath, with its ancient Roman baths still extant, but do not recommend continuing on your journey from there to see Stonehenge.

It takes a while to get to Stonehenge by train, it’s a pricey ticket, and then you get there and you’re like, here are some big stones, standing up, all in a circle. You do wonder how they got them that way and what it meant, but you don’t need to go all the way there to figure it out. You can stay put in your plush suite at the Mayfair in your robe and slippers and think about it there.

Oxford is interesting to walk around in, but other than look at the ancient buildings and maybe take a trip down the Thames or spend the afternoon drinking in some pub, there is not much to do.

I suppose now that Grindr’s a thing, it would be cool to go and fuck an Oxford student. Hear tales from school, check out their Harry Potter regalia, see if I can have a romance to rival Nick’s and Wani’s, or Sebastian’s and Charles’.

♦

There are no other cities quite like London, which blends the bustling and diverse international element of New York with the quaint orderliness of English life. It’s quieter and cleaner, and less rowdy, in London than it is in New York. And London’s a quick gateway to Paris, which is much less hospitable to Americans, but still a lovely place to visit.

I love Brits for their sense of humor — Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag being a prime example — their wit, and their lenient, if not defiant, attitude towards alcoholism.

I also enjoy the soap opera that is the royal family, and recently finished the final season of The Crown.

And the food reminds me of home, and makes my tummy feel full and warm.

To this day, Ryan says I am every European’s favorite American, and if that’s true, I think it’s because we share the same spirit, and the same cultural sensibilities. I make the Euros feel just a little bit more at home in America, not so marooned in a cultural wasteland. And for me, a new European friend is a passport to all sorts of interesting conversations, fun hangs, and possible adventures in Europe.

I began having those cross-cultural exchanges in London.

♦

You should absolutely spend a semester studying abroad. If you speak a foreign language, maybe go somewhere more challenging than London.

But no matter where you go, once you’re there, fully embrace your existence abroad. Don’t be half at home, half wherever else you are. Ideally, do not be in a monogamous relationship (or one at all — who wants to spend the whole semester on FaceTime?). Don’t try to have one specific experience of the place you’re in. But embrace meeting new people, especially locals, and trying new things while you’re there.

I hope to get back to London soon, perhaps for an extended stay, like I have in other cities. I have some friends I could look up, and I’d also like to see how the city has changed since I was there ten years ago.

I’m sure I have many adventures left in London, and many more tales to tell. ♦

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Georgetown is a spooky place, with Gothic buildings lurching over graveyards and old cobblestone streets lit by lantern light. It’s particularly eerie in the fall, when the darkness sets in earlier, and the rustle of leaves and shadows of barren trees suggest something sinister lurking around the corner.

It was this spookiness that made Georgetown a perfect setting for The Exorcist, which was written by a graduate, William Peter Blatty. His time on the Hilltop sparked his fascination with the dark Catholic rite.

When I was at Georgetown, students would jog up and down the legendary Exorcist steps, which are made of narrow stone and incredibly steep. In the movie, a priest gets thrown to his death down them.

Jogging anywhere, including on those scary steps, is terrifying, and the thought of doing so chilled me to the bone. There was a liquor store at the bottom of the steps, though, so I did take semi-frequent, careful walks up and down them to buy kegs for parties.

When fall came around, I looked forward to the annual screening of the movie on Healy Lawn, as well as the traditional performance of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” by one of our school’s dance troupes, Groove Theory. And Halloween parties, of course. One year, I dressed as Thurston Howell III. Another, I remember two of my blacked-out friends showing up at my townhouse incoherent, clutching big black dildos. (“Dick in a Box” was big that year.)

The most terrifying thing about Georgetown when I was there, in the mid-aughts, was its proximity to the ongoing horror show that was the George W. Bush administration and the Republican Party, which held both houses of Congress. Georgetown was a hub for DC power players, who lived in its red brick townhouses and shared gossip and made deals at neighborhood hotspots like Café Milano and Lutèce.

There was a cheap Chinese restaurant perched across from Café Milano, Hunan Peking, where my friend Elle and I would eat egg drop soup and sesame chicken and watch the political figures come and go.

We saw Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld get swept into black cars and driven away. We saw Bill O’Reilly trying to hail a cab. We saw Condi checking her BlackBerry. One time, we even saw Joe and Hadassah Lieberman on date night. I know he’s not technically a Republican, but I mark that sighting as the most frightening of all.

The president’s nephew, Pierce Bush (who looks mighty like Alfred E. Neuman, the kid from the cover of Mad magazine), was a classmate of ours, and W.’s daughters were regulars at a Georgetown bar called Smith Point. It was a preppy place owned by a homophobic douchebag who was also a classmate of ours. I didn’t go there often, but I did drop in a few times to chug gin and tonics and count the popped collars. I mostly followed what went on there through this social media site, Late Night Shots.

Late Night Shots was an allegedly “exclusive” social network, and it detailed news and gossip from the Georgetown and larger DC social scene. It was dominated by the polos-and-Nantucket-red-wearing, prep-school-going, summering-in-Montauk types that I went to school with.

Although I dressed preppy, this was not exactly my scene. I was more of an Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise type at that time in my life. I had a large crew of French study abroad student friends who I called The French People. We would chain American Spirits in my university-provided housing and listen to David Bowie and The Velvet Underground into the early morning hours.

But still, I wanted to know what Jenna and Barbara were up to.

By the time my senior year arrived, the most terrifying and difficult thing in my life was coming out. I had started experimenting with guys during my semester abroad in London, but I wasn’t ready to come out yet. I was still wrestling with a lot of internalized homophobia, and turned off by what I had seen of the gay scene in DC — tight V-necks, EDM, tiny dogs, drag queens, the whole rainbow milieu. I thought I would keep experimenting, but keep it to myself for a while longer.

Except one late night, after one too many beers at the Tombs — the de facto campus bar that was the inspiration for the Brat Pack classic St. Elmo’s Fire — with Seamus, a gay classmate I had a crush on, I blacked out and came out to — and then on to — him. He had to tell me in the morning, because I didn’t remember it (or a hookup, either).

Knowing that my secret had been let loose in the world sent a shiver of panic down my spine. Even though I wasn’t ready to come out, I decided in that moment that I had to. I didn’t want my friends to find out through the rumor mill. Seamus said he wouldn’t tell anyone, but he had already outed another classmate — a Billy Joel–playing grill master who bragged about having six different colored pairs of boat shoes — to me the previous week. I wasn’t going to risk him blabbing.

What followed were weeks of one-on-one conversations with my friends, all of which went better than I could have hoped. My friend Ryan thought I was bullshitting him, which was kinda funny. Another friend of ours had to tell him I was for real before he believed me. But the anxiety of facing homophobia in the larger world weighed heavily on me, leading to a severe depression that lasted most of that fall, and left me with a ghostly pallor.

I remember sitting on Healy Lawn one late fall afternoon, drinking a chai tea latte, trying to warm up, consumed by shame and fear. There was a chill in the air, and my friend Maria approached me with a concerned look on her face.

“You look like you’ve been through war,” she said. She wasn’t entirely wrong. There was a monstrous battle raging inside me, one I felt like I was losing. But I told her I was just stressed about a paper, exchanged a few niceties with her, and went back to the solitude of my latte. Those lattes always seemed to go cold so quickly, just like my coming-out journey did. It was less euphoria and more despair.

That winter, my lesbian theater professor, not knowing that I was going through the coming-out process, but perhaps sensing it, picked me to play Roy Cohn in a class staging of parts of Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America — also a great HBO miniseries with Al Pacino and Patrick Wilson.

I remember practicing the scene where Roy first meets Joe, the Mormon lawyer he is trying to recruit to some Republican Party judicial sinecure, while working the phones and offering Joe sandwiches like a doting mameshi.

“I wish I was an octopus, eight loving arms and all them suckers!” was the line.

I thought about Roy Cohn sucking a bunch of cocks out on Fire Island. Then I thought about him having tea at the Plaza with his fellow cocksucker, Nancy Reagan. And I thought about what it would have felt like to have to lead that double life, to keep that secret, so that it didn’t end up on Page Six, or worse yet, in The Washington Post.

At least now I knew that wouldn’t be my fate. I would die an out gay man.

But a proud one? It was yet to be seen.

As the year progressed, I slowly became more comfortable in my own skin and with my identity as a gay man, but I was still uncomfortable with the gay community — or the gay community as I perceived it, at least.

This meant I wasn’t having any sex. I wanted a guy who looked like the guys I had grown up with, with a boy-next-door quality, who was masculine and had a deep voice like me. I wanted a guy on the way to an important job and maybe even some power in the world. But I wasn’t finding him.

I did not want an effeminate boyfriend or a gym rat boyfriend or, heaven forbid, an activist boyfriend. (Does anyone want one of those?) Mostly, I didn’t want to be a stereotype. I didn’t want to feel like a faggot. That terror sloshed and bubbled inside of me like the toxic brew in a witch’s cauldron, double, double, toil and trouble.

As Roy Cohn said in the play, gay men had no power in the world. Gay men, at the time I came out, had just lost state after state in gay marriage referendums, which Bush’s (closeted gay) campaign manager had generated to drive up social conservative turnout in the 2004 presidential election and help re-elect Bush.

Cohn didn’t see himself as gay. He was powerful. He was an important man, one who just happened to have sex with men. I wasn’t capable of such self-delusion, and pitied Cohn for the shadow of a life he lived, but I still feared that to fully embrace gayness would leave me vulnerable, discarded and a total nothing in the world.

It was awful to imagine, and so, when evening arrived and my friends started pairing off and making booty calls, I fired up the internet and sought out similar, repressed types. Grindr wasn’t a thing yet — smartphones barely were — and so I would take to Craigslist, which used to have a personals section, with categories like casual encounters and men seeking men.

The Craigslist personals section was a distinct vibe. There was some scary stuff on there. It was like the cantina from Return of the Jedi. Even if you found someone halfway decent on there, there was still a good chance they would flake, or that they were catfishing you, or that they were totally fucking psycho and on drugs. A lot of them smelled like incense, too.

I don’t think I ever found the kind of guy I was looking for on Craigslist. But I did find him one night — by accident — on Late Night Shots.

Perusing its message boards on my MacBook while eating my dinner of Chicken Madness, I saw a post from some woman who purported to be a friend of this guy called “Brady.” The name was a pseudonym, but he was allegedly a clean-cut, straight-acting, professional guy, VGL (internet parlance for very good looking), not into the scene, and looking for someone similar.

The post went on to tout Brady’s many great qualities. It was probably written by Brady, not some yenta girlfriend, and I knew that. But I didn’t care, because Brady as advertised seemed absolutely perfect for me. I messaged the alleged friend, and before long, I had Brady’s email. We exchanged a few messages, sent each other some nudes — no face pic from Brady — and talked about where and when we might meet up, before he stopped responding.

I didn’t hear from him again until a few weeks later, very late at night. I had thrown a party at my townhouse, the theme of which was French vs. Flannel, where people were asked to dress either like they were a courtier at Versailles, or a lumberjack. It was a great excuse to get shitfaced and play the soundtrack of the Sofia Coppola movie Marie Antoinette, which had just come out.

I was very drunk, and at about one o’clock in the morning, I pulled up Craigslist on my laptop, only to hear the ping of an email from Brady coming in. He was seemingly in the same state — drunk and horny — and wanted me to come to his apartment right away.

It truly felt like now or never, so within minutes, I was in a yellow cab and on my way to the neighborhood near Capitol Hill where he lived, in one of those gigantic, soulless white brick apartment buildings that house the city’s young professionals.

When we pulled up, I got into an argument with the cab driver because he wouldn’t accept 20 euros as payment in lieu of a 20-dollar bill. I tried to explain to him that the exchange rate was in his favor and that he was throwing away money, but he wouldn’t take it. So I fumbled for a credit card, leaving my cell phone on the seat in the process, and then stumbled out under the porte cochère.

I couldn’t figure out the door code or how to ring Brady, and was now unable to call him, so I ended up having to scale an eight-foot brick wall like James Bond, and enter the lobby through a back door.

By the time I got to Brady’s apartment, I was covered with leaves and scrapes and cuts, but apparently, I still looked hot, because he immediately lunged at me and gave me a deep, sloppy kiss.

He looked like his photos and was handsome, although not VGL. He was clad head to toe in Brooks Brothers (they make a great non-iron shirt — just ask a store manager), and the alcohol made his skin look pink and shiny, almost porcine. But like, a pig that was kinda hot.

We immediately made our way through all the shit on his floors — dirty socks, ties, newspapers, takeout containers, all strewn among Ikea furniture — and to his extra-long bed. I started quickly unbuttoning his shirt as we kissed, gradually moving my lips to his neck and shoulders. He tasted a little salty and a little like honey. I liked it.

I soon got his shirt and undershirt off and leaned him back on his bed, kissing him all over, nibbling on his nipples and flicking them with my tongue, scratching him with the scruff on my chin. I buried my face in his armpits and inhaled his musky scent, my nose dampening with his sweat, before ripping off his boxer shorts and grabbing his hard, pink cock.

I had only touched another guy’s cock a handful of times before that, and it still felt new and exciting. I slapped my face with it, stroked it up and down, slid my tongue and lips down it. Thanks to a girl named Jackie C. who told our whole sixth grade class about blowjobs on the bus ride back from a field trip to Old Sturbridge Village, I knew not to use teeth at all. Thank you, Jackie C.

Brady demanded I strip down to nothing, and I did as I was told, throwing my black Lacoste polo to the ground, and feeling my cock bounce as I slid off my underwear.

Brady grabbed my underwear and took a long whiff of it, then pinned me against the headboard and facefucked me underneath a Reagan-Bush ’84 campaign poster. I was thrilled to be having the classic DC experience, hooking up with a closeted Republican staffer. And I loved the smell of him and the feeling of his cock filling up my throat.

Who he worked for was a mystery, but closeted Republican hypocrites were nothing new. There were tons of closet cases in the Bush-era Republican Party, like Bush’s campaign manager Ken Mehlman, Senator Larry “wide stance” Craig, Miss Lindsey Graham, and Mark Foley, the congressman from Florida who was caught sending inappropriate messages to, and making passes at, underage male pages.

My sophomore year, when I interned for John Kerry in the Senate, I used to exit the Metro at Capitol South in the early mornings, and would see Foley jogging sometimes. He gave me these lascivious looks when we passed each other, and these interactions, plus his gayface and shorty-shorts, left me uttering, “Yup,” when his scandal broke.

Now, I had my very own closeted Republican.

Brady shot his conservative load all over my face, and I grabbed a big, wet wad of it to lube up my cock. Then I jerked myself off while he held me tight and kissed me, and I came a ton.

We were both eager to call it a night after that, and I started to make my way back home. Somehow, I also got locked into the building when I tried to leave, so I had to exit via the same side door and scale and plummet down the same wall that I did when I entered. (Whether you’re in or out — of the closet, or an apartment building — life is full of hurdles.)

I began visiting Brady regularly that winter and spring, usually under similar circumstances — late at night, drunk, and horny. I always felt like I had to sneak off, or invent some excuse to get away, even though there was no real need for it. I clearly still felt guilty about it.

My friends and I were playing this song “Flavor,” by Girls in Hawaii, on heavy rotation in those days, and the foreboding buildup of that song matched the anxious jitters I would feel as my cab whooshed past the Watergate Building and the towering, phallic Washington Monument on the way to Brady’s apartment.

One night, after La Fête de la Francophonie, a party the French Embassy threw every year with food from French-speaking countries from all over the world and excellent wines from all over France, I made my way to Brady’s place in my Ralph Lauren suit and pastel pink skinny tie. I sucked his cock with my wine-soaked mouth, and let his come crust over on my chest hair while I played Serge Gainsbourg tunes on my iPod for him.

Another late night, I sucked his toes one by one as he jerked himself off and yelled, “You’re so fucking hot” at me over and over. I asked him to drop his balls in my mouth while I jerked off, and I shot all over my leg. I left it to dry there.

Our sex was hot, like a poorly lit Corbin Fisher video. Republican jock facefucks Democratic prettyboy. And when we were fucking, I could forget my fears about being gay for just a moment. But I never pined for Brady when we were apart, because we never really got to know each other.

I did figure out who he was one night, though. The last night we hooked up, actually. I accidentally caught a peek at his diploma, from Ohio Wesleyan University. Wesley Goodman. He saw me eye the diploma, and looked at me with these incredibly vulnerable eyes. I stared back for what felt like a long time, but was actually only a second or two. I knew not to acknowledge it. “Goodnight, dude,” I said.

As the months wore on, the terror of coming out faded, and the terror of graduating and having to face the 9-to-5 of the adult world grew. I focused on term papers and applying to jobs, and eventually got hired by a white-shoe K Street law firm on the Georgetown waterfront, in a building where Nancy Pelosi lived on the top floor. I was going deeper into the hellscape of DC politics.

I lost touch with Brady. Toward the end of the year, I started dating a guy named Doug, who was tall, handsome, Black, and the salutatorian of our class. (Many of my girlfriends were jealous.) Doug showed up at the door of my townhouse late one night to return some lost sunglasses that weren’t mine, and that I had not lost. He looked at me with his devilish grin and the most playful eyes, and that was all it took.

Although that relationship didn’t last long — and involved one painful aborted attempt at anal sex, the night before graduation — I went on to have many other relationships, and a lot of phenomenal sex, over the years. Overall, it probably took me longer to wrestle with my internalized homophobia than it did to adjust to anal sex, or to master being a dom top. :-)

And honestly, I still suffer from a bit of internalized homophobia. Jonathan Van Ness annoys me more than he should. But I know I made the right choice in being true to who I am and facing the world with honesty, rather than confining myself to the closet and the hypocrisies and desperate one-night stands that would have entailed.

As for Brady — or Wesley? I Googled him a few years ago. It turned out that at the time I was fucking him, he was working for a then-little-known congressman from Ohio named … Jim Jordan.

Yep. I fucked a Jim Jordan protégé. I might be the one who needs a fucking exorcist.

Wesley had obviously made some great connections in the GOP in the years since I had been sucking him off, as he got himself elected to the Ohio state legislature on a Christian right, anti-gay, “family values” platform.

Unfortunately for Wesley, though, Brady stayed a busy boy over the years, too — even after Wesley got married and had kids and got elected to office. He was eventually caught having gay sex in his office, and resigned in disgrace after it came out that a bunch of young, male Republican staffers had reported him for sexual harassment and inappropriate touching.

Who knows what he’s up to now. Conversion therapy?

When I think back to that time now, I can still feel the fiery lust and the tingle of danger and excitement in the pit of my stomach. The anxiety and trepidation of those late nights. The devastating depression. The time spent wondering if my future would be okay.

And I can still taste the Blue Moons with orange wedges that provided me with much-needed liquid courage for those late-night conversations and trysts. I remember worrying then for the first time that I was drinking too much, and thinking about that F. Scott Fitzgerald quotation, “First, you take a drink. Then, the drink takes a drink. Then, the drink takes you.”

Drink would end up taking me many dark places over the years. There was a lot trapped inside of me back then — bad as well as good — that needed to be exorcised.

The process continued long past Georgetown, and is ongoing, but today, I am incredibly grateful that I faced my fears and took those first steps toward honesty and the light, regardless of how scary it was.

Because the truly scary thing would have been ending up like Brady. Or Wesley, rather. Thankfully, the power of Christ — and my dick, and Blue Moons — compelled me in a different direction. ♦

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When I was in eighth grade, I had this classmate named Shawna Murphy. I wasn’t really friends with her, but we had lockers on the same floor, and we were in Spanish class together. So, we talked, sometimes.

Shawna was pale and freckly, with long red hair and bright blue eyes. She was also a little chubby — but definitely not fat. Shawna liked to wear clothes from Hot Topic, Converse or Doc Martens, and thick eyeliner, although I wouldn’t say she was a goth. She actually had an effervescent personality, and her social life was fascinatingly dramatic.

Each day, in our Spanish class, rather than pay attention to our teacher (Señora McDonald), Shawna would gossip with the girl who sat next to her, Tonya, and spill the scintillating details of her existence — details which I, sitting right behind them, gobbled up, like the socially starved gay nerd I was.

Shawna didn’t know it at the time, but she was iconic to me. I was really shy and self-conscious at that time in my life, so I didn’t try to make friends with her. But, I was a big fan, and an especially big appreciator of her artistic talents.

This was because, first semester, before the two of us were even in Spanish class together, I started to notice Shawna’s one-of-a-kind signature, on her artwork and school projects that her teachers had hung in the hallways.

Huge and prominent on all of her works, the signature started with a beautifully swoopy S, which gave way to a smaller and more modest h-a-w-n-a, and then became grandiose again, with the M. The rest of the letters were as small and modest as before, except for the Y, whose tail lassoed around the entire name, forming a heart at its tip, right at the top of the name.

It was a masterpiece. It was like John Hancock–meets–Lisa Frank–meets–Banksy. And you could not miss it, going down that hallway.

Shawna varied the colors she filled the heart in with, but the signature always remained the same. It was unforgettable — and a brilliant exercise in branding.

Social media wasn’t a thing back then, although AOL Instant Messenger — popularly known as “AIM” — was. And, AIM profiles and away messages were definitely vital ways to showcase your personality (especially with the perfect song lyrics, to encapsulate the emotional torrents you were going through). But AIM was still a new frontier, at that point. A lot of kids’ families didn’t have internet — or even computers — yet. So for all intents and purposes, the middle school hallway was your timeline. It was the showcase.

And Shawna Murphy was dominating it.

Aside from her iconic signature, I also admired the finesse and joie de vivre Shawna brought to her life.

One great display came partway through the school year, when the father of one of our classmates, Kara Kawa, died of cancer. It was really sad. Kara, who was a shy, bookish girl before his death, turned emo afterwards (hot emo though), wearing dark clothes and eyeliner, and putting Jimmy Eat World lyrics in her away messages. Shawna and her friend Tonya, from our Spanish class, were both friends with Kara, so they were allowed to go to his funeral, which took place during the school day.

Just like those social media posts about jauntily showing up late for work with a fresh Starbucks, Shawna and Tonya returned to school from the funeral, midway through Spanish class, in grand style, carrying soda cups from the sub shop D’Angelo, and laughing up a storm — completely interrupting Señora McDonald’s lesson (that poor woman had zero control over the class).

“We had the best lunch,” Shawna said to Tonya, giving her that iykyk look, for the benefit of the rest of the class, as she took a big sip out of her Coke.

Flashing a smile of her own, Tonya gave Shawna a high-five, and they took their seats, continuing to ignore Señora McDonald, as they raved on about their D’Angelo moment.

The entire thing was like a fucking D’Angelo commercial. Just casually coming back from their friend’s dad’s funeral, after having had the. time. of. their. lives. at a fast-casual sandwich shop. It was brazen and morbid, and I loved it. Easy-breezy, effortless, funereal fun!

The most fascinating part of Shawna’s arc, though, was undoubtedly when she started dating another iconic “indie” student at our school — Christopher McGuire. Christopher, too, was well-known like Shawna. He was a theater kid, and could be reliably found in the hallway between classes, hamming it up with his fellow theatricals.

As far as I was concerned, though, there was one big problem with Shawna dating Christopher. I mean, surely, you have already begun to pick up on it. Theater kid? Going by Chrissstopher, instead of Chris? That’s right, you guessed it — Christopher was a massive homosexual (with a delicious li’l lisp to match!).

Shawna? Oblivious.

Underneath it all, Shawna Murphy was undoubtedly an ally. Her b.f.f. Tonya? Total tomboy, soccer-playing lesbian. She probably definitely could have kicked my ass. And Shawna had plenty of other gay friends at our school, too.

Like many female allies early on in their lives, however, Shawna suffered from a particularly awful case of what is known as fruit blindness — romantically attracted to gays, like a moth to a flame, yet utterly impervious to their gayness. Blissfully ignorant, and simply thrilled to have a boyfriend who is so creative and sensitive and thoughtful — and who doesn’t pressure her into sex. And, who wouldn’t ever think of looking at another girl!

Oh, honey.

Some of these girls figure it out in college; others, when their husband comes out to them and asks for a divorce after 20 years of marriage. But, regardless of when it happens, all of these women have to endure a truly cringeworthy series of disappointments and embarrassments before they see the light. Then, they emerge on the other end of it as lifelong fag hags; for, despite all that they have gone through, their love for the gays is eternal.

And, on that score, Christopher McGuire would offer Shawna a mortifying initiation into her fag hag journey.

For the first couple days of their relationship, things went great. Shawna and Christopher were the talk of the eighth grade — and undoubtedly, the premier indie couple at our school.

They held court together at the other end of the skater kids’ table, in the cafeteria. Shawna’s brown paper bag textbook covers were covered in hearts and Christopher’s name, as well as an exciting new iteration of her iconic signature — this time featuring both of their names. They performatively checked in on each other, each time they passed each other in the hallways, so that everyone could witness their love. There was even talk of dates at the South Shore Plaza.

Unfortunately, though — as with most middle school relationships — things went south between Shawna and Christopher, fast.

You see, Christopher had this very close male friend, Philip. The two of them often wrote long notes to each other, and left them on each other’s lockers — which definitely wasn’t gay at all. And, as it turned out, Christopher and Philip liked to gossip, too.

You’re shocked, right?

Shock was what Shawna felt, one Friday morning, when she discovered one of Christopher’s notes to Philip, on the floor of the hallway. Figuring she was doing her new boyfriend a solid by making sure his friend got his note, Shawna picked it up, to put it on Philip’s locker.

A little bit curious, and assuming it was just a funny note between two boys, Shawna decided there was no harm in reading what the note said.

It read:

GUESS WHAT? I’M FINALLY DATING THAT PORPOISE SEAL SHAWNA MURPHY

Underneath it was a drawing of a giant seal, with Shawna’s face.

Holy gay bitch, Batman!

Naturally, Shawna was devastated — but not cowed. She showed the note to Tonya during Spanish class, and they agreed that Shawna would publicly confront Christopher about it, in the hallway, after class was over.

Overhearing this all, my suspicions about Christopher were confirmed. The cunty note? The fat shaming? Clearly, the hallmarks of a Mean Girl Gay. There was so much else I wanted to know, though!

First: what is a porpoise seal? Is that, like, a cross between a porpoise and a seal? Don’t those things usually get names like “sorpoise,” or something? Or: is porpoise supposed to be, like, an adjective, there? As in, using “porpoise” as a synonym for fat? If so, brilliant and playful use of language, Christopher! Also: you’re “finally” dating that porpoise seal? So, you mean you’re happy about all this? Then why are you slagging her off behind her back to your gay lover? Talk about mixed signals, Christopher! And Dr. Freud would have a lot to say about where you left that note — it’s almost like you wanted Shawna to find it!

It was hilarious and confusing, and very sad for Shawna. She couldn’t have been too embarrassed, though, as she proceeded to tell several other girls around her about her discovery of the note and its contents — virtually assuring the story would spread like wildfire.

I suspected Shawna was more thrilled at the impending drama and scandal it would bring than anything else, a belief which was confirmed when Shawna and Tonya went to accost Christopher, at the end of the school day. Shawna knew her angles well, and staged the scene for maximum effect.

I watched from the other side of the hallway, as Shawna and Tonya approached Christopher, wordlessly. Shawna slowly unfolded the note, revealing its contents to Christopher. As a big crowd looked on, he confessed, instantly. I didn’t hear exactly what was said, beyond that, as the bell began to ring, and the run to the school bus was officially on. But, it was clear that Shawna had broken up with him, as she and Tonya walked away defiantly, in an I-am-woman-hear-me-roar kind of way.

The whole scene could have been set to that song, “Teenage Dirtbag,” by Wheatus. It was incredible. I was really proud of Shawna.

What I really didn’t understand, though, was how, when Monday arrived, Shawna and Christopher had gotten back together.

Before you ask, no. I have literally no idea what Christopher said to get back in Shawna’s good graces, or how she justified the reconciliation, in her mind. Was there, perhaps, a perfectly reasonable explanation for why he had called her a porpoise seal?

Is there ever?

Thinking back on it, as an adult, my assumption is that their reunion was just about as legitimate as their relationship itself ever was — that is, not at all. Delusion, or delulu, as the kids call it, runs strong in the middle school dating scene. We all know it’s more about saying you have a boyfriend than anything else, so who really cares if your boyfriend calls you a porpoise seal, so long as he still watches Glee with you, and pays for your dates at Bertucci’s? A girl’s gotta eat. And, a girl’s gotta gossip about something.

As for me, eighth grade was my last rodeo with the Weymouth, Massachusetts, public school system. I started at Boston College High School, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, for ninth grade.

But, eighth grade wasn’t the last time I got to see Shawna Murphy.

Partway through my freshman year at BC High, I got a job as a cashier and bag boy at Shaw’s Supermarket, in Weymouth, Massachusetts. And, a few months later, none other than Shawna Murphy got hired to work there, too.

Another one of my ex-classmates, Emily Andrews, worked at Shaw’s, too, as my front-end supervisor. She was friends with Shawna, and told Shawna that I had said she wore too much makeup (which she did). After Shawna and I discussed that and cleared that little hurdle, we became real friends, at last.

Now, Shawna gossiped with me. We speculated on how much dick Christopher was probably sucking this year, at Weymouth High School. (I remained firmly closeted, myself.) And, I told her about how much I had loved her iconic signature, back at ol’ Abigail Adams Intermediate School.

She even drew one, just for me.

I still have it, to this very day. ♦

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About a decade ago, when I was trying to quit drinking, I went to an inpatient rehab in New Hampshire, in the mountains. Some detoxing and group sessions among the balsam firs, hemlocks, and sugar maples. My aunt Alice and cousin Angelika lived nearby, and are both in recovery, so my mother suggested I join them for some meetings after I got out of my program.

I was unenthusiastic about the idea. Trying to give up alcohol and benzos was already nearly breaking me. Adding Alice and Angelika to the mix struck me as an utterly sadistic cherry on top of everything else I was going through.

But those were desperate times for me. So I took the desperate measure of following my mother’s suggestion, and on the day I was released from my program, I was greeted by my aunt, who ferried me, through the colorful fall foliage, over to her and Angelika’s A.A. meeting, in suburban Manchester.

I soon found myself in one of those old, white steepled churches that once dotted the New England landscape. Protestant, sparsely decorated, freezing.

The basement room we met in looked like a high school auditorium. There was a crucifix on the wall, and an American flag on the stage. The smell of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and Marlboro Lights breath lingered in the air.

My cousin Angelika and her son, Austin, gave me and my aunt a big wave from the back of the room as we entered, just in time for the meeting to start. After the meeting’s host, a brash female truck driver, got everyone settled and dispensed with formalities, she announced the meeting’s speaker — Angelika.

I instantly grew excited. And just a little uneasy. The public utterances Angelika had made over the years — in places like the supermarket, the bank, and yes, church — were a greatest hits collection of the disturbing and the bizarre. Considering the many crowds of people I had seen her completely mortify, putting her in front of an audience was bold.

Angelika put Austin and her Dunkin’ Donuts down, and walked to the front of the room. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a braid, and she was wearing a festive Christmas sweater. It all looked very wholesome. To me, the whole thing was a (nonalcoholic) cognitive dissonance cocktail.

Soon, Angelika began to speak.

“Recovery is the single hardest thing I have ever done. It was like climbing Mount Everest. It was something that I never could have accomplished on my own, no matter how hard I tried. I know, because I tried many times on my own, and fell flat on my face every time.

“But when I first came here, the people were friendly. They were open. They made climbing the mountain less scary. They made me want to come back again and again, even after I failed another time. They shared with me a new way of life and a different way of thinking about my problems. They made me realize I didn’t have to climb alone. And if I struggled or slipped, I was confident that they would be there for me, in a nonjudgmental way.

“That didn’t mean the climb wasn’t still hard. That didn’t mean there weren’t times when I was frustrated by my new friends or by this program. That happened a lot. But one day, after days and then weeks and months of muddling through, I put my head up, and I could see that I had made it so far up the mountain that my view of life was already totally different. And it had taken me that long to notice, because I was so busy and present with doing the work.

“So I want to say to everyone who is coming here today for the first time, remember that it’s supposed to be hard getting sober. Every time you feel that frustration or doubt, remember that you’re climbing Everest. And look around at your fellow climbers, because no matter what happens to you on the mountain, they will give you a helping hand to reach the top.

“Keep coming, guys!”

As she finished her talk, everyone in the room rose to their feet with applause. Including me.

I was positively gobsmacked. Was this eloquent, polished, wise woman really my cousin Angelika? Were this articulate, inspirational speaker and the girl who once shat in the lake, while someone was swimming in it with her, actually the same person?

Was this really The Blonde Thing we were all applauding for?

♦

To explain The Blonde Thing, let me take you back in time, to a warm summer evening in the mid-’90s, up at my grandparents’ lake house in Quebec. I would stay there with them every summer, along with my brother and some of my cousins, including Angelika.

My grandparents (or as we called them, Nana and Ganka) and I were watching one of those classic film channels on DirecTV. We had missed a bit of the beginning of the black-and-white film that was on, but caught an early scene, where a pigtailed little blonde girl murders a boy to steal a medal he won. Shortly afterwards, she confesses to having previously murdered an elderly woman, locks a guy in a building and sets it ablaze, burning him to death, and otherwise generally girlbosses it to the max.

The movie was The Bad Seed, a psychological thriller released in 1956, about a precocious eight-year-old girl named Rhoda — a psychopathic killer in a pinafore dress.

Not long after we were caught up on Rhoda’s antics, the three of us looked at each other with conspiratorial smiles, and all shouted the same name — Angelika!

Oh boy, was Angelika a terror in those days. Such a terror that my grandmother had come up with her own moniker for Angelika: The Blonde Thing. The name was a sort of morbid joke she would make to any innocent bystanders who witnessed one of Angelika’s performances, a way of explaining her behavior. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

While Rhoda’s rap sheet was unquestionably worse than Angelika’s, Rhoda reminded us all of her. They were both angelic-looking blondes and holy terrors. They both had bad-girl nicknames. I even liked my grandmother’s coinage, The Blonde Thing, more than Hollywood’s The Bad Seed.

I think it inspires more dread.

♦

Summer Winds, as Ganka called the Quebec lake house property, was a bucolic playground, with wide lawns, endless flower beds and topiaries, a babbling brook, a Japanese garden, swings, four-wheelers to ride along the miles of maple syrup farm trails that filled the dense forest behind our house, and a dock, stretching out to a speedboat, for cruising, waterskiing, and tubing.

It was an idyllic place. The days were filled with sunshine, and the nights blanketed with stars, so quiet outside that you could hear crickets, and the loons calling, out on the lake.

Except when The Blonde Thing was in residence, of course.

One of Angelika’s most noticeable characteristics back then was her loud, piercing shriek, which would echo throughout the mountains surrounding the lake, like in some horror version of The Sound of Music.

She shrieked so loudly when she got her first period — while being pulled behind Ganka’s speedboat, in a watertube — that neighbors came running over to check if things were okay when they pulled into the dock — Angelika, shrieking, in tears, telling everyone what had just occurred on the lake.

“My fucking vagina started bleeding and Ganka wouldn’t stop dragging me behind the boat!”

I watched as my grandmother, ashen-faced, tried to reassure the onlookers from our lakeside community and shoo them off.

It was not the first time that Angelika had made a public declaration about her vagina. On the way to church one Sunday, she had let my grandmother, and all of my cousins riding along in the car with her, know that, when the Grand Marquis bounded over a particular hill in the Vermont woods we were passing through, it made her “China go up, and it felt really good.”

Angelika was feeling that inertia everywhere, even in her Far East, and she needed us all to know. We were about eleven or twelve. Angelika was probably about six.

Probably her most famous scream, though, was when Angelika screamed at me, so loudly, and for so long, that I fully went Will Smith at the Oscars on her. In my family, The Slap will always be the time I hauled off and smacked Angelika across the face at Beaver Brook Falls.

The falls were a spot in northern New Hampshire we used to go to, to have a picnic, hike the mountain and play in the waterfall. It was fun and a very pretty area, but trips there were always fraught with drama.

My cousin Stephanie would wear moccasins to climb the very muddy mountain, and scream with terror as she quickly slid down the side. My cousin Timothy would climb to a point of no return, and necessitate a fevered rescue operation, every single time. The girls would fight. The boys would fight.

This particular trip, Angelika had instigated fights with everyone, including my grandmother. She was in a horrid mood, and we were all going to bathe in it with her, whether we liked it or not. A common occurrence with The Blonde Thing.

As we were packing up the car to go, Angelika started complaining about her spot for the ride home, and I finally barked at her to shut up. This led her to start screeching again, on and on, with increasing volume and velocity. All I could hear was ringing in my ears and a very faint sound of the falls in the background.

As her screams reached a fever pitch, I suddenly felt a huge rush of adrenaline, and found my hand flying through the air and landing — perfectly, I might add — on Angelika’s cheek.

The slap echoed. Then came what felt like an endless silence, as all of us, including Angelika, processed what had just happened.

Followed by Angelika releasing the single loudest shriek she has ever made, and that I have ever heard, to this day.

People probably thought the train was coming through town.

♦

Angelika was one of my many cousins on my mother’s side of the family. Like many icons before her, Angelika came from a troubled background. Angelika’s parents were my Aunt Alice (my mother’s older sister) and my Uncle Julio. Julio used to accuse Alice of being a raging alcoholic, and Alice would fire back by calling Julio a Puerto Rican. It was that kind of unhappy dynamic. (They’re happily divorced now, and Alice has been sober for well over a decade. Julio, as far as I know, is still Puerto Rican.)

There is no doubt that Alice’s alcoholism, with its attendant chaos, traumatized Angelika.

One time, in the middle of the night, Alice, blackout drunk, decided to drive her and Angelika up to my grandparents’ lake house. They somehow made it through the length of New Hampshire, and when they got to the Shrine of Our Lady of Grace in Columbia, New Hampshire, about a half-hour from the lake, Alice decided she was going to fix a screaming and crying Angelika, once and for all.

At about 1 a.m., my heavily intoxicated aunt parked, got out of the car, and put Angelika, shrieking, on the outdoor stone altar. There was no need to light a candle, because there were some already flickering from behind the altar. Alice then began praying and angrily shouting at God to please let the demons out of her daughter.

I can picture it now: the chill of the night forest. The sound of crickets and passing cars. The stone face of the Virgin Mother peering down, lit by the moon and stars. The screams. The stench of vodka in the air.

By the time they arrived at the lake house — Alice having miraculously made it through Customs and Immigration at the Canadian border in the state she was in — Angelika was still in hysterical tears. She reported everything to us.

My grandmother was mortified and sent us all to bed, presumably to deal with Alice. At the time, us kids thought this was all hilarious. Angelika’s possessed! Nowadays, my heart breaks for Angelika when I think about this moment. She deserved much better parenting. Every kid does.

With some context, the incident was not too surprising. My Irish Catholic family had dark, gothic vibes. Many were alcoholics and addicts; most were mentally ill in some way, shape, or form, too. Read a few novels by William Faulkner and you’ll get the general vibe. We would picnic in cemeteries and take photos with the graves. We’d have bonfires, séances, all sorts of spooky undertakings, in the woods behind the house. My mother even drove a hearse at one point. We would all play and sing in the back.

And Angelika had definitely pulled a “child from The Exorcist” before. One morning before church, my grandmother refused to let her wear what she wanted, so Angelika began screaming at Nana, “What’s your name again? Mary? I HATE YOU, fuckin’ Mary!”

This led Nana to tell her to go to her room and that she wasn’t coming to church with us. Going to church, at St. Albert’s in Beecher Falls, Vermont, also meant getting to go to breakfast with everyone at Bessie’s Diner in Canaan, Vermont, afterwards. So Angelika wasn’t going down without one last cry.

Yelled at by Nana once more, Angelika ran up the stairs, just like Regan in The Exorcist, and then, with both her hands clutching the rails, she stuck her head through the banister, and ghoulishly screamed at all of us, “I’M GOIN’ TO FUCKIN’ CHURCH!” She even sounded like the possessed Regan. It was terrifying.

Certainly though, regardless of a kid’s antics, DIY exorcisms are not it.

You can go ahead and call Child Protective Services now, before I continue.

♦

You would think, based on the situation at home, that Angelika would have relished the opportunity to spend weeks at the lake with her grandparents and cousins. But a lot of the time, even when things were going well at the lake, she would get on the phone with her parents, and make up stories about how awful everyone was being to her, in the hopes she could convince them to bring her home.

I suppose being around us all might have been tough for Angelika, as an only child. It was also likely a challenge to her continued M.O. to be under the watchful eyes of sober adults (for once). Although she might have been protected from escapades like pulling a microwave off the counter and onto her face, necessitating stitches and leaving a scar, if my grandparents had been watching her instead of her mother.

In any case, every time Angelika would call her parents and make up these stories, it caused big drama in the house. Worried, to some extent, about their daughter, Alice and Julio would talk to my grandparents, and demand to know what was going on. Then my grandparents would confront Angelika about her lies, and we’d all find out what she said.

Finally one day, after another of Angelika’s false flag phone calls, my cousins and I all got sick of her routine, and cut her off. The silent treatment.

She really didn’t like that. In order to try and get back in our good graces, she dialed her parents up, and proceeded to put on an Oscar-worthy performance of her love, and cherishing, of her cousins, and everyone she was surrounded by, at Summer Winds.

“Oh my God, momma! I love being around Stephanie. She’s like a sister to me!”

She then cradled the phone to her neck to call out, “Stephanie, do that smile you always do!”

Angelika even pulled Stephanie in, to talk with her father on the phone, while she poured herself a full glass of milk, to fortify herself for another half hour of ass-kissing, for our benefit, on the phone.

♦

Angelika was actually a pretty good actress. She reminded us of Amanda Bynes, who was still on Nickelodeon’s All That back then.

Angelika was probably even my first muse. In between real-life dramas, the cousins often staged our own productions, either performed for the adults, or saved on the gigantic ’80s camcorder we had.

Enhancing her performances, Angelika’s face was a true carnival, a never-ending display of sights and sounds. She was slightly chubby, and her eyebrows were very light, so if she smooshed her chin down, she could make something we called “the Egg Face.” The Egg Face was accompanied by a set of bright blue, terrified eyes that looked like they had been jacked up with a couple of hits of Upneeq.

Our productions ranged from vaudeville to music videos, from comedies to dramas. We had a gigantic bunkroom in the basement of the house, filled with twin beds covered in Disney-themed comforters. There, we filmed a lip-synched duet to “Unforgettable” by Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole over candlelight. We did a go-go style music video to “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” by Nancy Sinatra, and a Western-style one to her darker track “Bang Bang.”

Various skits were done featuring Angelika doing the Egg Face. Humpty Dumpty showing his track marks. A Southern gnome guarding her swamp. A kindergarten teacher with rabies.

I was a tough director.

“Angelika! Come. On. Is that really the face you’d make if your daughter was just raped and murdered? You look like an old woman at the supermarket who forgot her coupon book.”

When the O.J. Simpson trial was happening, we made up a song about the murders, set to the tune of “In the Jungle,” and performed it for the adults. Another time, we harmonized “Dream On” by Aerosmith as we paraded through the house. (All of our parents were big Aerosmith fans, and my grandfather had sold Steven Tyler a bunch of motorcycles at his Honda dealership in Massachusetts.)

Ganka spent a lot of those days parked in front of the T.V., watching the O.J. trial, from start to finish, on Court TV, as well as the entire saga of the Clinton impeachment on CNN. He was cranky, and did not like to be bothered (fathers — you’ve met them, I take it?) — so of course, we would send Angelika his way. As either a performance artist or a human grenade, depending on how you look at it.

My other cousins and I would hide in the kitchen and watch as Angelika was sent to ask a variety of bizarre and disturbing questions, all to see what Ganka’s reaction would be.

“Ganka? Ganka? Ganka. Ganka!”

“For the love of God, what?”

“Can I go to the bathroom?”

“Of course you can.”

“No. Can I go to the bathroom?”

“Get the hell out of here!”

Or there were questions about the birds and the bees.

“Ganka, can I ask you something?”

“What is it, sweetheart?”

“If I made out with a boy only wearing my bathing suit, do I need to take a pregnancy test?”

“Get out of here, you lunatic!”

Another time, we made her stuff her mouth with 20 packs of white Tic Tacs, then blow in his face. She could have done it from across the lake — it was a truly powerful and invasive smell. Like heavy-duty, industrial cleaning chemicals. And it assaulted you like you were being hit by an arctic fucking blast from a Star Wars- or Ghostbusters-type gun.

I think Ganka actually laughed at that one. Worth the stomach cramps, Angelika thought.

I have seen Caroline Kennedy’s hot son Jack Schlossberg do TikToks where he annoys his famously prickly dad, Edwin Schlossberg, with these types of questions and stunts. Furthering my belief that Jack and I are operating on the same wavelength. (Never forget that Angelika and I were there first, though, Jackie boy.)

I think about Angelika and laugh whenever Kanye West parades his wife Bianca Censori around The Grove naked, or pulls some other stunt for the paps with her.

You just know Ye and Bianca spend the next few days lolling up a storm, with tears in their eyes, as they survey the media freakouts and insane social media commentary that follow.

I also thought of Angelika when the internet was losing its shit over the bizarre and captivating faces the Chick-fil-A Girl served from behind her counter. I lolled perhaps just a little bit harder at her theatricality; her face, a limitless palette of wild-eyed expressions and masks; her weirdness, and all the delight it brought the enthralled masses. It was all so familiar to me.

Angelika, who was six years younger than me, shared Gina Lynn’s electric, shapeshifting visage, her love of attention, and Bianca’s gameness, her full willingness to be an objet d’art of fuckery. She was a true gift to me as an auteur.

♦

My theatrical cousin was also a phenomenally entertaining dancer. So captivating that she actually inspired me to create an entirely new form of dance: leg dancing.

Yes, I also do choreography. And leg dancing is one of my most brilliant artistic creations to date. And it is really simple to learn, too: just lie flat on your back and kick your legs up in the air, along with the song.

You can really take it anywhere you want. Perhaps you want to add a little elegance to the routine, so you arch your feet and move your legs up and down in a sophisticated way. Maybe you go cancan style. Or perhaps you want to trace an invisible bow in the air with your big toe. There is no wrong answer.

What I love most about leg dancing is how it puts the focus back on the leg, freeing it from the tyranny of its dependence on the floor and an upright posture, and allowing it to flourish, footloose and fancy-free, in the more prominent locale of the air.

Angelika was a phenomenal leg dancer, with a legendary kick. We once did a coordinated leg dance to Paul McCartney & Wings’ “Goodnight Tonight,” which has a little bit of a disco vibe, and playful guitar work that really allows your gams to blow it out. We all did great, but Angelika really stole the show.

She was, undoubtedly, a star.

I once taught leg dancing at the Brooklyn Bridge, at 3 a.m., at an illegal dance party that my friends and I had, with a gigantic boombox. Kieran Culkin and Emma Stone were there, and both of them cracked up to see me horizontally dancing to “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson. Then they joined in.

One day, the leg dancing tsunami will crash over the world, and you better be ready, Mr. Fosse.

♦

Angelika would often go missing, leading to frantic searches for her whereabouts.

She had stark blonde, almost white, hair, with the exception of her birthmark, a brown patch of hair on the back of her head, that Alice called the “Puerto Rican patch.” The patch allowed my grandmother to I.D. Angelika the time she got lost at Fort Ticonderoga, trying to peep under a Native American reenactor’s skimpy loincloth. She didn’t have to try that hard, because the guy’s shit really was all hanging out. Run those background checks, U.S. Park Service.

Another incident saw Angelika take off on an ATV, only to return with kittens she had decided to adopt. From whom is anybody’s guess. She also dragged our elderly neighbor Mrs. Roy, who spoke no English, down the driveway, so she could introduce everyone to her new friend.

Nana had to drive an exhausted Mrs. Roy back home.

♦

Time for one last story from our childhood. I just know you’ve been waiting for this one since I mentioned it at the beginning.

You know that expression, go shit in a lake? Well, Angelika did that once, for real. While she and Stephanie were swimming by themselves, Angelika decided to just drop her bathing suit bottom under the water and let out a big dump. In the lake we all swam in, every day.

Her big mistake was telling Stephanie, the biggest tattletale in the world, what she did.

No one believed Stephanie when she told us, almost right after Angelika told her. So I had everyone line up behind me, waiting for Angelika to emerge from the lake. Like a true detective, I waited until she was face-to-face with us, then asked her point-blank, knowing that the expression on her face would say everything.

“Angelika.”

“What?”

“Did you shit in the lake?” We all stared at her.

“No?” she lied, her face giving her away instantly.

“You’re disgusting!” we all yelled, going to tell Nana, who made Angelika go and fish the floating turd out of the water and flush it down the toilet.

♦

The last time I saw Angelika was when she and her husband Jerry got married, a few years ago. It was during autumn in New Hampshire, at an apple farm, and the scenery, especially the foliage, was gorgeous.

Aside from my family, I hardly knew anyone at the wedding. There were a lot of people from Angelika’s recovery meetings there, as well as a heavy contingent of deaf people. One of Angelika’s jobs was sign language interpreter, and her hands and face became entertainingly animated as she signed. There were even some words and expressions where it looked like she was doing the Egg Face.

It was delightful to watch, and it made me realize it was probably much easier for Angelika to maintain friendships with people who could not hear her at all.

There was also a huge contingent of lesbians at the wedding — more lesbians than family members combined, for both bride and groom. No one knew how or why Angelika knew so many lesbians. Not even the lesbians. They were very friendly, though.

We were all so happy for Angelika that day. She had come a long way since her first love, her babydaddy. Before we met him or even saw a picture of him, she had taken pains to emphasize that, when selecting a partner, she went “not on looks, but on personality.” (He had neither.)

But Jason doted on her. And her son, Austin, is adorable and a really nice kid. He has an almost Zen air, which is honestly a miracle, in my book.

Angelika was adulting much better than any of us would have given her credit for. I was proud of her.

After the beautiful ceremony, we were transported through the apple orchard on our way to dinner. Before we completed our journey, though, we were informed that Jerry and Angelika were going to take photos in the orchard, so we were going to wait.

It was then clarified for us (us being the entire wedding party) that Angelika and Jerry, both of whom are morbidly obese, were taking boudoir photos in the orchard.

No tables and chairs, no music, no appetizers, no drinks. Just eighty or so of us, left, for a half-hour, to chat amongst ourselves, contemplating the corpulent and tatted bride and groom taking naked pictures in the apple orchard.

♦

As everyone struggled to hold back their sobbing laughter, I sidled up to one of the lesbians and introduced myself. She turned out to be an A.A. friend of Angelika’s.

“I have got to say, the program has really done wonders for Angelika,” I said. “I am so impressed at how she’s turned her life around. It almost makes me want to tear up. And I went to a meeting with her not too long ago, and she gave this beautiful, eloquent speech that brought everyone to their feet. I was amazed!”

The lesbian smiled. “About climbing the mountain?”

“Yeah, actually! Were you at the meeting she spoke at, too?”

“The meeting?” she laughed. “I was at a meeting with Angelika, where a woman gave that speech. A couple weeks later, Angelika was called up to speak, and she gave the same exact speech, practically word for word. I think the woman was even there.”

I was dying. “Did she credit her at least?”

“No. And Angelika has given that same speech every single time she’s been called, for like the last three or four years. At first I thought it was bizarre, but then I realized, that’s just Angelika!”

Angelika indeed. Never change, cuz. ♦

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BOSTON RUNS ON DUNKIN’… ENMESHMENT

I know you’re familiar with Boston. So you’ve probably heard of our whole thing with Dunkin’ Donuts.

Our thing. Well, for the record, I’ve never been quite as on board with the place as my fellow Bostonians are, and especially not as much as my family is. I find the place a bit sugary. A bit unsubtle. It’s not like I won’t go there, but it really is a few-times-a-year kinda thing with me. They make a decent blueberry muffin. And I think the Boston cream donut is all right.

Everyone has their Dunkin’ order, though. My Aunt Joan always orders a large coffee with eleven milks and two Equals. Yes — she has an exact number of pumps of milk that she specifies, and it is in the double digits. And yes — she does have a Dunkin’ where this order is “the usual,” and where she knows the personal business of every teenage girl working behind the counter.

Joan and my Aunt Catherine go to Dunkin’ every single day. Multiple times a day. If for some reason you cannot find them, there are definitely Dunkin’ locations where you stand a decent chance of locating them, or at least of talking to someone who knows where they are. Because they inevitably share their entire life stories with their Dunkin’ girls, becoming enmeshed with them in the same way Dr. Isaac Herschkopf was with his psychiatry patients.

Joan is an office manager for a hospice company, and frequently decides she is going to help one of her Dunkin’ girls live out her very own Horatio Alger story, freeing her from her pink-and-orange Dunkin’ garb by giving her an office job.

Every time, this goes horribly. Things always start with Joan crowing about what a wonderful thing she is doing for the girl, raising her up by her bootstraps; then, they gradually devolve into “problems” with the new hire; and finally, one day, a tearful announcement is made that Joan had to let the girl go.

My Nana and I would call it “The Cycle,” and we thought it was hilarious. Nana lived with Joan and Joan’s husband Craig at the end of her life, and I would call her every day on the phone to talk (until the day she died). So she’d keep me updated on Joan and her new hires:

“So what else is new, Nana?”

“Well, let’s see. Joan hired a new girl from the Dunkin’ Donuts. Destiny.”

“Oooh! The Cycle has begun?! Where in the Cycle are we?”

“Well … apparently Destiny has been having a hard time showing up to work on time.”

We’d both start cracking up. (We laughed a lot on our phone calls.)

Nana and I always wondered if the girls ended up going back to work at the Dunkin’, or if Joan had left them totally jobless and bereft. Once a girl had been disappeared, however, she was off-limits for discussion with my aunt.

One thing was certain, though: even repeated failures to acclimate these bright, young fast food workers to office work were not going to stop Joan from trying again. And again. And again.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

A FAMILY AFFAIR

My Aunt Catherine really takes the coffee cake when it comes to her Dunkin’ order, though. Catherine doesn’t just leave the place with a lahge regulah and a donut. Indeed, she has, on multiple occasions, walked out of the place with new, adopted family members.

Yes, Catherine has fully “adopted” numerous Dunkin’ girls over the years. None officially, at least that I know of. If any of her adopted daughters ever got that honor though, it was probably Jacqui. (Yes, that’s how she spells it.)

Jacqui is a very attractive Brazilian girl, who may or may not have her own mother. Regardless, one day, about twelve years ago, Catherine — or “Cathy,” as she is wont to be called when she is at Dunks — walked out with a teenaged Jacqui on her arm, and has been calling her her daughter ever since. Day after day, to anyone who will — or won’t — listen.

Jacqui even lived with Cathy, her second husband Roland, and my cousins Timothy and Stephanie, at some point. One day, Jacqui began appearing at family birthday parties and holidays, where she was introduced to us as our cousin, news to us. Breathless updates about Jacqui’s life were provided to Nana every day, when Catherine called her on her drive home from work.

“Your granddaughter Jacqui enrolled in her teaching program today,” Catherine would brag. “I was so fuckin’ proud of her. I told her, that’s my daughter!”

“Wow, darling. Isn’t that wonderful,” Nana would respond.

I have to say, if Jacqui was indeed our cousin, she made an unusual, and somewhat uncomfortable, addition to the family — especially for some of my male family members. Both my brother and Jacqui’s (presumable?) brother, Timothy, wanted to fuck her, although I don’t think either one of them ever did. (Catherine would have had a heart attack if they had.)

Jacqui did date one of our second cousins, though. James, a dentist who lives up in New Hampshire. The two of them met at a family reunion for the northern New England branch of our extended family. They had a torrid, six-week romance, which led to a horrible, drama-filled breakup.

That didn’t stop Jacqui from showing up at the family reunion again the next summer, though, despite James saying he never wanted to see her again, and the reunion being at his house. She is family, after all! This led to a huge scene, tears, and our side of the family not being invited to the get-together since.

(Not a huge bummer for me, to be honest. I don’t typically attend these events. But I wasn’t surprised when Nana told me about it all, either — Jacqui obviously took after her mother, Catherine. She did things her way.)

ARTS AND CRAFTS AND SINGERS AND SONGWRITERS

Catherine is one of my mother’s older sisters. She’s probably around 60 years old now. I was much closer with Catherine when I was a kid. She would look after my brother Harris and me a lot back then, making the two of us more like siblings with our cousins Timothy and Stephanie.

I had a fun time over at Catherine’s house. I would play Super Mario Brothers with Timothy on his Super Nintendo, and sometimes go and play with the girls who lived in their neighborhood. We would use sticks to draw pictures in a patch of dirt in the backyard that refused to grow into grass. (Eventually, the girls all got in a huge fight over who I was spending time drawing with, to my horror. Not the first time I have been completely oblivious as to what is actually going on with me and girls.)

Catherine has had a multitude of jobs over the years, and back then, she worked at a bank and had a side business selling themed cakes. So her kitchen was constantly in action, and I would watch her use piping bags to decorate her cakes to look like a cow, or Mickey Mouse, or Santa Claus, whatever the theme was. She was really good at making cakes, and at creating decorations out of markers, construction paper and other supplies, too.

Our larger family often spent the holidays at Catherine’s. She always did a marvelous job at Thanksgiving (except for putting rice in the stuffing for several years). Her first husband, Frank, would play that song “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” by Arlo Guthrie, and Catherine would sob hysterically when she said grace.

After Catherine and her sisters had drunk enough, the boots usually came out. My mother and all of my aunts were obsessed with boots. One year, I remember them clearing the living room furniture and all two-stepping to “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” by Nancy Sinatra. (Without a doubt, my family are showmen, all of us.)

Catherine always made holidays fun for us kids. We decorated Easter eggs with her. Made Valentine’s Day cards for our classmates. Carved pumpkins and made cupcakes with orange frosting for Halloween. Googly eyes went on a lot of things.

Catherine also loved to color, and had her own signature way of doing so. Each part of a picture was outlined with a marker of an appropriate color, then gently shaded in, with a pristinely sharpened crayon. You could clock a work of Catherine’s instantly, by its vividly colored edges.

The kids would color with Catherine a lot, too, either at her house, or up at my grandparents’ lake house in Quebec. She loved to play her favorite music, almost exclusively singers and songwriters from the ’70s (her heyday), while we colored. She liked songs like “Tin Man,” by America, “Band on the Run” by Paul McCartney & Wings, “So Far Away” by Carole King, and, especially, “Aubrey” by Bread.

For the record, I loved this. I thought, and continue to believe, that AM Gold slaps. The radio vixen Delilah was basically the only game on the radio once you drove up to northern New Hampshire, and all of us loved her golden voice and groovy tunes. Catherine would often lead us children in song, like we were the von Trapp Family Singers and she was Julie Andrews.

I remember one afternoon, driving to the grocery store in tiny Coaticook, Quebec, in the back of my mother’s hearse, harmonizing to “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas & the Papas, as we flew past the dairy and strawberry farms that dot the landscape.

MAIN CHARACTER MUSIC

If you know someone with main character syndrome, or perhaps follow them online, you will have no trouble understanding Catherine. Catherine invented main character syndrome. And she has a particularly bad case of main character syndrome when it comes to music.

There are many songs, you see, that are Catherine’s songs. And each song has a story behind it:

“Forever in Blue Jeans” by Neil Diamond is her song with her second husband, Roland, and according to Catherine, it describes their carefree relationship perfectly. Jimmy Connolly, a boy from the old neighborhood, told her one afternoon in the early ’80s that “Crimson and Clover,” by Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, was his song to her, but she never figured out why. Catherine listened to “Live for Loving You” by Gloria Estefan when she baked, and had a signature move for it, where she twirled her wooden spoon when Gloria went, “Oooh, la la la la la la la!”

After Trump’s shock election in 2016, Catherine called Nana in tears, wondering, in between sobs, how America could have elected that horrible man, and lamented that if she had the world’s ears, she would sing the song “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” by The New Seekers, because it was a perfect summation of her political philosophy and aspirations for mankind.

“Aubrey” by Bread, we were told, many times, was the name she wished she had named Stephanie. The beauty of this song, and of the name Aubrey, was so drilled into Stephanie’s (and the rest of our) heads that, a few years ago, when Stephanie had her own daughter, she named her — you guessed it — Aubrey.

I bonded over music with Catherine a lot. I never quite understood why she felt praising Wings necessitated disparaging The Beatles, but still. About ten years ago, as a thank you for some help they had given me, I took Joan and Catherine to a Stevie Nicks concert at TD Garden in Boston. The Pretenders were her opener. How sick is that?

For all the women in my family, Stevie is their ultimate icon, as I know she is for many women. They dressed like her, they sang with her, they mirrored her journey through mental illness and substance abuse. So it went over really well as a gift, as I knew it would.

They both got dolled up in their ’70s garb, promptly got sloshed, and when Stevie started singing “Gold Dust Woman,” from her days with Fleetwood Mac, they went into a trancelike state, in which they appeared to be either conjuring a spirit, or being possessed by one. It was very dark, very smoky, witchy, Pocahontasy energy.

I was transfixed. The power of Stevie Nicks, people.

PUMPKIN BOY AND CHICK-CHICK GIRL

Since her granddaughter was already named after a song, I’m not sure if Catherine ever made up her own song for Aubrey. But when we were kids, she made up nicknames, and songs, for both of my cousins.

Timothy was “Pumpkin Boy,” and his song, in a sort of nursery rhyme singsong, was “Pumpkin boy, pumpkin’ boy! Sweet little lovin’ little angel boy!” (Timothy did not love that all of the cousins called him Pumpkin Boy for the rest of his life, after that.)

Stephanie, on the other hand, was known as “Chick-Chick Girl,” and her song was a little rockabilly-esque. It went, “Hey little chick, little chick-chick girl! Hey little chick, I’m gonna rock your world!”

We would sometimes call Stephanie Chick-Chick Girl, but our preferred nickname for her was “Bubble Girl,” because she sucked her thumb until she was 12 or 13, leaving a raised piece of skin on her thumb that formed into a bubble. (Yeah, little kids are mean.)

While Stephanie and Timothy are co-holders of the Jason Waterfalls Lifetime Achievement Award for Most Bizarre Misheard Song Lyrics, they too are musical like their mother. When he was five, Timothy’s Catholic school did a pageant, where they performed this hilarious song that went, “I am the church, you are the church, we are the church to-ge-ther! All who follow Jesus, all around the world! Yes, we’re the church to-ge-ther!”

Timothy really blew it out with his facial expressions, jazz hands, and pantomime during the song. He was the star. When Catherine went to the altar for communion during the Mass portion of the evening, she pocketed the host instead of eating it. The priest chased her back down the aisle, and commanded her to swallow it.

She was pissed, and cussed him out.

THE SPOON MAN

Catherine’s main character syndrome went far beyond songs. Sometimes, she’d make herself the main character on the actual news, being featured in local outlets repeatedly, always for memorable reasons.

Her very first media appearance was because of The Spoon Man.

You see, when us kids were elementary school age, Timothy went to a primary school down the street from Catherine’s house. The school had a big field, separated from the main road by a chain-link fence. One spring, for several weeks in a row, a lonely man would pull his car up to the fence, and when the kids were out at recess, he would take out metal spoons and click them together, doing some rinky-dink musical number to entertain them.

For the record, no one really knew what The Spoon Man’s true intentions were in clicking his spoons for the kids, innocent or not. But there absolutely were teachers out at recess with the kids, which is how Catherine ended up getting wind of The Spoon Man to begin with.

None of that mattered to Catherine, who loves nothing more than an opportunity to arch her back up and act first, leaving the questions for later (if at all). As soon as she heard about this old man and his musical spoons, her mind went immediately to pedophilia and molestation, and she roared down to the school in her Kia at recess time, to give The Spoon Man a piece of her mind.

Apparently, this caused a huge scene at the chain-link fence, which escalated when The Spoon Man began to make a hasty retreat, and Catherine started trailing him in her car. She eventually chased him into an empty church, where she ran him literally up to the altar, stuck her finger in his face, and told him that, if he ever came clicking his spoons again, or put his fuckin’ hands on her kids, or any of those kids, she would fuckin’ kill him. (“Fuck” is practically a definite article or adverb in Catherine’s vocabulary, and it peppers her speech with a frequency and ferocity matched only by hardened sailors. And she says it the Boston way, fahken.)

Catherine followed this performance with a call to the local ABC news affiliate, where she was portrayed as a heroic Mama Bear, defending her cubs, and mortified teachers and students were interviewed about The Spoon Man.

Who, incidentally, has neither been seen nor heard from since.

HORRIFIED AND AMAZED

Another time, Catherine and her first husband, Frank, hired a Saul Goodman–type local attorney to handle some legal work for them. After a few meetings and phone calls, however, the lawyer stopped returning Catherine’s messages. So she decided to go down to his office, near Thayer Academy in Braintree, Massachusetts, and investigate. (Catherine loves an investigation.)

She soon discovered that the lawyer had abruptly closed up shop and absconded, throwing all of his clients’ confidential files in a giant dumpster behind his office.

Catherine rifled through the dumpster, finding her files, before she called up The Patriot Ledger with her scoop.

Within days, she was on the front page, in a large picture of her, holding a bunch of files in the air, with a conspiratorial look on her face. It was very “Catherine investigates.” There was even a gigantic pull quote on the front page alongside her picture, where the newspaper quoted her as being “horrified and amazed” by what she had found.

For years after this, everyone in our family was horrified and amazed about everything. It was honestly a pretty apt phrase for much that occurred in Catherine’s world.

ANIMAL FARM

Catherine lived largely in a world of her own creation. This extended to her house, a colonial home known as the Asa Bradford house, which dates back to the 1700s and is on the historical register. Thematically, Catherine loves strawberries and roosters, and you could find them all over the house, on embroidered pillows, tables, the wallpaper, and in the cabinets, along with the good china.

Contemporary times have definitely caught up with Catherine’s neighborhood, as there is a strip mall across the street, featuring a Family Dollar and a Chinese restaurant, where Cathy and Roland go to play Keno.

This has not stopped Catherine from turning her property into a veritable farm, though. Over the years, she has had countless dogs, cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, and ferrets, many of whom have died in traffic, or been swiftly put down after biting a neighbor. (The deadliest profession in the world is being one of Catherine’s dogs.)

My brother and I were asked to babysit some of her animals a few times, when Catherine and her family went down to Florida to visit my grandparents at their Tampa house. I never understood the point of having a pet guinea pig, rabbit, or ferret. All they ever did was sit in their cages, shit, and shiver, like The Spoon Man had at the end of Catherine’s finger.

Having animals was a way of life for Catherine, though. When she was a girl, my grandfather domesticated a raccoon, which they called Ricky, as a pet for his kids. One of the neighbors, afraid of rabies, ended up poisoning it, apparently.

My grandfather, who we called Ganka, also got his kids a black horse, named April, who Catherine would ride for hours and hours at the (actual) small farm she was kept at, down the street from the family home in Weymouth, Massachusetts.

THE TWO BLACK PIGS

Having a horse as a girl left quite an impression on Catherine, and if she could’ve afforded it, I’m sure she would’ve loved to keep one in the small barn she has on her own property.

The closest she has ever come to a real farm animal, though, are her two pigs, who, like their owner, were seemingly destined for the spotlight.

After Ganka died, everyone in my extended family clamored for a chunk of Nana’s cash, knowing she was far more likely to let go of it than my grandfather ever was. One of Catherine’s financial requests was for the money to buy two pigs, which, for some reason, Nana granted.

The pigs were ostensibly a gift for Stephanie’s sweet sixteen. Us kids were thrilled when Catherine told us she was buying two pigs, thinking they would be cute and cuddly pink things, like the pig from Babe.

That is not what these pigs were. They were two black, warthog-like, very ornery, very coarse-haired pigs, who were unfriendly and physically dangerous to people. They (I can’t remember their names) lived in a fenced-in area in Catherine’s backyard.

For years, they were kept back there, grunting and snorting and remaining distinctly unsociable. Catherine would go to the pet store twice a month to buy their expensive food, telling them both to fuck off as they stormed at her.

Eventually, Catherine got tired of this rigmarole — as she tended to with most of the animals she took in — and decided to give the pigs away. Fortunately, one day, she met a woman — I am assuming at Dunkin’ — who owned an actual farm somewhere, and struck up a conversation with her. They ended up agreeing that the woman would take the two pigs, so that Catherine could be free of them, and they would have a nice new home.

In the days leading up to the pigs’ rehoming, Catherine let out a seemingly endless sigh of relief. She was so fuckin’ glad to be done with those goddamn pigs!

But then, something horrible happened — at least, horrible by Catherine’s logic. One afternoon, after the pigs had been at the farm for a few weeks, she logged onto Facebook — Catherine was a big Facebooker, for a time — and discovered that the farm was posting pictures and videos of the pigs, with kids and families coming to pet and play with them.

For the life of me, I could not tell you why this upset Catherine so much. Seemingly, the pigs having company and being loved should have come as welcome news. But seeing this woman put the pigs on Facebook like this — yep, you guessed it — horrified and amazed Catherine.

She was livid, and emotional, and acted like the woman was airing torture porn of the two pigs, tying them up and branding them, or something. This led Catherine to make a speedy journey two towns over, to the farm, where she cussed the woman out to within an inch of her life, took the pigs back, and returned them to her backyard, where they have been living, and consuming their biweekly portion of expensive pig food, since.

THE SAGA OF THE BUMBLEBEE

In addition to the real-life animal dramas on Catherine’s farm, there have also been donnybrooks involving fake ones. The saga of the bumblebee comes to mind.

In her front yard, which had a pretty garden she tended to as a hobby, Catherine had placed a metallic bumblebee, which was made out of scrap metal and painted in bumblebee black and yellow. It really did look nice, and Catherine was proud of it. It had a friendly, jaunty appearance, leaving an impression on passersby on the road.

One day, an old man even knocked on the door, to ask Catherine about it. As it turned out, his wife had noticed the bumblebee, loved it, and remarked upon it every time they drove by. He wanted to know where Catherine had bought it, so he could buy his wife one for her upcoming birthday.

This is when the legend of the bumblebee began. And, just like the Grinch’s heart at the end of the story, did the legend grow and grow!

According to Catherine, she found the bumblebee at a flea market, when she went down to Florida to visit Nana and Ganka with Frank. She had taken it back to my grandparents’ and fixed it up with my grandmother, painting the bee its bright colors as their mother-daughter bond deepened in a Hallmarkian way. It was a very special thing, and one of her most precious memories with her mother. Long story short, the bumblebee was one-of-a-kind.

Nana’s version of the story, by the way, was quite different. When she was told what Catherine said about their bumblebee moment, she laughed and said that Catherine and Frank had spent the entirety of that Florida trip hanging out with a bunch of hillbillies at the biker bar down the street from my grandparents’ gated retirement community. She and Catherine stopped at the flea market on one of the last days of the trip, were there for no more than 15 minutes, and purchased the bumblebee with zero fanfare. And that was the first and last time Nana had ever heard of it. She absolutely did not remember ever fixing it up or painting it with Catherine.

This did not matter to Catherine, though, and the bumblebee became even more special to her when the man showed up at her house a second time, wanting to buy the bumblebee off of her, at a very favorable price.

No way, she told him. This was, after all, a bumblebee that she and her mother had worked on together for years, putting it together from scratch, and that, when they finished painting it, under a double-rainbowed sky, had begun to shed tears like a statue of the Blessed Mother. How on earth could she ever part with it?

The best she could do was to let him take a few pictures of it, so he could find something similar to get for his wife. The man figured he would take what he could get, dutifully took some photos and thanked her.

But, just a few short weeks later, he turned up again. He had had no luck tracking down anything quite like Catherine’s bumblebee. And now, he wanted to take physical possession of the bumblebee, so that a friend of his could measure it and construct him one from scratch.

This is when Catherine put her back up and went The Spoon Man on the poor guy, cursing him off of her property, and telling him that if he ever showed up again, she would call the fahken police. How dare he try to take the last thing she and her dying mother had ever worked on together and experienced the rare phenomenon of mutual stigmata while painting?

The last visit was followed by weeks of vigilant paranoia that the man was going to come by and steal the bumblebee, so it was moved to the backyard, where it remains today.

Out front, Catherine left a sign reading:

MR. BUMBLE FUCK: COME BUZZING AROUND MY HIVE AGAIN AND YOU’RE GONNA GET STUNG. SIGNED, THE QUEEN BEE.

POST-OP, HOT TOPIC, SCHOOL BUS DYKE

For much of her adult life, Catherine struggled with her weight. Around when she turned 40, she had gastric bypass surgery, which turned her into a tiny little thing. Her new physique made her excited about buying and wearing clothes again, and led to a number of lifestyle and personality changes over the years.

One day, she started buying clothes from Hot Topic and Forever 21, at the South Shore Plaza in Braintree, Massachusetts. This disgusted my mother, who said her sister was dressing and acting like a sixteen-year-old. All the kids in the family thought it was hilarious. And Catherine was definitely doing it to be provocative, although all the weight loss significantly affected her ability to hold her liquor, so a big part of it was also just being kind of a lush at that point, and making delusional choices.

It was also during this period that Catherine switched careers. Over the years, she had worked as a banker, a part-time baker, a union official, and at a shipping company. But by far, her most memorable career is the one she tried her hand at during this transformative time in her life: school bus driver.

Catherine not only became a bus driver; she deeply acclimated into bus driver culture. I don’t know how she both got the kids to school on time and knew the business of every mother on the route, but she did. Everyone knew her. That’s a whole lot of screaming out of a folding door.

Life during this time was very much a Magic School Bus kind of vibe for Catherine, and she tried lots of new fun fashions then, too.

At one point, noticing that a lot of the other lady school bus drivers shaved their heads, she decided to, too. This was accompanied by Sinéad O’Connor–esque attire and references.

It actually turned out that most of these buzzcut lady bus drivers were lesbians, and on account of Catherine’s haircut, and the fact that she cursed like a sailor, they assumed she was, too.

I was in middle school at the time. Catherine knew my bus driver, who was a Black lesbian with a shaved head, and played “Got Your Money” by Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Kelis while driving 12-year-old children reading their Harry Potter books. She ended up inviting Catherine out to what turned out to be a lesbian biker bar with the other lesbian bus drivers.

Mizz Frizzle definitely don’t be swingin’ that way even a little, j’know what I’m sayin’? So she had to break it to her colleagues that she was straight. But, it was a night she never forgot, and one that every Dunkin’ Donuts girl in a five-mile vicinity surely heard about.

When I was in high school, Catherine asked me for a mix CD of the music I was listening to, so I made her one. (Apparently there was jealousy from my other aunts about this. Don’t you miss mix CDs?) I put “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” by Cake and “Loser” by Beck on it, and she became obsessed with them. Especially the Cake song.

I had given her the nickname Kitty at one point, because my high school mentor, former three-term nonconsecutive Massachusetts governor and 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, had a wife named Catherine, too, and she went by Kitty (#riptoarealone). I thought it was a kicky name.

Everyone in the family took to calling Catherine Kitty, too, so she loved the line in the song that went, “she’s changing her name from Kitty to Karen / she’s trading her MG for a white Chrysler LeBaron.” Except in her case, it was a white Kia Sportage.

Catherine went to Paris once, with my grandparents and a few of her sisters. She hasn’t traveled much in life, and the trip was a big deal to her. It was actually very sweet. Her stories reminded me of that short with Margo Martindale in Paris, je t’aime (2006), where she plays a postal worker who visits the city. Except it was Catherine, so it was full of hilarious events, like a homeless person refusing her offer of bread, because it was Portuguese bread and not a baguette. (I love that even French hobos are snobs.)

Catherine fell in love with the city, and it became her personality for months afterward. She even redecorated one of the rooms in her house to become “the Paris room,” which was later converted into the Paris laundry room.

♦

What else is there to say about my Aunt Catherine?

In addition to being a character herself, I have seen flashes of Catherine in many TV characters over the years — Mrs. Patmore from Downton Abbey (Stephanie is Daisy), Carla Tortelli (Rhea Perlman) from Cheers, Roseanne, and Jerri Blank from Strangers with Candy. Catherine, aka Cathy, aka Kitty, contains multitudes.

I had a lot of fun with her as a kid. She spent a lot of time watching me, and I always felt safe and loved, even though she yelled a lot, and seemed to get angry very easily.

These days, I keep my distance from her, as I do with most of my family. Living in a fairy tale world may suit her — and I do astonish myself with my ability to conjure sometimes — but as an adult, I find that living in the real world better suits my mental health and overall functionality.

That doesn’t mean I don’t love her, though. Or have many fond memories of her.

The last time I spoke with Catherine was over text, right after Nana died. I found her obituary in The Patriot Ledger, and was surprised to learn that, in addition to Jacqui, I had two other cousins who I had never heard of before.

I was upset, and knew it was Catherine’s work immediately. I texted her:

“Earth to Catherine/Jacqui: you either get to fuck our cousin or be our cousin. Pick one. We are from Massachusetts, not West Virginia.

“… And who the fuck are Patrick Joseph and Aiden?!”

Love you, Kitty! ♦

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