Big Fish Energy
Looking back at it now, I’m not sure how Diane and I became friends. She is Catholic, I’m an atheist. She carried a color-coded, Lily Pulitzer planner, while I didn’t have a pen half the time. She spent her free time volunteering with her co-ed community service fraternity, while I spent most of my time in the library trying to learn physics.
Regardless, we fell into a pattern of a standard Wednesday lunch date at the far end of campus, a half mile walk from the apartment that I shared with three strangers from the prestigious music school nearby. These lunches felt obligatory, to me, while I assume generative to Diane. We would talk non-stop, the entire time, but about what I couldn’t tell you.
We would always part ways right at the hour mark, my invention, a pattern that she remained blissfully unaware of. I must have always said things that helped her, though, because she would always exhale and dramatically throw her shoulders towards the ground and explain how much better she felt. I would usually offer an awww which would escape from my throat like an acerbic belches that come after you vomit, followed by an I’m glad I could help and a half-hug before ambling off and thinking about how the course of my life would not be altered if I never saw her again.
During the final semester of college, somewhere on or about May 2015, Diane delivered the news to me that she would be moving to New Brunswick, New Jersey to work as the in-house Social Media Manager for a furniture company. She described the company as “three steps above IKEA, two steps below Article” and the role as “two levels above entry level” because of her “work abroad” (she did a study abroad internship in London).
Diane’s news was a coincidence in the context that I had, several weeks prior, accepted a job working for a company that manufactures microscopes and other equipment for commercial laboratories around the world, also based in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It was a sales job, something that I was entirely uninterested in, but I would be well compensated and the company had offices all over the country should New Brunswick prove inadequate.
Inadequacy, or its related characterizations, has never been a concern of mine. Moving to New Brunswick, a place I’d never been, known mainly for Rutgers University and being somewhat close to New York City, would work just fine for me. Unlike most people, I was never searching for the perfect pair of shoes.. I was completely fine with whatever random offering came my way, and I never complained about it.
Diane, on the other hand, had an entire five-year plan, of which New Brunswick was a crucial stepping stone. She’d work at the “lesser known” furniture company for two to two point five years before “selling out” to work for a more luxury-oriented brand, based in New York City, where she claimed she felt most at home (she’s from Florida).
Once we arrived in New Brunswick, Diane hit the ground running, organizing social events for other recent college graduates (YoPros, her term, a portmanteau meaning Young Professionals) living and working in the nearby area. She would regularly reach out to schedule brunch or after work drinks or, once my silence was read as evasion, a simple evening walk. I used nearly every excuse in the book before I finally agreed to attend one of her events: the Meetup Mashups, as she called them.
These Meetup Mashups were Diane’s way of channeling Big Fish energy in a small, strange place like New Brunswick for two to two point five years until she moved to New York, where she would inevitably become a Little Fish Again.
I do have to hand it to her, however. She was excellent at working the room at these events. She looked stately, like a Senator’s wife, in a navy shift dress that sported a conservative neckline and elbow length sleeves. Recognizing the importance of implied sexuality to an otherwise stuffy look, she wore nude (elegant) dagger-like (suggestive) stilettos, a thin pearl necklace, and a glass of red wine from which she never took a sip (Diane doesn’t drink, so she uses this as just another accessory, communicating a sort of down for anything je ne sais quoi).
After attending the first, Meet Up Mashup I realized I had re-opened the floodgates in our relationship. The occasional text for one-on-one plans led to my inclusion in a number of group texts with several nameless, faceless contacts, attempts to make plans for group trips to Broadway, the beach, the Pine Barrens, and of course, Brunch. The texts would pile up, going unanswered as the full lifecycle of a plan unfolded before me. If I wasn’t attending these ancillary plans, I had to show up to the next Mashup.
After arriving at these things, I spent most of the time thinking about how I really ought to get one of those sleek leather backpacks everyone had to replace the tattered Jansport backpack that gives off the impression that it’s full of dirty socks and condoms. I normally kept this backpack slung over one shoulder while Diane’s friend Lucinda, a portly blonde woman who confusingly took to me at these things, told me about her Irish ancestry.
I’d usually arrive about 30 minutes late, and leave within the hour.
Something urgent on a new account just came up, I’d exclaim, but we will definitely do brunch, soon!
Yes! Brunch! Diane would reply, introducing me, again, to whomever she was speaking with as her friend from college.
Her hand would land on my far shoulder before slowly crisscrossing my back and reaching my elbow, where it would settle in a curious cupped position. She’d remark to the other person how I was the one who pushed her to start these things. This person would remark how great my encouragement was. New Brunswick needed something like this. Happy to help, I’d chuckle, having no idea what I said that provided this encouragement, wondering if Diane could feel the tension in my body as her hand cupped my elbow.
The venues available to Diane for her meetups were not Big Fish venues. They were spare classrooms at Rutgers, a conference room at the Hyatt, even the meeting room at the VFW in Piscataway once. The type of spaces that served no purpose except to hold a haphazard group of strangers for an extremely short period of time. The fluorescent lighting of these spaces have Diane’s instagram photos a terrible, hollowed out quality that I could not imagine would entice a random Instagram interloper to attend these events on their own free will. The rooms were always too cold and if Diane managed to scrape together enough money for caterers, they were always stned, rude, or both.
Maybe it was these failures of industrial design or the palpable distress of people who found themselves working as suburban caterers when they probably wanted to be actors that made me so squeamish. Unlike Diane, I did drink, although usually alone in a bathroom stall beforehand so that I could loosen up my gut and get through the evening without the discomfort that socializing while sober brought me.
Once I was able to escape Diane’s elbow, I’d take a long walk home, stopping at a gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes and a stick of beef jerky. By the time I’d get home, I’d drink a couple of beers before converting my couch into my bed and sleeping just past 11AM.
In the mornings after the Mashups, I would wake up and look at Diane and Lucinda’s Instagram stories to see what I had avoided in generating an urgent need for microscope sales at 7:47PM on a Friday Night. The YoPros would end up going to some fancy, dark bar near College Ave where sparklers were involved. The Instagram Stories would last until after midnight, picking back up shortly after 10AM with slightly askew photographs of workout statistics at a place called OrangeTheory Fitness. I’d press my finger on the screen to hold the story in its place, squinting to attempt an interpretation at the statistics before dropping my phone on my face.
If you were to look deeper into Diane’s Instagram page, there’s one photo of us. The caption reads, “From College to NB Vibes” followed by an emoji of an American flag and a stack of books. She’s dressed for an interview while I wear a button down that fits my torso weird. If some curious interloper wanted to use this photo as a jumping off point to see what I’m all about, it wouldn’t be super fun. I’ve never posted a photo on Instagram and my tagged photos are limited to this photo of us.
Did this make me mysterious? I’d sometimes wonder. Perhaps… how intriguing it is to find someone in their early 20s who didn’t constantly feed Instagram’s algorithm information about which products to advertise to you until you finally break down and hit purchase. But my reluctance to use the account really wasn’t about anything deeper than not knowing what to post.
One day after missing the previous few Meetup Mashups I accidentally took a photo and posted it to my Instagram story. I was at Donaldson Park at dusk, along the Raritan River. I decided to take a photo of the sunset but couldn’t get an angle wide enough to catch the full expanse of the landscape. I remembered that Instagram’s camera somehow worked around this limitation of the typical iPhone camera, so I snapped the picture and put my phone back in my pocket. When the phone slid into my pocket, I must have hit post because Diane immediately replied.
OMG!!! Where are you? Take me next time!!!!!
I pretended like I didn’t see it for hours because I didn’t want to tell Diane that I was at Donaldson Park to meet a guy who posted an advertisement for a quick, anonymous blowjob on Reddit. I suspected, of course, that she would be horrified by the concept of this, which I realized I didn’t need to tell her at all — I could just have driven by and snapped a pic of a beautiful sunset. But that wasn’t typical of my behavior on Instagram and what if she had seen the post from earlier that day made by someone with the username magicaldicksurprise who said they were 6 feet tall, 150 pounds, and looking for someone who could suck off their hard cock at Donaldson Park. She wouldn’t, of course, have seen this, but my mind went there and I decided to ignore her indefinitely, or at least for a couple of weeks.
I, of course, did meet magicaldicksurpise at Donaldson Park that night, regardless of my Instagram error and I did suck him off like he wanted. I did it in his car, which was a pick-up truck, and I did it regardless of the fact that he hadn’t been 150 pounds for several years, by my estimation. He was nice enough, like most of the guys I met this way, and he even stroked my hair while I gave him head. We didn’t talk very much before or after. He came relatively quickly, exhaling with a rather cacophonous orgasm that caused his legs to shake.
I had never tried any of the other, I guess, more traditional methods of getting dates since moving to New Brunswick, or even in college, or ever really. The sanitized nature of my relationship with Diane and people from other phases of my life, really, allowed me to avoid any sort of I Have to Introduce You To My Friend conversations and I sometimes, albeit rarely, wondered if people who knew me would say to each other, Hey What’s His Deal?
But on Reddit, I could cut straight to what I wanted. People would rarely post pictures with their advertisements — only their age and some stats; height, weight, sexual orientation, cock size, and the details of exactly what each user was looking for; something like this:
24M, Throbbing cock looking for a release. I’m six feet two inches tall, pretty jacked, and
hung. Looking for anyone to come by for some fun. I’ll smoke you up and give you the big load
I have waiting for a special someone. If you wanna suck a stud’s hard cock, send a DM.
While I appreciate the specifics of how a man looks, you know, six feet tall, hung, jacked, etc.. I don’t really discriminate against the men I pursue. I’m intrigued by all types of men, and the directness of this method of meeting them cuts out everything I usually hate dealing with: meeting, greeting, the whole song-and-dance of it all, you know?
A couple of days after the Instagram story mix-up, Diane wrote me a long message on Instagram. At first my heart sank to my feet thinking that she had finally decided to confront me for my flakiness, or for the fact that she put forth all of the energy in our relationship. I quickly closed out of the Instagram app and shoved my phone into the cushions of my couch, which was in couch form, and tried to busy myself by making a tuna fish sandwich and cleaning the fridge. As I was pushing on the middle shelf of my fridge with a Clorox Wipe, which was characteristically empty, I must have found a section where the glass had degraded because I soon found my arm wearing the shelf like an enormous bracelet.
Miraculously, I only slightly grazed the outside of my thumb with the broken glass and was able to pull my arm out without developing further abrasions. I dropped down to the ground beside the fridge and used the Clorox Wipe to sop up blood that had risen to the surface with that type of logic that sits in the back of your brain telling you that the wipe was also disinfecting the wound.
The bleeding stopped quickly, at which point I decided to ask myself why I felt so anxious about having a potentially relationship-ending confrontation with Diane. We didn’t have any gut wrenching, belly-laugh inducing memories that are indicative of a deep connection. We had no shared language, either, no encyclopedia containing inside jokes or pet names. In fact, in that moment I realized that our entire relationship could be distilled down to two composite memories: our weekly dining hall lunches in college and the Meetup Mashups where I would interact with her, directly, for a collective two minutes at most. Perhaps, it was the fact that I was bleeding out of my hand because I wanted to avoid her, but I was suddenly hit with a pang of guilt for keeping her at such a distance for the entire time that I knew her.
She had an entire interior life that I largely knew nothing about; I knew what she did every day over the course of our college years, actions that would be observable to anyone who was reviewing surveillance footage, and yet the only true facts I knew about her were that her favorite band is Imagine Dragons and she is Catholic, or was raised Catholic?, the status of that Catholicism, I really knew not of.
And yet, when I would think about potentially trying to get closer to her in a meaningful way, I would call those two facts to mind and force quit her image from my mind. I startled myself by how quickly I leaped up from the floor towards the couch cushion where my phone was stored. My limbs, which I often lost track of in ambulating, swung wildly. This was bad news for my newly healed thumb-skin, which hit the wooden frame of my couch and began spurting blood anew. I was suddenly out-of-breath and decided that what I needed the most was to lay on the floor like a starfish while I read Diane’s message.
I pressed my bleeding hand into the hardwood floor, lazily recalling that wood was hypertonic and would potentially suck the blood from the surface of my body into its long deceased cells, while I propped my phone a foot above my eyes. It took me several minutes to pull up the Instagram app which I kept in a folder labeled “Tools”. It was to my satisfaction that Diane’s message was the first thing I saw when the app loaded.
Hey, you! the message began, Yes you! It’s me — you’re favorite New Brunswick-prenour. Do I
have big news for you, or what! Not only is next week my 23rd birthday, but it’s also — sadly —
the last week that I will live in the City that I have called my home for the last 1.25 years.
She’s leaving, I thought, breathing out what I conceptualized as a sigh of relief but what
turned out to be just carbon dioxide. The message continued below, which I quickly realized
wasn’t only addressed to me, but to a group of 25 or so Instagram accounts that I did not
follow and that did not follow me.
She explained how she had wanted to live in New Brunswick longer than 15 months, but her company was recently acquired by a larger furniture conglomerate that had offices in the Big Apple (her words) and the concrete jungle was calling (her words, again). She would be gathering at The Unicorn Club for one last hoorah, and an announcement regarding who would be carrying the organizing torch of Meetup Mixups.
A quick Google Search of the Unicorn Club — a place known for their glitter-infused cocktails — revealed a place where I hoped to never find myself, but would find myself in order to salvage whatever remained of my relationship with New Brunswick’s premier event organizer, I guess.
I arrived, of course, late to the party. The venue was large and cubical, resembling the 3D squares that you learned to make in elementary school, I imagined, as I zoomed out and tried to imagine where in the world I found myself.
The entire space was lined with mezzanines where people could stand or sit and watch the people down below, drinking cocktails containing glitter — something I don’t think is meant for human consumption — and grinding on strangers. There were two bars situated on opposite ends of the room with not much else filling the remainder of the space. At the far end of the venue from where I stood, a small group of
people gathered around a chair which Diane stood atop. Despite the enormity of the venue and the fact that this group was not the only group of people in it, it became apparent that I had interrupted something.
Diane’s hands were clutching a collection of papers outlining, I assume, a goodbye speech. When she laid eyes on me approaching the group from the entrance, she paused and shuffled the papers while making eye contact with me. By the time I reached the group, she had resumed her speech, announcing that Lucinda would be taking over all operations of the Meetup Mashups. Lucinda, likely privy to the plan prior to this announcement, clasped her hands together, jumped in place, and wiped back tears as she hugged Diane.
I quickly found myself in the middle of Diane’s group, wildly aware of how impossible it was to position your body so that you are not cutting someone out or standing outside of a group of people having their own conversation.
Yeah, Diane and I went to college together. It’s great. I’m so happy for her. You’re right. New Brunswick won’t be the same without her. I repeated this over and over to what seemed like fifty people before I was able to capture Diane’s attention and say hello.
You made it! She exclaimed.
Her tone was the same as usual, though slightly off. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but it seemed almost as if she was distracted or overwhelmed with tending to her own going away party. I found this peculiar given how this party is no different from the events she regularly hosts, and how easily those events were put together.
I pushed it out of my mind, and replied how I was happy to be there before apologizing for my extended absence. Before I could offer some sort of half-true explanation, she was grabbing my wrist and dragging me to the outer orbits of her going-away-party-mob.
This! she shouted, is Carter.
She motioned with an urgency that denoted significance within her life, towards a tall, brown haired man who looked like he played pick-up soccer in the park after work and always wore a button down shirt no matter the occasion.
Hi, Carter. I replied swiftly, matching Diane’s tone of enthusiasm. It’s great to meet you. You must—I began before stopping to listen to what Carter had to say.
I’ve heard a lot. It’s great to meet you. He extended a huge hand for me to shake.
I received his hand and felt my stomach churn in a way that usually indicated arousal or indigestion, but in this context, I figured it was arousal. His grip was tight and I could feel the mounds of dead skin that had built up on his palms from lifting weights. Diane was glancing around the room, looking for more acquaintances to celebrate her achievement while Carter stared directly into my face as I thought about sucking on his fingers.
I wasn’t sure how much time had passed since he said my name and subsequently gripped my hand—it could have been nanoseconds, or it could have been minutes—so I replied, Sorry it’s so loud
in here; It’s great to meet you too!, despite the fact that it was not that loud in there, and I didn’t know I would be meeting him.
Diane refocused her attention on us and began to explain to Carter how I had encouraged her and such and how she wished she saw me more at the events that I told her everyone would love. I blushed and giggled nervously and then Carter asked me what happened to my hand.
Oh, just a cleaning accident, you know.
He looked at me blankly, which indicated that he did not know. I told them that I had an issue with my fridge, which I figured might be enough explanation until Carter replied asking what kind of an issue. He used to work for an appliance repair service when he was at Rutgers (he wrestled there, of course), and he was sure he could help me.
I could easily imagine him putting on a too-tight screen printed t-shirt in some awful yellow with the title of a business whose name served a purely utilitarian purpose — Bill’s Appliance Repair, or New Jersey Appliance Services or something. He would go into houses of suburban people, some of whom far removed from situations where towering former wrestlers would be twisting things in a too-tight t-shirt before asking for a glass of water.
For a moment, I worried that my facial expression indicated this daydream that I had drifted into, as both Diane and Carter appeared to be waiting for a response. I explained that the issue had been taken care of, turns out that’s what the maintenance service included in my rent is for, haha, despite the fact that there was still a gaping hole on the middle shelf of my fridge, partly containing my own blood. They seemed unfazed however, which gave me a moment to gather my thoughts and say hey I just got here so I need to run to the bathroom.
I exited the group in what could only be described as a scurry and found myself locked in the furthest stall from the entrance to the men’s room. As is typical with these events, I had several nips of Jameson in my pockets, which I quickly downed while sitting on the toilet and thinking about Carter’s hands. They seemed so much larger, the skin so much thicker, than any of the men I had met recently. I couldn’t help myself drifting off and thinking of Carter’s hands slapping Diane’s ass as she rode his dick. I hadn’t stuck around long enough to get the proper context as to who Carter was, but something told me he was a sexual partner of sorts.
I hated thinking of Diane having sex; after so many years of never even grazing the topic of sexuality, she had amassed the sort of asexual energy that you’d attach to a relative or a substitute teacher. But suddenly, it was as if I could almost hear her moans coming through the door of the bathroom stall. Perhaps, what I did next was to remove this image from my head, but before I knew it I had lit a cigarette which I took two large drags of before dropping it into the toilet. I watched it swirl down into the septic system of the Unicorn Lounge when someone started banging on the stall door.
Just a minute, I yelled over the EDM remix of Rihanna’s We Found Love.
No, I need you to get out, the voice replied with authority. Now!
I swiftly opened the stall door and saw a security person standing there. You need to leave, they explained. No smoking inside.
I stood, slack-jawed, and said that I didn’t do anything. They obviously didn’t like that; the smell of smoke was on my clothing and you could see the hazy remnants of the smoke that had just exited my lungs hovering between the two of us. They didn’t dignify my rebuttal with a response other than, Now. Get your things and go. I told them fine, I would leave, and when I exited the bathroom, the image of Diane dancing with a unicorn crown atop her head and Carter affixed to her backside greeted me.
The EDM music caused a group to assemble alongside the sandwich of Diane and Carter. The whole room began to, not so much spin, as tilt, as I approached the group, the number of security guards behind me steadily increasing in number. I blinked several times to try to refocus my gaze and make the room stop its revolution which appeared to work, except for producing an image of Diane and Carter where their hair was bright red and their eyes wider than any human can typically hold for longer than a couple
seconds.
At this point, I realized that not only had I lost track of my backpack, but my shirt had opened up, revealing the white Hanes t-shirt beneath which was completely soaked through with a yellow sweat. I spun around several times trying to figure out where my backpack had gone before realizing that the security guards who had come to me in the bathroom were also now dancing in the group with Diane and Carter, their eyes wider than a full moon; their hair bright red as well.
They beckoned me to come closer, to dance in the group, as well, despite the fact that my shirt was stained with bright yellow, pee-like sweat, and that moments ago, the security guards had been in the process of kicking me out of the establishment for, among likely other things, taking two drags from a cigarette in the bathroom and then lying about it.
Despite the disorientation I felt — where had my belongings gone and why is my sweat the color of a urinal collecting the piss from dehydrated college students — I felt my cock start to swell in my pants. This was the last thing I needed, I thought, as I continued to amble towards the group of people who resembled crazed versions of my friends who exist in a parallel dimension to the black box club in Downtown New Brunswick, New Jersey. The room continued to buckle at the corners, my eyes refusing to focus on one thing, the group of people dancing in a line remaining the same distance from my legs despite the fact that I was putting one foot in front of another, pushing the rotating earth away from me, attempting to close the distance between my now putrid smelling body and those of my, I guess I’d call them, friends.
Did I take something? I asked myself. The feeling I was experiencing was reminiscent of the time when a Reddit user had offered me what I thought was a sniff of Flonase but ended up being a sniff of aerosolized Ketamine. We were at Donaldson Park and I felt the walls of his truck cave in around me, the outside world neatly disappearing much like what it felt like to be a child sitting within a large, cubicle cardboard box, someone on the exterior closing you in, the sounds of a television in the other room becoming muffled, but still just over there. The sounds, in this particular situation, were not a television, but my sexual partner stroking my hair and calling me a good boy while I obviously operated my body in some way that brought him pleasure. I found myself back in my apartment in the early evening hours of that same day curled up on my couch with my boots on and a blanket over me. There was a notepad on the table that said, “Fern Was The Name of Your Best Side.” I did not know what this meant, and still do not, and don’t know if I wrote it, or the person who I only knew by a username and a pressure on my head.
As I went through these thoughts, attempting to gain clarity on how I ended up in such a precarious state-of-mind, I realized that I was looking down at my feet, which were no longer moving. The room had grown darker, the sounds faded from a recognizable pop song into a loud, industrial drone. Suddenly, I heard someone screaming in my ears, which caused me to glance up and realize that I was standing in the group composed of Diane, Carter, Lucinda, Diane’s friends, and the security guards. It turned out that these guards were not guards, after all, but men who knew Diane and were wearing similar polo shirts.
The entire group's hair, I now realized, was not red but purple, an effect of the club lights. Their eyes remained glued wide-open, unable to blink or move on their own, causing their heads to operate similar to a ventriloquist dummy or one of those lizards whose eyes look like googly-eyes stuck to the side of their heads by a child in elementary school art class.
Before I could get a word out, I realized that, just below the hum of the Industrial noise music that the club had shifted to, was uproarious laughter. The security guards turned friends of the hostess were, between guffaws, telling the story of how I had entered a panicked state as they banged on the bathroom door, fucking with me, and now I was sweating out piss and smelled like a pot of boiled shrimp. I tried to look at Diane’s face, but her eyes left me feeling so uneasy and scared that I focused my gaze at her hips, which I realized wore a harness that she could clip a dildo to in order to fuck someone as if she had a dick of her own.
Before I knew it, she was grabbing my hands and placing them on the harness, calling me baby. The room started to buckle again, which caused me to glance up above me, where an even taller Carter was coming, his hands nearly four times the size, wrapping around my backside, pushing me between him and Diane. I felt him get harder and harder through his khaki pants as his enormous hands ran all over my body, down my filthy, now-likely-permanently stained shirt, as the distance between me, him, and Diane shrunk.
We stood like this for a minute while his cock getting harder and harder, to a degree that I had never seen or felt before. In an almost melodic unison with Carter’s throbs came Diane’s shrieks, yelling how she wanted to feel me like this forever, while also screaming, OH, YEAH! As Carter operated all three of our bodies as one unified force, like a surfer at high tide. I realized that I, too, was aroused, and that the three of us, despite being fully clothed and in public, had transcended to a place where we were approaching orgasm. Carter’s hands and Diane’s arms had stretched and grown to a point where they had completely enveloped me, squeezing and contracting as the pangs of pleasure grew stronger and stronger.
Before any of us knew it, Diane was almost singing a siren’s song to both of us, while I felt a viscous, warm moisture grow and expand on my back as Carter thrusted and repeated yeah, man in my ear.
Their grip on my body began to lose and the buckling began again. The noise music softened and the light began to dim to the point where I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anyone, could only smell something metallic and acidic, with the sound of a slow, steady hammer coming from the distance. I closed my eyes, hoping that the opposite happened like it did with my feet, begging the normal orientations to space, place, and time to return. I blinked several times, only to realize that there was no difference between open and close, only the sight of the inside of my eyeballs how they appear when the bright overhead lights of my apartment are on. The outline of my body was no longer gripped by Carter or Diane, but rather rested gently against a hard, familiar surface, that of my living room floor.
I had felt this feeling before, I realized, and tried to let out a scream before bursting out of the Unicorn Club’s ever-changing funhouse of horror, back into my apartment where the refrigerator door was wide open, enormous shard of glass scattered all over the fridge’s interior, the floor, and, well, yes, my arm.
I looked down at my body and realized that, yes, I had actually peed my pants and what I thought was initially a light scrape on my hand, was actually an enormous gash spanning nearly my entire forearm. I had bled quite a bit, which had likely caused me to fall to the floor and faint. As I attempted to get up, I hit my head against my coffee table because there was also quite a bit of blood towards that end of the temporary bed I had made for myself on the floor of my apartment.
A few moments had passed since I regained composure, when I heard a key turning and two voices making idle small talk as they prepared to enter my apartment. The man bearing the keys — a rather tall, white haired gentleman offered an exasperated, I’ve seen it all, Jesus Christ upon seeing me strewn about on the floor of my apartment, wearing broken glass from the fridge like a sort of throw blanket. What the fuck happened here?
I began to sweat profusely again, asking the man who he was and why he was here. He offered up a name and told me that he was there because my downstairs neighbor had heard someone fall. Plus this guy, your friend here, he said, was waiting downstairs for you for almost thirty minutes.
I tried to collect myself, focusing my gaze on the guest, who I now remember was coming over for the purposes with which anonymous male guests come over sometimes. He was nearly just as tall as the key bearer, but much younger, right around my age, solidly built, like a former athlete who kept up with all of his fitness routines. He had big hands, and he wore a shirt that bore the name of a furniture moving company.
What did you say your name was again, the key bearer asked again to my guest.
Bill, he replied. What the hell happened, are you okay?
Of course I’m not okay, I yelled, catching my breath for a second before yelling his name back at him, Bill!
With that, I watched as the man I assumed to be the building super tried to piece together the situation of what happened, and who Bill was to me. Bill was also alarmed, the expectations of a sub-slut shattered as I raised my voice at him. I shooed both of them away, out of my apartment, locking the door behind them, despite Bill’s insistence that he drive me to a hospital or something.
My sweaty forehead rested against the door for 30 seconds or so as I dreaded turning around and dealing with the mess I made. At exactly the 30 second mark, I sprinted to the small closet next to my bathroom where a pile of old bed sheets lived. I wrapped one of them around my arm and another one around my head, affixing a handful of ice directly against my skull. After letting out two or three huge sighs, I found my phone, opened Instagram, and replied to Diane’s group chat:
I’ll be there!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 😍
When I arrived at the Unicorn Club, I was relieved to see that the decor was colorful, matching its signature glitter filled drinks, as opposed to black, as it appeared in my delusion. The room was long and rectangular as opposed to cubical. You could not see the entire space from any one point, which was also good, since it would likely be impossible for it to warble, disorient me, and send me into another tizzy.
For the first time in the history of our New Brunswick friendship, I was mostly on time. Lucinda stood in a floor length dress behind a table that Diane was buzzing around. In preparation for tonight, I bought a new outfit, a blazer and chino pants, and styled my hair neatly to distract from the bump that was starting to form from my fall.
Diane and Lucinda were both somewhat shocked when they laid eyes on me. They exclaimed in unison, lookin’ good!
I do look good, I thought, starting to wonder if I was finally understanding why some people spend so much time and money buying nice clothing, decorating their apartments, going to the doctor, calling their parents.
While I was lost in my train of thought, Diane and Lucinda drifted off into a conversation about logistics for the evening and I decided to excuse myself to the bathroom.
In the stall closest to the door, I closed the toilet seat and sat down, pulling my brand new leather backpack off my shoulder, fishing a small bottle of Fireball from the bottom. With a single swig, I threw the contents of the bottle back and told myself that tonight was going to be a good night. Maybe I’d meet someone, make a new friend, hell, maybe Diane and I would make brunch plans that I’d follow through on.
I sat for a moment longer on the toilet seat before pulling out a small pill from a baggie, a dose of Klonopin that a man I sucked off a couple weeks ago gave me in case I ever needed to “take the edge off”. My edge was already gone, but I wanted to see just how far I could push it. Plus, every 20 minutes or so, after the previous Fireball shot began to wear off, I’d feel a slight throbbing coming from beneath my blazer, where my wounds from earlier continued to pulse in an attempt to heal themselves.
Tomorrow’s problem, I told myself, the makeshift tourniquet would hold me over for tonight. And whatever qualities of it might fail, well, that was for the Fireball and Klonopin.
When I emerged from the restroom, I rejoined Diane and Lucinda, whose group had at least tripled in size. As Diane began to offer introductions, everything slowed down a bit, I smiled widely, lazily, and a calmness washed over me that allowed every note from the background music to pair perfectly with the words being spoke by Diane.
Diane, I thought, what a wonderful person. All she cares about is bringing people together and helping people make connections. I’m really going to miss her. Damn, I was wrong, wasn’t I?
My daydream was interrupted when the introductions got to a familiar face. It was Bill. Except Bill introduced himself as Kyle. And Kyle was there as Diane’s date.
Kyle, I said with a tenor that swiftly disrupted my Benzo haze, great to meet you!
I stretched my hands out, both of them, to grab and shake his extended right arm.
It’s nice to meet you too, Kyle replied with a detached yet direct sternness.
Kyle, Diane offered with a flirtiness that immediately told me everything I needed to know about the situation, lives in New York – Murray Hill, to be exact – he took the train down to support my big send off.
Kyle remained strong and silent, gazing at me with an expression that indisputably communicated keep your mouth shut. I took a deep breath and excused myself, briefly retiring to a barstool across the room from the group where I ordered a Tito’s and soda that I used to wash down another Klonopin. When the bartender wasn’t looking, I poured my last nip of Fireball into my drink, topping it off again, which I took a confident sip from before taking another deep breath, strutting back to the group, and declaring that we should dance.
Diane, Lucinda, Kyle, and the others, whose names my memory did not hold onto, looked at me with an almost uniform cock-eyedness.
We’re about to do speeches, Lucinda reminded me while touching my arm with the concern that indicated that this was knowledge I already had.
Right, I said wiping sweat away from my temples, speeches! I yelled.
Lucinda led the group to a room off the main space to toast to our Networker-in-Chief. I nodded along, sweat continuing to pour from my hairline, following the rear of the group as we made our way across the Unicorn Club.
Kyle stood at the opposite end of the group once we arrived at our destination, a small room with tables and chairs pushed to the sides, the windows covered by thick blackout curtains. Whenever the conversation focused on someone in my direction, he stared confidently forward with his head slightly cocked to indicate a nonchalant indifference.
The conversation sloshed between niceties and small talk while the group waited for someone to funnel our attention towards extolling the virtues of Diane’s Meetup Mashup. I took a deep sip from my drink before breaking through the mundane conversation.
Hey, Kyle! I proclaimed, shocking my audience with the uncharacteristic volume of the outburst, Why don’t you get us started?
Lucinda and Diane, who were standing by Kyle’s side, looked perplexed. Not only was it bizarre for me to draw attention to myself in this way, or any way for that matter, but it was clear that Kyle was a newcomer to this group and therefore a strange person to kick off the niceties and reflections.
I think maybe I should start, Lucinda replied with an uneasy laugh, pulling a large legal pad out of a black Longchamp bag slung over her shoulder, shuffling side-to-side.
Normally, my face would have turned bright red, sweat stains popping up in my armpits, recognizing the way my outburst had made everyone uncomfortable. But in this instance, I found myself completely calm, wondering if I could push things a bit further.
No, we all want to hear what Kyle has to say! I yelled, Lucinda, we’ve heard it all before. Diane, she puts everyone above herself. I paused, clapping my hands together, mimicking Lucinda’s standard gesticulation. This space would have never existed if it wasn’t for all her hard work. We know. I wanna hear what Kyle has to say!!! I repeated.
With that, the energy of the entire space shifted, like I had irrevocably messed things up. People began to exchange whispers, likely offering whatever tiny bits of information they had on me, trying to understand the outburst. Lucinda put her paper away and began to approach me with Diane by her side. Kyle barely moved during the entire outburst.
Hey, Diane said with a concerned whisper, You good?
I pondered the question with sincerity. I certainly felt good; my body’s usual tension absent, my muscles feeling like clean laundry strewn over a chair, waiting to be folded, my body devoid of any imperfections capable of causing any sense of physical pain. But beneath this stasis, a creeping discomfort developed, starting in my stomach and expanding outward towards my limbs, lighting up my fingers and toes with the burning hot sensation of embarrassment.
Diane, I replied, pausing as I realized the entire room was looking at me, I don’t feel so good, actually.
Lucinda addressed the group, asking if everyone could give us some space. Kyle was the first one to exit the room, with the remainder of the onlookers exiting into the much better larger space which, admittedly, had much better vibes.
Once the room was just ours, Lucinda returned with a glass of water for me while Diane excavated a chair from the wall for me to sit in. I made myself comfortable while Diane considered what she was going to say.
What the fuck, was the first sentence she decided on, her face communicating the rest. Lucinda stood several feet behind her, a concerned lackey, in case I decided to channel this bizarre, unpredictable behavior into something more violent.
I’m sorry, I fucked up. I replied, knowing that I couldn’t possibly explain the real situation that caused the outburst. It’s just, I started, knowing I had no idea what I was going to say next, I’m going to miss you so much.
Diane let out a scoff so loud it caused my Klon’d-out body to jump.
Be fucking for real. Diane yelled. You’re going to miss ME? You haven’t spent more than a collective, I don’t know, thirty minutes in my company since we graduated college. You practically forgot that I fucking existed, never responding to a single text, evading every invitation I offered to you, and for what? For you to come here all fucked up and make it all about you.
I sat in the chair completely still, shocked at this confrontation. I realized that, had I just showed up and left in the manner I usually did, my relationship with Diane would have come to a close with nothing ever being said, our relationship fading into annual birthday wishes for a couple of years before those stopped too, and she became someone that maybe I’d Google in five years time, but probably not.
I just – I replied, softly – Shit. I don’t know what to say, Diane. I said, sitting up and rubbing my face, which began to feel numb. This stuff, this socializing stuff, comes so easily to you and I’m just –
You know what, Diane replied, cutting me off. I honestly don’t want to hear it. I was trying to help you. I’d say to Lucinda all the time, how I worried about you. Lucinda nodded. You isolate yourself, you disappear from weeks, months at a time, doing god knows what with your time. He just needs to meet someone who is like, I don’t know, a little more introverted and weird like him, Diane continued, her arms flying wildly, I put you in all these groups to try to like, find that, and this is how you act when I’m trying to celebrate my fucking accomplishments.
The air conditioning kicked on, my fluid soaked body recoiling in discomfort. It was clear that it was my time to reply, but I continued drawing a blank.
Nothing, right? You have nothing to say? Diane pressed, Okay, so here’s how this is going to go. Since you’ve already, like, ruined this part of the night, you can just chill out in this room or you can leave. I really don’t care. But you can go ahead and lose my number and have fun with your loser, loner life. Oh, and I don’t know what the fuck you have against Kyle, but leave him the fuck alone too.
Diane wrapped up our conversation with the corporate precision she was clearly so skilled at, turned on her heel, and led Lucinda away from me, returning to the party. Once I had the room to myself I decided to take my blazer off and lay on the floor to ponder my next step. As I stretched my legs out, I kicked over the remnants of my Tito’s and Fireball soda. I probably definitely don’t need any more of that, do I. I thought to myself, considering all of the other things that Diane just said to me.
As the night continued on, my body starfished out on the floor, I pledged to myself that I would change, first thing tomorrow. Get a better apartment, with a real fucking bed. Maybe I’d join a Spanish language conversation group to make some more friends. Look into transferring to an office in a larger city, where I could actually date someone. I’d call Diane first thing in the morning, we’d make up, I’d visit her in New York and we’d go to the Big Gay Ice Cream shop. I’d call my Mom back. We’d schedule a visit. I’d post about it on my Instagram. I’d never think about Kyle again. I’d figure out the secrets to all the things that Diane and Lucind and everyone else seemed to have figured out. First thing in the morning. As soon as I got myself off this floor.
After what could have been twenty minutes or two hours, I sat up and ran towards the door. Who’s that Chick by David Guetta was blaring from the speakers. In high school, my best friend Laine and I used to dance to this in my bedroom. If only I could see Laine right now, I thought, she really knew me.
As I approached the group, I looked down at my arms, blood-stained bed sheets pouring out from the cuffs of my shirt, my blazer remaining on the floor of the other room mopping up my mixed drink. Sure, it was an alarming look, but I didn’t care. This was a new beginning, and I wanted to dance.
Lucinda spotted me first, grabbing Diane’s shoulder to physically reorient her body towards her.
Jesus Christ, Diane screamed, What the fuck happened to you?
The music cut out overhead and before I knew it a paramedic was cutting my sleeves off, loading me into an ambulance. There goes my first Ben Sherman shirt, I thought, I needed to go there in the morning, anyway, to get more shirts. I’ll get five more. Maybe ten. Lucinda, Diane, and Kyle stood at the doors of the ambulance, waving goodbye to me, slamming the doors shut.
For a moment a silence fell over me, before a slow, rhythmic knocking started on the outside of the ambulance.
Hello??? A voice started yelling. Can you open the door????
I tried to move, tried to open my eyes, but nothing was working. I had fallen fast asleep. I felt my body rocking back and forth, eventually breaking through my sleep, where I found myself lying on the floor of my apartment, surrounded by shattered glass, my phone open to a text message sent to Diane.
Two words: Help me.
Clumsily, I sat up. Walked on my knees to the door and, using all the strength I had, turned the knob. Diane burst through.
Are you okay? She screamed, I came as soon as I got your message.