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It was 2006, round this time in bitter wicked winter’s breast, when I was on a lot of pills to make me not feel what eventually everyone who has ever had to fall out of love feels. Yeah, but they weren’t the normal pills that one would take for that sort of thing, the Prozacs and Paxils and whatnot. No, my friend Weaver had broke his arm that month so he was awash in Vicodin, so much more than what he said he needed, so he was selling, and I was buying. And gobbling. And buying. And gobbling.
It was another month before I a couple of friends of mine would set me up with a New York City socialite, who would become my Vicodin for the next thirteen months. But I didn’t know that. I had time and my liver to kill. Time to somehow convince my girlfriend, who just up and left for San Francisco the week before, that SF was not all that it was cracked up to be. I was relieved in some ways, when this girlfriend split. Every day I never knew what I was in for, details withheld due to their ultimate irrelevance. But be fucked If you think I didn’t miss having that someone close to me. It gave me a boost like no other.
Drug.
That’s what the year 2006 was for me, just trying to delay feeling absolutely crushed, to fill the abscess with narcotic cotton, smoke some more cigarettes, take a monster bong rip. She would come back, I would say on, ha ha, my more positive days. On my more negative, I would poke my head out of the fog to stumble into a new living breathing being to stand in place and play the part.
Yeah, it’s called rebound, Edgar Alan Poe.
And ultimately I would find that rebound, see New York socialite. Which is a whole other volume.
But that in-between, a short twenty something days, filled with the blur of late night parties, The Catcher in the Rye and Johnny Weir.
Parties, because I could not stand being in my own home. I hated it. I’d only lived in that apartment a few months when my ex-girlfriend just started staying there every night, and even though she complained that it always felt like my place, it always felt like our home to me. And I hated still smelling her there. So, I spent as much time out of my house as possible. And believe me, I made it possible,
My ex and I were reading The Catcher in the Rye to each other in bed each night when she left in the middle of the story. It was not important that I had read the book a dozen times, and it doesn’t matter now that I have not read it since. What was important to me was that I, and you’re going to love this, finish reading the book out loud to myself. (I told you I was on a lot of pills.) But there was something that was keeping me from completing the task. Like if I did, that would be the last remaining shared experience that we would have, even though she was gone.
Johnny Weir, the adorable figure skating sensation, was skating int he Olympics that February and all my guy friends — my STRAIGHT guy friends — were all enamored with his flamboyant charisma. I’m still not sure if it was a joke, but I bought into it. In my haze, I friended Johnny Weir on MySpace, write a gushing letter to him, and then got immediately DROPPED.
It’s what everyone on pills does.
So when I watched this Johnny Weir documentary last night on the teevee, there were two things I thought. Now keep in mind I had not thought about Johnny Weir in almost four years, but I thought, well isn’t he as cute as a button. (Not my actual thoughts.) The second was what was going on in my life when the last time I actually thought about that Johnny Weir: that February in 2006.
And when I heard this morning of Salenger’s death, my nostalgia overcame me. I don’t know if I will have the actual power to write about this time in my life to make it compelling to anyone but myself. But I think I just gave myself the power to at least give a shit and try.
Oh, no. Not right now. I am too sleepy.
