I’m Special (5 page)

When Stephanie fell too far down the K hole of cocaine, I searched for a new friend and stumbled upon a gay mini–Patrick Bateman named Evan. When I first tried talking to him at school, he ignored me because I was wearing ugly cowboy boots and had dried toothpaste all around the edges of my mouth. Then, like every smart Millennial, he went home, stalked me on every social network, discovered we had mutual friends, and decided I was cool enough to talk to.

“Hey, Ryan,” Evan greeted me warmly one day when I was on my way to the dining hall. He moved in to give me a hug.

“Uh, hi, Evan . . .”

“So listen, I just went on your Facebook and saw that you're, like, really good friends with Wyatt.”

“Yeah; we went to high school together. How do you know him?”

“He's close with this guy I'm kind of seeing in New York. Wyatt's really cool. We hung out together at Misshapes.” Misshapes was a popular nightclub in New York that was frequented by sociopaths with eating disorders. I went there once and left because it made me feel like a sad, hipster version of Kirstie Alley.

“Awesome. I freaking love Misshapes.”

“Yeah, so we should hang out sometime.”

“Definitely. I would like that. Call me.”

Evan and I became inseparable after that day, sneaking into bars together, gossiping, and watching marathons of trashy reality TV. I don't know why I felt so honored to be in his presence. I didn't even really like him. He gave me strong “BAD PERSON WHO WILL RUIN YOUR LIFE!” vibes, but I ignored it because I was desperate for any kind of closeness. As it happens, Evan did turn into a complete asshole after we became friends. He began to put me down, make disparaging comments about my appearance, and try to control my social life. It was like having an emotionally abusive boyfriend but without the mind-blowing sex.

“Where are you right now?” Evan texted me one night. Beads of sweat started to form on my forehead because I was at a restaurant he hated with people he didn't like. I contemplated lying to him so he wouldn't make fun of me for it, and sometimes I actually did lie, but this time I decided to be brave and tell the truth.

“At Park Chow with Caitlin,” I texted back.

“Ew. That's embarrassing.”

“Wanna hang out later?” I frantically wrote, hoping to quell his annoyance.

No response. After sending him a few more desperado texts that said some variation of “I'm sorry! I'll be done really soon. Let's hang, please!” he acquiesced and said, “Fine, I guess. Come over.” I wolfed down dinner, said good-bye to my friend, and rushed to his apartment, where I spent the next few hours getting ridiculed for hanging out with “lame people.” Sometimes, in a bizarre act of repressed gay aggression, we'd wrestle. Then I went home and we did the same thing all over again the next day.

Most of us have been in a toxic friendship before. We've had that person in high school or college who latches on to our insecurities and plays them like a fiddle. It's almost like an addiction. This person brings you down and instead of trying to get back up, you lay there asking for the next kick. That's what happens when you don't know who you are yet: you let someone else decide for you.

Evan and I were “BFFs” for two twisted years. Eventually I was able to muster up the courage to kick him to the curb—but not before something happened that restored most of my confidence and allowed me to reinvent myself. I didn't find my new identity by changing my style or doing drugs or getting into an all-consuming relationship like everyone else had done in college. It was easier than that. All I had to do was get hit by a car.

A downside to having cerebral palsy is that sometimes your brain will decide to take a nap and screw you forever. When people ask me why I decided to run into oncoming traffic on May 9, 2007, I don't know what to tell them other than, “Oops. My bad. I'm retarded.” Sometimes my brain will black out and I'll lose all capability of making a proper decision. That's what happened when, during finals week of my sophomore year at San Francisco State, I ran into oncoming traffic to try to catch a bus that was going back to school.

I remember some things about the accident, like the sound of tires screeching and everything going black. I came to with an elderly woman standing over me, asking if I was okay. I told her yes, tried to get up, and immediately fell back down. An ambulance came, and I tried to explain to the EMTs that this couldn't be happening to me. I had to go back to school and take my Coloring Queer final (yes, that was a real class I took). “Sit still,” an EMT scolded me. “You're going to hurt yourself even more if you keep moving around.”

I had been living under the assumption that bad things didn't happen to gay people with cerebral palsy, but a few moments after arriving in the ER, my condition worsened when I lost the ability to move and feel my left hand. One second I was doing jazz hands on the gurney and the next it was totally frozen. “It's just a nerve contusion,” one doctor assured me. “You'll regain movement and sensation in a few days.”

After two days and a series of misdiagnoses, it was revealed that I had compartment syndrome—a semi-rare condition that can develop after the body experiences trauma to a compartment of muscles. When that car smashed into my elbow at 45 mph, it caused pressure to develop in my forearm that was cutting off the oxygen supply to my muscles. This can result in a whole boatload of things, including amputation, but for me it meant a permanent, major loss of function in my left hand. Eight years after my accident, I've undergone six surgeries and had a skin graft. I can't handwrite, tie my shoes, or give decent hand jobs (although, to be fair, who knows if I ever could). Basically, I am just a little more disabled than I was before. And even though I've never been totally able-bodied—I've never walked without a limp, I've never been flexible—my condition before the accident seemed manageable because I never knew anything different. This, however, was something else. This felt like the world was robbing someone who didn't have much to begin with.

After leaving the hospital, I moved to Los Angeles and took the semester off from school to recover. Sensing that I might be spiraling into a depression, my dad sent me to a gay shrink. “He'll empathize with you more,” my dad explained as he drove me to my first appointment. “You know, because he also likes dudes.” I arrived at my shrink's office—which was on the corner of Cock Ring and Poppers in West Hollywood—not knowing what to expect, but I immediately became suspicious when I saw a sexy glamour head shot of my therapist in the waiting room. “That's strange,” I thought to myself. “Do therapists normally take sensual head shots?” Shrugging it off, I entered his office and laid eyes on the man who was going to bring me catharsis.

Holy shit. No, no, no. This can't be right. My shrink, Adam, was stunningly gorgeous. He had piercing blue eyes, a sleek haircut, and was wearing one of those sophisticated outfits that was supposed to be conservative but wasn't actually because it was a size too small and seemed to deliberately show off his spectacular gym body. My penis was doing jumping jacks at the mere sight of him, which is why I knew instantly that this wasn't going to work. I would never let myself open up and ugly-cry to someone that good-looking. Instead, I'd try to put on a show and pray that one day he would take pity, bend me over the couch, and screw the depression out of me. “Hey, Ryan.” Adam shook my hand and motioned for me to sit down. “What brings you here today?”

“Um, not much,” I stammered, suddenly self-conscious and pulling the hair out of my face.

“Not much?” Adam gave me a confused look before checking my file. “Your father told me you were hit by a car a month ago.”

“Oh, yeah,” I laughed nervously. “That. I guess things have been pretty heavy.”

“Are you depressed? You've gone through a major life change, so I would expect you to be experiencing some feelings of despair right now.”

“Maybe? Gosh, I don't know. Tell me about you! How long have you been a therapist?”

Adam paused and looked me dead in the eye. “How are you doing, Ryan? You can tell me. That's why you're here.”

I shifted in his $10,000 leather chair and blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “Well, okay. If you really want to know, I'm convinced no one's ever going to want to have sex with me again.”

“And why's that?”

“Because I have cerebral palsy and now I'm one-handed. Being with me would be like having sex with a fidgety lobster claw.”

Adam smiled. He had great teeth. “Ryan, I can already tell that you're an attractive, bright individual. I guarantee you that you'll find someone.”

“Really? You think I'm attractive?”

“Sure.”

“And you think someone would actually want to see me naked after all of this mess?”

“Why not?”

“Wow, great!” I beamed before getting serious. “So do you know who specifically would sleep with me? Like, did you have anyone in mind or are you just speaking generally?”

“Um, generally, Ryan.”

“Oh.” I sunk back into my chair. Fantasies of us holding our adopted baby, Moppet Azul, on a safari in Africa were dashed to hell.

“So, besides feeling undesirable, is there anything else you're struggling with post-accident?”

“Um,” I hesitated.
Don't let him see you sweat, Ryan. Keep it together. The goal is to make him like you.
“Nope; I think that about covers it!”

After our anticlimactic first session together (and having one amazing climax alone in my shower an hour later), I promised myself that I'd quit Adam and find a therapist who could actually help me sift through the wreckage in my brain. I could never go through with it, though. Spending time with him was like seeing a hint of a shirtless dancing rainbow in an otherwise hopeless sky. Adam was like my hooker, but instead of paying him to fuck me, I was giving him money to feed me compliments and hand me bottles of Fiji water. If insurance hadn't stopped covering our sessions, I probably would've seen him indefinitely.

Life in LA was not turning into the healing Namaste journey I thought it was going to be. Now that my weekly sessions with Adam were over, I had nothing to do. So I passed the time by eating. A lot. I ate at a Chipotle that was near my apartment four times a week. After devouring a giant burrito, I would then walk to a place called Sprinkles and order four cupcakes, two of which I would eat in a Kinko's parking lot on Elm and Wilshire. Besides treating my body like a carb Dumpster and deleting 461 days from my lifespan, I also got to know my roommate, Emma. The two of us had met at a house party a year earlier and immediately bonded over our love of astrology and pugs. When I moved to LA, Emma suggested we sublet a place together and I thought, “Why not? This girl seems fun, flirty, fabulous! I mean, we've only met IRL once, but I'm sure she's totally great!” A week into us living together, I realized I had made a grave error in judgment.

“Hey, babe,” she bellowed one day when she entered our apartment carrying a $400 gym bag and her favorite Lululemon yoga pants. “You will not believe how much I just paid for an iced mocha at Urth Caffé!”

“How much?” I asked with the bare minimum of enthusiasm.

“FIFTEEN DOLLARS!” she exclaimed. “Can you believe it?”

“No, I can't. No iced mocha costs fifteen dollars. That's actually impossible.”

“I'm not kidding. It really was fifteen dollars. The prices there are outrageous!”

She was right. The prices at Urth Caffé were outrageous, but there's still no such thing as a fifteen-dollar mocha. I was offended by how unabashedly false her lie was. She wasn't even striving for authenticity here.

“I really don't believe you. There's no way.”

“Ryan, why would I lie?”

Now there's a question I would've loved an answer to. Emma did nothing
but
lie. She told me she was a nationally ranked tennis player, that she used to strip at Scores, that she had a sugar daddy who sent her money even though nothing sexual would ever happen between them, that Kat Von D tattooed her at a house party, that she was in training for Wimbledon. She was nuts, but her antics were a nice distraction from the pathetic happenings of my life. Whenever I thought I was losing my mind, I'd flash back to Emma and her delusions about fifteen-dollar mochas and instantly feel rooted in reality.

I needed all the pick-me-ups I could get. Acquiring another disability on top of the one I already had messed with my sanity and moved my self-esteem from “Sometimes I like myself on Tuesdays and Thursdays!” to “I am a disgusting Grendel whose penis might as well be donated to charity.” All my friends in San Francisco were busy moving in together and getting into serious relationships. They were constantly evolving, and even though the accident had given me the chance to start over, too, I was treating my beginning like a permanent ending.

The only way you can recover from a traumatic event is if you admit to yourself and others that you're miserable. People always feel this pressure to say that they're in such a good place when they're actually swimming in a bottomless pit of despair. In order to get past anything, you have to own your misery. You need to write, “THIS DEPRESSION IS THE PROPERTY OF: [insert your name here].” Otherwise, it's going to stick to you forever.

I lied to my friends about how I was doing, and I slept in a lot; my eyes felt sewed shut by my depression. When I did leave my apartment, I cried in public. I sampled everything on the grief buffet and went back for seconds. During my recovery, I had nothing but time to think about the difficult questions no one likes to give any thought to, like, What do people really want out of life? What keeps them content after their looks fade and they've seen loved ones die and they've been betrayed? Before you hit your mid- to late twenties, it's hard to think of yourself as someone who's in control of his life. It almost feels like your body is a loaner, something given to you to wreak havoc on. These bruises aren't yours. This weight gain isn't yours. None of it is real. You can go back to the way things were at the drop of a hat. You can reverse the damage with a good night's sleep. You can treat people terribly and expect them to still be there for you in the morning.