LITMIR.BIZ

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an impressive selection of vitamins, sleeping too many hours a day, sweating all sorts of things out. I’d work some shifts at the local Urban Outfitters in Pasadena, maybe intern at a magazine a day a week or so, but I was mostly glad I did not have my own car and did not know my way around Los Angeles. I didn’t feel as if I was from there. I didn’t want to know its troubles. It was now just a place for me to buy time, before the showtime of Sarah Lawrence and New York City.

      There was one time my body announced itself and nearly escaped, a time when I came close to losing it all. It was my senior year. I had come home from SPIN magazine, my final internship, on a Friday night, and my central campus dorm hall was raucous with sounds of indie hip-hop, a Pharcyde and Dr. Octagon sort of night, which had to mean my friend Missy was up. She was a refugee of the old MacCrackHouse, and she always had the best pot, the only drug she claimed she did at that point. It had become my post-internship ritual to go to her dorm and smoke cigarettes with her in the hopes of getting a hit or two of her bong. She always shared, as she did that night, but this time the pot hit me badly. My other friend, also a former MacCrackHouse character, Ace, was in the room, and he and Missy were fine, but I was very much not. For a while we all assumed I was having some sort of panic attack—I had had my first few panic attacks those Sarah Lawrence years, often tied to drug use—and we tried to ride through it.

      “You’re cool with us, you’re cool here, all is well,” Missy said, swaying with the bong in hand above me, as I reclined on her floor, everything spinning. Missy was very rich, like all the Sarah Lawrence kids, but she worked on the side, which meant stripping in Yonkers, something I could never get out of my head every time I saw her.

      “Please stop freaking out!” Ace was less consoling. “I can’t deal with it.”

      It was bad drug etiquette to freak out. Back then nobody went to the ER, or called a doctor, or turned to help. You knew the risks—if you were going to do drugs, then it was all fair game. Even death. Back then we lost friends, so it was never unthinkable but rather built in to the experience, the risk maybe even part of the thrill. There was no going back. You had to do your best to live, but there were no guarantees.

      I realized after a while that both Missy and Ace thought I was on something else. At some point I must have gotten sicker, much sicker, and they were more panicked, hovering over me, demanding to know what else was in my system.

      I yanked myself up, suddenly lecturing them, “Fuck, nothing is in my system. I’m not a junkie like you guys! Cigarettes are in my system! That’s it! I didn’t even drink tonight!”

      Somehow I stumbled out and made it to the doorway of my own room, and I realized my vision was a mess and I was seeing things. Orange cats were multiplying. Everywhere and fast.

      Before I knew it, I was with Missy and Ace again, demanding they call 911.

      Orange cats.

      “Why? Just relax,” Missy kept saying.

      Orange cats. Orange cats. Orange cats.

      “We can’t be here if the paramedics come, Missy,” Ace kept saying. Fucking junkies.

      I demanded they help me, my heart beating too fast, saying I needed help and there were too many fucking orange cats.

      “What do you want us to do, we’ll do it, but what?” Missy was panicking.

      “Dude, Porochista, we know how to speed up your heart not slow it down,” Ace said at one point.

      Like the druggies they were, they disappeared by the time I or they or someone called 911 and the paramedics showed up at my building, the very center of Sarah Lawrence’s sole quad.

      For some reason, I could not get out of Missy’s chair—I told the paramedics that I was stuck, that my grip on the legs was not something that could be undone. I even laughed for a moment that someone had glued me—and the paramedics were not amused, just lifting me and the chair outside the dorm and into their vehicle on the lawn, past half the campus standing in their Friday evening best. The red lights of the ambulance gave the quad a sort of haunted emergency quality, like something very bad was wrong, but what?

      Me.

      I was what was wrong.

      I was still seeing orange cats.

      In the ambulance they gave me oxygen, the first time of many times I’d be given it, and they asked about drugs. I told them everything, and I begged them not to report it to my parents.

      “You are an adult,” one of the paramedics said.

      I was an adult. He was right. I was twenty-one at that point. For years, without even noticing, I had been an adult.

      At the ER, various hallucinations continued—this time I saw the male receptionist in blue sequins and a beehive wig, the sort of illustrious drag my favorite performers at the East Village’s Lucky Cheng’s would wear. I laughed and laughed, as I struggled to breathe and the various monitors beeped soberly.

      I had lost all sense of time, but according to the nurses I was fine. I’d had something more than pot; it had to have been cut with something. But they were concerned about my other vitals throughout the night and kept me there for more bloodwork. Apparently I had disturbingly low blood pressure, an erratic heartbeat, and a slight fever. “Have you been sick for a while?” the main doctor kept asking, it felt like every hour, over and over.

      “I told you, I don’t know,” I would say, because I didn’t. How did I know if I was sick? I didn’t have a life of thermometers and chicken soup and a mother and a good doctor. In New York I had a life of endless nights, sex worker friends, drinking too much and smoking too much, doing drugs whenever I could, keeping whatever hours I could build internships and classes around. I had a life of New York City. I barely ate, often some beans and rice from the cafeteria, a pie, too much soda, fries. In the city I’d hit up vending machines at work, and if my saved-up pennies allowed, a lemon cookie from a bakery at Grand Central, which had become a sort of reward for me. Reward for what, who knows, but I was living a sort of life that needed rewards, I had decided. I was also too skinny—an editor at the magazine had once said I was the skinniest human being she had ever seen, and I, remembering my dear aunt, had taken it as a compliment.

      So I had no idea what normal was. I never felt good. I never felt not sick. I told the doctor that.

      He wanted to know how much I smoked. Too much, I said. Had I been anemic before? How was my thyroid? What were my periods like? Had I been tested for STDs? Had I been tested for Lyme?

      I shrugged it all off to get out of there, wanting the night to end, hoping for anything that would allow me to leave, but having no good answer for any of it. No one I knew went to doctors. No one I knew was healthy. No one expected it. If you were alive, then you weren’t dead. That was it. It was just not in our culture to care.

      The dean of studies came by some time around dawn.

      “Look, I’m sorry, nothing like this will happen again,” I blurted to him, embarrassed and shocked to see him there.

      He looked resigned and disappointed in a gentle fatherly way, and for a moment I worried I was hallucinating him.

      “Are you really here?” I gasped.

      And there came his kind, booming voice, “Yes, Porochista, I am really here.” We had never interacted much, so hearing my name pronounced correctly by an administrator astounded me.

      “Please don’t tell my parents, please. They won’t understand, they don’t know . . .”

      And there it came again, like a taunt if it hadn’t been so true. “Porochista, you are an adult.”

      I was an adult. An adult who had been dragged out of a dorm room on a chair, a chair she thought was a gluetrap, who had hallucinated orange cats and then a drag queen in a shiny blue dress, who had no health history, who had only junkies for friends, who had taken something that was laced with something and had nearly lost it.

      Long after he was gone, when it was well into the

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