LITMIR.BIZ

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changed back to drinking, “hey, I know, why don’t we go out tonight? My father just gave me money for books, we can use it to get wasted tonight.” Jason decided my coming out was a good reason for us to get hammered together. Soon it would become tradition that everything from a good grade to a hangnail was reason to get hammered together.

      “I can’t, I have to study. I have exams coming up,” I replied. School was definitely getting in the way of my social activities, but that was what I was in New York to do in the first place so I had to put forth some effort.

      “Fine,” Jason said, defeated. “Call me this weekend, and we’ll go out.” I hung up with Jason and got to work.

      A few days later, I was beginning to worry because I had not heard from Greg. It had been three days and I had not so much as heard a peep from him on instant messenger and began wondering what was going on. Finally, after five days of not hearing from him, I gave him a call, but it went straight to voicemail.

      “Hey Greg, it’s Mark from the other night,” I said into his voicemail box. “You know, like Mark from Rent, ha, ha, ha.” What the hell is wrong with me? “Just calling to see if you wanted to get together sometime soon. Maybe we could catch a show or something. I would love to see Chicago or even Annie Get Your Gun. You know, that was the first show I was ever in and now Bernadette Peters is doing it on Broadway. I love the story of Annie Oakley.” I would continue with the rest of the message I left him, but I am afraid it gets a little too embarrassing even for me. I had no idea what I was doing so I continued rambling on until his voicemail cut me off. I could not remember whether or not I told him to call me, so I called him back and left another message reminding him to call me back. After a few days of not hearing from him, I began to worry so I called Jason and the two of us met at our favorite piano bar.

      “I don’t get it,” I said as I sipped my Manhattan. I had upgraded from Whiskey Sours to Manhattans in a matter of weeks. “Why hasn’t he called me back?”

      Jason looked at me as if I was a child who was just told the Easter Bunny wasn’t real. “Mark, honey,” he said, cocktail in hand, “I’ve been doing this a while and I have to let you in on a secret. What you did last weekend was a meaningless hook-up. Greg is not going to call you back because he was not interested in anything more than a hook-up. That’s how we gays do things.”

      “Wait…what?” I replied.

      “Mark, it was a hook-up. Get over it!”

      Jason and I drank our cares away. We drank Goldschlager and White Russians for the rest of the night and I got sick off of alcohol for the first time. After getting loaded that night, I woke up the next day vowing to get over Greg and move on. He was my first hook-up after all and I felt it was going to take some time to get over. However, Greg had left me with a little present that was going to forever ingrain him in my memory.

      “You have scabies,” Dr. Huxtable said to me the next day. My doctor in New York barred a striking resemblance to Bill Cosby and every time he walked in the room I thought he was going to do a stupid dance or offer me Jell-O.

      “What the hell is scabies?” I asked as I itched every inch of my body.

      “It’s like body lice,” Dr. Huxtable said with a smile, although I did not find his response charming or funny. “I will give you a cream that will get rid of it. You have to go home and wash everything. Every towel, every sheet, every article of clothing must be washed. Clean everything and use the cream I give you and it will go away in no time.”

      I shrugged. Of course the first time I hook-up with a guy I get an STD. Just my luck.

      “Just use the cream to make key lime pie,” Dr. Huxtable then said.

      “What?” I asked quizzically.

      “Just use the cream and you’ll be fine,” he said.

      “Oh.”

      I sat and stared at the doctor wondering what Phylicia Rashad was doing with her career. How had I come to this? That afternoon, I called Greg and told him to go fuck himself for giving me scabies and to lose my number, which he apparently already had done as I had not heard from him in two weeks now. And so, the Great Scabies Debacle of 2000 kicked into high gear.

      I went home and washed everything in my dorm room. As I was doing this, my straight pot-dealing roommate looked on. Probably because he was high. I washed everything and used the cream and felt relieved. However, the next morning, when I woke up, I saw that my roommate was itching all over.

      “What the hell is wrong with me?” my roommate asked.

      “What’s up?”

      “I am itchy all over.”

      Oh shit, I thought. I had somehow given him scabies. Then I remembered when we first moved into our dorm room, I commented on the fact that we both had the exact same towels and we had better be careful not to mix them up. Apparently, someone had and now my roommate had scabies as well. But, it didn’t end there. He had given it to his girlfriend, and she had given it to her roommate Meegan (pronounced Meegan. Not Megan. Upon meeting her, I told her that I thought her name was ridiculous and that I would be referring to her simply as Megan or Sara. I thought she looked more like a Sara anyway). For a week, the four of us sat around my dorm room, scratching ourselves like monkeys in a cage. Everyone wondered where the mysterious scabies outbreak originated, but I kept mum. I did not need everyone knowing I had slept with a dirty boy on the Upper East Side.

      After the scabies outbreak calmed down, my best friend from high school, Evelyn came up to New York to visit. It was time for me to come out of the closet to her. I always suspected that Evelyn knew I was gay and was just waiting for me to come out, but nothing prepared me for her response to me coming out of the closet.

      “So, I got us tickets to go see Chicago,” I said as Evelyn and I were walking down Broadway with the lights of Times Square upon us, “oh, and I’m gay now.”

      Evelyn stopped dead in her tracks.

      “What?” she asked.

      “I’m gay now.”

      “Gay?”

      Apparently Evelyn had forgotten how to speak English in the two months we had been away from each other.

      “How are you gay?” she asked.

      Had she forgotten the night that we drove around D.C. singing every single lyric to the entire CD of ABBA Gold?

      “I’m gay, Evelyn,” I said. “We all knew it was only a matter of time before I came out of the closet.” Evelyn’s face went lax. I could see she was extremely disappointed by this dramatic revelation. “Seriously Evelyn, the signs were always there. For God’s sake, for our tenth grade English project on Othello I wrote a script for a play and based it off of the characters on All My Children. How is that not the gayest thing anyone has ever done?”

      “I know Mark, but I thought,” Evelyn paused. “I thought you would always be my back-up guy.”

      “Come again?”

      “My back up guy,” she said again, “you know, if I couldn’t find a husband by the time I was thirty, you would be there for me.”

      “Well, let me just put my life on the backburner and wait twelve years to see if you do or do not get married.”

      “Oh, Mark, you know what I mean.”

      After about an hour of explaining to Evelyn that I not only liked musical theatre, Britney Spears, soap operas and ABBA, but also dick, she finally got the message. Since then Evelyn has become the perfect fag-hag. Accompanying me to weddings, galas and pretty much any family event I needed her to go to with me. Coming out to Evelyn was an easy segue into coming out to my parents, which was made even easier by my sister who decided to come out the same night. That was a memorable Thanksgiving for everyone in the Rosenberg clan.

      Freshman year of college was a really enlightening experience. Not only was I exploring the many possibilities

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