Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (10 page)

I kept buttering up one guy, a buff beauty I met at a sex party (that’s for the next book), by telling him he looked like a vintage beefcake model. After this and other rave reviews for his body and face, both of which he was in love with and very happy to possess, he eventually said to me dismissively, “Thanks for the compliment, but you’re
too
complimentary.” And then we had sex, but I only remember what he said and not what we did.

I spent a lot of time in my teens traveling, but one journey I’m still on is a journey of self-acceptance. You’d think it would be easy for a narcissist, but going from Point A to Point A can take a long time if you’re unclear where you’re coming from and where you’re going.

When MSU student Dallas Egbert infamously disappeared in 1979, there was only one lesson to be gleaned: Dungeons & Dragons kills. The young computer genius—at that point, I still thought of
I Dream of Jeannie’s
fridge-sized computers whenever I heard the word computer—had been a devotee of the medieval-themed roleplaying game, so rumor had it that he and others were playing some horrendous real-life version of it in the university’s extensive steam tunnels. In reality, he’d just snuck down there to commit suicide, but failed, and had escaped to another state, where he was eventually located under mysterious circumstances. Why had he run? From what was he attempting to escape?

Sadly, the boy killed himself the following year. He used a shotgun, not a broadsword—but the media didn’t care. Instead, they made him the poster boy for the inherent dangers of pretending you’re an elf and that you’re killing dragons in order to score a few gold pieces. A group called BADD (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons, which I would argue doesn’t effectively express the type of outrage they were pedaling) was even formed. Parents of geeks were on red alert.

None of the negative press surrounding Dungeons & Dragons turned me off. Morbidly, it turned me
on
. Introduced to the game by my best friends and classmates Eric and Mike, I quickly saw it as a nerd’s paradise—you got to completely reinvent who you were (down to the gender and species.) while you played, existing in an alternate world where you might be a muscular fighter or clever wizard able to cast spells. If a genius like Egbert had been caught up in it, then becoming a part of a D&D sect, I mean group, was almost like founding your own Ivy League college.

Even more appetizing was the prospect of becoming a Dungeon Master. As fun as it was to be a player, I quickly discovered it was at least (rolling the 20-sided die…12)
twelve times
as fun being the evil genius in charge of running a campaign, which consisted of reading an elaborately sketched out module written and published by middle-aged nerds and executing a campaign from beginning to end (which could take weeks or more), or of creating your own entire setting, complete with appallingly creepy creatures, ball-tightening action, sexual intrigue (I once created a town brothel for my virginal friends to patronize—and they did, in what amounted to a dry circle jerk), and laugh-till-you-puke-Doritos humor. It was exhilarating. Just…not something to tell people about at school, especially girls, because as much pleasure as we derived from D&D, it was still a sure sign of painfully chronic dorkiness.

The first year of high school, one of my absolute favorite teachers was Mr. G.,, who taught…something, who the fuck remembers? Because what was most riveting were his stories of being a onetime college gymnast who’d scored with tons of chicks. He had hotter stories than Hugh Hefner, and would even talk about his wife’s hot temper in the way a sub talks about a dominatrix. Most of what he said (not all) during class was tame enough on paper, but most of what he said (not all) would not fly today. It was guy talk in mixed company from a teacher to his students, but whatever it was, it endeared him to us. That’s why, when he singled out my buddies and me to come over for his son’s birthday party, we went along with it. A blind play-date of sorts for teenagers, the party was supposed to be a way for his socially awkward son to have an instant set of comrades. What was in it for us? Free pop and chips and cake, and oh, yeah—the son, Michael, was way into D&D.

The party wasn’t anything memorable, except for the fact that the family housed a large python as a pet downstairs. Watching it being fed a mouse was (almost) enough to put me off frosting straight out of the can.

But we did start hanging out with Michael and his friend Eric (which meant our D&D troupe expanded to include myself, my cousin Wally, his friend Collin, two Mikes and two Erics), and we played D&D for years as we grew from kids to young adults. Nobody ever disappeared into a sewer, but I wished Michael would have at times. Why? Partly because he seemed to hero-worship me from Day One. My own propensity to idolize stars and to heap praise on others was a mirror image of how Michael behaved toward me. But when you have serious self-worth issues (over my weight and my by-now-obvious-to-me-only homosexuality), praise can burn like acid, and can make you hate and even fear the one who throws it.

The way I described Michael in my journal:

“Michael is 14 and a freshman, one year and one school below me. He is a thin fellow. His all-consuming passion is ‘computers.’ Believe me. He spends hours describing endlessly boring details of the literally hundreds of discs that he owns.”

I love that I put computers in quotes. If only I could go back in time and become all-consumingly passionate about “computers,” I might be “rich” and “steadily employed” today.

Michael was actually just an intimidating intellect and could not be trusted not to ask embarrassing questions since we were older and he presumed we knew everything. For example, because he saw me as some kind of social genius, he would ask about girls and how to connect with people, queries that made this queer break into flop-sweat because…
how was I supposed to know???

Things came to a head when Michael got braggy about his D&D game. He was a bit of a know-it-all, so during a game at Collin’s house in Swartz Creek, we all ganged up on him and devised a plan to kill off his beloved character, one he’d spent years building up from scratch until he had countless levels of experience. He’d never be able to recreate such a potent character. We did the deed and coldly watched as Michael stormed out of Collin’s house and into the dark, crying. He was up Swartz Creek without a paddle, though, and since I was his ride, all he could really do was vent in the field.

The chasm between the game we were playing and the reality was instantly crystal clear to me. We apologized and I don’t remember playing much after that. I’d definitely lost my interest in an alternate reality when it brought out such a shitty side of me. We’d role-played rape and murder long enough. We were just living out parallel lives instead of trying to come to terms with becoming adults.

I still think D&D is a good escape and as harmless as any other hobby (well, maybe butterfly-collecting is less likely to lead to violence, but the butterflies would argue that point), but it had led us to bully a very sensitive and bright kid, albeit one who was annoying the hell out of me for reasons he could not have known.

At the end of high school, when I was out to all my friends
except
for Michael, who was still gushing over my supremacy every chance he got, I drove him home in my gray Chevette one night and delivered what I knew would not be welcome news—I was not as perfect as he thought, I was gay. Michael was the only person I’ve ever told (including, later, my grandparents) who had a bad reaction. He was incensed. As I’d guessed, he felt misled and fooled. He probably, as a straight boy, felt really stupid for having been so close to me without realizing the truth. They say to never meet your idols, but when you find out one you’ve known for years wasn’t who you thought they were, it can be a lot tougher to deal with than meeting a superstar and having them ignore you.

He told me homosexuality was not natural and that it was a kink that people chose when they ran out of other things to do. He implored me to change, begged me to admit I was lying. I think he said he would rather find out I was dead than gay.

I laughed it off, but it was very hurtful, and I wondered if he would out me to people I didn’t want to be out to just yet. But he didn’t. We just stopped being friends, though I think he reached out again in college when he had more information on sexual orientation than whatever he’d been told by his church.

Whatever my expectations of him and his expectations of me had been, they eventually changed and when I met up with him in adulthood. It was fun seeing how successful he was, a handsome doctor and articulate inventor whose passion for computers had led him to design apps, among many other accomplishments. There was no trace of the person who’d said those things to me.

As kids, we’d tried to kill each other off, in different ways. And we were both happy to have failed.

The first job I ever had was strictly who-ya-know, with-whom-ya-grow—one of my best friends I grew up with in Michigan, Mike Ashton, was the son of a department-store manager, the man who was destined to be the first person to tell me what to do and to whom I could not honestly reply, “You’re not the boss of me!”

For years, I’d spent a lot of time at Mike’s two-story house a block or so away from me and kitty-corner from where his very best friend, Eric Olson, lived. Eric was a ginger before they were called that, a brainy guy who took jabs about his red hair in stride and had a laser-like focus on whatever problem was before him. Mike was a happy-go-lucky, quiet, dark-haired kid who was short for his age, a trait his tall, leggy parents tried to mitigate by feeding him non-stop. And it wasn’t like he was on a high-protein diet, either—whenever we were over, it was all the Cheez-Its and Twinkies and King Dons we could eat, washed down with pop after pop. Eric eventually became muscular, while Mike stayed short until around 18 when he went from short to tall overnight.

I doubled in size.

The three of us bonded over Atari—Mike’s parents made sure he got the console way before I could afford one—and Dungeons & Dragons, not to mention our status as unpopulars. It’s not like people hated us, and I was rarely bullied…it felt to me more like we were invisible.

When I hit 16, thanks to Mike’s dad, Eric and I (but interestingly, not Mike) took jobs at The Fair Store in Flint’s lovely Northwest Plaza, a shithole a stone’s throw away from my childhood home, the one that was already by then well on its way to blowing up while in the care of drugged-out deviants. I knew that having a job would really mess up my plans to stay at home all the time and stare at my Madonna posters, but I also knew it would bring me some disposable income, of which I could dispose on…wait for it…more Madonna posters.