The Two Kinds of Decay

Secrets

One day in 1997 I was at Mars Bar, on the Lower East Side, with the man I was having an affair with. The man had a girlfriend. We played chess at the Thompson Street chess store and went out to dinner and made out in cabs. I was twenty-three and had everything I wanted.

I was still taking steroids, but my excitement at having got well enough in two years to graduate college and move to New York had made me furiously happy.

I was an intern at a magazine, second shift, three or four nights a week. Afterward I’d go to Pravda with the man I was having an affair with, and we’d drink chocolate martinis, which were a fashionable drink that spring.

So one day we were at Mars Bar with a friend of the man I was having an affair with.

The friend seemed manic. He was funny and verbal. We all took turns telling our best drug stories.

Then the friend of the man I was having an affair with said, The best drug I have ever taken was steroids.

And I said, Me too! Do you have MS? I knew that multiple sclerosis and its sister diseases, like mine, were commonly treated with high-dose corticosteroids.

The bar was very loud. The man I was having an affair with didn’t hear. By then a few more people we knew had shown up.

The friend of the man opened his eyes wide and said No! but didn’t mean it. I took him aside and apologized, but I wasn’t surprised when he began to weep. He said, I’ve never been able to tell anybody that, and I hugged him.

His tears seemed fake, though, and I wasn’t surprised when he became an actor.