Free Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture by Andy Cohen

notion that he was placing a murder weapon order before writing another fake roommate ad. A slightly more likely explanation was that he was just a fella who worked in the knife biz and was catching up on the latest knife knewz. That concept floored me. Had he always wanted to be a knife guy, or had he just bopped around going from job to job until he fell into the knife lifestyle? This odd voyeuristic moment on the bus made me so grateful to have figured out what I wanted to do in my life, something glamorous, exciting, and important. I was going to work doing something in TV, somewhere. Not only that, I had learned about modulating the level and tone at which I expressed myself, and maintaining some kind of decorum. In the office.
    I spent my last week in New York unemployed, running around, being gay, and lying out in the Sheep’s Meadow. I called the morning show one last time to try to connect with the senior producer who had informed me about my eye. A newsclerk named Cornelia told me he wasn’t there.
    “We kept your mailbox up,” she said. At the beginning of the summer, each of the interns was given a mailbox. I was flushed with excitement. “We all know you’re coming back here.”
    I knew, too.

 
Sunrise with Tammy Faye Bakker
     
    TUPPINS
     
    After my internship, I went back to college having identified two critical things that some people take a lifetime to figure out—who I was and what I wanted to be. Now I had to figure out how to deliver on the latter. The monkey was off my back and I was out and free, but I had turned a corner smack into a new, chilling reality—AIDS.
    Along with every other gay man in 1988, I was convinced I would become infected. I filled the empty bin in the back of my head that used to house all my coming-out fears with my updated paranoia, and I equated every ailment with the one I feared the most. I stared at all my bruises, sores, and blemishes, convincing myself that I was going to die. I was too scared to get tested because I thought it simply meant finding out that I had the disease. I didn’t talk to anybody about AIDS; my friends were just coming to terms with the new me and I wanted to project an image of calm, of health.
    Watching Oprah and All My Children every day after class provided refuge from my fears. Even when I thought I didn’t care about Oprah’s topic, she had a way of making the show great. Nobody else could do that. And my hair was huge, almost as big as Oprah’s.
    Just before senior year, I finally told Graciela that I was gay. I’d saved her for last for some reason. I guess I felt like if I was going to be with a woman, it would’ve been her, and to eliminate this possibility by admitting I was gay meant I was breaking both our hearts. One day at Amanda’s parents’ house, while looking at her painted toenails, she asked me if I liked girls with painted toenails. Amanda and I gave each other a long look.
    “I’m gay.”
    “Oh, okay,” Grac said matter-of-factly. “I have to make a phone call.” She disappeared inside the house. Amanda and I sat in disbelief, thinking she was in serious denial. Grac said later that she’d been worried how she appeared in front of us, and, like Dave, felt left out of my circle of trust. We barely spoke of it all day, and that night we saw Do the Right Thing . The next day we talked for hours and went deep, agreeing that if I were straight we probably would’ve wound up together. It was all very melancholy.
    We recovered by reframing our friendship, becoming even closer. We were partners in crime and on the dance floor, where we always came together. We went to several B-52s concerts that year and danced our butts off. That year Grac had the best college job of all time: She was a moderator on a “Big & Beautiful” chat line, for people who are big and the people who love them. Sometimes the conversation got really dirty, and she had to jump in and tell them to clean it up. But mostly she just let them