Free Born to Be Brad by Brad Goreski Page B

proper date. We went to restaurants I’d passed by in the gay area of Toronto and only dreamed of going into. Places I used to walk by and think, I can’t even afford to buy a drink there. But suddenly I was inside having an appetizer and dinner. I was used to eating the eight-dollar bowl of stir-fry from a place called Spring Rolls, and now I was one of the pretty people.
----
    “Ours was this thrilling Gay-December relationship.”
----
    It was very romantic. I was still working at the restaurant, and I’d get off the late shift and go meet Nick and his friends somewhere to dance. He was friends with the group in Toronto. The muscle boys. The cool go-go dancers. The cool lesbian couples. When I’d go out with them, I was so skinny I looked like a Chihuahua in a room full of pit bulls. I was this wispy thing with my little fashions. I’d go into Nick’s closet and style him for the night. He didn’t care about fashion but he loved Madonna and he loved me and it was heaven. I’d been obsessed with Gianni Versace, and a few years earlier when his boyfriend murdered him, I’d had a meltdown for a couple of days. And so, when Nick and I went to Florida for New Year’s Eve 1999 to celebrate the millennium, my first stop was the Versace mansion to pay my respects. That night, Nick and I dressed in matching silver pants (made out of plastic!) with tight white T-shirts and black shoes and silver bandannas around our necks. Did I regret this look? No way. Who regrets wearing anything in Miami? I was fake-tanned and ready to go—there’s no other way to survive the Toronto winter. (I do, however, regret the time in college when I fell asleep in the tanning bed and the manager didn’t wake me up. I was in there for fifteen minutes and couldn’t participate in my classes for two days because I was so badly charred and couldn’t lay down on my back. You could actually see the imprint of where the lightbulbs had been. It was not cute.)
    Life with Nick was a whirlwind: I was dancing to Deborah Cox remixes and Whitney Houston was making a comeback and I knew all the lyrics and it was always five in the morning and we were shutting down some club and going to the twenty-four-hour deli to get ice cream and Gummi bears. We’d stay awake until the sun came up and we’d talk and laugh and then the next weekend we’d do it all again. Nick came into my life at a time when my parents were divorcing. My mother had called me over Thanksgiving to ask if I was coming home. I was, I said, and she answered, “Good. It’ll be the last Thanksgiving we spend together as a family.” In that time, Nick was so gentle. He’d been through a divorce himself and he knew the effect it could have on someone.
----
    “We’d stay awake until the sun came up and we’d talk and laugh and then the next weekend we’d do it all again.”
----
    I thought, Maybe life will carry on like this forever. But my lifestyle started to ruin relationships. My sister and I weren’t getting along. She was in a serious relationship with her first love and their life together was crumbling, leaving her devastated. She didn’t call to tell me. What good would I have been to her? We’d drifted apart, and she knew my drug use was more than recreational. It sounds crazy, but I found out about her breakup in a dream. Our grandmother Ruby had always said that Mandy and I were more like twins than brother and sister. We had that cosmic connection that twins share. As damaged as I was then, I had a dream one night that my sister and her boyfriend were splitting up, and I called her the next morning. “I want to know if you’re OK,” I said. She wasn’t OK. Neither of us were.
    It was all coming to a head. Tracy, my best friend from high school, was studying at Ryerson University, Toronto’s answer to the School of Visual Arts. She was eight subway stops away all of this time but we made excuses about not getting together. When we did see each other, she didn’t