Free Swish by Joel Derfner

from
Jesus Christ Superstar
) was a smashing success despite the song’s being totally in the wrong key for me. Then I went upstairs to the bar and smiled at the handsome, shirtless bartender, who smiled back. Maybe my life wasn’t a cruel joke the Fates had decided to play on me, I thought. Then cheerleader Robbie saw the handsome, shirtless bartender smiling at me and patted my shoulder condescendingly. “Oh, he does that to everybody,” he said, and my soul shriveled into a little ball of self-hatred and despair. Robbie walked away, came back three minutes later, and said, “He asked me to meet him after close.” I said, “Oh,” and went into the bathroom and tried not to cry.
    The evening got worse from there. Robbie, Mark, Steven, and Phil all got roaring drunk (Horace and I weren’t drinking—I because I don’t, he because he had to drive), and Mark and Robbie started dancing shirtless in the go-go cage, clearly having more fun doing so than all the fun I had ever had in my entire life put together. I watched them in agony for a time, torn between my desperate desire to join them and actually enjoy myself for one second and my mortal terror of joining them and making myself a laughingstock. Eventually the former impulse won out; I bravely took my shirt off and joined them in the go-go cage, where I felt like an idiot because there wasn’t enough room for three people and I moved as gracefully as a Parkinsonian C-3PO.
    I gyrated halfheartedly for two minutes, during which time I was so miserable I wanted to put my eyes out with a carving fork, and then I got out of the go-go cage. Eventually the four drunk cheerleaders played out an intensely annoying drama about who was taking which strangers home and who was avoiding taking which strangers home, and in the end nobody took any strangers home. I puttered around the house briefly before going up to my room only to find Phil there giving Mark a blow job. I took this as my cue to find somewhere else to sleep and made up the air mattress downstairs. Then I puttered around for a while longer, helping Horace clean and rolling my eyes with him at the drunken behavior of the other four. I was grateful for the shared moment with somebody I liked and respected. Our bond was already infinitely deeper than the shallow fun the drunk cheerleaders were having, and it deepened further when Horace loaned me his copy of
Emma
as bedtime reading.
    Then I woke up the next morning to learn that after I’d fallen asleep he’d gone upstairs to fuck Steven for an hour and a half.
    Events like this took their toll on my cheerleading. At Pride appearances and Sharks games I grinned and clapped and round-off back handsprang as maniacally as ever, but home felt farther and farther away. No one ever dropped me from a half extension (though I did give Tommy a black eye once during a twist-down) but the rapture of trusting in the hands of others to support me became ever more elusive. I couldn’t understand: I was doing everything right, yet the promise of that bright Thanksgiving morning was growing emptier week by week.
    Nonetheless, I might still have been okay if it hadn’t been for the transcranial magnetic stimulation.

    Anything resembling a complete history of the decline and fall of my mental health would quickly become so soporific as to send a meth addict into a coma. Suffice it to say that I was more or less all right until the age of twenty, at which point my multifarious anxiety disorders broke free from the chains that had bound them and began to ruin my life.
    I can’t stand it when people laughingly say things like, “I got all OCD about filling out that form” when what they mean is, “I filled out that form more punctiliously than necessary.” Obsessive-compulsive disorder is something completely different (not to mention being a noun rather than an adjective). When people have OCD, their minds are filled with intrusive, irrational, repetitive thoughts often so