I don’t remember why I started listening to RadioNow 93.1, Indianapolis’ Top 40 radio station, but I know exactly when. I was nine, and it was the summer after third grade. Before this, I had basically stayed away from pop culture. I didn’t really get it, or like it, and there was a girl in my school who told me she was receiving shots to delay puberty because she had watched too much Britney Spears with her older siblings and it had somehow tricked her body into pressing “skip” over the last part of her pre-preteen years.
I fell in love with Lana Del Rey a week after I got my driver’s license. Sixteen and in the deeper throes of teenage angst, I’d taken to calling the suburban split-level I’d grown up in “my parents’ house” and spending as much time as possible out with my steady, if less than stable, high school boyfriend.
My sister started her coming-out process in eighth grade. My brother and I were in seventh. She entered her final year of middle school feeling alienated and afraid, so when the girl next to her in homeroom showed up with a print-out of Sid Vicious taped to her binder, Steph seized the opportunity to make a friend. Her name was Anna. She was thirteen, wore rainbow-banded tights and sometimes smelled like cigarettes. Her screen name was “kind-o-kinky.” She was the first bisexual any of us had ever known.
Call me Moses Goldstein. You won’t be wrong. Say it and I’ll turn around, look back at you out of the corner of my eye, smile a bit and raise an eyebrow at you coyly, because I’m a coy guy, and—of course—that is my name.
Maybe it’s just the New Jersey weather or the tint of the van’s windows but it seems like it’s always foggy when I drive to Garden State, a sprawling correctional complex whose hallways I’ve walked through without ever really managing to glean the building’s external shape. We always drive towards it from the same side. Inside the hallways shoot off from rounded enclosure where the guards sit like identical grayish-beige spokes from a wheel. Sometimes it’s hard to find my way out because everything looks the same.
Driving back to campus from sailing practice a few weeks ago, I partook in one of my habitual pastimes: people-watching. No, it’s not that creepy lustful gaze, or the serial killer glare that people sometimes give. It’s just my face, watching.
