I’m Special by Ryan O’Connell Page A

two-bedroom apartment where I took up residence in the walk-in closet. (To this day, my father doesn’t think it was weird for his son to live in a closet and insists it was the size of a small bedroom. It wasn’t. It was the size of a closet.) My father was offensively cheap. Whenever we would grab burgers at a fast-food restaurant for dinner, he would refuse to do something as simple as pay the extra sixty cents for cheese, insisting that he could melt cheese in a pan himself when we got home. We could also never order anything other than water when we were at a restaurant. Suggesting that you’d like to have a Sprite was basically like demanding that he send you to Sarah Lawrence for college. Whenever I asked him why he wouldn’t buy me a soda, he would say, “BECAUSE IT OFFENDS ME THAT THEY’RE EVEN CHARGING FOR SOFT DRINKS. IT’S THE PRINCIPLE OF THE MATTER, RYAN!”
    As I got older, my father remained cheap as ever, but somehow he, my brother, and I all managed to move up in class. When I was fourteen, my father remarried a sitcom writer and moved into her beach house in Malibu. When I was eighteen, I got access to my settlement money, and my parents were basically like “K, bye—no more money for you.” (One of the first things I did with my money was take my dad out to dinner and order a million Sprites just to spite him. It was a bittersweet moment because no purchase has ever felt as gratifying since.) After I received my lump sum of cash, my brother started his very successful porn website and bought a million-dollar house in the Hollywood Hills. Soon, the three of us were eating out at steakhouses and experiencing a lifestyle that was wildly different from the one we grew up with. We had reached financial stability thanks to second marriages, porn, and cerebral palsy.
    I’ll never forget the day I got my settlement money. On my eighteenth birthday, I went into a Washington Mutual (RIP) and took out $300, which was the most amount of money I’d ever seen in my life. Holding those crisp $20 bills in my hand felt like being in possession of crack cocaine. I just wanted to use it until there was nothing left. So that’s what I did. I had Baby’s First Spending Blackout in the mall. I bought a few CDs at Sam Goody, an ice blended mocha at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, a new wallet at the skater shop, and some T-shirts at Miller’s Outpost. I bought lemonades for all my friends at Hot Dog on a Stick and took a cab downtown to go to the movies. I was an instant nouveau riche teen nightmare. Growing up in a household that was dominated by financial stress, I’d never thought of money as a happy thing. It was the source of depression, anxiety, and fear—not a cause for celebration.
    It felt strange gaining access to a world that was never meant for me. The switch reminded me of my car accident, when I had gone from being Ryan, the dude with cerebral palsy, to Ryan, the poor guy who got hit by a car. I was again wearing the personality clothes that didn’t quite fit. People assumed I came from a wealthy family and had a trust fund when it couldn’t have been further from the truth. Cerebral palsy, the source of all my major issues and internal strife, was the reason why I was able to order an $18 salad at [insert hot restaurant here].
    Having money meant I dodged a crucial aspect of your twenties: being broke. In college and beyond, you’re supposed to have a hard time financially. If you don’t, it’s a strike against your character. Many of my friends take pride in their working-class roots and have told me that they wouldn’t date someone who’s rich because the class inequity would make them too uncomfortable. Once, a friend of mine who’d ended up with a wealthy boyfriend accompanied him and his family on a shopping trip to SoHo and watched them drop thousands of dollars in two hours. Afterward, she was so traumatized that