Starf*cker: a Meme-oir by Matthew Rettenmund Page A

and be like, “Whoa, dude,” but I thought of it as true love on a Shakespearean level. He was dating off-and-on a radiant girl named Laura who I liked a lot, but from whom I plotted to man-poach on a daily basis. That Andrew probably wasn’t gay was no matter. Even though my own sexual identity had dawned on me organically and over a very long period of time, coming to a head at Christian summer camp at age 11 when I made sure I was in the cabin at the time my bunkmate would get naked because I really just needed to see his penis, I convinced myself that maybe Andrew was in need of a more formal sexual-orientation orientation, and that I would be a good guide.
    I decided, with an alarming degree of deliberateness, that I needed to befriend Andrew, tell him I was gay, make it clear I wanted to be his boyfriend, and then do the deed with him. Because as a teenage boy, sex was love and love was sex. “Love is sex and sex is heaven, we’re the class of ’87.”
    I started by chatting Andrew up. He was a Beatles fan, I was Mr. Madonna—and we sparred over that enough that I thought I might never break through to him. He did like my intellectual spunk, though, and also didn’t mind how nakedly I fanboyed him. I saw all of his plays and even had him sign the programs—I was stage-dooring a dude from my Chemistry class.
    “Thanks for coming!” he wrote on one, and I wondered for hours if he was making a crude double-entendre. “As the good book says, ‘Merci beaucoup mon ami’” on another led me into a fantasy about French-active vs. French-passive.
    At the height of my unhealthy mooning over Andrew, he landed a part in a legit community-theater production of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs . I was old enough to drive, so I bought a ticket and went and saw it without even telling him in advance. It was obvious why I’d see him in school plays, but I felt like following him to a city-wide production would be comparable to telling him it gave me a woodie when he told me I was an idiot for liking Madonna.
    Unable to contain myself, I went into a flower shop across from The Fair Store and had roses delivered to the theater along with a skillfully handwritten (not in my writing) note that identified myself as a secret admirer. I’m sure this drove him crazy, and I never told him it was me. Even now, I am scared writing about it, even though I know that nothing about me would shock him anymore, and even though my feelings for him came crashing down before the Berlin Wall did.
    Still, shadowing his acting career wasn’t getting me close enough.
    Though I’d been friends with Mike and Eric and my other D&D buds since fourth grade, I cut them off. I saw Eric at work, but rarely elsewhere as I started piecing together where best to single-mindedly pursue Andrew. Because he was popular, he was involved in things like the student council. No interest there—my stint as a seventh-grade class treasurer had ended in disgrace when I’d gotten distracted watching cartoons at home and missed 95% of our year-end meeting. I bawled my eyes out and wailed how much I hated myself over the shame, taking it as seriously as a Japanese white-collar criminal, before my concerned mom talked me into splashing cold water on my face and showing up late with a lie that my aunt had been near death. (She’s still alive. No one bought it. I still have the ledger.) My mom was annoyingly good at knowing when I needed to be consoled, the worst time being when I was sobbing in the shower over Andrew and she gently knocked on the door to ask why I was crying.
    “I’m not!” I chirped. “I’m singing!”
    Instead of letting it go, she nudged me in her softest voice, “I know you’re crying.”
    I wouldn’t hear of admitting it; all of my high school drama was something I was going to face alone.
    Andrew was popular, yes, but because he was also artsy, his real hangout was where all the cool kids went, the Barkeys.
    Kelly Barkey was a