Affirmative
By Hart Hallos
God, it seems like yesterday, doesn’t it? But it was years ago—my sense of time is probably distorted because I have a lot of trauma and a suuuuuper fucked up relationship with my family (ugh). I can almost picture where we were: my friend’s Rural Farmers Are Poor and That’s Really Funny To Me party. Omgggg put that steam right back in your ears, you sillies; we were all fully vaccinated and wearing masks, and also it was before Covid.
Some twunk in Margiela overalls was pouring shots of Peach Schnapps for the classic drinking game Count to Two, and someone really witty said they hoped this bottle was distilled using the peach Timothée Chalamet fucked in Call Me By Your Name (2017). Needless to say, it crushed. And just as everyone finished screaming, laughing, AND crying, I prepared to follow it up with WatchMojo’s #1 fun party fact: that T Challey had chlamydia … or was it syphilis? At the very least HPV ...
Then, out of nowhere, some plaid-clad pipsqueak pipes up and steals my fact. I honestly don’t remember that much of it, just that it all happened in slow motion—soft blond hair bouncing as he enunciated the “y” in genital herpes, mouths agape at the news, someone literally about to cum. A sex-positive discussion on the vilification of STDs ensued, and I was sickened by every minute of it.
Like, hello? Were you even in our quadrilateral-shaped group of six before that? Because I didn’t hear you speak up, stupid. Maybe you thought I was weighed down by these two extremely ironic hay bales, but I assure you I still had plenty of room to carry that conversation. On. My. Back. Okurrr!
I wish I came up with something that good on the spot. I guess that’s why they say foreskin is 20/20. But I don’t even think about it that much—definitely not when I’m jerking off! I can’t believe you would even ask me that omg that is so violating!!! I only jerk off to FamilyDick™ (#ad).
So yeah, you could say I hate Cy Gilman. Because the thing is … he kept spilling Timmles’ gonorrhea-ridden beans. At my friend’s If You’re From The South How Are You Cool open bar? My (toxic) ex’s Do Homes In Rural States Have Real Floors soirée? My other ex’s toxic ex-friend’s If You’re From Kentucky Is This Your First Pair of Shoes social? All the same: killer joke from some under-appreciated genius about Teedles Cheedles breedin’ the ol’ peach, followed by huge laughs and a few seconds where I think “Hey, I just might get my epic party line in.'' But every time, Cy Gilman busts on in, practically red in the face and with ice-hard nipples to tell us about TimTam Chaddles’ ambiguous phallic pustules. Not okurr!
It didn’t even matter if people knew that Ladybird supporting actor and international heartthrob Timothée Chalamet had Hep B- and spread it around NYU during his time there (like I said before, that’s actually pretty cool and you’re being super judgmental rn). What mattered is that I should be the one to tell them! Not Cy! Not Cy with his freshly ’roided, Jeff D.(I.L.F.) Bezos muscles; not Cy with his Limited Easter Edition Tonka Dump Truck of an ass; not Cy with his occasional mild-to-severe pain when peeing! Ugh I haaaaaate Cy so much I want to hate him so hard!!!!! Also my friend told me Cy reads Columbia undergraduate magazines, so take from that what you will. (Horse. Hung.)
Ok sorry I had to go clean up a glass of water that I spilled. But it should be extremely obvious at this point that I hate Cy Gilman—hate him so much that if I saw him at another party, I might even slap him in the face! Yeah, I said it—freedom of speech!!!! He cost me so much by stealing my really cool fact that one time I barely even remember; like, imagine the scores of people who would have gone away loudly saying “Woah, that guy Hart was fun, toned, and witty—we should invite him to our next wine, cheese, and cocktail party ASAP.” And if there’s anything you’ve learned from reading this, it’s that I would be great at a wine, cheese, and cocktail party. Please invite me! I’ve never even tasted alcohol before!!!!
Signed,
Twink looking for love and horse tranquilizer (and not necessarily in that order, either ;))
Negative
Cy Gilman
Hate? HATE? Hate doesn’t begin to describe the veritable constellations of sentiments racking my soul—doesn’t even begin to delve into the chaotic system of emotional negotiations and intimate hostilities that go on between two people. It’s fucking complicated, man.
When you notice that the ripples in the frosting of your birthday cake look like the sand dunes on Arrakis (see the way they undulate: straight up, then thrust down and forwards) and you begin to weep, is that hate? Or when you see some Victorian orphan in Washington Square Park, cross-legged and smoking a blunt, and you start hyperventilating—could that possibly be a copy of Howard Zinn in his hand?—is this hate? God damn it, sometimes I think I’m morbidly haptodysphoriac and sometimes the feeling of rubbing my face through a bowl of just-over-ripe peaches is nothing short of hapto-Armie-Hammer-fucking-euphoria: This is many things, but it is not hate!
I see things sometimes. On the 1 train, going from 116th to West 14th, I look out the window and see, clear as day, the Beautiful Boy himself. He stares directly at me through the pair of sooty windows passing in the night, gazing straight into the depths of my being with the kind of smirk that freezes one’s veins. And then a drop of blood drips like a tear down his cheek, and the left side of his face begins to shrivel up, and those grinning teeth turn the color of Moutarde de Dijon (I know these aren’t real Chlamydia symptoms, but my subconscious has an active imagination) and then he mouths across the gap, You made me do it, and then pulls a bunny mask over his face and then I realize Wait shit that last bit’s Jake Gyllenhall and the vision promptly disappears.
Do note: This is not a pathetic fawning celebrity obsession; I am not some twitchy loser drooling over a wall of paparazzi printouts. I’ve reached nothing short of my goddamn telltale-heart moment . I’d had my 15 minutes of fame, been touched by God—I had been given the keys, delicately wrapped and tied up with lace, to a very small, precious room—and not only did I trash the place but I chucked its contents into the street. I turned a jewelry box into an arms cache and opened the floodgates, knowing full well what carnage would follow.
Reader, I marred him. I gave Timothée Chalamet Chlamydia trachomatis. I loved him and I fucked him and I made him ill and I left him—now Challie Mae is spreading the chlam while I’m spilling the tea—each of us going from party to party, him downtown, me up, each of our names on more pairs of party-going lips than mono. I’ve Dorian Gray-ed it so that I’m stocking up on social clout by rolling him in the dirt for something I did—and now the goss about Tim Tam and his Vegemite has taken on a life of its own, and with each re-telling, the particulars get as fuzzy as the surface of a certain lascivious stone fruit. Party animals have begun to mix up Challey’s Clam with Crabs or the Clap—such terminological sloppiness being the hallmark, I immediately assumed, of truly tragic virginal naïveté.
Yet even those who should really know better are twiddling with the details: My doctor the other day tried to convince me that I was, in fact, afflicted not with chlamydia but with a case of the pox. “No,” I tried to explain to him, “You’re getting your STDs mixed up like the rest of them. Mr. Chalamet has chlamydia, not syphilis.” But he wouldn’t listen. Deluded sexual fantasies brought on by neurosyphilitic dementia. Yeah, right.
And so my doctor’s incompetence means that the only bearers of my inconvenient truth are myself, my conscience, and the one and only Timon of Manhattan himself. And as I linger for hours in tiny Italian towns on Google Street-View, bathed in sweat during the wee hours of the night, I cannot but desperately hope—nay, I know it to be true, for God is always forgiving—that he does not hate me the way I so undoubtedly deserve. And as for me: How can I hate someone that I have so badly wronged? How can I hate someone whose bones are the skeleton in my closet?