Will and I lived in the squalid back rooms behind the barbershop. The apartment was essentially a glorified hallway that ended in a tiny backyard filled with raccoons and cigarette butts. The kitchen window looked out onto a cinderblock wall, so no sunlight ever got in. We couldn’t bear the glaring fluorescent lights our slumlord installed, so we lit the place with candles all day long. Ants streamed along the caulked cracks between the tiles. Cockroaches scuttled into the cutlery when we opened drawers. In the summer we walked around without shirts and without air conditioning or even a decent cross-breeze. Our friends put on plays and cabarets and happenings in the front room, and then we’d squeeze into the sweltering kitchen backstage and drink beer in the semi-dark, usually just a single candle stuck to the Masonite table with its own dripping wax. And every morning we’d wake up to find a different friend asleep on our couch or in our shower, a revolving door of underemployed actors, drag queens, performance artists, and those who hadn’t yet decided how best to waste their lives.

Once you happened to be in Toronto for a conference while I was putting on a show. I called to see if you wanted to come and you said you’d rearrange some things to be there. I warned you in advance that the show was a little on the autobiographical side. “And there’s a slightly gratuitous ejaculation scene.” We held the door for fifteen minutes until your cab arrived. You whispered your apology as you passed me at the tech table (which doubled as a box office). Will handed you the playbill, a few pieces of computer paper stapled together. I watched you the entire play shifting back and forth in your chair and then looking down at one point into your lap for the better part of five minutes, so long that I thought you might’ve been on your phone. But no, you shifted your weight and I saw that your hands were clasped on your lap; you were just staring down into them. Later on you started fanning yourself with the playbill, which for some reason irritated me so much. Granted, it could be a trial to sit in that cramped storefront on a hot night enveloped in “l’eau de hipster sweat,” as Ana would say.

When the show ended you clapped, though not hard. I tried to catch your eye as I passed you on my way backstage to check in with the actors, but you were looking through your purse for something. When I came back out a couple of minutes later, you were gone. I didn’t hear from you that night. Or the night after. I eventually broke down and called.

“You made me out to be some kind of of of monster!”

“Mom, it’s fictional!”