The Volunteer Coordinator at My Internship

Through my stepbrother’s wife’s brother’s now-­ ex-­girlfriend, I scored an internship at a tutoring center, where my primary responsibilities were taking out the trash and improving youth literacy.

In any new place—to make that place worth going to—there should be someone you aspire to kiss. One night, I followed the paid employees to the bar Amnesia (other nights they went to the Make Out Room or the Beauty Bar, names that doubled as offerings). I stuck to the edges, unnoticed, until out of nowhere the volunteer coordinator with the good sense of humor came over and talked to me when no one else did, which meant I’d love him always.

We didn’t kiss that night. Or any other. It’s now ten years later, and I’m still extremely not over it.

At the second publishing house I worked with commas. Nine hours of the day, every business day, I added and removed commas. I was alive one out of every four seconds. I could not believe that this was what people did all day, that “having a career” is people signing emails Cheers. I needed someone to kiss. But no one there wanted to kiss me, which isn’t why I got fired, but I did get fired without having kissed anyone at all

One spring evening, I met an actor at a one-­man show—he was the one man. After his show, this non-­gay actor living in San Francisco and I went to a bar together, and then once we were blitzed with fernet, we left the bar together. Outside, he pressed me against a wall, fitted his knees between my knees, and he gave me my first (and last?) cinematic kiss, a kiss that a homeless person interrupted to hand us a map of San Francisco, a memento.