weren't involved with anyone else would meet up at a bar. We'd drink, we'd try to go home with someone, but then Michael died.
After the dust settled, so to speak, my friends tried to get me out of my funk. They tried to help me forget, not about my brother, but about the pain.
I'm not sure it is possible to do that. Not so soon, but again, I craved distraction. That's why I watched so many hours of television and read so many books, anything that took me away from this pain.
When Allison first told me about Redemption, she said something in passing like, "Did you know that Dean and Melanie went there?"
I asked her more about it and I was curious, of course, not just as a journalist, but as a human being. I found it fascinating that couples and people in committed relationships would go to places like that to explore their sexualities.
We didn't mention it again until she and I got drunk one night on too many wine coolers and played Truth or Dare. I had asked her to tell me the one thing that she’d never told anyone and she told me that she’d gone to Redemption.
"What was it like?" I asked, excited and a little bit shocked.
“I don't know it was, liberating, you know? It was like the veil had been lifted and you didn't have to play these games that you do at a bar,” she said with a sigh. "Do you like him? Do you just sort of like him? Does he like you? How far will this go? And then the ultimate game of all, will he call? Will you call? Do you even want him to call? Because, come on, let's be frank, most of the time the answer is no.”
Allison laughed, tossing her hair from side to side.
I folded my legs underneath my butt and leaned closer to her. "Okay, tell me everything."
She licked her lips and held up her wine glass in front of her as if she were holding court. "Well, the couple I told you about, Dean and Melanie, they invited me. They sort of vouched for me to get the invitation."
"But I thought you had to be in a relationship.”
"No, generally there’s a whole screening process for people who are couples who are interested. But single women, they're what they call unicorns because, you know, very few single women want to go to a place like that."
"What about single men?" I asked.
"Many, many want to and very, very few are ever allowed. Otherwise, it'd just be a whole sausage party.” She tossed her hair again and took another sip of her wine.
Allison McGivers is my friend from Dartmouth College. We were roommates for the last two years of school and we moved to the city together. And by the city, I, of course, mean New York.
But six months later, she found a guy and wanted to move out to live with him and this beautiful single life where we both took the city by storm ended in a little bit of a disillusionment when I couldn't pay my rent. She had paid two months ahead but I couldn’t find a roommate that I didn’t hate so I had to downsize to a studio that cost $1500 a month and wasn't worth $500.
And that's when I realized that it'd be better for me if I even rented something in Brooklyn or Jersey City and commuted because commuting, after all, wasn't too bad. But that was a huge hit to my pride.
It is hard to explain to people from other places, but somehow living in Manhattan made you feel like you were part of something bigger, at least that was what all the television shows and movies told me.
That’s not to say that people elsewhere were less but I thought that my dreams had a much bigger chance of coming true if I lived in New York.
And what was this big dream? To be a writer. The only job I was able to score, even with my Ivy League degree, was a receptionist at the same media conglomerate that Allison worked in. I worked more than the standard eight hour day. I got paid barely forty grand a year, hardly enough to pay off my loans from a private university, but that was fine.
I was good with that. This job was going to lead to another one, maybe in publishing.
Of course, I never did an internship in publishing