if I had to go on stage, I certainly didn’t plan on remembering anything that came next. If I was lucky, some of those pills might even be anxiolytics.
And now, only 5 minutes later, wasted, I was supposed to play this excruciatingly earnest, heartfelt, claw-your-eyes-out sappy love song about the first guy who’d made me feel desirable. The guy who’d told me to take all the time I needed, that he was fine with waiting to have sex. The guy who was fine with ‘waiting’ because he’d been fucking someone else this whole time.
So there I was, grabbing onto the mic stand for support, staring down at my guitar like I’d never seen it before and didn’t know if you plucked the strings with your fingers or your teeth, wishing the room would stop spinning, when I saw the rum and coke Justin had been drinking earlier, balanced on an amp in the corner.
I lurched over to it, drank it like I was dying of thirst, and somehow made it back to the wooden stool at the front of the stage. I couldn’t see the faces of the crowd in front of me, and not because of the lights. I couldn’t even see my hands at that point.
Muscle memory and sheer blind luck got me through the first verse of the song. Then I got to the chorus, and I remember thinking, fuck, I might actually cry.
I’m high out of my goddamn mind and my boyfriend just publicly outed, dumped, and cheated on me and I’m pretty sure I’m slurring my words, but the most embarrassing part of all of this is that I’m about to cry because I have to sing a song about fucking beginnings when I’ve just been forcibly reminded of how all anything ever does is end.
Amazingly, I didn’t cry.
Instead, I passed out.
And stopped breathing.
Like I said, not the best way of dealing with your problems. Instead of waking up 12 years later, my very public breakup and shame lost to the mists of time, I woke up 12 hours later, in the ER, my sister beside herself with fury and relief as she leaned over my bed, and discovered that my meltdown was on the front page of entertainment blogs and websites across the country. I’d even made it onto the local news.
My big break had turned into my big breakdown. Hell of a coming out party.
“Fuck,” I said, starting to put a hand to my head, then stopping when I saw that there were tubes poking out of it. “Where am I? What happened?”
Esther, my sister, smiled down at me, relief washing across her face. “You’re in the hospital. New York Presbyterian. Thank God you’re okay.” She took my hand and gave it a squeeze. “You really scared me there for a minute. How much do you remember?”
“Not much,” I said, closing my eyes in an effort to make my headache go away. “We… had a show. At the Grasshopper. I was about to go on—oh, fuck.”
My eyes snapped open—headache very much still present, unfortunately—and stared at Esther in horror. Images from the night flashed through my mind, disconnected but with enough detail for me to piece the outline together.
“Oh, God,” I said.
“Adam, what happened?” Esther asked, trying her best to use her stern big sister voice and utterly failing to keep out a note of panic. “Why would you do something like that? I know you don’t like playing in public, but I thought that was getting better these past few months. You’ve been doing so many more shows.”
“I—it wasn’t—” I stopped, unsure of what to say.
“If you were feeling—God, if things were getting this bad, why didn’t you tell me? Or someone? We can get you help. I know things can feel really bad sometimes, but you can’t—you can’t just—hurting yourself isn’t the solution.”
“I know, Es, I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you.”
“Adam, I have to ask.” Esther bit her lip, which, combined with her too-gentle tone of voice, had me worried. Unsure and mild were not words I’d usually use to describe her. “Did you—did you do this on purpose?”
My eyes widened when I realized what she was saying.
“God, Esther, no. No. Jesus, no, nothing like that. I wasn’t—I wasn’t trying to like, kill myself or anything.”
“Adam, it’s okay, you don’t have to hide it or anything. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I just—please, let me help you. You don’t have to go through this alone.”