Reality Bites

On Dennis, The Dead and The Summer of 1995

June, 2025.

The rooster crows. When life looks like easy street there is danger at your door.

It's my fourth summer upstate. Four summers trying to figure out how to own a house. To mezuzah or not to mezuzah. Deadbolt or padlock. SimpliSafe or ADT. Cameras inside or out. The first month I was here I bought a pair of men's boots, caked them in mud, and left them on the welcome mat.

The mint is back, uninvited but determined. The rhubarb has split again. The hydrangeas are confused by the light.

My daughters are with their dad today. This week.

Thirty years ago, a month after I graduated from high school — I showed up at Soldier Field in Chicago: young, stoned, hairy and holding a Tupperware container of ganja gooballs, which are globs of peanut butter packed with weed, coconut, and carob chips. It was 1995. Brad Pitt was People’s Sexiest Man Alive, O.J. was on trial, and I’d just had my first-ever Frappuccino.

My mom was 50. My big sister had just graduated from college and was living at home. I worked as a camp counselor at the JCC; she was a junior travel publicist. Every morning I’d pack a brown-bag lunch in my Birks and beads; she’d be in cork platforms, weighing chopped cucumbers on a food scale.

At Soldier Field, I was with my best friend Dennis. The asphalt was so scalding that the pavement was bubbling. Up close, all the deadheads girls looked like Kate Moss — glowing emaciated aliens, vibrating with adrenaline. I had never seen such raw, strung out, blazing beauty in my life. The closest I'd ever come to a real life fashion show.

That July was one of the hottest summers on Chicago record. The heat peaked at 119 degrees.

I'd just been accepted to Brown off the waitlist. My yearbook read: Most likely to be the next Joyce Carol Oates on Broadway and make bebes with Dennis. I wrote it myself.

*

When I was in eighth grade, I met my double. Twin flame, you'd call it now. Soul contract. But I was years away from that kind of language. Back then, it just felt like gravity. There’s no such thing as signs and symbols and synchronicity when you’re in your adolescence — no awareness of how time and place and chemistry conspire.

I didn’t know yet how life works: that the pursuit of getting and doing always comes up empty. That nothing ever matters, really, except the people you meet.

His name was Dennis. He was shadowing at our school for the day, trying it on, seeing if it fit. I remember the way he stood — too still, hands slack at his sides.

He was pretty, too. Blonde hair, pink cheeks, blue eyes like the inside of a glacier mint. We were both close to six feet tall — already larger than the world had room for. My first thought when I saw him was Bobby Brady. That’s how young I was. My frame of reference: The Brady Bunch on Sunday morning, reading the funnies with my dad, eating pancakes in flannel robes.

My school, Frances Parker, was the kind of place that made a certain kind of person feel like they'd made it just by showing up. Progressive in the way rich people are — soft-edged, lazy, proud of being untucked.

At Parker, you could turn cartwheels in the hallway. Call your mom from the pay phone. Grab a donut from the cafeteria. There was a code. Sit cross-legged. Braid your friend’s hair. Come back from winter break sunburned, wearing a white turtleneck to show off the tan. Everyone said, “Where are you going?” not “What are you doing?” over break. Aspen, Barbados, Turks and Caicos. Points if your nose peeled from too much sun.

Dennis was from St. Margaret Mary in West Rogers Park. Catholic school. I’d transferred the year before from Newberry Academy, a magnet school next to Cabrini Green. Once I got beaten up on the playground. Once I found a typed death threat in my locker.

We were imposters. But our armor was good.

When I walked into Parker, I felt something lift. I felt free. Seen. The hallways were drenched in sun, not bars or overhead lighting. The world was soft. There was space for me to breathe.

It was my second year at a private school. I’d been begging my parents to send me to Parker for years, which I know makes me sound like a little bitch. But I wasn’t a little bitch. I just didn’t want to get bullied anymore, and I wanted to read real books. Even now, I don’t think that makes me entitled. I think that means I wanted a chance.

You might think this sounds silly. I was a white kid, Jewish, from an upper-middle-class family with two parents. We lived on the top two floors of an old house with crown moldings, fireplaces and a patch of backyard. My dad drove a Saab. My mom had a minivan. Shabbat dinners with warm challah and roast chicken. College degrees on the walls.

Of course I had a chance.

But it wasn’t that simple. Anyone who says it is hasn’t looked hard enough.

I also knew I was behind — academically, intellectually.
I’d met Parker kids at camp. They were smart. They could talk. About the world. They were reading real books. E.B. White. Bridge To Terabithia. Elie Wiesel. They had opinions. I remember listening to them on the JCC bus, debating right and wrong, the Holocaust, Kaddafi, Cubs versus White Sox.

I didn’t know how to think critically. I didn’t know how to argue. I’d been taking standardized tests and filling in bubbles with a number two pencil my whole life.

This was the 1980s, when the Secretary of Education had called the Chicago Public School system the worst in the country.

You might assume my parents couldn’t afford something better. But they could.

They just didn’t want to.

My father hated Parker. He hated the principles of progressive education. Too comfy. Too cutesy. For kids with soft hands. He wanted a daughter who was a tough son. I was not tough. I wanted fluffy pillows and a father I called Daddy.

To my father, private school meant Jewish American Princess. It meant he hadn’t done his job.

Parker made me frail in his eyes. Diminished.

I think what I’m trying to say is that by the time I was a teenager, I understand that my hunger for words, for beauty, for meaning — was a sign of weakness. A source of shame.

*

A year after he shadowed, Dennis enrolled up at Parker for real. It was the first day of freshman year.

We were assigned to walk around Oz Park together and ask a stranger for an egg. Ninth grade orientation team-building activity led by Mr. Lurie. We just bought an egg from The White Hen Pantry, then Dennis drew a picture of Madonna, naked, her butthole spread. I’d never seen such a good drawing in my life, up close, by a kid.

Later, we smoked pot from an apple with a boy in a trench coat. I wore a snap-crotch bodysuit from Filenes Basement and blackberry lipstick. We listened to Like A Prayer. When Anna and Jane disappeared to a party, they left me at home with a pack of cigarettes. They came back smelling like sweat and sex. Jane called me a slut and told me how to make a guy come. I curled into the phone with Dennis that night, his voice in my ear like warmth.

Blane Reed was the kid Dennis shadowed. Blane was not shiny. He had frizzy hair and big pores. We went to Sunday school together. He played the saxophone and made fun of me for reading Little Girl Lost— Drew Barrymore’s memoir — when we went spelunking in Indiana.

Dennis was something else entirely. Pale and smooth. A face like a pond. From the beginning, he shimmered.

*

We didn't see each other's shadows right away. Just the shine. But now I know. We were already in the woods, both of us. The stories said you could get out if you followed the crumbs. But no one tells you that the longer you stay, the more the forest sinks into you. Eventually, you become the woods.

He had the softness boys aren’t supposed to have — faded flannel, worn Doc Martens. I had orange jeans from New York and streaks in my hair from Sun-In. I told him about this store I’d just been to in Manhattan. It was called Urban Outfitters. I said I’d seen these amazing jeans there, Levi’s 501, but they had a red seam and they were from Tokyo.

“Have you ever been to New York City?” I asked.

He hadn’t. But I had. We’d just driven Becca to Connecticut College in the minivan and stopped on the way. That same trip, my dad got mad at us at a Howard Johnson because we made my seven year old brother Zachary laugh so hard he vomited Lucky Charms out his nose. We’d said, in unison, “Rick Moranis ripped his anus.”

I didn’t know what gay was yet, but I knew Dennis was trying not to be something. Or maybe trying too hard to be something else. That’s its own kind of shine.

He stole a Vogue and we ran down Clark Street. Tower Records had just opened. We saw Basic Instinct at Water Tower. He picked me up in his brother Tommy’s red Blazer. The radio station B96 had announced that Bobbi Brown would be giving free makeovers at Bloomingdales. Bobbi did my makeup — brown lipliner and shimmery lipstick — and she said I was pretty. Dennis stood beside me, beaming, proud, like I was his present.

Afterwards, we drove to Discover Cafe on Lincoln Avenue and drank black coffee at ten at night.

We were fifteen. Dennis didn’t even have his driver’s license. Tommy was so mad.

I didn’t know if I wanted to be with Dennis or be Dennis. I just knew I wanted to be wherever he was.

*

After the Dead show, I worked in a real estate firm, some friend of my father. Brown had accepted me off the waitlist but only if I started in the second semester. For a while I followed my boyfriend Brian west. We hitchhiked in the backs of U-Hauls to Phish concerts, slept in parking lots and strangers' trailers. I lost my virginity to Brian in a Motel 6 in Missoula, Montana. Brown carpet, broken air conditioner. Afterward, Brian rolled over and turned on the O.J. trial.

In Seattle, we took what we thought was acid and ended up in the ER. I remember Brian doing a farmers blow in the hospital parking lot, his face melting like wax. Maybe it wasn’t acid. Maybe it was rat poison.

Brian was mean. He stole money. He made comments about my body and my clothes and acted shocked when I got upset. “I’m just being honest,” he’d say, like honesty was a virtue and not just a way to be cruel. To this day, Brian was the best sex I ever had.

We saw Phish play in Ithaca, the three of us — me, Brian, Dennis — and ended up in a dorm room at Cornell. It was freezing. My knuckles cracked and bled. My hair bloomed with static inside Brian’s sleeping bag. We slept until five in the afternoon and woke to bird sounds playing from a boombox. The dorm belonged to a boy named Callum, who bought us tofu from the Cornell cafeteria on his meal card.

Dennis went to Hampshire. He dropped out after one semester. The next year, he enrolled at Parsons. He lived in a dorm on 8th Street, across from the Patricia Field store. He once called to say he’d eaten a falafel next to Nan Goldin. Sometimes we met in L.A. on spring break and crashed on Josh’s couch. Once, at an Oscar party, we got so drunk Dennis touched Johnny Depp’s agent’s wig and Mick Jagger shoved me over an amp.

That dorm is a Sean MacPherson hotel now. It’s called The Marlton. You can stay in Dennis’s old room for four hundred dollars a night.

That night the Dead played Soldier Field, Dennis and I walked home down Lake Shore Drive — ten miles in the dark. We sat on my front stoop facing the maple tree.

We'd eaten mushrooms; our pupils were blown wide, black as burnt-out moons. The air hung thick with humidity. Somewhere down the block, a car stereo played Digable Planets. I was talking, probably too much, always talking too much — always talking about all the things I wanted to do, all the books, the movies, the men. My future was going to be a gold field of wheat.

We were sitting smack in the middle of the nineties. Reality Bites. Sassy magazine. Kurt Cobain had killed himself the year before. Women were throwing their rapists’ names into fires. A man named Bart from Swarthmore had just given a talk to my senior class about something called the Internet. It will change the world, he said. Ellen had come out on national TV. I’d been editor-in-chief of my high school literary journal. Dennis was headed to art school. Our college counselor told him not to write a word about being gay on his college application. You can talk about it when you get to New York City, she said. You just don’t want this kind of thing on public record.

People thought we were twins.

We were sitting on the stoop, after the Dead show, tripping, when I heard a sound. Something splitting. It was him. He was crying so hard his voice choked in his throat. I remember the taste of the air that night— wet bark, asphalt, something electric. I think he said my name. I think he said: I can't see my future.

*

Eleven years later, in August 2006, I walked down Lake Shore Drive again. Twenty miles in the middle of the night. I had blonde, blunt hair, a flip phone and I hadn’t listened to the Dead in almost ten years. Tommy, Dennis’ big brother, walked with me. The walk was called the Out of the Darkness. I'd raised five thousand dollars on Facebook to participate.

By then I was living with two cats in the East Village. I was a babysitter. Every morning I made my bed, got on my knees, and whispered: God please keep me away from drugs and alcohol, just for today.

Becca was married. She had a baby. She was a music publicist in Manhattan, with a two-bedroom apartment in Chelsea, a diamond ring and a gym membership.

In our twenties, we were out constantly— George Magazine parties and Miramax premieres, vodka tonics and yellow taxicabs. People called us the Jewish Hilton sisters. I was hippie Paris; she was Nicky with black hair.

When I asked why she was starting a family, she shrugged. We were at Newark, facing the luggage carousel. Then she said, "It's time." Those two words put a chill down my spine. I didn’t know what she meant. Time for what?

A month later Dennis slit his wrists. November 2005. It was our tenth-year high school reunion. Becca had just started to show. I stood in my kitchen, holding a beer, trembling. Then I poured the beer down the drain.

I haven’t had a drink since.

Now I stand in my garden, full of roses and raspberries. The sound of Pride starting in the town square. I’ll see my daughters there with their dad. My cat Harry walks by with a mouse in his mouth —his first of many for the day.

Time for coffee. Then I’ll clip some roses. Call my mom.

It’s time. I didn’t know what Becca meant back then. Now I do.