Kenneth, a senior at my high school when I was a freshman, had hair-sprayed crispy, spiked hair, light brown skin, and a navy blue polo in his junior yearbook photo. Over the phone Kenneth played his favorite song, "Lost in Love" by the Nasty Boy Klick, a Spanglish R&B song popular on hip-hop stations across the Southwest. Kenneth told me “Fire It Up” by Busta Rhymes sampled the Knight Rider theme song. Kenneth couldn’t believe I had never heard of Knight Rider. Two months later I changed my screen name to “FireItUp6.” This was in the middle of a period of using Tori Amos song titles for my secret gay screen names. My straight friend Jerry later recalled in disbelief that I was the one who called her “Tori Anus” all the time. That was only a year before I got the poster of Tori nursing a piglet that my mother demanded I remove. For my straight friends I was “Vow15” and later “Vow16,” a gothy song by Garbage, plus my age. Jerry introduced me to Garbage lead singer Shirley Manson one afternoon after school at Jerry’s. Jerry thought she was my type, and for a while that became my explanation. A backlit band in greyish blues, oranges and purples play to sawing noises and grinds. Then, standing defiantly still to an almost danceable mid-tempo rhythm, a woman at the mic does not smile or make an innocently seductive face. You could call it a pissed look if only she cared. A large area around her eyes is black. She’s telling another girl that she’s a phony for trying to be liked, that everything she actually possessed she was wasting. What should the girl have done with what she had? Years later, when I came out to Jerry, he couldn’t believe how well he was duped the whole time, that all the signs had been in plain sight.

Kenneth was Navajo. Kenneth’s parents never married, though they were a couple for at least as long as he had been alive. Did his parents celebrate anniversaries? Eat dinner together? Live together? Kenneth told me they did, in an apartment complex near the Costco on Jefferson. Maybe Kenneth played the Nasty Boy Klick song to tell me he wanted to get lost in love with me. I didn’t know if this was a thing people did. All I knew was Shannon Cooke and I would play songs back and forth over the phone, holding cordless receivers to our boom boxes to have a conversation. We once used most of an evening and Jagged Little Pill to communicate that she had a crush on me. That was not long before I had to buy a second Jagged Little Pill because my first was so scratched. I got my first copy by exchanging The Fugees’ The Score because, I still remember, on the way home from the mall, I told my father it had a parental advisory sticker. “Should we return it?” my father asked. “I guess so,” 12 year-old me responded.

School was seven hours of half-awake hiding in a notebook drawing cats and a goth sneering drag queen-ish character, and then I came back to the computer. My parents interrupted to make me eat dinner and play piano. Otherwise, my mother watched The Nanny or my father watched the British Parliament on C-Span. At 11 PM my mother would burst in and yank the phone cord from the wall in a dramatic show of force. Some nights I would sneak back to the computer room and plug the phone cord back into the wall, but only after waiting until my parents had gone to sleep, in the interim listening to Tidal or Tigerlily or Eurythmics’ Greatest Hits—my first album purchase at age 11. When I played “Sweet Dreams” to my parents, they said the music was fake, because there were no actual instruments. This was a popular commentary on disco and synth music in that time. One time my mother paused the song. “Did she just say some of them want to abuse you? Abuse?” in a tone like the answer would determine whether the CD would be trash. ”No, amuse,” I said.