The Gilded Razor by Sam Lansky

Author:Sam Lansky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

I was given clean sheets for a lumpy twin bed; on the top bunk was a dark-haired boy with a sparse mustache that belied his age. Fourteen, fifteen, maybe. In the night I heard him weeping, which gave me an erection for reasons I couldn’t explain.

Dizzy from hunger, I ate macaroni and cheese for breakfast. I poured myself a tumbler of milk and mixed a few tablespoons of Nesquik chocolate into the glass with a long spoon. The taste was chalky and saccharine. After, in the privacy of the bedroom, I nursed my protuberant stomach with one hand.

And then, in the bathroom, one of the escorts sat on the toilet and watched me as I lathered my face with shaving cream and ran a razor across my chin. Hand quivering, I swiped my neck. A stinging, the metallic smell of blood, a crimson glistening. He grabbed my hand.

“You’re finished,” he said. It had been an accident. Even at my worst, I had never been a self-mutilator.

Later that day, they gave me a letter from my father. It was reasoned, cautious, and positive. He told me that he wanted to see me move into a life without dependence on drugs; that he knew this approach was not in my comfort zone, and he hoped that I would embrace the program as a new and exotic experience (those were his words, “new and exotic”—the absurdity of this was laughable); and that he apologized for not involving me in the decision-making. “I know this will be a great few weeks for you,” he concluded.

I gave the letter a cursory read, then tossed it aside.

“Don’t you want to keep that?” Tim asked.

“No,” I said.

Tim picked it up and tucked it away. I hated my father for doing this to me, hated him for his optimism and concern. I had already started going to twelve-step meetings, even if I hadn’t been staying sober. I would have been willing to go to a real rehab. Why was this necessary? Pulling me out of bed in the middle of the night, sending me to some godforsaken shithole in the desert? Making me hike?

It wasn’t, I concluded. The whole thing was bullshit. I would play along for as long as I had to, but my father was dead to me.

On the third day, a van arrived. The fat woman in the driver’s seat was all teeth. Tim pulled my bag from a locked closet and passed it to her; I watched this exchange with hawkish intensity. My pills were in there, and my phone.

There was another boy in there already, sitting in the back-seat of the van. He was shorter than I was, and muscular, broad-featured. He introduced himself as Eric. I shook his hand.

We talked about what had brought us to Aspen. Eric was from the Jersey Shore, a stoner and a football player who had ingested what he had thought were psychedelic mushrooms—they turned out to be poisonous. He’d nearly died and landed in the hospital

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