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I was, for a time, living on 14th Street and 8th Avenue in an overfull, illegal three-bed above a brothel that I shared with two other gay men. One was from Australia. He was the tallest and had the smallest room, which was just half the living room converted into a makeshift bed area. No windows or closet. The other was an otter from New Jersey, and we used to drink together from time to time. I think they both regretted inviting me into the apartment as soon as I’d moved my stuff in. Perhaps it had something to do with the months I slept with a mattress on the floor and nothing unpacked because I couldn’t get around to doing it, what with the drinking and all.
When the hour for sleep arrived around 9:00 a.m., whether alone or with a boy, I’d pull the cracked vinyl shades down over my window, shrouding the room in darkness and transforming it into a Stygian twink cave. The type of place you’d expect to find Edward Cullen getting bottomed. What sparse beams of light made it through the blinds illuminated the permanent cloud of cigarette smoke that hung heavy in the air. A diary written in Parliament Lights.
I’d roll over onto my side, stare at my nightstand, perpetually covered in a blanket of dust and cocaine residue. Resting atop it was a cityscape of empty cans of whatever shitty beer we’d picked up at the bodega downstairs. Or swiped from a bar and stuffed into the pockets of our trench coats, the condensation seeping into the fabric and creating strange little Rorschachs that the rest of the world could only interpret in one way: those bitches are addicts. But still, I needed sleep. I needed my heart to stop pounding through my fucking chest. And I’d just tell myself, quietly, usually in a fetal position, It’s okay if you die, just get some sleep. It’s okay if you don’t wake up, just go to sleep…
Stealing those beers always reminded me of this woman Laura that I partied with in Atlanta from the ages of, like, 15 to 19. She looked like a New Jersey housewife that got elected Queen of the Fags on a bachelorette weekend in Atlanta and was never allowed to leave again. Brown, thick hair framed her chiseled face, a skeleton of a body swaddled in oversized Rag Bone T-shirts and Helmut Lang leather leggings. Always in a blazer, with a Love bracelet and the loudest, raspiest laugh you’d ever heard. She must’ve been in her mid-to-late 40s. We met through her best friend, Billy, who supplied our drugs. His lot in life is still unknown to me. He wouldn’t even let us inside his apartment when we’d go to pick him up. He, too, was a shell of a man—short and skinny, high-pitched voice, always ready to read you for filth.
Laura would fill the base of her Hermès Birkin with Long Island iced teas from Blake’s, a glorified trailer on the edge of Piedmont Park that was my—and every other faggot in a two-hour driving range’s—safe haven. We’d pile into Billy’s Audi A3 and ride over to whatever warehouse afters or shithole drug den we’d been called to and finish them off.
But back to sunrises. Or, actually, one sunrise in particular: The morning of May 13th, 2013. My eyes are glossed over, squinty as the sun rises up and presents herself to all of creation. It’s my 21st birthday, and I keep thinking how underwhelming and meaningless the occasion feels given that I’ve spent the last decade blacking out.
I’m with Peter, my boyfriend, in a taxi driving across the Williamsburg Bridge. I peer through the window, looking out at the East River. My phone is dead, my toes and fists are clenched. Peter brushes his fingers through my hair, getting stuck in my blond locks—matted and greasy, but still soft. At least, he thinks so.
The night wasn’t supposed to end this way. I should have been at LaGuardia an hour ago to catch a flight to Burlington for my old prom date Jessica’s graduation at UVM. But I wasn’t. And now I’m here, suffering from a mild form of delirium tremens in the arms of my lover, while Jessica’s probably applying the finishing touches to the winged eyeliner she always pulls off so well. My throat is raw from cocaine drip and cigarette smoke.
Numb, tired, ashamed.
I keep stretching out my chapped lips to feel their sting.
Why do you do it?
Peter’s voice. Gentle, a little gravelly. He’s looking down at me, his face suggesting no emotion in particular. I stare back at him.
What?
He slowly exhales.
Like, I’d get it—I mean, I get why people do drugs. And obviously you do you, but you just seem…
His voice trails off, and he looks out the window, perhaps in search of an answer to his own question.
I follow his gaze, then keep going, up toward the sun and her white-hot light, and I hope she’ll blind me. If I’m lucky.
You just don’t seem happy.
I reflexively wince, and suddenly I’m swimming in a Technicolor sea of blue and purple and orange, sun dots seared into my eyes, and for a moment I wonder if I’ll get my wish. And then without opening my eyes, without thinking, really, I say—
Because I don’t really know what else to do.
A few months prior, Peter had been waiting for me at 89 Christopher Street. A different sunrise. I’d spent the witching hours of that morning dragging the limp, overdosed body of a friend of a friend down the hallway of her building after hours of speedballing together. She was svelte, but every muscle in her body had gone limp, so I had to lug her down the hallway, past apartments belonging to all manner of blue bloods. By the time we got into the elevator, her blond hair was crazy with static from the carpet.
I remember thinking, How the fuck did this happen? Like, 45 minutes prior, the three of us were laughing our asses off, and then Mitt, the boy, and I got lost in a conversation about nothing in particular, until we realized she’d been silent for a while. I walked over to her and her skin was a sort of gray-blue and freezing cold. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Mitt urged me not to call an ambulance, fearing he’d be blamed if she was actually dead, but my stubbornness—or really common fucking sense—prevailed, and I did it anyway. It came in a blinking blur of red and blue, and since the girl and I bore a resemblance, the paramedics didn’t question how we knew each other, or whether or not we were related, or why the fuck I was dragging her out of this expensive apartment building. They just scooped us up, and having no shame about my drug game, I told them everything that she’d consumed to the best of my knowledge.
Nothing is more sobering than riding bitch in the back of an ambulance. White lighting, cold metal, too many colors clashing, sirens significantly less loud on the inside, everybody’s radios going off, and the sterile smell of antiseptic. When the girl came to after a few blocks and some Narcan, she refused to look at me—clearly any chance of us ever being friends was gone. Not that it mattered much. When we pulled up to the hospital, I left without saying goodbye. I was running late, as per usual, and Peter and I had a flight to catch to Cancún for spring break.
At Peter’s apartment, I fell into his arms, just as I did whenever we’d watch the sunrise together, and broke down. I couldn’t tell him what had happened or why I was late, just that I’d been “out.” He’d already done the packing, so we quietly rode to the airport holding hands. My phone vibrated. A text from the girl. Just two words:
fuck you
Relatable.
On the flight, I wrote monologues about how this trip to Mexico would heal me (lol)—how I would come back to the city a new man, no more hard drugs, just the occasional “responsible drink.”
When we got to the resort, something Azul, I couldn’t even get drunk from the watered-down, all-inclusive booze bottles in the hotel room, so I gave up and detoxed in the scorching sun.
Back in the city, it went on like this—tiring, depressing, strange, numb—for a few weeks. In February, I was arrested for drug possession in the Lower East Side after two undercover cops found me doing key-bumps outside a shitty club, and it was late March or early April when she overdosed. I was starting to see other people in the extended circle of druggies and theater kids and people I called “my friends” disappear, drop out, dissolve into…something or nothing. Ashes to ashes. At my normal dive bar haunts—the type of places where promoters with names like “Jagger” would practice dark arts on young, unsuspecting twinks—bodies were moving around like musical chairs.
It only took a few weeks before I was digging back into my old Rolodex of dealers and scoring my usual everything-but-the-kitchen-sink cocktail of pills and powders and flowers and mushrooms and vials and whatever else the vagrant in front of me was hawking. Some cocaine to bring me up, Xanax to help me sleep, Molly to sprinkle into beverages and blunts, and, of course, my newest addition (who was rapidly becoming a series regular): heroin. I would get it in white powder form to snort, because shooting up just wasn’t for me. And so, to nobody’s surprise, really, but my own, by the time my birthday came around, I had multiple eight balls at the ready and a night of mediocre Brooklyn debauchery planned. It was to include some dumpster fire gay bars (that definitely did not go on to survive the pandemic), and the wild mix of friends I somehow managed to hang on to during my rock-bottom moments.
It’s just—I’d understand if you were enjoying yourself, but you seem…
We’re back to 2013. Peter again. I want him to stop talking, my ears are bleeding and my brain is struggling to keep up. Like, shut the fuck up.
I don’t want to be presumptuous, it’s just—and I’m not judging you, I promise. I’m just curious, like, why do cocaine and whatever else if it makes you so…
Miserable? I manage to croak out.
Yeah.
I don’t know… I don’t want to do it, but I can’t…not.
I struggle to remember the end of this conversation, because really the only thing that matters now is that it happened at all. That for once in my fucking life I could honestly say to someone I didn’t know why I couldn’t stop doing drugs. That I could not sneak, lie, cheat my way out of confrontation, like I did when I said I was going to rehab a few summers prior to avoid getting expelled from Semester at Sea for sneaking drugs onto the boat. Peter opened a door for me to finally admit for once that I didn’t want to do drugs anymore and that I didn’t know how to stop. A seed planted, and the sunrise fertilizing it.
***
We’re driving out to East Hampton. Being in a confined space with my father means endless tapping of my toes in anticipation of whatever serious-but-not-too-serious, slightly-misguided- imparting-of-wisdom-cum-jeremiad he has cooked up. Except it never comes. I look down at my hands, marveling at how their square shape mirrors his own, only a little smaller. Larry Ivan Dorfman, born in the mid-50s in Brooklyn, Jewish with a signature crew cut and an infectious smile. A teddy bear of a man. His hand is gripping the gear shift and I’m thinking, Oh, shit. This time is different. This time he’s quiet and reserved. When I’d called him and told him I wanted to try to get clean, he’d simply exhaled, and in the same breath, said, Finally. Thank you.
He assured me he’d be on the next flight out of Hartsfield- Jackson, but I asked him for one last night alone with Peter. He obliged.
Here’s something dark: When searching for a rehab that night, I literally googled “celebrity rehab fancy.” I wasn’t famous, not even close; I was just delusional and unwilling to go somewhere that would ask me to mop floors or give me cafeteria duty. Because heaven forbid this shit actually be, you know, hard.
The closer we get to East Hampton, the more I regret my decision. A pit in my stomach starts growing, screaming at me to jump out of the car Lady Bird–style (even though Lady Bird was still a few years off—bless you, Greta).
I don’t think I can do this, Dad.
You can.
I don’t know. Maybe I jumped the gun.
You didn’t. But if you did, you’ll find out soon enough. We’re here now anyway.
I press my forehead as hard as I can into the cold window of the car—except it feels more like a hearse.
Fuck.
Adapted from Maybe This Will Save Me: A Memoir of Art, Addiction and Transformation by Tommy Dorfman, to be published on May 27 by Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2025 by Tommy Dorfman
