Orange Is the New Black

living on room service, exoticism, and anxiety for a long time. But I had several great friends from college now in the Bay Area who took me under their wing, pulling me into a world of work, barbecues, softball games, and other wholesome rituals. I quit smoking.
    I was terrified all the time about money and immediately got two jobs. I rose early in the morning to get to job one in the Castro, opening Josie’s Juice Joint and Cabaret at seven A.M. , and I got home late at night after hostessing at a swank Italian restaurant across town in Pacific Heights. Finally, I got a “real” job at a TV production company that specialized in infomercials. The job required coaxing passersby onto bizarre exercise equipment in public places, tending tothe needs of C-list celebrities on set, and waxing facial hair off perfect strangers. I flew all over the country, filming people who wanted to be less fat, less poor, less wrinkled, less lonely, or less hairy. I found that I could talk to just about anyone, whether it was Bruce Jenner or a mom with a mustache, and find some common ground with them quickly—I wanted to be less poor, lonely, and hairy too. I worked my way up from Gal Friday to a real producer, working on preproduction, filming, and editing for broadcast. I loved my job, much to the amusement of my friends, who would tease me about the latest late-night life-changing widget, scheme, or cream.
    I dated but still felt pretty crispy and gun-shy after the flame-out with Nora. I was fine being serially single, with the occasional crazy romance thrown in to distract me from work.
    I never talked about my involvement with Nora to new friends, and the number of people who knew my secret remained very small. As time passed, I gradually relaxed inside my head. I started to feel as though there were no second shoe, and it had all been a crazy interlude. I thought I understood risk. I considered my time abroad with Nora as a crash course on the realities of the world, how ugly things can get, and how important it is to stay true to yourself even in the midst of an adventure or experiment. In my travels I had encountered all kinds of people whose dignity seemed to have a price—widely variable—and I thought that next time I had better set my price higher than anyone would pay.
    With all that worldly wisdom secreted in my memory, I was feeling pretty damn lucky. Great job, great friends, great city, great social life. Through mutual friends I met Larry, the only pal I knew who worked as much as I did in leisure-loving San Francisco. He ran a wire service called AlterNet at a nonprofit media institute. When I would crawl, exhausted, out of the editing room after hours, I could always count on Larry for late dinner or later drinks.
    In fact, Larry was always up for anything. Random tickets to a random music festival? Larry was in. Want to get up early on Sunday and go to church at Glide in the Tenderloin, and then go on a six-hour urban hike with pit stops for bloody Marys? He was Jewish, butsure, he’d come to church and lip-sync the hymns. He wasn’t my only straight male friend, but we shared a particularly simpatico sense of humor, and he quickly became the most reliable source of fun that I knew.
    As Larry’s new best lesbian buddy, I got to hear about his every romantic conquest and reversal in gory detail, which was both appalling and entertaining. I spared him nothing in my evaluations of his progress. He returned the favor by treating me like a queen. One evening a bike messenger arrived at my office with a parcel that yielded a real Philadelphia soft pretzel, complete with spicy mustard, which Larry had personally imported just for me from a trip back east. How sweet, I thought, chewing.
    But then a disturbing thing happened. Larry got hung up on one of his attempted conquests, and a rather drippy one at that. He became distinctly less fun. I was not the only one who noticed this. “She’s leading him around by his nose!” other friends smirked. We mocked him mercilessly, but that didn’t seem to have much effect. So I had to take matters into my own hands, and in a dark corner of a dirty nightclub, I sacrificed myself for Larry’s dignity, kissing him squarely on his surprised, wisecracking mouth.
    That got his attention. And mine. What the hell was I thinking? I proceeded to pretend for several months that nothing had happened, while I tried to sort out my feelings. Larry was nothing like any guy I’d been