It started in the stockroom at Macy’s. Me in men’s shoes, him in ladies. Two departments sharing the same space where the magic happened — Brannock devices, shoehorns, notions, bunion stretchers, inserts. Tools of the trade. If the shoe they wanted didn’t fit, we always had a trick up our sleeves.
I was the big guy with metalhead hair and too much confidence for someone making five bucks an hour. He was the wiry kid with thin spiked hair, walking tall like posture was the only thing holding him together. Punk, new wave, theater‑kid energy. We shouldn’t have overlapped, but hey, we sold shoes and shoes didn’t care about categories.
We clicked right away. It wasn’t a moment or a story — just an easy connection that made sense without needing to be explained. He had his scene, I had mine, but back there none of that mattered. It was two young guys doing the same job, crossing paths a dozen times a shift, talking because talking made the day move.
That’s where the year started — in that stockroom. Two worlds crossing in a hallway neither of us owned. Two young men who just happened to be looking for their first place away from home.
We found a small place a few blocks from the store — close enough to walk, a little too far to run on the mornings you overslept, and there were plenty of those. 165 Park St, New Haven, CT. A basement apartment you entered under the stoop of an old brownstone, right next door to Viva Zapata’s Mexican restaurant. Just outside the pretty parts of Yale’s campus and a stone’s throw from Chapel & Howe, the corner every suburban teenager knew as the place where the ladies of the night worked their trade.
Behind a steel cage door, the apartment had one bathroom, one bedroom, and a living room with a draw-curtain and a Murphy bed. That would be my room.
A Murphy bed, a curtain for a wall, and just enough space to pretend I had a door if I pulled it tight and no one breathed too hard. It wasn’t much, but it was mine, and at nineteen that counted for something.
We settled into a rhythm fast. Two kids playing at adulthood, improvising the rules as we went.
He was involved with a small theater troupe and needed to have a phone. I did not. So he paid for it and kept it in his room. That was the agreement. More often than not, the phone would ring and he’d come slinking out of his room, phone in hand, “it’s for you”. No attitude. No edge. Just the way things were. He’d hand it off and drift back to whatever he was doing.
I shared my Aquanet hair spray (always the pink can) and he taught me how to apply guy‑liner, dead serious about the angle and the pressure. Gave me my first Aziza eyeliner pencil like he was passing down a family tool. We were both experimenting with who we were supposed to be, just in different directions.
After a few weeks he broke up with his girlfriend. Told her he wasn’t sure about his sexuality. She handled it better than most people our age would have. I kept my mouth shut about the older director — the one I thought was taking advantage of him. Not my business. I was the roommate, not the parent. My only comment, “nice, you can do my ironing too”.
He laughed, half‑embarrassed, half‑relieved that I wasn’t going to turn it into a big conversation. That was our whole dynamic — he’d drop something vulnerable on the table, I’d give it a quick spin so it didn’t feel heavy, and we’d keep moving. Not avoidance, not denial, just two nineteen‑year‑olds without the language for any of this, doing the best we could with humor, timing, and whatever grace we could muster.
One night, not long after the breakup, he walked in on me, his ex‑girlfriend, and another young lady. Three people who were comfortable with each other, no secrets, no shame, no performance. He froze for half a second, politely excused himself and closed the curtain behind him. Later we casually talked about it. No drama. No jealousy. No weirdness. Just two young men sharing a space and trying not to trip over each other’s lives.
My friend and I had Tuesdays off so on Monday nights we held a “We Survived the Weekend” celebration. Monday nights became our decompression ritual. Eventually he’d stand in the doorway, polite to a fault, saying “come on, guys…” long after he should have.
But the year worked. Somehow. Two different energies under one roof — his elastic, mine grounded — and neither of us trying to reshape the other.
Years later, after a gig at Café 9, we met for breakfast. He brought his wife. That told me everything. He wasn’t hiding who he used to be. He wasn’t embarrassed by the confusion, the director, the eyeliner, the walk‑in, any of it. He’d found himself. She knew the whole story — you could feel it — and none of it cast a shadow.
We sat there as grown men who’d survived their twenties with their integrity intact. No tension. No rewrites. Just the clean, adult version of the same connection we’d had in the stockroom at Macy’s, two kids crossing paths in a hallway neither of us owned.
A one-year lease.
A lifetime of clarity.