3
I’ve been on two TV game shows, but neither of them showered me with as many fabulous prizes as Drew. On our first date, I offhandedly mentioned a type of British candy I’d liked when I visited London. The next time we met, he showed up with a box of it, along with the new Pet Shop Boys CD, which, for gays, is just kind of a given. When I told him I’d never seen the original Nightmare on Elm Street, he immediately went out and bought me the DVD. He once saw me playing Mario Kart, and even though he couldn’t stand video games, he messengered a copy of the newest installment to my apartment the day it came out to make sure it reached me before I bought it for myself. Every date with my new boyfriend was like a Showcase Showdown. It left me wondering whether he would one day pick me up on a catamaran or in a brand new car!
I wasn’t the only one who benefited from Drew’s generosity. He drove across town to Best Buy every Tuesday, when new releases arrived, and bought absolutely anything he could give away to anyone he even remotely knew. He thought nothing of dropping $90 on an X-Files box set for the nerdy receptionist at his office or $40 on the limited premium edition of the direct-to-video title Aladdin 3 for his goddaughter, who kind of liked the first one.
For a while, I thought Drew must be a millionaire, but then I saw his apartment. His dump was just a few blocks from my dump on the dumpier side of West Hollywood, not far from where Eddie Murphy and Hugh Grant were busted for picking up prostitutes. In many ways, Drew’s building was indistinguishable from a prison, right down to the bars on the windows. There were no curtains, no decorations on the walls, and where a dining room table should have been, Drew had a large cardboard box with the leftovers of last night’s pizza on it. Anyone who equates being gay with fastidiousness and design skills has clearly never been his houseguest.
It’s not that Drew is a slob. He just prefers to spend money on other people rather than himself. If the guy who cut his hair had lacked a dining room table, Drew would’ve had one express delivered to the salon, with assembly thrown in. Asked why he didn’t just buy himself one, though, Drew shrugged and asked, “What’s wrong with the box?”
People were always trying to repay his kindness, but as beneficent as Drew was with others, he was miserly about accepting gifts in return. He still took a clunky first-generation iPod with him to the gym. As his birthday approached, I figured I’d get him the latest model, until I saw that he had a closet full of iPods, unopened in their original packaging. It turned out most of his close friends and business associates had the same gift idea at one point or another, but Drew felt uncomfortable accepting something so expensive. Instead, he held onto all the iPods until Christmas, then regifted them to his family. “Does Matt have an iPod?” he’d ask.
“You gave him one for his birthday.”
“But does he have a Nano?”
It wasn’t just Apple products Drew tossed aside. After I moved in with him, I started finding unused gift cards everywhere in his apartment. They were buried in drawers or amid piles of receipts on top of his bureau. $25 to Bed, Bath & Beyond, $50 to AMC movie theaters, a $100 spa voucher.
“Why don’t you spend these?” I demanded.
“I don’t like to. I feel weird.”
He had enough Cheesecake Factory gift cards to eat Crispy Caramel Chicken for a month, enough Gap cards to buy the same bland sweatshirt in nine different colors. He had $300 in Best Buy cards. Best Buy! He was there every week! My new boyfriend was probably the first hoarder in history who stashed items of actual value.
One day, in frustration, I scoured the apartment, with the goal of finding every last unused gift card. Over the course of one afternoon, I turned up untold stashes of store credit and amassed them in a massive plastic Matterhorn on top of his dining room box.
The grand total was $2,255.
“We have to start spending these,” I told him.
Drew rolled his eyes. “But I have money.”
As his birthday approached, his friends started calling and emailing me. “He’s so hard to shop for. Any idea what he wants?”
“Geez, if I knew, I’d get it for him myself.”
Then they’d sigh. “Fine, I guess I’ll just get him a boring gift card.”
I wanted to tell people not to waste their money, but then I realized something. I had no problem spending gift cards. “Great idea,” I’d say. “I think he really likes Restoration Hardware.”
I told everyone the same thing. “Get Drew a gift card to Restoration Hardware. He’d love that.” Did I feel a tiny bit guilty? Sure, but I had a plan.
On his birthday, he arrived home from work, arms laden with iPods from people who hadn’t bothered to contact me. “Ugh, I hate these things!” he groaned as he walked in. He went to dump his bags on his dining room box, when suddenly he stopped short.
The box was gone. I was sitting instead at a brand new, gleaming oak table. “Where did you get that?” he asked.
“Restoration Hardware. Happy birthday.”
He gave me a giant hug, then backed up and looked around, just a tinge upset. “What did you do with my box?”
It wasn’t long before Drew and I started hearing the question all young, committed couples are hounded with: “So . . . are you guys planning on having kids?” Given that we were gay, the topic was usually broached delicately or with a wink, like they knew it was a long shot. “That’d be so awesome!” people said. Often, the query was followed up with, “Because you can, you know?” or with a reference to Rosie O’Donnell’s family. “She has, like, ten kids,” people would remind us.
I imagine we got the question more than most gay couples, simply because Drew connected better with kids than anyone I had ever met. If we found ourselves in line behind a father and son at the movies, it was a given that Drew would start talking to the kid about what he was going to be for Halloween or complimenting his cool Power Rangers T-shirt. Personally, I feared strangers’ children because talking to them in public can quickly get you earmarked as a perv. Drew never made anyone uncomfortable, though. His interest in kids was so pure and sweet.
If we were having dinner with our friends Marcel and Deborah, we would arrive an hour early so Drew could squeeze in some play time with their daughter, Charlotte. When it was time to go, it was his leg Charlotte would cling to. “Don’t leave!” she’d wail. “Read me a story, Drew!”
Older kids loved him because he worked at MTV, and he was happy to share the behind-the-scenes scoop on Jackass and Pimp My Ride. Younger kids loved him because he was silly and imaginative, unafraid to play princesses with them or wrap a diaper around his head for a cheap laugh.
In another generation, Drew would’ve been the host of a kiddie TV show, an asexual clown with a puppet on his lap and a mid-afternoon time slot. When people asked him why he never had a family, he’d put down his ukulele and motion to the hordes of screaming toddlers at his feet. “Aw, these are my kids,” he’d grin.
This was the twenty-first century, though, and all those well-meaning friends were right. We could have kids of our own. We should have kids of our own. If anyone deserved to be a dad, it was this garrulous man I’d fallen in love with.
As much as we liked the idea, it did seem like a long shot—at least until we found an adoption agency that accepted gift cards. That didn’t stop us from having fun with the idea.
I would suspect that overall, I’m a pretty kick-ass guy to be in love with. I’m not controlling or aloof. Not commitment phobic or necrophilic. Not an alcoholic, chocoholic, or rage-oholic. My loyalty is strong; my body odors, weak. I’m too small to abuse you physically, too conflict averse to beat you up emotionally. I don’t have a lot of bad habits like smoking crack or stabbing Federales. I’m equally comfortable making conversation with your parents, your grandparents, and your special needs cousin. I’ll never tell you you look fat, old, or confused, but I will tell you when you have a full broccoli floret stuck in your teeth. You can even leave the toilet seat up with me. When I need to sit, I’ll know what to do. But if you do plan to date me, there is one tremendous catch you should be aware of.
I play pranks.
Not often and not haphazardly but when you least expect and with cunning precision. I prank the way some people bite their fingernails or speak French. I can’t help it. April Fool’s Day is my Kwanzaa.
Drew and I met on February 1, so our bi-month-iversary seemed like the perfect time to introduce him to my dark side. Cue evil laugh.
He’d been developing an MTV series with Paula Abdul, who brought the requisite dose of crazy to my favorite TV show, American Idol. She once left Drew a rambling, tearful voice mail message, which we played about a hundred times, laughing and laughing. Paula had been trying to get Drew to attend a taping of Idol, and now that he had a boyfriend who was slavishly devoted to the show, Drew finally took her up on the offer.
On the very morning we had tickets, April 1, 2003, a scandal rocked the entertainment headlines. A finalist named Corey Clark had been booted unexpectedly off the show by producers. For weeks, Clark had been making waves by serenading Paula at the judges’ stand. Now he would become better known as the dude who’d been arrested for allegedly beating up his sister.
It was a juicy story, but it deserved to be even juicier. The stars had aligned, and conditions were ripe for a perfect storm of pranksterism. I typed up a phony news story, slapped a Daily Variety logo on it, and emailed it to my trusting boyfriend.
Ousted “Idol” Fights Back—Alleges Affair with Host
Tues Apr 1, 1:06 PM ET
LOS ANGELES (Reuters)—Disgraced “American Idol” contestant Corey Clark has lashed out against the show, claiming producers are hiding the real reason for his expulsion. Clark alleges that two months ago, during the show’s semifinal round, host Paula Abdul “made advances of a sexual nature, after which we had sex.”
Clark claims the former pop princess isn’t kidding around when she declares her crushes on the competitors. “She’s a predator,” he says. “She’s pushing 40, she’s lonely and she hasn’t had a hit in years. She’s doing the show for two reasons. To revive her career and to meet men. Period.”
Throughout their fling, Clark says Abdul lavished him with expensive gifts and gave him tips on his image, encouraging him to wear a sheer mesh shirt during last week’s show. “I didn’t want to wear that,” he says. “It was skanky.” He claims he was often absent from the Hollywood Hills mansion that houses the other contestants because he was at Abdul’s home with her and what he describes as “her ugly dogs.”
I worried that I’d gone too far. It was so absurd, and the quotes were particularly nonsensical. Drew was smarter than to fall for this.
Within seconds, he responded. “HOLY SHIT!” he emailed. “HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT!” As any prankster knows, this was a rave review. Three “Holy Shits”! Kudos to me!
There was just one thing I hadn’t expected: Drew had a dark side, too. My good-natured boyfriend, it turned out, was a super-gossip. Before he replied to me, he forwarded my email to half his address book. His coworkers, his boss, the MTV press department.
Then, suddenly, he called me in a panic. “Tell me you didn’t just burn me with an April Fool’s joke.”
I snorted with glee. “To a crisp!” I cheered.
But Drew wasn’t laughing. He let me know that my email was currently circulating throughout Hollywood—among his agent friends, his producer friends, page 6 of the New York Post. Any second, Kurt Loder might break into TRL with an MTV News special report.
“I could lose my job!” Drew said. “Thanks a lot.” Click.
Of course, he didn’t get fired. He just had to send an embarrassing retraction and make a couple of crow-eating phone calls to reign in the hoax before anyone took it seriously. It turned out that no one other than Drew believed the story anyway. As I suspected, it was too ridiculous.
We went to the taping that night as planned. I got to meet Paula Abdul. She was extremely nice. She called me “Jimmy.” It was a great time.
Did I learn my lesson? Yes. April Fool’s Day is fun!
The following year, I cast my net wider. My target: everyone.
I spent months planning my ruse. It had to be elaborate. It had to be believable. It had to be perfect.
Then, first thing on the morning of April 1, the following email hit the in-boxes of just about everybody I know.
From: Jerry Mahoney
To: [recipients]
Subject: Big News!
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 05:59:12 -0800
Dear friends and family:
Drew and I have a very big announcement to make, and I hope you’ll forgive us for doing this via email, but it really was the best way to reach all of you at once. A few months ago, we began the process of adopting. We have lots of love to give, and if we can piss off a few right-wingers in the process, so much the better!
After exploring several options, we decided on an agency that specializes in Chinese adoptions. It seems fitting for us to take in an Asian kid. I mean, Drew and I both love Chinese food and Jackie Chan movies. (Ha, ha. Geez, if that’s my level of cultural sensitivity, I feel sorry for this kid already.) Maxine, our agent in America, knew of a particularly distressed orphanage in the Siyue Hunong region. We submitted our application, had it professionally translated, wrote about a thousand checks, and submitted to a very long, awkward, static-filled phone interview. Then, finally, just last night, we signed the papers. In three weeks, we’ll be flying to Shanghai (and then taking a nine-hour train ride) to pick up our daughter!
Out of respect for her heritage, we’ve decided to keep her given name, Fu-Ling. We deliberated whose last name to give her, weighing all the implications of each, how our families would feel, and, of course, whose name sounded better with Fu-Ling. And in the end we flipped a coin. Welcome Fu-Ling Tappon. (Dammit. Should’ve picked heads... Well, at least the next one will have my name.)
And since I’m sure everyone wants to see the newest member of our family, her picture is attached below.
Love,
Jerry and Drew
>——-Original Message——-
> From: Maxine Rablish
> To: Jerry
> Sent: Tue Mar 30 13:29:21 2004
> Subject: Fwd: Re: [no subject]
> hey, guys!!! well, i had to say five chinese prayers to buddha and sacrifice a goat
> (sorry, sick joke!!!!!!!!), but we finally got a picture out of that crazy woman!! i
> have to say, in all my years of doing this, you prob. scored the cuuuuuuuuutest
> baby ive ever seen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! congrats again and again, kids!!!!! can’t wait
> til you bring her home and i can take you and little fu-ling out to lunch!!!!! xoxox
> >—- happy baby adoption china siyue wrote:
> > Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 18:43:57 +0100
> > Subject: Re: [no subject]
> > From: xin-xian xiang
> > To: getchababyhere323@yahoo.com
> >
> >Attachment is pictur of you baby for arrange to pick up china 23 apirl. Too
> >welcome Fu-Ling too happy familiy!
Below all of this was a picture of China’s absolute most adorable baby. Thank you, Google Image search.
Then came what, in the Internet age, marks the official start of any good prank, hitting “Send.” It was out of my hands now. My baby was off on its own, out in the big world, sowing mischief far and wide, and I left Drew behind to deal with the fallout.
I was on my way to meet up with Greg in New Orleans.
The trip was his idea. In the time since our fateful phone call, so much had changed for both of us. Drew and I moved in together, and Greg embarked on the world’s fastest-ever coming-out spree. Friends, parents, baristas. Most of the Tri-State Area heard the news. What it took me ten years to do Greg accomplished in about two weeks.
Along the way, he learned not one but two of his two best friends from college were also gay. Back in school, the three of them shared a house together, but apparently, little else. We all felt the same—shocked, confused, and full of regrets from years spent in the closet. Greg thought the answer was to pack everything we missed into one wild three-day jaunt to the Sleazeville of the South. A good, old-fashioned Repressed Gay Summit.
The timing was purely coincidental, but it did keep me from giving my April Fool’s joke the follow-up attention it deserved. This was back during that brief period of several weeks in the early 2000s when cell phones could ring with a polyphonic rendition of “Baby Got Back” but not yet book your round-trip tickets to Orlando or turn your sprinklers on. Or, for that matter, email.
The only indication I had of how people were reacting was a voice mail I heard from my friend Adam during a layover.
“OHMYGOD! I’MSOHAPPYFORYOU!! OHMYGOD! SHE’SBEAUTIFUL!! I’MEXPLODINGWITHJOYANDLOVEANDHAPPINESSFORYOU! I’MSOSOOOOOOOTHRILLED!!! ICANNOTIMAGINEBETTERPARENTS! OHMYGOD! IT’SSOFUCKINGGREAT!!!!!!!”
So far, so good. I turned my phone back off for the connecting flight.
Soon, I was sitting with Greg and his two college friends in a restaurant that served gator fricassee. If you’re in a group of four gay men, it’s inevitable that you’ll compare yourselves to the ultimate group of four gay men, the gals of Sex & the City.
One of Greg’s friends repeatedly demanded, “I want to be the Miranda! Let me be Miranda! Come on, please can I be Miranda?” We said yes because, really, only a Miranda would want to be Miranda. (Although if he’d brought it up one more time, we were going to make him Stanford.)
Miranda branded Greg’s other friend the Charlotte. Charlotte had never seen the show, so Miranda had to explain his reasoning. “She’s a prude.”
“Oh. Okay.”
One thing nobody debated was that Greg was Samantha. Since his metamorphosis, he’d been slutting it up all across Manhattan. With this trip, he was expanding his conquests to below the Mason-Dixon Line. He arrived the night before the rest of us, bravely ventured into a gay bar, and hooked up with a guy he met there. It was that easy—and so was Greg. I’d spent my delayed adolescence as the shy wallflower. Greg had actually become Sweet Talk.
I was labeled the Carrie, the protagonist, the moral center. Lest I be too flattered, Miranda reminded me it was only because all the other roles were taken. Bitch.
While we were breaking the ice and eating okra, I sent a couple of phone calls through to voice mail, but when Drew called for the fifth time, I decided I should probably pick up.
He was practically hyperventilating. “Have you checked your email?” he asked.
“I’ll have to do it back at the hotel. Are people falling for the Chinese baby joke?”
“Hard,” he said. It was just as I’d hoped. My prank was weaving its delicious black magic. I let rip the delicious cackle of April Fool’s triumph.
“It’s not funny!” Drew shouted. “I’ve had people come into my office in tears! They’re so happy for us! I feel sick!”
“Wait,” I said. “I didn’t send it to anyone you work with.”
“I forwarded it to them. Now I wish I hadn’t. They want to throw us a baby shower!”
The more he told me, the more I exulted. My caring, trusting friends had taken little Fu-Ling into their hearts. It was an April Fool’s Day miracle!
Too bad my boyfriend was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I tried to calm him. “Look, I knew I was going to be out of town, so I composed an email to let everyone know they’d been had. If you want, you can send it on my behalf.”
“Where is it?”
I gave Drew instructions how to find the message on my desktop computer, back at our apartment.
“All I ask is that you hit ‘Send’ precisely at the stroke of midnight tonight!”
“Fuck that!” Drew replied. “I’m going home and sending it now. This has gone too far!” He slammed down the phone.
I was dying to check my email back at the hotel, but first, I had a date with the undead. Our Miranda had signed us up for a “haunted” tour, which seems to be the only kind of tour they offer in New Orleans. He wanted to save a few bucks, so he booked us with some no-frills outfit he found in a tiny ad in the back of a tourist magazine. Such a Miranda move!
Our guide ended up being a bitter grad student named Mitch. He asked us to meet him at a bar, and he arrived forty minutes late, with a backpack, three days of facial scruff, and no apparent interest in the history of his adopted hometown. He checked the four of us out, sighed, and rolled his eyes. “Do you really want to do this?” he asked.
We followed Mitch lazily around town. At times it felt like we were leading the tour because it was impossible to walk any slower than he did; thus, he was always trailing behind us. He didn’t say much, and when he did, it was something like, “This is one of the most haunted houses in the city. There was a guy who used to live here . . . I’m blanking on his name.” Most of the ghosts he told us about were vengeful former slaves, which was kind of a buzzkill. Who wants to go on a ghost tour where you root for the ghosts?
We kept having to step aside to let the more popular tour groups pass us by. Dozens of tourists would crowd around a guide decked head to toe in vampire gear, with pasty white makeup and the raspy voice of the undead. They clung to each other as he intoned chilling tales of spirits rising from the bayous. “I know that ‘vampire,’” Mitch said under his breath. “He’s from Cincinnati.”
The walking tour ended abruptly when we realized Mitch was no longer with us. We weren’t sure how long it had been since he’d disappeared, and we couldn’t tell whether he snuck away or had just fallen behind and gotten lost. But we didn’t look too hard.
We had more important plans, plans far more frightening than anything on Mitch’s tour: it was time to go to a gay bar. Greg had arranged to rendezvous with the guy he’d hooked up with the night before, and he wanted to introduce us all. “He can’t wait to meet you,” he assured us.
The way Greg talked about him, this guy sounded purely magical. He was older, confident, and dashingly handsome. He was passionate but tender, strong yet sensitive. They talked about their lives. They wondered about the future. They ordered room service. Greg had already invited the dude to visit him in New York. Was our Samantha in love?
We knew when we lost sight of Greg amid the sweaty, strobe-lit room that he’d found his man. And if there was any doubt, it was erased when we saw Greg’s tongue eagerly probing some strange guy’s esophagus. We casually strolled over and waited a long time to get their attention.
Greg’s new man was not what I’d expected. I’m not one who describes people as lithe, but it seems like the most appropriate word in this case. “Petite” would be another fitting description, as would “revolting.” He was small and twig-like, about half the weight of a third grader, with jeans so tight, he seemed like a plastic doll. He was ten years older than we were but dressed ten years younger. As we moved in for introductions, he threw his arm around Greg’s neck and plopped sideways across his lap.
He smiled and told us his name, but what I heard was, “Hi, I’m Sex.”
Sex sat with Greg all night, like a dutiful puppy—a puppy perennially searching for food inside its master’s mouth. He was the kind of guy who seemed to exist solely to shepherd guys like Greg through that potentially unpleasant “first fling” phase. I couldn’t imagine Sex outside the context of a pickup scene. Sex at the Laundromat, waiting for his clothes to dry. Sex at the dentist with cotton balls tucked into his gums. Sex at work, standing on the corner of a downtown intersection, twirling a Quizno’s sign.
Charlotte, Miranda, and I knew from the instant we met him that Sex was going to break our friend’s heart. He wasn’t interested in falling in love. He got everything he needed out of the relationship the night before. Sex would never be coming to New York.
When Sex stood up to get another Corona, Greg turned to the rest of us and smiled. “Well . . . ?” he asked.
I was as speechless as I’d been when the torso told me I was cute. I searched my brain for something nice I could say convincingly. Looks—no. Personality—no. Think, Jerry, think.
“You seem very happy with him,” I said, finally. Whew, not bad.
“I don’t like him!” Miranda snapped.
“What? Why not?”
Greg was devastated, but rather than retreat, Miranda doubled down. “He’s gross!”
Greg looked at me. “Do you think he’s gross?”
In truth, I thought “gross” was far too mild, but I couldn’t say that. “He’s . . . not someone I would be interested in myself.”
“Great, so you all think he’s disgusting. Thanks for your support!” Greg stormed off. It was the last we saw of him that night.
A little while later, I returned to the hotel, disheartened and exhausted. As I passed by the business lounge, I realized there was something inside that might cheer me up: my emails. Though I could barely keep my eyes open, I logged into my Yahoo account.
I’d never seen so many messages in my life, without half of them being for cheap V_1AGRA. The “HOLY SHIT!”s were off the charts. I even earned a few “OH MY FUCKING GOD”s, which is like a prankster’s Pulitzer. My friends’ euphoria burst from the screen with every word.
“This is the best news of the year! I have a smile a mile wide.”
“Wowee, I can’t be more excited for you guys!”
One buddy offered his sister as a translator. (She’d minored in Chinese at college.) Another said that Fu-Ling kind of looked like Drew.
It was just what I’d been hoping for—until I saw the responses that came in after Drew revealed it was a joke.
“Hope you had a fun time with this. Know you made me feel like an idiot!”
“Please tell Jerry that I fully CRIED!!! You guys are dicks.”
“I don’t think this is funny.”
“You a**hole.”
It was hard to gauge people’s tone from responses like these. I wanted to believe they reacted out of bemused appreciation, but I couldn’t be sure, especially when I saw this note from Drew: “You need to call Pam and apologize. She says she’s never talking to you again.”
I decided to call my friend Adam, the one who had gushed so delightfully on voice mail. He was a great friend and a good sport. His reaction would be fair.
I remember two quotes distinctly from that phone call. One was “I will never be happy for you again.” The other was “Everyone is going to hate you for the rest of time.”
If one thing was clear, it was that people loved the idea of Drew and me having a family. People weren’t upset because they’d been fooled. They were upset because they wanted so badly for my news to be true.
I realized I’d broken one of the golden rules of pranksters: never prank the things you dream about, because when you’re done, all you’re left with is the realization that they were just a joke. We weren’t going to China, we weren’t visiting an orphanage, and we weren’t going to have a sweet little girl falling asleep in our laps on the plane ride home. Man, that would have been incredible.
By the next morning, at least one person had forgiven me. Greg was disappointed that we didn’t give Sex a more positive review, but he rejoined our group for our airboat tour of the bayou. Soon, we were joking like we always did. I think we both knew the Sex thing was fleeting. What we had with each other went much deeper.
As time passed, most of my friends grew to have at least a grudging appreciation for my prank. I even got a few delayed compliments on pulling it off. Everyone else just stopped bringing it up.
Then, months later, a shocking story hit the entertainment world. A former American Idol contestant, Corey Clark, was claiming that he and Paula Abdul had been having an affair, and that was the real reason he had been kicked off the show two years ago. Drew called me instantly when he saw it, speechless.
That’s the other thing about my April Fool’s jokes. They have an uncanny tendency of coming true.