It Gets Worse Read online

  LISA: You ready for bed?

  ME: Ya! I’ll be right there.

  Lies. I wasn’t ready for bed. I was going to lie there till she fell asleep and then get up, hit four fast-food drive-thrus, and come back home to puke it all up. Wow, what a catch.

  As I lay down next to her she wrapped her arms around me. It was romantic and sweet, but all I could think of was “GET YOUR FUCKING ARMS OFF ME I HAVE A 5-POUND BURRITO TO EAT!” How was I supposed to sneak out if she was all over me? Didn’t she know I had business to take care of ? Oh wait, of course not, because she wasn’t insane like me and wasn’t thinking about what it would taste like to put a Twinkie in a hot dog bun at two a.m.

  As she fell asleep I slipped out and put on my shoes. I didn’t even waste time putting on pants because I was going to be in my car anyways. As I walked to my car I started to get that high feeling. I was thinking about all the food I was going to devour and how good it was gonna feel as it went down. Of course I wasn’t thinking about how horrible it would feel coming back up, but that’s because when you are in that state your brain doesn’t let you. That’s why it’s such a dangerous disease.

  After my four drive-thrus I made it back to the parking space outside of Lisa’s apartment building and started steaming up the car again. Four empty bags later it was time to fill them back up, if you catch my drift. After I filled them up I took a trash bag out of my glove compartment—I had really thought this through—and I threw them all in there. I hopped out of my car with a trash bag full of vomit and walked to the Dumpster in the back. As I made my way up I noticed that it was locked. Plan B. There was a bin at the top of Lisa’s stairs where everyone in her complex would throw their trash if they didn’t want to walk all the way down to the Dumpster. The image of me walking up the stairs with a bag of puke behind my back in the middle of the night reminded me of Santa Claus delivering presents to all the little children. Except instead of presents it was vomit, and this situation was about as far from merry as you could get.

  As I walked up the stairs I tripped over my own foot, and what happened next was the worst thing I could have ever imagined. No, I didn’t break my neck. It was worse. The bag of vomit ripped open and went all the way down the stairs and into the street. And it was all leading from Lisa’s front door!

  I started to panic. It was two a.m., and I was in my underwear, covered in my own puke—and it was a Saturday night, so people were bound to walk up and see me. Santa never had to deal with this shit, that fat lucky fuck!

  I pulled myself together and decided I had to clean up all the evidence, so I tiptoed into Lisa’s apartment and grabbed as many paper towels as I could find. I prayed to God she wouldn’t wake up because I had no idea how I was going to explain this to her.

  “Oh hey, Lisa! I was just vomiting all over your apartment complex and decided to clean it up at two a.m. You having good dreams?! Make sure to write them in your journal so you don’t forget them!” What a disaster.

  For the next three hours I was on my hands and knees cleaning up puke. I had to clean from her front door all the way to the street corner, where cars zoomed by honking at me. Drivers must have either thought I was a drunk or a really sad prostitute who had just given up on trying to look sexy.

  While I was cleaning up my mess, I had another conversation with myself. This time, it was real.

  ME: This is it. This is the last time. I’m never going to do this again. I promise. I know I’ve said this a million times before. But this time I mean it. I don’t want to live like this. I don’t want to have to lie to people I love and pretend like my ass is always leaking. I don’t want to end up dead in a bathroom someday because my heart gave out. I just want to be healthy. I want to be happy. Please God, help me.

  I took a shower and threw out my clothes and crawled back into bed with Lisa. She rolled over and opened her eyes.

  LISA: You smell like barf.

  ME: You’re dreaming. Go back to sleep.

  LISA: You’re so weird. Love you.

  That was the last time I ever wanted to lie to her or anyone else in my life. I decided to get help, so I started seeing a therapist and got my life together. It’s still a daily struggle and I haven’t been perfect. At least once a year I slip up, but I’m honest about it. I tell my therapist and my friends. Bulimia is a disease, and I knew I couldn’t get over it alone. I’m so glad I ended up on that street corner covered in vomit because if I hadn’t, I might be dead now. Or worse, a friend might have actually called 911 because they thought my asshole was gonna fall out. Seriously, how come NO ONE questioned that? Or maybe they knew the whole time I was struggling and were too scared to ask me about it.

  A word of advice to anyone who thinks someone in their life is struggling with an eating disorder. Talk to them. Tell them not to be ashamed and that you are there for them. They might deny it, but it will open the door for them to come to you later when they are ready. Another word of advice. A Twinkie in a hot dog bun is NOT GOOD. Holy God. I might puke again just thinking about it. But don’t worry, if I do, I won’t describe it to you. I promise. And nowadays I keep my promises.

  My Craigslist Hookup

  About the Artist

  MICAELA HORNING is from a small town in Wisconsin. She is currently eighteen years old and studying graphic design at her university with the hope of graduating with a BFA in graphic design and interactive media with a concentration in design. Her love of drawing stems from her childhood and the constant support and wonderful upbringing that her parents have given her. She hopes to someday create concept art for television, movies, and video games as well as possibly to be an illustrator or a tattoo artist.

  It was the middle of the night, and I was standing on top of a shit-stained toilet, staring out the broken window of a dirty motel bathroom. As the wind blew through my hair I could smell weed burning and definitely some kind of animal giving birth. I heard a gunshot, then a scream, then a woman crying, and then silence. Before I could process the murder I just witnessed, I was distracted by a beat-up car pulling into the parking lot with a bumper sticker that said “DOWN TO POUND.” My Prince Charming had arrived. I never expected my life to end up this way. Well, I did expect to be twenty-six years old, hovered over a motel toilet with someone else’s turd floating in it, but I never expected to be waiting for a Craigslist hookup.

  Before I came out as bisexual I had only ever been with women, and I was always too scared to try anything with a guy, even though I wanted to. I never went to college, so I kinda missed out on my experimentation days. Instead I had chosen to cross-dress on the internet in front of my webcam for children, which, now looking back, I guess is pretty experimental. Now that I was newly single I was ready to dip my toe into the gay pond and see if it turned pink. Would I like gay sex the way I liked straight sex? Would I hate it the way I hated watching my parents have sex? Would I feel nothing like the way I feel nothing when people ask my opinion on politics? Many questions left to be answered.

  My main issue with finding a guy to have sex with was that I wasn’t just a normal guy in the closet. I was a semi-kinda-but-only-online-famous guy in the closet. If I were to go out on a date with a guy in public and a fan saw us, it would turn into a scandal on Twitter, and the last thing I needed was another Twitter scandal. I’d already accidentally tweeted a picture that had a reflection of my junk in it, and that was a nightmare. Most of the people that watched me online assumed I was gay anyway. The closet I was hiding in wasn’t even a closet; it was more like a beaded curtain. Pink, glittery, loud hanging beads just waiting for me to pop out and say, “HEY, QUEEN!!” Even though it wouldn’t have been a shock to my audience, I still wasn’t ready to publicly talk about it, so I had to take matters into my own hands.

  First I tried Tinder because I figured maybe people in my area weren’t updated on their YouTubipedia and would just think I was another sad single guy with way too many pictures of dogs on his profile. Seriously, what’s with that? As I swiped
through my options I saw the same types of pictures on every profile.

  1ST PROFILE PIC: Guy looking serious while sitting at a bar.

  2ND PROFILE PIC: Guy crouching down on the floor putting his face next to a dog that doesn’t belong to him.

  3RD PROFILE PIC: Guy who is shirtless but laughing about it ’cause it’s like sooooo lame and he’s sooooo self-aware.

  4TH PROFILE PIC: Guy with a baby. No caption. No explanation. Just a baby.

  LAST PROFILE PIC: DISNEYLAND. I have no idea what the fascination is with Disneyland, but it made me want to climb to the top of Cinderella Castle and jump off. Hopefully crushing a Mickey-ears-wearing gay dude taking a selfie.

  After swiping over a hundred guys whose bio said, “How come nobody writes back on here??!” I finally had a match. He was an attractive guy who surprisingly wasn’t holding a baby and wasn’t wearing a shirt that said “My Disney Princess name is Taco Belle.” I’m not kidding. I actually saw a guy wearing that. It made me want to “Crunchwrap” my hands around his neck and choke him to death. But the guy I matched with didn’t look like the kinda guy I wanted to kill. He looked like the kind of guy I wanted to have anonymous sex with and then never call back.

  DING!

  I got a text, so I closed the app and opened the message. What I saw only made me feel even more helpless.

  FRIEND: Shane! You just matched with my gay friend on Tinder! You’re GAY ?!?!

  And then there were about five peach emojis and an eggplant. My heart broke. The second I thought I had found a potential date I was outed. It was going to be impossible to date privately. I deleted my Tinder app and decided it was time for something sneakier and potentially creepier. I recalled a conversation I’d had a few years before with a fellow YouTuber named Tyler Oakley, and if you don’t know him, then you must live under a rock. A rock that has incredible sound protection, ’cause that motherfucker is LOUD. And it’s not just his laugh that’s loud; it’s everything about him. From the pink hair to the tie-dyed reindeer head on his wall, the guy has no problem being himself, and I was always so envious of that. One night we were hanging out, and he referenced an app that I had never heard of. The conversation got real weird real quick.

  ME: What’s it called?

  TYLER: Grindr! You’ve never heard of it?

  ME: No. Is it like FatBooth? ’Cause I LOVE FatBooth! Or UglyBooth?! Or OldBooth?! Or fat ugly old nasty acne cross-eyed dumb stupid bitch booth?!

  TYLER: You use all those?

  ME: I have a lot of issues. Back to Grindr.

  TYLER: Ok, so Grindr is an app that tells you where all the guys are in your area that wanna hook up!

  ME: Oh! So it’s like Yelp! But for penis!

  TYLER: Kinda. Except you don’t leave reviews, and you NEVER return to the same restaurant or else you’re actual gutter trash.

  ME: Totally. One time I went to the grossest Chipotle and the guy serving me left an arm hair in my guacamole, and I left such a mean review. And then I went back the next week ’cause the only other Chipotle was like twenty minutes from my house.

  TYLER: Ya, it’s totally like that. Except not at all, and I think I’m gonna narf.

  ME: Have you ever used it?

  TYLER: A lady never tells her secrets!

  ME: I wish someone would tell that to my mom. She recently told me that when she gave birth to me, she shit on my head.

  TYLER: You make me sad.

  So I deleted my Tinder account and decided to download Grindr. As the app loaded it asked me to enter my name. I obviously wasn’t going to give them my real name, so instead I made up something cute and sexy that I had seen work in the past.

  Name: Taco Belle

  Perfect. Then it asked for a picture. I didn’t want to show my full face obviously, and I didn’t want to show my body because . . . obviously. So I just posted a picture of my mouth. In hindsight that was probably the wrong move, but I was nervous and wasn’t thinking clearly. I even added a joke under my name that I thought was funny but then later realized how disgusting it was.

  Bio: Just a bean and cheese princess awaiting her extra spicy beast.

  Ya. I was just asking to get raped. So after I submitted my info, the app took me to what looked like a tic-tac-toe board, but instead of Xs and Os, there were dick pics and LOTS of nipple hair. There were over one hundred guys in a ten-mile radius of me, and the second they saw my mouth pic I had five messages. I was so overwhelmed. I saw words I didn’t recognize, like “BTM” and “VERS.” I saw pictures of the insides of guys’ asses, which were surprisingly cleaner than I expected. I had only ever seen the inside of my own ass when I was twelve, using my mom’s makeup mirror. I still can’t believe she never got pink eye.

  I finally got to a message that caught my eye. It was from a guy whose name was “Bob,” and he seemed relatively normal. Granted, his face wasn’t in his profile pic, but hey, neither was mine. Maybe he was a YouTuber in the closet too?! Maybe they were ALL YouTubers in the closet! I’m pretty sure there are hundreds of them. I opened his message and initiated some casual small talk.

  TACO BELLE: Hi! I’m really scared and I’ve never done anything like this before because I’m in the closet and I’m not even sure if I’m gay or not. I actually think maybe I’m bi but I’m not sure if that’s real because I feel like maybe it’s my Christian guilt making me want to eat pussy. Like maybe I don’t actually like it? Maybe GOD is making me like it?? KNOW WHAT I MEAN?!

  Ya. Super smooth.

  BOB: Calm down, man. Everything’s ok. What’s your name?

  TACO BELLE: I can’t tell you my name ’cause if you have teenage kids they probably know me, and then what if they find out you had sex with me?! What if you brought them to VidCon and when I gave them a hug they whispered, “I know you fucked my daddy” in my ear?!

  BOB: I don’t know what half of those words mean. What’s VidCon?

  TACO BELLE: I’m sorry. I’m just so nervous.

  BOB: It’s ok. I was nervous when I was young too.

  TACO BELLE: Thanks. How old are you by the way?

  BOB: 75. But I look 70.

  FUCK. He was old enough to be my grandpa and was staring at a picture of my mouth, fantasizing about putting his shriveled old dick in it! This was too fucked-up even for me. Except he had been so nice to me that I couldn’t just block him. So I decided to let him down easy.

  TACO BELLE: I HAVE TO GO BYE!

  Whew. Close call. Nice guy though. I hope he’s not dead. Then I read the next message, from a guy named “Paul,” and it seemed a little more my speed.

  PAUL: Hey. Looking to try out guys on the down low. You down?

  TACO BELLE: Ya! You’re not gonna film it, right?

  PAUL: What?

  TACO BELLE: I don’t know. I feel like people film sex a lot. I don’t have it often, but I see so much porn online of people having sex and filming it on their iPhones and that’s like my nightmare. The iPhone camera is SO unflattering.

  PAUL: I have to go bye.

  Damn. Instant karma. Oh well. Then I got a message that I will never forget.

  NO NAME: Oh hey. You live in the same building as me.

  WHAT?! How does he know that? Then I looked at his profile and saw that his current location was three hundred feet from me. OH MY GOD. He could see where I was! What if he was a serial killer? What if he was a neighbor I had ridden the elevator with? What if he was that annoying lady who has twenty dogs to fill the void in her heart from not having a husband?! What if THIS was what she did for fun? Find young guys and feed them to her dogs?? My mind was racing.

  NO NAME: You got a nice mouth. I bet you really know how to use it.

  HOLY SHIT! His current location was 200 feet away! He was getting closer!

  ME: I’m sorry! I’m not interested!

  NO NAME: You sure?

  PICTURE SENT. I opened it, and it was the creepiest man chest I had ever seen. His chest hair was long enough to braid, and his nipples looked like the
y were crying!

  ME: No! I’m sorry! Please stop talking to me!

  Fifty feet away.

  ME: PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE!!!!!

  Thirty-five feet away.

  NO NAME: What are you talking about? I didn’t say anything.

  Ten feet away.

  ME: PLEASE!!!!!! I DON’T WANT TO DIE!!!!!!!!!

  Five feet away.

  I dropped my phone and stood up from the couch. I started to breathe heavily. I imagined him standing on the other side of my front door with his shirt off and his nipples crying all over my welcome mat. I slowly walked over to the door, each step I took more terrifying than the last. I made my way to the peephole and slid it open. I put my face against the hole and I saw . . . nothing. Then I heard noise coming from above me. Keys rattling and a door opening. He lived ABOVE ME. He wasn’t stalking me. He was probably coming home from work and was trying to get a little action on the way. I felt like such an asshole.

  ME: I’m sorry. I thought you were stalking me lol.

  GRINDR TEAM: You have been blocked from talking to No Name.

  Andddddd time to delete Grindr. Which meant there was only one other place to find a potential hookup. Not a bar, or a mall, or a sexually open church. No, no, no, those all made way too much sense. It was time for me to go to Craigslist.

  As I opened up Craigslist I had flashbacks of my mom and I shopping for a couch. Little did I know, twenty years later I would be shopping for someone to eat my ass. But hopefully they also had a couch. Hooking up in bed with a stranger you met on a website is a little tacky.

  As I scrolled through the list of ads I noticed that they all had very similar headlines, most of which started with “NO AIDS.” I’m gonna be honest though, NO AIDS was a plus. One ad stuck out, and I opened it.

  SUBJECT: NO AIDS. LOOKING FOR DISCREET WITH A FIRST TIMER

  Hey, my name is Greg. I’m a 6ft nice guy who likes helping straight guys figure out if they are interested in men. It’s like I’m giving back to the universe. But with my dick. If you are a straight guy and want to see what you’ve been missing then hit me up for some animal style sex. Don’t worry, I don’t bite. Unless you want me to. ;) But I probably won’t because that’s one of the ways Aids is spread.