Leslie (5:03)

So from 14 to 18, I went to a musical theater camp that was year round. We did five musicals a season, three seasons a year. It was a fantastic education. And there were a lot of co ed sleepovers. I finally, after a lot of brow beating, got my parents to allow me to go to one of these. But my parents had nothing to worry about. I was a late bloomer, especially sexually. Braces, uneven puberty tits, and a mini FUPA are all the chastity belt that this little fruit fly ever needed. Plus I had pinned all my hopes onto a very closeted singer name of Michael. You know, we would shut the door while he would hang out at my home. But my parents had nothing to worry about because we would just scream the Jekyll and Hyde theme song back at one another. And that's all that I was really interested in. I liked boys. I liked being with boys, but I was unaware of what it was to be with a boy. So I remember I'm at my first sleepover and I'm watching my first scary movie because I wasn't allowed to watch scary movies. And I'm in the dark in a living room, curled up on this white leather couch with boys. And I noticed Leslie's on the floor right in front of me with Victor. Leslie is one of the popular girls at this young performers workshop. She's gorgeous. She's obviously of all the girls there, she is the one that's the most developed sexually. She wears perfume, she wears Candy's high heel acrylic sandals. You know, she's just got it together. I hadn't even started shaving my leg up to the knee at this point. And I just felt very square around these girls. I wasn't even very comfortable around girls. I always felt more comfortable hanging out with guys, but just in a friendly way. Maybe a poke of the shoulder, you know, a little punching, but that was the extent of it. Girls scared me because I felt that I was always being judged. And for someone who's as nervous and anxious as I am, that just turns me off or makes me incredibly loud and incredibly annoying to mostly everyone around them. Every season at Centenary, when it the day of auditions, you would lose your friends. After the cast list went up, you would gain your new friends for who that season was going to be. Because as friendly as we all were at the beginning of the season, we were all competing against each other for the best parts. So after the beginning of a season when the cast list went up, Leslie and I were in a lot of the similar shows and had a few scenes together. And we just, you know, started to have fun together during rehearsal. And she asked me if I wanted to go to a sleepover to her house that night with a couple of the other girls and her boyfriend at the time. So I'm at this party and I noticed Leslie on the floor with Victor. And Victor's one of the most popular boys at the Young Performers Workshop. But they're not watching the movie. He's pretending to watch the movie, but her head is under their blanket. And I have no idea what she's doing, But I am intrigued. She has my full attention here. I saw that she was talented in ways that I couldn't even begin to fathom. She was so cool and so confident and so okay with herself that she made me feel more okay with myself. So we became fast friends really quickly. We have sleepovers at her house all the time. She has a revolving door of boyfriends, and I love hanging out with the guys. You know, I'm not ready for the kind of experiences that she's having, but I'm grateful for any spillover of attention. And I hated my home. My home. No one ever came over. Dad was an alcoholic. Mom was very unhappy and didn't know how to deal with it, so she would just sort of sequester herself in the bedroom. It was not a happy home. So to go to Long Valley to her fantastic house where friends were welcome, and she just made me feel not weird. And I felt really special. And I felt like I had a place for the first time in my life, and it was with her, and I felt really grateful for that. She got me high for the first time in her car. We're in the parking lot of the theater camp, and it's the middle of winter, and we're freezing in the snow because we're in our dance outfits still tights and leg warmers and very thin jackets, despite the New Jersey weather. And she says to me, suck in for as long and as hard as you can. Not everybody gets high for the first time. We're getting you high for the first time, okay? So I take the bowl that she's gotten from Cancun, and I suck in, but there's no filter, so flaming hunks of weed are going straight through the pipe and down my throat. She thinks I'm just really gotten the hang of this, and that we have to constantly repack the bowl. But I'm not actually smoking it as much as I'm ingesting it. But, you know, like any good teacher, she's holding the carburetor on the bowl for me. She's lighting it, because at this point, smoking pot is like some sort of magical alchemy. So she's leading me through this experience, and I get so high that I have to push both of my feet against the dashboard in order to keep from falling out of existence. Really good times. We drive to the diner. I don't even know how she could drive. I couldn't even function. And we go to the diner where everyone would go after rehearsal. There's a huge table in the center of the diner, and as soon as we walk in, everyone sees us. I'm so high. I run into the bathroom, hide in the stall, and she basically talks me out of the stall. It's okay. Everything's fine. You have no idea. Everybody smokes weed. It's not just you. I'm sure half the people are high there right now, which is true. So she pulls me out of the stall, and I'm too stoned to talk to anyone, so we just go to a back booth. We walk past the table as if we were strangers to them. And while the boys come up to us to try to mess with me because I'm so high, she protects me. She says, justin, leave her alone. Kevin, don't bother us. We're just having a girl's night out. And I felt really safe. And it obviously worked because I love smoking pot to this day. So she got me there. Leslie's parents eventually get divorced, and it's really hard. I even asked my parents if she could live with us, because we were that close at that point. But my father saw that she was a wild child and put a kibosh on that super fast. I was devastated. She decided to go live with her father in Briarcliff, New York. She knew I was so upset, so we would continue to have these sleepovers. She would just pick me up after rehearsal on the weekend. We would drive up to Briarcliff, have our sleepover, and then she would drop me off at Centenary, the Young Performers Workshop. She couldn't be in it anymore because she was adjusting to her new life in New York. But she would make sure that I could be a part of the Young Performers Workshop and still be a part of her life. We have a couple of these sleepovers. Everything's great. But one particular time, I remember seeing all these pictures littering the backseat of her car. And I look through them and they're pictures of her kissing girls and her splayed out naked on a pool table. And after that I stop looking because I feel really uncomfortable. It was one thing for her to have a revolving door of boyfriends. When I ask her about them, she says, it's just something that I do with my new friends. And I feel shamed. And I great. Now I'm lame to the one person that made me feel not lame, you know, because she's starring in some pre Internet bang bus that's littering the back seat of this dented Dodge Probe. And I just try to shake it off. Maybe I'm the one that's too provincial. Maybe I'm so suburban. Whatever. She's kissing girls, she's naked on a pool table. Whatever. She takes me to a party that night and she promptly leaves me alone so she can go ski pole two guys upstairs. I get baited into a drinking contest by the rat from Charlotte's Web. I'm 16 and I've never drank alcohol on purpose in my life. Before that, I knew I would win this drinking contest because it was a straight vodka drinking contest. All kind of like quarters, but mostly. Can you drink this? I can drink this. You know, kind of like the Indiana Jones scene with Karen Allen. I had in my youth come in from playing Gone to take a glass of water off the kitchen table and unwittingly taken a big swig of straight vodka. That's why I can't drink vodka to this day. My father would hide it in the house so I knew that I could beat this kid. So I drank two red beer cupfuls of Georgie Vodka before she returned. I remember pouring orange juice into the third cupful and getting into her backseat and continue drinking into my first blackout. Black in I'm knuckle deep, fingering a very wet wriggling Leslie and she's trying to shove a digit into me, but I'm dry as a bone at this point in my life. I've never even touched myself down there. I didn't even know what a pussy was supposed to feel like aroused until My fingers were in Leslie's pussy. And I was like, well, this is working for her, but it's not working for me. I stumble out of bed and I go sleep on the couch. A real great divide. It was the first time that I didn't sleep with her to sleep over. She dropped me off at Centenary the next morning and we never spoke about it ever again. I felt so ashamed. I felt that she knew that I was not ready to be a sexual person. But sort of, I was the last person that she was with for the evening. So we were gonna get sexual because she wanted to get sexual. And I felt betrayed. I felt like she knew that I would be really bothered when girls or anybody would tease me and call me a dyke, because I knew in my heart that I wasn't. But I loved Doc Martin boots and corduroys and my dad's Cosby sweaters. I just wasn't a girly girl, but I didn't want that to make me a dyke. But I felt like fingering Leslie had made me a dyke. Like it or not. You know, I thought that somebody would be able to tell that I had had my first sexual experience and that they would know that it was with Leslie. Needless to say, I was not available for any more sleepovers after that. And we. We fall off. I start dodging her calls. And a whole year goes by with really very little contact until she calls me spring break, senior year of high school and says that her father killed himself. He shot himself in the back of the head with a nail gun that he had gotten from Home Depot that day. This was all over the news. It was brutal. So I jump right back in it. I feel that, you know, she is my friend. She took good care of me and she protected me and made me feel safe when I felt socially awkward. I just needed to be near her and make her feel safe. So I didn't leave her side for days. She was holding up pretty well until the day of the service. She disappeared from me for a little while. And we meet back up in the church parking lot and I see her stumble out of her car. And I think it's because she's just so wrought with grief. But when I get closer to her, she has this Heath Ledger, joker style grin from ear to ear. And her eyes are like saucers. The pupils are just dilated beyond belief. And she's tripping her face off at her father's funeral. I mean, smoking pot is one thing, but tripping on the day you're gonna put your dad in the ground. I was just so out of my depth. I didn't know this person anymore. It really felt like someone had screwed off the top of her head, taken out her brain, and put this animal inside of her. At the service, I'm holding onto her leg and her knee to keep her from bursting out laughing during the service, and I'm itching all through it because I've stressed myself out. I gave myself the chicken pox or at least lowered my immune system enough so that chickenpox could just flow through me. After the service, I leave her with her mother and I sit in a bathtub for the rest of the week filled with oatmeal and just try to pop the blisters between my toes.

Sarah Bell (19:57)

We'll be right back, folks.

Kevin Allison (20:00)

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know, we often hear about red flags we should avoid, but what if we focused more on looking for green flags in friends and partners? Therapy can help you identify green flags, practice them in your relationships, and embody green flag energy yourself. I have so certainly benefited from therapy. I would say I've learned to be a little bit more green flaggy toward myself because I can be roughest to myself. And it's just profoundly helpful in ways tiny little nuanced ways to be able to share with someone who is, you know, an objective professional object about how you're coping and processing. I mean, we have all got a lot to be dealing with in our lives. So very many of the people you've heard sharing stories on this show have also benefited from therapy and talk about it in their stories. So many Risk fans have written in to say that listening to the show encouraged them to seek out therapy. So BetterHelp is fully online, making therapy affordable and convenient. Serving over 5 million people worldwide, you access a diverse network of more than 30,000 credentialed therapists with a wide range of specialties. Easily switch therapists anytime at no extra cost. Discover your relationship green flags with BetterHelp visit betterhelp.com risk today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp H-E-L-P.com risk add a little.

Narrator (21:58)

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Narrator (22:20)

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Narrator (22:44)

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Leslie (23:13)

We're back. It's later summer and we're at a party together. She's looking for a housemate in Yonkers, and I've been denied housing but accepted to Fordham. So my only other option at this point was to live at home. But she's like, come live with me. Oh, it'll be so much fun. I didn't want to live with her. I didn't want to deal with it. Not that I thought that she would come into my bedroom, you know, at night and take advantage of me, but she was a full time job in and of herself. I was starting my new life and my new identity, and I didn't want all the baggage that Leslie brought with her to kind of follow me to New York. But my only other choice was to live at home. And home was my father, yellow with jaundice from alcohol withdrawal, and my mother was not yet medicated for her special brand of insanity. And I just didn't want to continue in that prison. I wanted a fresh start. So the freshest start I could possibly get was with the Black Hole of Briarcliffe. So for freedom, I choose to live with Leslie. And she's eventually kicked out of that apartment only a few months after for fucking too loudly. She would wake you up out of a dead sleep. The neighbors at dusk would set up lawn chairs to watch the sexual carnival going on through her bedroom. Plus, my bedroom was the converted dining room, so there was no way to get to the bathroom except go through my bedroom. And it was like Grand Central Station during rush hour because of her. Just the parade of sexual partners going through there kept me a prisoner in my bed, under my Covers. Before she left, she had to give one little gem of a parting gift. One more time. It's my first night on my own. I'm 18, I have some fresh ink on the back of my neck. I feel really cool. And Leslie invites me to hang out at the bar where she's cocktailing at. And I've never even been in a bar before, so this is perfect. My first real night of independence. And I drink there for hours until she says, open your mouth, slut. She slaps a tab of acid on my tongue. I didn't know she was gonna dose me when she said, open your mouth, slut. I don't know, I thought she was gonna put like a pretzeler in there or something like that. So when she slapped the tab of acid on my tongue, I immediately swallowed and said, what was that? She says, oh, it's acid. You'll have a great time. We do it all the time. Okay, how do I know when it kicks in? Flash forward a few hours and we're all laying on the bed. Her, her boyfriend at the time, this beautiful black man, Eric. Oh my God, gorgeous. And we're all staring up at the ceiling because I have these big joists that are sort of waving in and out and they're about to go to bed and I realize I have to get up today. Today's my first day of college. And I get so excited that I'm going to college. I'm using MTA for the first time. The first time I'm making this pilgrimage to college. And once I get to the train station, which is about a two mile walk from the house, I'm so excited about being at college that I forget that I'm on acid. Somehow I get get through Times Square, take the two stops up on the Red line to get to Fordham, walk to Fordham, which is like singing trees, like who Framed Roger Rabbit when they go into Toontown. That was college. The doors were opening, Everything was singing. I meet my parents, we watch a anti drug assembly right when the day starts, like at 8:45 in the morning. And I'm loving it. It's amazing. I'm just clapping wildly. This is the best. We're at college. It's my first day of college. Is it your first day of college? Yeah, you know, just super excited. But my parents didn't really catch on until we're waiting in line for my commuter locker assignment. And the place is packed. The line is snaking around like TSA with parents and freshmen. Everyone has a name tag on Everything's bright, as if the sunshine was just emanating from everyone's beautiful, hopeful faces. And I have lightning coming from my fingertips that I have to get rid of. So I have to run like an airplane around the room to get the lightning out. And I'm running and dodging and weaving, going behind the tables. There are these tables that everyone's trying to get to to get their locker assignment. I'm running behind the tables, but always getting back to my parents because they're holding my place in line until my mother grabs me by both of my shoulders and she says, sarah, are you on drugs? And I say, how. How dare you? How dare you accuse me of being on drugs? I am excited about being at college.

Sarah Bell (28:57)

Whoa.

Leslie (28:59)

College. And then I proceed to run around the room some more. I tortured this poor little Asian boy that I met in line after that. Oh, my God. I just tortured this poor boy and made him run from me and probably made his college experience terrible. So my parents leave quickly, very disappointed in their only progeny. All I can think is, thanks a lot, Leslie. I felt betrayed again. I felt like my fresh start in New York was already tainted, that this was a snowball that was starting to go down. And if I really latched onto Leslie like in the past, it was just gonna get worse and bigger and more out of my control. And I really didn't feel like she was a friend after that. More time with Leslie meant more experiences like these that I just. It felt like the last straw of our friendship. I didn't want to continue with the albatross of Leslie around my neck in this new life, and I just can't. Can't do that again. I like my new life way too much to have my old life sort of creep back in and we don't keep in touch anymore. But I do think about her a lot, you know? And I still put on my liquid eyeliner the same way she showed me how 16 years ago. And like it or not, she was my first finger blast.

Kevin Allison (31:00)

Size. We slow down and we speed up Sometimes it will surprise it will surprise you when you get the good news you get what you want and you don't know what to do Is a thin line between taking on one more thing Victory laugh and being on the run it's just your path now Watch us fly Just a blood going by Watch us fly now we got hostages, too if we don't get what we want well, you don't know what we'll do what to do with the silvery mirror of the new rain.

Leslie (31:56)

With the.

Kevin Allison (31:56)

Wrinkles in our little stars Time and time again High fives all around we can speed up our Slow them. You work like a charm. Why'd you think you were broken?

Sarah Bell (32:26)

That's it for this episode, folks. This is the great A.C. newman behind me now. Hey, don't forget. Our new video course from TheStoryStudio.org is called Storytelling for Business. Over 100 minutes of video lectures, over 30 pages of story exercises. Learn the two essential elements of all stories. Learn the one crucial difference between stories told for business and other stories. Learn how to use the six senses to evoke emotion and the five beats of a classic story structure. And finally, learn the one sure fire method for driving a narrative toward a persuasive selling point. Go to thestorystudio.org today to sign up for our video course, Storytelling for Business. Folks, today's the day. Take a risky toffee. Went to Zigzag, Oregon, and now we're infested with snakes.

Leslie (33:41)

Kevin, don't bother us.

Sarah Bell (33:45)

Sorry.