YA LGBT Books discussion

Title: GET OFF: The Sordid Youth and Unlikely Survival of a Queer Junkie Wonder Boy

Cover:
Number of Copies Available: 20

Formats Available: .pdf, .epub, ,prc (Kindle)

Word Count or Pages: 158 pages

Blurb: Set against a backdrop of New York City in the grungy, glittering 1980s, Get Off is a memoir about desperate living, hidden promise, double lives, and the danger of getting too much too soon. This eloquent, entertaining, sometimes absurdly hilarious book is a tale of how an anxious theater nerd from Long Island created and ultimately emerged from a hell of his own making. Written as a testament for his young son, Scott Alderman's account of his wasted youth and hard-earned manhood will resonate with and inspire anyone who has been lost and struggled to find their way back.

**any content warning: There is mention of drug use, and non-explicit sexual activity, profanities. It's a book about growing up in the seventies, so there is sex, drugs, and rock & roll, but it is not explicit or sensationalized in any manner.

Excerpt (from page one):

PREFACE


January 2020

I’m driving with my twelve-year old son when the Elton John song “Benny and the Jets” comes on the radio. I tell him that when I was his age, I saw Elton John in concert at my school when my family lived in London—the very first concert I’d ever gone to. It was 1973, and I sat right in front of the stage as Elton John performed to a packed school gymnasium. I look at my son for his reaction, and he gives me that classic, twelve-year old look: pointedly bored, like he knows I was trying to impress him and that I should get over myself.

He and I are driving along. He’s bopping his head to “Benny and the Jets,” and I can’t stop looking over at him. I’m remembering myself at his age running unsupervised and amok around London, smoking and drinking and playing doctor and making out, already firmly on the road to ruin. It seems impossible to imagine him ever running wild like that. He’s so innocent and pure; already such a better person than me. But then I wonder: Did my parents once look at me the same way? Did they ever think I was that good and that innocent?

How could I ever describe my life to my son? How do I explain to him that his father is a ghost? My greatest fear is that he will lead my life. He’s a different person, I see that, and I can’t see him doing a quarter of the shit I’ve done, but …what if he does? Who knows where his life might lead him. My father didn’t have a clue what made me tick, or I him, and I only really learned about him after he died. I used to feel that he’d left me unprepared for the life I’ve lived, and I resented it.

In Captain America: Civil War, the Black Panther’s father tells him that any man who doesn’t prepare his children for his death is a failure. It hit me that my kid needs to know exactly who I am, and what I’ve done, and where I came from, and in a permanent record in ink. I once heard a friend use the term “plausible deniability” when discussing what he will tell his children about the more dubious or damning aspects of his life. And while I knew he meant it in fun, hearing him use this lawyer term for denial and evasion in relation to his children struck a wrong chord for me. I’m only alive because 33 years ago I made a decision to live openly and honestly, without shame, and defiant in the face of anyone who might judge me. I don’t want to stop living that way now because of my kid.

So I decided to write this book. And though I talked to my son about the book often while I was writing it, he only the other day asked me what it’s about, and if he’s in it, and if he can read it. I told him he can’t read it until he’s 40, or until twenty years after my death. But seriously, I know I can’t control him, or make his decisions for him, or protect him from the world or from the truth. So if he does end up like me, he will have a road map to help him find his way home if he gets lost. And if he doesn’t follow my path, then at least he’ll know who I am and why I wrote this book for him.


“Anyway, I wrote the book because we’re all gonna die.”

- Jack Kerouac, On the Road


1. MANNIX

June 1978

Plans changed when T.J. dropped acid with two girls he met at a mixer at his military academy. We had planned to hang out and chill, but instead he and the girls wanted to go see a midnight movie at the Uniondale Mini-theater. The Uniondale was a funky art house theater where you could get high and drink and watch cult and concert movies, plus Marx Brothers, Three Stooges, Laurel & Hardy, and some weird shit. I’d seen Eraserhead there the first time I did acid—the two most confusing hours of my life to that point. T.J. and the girls were tripping by the time they picked me up, and though I was still coming down from speeding in the City the night before, and needed to recharge, I jumped in the car and dropped some acid anyway.

The movie was a Stones concert film from their 1972 tour, and the theater had placed concert speakers and sub woofers on the floor on each side of the screen to simulate “real” concert sound. It was loud, like front row at a concert loud, and I was digging it at first; the bass from the woofers combined with a creeping acid tingle made me feel good. I started to drift into that blissful area where the concrete world fades into the background, but I started fading a little too deep, and the acid kicked in a little too hard, and soon I was enveloped in a psychedelic darkness, except for the rays of projection from the screen, and the pounding bass line. I started to become queasy and paralyzed. The bass vibrated through my toes up through my torso on to the back of my head, relentless and inescapable thumping in pulses through my body and on up my spine. I was officially freaked out. I sat back further into my seat and gripped the armrests, but as I sat further back the screen slowly moved away from me, and my seat began accelerating backwards, gaining speed with each bass note. I dug my fingernails deeper into the fabric of the armrest. I could feel wind blowing my hair, and it felt like my lips were flapping like pilots in High-G training. In a moment of clarity I realized I was a hair’s breadth away from being flung out of the theater and into the cosmos. I covered my ears to block the sound. I tried deep breaths and multiplication tables in my head, hoping to find something to hold onto, but I was gone, man, and there was no way to stop it. I had to make at least an effort to save myself so I mumbled something to T.J. and fell out of my seat into the aisle. I stayed low to the ground, pulling myself along by the seats until I could see the small rectangular light from the back door and stumbled forward. I flung myself through the door and tumbled headfirst into the lobby, probably not an unusual occurrence in this theater. It was bright out there, and quiet, and I felt myself coming back. I stared at the popcorn machine for a while, focusing on the kernels blasting out of the popper, and eventually made it outside to air. I sat on the curb, and the air and traffic and people started bringing me back down.

I smoked cigarettes and breathed deeply. I’d been doing acid regularly for the past year, but this was the first time I had completely freaked out and had to leave the premises, so to speak. I always feared that I would go permanently crazy while tripping like Kitty Linkletter when she jumped out a window, but that had become a normal level of fear and anxiety, nothing out of the ordinary. This time had been different.