White Sox Lose 121 Games in a Season, Making History

Alexandra's live chat with readers starts at 11 a.m. ET on Tuesday. Submit your questions now.

D.C. Council members pressed the city, Circulator and Metro officials on the lack of a transition plan for Circulator employees.

Saturday’s matinee between the Pirates and Yankees will be Paul Skenes’ last appearance of a masterful splash into the big leagues.

Mark Bourdillon/NetflixThis week:No Soggy Bottoms This Week!I have a tried-and-true morning routine. It’s less been “honed” over the years than it’s been thrust on me by the universe, to the point that it’s now a daily reflex.Read more at The Daily Beast.

A huge smelly blob of black sludge was unearthed this week at a construction site for new housing going up along Brooklyn's toxic Gowanus Canal.

Two Georgia police officers were wounded and a man was killed during a shooting inside a suburban Atlanta retailer that calls itself the world’s largest gun store

People started calling 911 in shock shortly after seeing Andrew Mullins, 30, strike the goose with the motorized bike on Sept. 11, near Pier A Park on Sinatra Drive.

NY Post readers discuss the listeria outbreak at a Boar's Head processing plant and more.

Dockworkers along the East and Gulf coasts have pledged to strike unless a new contract is reached by October, prompting experts to warn higher prices and empty shelves could await consumers. 

Former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. mocked Vice President Kamala Harris during a Michigan rally this week, encouraging the audience to chant "I was born in the middle class!"

Anna MoneymakerNorth Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson was treated for second-degree burns at Northern Regional Hospital “following an incident at a campaign event” in Mount Airy on Friday night, according to his spokesman Mike Lonergan.Lonergan said Robinson “is in good spirits, appreciates the outpouring of well wishes, and is excited to return to the campaign trail as scheduled first thing tomorrow morning.”CNN reported that Robinson’s burns occurred during an accident at the Mayberry Truck Show and Parade and that no foul play was involved.Read more at The Daily Beast.

A model has called out the backlash to a video of herself showing off her outfit, in which she ditched wearing a bra in order to complete the look.

The feds were "looking for records," sources said, signing into the visitors log at around 1:30 p.m. Wednesday for the records section of the 16th floor of 375 Pearl St.

The Liberty don’t need to watch tape of last year’s WNBA Finals loss to Las Vegas, or their three-game regular-season sweep of the Aces.

Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah confirms leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli strike in Lebanon, hours after Israel announces it.

Former GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin said the proposal would create a Constitutional right to a host of far-left transgender wish-list items

Schools Chancellor David Banks previously promised to ensure students' safety both inside the classroom and "in the communities that surround them."

The moment the Nets moved Mikal Bridges, they picked a lane. They just hope they’ll find Cooper Flagg down the road.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed during a massive airstrike in Beirut, Lebanon on Friday.

The superintendent of Staten Island public schools was abruptly removed from her post a week ago amid ongoing accusations she made derisive comments about staff and vowed, "No more white principals," The Post has learned.

Two Georgia police officers were injured during while responding to a burglary at the “actual largest gun store in the world" just after midnight Saturday.

Here’s how I’m playing the colossal showdown between the Dawgs and Tide and why I’m taking a service academy seriously.

Two Delta Airlines ramp agents were arrested for smuggling more than $3 million worth of ketamine through John F. Kennedy International Airport, federal authorities said.

The Israeli military decided to strike at the Hezbollah leader because it believed there was only a short window before he disappeared to a different location, three senior Israeli officials said.

The Dragon capsule carrying SpaceX Crew-9 will bring back Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore, who have been stuck on the ISS far longer than planned.

A New Jersey mom was hurt after a kid riding a motorized, plush animal at the giant East Rutherford, NJ, shopping complex barreled into her while she held her 2-year-old daughter, reports said.

Jayden Daniels and the Washington Commanders look to keep rolling on Sunday when they meet the Arizona Cardinals. Here’s everything you need to know for game day.

It’s about a lot more than “baby fever”—and it may be about more than government support too.

Was the Pitt/Clooney comic thriller Wolfs downgraded from theatrical release to Apple TV+ for good reason?

A new book by Vivek Ramaswamy extolls the virtues of common ground.

The U.S. announced an end to the coalition fighting Islamic State in Iraq. But it's not clear how many troops will remain in the country.

The cast of MTV’s The Challenge: Battle of The Eras. You’d be forgiven for thinking this year’s MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) was a rebroadcast of a previous ceremony. From performances by Lenny Kravitz and Public Enemy to the archival red-carpet looks worn by many attendees and host Megan Thee Stallion, the show’s homages were as central to the celebration as the current artists who were nominated.  The overall throwback vibe was supposedly in service of the awards show’s 40th anniversary. However, the ceremony didn’t look that different from last year’s VMAs, which featured a tribute to the now-disgraced Diddy or other recent ceremonies honoring Busta Rhymes, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and LL Cool J. This seems to be MTV’s playbook: force-feeding older viewers ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s nostalgia, especially now while they struggle to reel in the young people in the age of streaming and TikTok.  For a brand that once represented the freshness of youth culture, it seems to be frozen in time. The cable network is at an interesting crossroads: Should it try to court an elusive Gen Z audience, or should it keep chasing the last generation that watched them?  Since 2019, the network has been banking on reunion-style shows and all-star editions of iconic series like Teen Mom, Jersey Shore, Catfish, and, most recently, the former VH1 show The Surreal Life. If you’re younger than 30, there’s not much on their current schedule that would immediately draw you in, particularly when streamers — like Netflix and even Peacock — are making buzzier content for teenagers and young adults, with popular reality shows like Love Is Blind, Love Island USA, and The Traitors. The ultimate case study in MTV’s uncertain future is its Road Rules spinoff The Challenge. Now the longest-running show on the network, having started 26 years ago, the Road Rules competition series has successfully carried the legacy of MTV throughout structural changes and mergers, recently expanding with an All-Stars edition on Paramount+ and The Challenge: USA on CBS, and some international versions.  However, the present iteration of The Challenge hasn’t exactly maintained the spirit of MTV. Currently, the show is attempting to conjure memories of its golden age with Battle of the Eras, the 40th season of the show, but the program falls flat without the unvarnished edge of the past. What was once a compelling clash of personalities and amateur athletes is now just a generic sports competition.  To watch The Challenge from its early days to where it is now is to see how MTV has lost its way as a brand. The series might seem like an invincible force in television, but it’s only as fun as the infrastructure around it. But what’s the value of MTV nostalgia without all the weirdness and unpredictability?  The Challenge represented the rowdy ethos of MTV.  Now it’s something a lot safer.  The Challenge has undergone several transformations since it premiered in 1998. The show ultimately became a competition between cast members of MTV’s Road Rules, where a group of attractive strangers live in a traveling RV, and Real World, where exactly seven attractive strangers share a house. (In later seasons, they added cast members of the dating show Are You The One?). Typically set in an exotic location, contestants live in what is essentially a frat house while they compete in a series of physical and mental games. These assignments range from outrageous stunts — like transferring food to a fake chicken’s mouth while dressed in a chicken suit — to brutal elimination challenges, like the Hall Brawl where players wrestle each other to reach the end of a narrow passage.  Over time, the production’s budget has increased, and the show has become more physically demanding and stunt-y as a result. Die-hard fans refer to it as “America’s fifth sport,” and some competitors even undergo intense training to prepare. However, the boozy fights, romantic drama, and rivalries that span the seasons have always been as important as the actual gameplay, so much so that the premise of several previous seasons (Battle of the Exes, Rivals, etc.) rests upon personal beef and alliances. The Challenge maintains and extends these years-long storylines by reusing many of its most notorious and messiest competitors, like Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio, Chris “CT” Tamburello, Laurel Stucky, Cara Maria Sorbello, and Aneesa Ferreira.   While the fighting and debauchery adds an exciting layer to an already impressive athletic showcase, these moments of chaos have often been truly ugly, coming at the expense of women, people of color, and queer people. Particularly in earlier seasons, there’s an uncomfortable amount of misogynistic language, hostility, and condescension toward female players. Black contestants have been met with similar microaggressions, if not blatant racism.  Producers tried to rectify this in 2020 when they hastily suspended contestant Dee Nguyen for making an inappropriate joke on Twitter about the Black Lives Matter movement. They also made the controversial choice to edit her out of the rest of the season. This foreshadowed a more censored approach to the program, one that would completely change the feel of The Challenge.  Efforts by the network to remedy a culture of poor behavior on The Challenge was well-meaning but ultimately over-corrective. For example, night-out scenes, where a fight might break out or cast members might hook up, are now used as opportunities for competitors to discuss game strategy. On podcasts dedicated to the show, cast members constantly complain about messier drama being left out of the show.  “You see a sort of progress happening in terms of the show not being as problematic as it was before,” says Challenge fan Kelli Williams, who co-hosts the podcast Beyond the Blinds. “But then there’s also the [newer] problem that it takes away from the drama of the show.” In response to BLM and changing ethical standards in reality TV, The Challenge has struggled to evolve while focusing on the aspects of the show that made it fun. In newer seasons, including the current Battle of the Eras season, the tone of the show has become almost comically serious and inspirational, as though the contestants are competing in the Olympics or for some greater cause beyond winning money and being on TV. Even the show’s dry, no-nonsense host, T.J. Lavin, has a gentler manner. It hardly feels like it’s from the same network that discovered Snooki and Spencer Pratt.  “You think of someone like Leroy,” says Williams, of fan-favorite Leroy Garrett, a Real World alum who first competed on The Challenge: Rivals. “When he came on the show, he was a sanitation worker, and you’re watching him jump over cars over water. You’re like, ‘Wow, he’s not trained to do this.’ Whereas now people have to prepare for The Challenge, and they call it the ‘fifth sport.’ Be real right now. This is The Challenge.” Battle of the Eras catering to Gen X and millennial fans is exciting in theory. But the neutered flagship show can’t resuscitate the original DNA of MTV.   Where does MTV go from here? MTV was always going to have a difficult time sustaining itself as a cultural tastemaker, especially as a cable station in an online world. But the network has a history of reinventing itself to meet the moment. The channel, founded in 1981, was initially targeted toward white, male rock fans until it was forced by public pressure to feature music videos by Black R&B and rap artists, debuting the program Yo! MTV Raps in 1988. When MTV’s first generation of viewers started outgrowing the channel in the early ’90s, it pioneered reality programming, starting with Real World and, later, shows like The Osbournes, The Hills, and Jersey Shore. As Amanda Ann Klein writes in her book Millennials Killed the Video Star, MTV executives have always had to work hard to maintain MTV’s key demographic. “The youth audience is fickle because the moment a company figures out how to create content that pleases them, they age out of that content,” she writes.  Reality shows sustained the network for nearly two decades, in addition to music-focused hits like Total Request Live (TRL) and MTV Unplugged.  The early 2010s saw the final season of Jersey Shore, the surprise scripted hits like Awkward and Teen Wolf, and the last truly memorable VMAs thanks to Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke – before a few years entering the proverbial programming desert, running episodes of the clip show Ridiculousness almost 24/7. By 2019, it seemed as though MTV had found a solution by upcycling successful IP. The reunion show Jersey Shore: Family Vacation garnered big ratings and was followed by a Teen Mom reunion series and a not-as-successful reboot of The Hills. On Paramount+, MTV launched The Challenge: All Stars and Real World: Homecoming.  Much of MTV’s library of ’90s and early-aughts content also became available to stream on Paramount+. In the book Television’s Streaming Wars, Florida State University professor Leigh H. Edwards writes about how MTV’s nostalgic marketing strategy cleverly (if not temporarily) reignited interest in the brand. “In effect, MTV turns existing IP into new content on streaming that targets the older streaming audience and encouraging those viewers to rewatch older content,” she tells Vox. “These series generate nostalgia by including flashback footage that encourages audiences to go watch the original episodes.”  This nostalgia approach, though, is more like a life jacket than a sustainable business plan. Real World: Homecoming is no longer available to stream and was seemingly canceled. The Challenge: All Stars has become less and less distinguishable from the original series as the casts overlap. Despite all the relative star power of Battle of the Eras, the landmark season still represents a ratings decline since the highly watched 35th season, Total Madness. Last year, Variety reported that MTV was the 44th most-watched television network in 2023, an 11 percent drop in total viewers from the previous year.  If there’s any hope for an MTV revival, it’s that the viewership for this year’s VMAs increased by 8 percent compared to last year’s show. One has to think this has more to do with appearances by big, next-gen artists like Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan — as well as ratings magnet Taylor Swift — than the show’s tributes to its peak era. At a time when networks are constantly renamed, rebranded, or completely scrapped, losing MTV wouldn’t be surprising, but it would be a huge cultural blow. Unfortunately, a network can only rely on nostalgia for so long before it looks like a graveyard. 

The Giants have hummed this tune for more than a decade, with very few respites, and unfortunately for them, it is back on the airwaves, once more.

In Berlin, the winter sky is screwed on so tight that all the world beneath becomes dark and gray and grim. On my runs around Wannsee, from the corner of my eye, I could glimpse the furious ghosts of the place seething in the middle of the lake, transforming into whitecaps if I looked at them directly. Around some bends, I’d come across naked old men, bright red with the cold of their swim, vigorously toweling off their withered loins. When I’d come to the ferry launch to Pfaueninsel, the peacocks across the spit of water would cry out so loudly in their winter rutting, I could easily imagine that the island was entirely made of peacocks, in layers four thick upon the ground, that the castle there was wrapped in a hissing sheet of iridescent blue, the million eyes of Argos on their tail feathers staring up, affronted by the low gray clouds.Then, in mid-April, just as despair crept in and I began to think that we would be stuck in chill darkness for good, the lid of the sky blew off, and the sun poured down, and the earth leaped up in joy to meet it. A green fur grew on all the bereft trees and dirt, and the tulips stood up and unfurled themselves, the brave avant-garde of more color to come. Even the German people who’d so dourly walked their dogs along the lake paths all winter began to smile and nod in greeting. But the ghosts still wrestled mutely in the middle of the lake; even the sun couldn’t burn those off.It was a week or so into this astonishing reversal of winter that my first love, my first friend, Leslie, called me for the last time. My heart seized; nowadays, he only ever called to relate tragedy—our high-school heartthrob who had died in a motorboat accident, my roommate from college who’d overdosed. Leslie wasn’t an oracle; he was just still on social media. There had been a time, long ago, when we didn’t need to call, when we could talk without talking in our separate beds across the little town where we were raised, chatting away in our minds until one of us fell asleep or was interrupted, and then we’d pick up the conversation mid-sentence at school the next day.I’d discovered him in first grade. He’d been there all along, since nursery school, but we’d somehow never connected until I turned around fast in the lunch line with a fork in my hand and accidentally stabbed him in the stomach. The injury wasn’t serious, he was fine, no blood even, but it hurt. He was always brave, though, and when he cried, he cried silently so as not to get me in trouble. I was impressed. I asked him what his name was, and he said, Leslie, but in a whisper, holding his gap teeth behind his hand, because already he’d been relentlessly teased for the gap and for having a girl’s name. From that lunch on, he was mine, and nobody ever dared tease him again, because back then I was a biter.Leslie wasn’t calling with tragedy this time; he was coming to Berlin for a couple of nights. He had to fly over to set up the house on his husband’s Greek island for the summer and could get away early to come see me. Why wouldn’t I want to see my oldest friend? he said. And I mean that literally. God, honey, I’ve been looking at your husband’s pictures of you on the ’gram, when did you decide to let yourself go? We both laughed, I a little sourly. It was true, the Berlin winter had seeped into my soul, and I had let myself go gray, let myself have my fill of beer and pommes rot-weiss. The way I looked must have been shocking to him, married as he was to an haute couture designer and now living in a world without fat or blemish, only expensive fabric on expensive bone.I had yet to meet Leslie’s husband, had not even been invited to the wedding, which rankled some. When I’d asked him about it, he had let out a puff of exasperated air and said, We only had four people there, they are all Damien’s friends, they’re so famous they’re not even real human beings. Bringing a normie into that mess would have been cruel to you, believe you me. When I’d said, But still, I’m me, you’re you, he’d said, Oh, honey, if it’s any consolation, not even my parents were invited. This was no consolation at all; I knew the parental history.Later, after my stung ego had eased up a bit, I felt sad for my friend, not allowed his own friends at his wedding; he had fought for so long, transforming himself from a street kid into a wildly successful interior designer without even a college degree, and as soon as he’d married Damien, he’d been forced to give up his career to become something like his husband’s majordomo. It wasn’t right; none of it was right. But Leslie’s allegiances had shifted, and he was happy, deliriously happy, and I found I couldn’t say this to him anymore. In revenge, I wore while bleaching the bathroom floor the one piece of Damien’s I owned. True, it was a skirt from his collaboration with a big-box store, but I’d felt sexy in it.In any event, the prospect of soon seeing my oldest friend was a light radiating out into the rest of my life. I ran faster; I ate fewer potatoes; I yelled at my kids less. Then, the next week, he texted to tell me that the few days in Berlin had to be curtailed to only one night, alas. And the day of, when I was already waiting at the restaurant where his assistant had booked lunch, he texted to say that, oops, Damien needed the plane, he could spare only the afternoon. Could I come to Mitte in, like, four hours? He needed to take pictures of something in the Altes Museum, and we’d have time to do dinner before he had to go back to the airport. I was upset, of course, but there was nothing I could do. I had to see him. Despite recent changes, Leslie would always share the private throne room inside me with my husband and my sons.For a long time, he’d been a separate piece of me, preferring to spend most of his time in my loud and messy house, full of pets and the friends of my brother and sister, chaotic with music and life and games, which Leslie, with his long-limbed, goofy sweetness, had joined with almost fervent zeal, his high-pitched laughter making everyone else laugh.[Read: Lauren Groff has written a new gospel]Leslie was an only child, and the rare times I’d spent the night at his house, I’d felt tentative in the cathedral hush. His was a large and supermodern home, on a hill above the lake, two miles outside town. There, you could stand on the flagstone veranda and look down on Main Street with binoculars to track the ant-size people who were so huge in our daily lives. The floors were dark, shining slate; the ceilings were 25 feet tall; the furniture was precious and uncomfortable and looked to my child’s eye like the carapaces of huge insects frozen in place. His mother was extraordinarily beautiful—Leslie got his glow from her—but almost entirely silent, floating pale-haired through the house with a chuckling glass of ice water that she replaced at exactly five in the afternoon with vodka from the freezer. His father was a froggish man, red-faced, also with long limbs, whose torso seemed somehow inflated, like a rubber hot-water bottle. Poor Leslie had inherited his face, with its huge, thin-lipped mouth and bulging eyes. My friend has never been beautiful, even during his years as a twink, though, of course, he overbrims with charm. His father was also the kind of man who sucked the oxygen out of every room and left you gasping. He loved gossip, jokes, pointed observations. Only at night did he go silent, though even the night hours in Leslie’s house were startling, marked by a clock that cuckooed the hour, then sang what in adulthood I would understand to be a Wagner lied.I hated being in that house. They kept it too cold, and Leslie was not allowed to hang the undeniably excellent drawings he did on the wall of his own room. I once woke to see the shadowy shape of his father in the doorway, his silken robe parted. Whenever Leslie’s father saw me, he had a savage impulse to needle me with dumb-blonde jokes over and over until I broke down and cried. That this adult man absolutely needed to make sure I knew how small and powerless and stupid I, a little girl, was compared with him has, I’m afraid, been the subject of hours and hours of therapy.The last day I’d see Leslie, I came, very slowly, on the S-Bahn to Museum Island. The weather was gray again, drizzling and cold, but the purple peonies at the flower shops in the station gave me courage. I wandered around the Neues Museum and had a coffee there, then sat on the steps of the Altes Museum, watching the tourists huddle and dart off, mesmerized by how they behaved like fish near coral, their colors the same brightness, their noise the same noise as the chewing one heard under the water. At last, when I had begun to shiver with cold, I smelled Leslie before I saw him, an expensive custom perfume of bergamot and orange and musk, and his hands were over my eyes, and I took them down and kissed his palms. He was laughing his high, delighted Leslie laugh.You looked so forlorn sitting there, he said. A lost little puppy.Oh, I thought, how strange to see people whom you’ve loved for so long. You don’t really see their current face; instead, you see the faces of your greatest intensity of love. I could see my 7-year-old friend, my 11-year-old friend, my 18-year-old friend, not really the middle-aged one. Still, I sensed something different about him now. Let’s go get you warmed up, he said, and he linked my arm in his, and we went inside the old columned building. At the desk, though, he stood aside for me to buy the tickets, behavior that felt a little strange for a man with a Greek island and a private jet. We walked slowly through the ancient torsos—You must change your life, I intoned gravely, which he blinked at, puzzled—the Etruscan jewelry, the Roman busts. He seemed to know where he was going, and we arrived at a little room on the second floor called the Garden of Delights.Inside was a circus of priapism. Ancient penises with wings, Leda being reamed by the swan, lamps in the shape of little satyrs, their members so huge and painfully engorged that they touched the ground. I said, I suppose that one set fire to the little hole in the urethra, what is it called? Leslie said, The glans? No, I said, I got it, the meatus. Leslie giggled, then set to work with his cellphone, taking picture after picture, in close-up. I thought about when we were 12, in the little Methodist graveyard where we’d liked to gossip and talk about death. One day, we’d decided out of curiosity to French-kiss. Leslie’s mouth had been cold and wet, and tasted like corn chips, which he’d just been eating. I’d fled immediately. All night, I’d turned in bed, unable to even try to talk to Leslie in my mind, growing ever more certain that now I was going to die of AIDS, that I was probably pregnant now, that I was doomed to have to marry Leslie and have his baby at 12 years old and spend the rest of my life kissing cold, wet corn-chip kisses. But in the morning, when I saw him at school, he’d looked at me, startled, and then his mouth had spread and spread in his froggy smile, and then I’d started laughing too, and we’d set the kiss event aside and never attempted another one again.I stared so long at one hyper-endowed lamp that it turned its head, stuck out its cracked terra-cotta tongue, and licked all the way around its mouth, lascivious, shimmying. Leslie said, suddenly, He’s thinking of a collection inspired by this room, and put his phone away. Who, Damien? I said, stupidly. Yes, Leslie said. Damien remembered this place from, like, a decade ago, and he wanted me to take photos of every single thing in the room. How’s he doing, I asked, this husband of yours whom I’ve never met, if he’s actually real. Leslie said, He’s real. He’s amazing. Just absolutely amazing. You have no idea what it’s like living with a genius. Oh? What is it like, I said, and he shrugged and smiled and said, Amazing. I was stung; he was protecting someone with his vagueness, but I wasn’t clear who.We came back down through the dim antiquities, the nine carved Muses on a sarcophagus gesturing above our shoulders. Now that his task was done, he could focus on me, and he asked me rapid-fire questions that I answered as honestly as I could: Yes, the boys were furious with us for dragging them to Berlin, no, they don’t like their school at all, yes, they were the most gorgeous humans ever to set foot on the planet, funny and loving and smart and good, yes, I do in fact wonder how they came out of me, haha, it’s true, yes, my husband wanted to see Leslie too, he says he’s sorry he had work to do today, no, I’m not getting any work done myself, this place is too exciting, I can’t focus. Ugh, Leslie said, nobody wants to work anymore, it’s a cultural disease. Then we went out into the darkening afternoon.Hey, Leslie said, I’m working on my bikini body—let’s say we skip dinner and just go have a drink? You already have a bikini body, I said, everybody has a bikini body, besides, I am starving, you had me skip lunch, if you remember. But he either didn’t hear me or affected not to, and said he knew an amazing bar, they always went there when they were in Berlin, I’d love it, and if I was really hungry, he thought they had food there, and swept me along.He led me by the hand down the damp and windy street, where idling for him was a gleaming black car of such absurd luxury that I laughed. Oh, he said, it’s the airport’s, not ours, we don’t keep a car in Berlin. I slid onto leather that both looked and felt like actual butter. For all my socialism, I luxuriated in the reflected heat upon my face, this dazzle, this excess, the champagne chilling in an ice bucket, which Leslie fell upon with relief, popping the bottle, pouring out coupes of perfect honeyed chill. We slid through Berlin surreally in this purring car, bubbles striking our tongues. Until then, I had mostly seen the center of the city as excitingly gritty—piss in stairwells, graffiti atop graffiti.Seeing my friend so comfortable in comfort, my old guttersnipe buddy who’d once lived for years in actual squalor, felt odd. Of course, he had started off in smoothness and sleekness up in that sad house of his on the hill, but the Thanksgiving of his freshman year in college, all hyped up by his campus LGBTQ alliance and against my counsel, he’d decided to come out to his parents. That same night, as my own family was passing around appetizers, he showed up at my house, unable to speak for weeping, his skin reddening into what would later be a hideous black eye. We had lost some of our ability to speak without speaking by then; enough life had streamed through us without the other person there to witness it. But while everyone else was eating stuffing and pumpkin pie downstairs, he lay on the foldout bed next to mine, and I held him, big spoon to his little, and I came to understand what had happened as vividly as if I had been in the room.His mother had bought a turkey dinner from a local caterer and put it on her own mother’s sleek porcelain platter. His father had been drinking bourbon, glass after glass, ever since the food had arrived hours earlier. Leslie had been quivering with anxiety, a big mistake, because when his father saw weakness, he leaped on it, he couldn’t help it, the man was a hunter, a predator, a kind of jungle cat. When at last my friend had broken the tension and announced that he was gay, his father had stood up and taken a fistful of turkey and thrown it in Leslie’s face, then leaned over and punched him in the eye. Before he’d left the room, he’d said, with his back turned, That’s it. You’re no child of mine.Leslie’s mother had picked turkey off her son’s shirt, whispering, Hush now, hush now, stop crying, he’ll hear, and then she’d kissed him, and whispered, I always knew, of course I did. A mother knows. But you’d better go down to your friend’s house, just get out of his sight. After his devastated week with us, my parents drove him back to college, and he finished out the term and spent winter break at my house, but when he went back to school, he was barred from the dorm; his father had withdrawn his payment for the semester, they were sorry, he was no longer officially matriculated in that institution.He’d hitchhiked to my school and spent a few weeks on my common-room couch, until my roommates had revolted. They loved Leslie, he was so funny and kind and smart, but he wasn’t a student there, and his feet at the time reeked like dead things, they were sorry, they sympathized with his plight, they were allies! But they’d have to tell the dean if he wasn’t gone by Friday. That day, I withdrew every penny from my savings account, all my earnings from lifeguarding during high-school summers, all my graduation and birthday money, and gave it to my friend. He sat for a long while with his face in his hands, saying, I should just kill myself, nobody would care. I said fiercely that if he killed himself, I would kill him again, and at last he smiled wanly and packed up. Whatever he needed, he just had to call, I said, I’d figure it out for him.He’d hitchhiked to San Francisco and lived on my money for about two months, after which he’d declined rapidly. I took a dining-hall job washing dishes so that I could send him a check faithfully every week—my hands can still hold searing-hot plates without pain. But some months, I couldn’t send one, because he had no address to send things to. Other months, he managed to call but couldn’t speak, only sobbed into the receiver.Along with the jobs he told me about—the go-go dancing, the house painting, the bartending, the dog walking—there were darker jobs he hinted at. I think he sold what he had, which was his youth. For a time, he was addicted to something, but he wouldn’t tell me why his speech was slurred. When he finally washed up in a steadier place, he was so proud that he bought a disposable camera and took pictures of his room and sent the camera to me to develop. But when I got the prints back, the room was so little and sparse—four walls with a giant poster of David Bowie on one, a bed scrupulously made with a cheap wool blanket—that I ached at the difference between my hopes for him and his reality.When I saved up enough to go visit him over spring break during my junior year, he was house-sitting for a pair of kind elderly lesbians in the Marina. He’d met them when he’d shown up with a crew to paint their house, and they’d worried about him and semi-adopted him. He seemed sober but looked pale and haunted when he picked me up at the airport, and I felt a strangeness between us during that trip, which couldn’t end fast enough. He had no money for restaurants or tickets, of course, so I bought us groceries, and we cooked and went for long walks and talked and talked, awkwardly, with hours-long pauses between bursts of conversation. At the end, he promised he’d pay me back for all the money I’d sent, which by that point was something close to $10,000. Not that I’m a person who keeps accounts like this, but even with all his private jets and Greek islands, he has yet to repay me. I don’t think it is intentional; I think he was so ashamed to have taken from me that he cast the debt from his mind. If he were to write me a check today, I don’t know if I would take it, though perhaps he could pay for his own museum ticket.We slid to a stop before a bar with a neon sign above a green door. It didn’t look like a haven for the cognoscenti, but one had to ring the bell to be let in, and the person who opened it was about 10 feet tall, with a shaved head and the sharp-boned face of an angel, and so many piercings, she looked like she’d been bedazzled by a bored child. Les! she cried out, wrapping him in her spidery arms. She looked behind him for Damien and seemed piqued when she saw me. God, Anya, you look incredible, let me take a picture for Damien, he might be able to use you, Leslie said, and once inside the dark bar, he took about 50 flash photos of Anya, her hand on her hip, looking very tough.She led us to a table, and Leslie said, My usual, thank you, and she said, Got it, then frowned down at me. Out of panic, I picked the first thing I saw on the menu, the Voltaire, a drink with cognac and quince. Leslie said, wisely, To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize, and raised an eyebrow. What? I said. Voltaire said that, Leslie said. And you call yourself a college graduate? He still had his phone in his hand and got distracted, poking and prodding it, so I was left alone to look around. The bar was full of Berliners, gorgeous girls with ratty mullets and 1970s eyeglasses, skinny boys slouching in all black. The bar was illumined by candles and an uplit line of mostly esoteric liquors along the full-length mirror against the back wall. Only when Anya delivered our drinks did my old friend remember I was there with him and put the phone away.He gulped down half of his drink in one go, then leaned forward and filled me in on all the gossip from our town, his face lighting up the way it used to. The divorces, the affairs, the tragedies in the lives of our classmates, people I didn’t think about more than once a decade. Nothing about himself. I watched Leslie speak, until I suddenly understood what had become so strange about his face. It wasn’t Botox or any kind of plastic surgery, subtle or not; he’d had his teeth fixed, and that glorious gap in them that I’d loved so much had disappeared.[Read: ‘Birdie,’ a short story by Lauren Groff]Oh, I interrupted him, Leslie. Your teeth. He put his hand up in alarm, then, remembering that I knew him best with his old set, grimaced to show off the new. He looked like a chimp demonstrating aggression. Aren’t they wonderful? he said. I feel like a new man. Damien was against it, he said the gap gave my face a certain rakishness, but I’ve hated it ever since I first looked in a mirror. You know, when I was a kid, if I forgot at dinner and accidentally smiled with my teeth and my dad saw the gap, he’d make me stand up and show my teeth while he threw toothpicks at me like darts, trying to get one through the space, Leslie said, smiling. I could tell that this was a story he’d told many times at parties, and that it had made people laugh.Oh, Leslie, I thought, sick. Don’t break bread with the kind of person who’d laugh at that. Aloud, I said, bitterly, Your goddamned father. At this, Leslie flinched, saying, Jesus, have some respect. My dad is totally demented right now, it’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen, he’s in a nursing home down in Sarasota crying all the time because he has no idea where he is or who he is or what’s happening to him, all day he’s just wandering around so confused, it’s like watching someone tormented, like someone in hell. My poor mom is just devastated, she visits him every day, it’s wringing her out, she’s never been strong anyway, you know that. It’s just breaking her to bits. So yeah, okay, fine, he wasn’t the best father, but he’s still a human being, damn. He deserves our pity.I suppose I still have a biter in me, because I said, Right, right, and does his dementia automatically absolve him for everything he did? Are you actually kidding me right now, Leslie?What are you talking about, he said, in a very low voice, because mine had made the Berliners around us stop in their conversations and look at us. You mean that time when I came out? Yeah, those were some shitty years, but I got through them, look at me, I’m absolutely fucking thriving, they made me what I am, I pulled myself up by the bootstraps, I didn’t make any excuses, I worked. I’m the fucking American dream, baby. Anyways, not that you care, my father apologized, I forgave him. Why the fuck would you still be angry when I’m not? What the fuck is wrong with you?This is when it all came boiling up out of my molten core, the mystery that all these decades I’d felt deep down, this terrible thing sensed, those sudden interruptions when we were talking in our separate beds across the village at night, that vision or dream I’d had of his father in a parted robe in the doorway, my revulsion for the man, the way my friend had made himself small in the world, apologetic, hiding himself, the way his father had watched with a gleam in his eye when he made dumb-blonde jokes at me until I cried, that fascist soul of that fascist man spreading its tarry blackness all over everything he touched. I couldn’t know, I didn’t know for sure what he had done to my friend. But I did know. I did. Somehow. Perhaps.Maybe the knowledge was written on my face—maybe, for a brief moment, Leslie could hear inside my mind again the way we’d spoken when we were little. He pushed back from the table so violently that my Voltaire splashed all over the table and onto my lap. In the shock of cold, I thought he was angry that I was witness to his deepest shame, but he hissed through his new, perfect teeth, Fuck you. You knew. All along.And then he was gone through the door. I was alone with my wet lap, my confusion, my rage, Anya glaring down at me, the angel of punks.I paid, I escaped. Out in the street, rain had begun for real, a rain that would turn overnight into ice and raze back all the tender new green that had emerged, leave the tulip blossoms withered brown twists on the stem. I dialed Leslie again and again, walking through the rain to the S-Bahn station, but he did not pick up, and at last my phone informed me regretfully that I was blocked. On the train, shivering, I tried an email, but he had preemptively emailed to say, You’re dead to me. Don’t contact me again. And when I tried to respond, my email bounced back.Now June is here, the lengthening days so rich with sunshine that light spills out everywhere like coins and bars of gold, spilling upon the vigorous green leaves fully and lushly emerged, upon the real cuckoos marking crazy time and the swans in their elegant glissades across the water, upon the crowds of naked youths sunbathing on the hillsides around Schlachtensee and Krumme Lanke, upon me in my endless all-day walks around Wannsee and Potsdam. I can only walk now, because I injured myself trying to run out my grief in the weeks after I saw Leslie—and I have to walk so much, often from the moment I wake up until the moment the boys come home from school and I can hold their animal bodies against my animal body and feel the batteries of their hot hearts recharge me again.Leslie is a person who holds fast to his actions; we have been severed, I know, I can feel it inside me, it is permanent. Voltaire did not in fact say, To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize. That’s the wisdom of an actual neo-Nazi. When I cry on my walks, the ghosts laugh at me from their heaving white masses at the center of the lake, where the sailboats slice over them; the ghosts of Wannsee mock me.They, by existing, remind me of what a new friend said once during the winter, a friend who is both German and American. She said that being German has a sense of heaviness to it—that the Germans are at least wrestling with their guilt and that we Americans have been trained to pretend that the wounds don’t exist, which only means they fester inside.A few days ago, I took the ferry across to Pfaueninsel, thick now with roses and wisteria. The castle at the center of the island was wrapped in renovation plastic, not in peacock feathers; peacocks did not seethe four thick upon the ground. I saw only a few dozen at most, shouting out in their strange, catlike cries. One approached me as I sat on a bench in my desolation, a male trailing his feathers behind him like the long train of a ball gown. I gave him the pretzel I’d bought but didn’t want, and he pecked at it for a long while, then rewarded me by lifting the strong muscles that carried his tail, unfurling his great glorious fan only a few feet from me so that I could be intimidated by his beauty, his shine, the shocking colors, the eyes on his feathers all at once winking at me, as if to say, Don’t worry, this will pass, we will survive. This is the way of things, we carry our gorgeous burdens, we go through life losing. By autumn, all his tail feathers will have fallen out; he will go into the long, dark winter bare of his glory. But this is the nature of the greatest gifts, the eyes of Argos say; they are never meant to last forever.

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