Chapter Text
Richie Tozier Cares What You Think of Him
January 10, 2018
“Man, this sucks. Do I have to do this? Are we committed to this?”
When I meet up with Richie Tozier and his manager at his Los Feliz house, he spends the first fifteen minutes of the interview appealing to his manager to get him out of this. It’s funny—Tozier’s always been funny, thanks in large part to good delivery, a straight-forward self-deprecation that carried off even the most off-putting of his jokes—but even he can’t keep it up forever.
“Jesus fuck,” Tozier says, once his manager pats him on the shoulder, unsympathetic, and abandons him to drink LaCroix in the other room. “Okay. What are we talking about?”
We first got in touch over email two weeks earlier. I’ve heard from Tozier a few times since then, a handful of emails and a couple of texts. We both know exactly what we’re here to talk about, but I remind him anyway. Immediately, he’s off again, talking at the speed of light.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m gay now, whatever,” Tozier says. “Who gives a shit? Can we talk about the time I tripped and almost died at a Dodgers game and everyone thought it was a fucking bit?”
He is gay now—although the “now” is a little misleading. Tozier says that he thought about coming out over the years, but it always felt like his success was impossible outside of his public persona—the aggressively bro-ey, staunchly heterosexual Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier persona that garnered him as much love as hate over his twenty-year career.
If you didn’t already know Tozier for the mildly offensive, frat-boy comedy he’s been slinging since the early 2000s, you knew him after the viral disaster of a comedy set he served up in August of 2016. In the now-infamous video of the incident, you can see Tozier forget his own name mid-joke and run off stage. Then, he disappeared for over a month, abandoning his tour and refunding hundreds of tickets. Everyone had a guess about what had happened—he had a nervous breakdown, he went to rehab, he was dead—but nearly a year and a half later, the full story still hasn’t been told.
“Everyone’s going to see this and assume it was about being gay,” Tozier says. “But believe it or not, I’ve got other issues, too.”
He sits on his couch while we talk, one leg folded up under him. He’s wearing a bold purple button-up with a banana print, open over one of his old tour t-shirts, with his own name torn out and the hole neatly patched back up. The look fits right in in his house. The décor is a mix of well-worn furniture, kitschy knick-knacks and art pieces that straddle the line between ironic and sincere. The shelf behind his head holds four identical Las Vegas mugs—three out of the four missing handles—an upside-down globe, and a framed caricature of someone Tozier informs me is a complete stranger.
On the floor next to the couch, there’s a three-foot tall acrylic flamingo. His spare pair of glasses rests across its beak.
“Summer 2016 was, hands down, the worst summer of my life,” Tozier says. “It had some stiff fucking competition, too, but I think that one really took the cake.”
As he settles into the story, he’s looking down at his hands more often than at me. It’s a shy gesture, at odds with the public image he’s cultivated over the past two decades. The longer we talk, the more it becomes clear that that image has very little to do with the man sitting across from me.
In July 2016, two of Tozier’s best friends from childhood nearly died within days of each other. One was a suicide attempt, the other a freak accident. He hadn’t seen either of them in more than twenty years when he received a call with the news minutes before going onstage in Chicago for the show now immortalized in the shaky cell phone video that garnered tens of thousands of retweets on Twitter.
“It was a bad month, man,” he says. “My dad died of cancer in 2011, and I spent less time in hospitals then.”
Tozier’s comedy of the past fifteen years has been much more likely to address cheating on your girlfriend or blackout drinking than grief and loss. But he also hasn’t written his own material since 2005, a fact that he owns up to with a mix of shame and pride.
“Yeah, I said a lot of stupid shit, but at least I didn’t write it?” he offers. “I don’t know, man. It’s a pretty shitty excuse, but it’s what I’ve got. The least I can do now is be honest, right?”
Tozier attributes this new-found honesty in his career and his personal life to reconnecting with his childhood friends following the twin death scares. Talking to his hands once again, he says he feels like he’s never had as good of relationships in his adult life as he did with the circle of friends he knew at thirteen. “We were seven shitty little kids who would do anything for each other. We loved each other so fucking much. Until they came back into my life, I never realized what I was missing—people who actually fucking cared about me.”
Tozier doesn’t paint a very happy picture of his twenty years in Hollywood. He got his start in performing in college, with the three a.m. radio show where his “Trashmouth” persona originated. He DJed and told jokes to audience of almost no one. Outside of the radio station, he nearly failed out of a couple acting classes and earned one-third of a degree in audio engineering before dropping out to wait tables and chase comedy gigs.
Back then, Tozier was still writing his own material, but he was also—in his words—a straight-acting teenaged fuckup who wanted to be successful just a little more than he didn’t want anyone to look at him twice. Growing up in a small town in the eighties and nineties, he didn’t see a path to being successful and openly gay.
Tozier’s phone rings halfway through a story about having a panic attack at the 2011 Emmys. He apologizes before he answers it—“I try not to miss calls from my friends. It’s a whole thing.”
His side of the phone call is a fast-talking, delighted affair. “What’s happening?...Wait, really? Horseshoe crabs?...Actually, sorry, I’m in the middle of something. Yeah, an interview, actually—No, asshole, I definitely told you about it. Well, I told someone—No, I’m not sharing my Google calendar with you, stop fucking asking. And don’t DM me on Instagram anymore, I forgot my password. Okay, call you tonight.”
He makes a jerk-off motion as he wraps up the call. “Sorry,” he repeats after hanging up. “I adopted this asshole of a parrot at the New York Zoo in the late 90s and if I don’t call every week, he starts teaching all the kids to call their dads cucks.”
When he gets sick of talking about himself, Tozier takes me around his house. It’s a two-bedroom, smaller than you might expect for someone of his success—“I fucking hate moving, I’ve been here for a decade”—and packed with furniture, ephemera, and raw stuff from twenty-plus years in Los Angeles.
The master bedroom has lots of natural light, with big windows overlooking the hills behind his house. “I tried to find my house in Grand Theft Auto, but I just got eaten by a mountain lion,” Tozier says. The wall behind the bed is covered with framed photos, a mix of landscapes, small towns, and a lot of beach photography. The photographer is a friend: “He emails them to me, I print ‘em at Kinko’s.”
In the spare bedroom, he has a collection of what he calls vintage Pez dispensers. At least a quarter of them are Funko Pop Pez dispensers. The most lived-in room is the kitchen. He apologizes for the mess; there are pans in the sink and discarded egg shells on the kitchen island. “I panicked an hour before the interview and had to make like six omelets to cope,” he says. “Do you want an omelet?”
The omelet—ham, onions, peppers, and a metric ton of cheese—is setting when Tozier returns to the topic at hand. “I did come out to my parents, in like fucking 2000 or something,” he tells me. “And then I was so embarrassed about every other choice I’ve ever made that I barely spoke to them for another decade.”
The early 2000s were where Tozier really made his name. The five-plus years clattering around the LA standup scene finally paid off with an agent and a series of successful national tours. He filmed a couple comedy specials and one short-lived Comedy Central series. He tried his hand at acting, with a series of guest roles in crime shows and short-lived comedies, and he rounded out the decade hosting Saturday Night Live.
Professionally, the decade was an unqualified success. In 2000, Tozier was 24 and living with four roommates. By 2010, he’d bought a house and was well on his way to becoming a household name. Outside of his career, though, Tozier was more alone than ever.
“2010, my dad got diagnosed with lung cancer and my boyfriend broke up with me. Not because I was closeted, though, he just thought I was an asshole.” He eats leftover spinach out of his hand while he talks, sitting up on the only clean part of the counter with his bare feet on the lower cabinets. “I had, like, two friends? And all the jokes I wrote myself were fucking bombing, so they stopped letting me write any of my own shit anymore.”
The writers were primarily his manager, Steve Covall’s, idea, when Tozier found himself stuck struggling to break through from mid-size local shows to a wider audience. “It was sixty-forty,” Tozier says. “Seventy-thirty? Steve pitched the idea, I said yeah, absolutely. The last time I dated a woman was when I took a girl to prom in 1994. I needed someone to update my references.”
Covall was with Tozier through nearly all of the ups and downs of his career. “I met Rich when he was 24 and we started working together when he was 25,” Covall recalls. “He came out to me a couple years into his career, but it was basically ‘I’m telling you this because I think you should know, but we’re never talking about it again.’”
The 2010s saw Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier become a well-oiled machine. His shows sold out, his specials—including his first Netflix special in 2014—were hits. His acting career kept chugging along, with well-paying bit parts and cameos in in The Lego Movie and Paul Blart Mall Cop 2. In the public eye, Tozier continued to live the gross-out comedian dream.
Then came 2016.
Fans didn’t react well to the news that the second half of the Foot in My Mouth tour was abruptly cancelled. In a hospital in Maine, Tozier couldn’t have cared less. And by the time the fog of waiting to see if his friends would be okay lifted, he found that he wasn’t sure he was ready to go back to how he’d been living before.
“When I got back to LA, I went a little nuts,” he says. “The whiplash of like, I’m spending every day with four of my best friends and also we’re in a hospital and also one of them is maybe dying—to I’m alone in the same house I’ve been in for a decade in fucking LA, was a lot to handle.”
In October of 2016, Tozier’s manager, already on edge after the cancelled tour, gave him an ultimatum after Tozier rejected every offer Covall sent him, then stopped replying to his emails altogether: he had say yes to something or Covall would think about dropping him.
“There were like, a couple months? Where I think it could’ve gone either way,” Tozier says.
It wasn’t the first time Tozier thought about quitting comedy. He’d toyed with the idea over the years, but this was the first time he actually took it seriously. He’s dealt with deep anxiety ever since his career began. He saved obsessively, took nearly booking that came his way, and avoided interviews as much as his management would let him get away with. He wasn’t the richest man in Hollywood, but if he decided to walk away at forty, he could have made it work.
“I’ve talked Richie off the edge of quitting before,” Covall says. “This time felt different.”
Hearing his manager talk about him gets to be too much for Tozier almost immediately. He steps out to go scrounge for sparkling water in the fridge in the garage. With Tozier out of the room, Covall grows serious.
“I don’t know if I’ve always done the right thing by Rich,” Covall says. “When he told me he was gay, when he said he wasn’t going to come out, I wasn’t going to push him on it, you know? I didn’t think twice about it, or about the straight guy schtick we kept putting together for him. He said it was fine, it was fine.”
Tozier has a habit of keeping people at arm’s length, driven by a wariness to be known that he credits only partially to his fears of coming out. Covall is one of the few people who has known Tozier and known him well for the duration of his time in the public eye.
“It didn’t take a genius to see that Rich hasn’t always been that happy,” Covall says. “I think I’ve been a much better manager than a friend to him over the years. That was especially true in 2016. I regret that, and he knows it.”
In the end, it wasn’t Covall wasn’t who got Tozier back into the world. Tozier credits one of that group childhood friends he reconnected with as the one who brought him out of the depths of his depression and made him reconsider how to have a career. That friend? None other than bestselling horror novelist William Denbrough.
“We were living in the same city for, what, a decade? Without ever realizing it,” Denbrough says when he catches up with Tozier and I at the café where they’ve made a habit of getting coffee together. “After Maine, Richie promised we would meet up once we were both back in the city. A few weeks went by and he wasn’t answering my calls, and I got worried.”
In person, Denbrough has the look of a charming young professor. He wears sweaters with holes in the cuffs and has a distinctive grey streak in his hair. He’s not as loud as Tozier, but he talks nearly as fast.
“When Bill comes knocking on your door yelling about promises, you open the door,” Tozier says sheepishly. Denbrough isn’t an intimidating presence in person—he stand five-foot-seven in Chelsea boots. Tozier describes him as “effectively a brother” and one of the best people he knows.
Denbrough was going through a similar career crisis in the months after his and Tozier’s ordeal in Maine. “For the first time in as long as I could remember, I couldn’t write,” he recalls. “I had a book due in three months and all I did every day was get up, sit down in my office, and stare at a blank screen.”
Tozier let Denbrough pull him out of his house to get lunch. It was the first time he’d gone anywhere other than his own backyard in upwards of a week. That afternoon, Tozier came out to Denbrough. Tozier confessed that he didn’t know how to go back on stage; Denbrough admitted he was lying to his agent about how much he was writing. They talked about growing up, about how they’d spent the past twenty years, about home.
“Someone cried, but I’m not saying who,” Tozier says.
“It was both of us,” Denbrough clarifies.
In the weeks after that lunch, Tozier started taking baby steps toward changing his career. He called his manager back. He put his usual rolling series of comedy tours on indefinite hold and fired his writers. He said no to any and all on-camera roles. Instead, he picked voice acting back up in earnest, booking a guest role in Bob’s Burgers and a handful of characters in the new Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 video game. In the past few months, he’s started recording for an as-yet-unnamed Netflix animated series. He and Denbrough are still getting lunch, at least once a week when they’re both in town.
Dumping the worst of his “Trashmouth” persona helped with much of Tozier’s discomfort about returning to the public eye, and turning from stand-up to voice acting did more. “It was good to spend some time being other people, but like, on purpose,” he says. “Acting instead of lying was a nice change.”
But it wasn’t enough. As the end of 2017 approached, Tozier continued to come out to the rest of the people close to him. He only did a handful of interviews over the course of the year, but when he did, he stayed away from speaking about his personal life—about his abrupt departure from stand-up, about the events of summer 2016, or about his sexuality. But without the brick wall of his on-stage persona to keep the real Tozier out of the spotlight, keeping this secret was starting to weigh on him in a way it never had before. It became increasingly clear to Tozier that there was no moving forward—in his comedy, in his acting, in his personal life—without coming out publicly.
When we meet up for the final time at Tozier’s house in Los Angeles, it’s the day before New Year’s Eve.
“I’m turning 42 this year,” he says. “Isn’t that fucked up?”
Tozier reports matter-of-factly that he thinks about death all the time. It’s hard not to: two of his childhood friends came close to dying a year and a half ago. Tozier’s father died in his late fifties, when Tozier was thirty-four; his mother followed a year later.
Again and again, our conversations have come back to fear—fear of death, fear of coming out, fear of loss. Tozier has spent a lot of his life afraid. In the past few decades, he let that fear drive him further into his persona, into lashing out at other people with his comedy and away from writing his own material or being honest about his sexuality. He jokes that after he comes out, he’ll get to stop being too afraid of being outed to date and start being too afraid of dating to date.
“Every like, month, I have a breakdown about the fact that I’m never going to fall in love. That I’ll never find someone who wants to be with me,” Tozier says. He laughs at himself immediately, rubbing at his eyes with one hand. “Jesus Christ. In a fucking pathetic, miserable interview, that’s got to be the saddest thing I’ve said all day. Richie Tozier, 41, closeted comedian. Wants to fall in love.”
In our conversation, Tozier keeps circling back to honesty. His success, his entire public image, was built on top of one lie after another—the little lies about who wrote his material and where he grew up and who he was dating and the big lie that Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier was a real person, not a character built out over two decades. And once Tozier pulls back the curtain on that character, he isn’t sure what will be left.
“I don’t want people to hear me saying that I’m gay and think that I think that’s the same thing as saying I’m sorry,” Tozier says. We’ve out in the yard behind his house now, where he has a patio and a small pool that he says he never uses. The yard is just this side of overgrown, with a lemon tree shading one side of the patio and bright pink bougainvillea bushes hanging over the back wall. “I want to, like, lead with the fact that I’m sorry for all the stupid shit I said, because I am. I really fucking am.”
Was the misogyny and general grossness of Tozier’s comedy any more heinous than most of the comedy of his era? The honest answer is, not really. That doesn’t make it good —Tozier’s embarrassment about what he used to say in public is palpable—but it feels like important context. Tozier was, quite literally, just repeating what everyone else was saying.
Tozier is an encyclopedia of bits he’s done that don’t sit well with him. He recounts the third of an early tour when one of his jokes involved an impression of a gay guy that makes him cringe so violently he can’t get through describing it. He did a recurring bit making fun of his married friends—“They didn’t exist”—and talking shit about his ex-girlfriend—“She obviously didn’t exist.”
Tozier takes a sip from the lemonade iced tea he dug out of the fridge and keeps talking. “Because I don’t know what that means to anyone, me doing all that shit and actually being gay. It makes it worse, right? That it was me, too. That I couldn’t make all those stupid fucking jokes they convinced me—I convinced myself—were the only way anyone would listen to me, without shitting all over my own—dignity, self-respect, whatever the fuck,” he says. “I don’t think that helps at all, actually, but it was true when I was twenty-two and stupid and it was even more true when I was forty and an asshole.”
He says he finds it embarrassing—coming out now, in 2018, at nearly 42, when he’s known he was gay for nearly all his life. “Or maybe not embarrassing,” he backtracks, frowning. “I was embarrassed as hell when I told people I was gay at twenty and then had to invite them to the shows where I talked for an hour about how much I like to fuck my imaginary girlfriend. That shit was embarrassing. Now—I don’t know.”
It took more than a year from when he first thought about coming out—really thought about it, for the first time in years—for Tozier to find the words to actually go through with it. He describes that year as uniquely challenging. Once he got his career moving again, he was working almost more than ever. He was also trying to maintain his newly rekindled friendship with Denbrough and the rest of his childhood friends, something he describes himself as comically out of practice at.
On one hand, there was no reason to rush coming out. On the other, once he started thinking about it, Tozier found it almost impossible to stop.
“I don’t know,” Tozier says. “I feel like a fucking coward jackass, doing this now, and being like, oh boo hoo, I was scared to come out in Los Angeles in fucking 2018, but like—a gay kid got murdered in my hometown last year, you know? Like, yeah, I’m a coward piece of shit, but it’s not like I’m this way for no fucking reason.”
He’s referring to the death of Adrian Mellon, a 23-year-old gay man who was killed in a homophobic attack on him and his boyfriend, Don Hagarty, in August of 2016. A group of four teenage boys attacked the couple at a carnival in Derry, Maine, beating them both and killing Mellon.
Despite regularly calling the suburb of Chicago where he graduated high school his hometown, Tozier was born in the small town of Derry and lived there until he was sixteen. Growing up there, Tozier says he was “very fucking aware” of how homophobic Derry could be. Hearing about Mellon’s murder was still a shock. When he reunited with his childhood friends in the days after the news broke, Mellon stayed on his mind.
He’s on Tozier’s mind again today, as the sun is setting over the backyard. Tozier didn’t go back to Derry until 2016, shortly after Mellon’s death. He’s never met Hagarty, although one of his close friends who lived in Derry as an adult knew both men and is still in touch with Hagarty. “I’d say Derry can go fuck itself, because that place fucked me up and it did a lot worse than that to a lot of people,” he says. “But every person who ever cared about me came from there, too, and so did Don Hagarty, and so did I, I guess.”
Tozier admits to being hesitant to even mention Mellon’s death today. “I know it’s been two years. I don’t want to be the one bringing something up again and hurting people. But…I still think about Adrian,” Tozier says quietly. “I think about him all the time.”
For the first time across all of our conversations, his voice is choked up when he continues: “I don’t know shit about the kids in Derry these days. But as someone who used to be a kid there, who used to see the shit that went on there when it felt like no one else did—I dunno. I bet there’s kids there who are still thinking about Adrian, too. I hope they’re talking about him.”
As recently as a few months ago, Tozier was terrified of coming out. A few years ago, he says he couldn’t have even considered doing this. A lot has changed since 2016.
“I can’t control what people think of me, obviously,” Tozier says. “And I don’t give a shit if Greg from Delta Kappa whatever the fuck class of 1998 smashes all my CDs. But for the people I actually give a fuck about, for the people who probably all hate me, I don’t want…I don’t know.”
It’s a strange sight—Richie Tozier, struggling for words. But we’ve been seeing this Tozier more and more often lately, at the Chicago show in 2016, at his first late night interview after he reappeared, and now, out in his backyard, watching the sky grow dark with a deep frown on his face.
“I do care,” he says finally. “I care so fucking much.”
--
March 2018
Nearly two months to the day after Richie came out to the world via Vulture article, Eddie Kaspbrak stepped off a plane in central Nebraska.
The past couple of weeks in New York had been unusually nice for March. Eddie was tentatively reveling in in the early spring sun—as much as he knew how to revel—by downgrading from his thickest winter coat to his second-thickest and taking brisk walks around the block on his lunch break. Spring was well on its way and Eddie had felt his heart lighten in his chest to match, a relieved little exhalation of tension that a difficult winter was finally on its way out.
The quiet corner of rural Nebraska where Ben had made his home for fifteen years was apparently yet to get the message.
A cold wind sliced down the tarmac on Ben’s property when Eddie reached the ground. Eddie had known for a long time now that Ben was the kind of man who not only owned his own private plane, but installed a professional-grade landing strip and hangar on his property—but Eddie wasn’t sure he’d entirely believed it until he saw it with his own eyes.
Bev and Ben took their time getting down the steps to the tarmac behind Eddie. He could hear Bev’s laughter on the wind. All around them, the countryside was still and quiet. Ben’s farm hadn’t shaken off winter yet; the handful of trees lining the side of Ben’s hangar stood grey and skeletal against the overcast early-morning sky.
Eddie saw Ben loosen up as soon as they touched down twenty minutes ago. It might have been loosening nerves from the flight, but Eddie doubted it. Eddie had needed to take a reluctant Dramamine and spend most of the flight with his eyes shut and Stan’s insomnia jazz playlist pouring into his ears to get through it, but Ben literally had his pilot’s license. If something was making Ben nervous, it wasn’t the plane ride.
“Welcome to Nebraska!” Ben called from the bottom of the steps. Eddie grinned back at him.
Eddie could only think of a handful of times when Ben had talked, really talked, about his Nebraska farm. The very first time Eddie came to his place in Long Island, with its floor-to-ceiling glass windows and calming overhead lighting, Ben had ducked his head and apologized for the empty kitchen cabinets and the missing towels and spare sheets. He only spent a handful of days a year here, he said; usually he was back home, in Nebraska. He’d said it like that—home—and then never so much as visited in the year and a half since he left Derry. He didn’t mention Nebraska much after that, not until the day that Bill got them started talking about a reunion in the group. Until he offered up the farm— I’ve got a place, actually, in Nebraska—and suddenly it was all Ben would talk about. This farm, this plane, this little house he’d renovated on his own, out on the prairie some two thousand miles away.
A rusted red pickup truck was waiting under the overhang next to the hangar. Eddie hefted his suitcase into the truck bed and wondered if it had been there since Ben jumped on a plane to get to Derry all of nineteen months ago.
Nineteen months. In that time, they had never once been together, all seven of them in one place. Eddie and Bev were roommates in New York, and with Ben was out in Long Island, they saw each other constantly. The rest were harder to reach. Stan and Patty had made it up to New York for New Year’s, and Eddie, Bev, and Mike down to Georgia for the first Thanksgiving after Derry. Mike came into the city a couple of times in the past year; Bill did the same—flying instead of driving—jumping at any opportunity to turn a work meeting into a visit. As for Richie—
Since Derry, Eddie had only seen Richie once.
--
When Richie came out, Eddie read the article from his office in New York. He started it on his phone, clicking on the link that Bill sent to the group chat, then pulling it up on his work computer so he could see it in full screen—the glossy photos of Richie looking sheepish and handsome in his kitchen, the pull quotes in bold that framed the paragraphs describing him, his home, his life.
The coming out wasn’t news to any of the Losers. Neither was the article, although Richie had been hard to pin down about when exactly it was going up. Eddie shut the door to his office and read it once, twice, three times in a row. That night, Bev and Ben wanted to talk about it over dinner in Bev and Eddie’s little blue kitchen. Ben confessed he had barely been able to finish the article, that he’d cried twice; Bev made gentle fun of him and called Richie brave in a frank, straightforward voice that left no room for argument. Eddie found he couldn’t talk about the article at all.
When Eddie opened it up on his laptop again that night, after Ben went home and Bev went to watch The Bachelorette in her room until she fell asleep, Eddie finally put a name to what it was the article made him feel. It was devastating, reading about Richie like this. The feeling had knocked Eddie to the ground in his office that afternoon. Nearly twelve hours later, he was still struggling to find his footing again.
Eddie got over it. He texted Richie his congratulations the next morning. He tried to tell Richie the same to his face, the next time they Facetime’d together, and Richie screwed up his face in embarrassment and changed the subject. He joined in when they made fun of Bill’s quotes in the group chat and chewed Richie out for calling Eddie a parrot—because of course Eddie had recognized his own sideways cameo in the article. Eddie bookmarked the article and reread it too many times. He stared at the bold, glossy photos of Richie the photographer had taken and had to bodily wrestle down the part of himself that never got to put up magazine photos of celebrities on his wall, yelling at him to print the photos out and tack them up in his office, his kitchen, his bedroom.
Yesterday, Eddie’s last day in the office before he flew out to this reunion, he’d lingered over the article again. Richie’s descriptions of the years Eddie had missed still made Eddie’s head hurt. Reading Richie talk about his time in the hospital waiting for Eddie to make it, days that sat hazy in Eddie’s own memory, made Eddie feel self-conscious and strange all over again. And—
Richie Tozier, 42, closeted comedian. Wants to fall in love. Eddie read and reread those lines. He tried to hear them in Richie’s voice in his head and almost succeeded; he’d never had Richie’s gift for imitation.
Sitting still in his ergonomic office chair, less than twenty-four hours out from seeing Richie again, Eddie read those lines and he wondered.
Nineteen months ago, Eddie suffered a traumatic injury that should have killed him. Instead, he got emergency surgery and three weeks in the Bangor Memorial Hospital and a scar the size of a handprint across his chest. He woke up with a hole through his cheek and his chest, but he also woke up surrounded by five of his closest friends that he had no idea existed a week ago. And most importantly, he woke up—nineteen months ago, Eddie’s friends killed a clown and dragged his body out of a sewer and somehow kept him from bleeding out until the paramedics arrived.
Nineteen months ago, Eddie lived. And then—
And then, Eddie rebuilt his life. Nearly dying made him realize that a lot of other things were broken, too, and it had been a long year and a half of figuring out what to tear apart and what to put in its place.
But before all that—before the divorce, the physical therapy, the search for a new apartment—before Eddie’s new second life started in earnest, Richie Tozier cornered him in a car in Maine and told Eddie that he loved him.
--
“Hello?”
Eddie left Ben and Bev to the weatherworn fences Ben was waxing poetic about and headed inside, chasing the warmth. The screen door screeched when he opened it. The front door—painted a peeling dark red—opened onto a dark hall.
Dragging his suitcase behind him, Eddie took a few tentative steps into the hall. He knew Mike was already here—had been for a couple days when his on-again, off-again road trip brought him into the area early. Bill and Richie were due to arrive today, but Eddie couldn’t remember when.
The door fell closed behind Eddie with an audible click. None of the lights on the first floor were on. Eddie could faintly make out the rug covering the foyer and the hall running down the length of the house to a screen door. Through the window, he could see a narrow strip of dead grass and trees behind the house. A staircase with a shining dark wood banister rose in front of him. It lead up to a landing before twisting out of sight to the second floor. On either side of the hall were twin glass-paneled double doors. Through one, Eddie could see a glimpse of a living room; the other, a dining room, with empty chairs sitting still and neat in the half-light.
Eddie felt along the wall next to the door until he found a switch. The overhead lights flared on, a series of hanging light fixtures running down the hall and one hanging above the landing upstairs.
“Anyone here?” Eddie called again.
The house was crowded. Eddie never would have expected that, after seeing Ben’s minimalist show room of a house out in Long Island. Here, the hall had the feeling of a thrift shop or an antique store, with every surface packed with knickknacks and photo frames and half-finished architectural models. There was a children’s desk sitting just to the right of front door, surface packed with pens and papers and funny little antique match boxes. Halfway down the hall, an upright piano was crammed up against the wall. A lamp, a stack of dusty sheet music, and two folded blankets lined the top of the piano.
“Ben?” someone called.
Footsteps started down the stairs. Eddie froze, one hand still gripping his suitcase. He knew that voice, and it wasn’t Mike’s. He didn’t need to hear the footsteps bounding down the hall or see the Garfield socks appearing on the landing to know well before his face came into view that the man currently bounding down the stairs wasn’t Bill, either.
“Benjamin Hanscom, I have a bone to pick with you,” Richie continued from the landing. “I’ve been here for thirty fucking minutes and I’ve seen no less than four different ye olden days women in the photos on your walls that I’m a hundred percent certain are going to appear in my dreams and try to eat me.”
Richie appeared at the top of the stairs, still talking. “Like, seriously, man, are you being haunted? Are these cursed artifacts? Do you keep trying to throw them away and they keep reappearing on your walls, because you should get that checked—oh, shit.”
Richie was halfway down the stairs by the time he finally looked up from the tarnished bronze frame in his hands. He froze where he stood. In the foyer, Eddie had to stop himself from doing something stupid like waving.
“Hey, Rich,” he said.
Richie’s face did something complicated, running through tiny expressions faster than Eddie could track before smoothing out into a surprisingly soft smile. “Hey, man,” he said. “I thought you were Ben.”
“He and Bev are unloading the truck,” Eddie supplied.
Richie stared at him for a second, then bounded the rest of the way down the stairs in a single motion. Eddie could see him properly now, in the light. His hair was a little longer than Eddie remembered it the last time he got a good look at him, on a group video chat a month or so ago. It tufted out around the ears, just this side of messy, but his stubble looked freshly trimmed and tidy. He was wearing a sweatshirt that Eddie knew immediately had to be stolen from Ben, heather gray with University of Nebraska in faded red letter across the front.
“Welcome, dude.” Richie pulled Eddie into a hug. Eddie fumbled, trying not to let his bag overbalance and fall, before giving up and returning the hug. Richie squeezed him once, hard, and let him go before Eddie had a chance to do anything other than press the flat of his hand to Richie’s back for a second and think soft. “How was the flight?”
“Fine. Weird,” Eddie said. “I’ve never been on a private plane before.”
“Dude . I thought he was fucking joking when he said he had a plane. I’m know I’m, like”—Richie made a vague gesture in the air—"Famous a decade ago or whatever, but who the fuck owns a plane? And look at this shit—you just got here, but this place is a Depression-era shrine or something. Do you see this?”
He brandished the frame in Eddie’s face. It was a sepia-toned photo of two of the most dour-looking women Eddie had seen in his life, one in a black dress buttoned up to her chin, the other in a nun’s—costume? Habit?
“We’d know if Ben had an Amish nun in his attic, right? Like, that’s something you tell your friends?”
Before Eddie could respond, the door behind them opened again. Ben and Bev spilled into the entryway, bringing with them a brief burst of cold air and the other three suitcases from the car.
“Beverly Marsh!” Richie crowed. “Don’t look now, but I have terrible news about your boyfriend.”
Ben squawked out a noise of protest. Next to him, Bev cocked an eyebrow, very try me, Richie. “Oh yeah?”
“Have you seen Jane Eyre ? Because you’re Jane Eyre,” Richie said.
“I better be Jane Eyre,” Bev said immediately. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Ben, is there a little old lady from the 1800s living in your attic and is she or is she not your first wife?” Richie said. “Sorry, Eddie, touchy subject.”
Eddie hit Richie in the shoulder. Richie cackled.
“Excuse me?” Ben said.
Richie brandished the photo in his face. “Who is this and why is she on every bookshelf in this place? It’s either a haunting or a body in the attic or both, and I’m not sticking around to find out if shit gets weird. People with my glasses prescription do not last long in horror movies.”
“Oh!” Ben’s expression cleared. “Ruth!”
Bev shot Eddie a little this better be good look, eyebrows raising. “Who’s Ruth?”
“She used to own the house,” Ben said. “This whole property, actually. But she’s been dead since—2002? We never met, I just bought the whole thing in the estate sale.”
“And you kept it all?” Eddie jumped in, incredulous. “You’ve been living in a nun’s graveyard for two decades?”
“Fourteen years,” Ben corrected. “And she’s not the nun, actually, she just knew a lot of nuns. I think she might have been gay? I have a lot of her old letters.”
“Jesus Christ,” Riche said, appropriately. “This is how I always hoped I’d go out. Killed by the ghost of a lesbian nun.”
“Beep beep, Rich,” Bev said mildly, “before this turns into the 2010 Richie Tozier comeback tour.”
Before Richie could do more than clutch a hand to his chest and stumble backwards, expression a mix of sheepishness and faux-offense, there was a clatter down the hall. A door opened, revealing the top of the stairs down to the basement—and Bill and Mike.
Ben actually cheered at the sight of them. Bev ran down the hall to meet them and tried to hug them both at once, nearly knocking their heads together in her enthusiasm.
Everyone’s voices overlapped each other as they traded hello’s and hugs around the hall.
“Hey, Bev—Ben—Eddie—” Bill said, peering over Bev’s shoulder to smile at all them. Next to him, Mike leaned down to plant a kiss on the top of Bev’s head.
“Richie, is this my shirt?” Ben asked as he pulled Richie into a hug. Richie laughed into Ben’s shoulder.
“Could be,” he said agreeably. “I didn’t realize Nebraska was fucking cold, dude, all I packed were t-shirts and bikinis.”
“I emailed you the weather,” Ben pointed out. “It could snow.”
“Bill, aren’t you rich? Why aren’t we spending the week in your fuckin’ palace in the Hollywood Hills? You know, where it hasn’t snowed since the sixties?”
“Because I’m separated from my wife and she’s got the house,” Bill said mildly. “You live in LA, too, in case you forgot.”
“When did you get in, Rich?” Bev asked. She gently elbowed her boyfriend out of the way and hugged Richie around the shoulders.
Eddie looked up in time to see Richie lift her an inch off the ground. “Two hours ago? Three?” Richie said, rolling his eyes back at a severe angle, visibly counting back in his head. “The drive here was worse than the flight, though, I had to listen to these two talk about research methodology and archival practices for two fucking hours,” he said, jerking a thumb at Bill and Mike.
Eddie pulled his eyes away from Richie to greet Bill and Mike, hugging each of them in turn. Mike must have recently come in from outside; he smelled like fresh air and trees, and he was still wearing his jacket. It was a faded, fur-lined denim jacket that tagged on Eddie’s memory as soon as he felt the fabric—had Mike’s dad worn a jacket like that, years ago? Eddie had a vague sense memory of bumping up against a scratchy denim sleeve and going pale, mortified at the horror of touching any adult that wasn’t his mother.
The front hall felt crowded and warm, bursting with life. They were missing Stan, but he and Patty would be here tomorrow. They yelled over each other’s heads, Bev and Bill trading notes on flight naps and Mike and Ben somehow arguing about seasonal vegetables and what made a soup a stew. Eddie could hear Bill reading definitions out from his phone at top volume and being roundly ignored; Richie was cackling at all of it, bouncing his head from one person to the next like a ping pong ball.
Eddie felt briefly high on this—all of his friends, here, loud and warm and laughing. He hadn’t realize how much he’d missed this feeling, of being truly surrounded by the people he loved, noisy and joyful and overlapping. It had been a year and a half since they’d all been in one room together like this—at the restaurant in Derry, in those moments before the bottom dropped out on their joy and the fear rushed in. This time, though—they were just here. Eddie took a deep breath, trying to feel this all through his chest.
In the gap between Bev’s head and Mike’s shoulder, Eddie caught sight of Richie looking at him. When Richie noticed, he grinned into the side of his mouth, his face briefly lighting up, before he turned back to Bill and his emphatic hand gestures. Eddie’s heart squeezed painfully in his chest.
--
A year and a half ago, Richie told Eddie he loved him. Then, Richie went back to LA. Eddie went home to New York.
When Eddie thought back, he barely recognized the person who got out of the hospital in Maine. In nineteen months, he’d moved out, gotten divorced, recovered from surgery in slow, painful steps. On the other side of the country, Richie was reorganizing his career. Firing his writers. Coming out.
It had been a long year and a half since Derry. Trying to look back made Eddie’s head spin a little. For the first time in his adult life, he had friends. He was out of his marriage. He still struggled to run and he got winded when he tried to take the stairs up to his office, but he was happier than he could ever remember being. And one of the best parts of Eddie’s new life was Richie.
They talked nearly every day. Eddie called Richie whenever he had a free minute, at lunch or on his drive home in the evening or when he couldn’t sleep at night. Richie almost never missed his calls. They never ran out of things to say to each other. Most days, Richie was the first person Eddie thought about in the mornings. More often than not, he was the last person Eddie talked to at night.
The last time Eddie had a best friend, he was thirteen years old. It had been Richie then, too.
Things were good. Eddie was happy. He was pretty sure he was doing better than he ever had in his life. Contentment was a new feeling on Eddie, but he was learning to lean into it, to trust it. To trust this life he’d built, in the wake of the one Mike’s call had sent slipping out of his grip all those months ago. It wasn’t perfect, but he felt at peace with the life he had—friends, a comfortable apartment, a steady job, people to have dinner with on a Friday night and people to call when he got lonely. For once in his life, Eddie didn’t think he was wanting for anything.
Then, two months ago, Eddie realized he was in love with Richie.