A few months after I moved to New York, just a year after my first show and with another year to go before I left Chris, I became involved in throwing extravagant parties. They took place in a cavernous Brooklyn loft, where I met two identical, tiny twins named Jaime and Janelle. Their perfect blond hair ran down almost their entire height. We would set out bowls of fresh apples before the guests arrived and, when they did, we’d adorn their faces with paintings of vines and anoint them with lavender oil. The place was always packed.

It was a bizarre and beautiful time, and Jaime and Janelle were some pretty bizarre and beautiful people. They gave me my favorite Morrissey shirt, the front of which is his yellow silhouette. After buying it secondhand, with a cut-off collar and sleeves courtesy of its previous owner, they both slouched around in it for a while until the next time we met. “The trick is to wear it backwards,” they told me. They were right, so instead of wearing Morrissey’s face on my chest, I wear the modified lyrics of one of his songs, made even clearer by their insistent yellow color: “We look at danger and we laugh our heads off.” Maybe not the sagest advice for a 17-year-old living independently in New York City, but my favorite nonetheless.