The Best Time I Fainted in Public

by Tyler Coates

I’ve been having a stressful couple of weeks. Work has been nuts, I’ve been going out drinking probably too often, I’ve had a handful of romantic disappointments (with at least one big one in the last two weeks), and then there’s that old standby: I’ve been freaking out about what to DO with my life. In other words, I’ve been extremely fun to be around.

I tend to self-medicate when I find myself losing control of my emotions. Instead of relying on alcohol or drugs, however, I overdose on culture. I like to listen to really sad music and watch really sad movies. The music helps since it’s nice to know I’m not the only person who feels kinda low sometimes. Movies, on the other hand, are generally for when I need to get out of a funk and be reminded that my twentysomething problems are not so severe, and that I need to chill the fuck out because my life is actually OK. This is why I saw Rabbit Hole last Christmas after a boy I liked stopped responding to my emails and texts. “Well,” I thought, “at least I don’t have a dead son!” (This kind of cultural therapy also serves as a reminder that I’m the kind of urban asshole who says shit like, “I overdose on culture” with a straight face.)

This is why I went to see The Normal Heart by myself on Wednesday night.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the play, which is currently enjoying an acclaimed run on Broadway. It’s a delightful little romp through the beginnings of the AIDS crisis in New York in the early ’80s, an autobiographical masterpiece by author and activist Larry Kramer. It’s certainly how any young, single, intolerably morose gay man would want to spend an evening. In all seriousness, I had heard how good the show was, and I really wanted to see it. I didn’t want to see it with anyone else, though, because I’m not the kind of person who particularly enjoys sobbing in front of his friends.

I had been dreading seeing the show all day, knowing how sad it was going to be. I kept making jokes to my friend about preemptively crying at work in order to get it out of my system. I was also concerned about seeing it at night, knowing that I would look like absolute hell after leaving the theater unable to cover up my surely swollen, red eyes with sunglasses. Still, it felt like my duty to see the play, so I arrived at the theater and took my seat in the front row of the rear mezzanine, happy that I had a good view of the stage despite being in the back section of the audience.

The show started. The first scene takes place in a doctor’s office where a young man learns that he has the mysterious virus that is killing handfuls of other gay men. “I am going to die,” he says to the friend who accompanied him to the clinic. And all of a sudden, I felt as if I was going to die, too. I could feel the lines on my forehead filling with sweat, and my eyes started to get heavy as a fuzzy feeling began to take over my brain. I immediately recognized the sensation of dizziness that foreshadowed a fainting spell, which I’ve encountered a few times in the past. The first was in seventh grade when my diabetic teacher decided to demonstrate to our class how she tested her blood sugar by pricking her finger. It happened again when my all-male health class had to watch an aging and oversaturated educational film about IUDs (you know, important viewing for every 14-year-old boy); the fear of passing out from watching the tape actually made me pass out in the bathroom after stumbling face-first into the concrete wall. Later, these spells (which is what I like to call them, because I’m from the South and it makes me feel like a character in a Tennessee Williams play) came about whenever I worked myself up into a frenzy about something, and seeing a depressing play about AIDS was enough to freak me out again.

I knew that sitting down was always the best way to deal with the lightheadedness, so I was already in the clear! I expected it to last four minutes at the most, after which my body would cool down and I would regain a normal consciousness. I closed my eyes and tried not to focus on Ellen Barkin shouting on stage; while she’s a very talented actress, she wasn’t helping me calm down.

A few moments later I felt myself regain a sense of gravity. But I also noticed something weird: I was lying down. I opened my eyes and whispered, “Uh, what?” Then I looked up and saw three ushers squatting down to me, and that’s when I realized what happened. Because I was sitting in the front row of the rear mezzanine, there weren’t any seats in front of me — only a curtain hanging from the metal rod separating the seating area from the aisle below. I assumed I was safe to pass out in my seat, not expecting that my body would just give up and slide out of my seat, allowing myself to fall three feet onto the floor below.

The ushers were sooner joined by an older lady in a pink suit, who helped me stand up and walk out to the lobby. She handed me a water, and another usher, a woman draped in silk scarves, handed me a folding fan to wave in front of my face, presumably to reduce my case of the vapors. “Is this a prop?” I asked, attempting a bad joke to demonstrate that I was fine. “No,” the usher replied, looking somewhat offended. “That’s mine.”

I assured the manager that I was OK, saying that I just got overheated in my seat instead of explaining that fainting was just my adorable version of an anxiety attack. I was extremely embarrassed; all I had wanted to do was go to a play and feel miserable by myself, but instead my body, ever the narcissist, decided to make a spectacle of itself. “Do you want to stay for the show?” the woman asked. I said yes (I paid seventy fucking dollars, after all), and added, “Uh, can I sit somewhere else?” Here’s a pro tip: If you ever want an upgrade at a Broadway show, just faint a little bit! I followed the manager downstairs to an aisle seat in the orchestra. Score, right?!

I spent the next two hours in tears, not from embarrassment or my own bad feelings, but because that play was SAD. I mean, spoiler alert: pretty much everyone dies and it was as emotionally exhausting as I expected, with the added bonus of a new fear in the form of AIDS. (I mean, that’s a pretty good way to reduce every other anxiety. “Oh, the boy won’t call you back? Well, your body could be completely broken and shut down, so how about you shut the fuck up?”) If I’ve learned anything, it’s that next time I’m having a bad week I need to CHILL OUT and do something more productive and less less upsetting than to treat myself to a play in which all of the gay guys die. Also, next time pick a seat in the second row of the rear mezzanine.

Tyler Coates wrote this while riding an Amtrak to Virginia because he is taking a vacation.