to go down), and ran out the door, too.
Amid the chaos, it turns out there was someone home, no, make that two other roommates, Rick and Flo, who awoke to see me in the buff full of KY front and back.
That episode, till this day, even with the blurred fuzzy cover-ups, has garnered the highest ratings of all time for The Real Life. Even now, people still call me KY behind my back.
Despite that embarrassing televised moment in my life, I need this job. When you are on a reality show, especially on a cable channel, you’re only paid a stipend because the rent is free, as well as the electric bill. By the end of the six months I lived in the Boston firehouse, the network paid me about $6,000. Since the show has a six-month delay, my modeling jobs poured in just as the show began airing two Januarys ago. I’ve been able to live off that money, by renting a room in a three-bedroom apartment in the South End where most of the gay guys (about 97.9 percent) in the city live.
I don’t have a car. I take the T everywhere with my monthly pass. I guard my savings and try not to use them too much. Because of the show and my fame, I’ve been asked by colleges and universities around the country to speak to their incoming freshman classes about my experience as a gay man in such a reality bubble. Those engagements pay about $1,500 a pop with travel expenses included.
So I’ve managed to live off my relatively short time in the spotlight. But I need to make it last. I don’t want to go back to Oklahoma and be a nobody. Just as I was looking to do something with my life, after graduating from Princeton with a degree in sociology (What can someone really do with that degree anyways?), there was an open casting call for the show on campus. I made an audition tape and stood in a line of hundreds of students for a shot to meet the casting directors. I was different, articulate and fun, and most of all, openly gay. The show hasn’t had many openly gay guys; and I know I am cute to boot, too. What else could they ask for?
Three weeks after that audition in September 2004, the producers called me back and flew me out to Los Angeles to interview me some more, but this time, they taped what I had to say. They asked me about my childhood and why I really wanted to be on the show.
I explained how constraining it was growing up in Oklahoma with the Catholic, Midwestern sensibilities instilled in you from conception. It didn’t help that my older brother was straight and butch with athletic prowess while I was a skinny, tall, gay kid who loved to act in school plays and pose for cameras wherever they popped up.
I told the casting directors that ever since I saw the first Real Life season based in New York with Ron, an openly gay guy, I felt like I wasn’t alone in the world. Here was a guy, gay and proud of it, which was, like, normal. And he had a boyfriend on the show! If he was a role model for me, perhaps I could be a role model to some other teenager struggling with his or her homosexuality and society’s views of us.
“I also want to be famous,” I bluntly told the producers. “I’m not going to lie. I don’t hold back. I make no apologies.”
I believe my sincerity scored points with the casting directors. In January 2005, I got word from the network. I’d made the final cut. I packed my bags and headed to Boston, to live with six other dysfunctional roommates in a former Boston firehouse in the city’s tony, historic Beacon Hill neighborhood.
Two years later, I find myself jobless. Money in my bank, while there, won’t last forever. More is going out than coming in. The account dwindles.
Now, I look out on the forlorn Charles River from the Hilton lobby as the snow continues to fall. That whole threesome episode and how it will cost me future jobs is weighing heavily on my mind. I almost wish I could somehow toss it into the Charles, where it could be swallowed up and forgotten forever. Then I feel a vibration in the pocket of my Levi’s. I pick up the phone with the gusto of a twelve-year-old girl.
“Hi, this is Kyle Andrews, may I help you?”
When I hear the other voice, I do mental cartwheels of joy. It’s my best friend Eric calling from San Francisco.
“Hey, Kyle. What’s going on?” he says. Hearing his voice reminds me of OK. (That’s Oklahoma, people!). We grew up together in OK City and his mother, Bella Sols, was always like MOM (my other mom) or that’s what I liked to call her. I came out to Bella first, even before my own parents, because she is so understanding and accepting. She happens to be the most fabulous radio psychologist in the Midwest. Eric is like my gay brother so I am always happy to hear from him. He also looks a lot like a butcher Ryan Seacrest from American Idol but with a better body and much taller, about six-feet-one.
“It’s so good to hear your voice, Eric. I’m here sitting in the lobby of a hotel feeling crappy about this potential modeling job,” I tell him as the snow dots the glass of the hotel’s aquarium-like windows. “I don’t think I’m gonna get it. I need the extra money. I need me some Benjamins.”
“Listen, Kyle, I have a publicist friend who is looking for a well-known gay celebrity to emcee a pool party at the White Fiesta early next year in Miami. Of course, I thought of you,” Eric says, always looking out for me. “They will fly you out and pay for your hotel room in South Beach. The job pays about $3,000. Not much, but hey, it’s a nonprofit and for a good cause. Interested?”
“Of course!” I blurt out, jumping up and down inside the hotel as all the other models eyeball me and wonder what’s going on with me. I can just see myself, the white boy surrounded by all those Latin lovers in Miami for the hottest circuit party on the East Coast. This is just what I need.
“Sign me up, pronto!” I holler into the phone.
“Cool, Kyle. I’ll have the woman call you with the details,” Eric says. “I know you’ll be a hit as always.”
Miami, here I come.
Chapter 4
TOMMY
It’s amazing how snow can just get out of hand. At first, it’s cute, sprinkling down like the powder a baker generously dusts on a fresh-baked pastry. But then, the white stuff just keeps coming and falling and then coming and falling down some more. Two days later, I’m still wondering, how can it still be snowing? Mother Nature, what’s up with that?
It fills sidewalks, streets, even the insides of my shoes. I have to punch holes with my feet in deep mounds of Mother Nature’s dandruff as I walk from brick-paved block to block. The parking lots at the Daily and for my building in Cambridge look like icing on a vanilla cake, with the cars and us humans as decorative figurines.
Mikey laughs when he hears my winter observations because this is my first winter in New England and, well, I’ve still got my native Florida skin. You can leave Miami but Miami never leaves you. It stays in your blood. I wish I could say the same thing about the tropical weather. Why can’t I bottle up those tropical south Florida breezes and unleash them in my apartment whenever I feel homesick or supercold?
“Tommy, you need a thickah coat. That thin windbreakah won’t do,” he says, standing in the middle of my Cambridge studio as I ready to go out on our first date. I like how that sounds, our first date. Hopefully, it won’t be the last one.
“It’s thirty-five outside, not fifty-five. Heah, take my coat. I’ve got another one in the cahr,” he says, helping me put on his Navy-like black wool coat. “You Floridians know nothing about wintah,” he teases.
Yeah, it’s 35 degrees outside—again!—and the wind is whipping, again! All I have on is my Nike red sweatshirt and a black Gap windbreaker. I hate layering myself like a ball of yarn, just to go outside for a few minutes before hopping into a car.
“Okay, you’re the native heah,” I say, imitating his Boston accent.
As I put on his coat, he grabs a black scarf of mine and twirls it around my neck like a strand of pasta on a fork.
“Now see…that’s much bettah, cutie. Are you ready to go?”
“Sí, lead the way.” I smile back and open the door for him.
I