Never Meet Your Heroes – Danielle Chelosky

October 22, 2025

“You might be the craziest person I’ve ever met.” He yelled it over the abominable music—maybe it couldn’t even be called music, it was more like sputtering noise, which came from a laptop on the stage. He said this because she was very drunk and kept spinning in circles. Men are so easily amused, she thought. But she had also wasted a crisp $50 bill she’d miraculously found on the ground that day—a cosmic gift from the Earth, tucked into the grass for her only—to get them into this awful show. They had been sitting at the adjacent bar, and all of a sudden she’d been overcome with the need to be submerged in songs. It turned out the musician—if you could call them that—sounded a lot better from behind a closed door.

She couldn’t remember this boy’s name—John—no matter how many times he reminded her. Perhaps if it was less generic she would. He was twenty-seven and from Italy, but he appeared younger, like early twenties. He had disheveled brown hair and a mischievous look about him that inspired her to blurt out that he looked like a frat boy. He took great offense to this. He wore a big white hoodie and rolled up the sleeves to reveal a plethora of tattoos. She promptly apologized for her unfair judgment. He was here with his friend who was visiting from Italy and not fluent in English. He was quiet but cute also, boyish and pretty. When John proposed a threesome, she didn’t have to think twice about it, as it’d been on her bucket list for years and they were beautiful and fun candidates.

This all transpired around midnight, after the evening had taken a strange turn when a feral stranger randomly accosted her, and her friend subsequently became enmeshed in a fight with the stranger, which unexpectedly led to the friend breaking glass over the stranger’s head. Everyone was speechless, paralyzed by shock, as this was out of character for that friend, he was an amiable, cool guy and even he was visibly surprised by his own actions, his own capabilities. She was embarrassed by it all—she felt like the friend had not been defending her, but instead escalating everything and using a heat-of-the-moment situation as an excuse to let out pent-up rage.

In her head, she kept replaying the moment of glass hitting skull; the fear she felt in that millisecond was foreign, she was not usually in intense scenarios like this, at least not since her childhood, which was full of repressed memories. When the stranger accosted her at the bar, she’d frozen up like she did as a kid, watching someone shout in her face from afar, trying to hide her shaking because she did not want to be weak. After the glass hit the stranger’s head, everything got quiet, and internally, she was just anticipating the worst, she was waiting for this stranger to produce a weapon from a pocket or something like that, this was America after all, she had nightmares of mass shootings quite often, but instead the stranger just kept arguing, so drunk or high or whatever that he seemed to barely notice the blood gushing from himself.

But that was in the past—the far, distant past, about four or so beers ago. She had been actively attempting to drink less, but this incident distracted her from that mission, or maybe it was just an excuse to abandon it altogether. She got in the Uber with the Italian guys. She took the aux and blasted ecstatic music—the songs she’d been listening to on repeat for the past five months or so. She wondered if she would ever tire of them. The boys sat next to each other, talking in Italian and telling her not to worry when she asked what they were saying. She rolled down the window and blew vape smoke into the New York City skyline. She was intrigued by these boys but she had fallen in love several times this night: Her friend’s hot friend who was a high school English teacher and liked the same music as her; the sexy bartender who gave her his number despite having a girlfriend; the handsome guy who worked at the venue and was having trouble breaking up the fight between her friend and the stranger (she had felt awfully bad for him in that moment, as part of his beauty was his kind and gentle air, which did not serve him well in this circumstance).

They walked from the apartment to a bodega for drinks. She continued to play music through her phone speaker while she danced in the empty streets and the boys had a conversation in Italian. To her, time did not exist; in reality, it was around two in the morning. The walk there felt like an eternity, the walk back felt like two seconds. John didn’t have any roommates. She was so drunk that she kept babbling about random things that these boys pretended to care about as they, on either side of her, removed a different item of clothing from her. As the Italian boy with inadequate English was fingering her, she felt awfully shy, and rambled about the time she went to Crema because her friend loved the movie Call Me By Your Name. He pulled her face to his and shoved his tongue in her mouth likely to shut her up. Ultimately this was for the better, as she was getting tired of her own voice but couldn’t seem to stop. The other boy began eating her out. It was all so amazing but she was so drunk that she was so overstimulated that where there should be pleasure there was only the feeling of awe, like she was watching someone else experience this pleasure and felt happy for them, and also jealous. Yet she was determined to make this work. The trio arranged themselves intuitively: The boy visiting from Italy was getting ready to fuck her from behind, while John was offering his dick for her mouth. But neither dicks were particularly hard; she wondered if she wasn’t the only severely intoxicated one in the equation. She wasn’t necessarily interested in putting in the effort to making them hard. It was late and she had to get home for work the next morning.

She gathered her clothes and began to dress. The boys were pulling the articles away from her but she tugged them back into her grasp and ran away from them as they tried to seduce her into staying. She felt sad her threesome fantasy hadn’t lived up to her expectations; about this, her friend later said, “Never meet your heroes.” John still paid for her Uber home, after the two chased her around the apartment some more, making her feel at times genuinely scared but mostly entertained, she kept succumbing to their kisses, these boys were irresistible and they knew she was full of desire, even if it was outweighed by ambivalence. Frankly she felt baffled as to why they wanted her; a sober stint had led to major weight loss, and drinking again meant gaining it all back. She was feeling particularly fat in front of these attractive men. Their Italian conversations only worsened her insecurity. Were they talking about her? It’s worth mentioning that she was very much Italian. Her grandfather had immigrated from Italy during a war (she should probably know which one) and he knew Italian better than he knew English. The only word she knew, though, was “mangia”—eat—which she said over and over to the boys’ amusement. In a way, she thought, this night was a way of bringing her closer to her culture, closer to herself. Everything started to make a lot of sense, she thought.