From Non-Registered Guest: A Memoir in Essays
I never meant to write a book. I grew up believing I was bad at writing, and to this day you would have a hard time getting me to read anything out loud. So this did not start as a plan. It started with a death.
People who know me well had told me for years that I should write a book. I brushed them off. Then Jewel Thais-Williams died, and I felt the urge to say what her club had done for me. I spent much of my young adult life with people questioning my sexuality, and Catch One was where that stopped being a question. I said it out loud, in writing. It was never easy, but I kept going, one essay and then the next. That is why these essays were published one at a time. I have brought fifteen of them together here, in the order I believe they belong, before there is a book to hold them.
The title comes from the months in 2022 when I lived in casinos on the Strip. I had gold status, which meant I could get rooms cheap, so I moved into one casino and then another. I gambled for a living, mostly shooting craps, ate my way around Vegas, and met women. One of them would not stop calling the hotel and showing up.
Near the end of those months, the front desk gave me a status: non-registered guest. If anyone asked for my room, I was not there.
I have lived that way in other places. I kept my criminal record off the record because I was not proud of it. I kept off the record a reputation I never wanted, the ladies’ man, when what I have always wanted is one lasting relationship, the kind that holds for decades. I wanted that, but I did not always choose to stay. I left a lot of women in my wake.
This book is me checking in.
When I became a food critic, and then a public face, I knew what I had kept out of public view: the questions people had raised about my sexuality, my criminal record, and how absent I was as a father. I decided to put it all on the record while nobody was watching, so it could never be a surprise later. If I ever do get famous, it is already public.
But the reader I have in mind now is my daughters. My eldest and I talk. I still get nervous every time, and that is mine, not hers. My youngest and I do not have that yet, and I hope we will. If she only reads one of these, I hope it is Before It Becomes Silence. It says what I have never said aloud: I love you, and I always did, in spite of my mistakes, my own drama, and my fear.
I am not proud of a lot of what is in these pages. I do not necessarily regret most of it. If I have one regret, it is how absent I was as a father.
I am scared this will ruin my life. I did it anyway.
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