Click Here for PART ONE
Click Here for PART THREE
At a nightclub, I met a man. A man with whom I hit it off pretty well. His name was Monte, and without going into extraneous detail, I will just say we hit it off exceedingly well. When I think back to that particular moment, I sometimes want to slap myself in the face for not realizing what I subconsciously knew I was getting into: the taste of lighter fluid & industrial chemicals on his breath, masked by a scant trace of butterscotch, betrayed a habit he would reveal to me the next weekend. He lived in Columbus at the time, and invited me to come to his loft that coming weekend.
Seeing as how it was Saturday night, I had the entire weekend to ruminate over how spending the night with Monte was going to go. He was 35 then, 17 years my senior, and he was absolutely beautiful. He had sleeves of tattoos on his arms, and a Bohemian style that I could totally dig. With brown hair & brown eyes, he was the dark-featured rebel cowboy, right down to the snakeskin boots he wore on his feet. His whole essence screamed urban hipster chic, long before the days being hipster was hip.
And his place in Columbus was just as keen. He lived in an area called the Short North, on High Street. The irony of this is not lost on me. When I arrived, he was not home yet, and when he called to let me know he was picking up some beer for us, I thought, Good, that will go perfectly with the weed I brought.
Monte pulled up in a jeep. He was even more handsome than I had remembered, wearing a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, exposing the artwork I had admired when we first met. Nine Inch Nails blared through the speakers, and when he opened the car door to step out, Trent Reznor sang in his not-forgettable but not-spectacular voice, “I wanna fuck you like an animal.” I could see Monte smirking.
You could be wondering how I remember minute details like this, down to what Monte wore ten years ago, and the songs playing in the background. My answer to that would be, it’s hard to forget the first person you really, really become enamored with. Also, I am painfully observant to begin with, and I saturate myself in my surroundings, and give life to my memories though words. A more relative reason would be that my meeting Monte led me down much darker pathways than meeting people at smoothie bars, and it affected my future in many ways.
I fell in love with Monte’s loft at first sight. It spanned from the front of the building to the rear, and you could see all the way from one end to the other; there were no doors except to the bathroom and entryway. Remember, I disliked doors, especially closed ones? Here at Monte’s on High Street, there could be no closed doors, literally. I didn’t bother to think that a closed off mind could be hundreds of times more hurtful than a simple piece of wood.
Monte didn’t have a television, he preferred music only, and when he turned on Tori Amos’ “Blood Roses,” my heart leapt. Tori Amos was, and still is, my favorite artist, and to hear the baroque notes of the harpsichord bounce off the walls of that high-ceilinged place, to get chills listening to Tori sing about “when chickens get a taste of your meat,” I longed more & more to find out all about this man. I could feel that the stratification of his soul ran deep, and I wanted to excavate each layer, one by glorious one.
We drank and shot the shit, and I pulled out the pot I had. He told me he hadn’t smoked reefer in years, and I gained a little pride knowing I was the one to get him to do it again. But things turned a tad more serious.
“Do you mind if I mix things up a bit?” he asked me. How could I deny him anything? He could have asked me to join him on a dive into an active volcano, and I would have said, When & where? So after I told him I didn’t mind, he went to the bedroom area of the loft and brought back a metal lockbox, smaller than a shoebox, but of the same general shape.
When he opened the box, I saw there were a few stray tablets strewn about, a baggie containing something of a shard like substance, and a pipe, the likes of which I had never seen before. I was accustomed to bowls for marijuana, bongs, steamrollers; this was a basic looking object, with a long stem and a bulbous end resembling a gumball. The first thought I had was, Ohmygod, its crack! And if it had been crack, I was going to pounce out the door like grease popping in a frying pan.
But when I asked him what it was, and he replied, “crystal meth,” I untensed dramatically. Pretty stupid, right? Why run from crack, but not meth? Truthfully, I knew very little about meth, but enough about crack to avoid it.
I’d be lying if I said my interest was not piqued, and my eyes watched in rapt attention as he loaded the pipe with the tiny crystalline shards using the cap of a pen. He used a butane torch and let the pipe hover in the space just about the flame. He took a hit, and when he exhaled, the plume of thick smoke rushed out of his mouth like steam out of a locomotive.
It was my turn. He handed me the pipe, but not the torch. “Here,” he said, “I’ll light it. It’s very easy to overheat and burn it all up. Just put your lips on the stem, and when I say so, gently inhale, and twirl the pipe in your fingertips.”
I nodded in acknowledgment and, trying not to shake too much, I waited while he heated up the drug, until he indicated with a quick arch of his eyebrows, it was time for me to breathe in. The feeling was instantaneous. It was an absolute envelopment of seemed relaxation that overcame me entirely. As I let the vapor escape my mouth, that wondrous sense of peace continued to caress my whole body, and as I sat back on the sofa we were on, which now felt like a magic carpet from a fucking Disney movie (!), I noticed the poster hanging on the wall. It was a vintage looking diagram of the anatomy of a silkworm. I remember this, because that’s what everything was for me just then: silken.
I smiled at Monte. We smoked much more of the meth together. We shot gunned it into each other’s mouths, and again I was reminded of how he tasted when we first met. Ah… so that’s what it was, that almost bittersweet flavor. It felt like we were reading each other’s souls over those hours. It’s arduous to try and explain the intense emotions I had for him. Imagine everything you ever desired, everything you ever believed would ideally complement you, and make you whole, all rolled up into a perfect package of physical form.
We decided to go dancing, and before we left for an insanely busy and popular club, he gave me one of the tablets I had seen in his box of treasures: ecstasy.
It was an evening of sweaty gyrations and more drug using, and I was experiencing a high that every drug I had done before could not begin to touch. When our night out had drawn to a close, our night in was just beginning, and since I did not set out to make this my Autobiography of Depravity, I will leave to the imagination what took place between those two satyrs that early, early morning, ten years ago.
*****
The feelings I had for Monte were a one-way street: they were not reciprocated. It was heartbreaking to read an email from him several days later, after I had written him asking him when we could see each other again; in his message, he told me he was not available for anything, that he was addicted to crystal meth, and was basically, a big, hot mess.
This did not deter me, however. In fact, while it killed me to find this out, I was determined to get close to him. This manifested itself into two entire years of abusing crystal meth. It may be a bit confusing, because it is just as taxing trying to explain it, but in my mind, how I was going to get to Monte again was by partying. I believed by venturing into his world, eventually serendipity would bump us together at some P&P gathering, and I could make him fall in love with me. Any shrink would tell you, I was just using Monte as my excuse to get high.
P&P stands for “party & play,” the key letter in “party” being t and t standing for “tina,” which is slang for meth. I would log onto adult chatrooms, find men in Columbus who partied, and they’d come to pick me up in Dayton. Total strangers would scoop me up and we’d head back north, where I’d participate in raucous orgies of sex & drugs, with even more strangers. Some of the acts would make Bacchus blush. Inhibitions were nonexistent as the meth was smoked, the GHB was drunk, and the ecstasy was swallowed.
At bathhouses I reveled in the attention being a young buck brought me. There were free drugs everywhere, and there was nothing—and no one—I would not do. I remember one time when Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” came over the PA system, and I strutted down the hallways, wearing only a black jockstrap, high out of my damned mind, and completely loving every single second of it.
Mind you, though, I still wondered about Monte incessantly. His image was never far from reach in my thoughts. He became a sort of sapient constellation that fueled my fervor, and my efforts to get closer to him were not totally fruitless. I found out about him in tidbits through others, gathering information like so many grains of sand. Everybody I encountered who knew him found him to be beautiful as well. His eccentricities did not end with banning television, no, I was told by one man that he once went to Monte’s loft and found that Monte had painted a picture using his own blood on a section of his wall. I was told I should forget about him; he was unreachable.
The deeds I did while in my “meth years” are likely unspeakable to most. I hopped, skipped & jumped from house to house until the drugs ran dry, then hopped, skipped & jumped to the next. When I first injected meth, it felt like a ghost had passed through my body. It took my breath away, and at first I thought something had gone wrong. But no, that diminished quickly, and the buzz went straight for my groin. I would leave my house for weeks at a time, blitzing myself beyond recognition, then return to my mother’s accusatory questions: What were you doing up there for so long? Have you lost weight? I’d answer that the shirt I’d be wearing was just too big.
I saw Monte two more times after the night we spent together. I will sometimes talk to him on Facebook. The exchanges are few and far between, and certainly always brief, but often they are poignant. Sometimes I think he may realize the profound effect he had one me, other times I believe I was just a blip on his radar. He lives in Georgia now, and is partnered with a man he’s been with for many years now. I have thoughts where I wonder where I’d be if I had never met Monte, or if I had told him I was not interested in him “mixing it up a bit”…
But these thoughts are not lasting, for I know that the paths we walk are destined well before we are even aware we are travelling on them. If there had been no Monte, there would certainly have been an Austin, a Blake, a Mario, somebody there with the butterscotch breath and the crystalline looking-glass.
Click Here for PART ONE
Click Here for PART THREE
Click Here for PART THREE
At a nightclub, I met a man. A man with whom I hit it off pretty well. His name was Monte, and without going into extraneous detail, I will just say we hit it off exceedingly well. When I think back to that particular moment, I sometimes want to slap myself in the face for not realizing what I subconsciously knew I was getting into: the taste of lighter fluid & industrial chemicals on his breath, masked by a scant trace of butterscotch, betrayed a habit he would reveal to me the next weekend. He lived in Columbus at the time, and invited me to come to his loft that coming weekend.
Seeing as how it was Saturday night, I had the entire weekend to ruminate over how spending the night with Monte was going to go. He was 35 then, 17 years my senior, and he was absolutely beautiful. He had sleeves of tattoos on his arms, and a Bohemian style that I could totally dig. With brown hair & brown eyes, he was the dark-featured rebel cowboy, right down to the snakeskin boots he wore on his feet. His whole essence screamed urban hipster chic, long before the days being hipster was hip.
And his place in Columbus was just as keen. He lived in an area called the Short North, on High Street. The irony of this is not lost on me. When I arrived, he was not home yet, and when he called to let me know he was picking up some beer for us, I thought, Good, that will go perfectly with the weed I brought.
Monte pulled up in a jeep. He was even more handsome than I had remembered, wearing a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, exposing the artwork I had admired when we first met. Nine Inch Nails blared through the speakers, and when he opened the car door to step out, Trent Reznor sang in his not-forgettable but not-spectacular voice, “I wanna fuck you like an animal.” I could see Monte smirking.
You could be wondering how I remember minute details like this, down to what Monte wore ten years ago, and the songs playing in the background. My answer to that would be, it’s hard to forget the first person you really, really become enamored with. Also, I am painfully observant to begin with, and I saturate myself in my surroundings, and give life to my memories though words. A more relative reason would be that my meeting Monte led me down much darker pathways than meeting people at smoothie bars, and it affected my future in many ways.
I fell in love with Monte’s loft at first sight. It spanned from the front of the building to the rear, and you could see all the way from one end to the other; there were no doors except to the bathroom and entryway. Remember, I disliked doors, especially closed ones? Here at Monte’s on High Street, there could be no closed doors, literally. I didn’t bother to think that a closed off mind could be hundreds of times more hurtful than a simple piece of wood.
Monte didn’t have a television, he preferred music only, and when he turned on Tori Amos’ “Blood Roses,” my heart leapt. Tori Amos was, and still is, my favorite artist, and to hear the baroque notes of the harpsichord bounce off the walls of that high-ceilinged place, to get chills listening to Tori sing about “when chickens get a taste of your meat,” I longed more & more to find out all about this man. I could feel that the stratification of his soul ran deep, and I wanted to excavate each layer, one by glorious one.
We drank and shot the shit, and I pulled out the pot I had. He told me he hadn’t smoked reefer in years, and I gained a little pride knowing I was the one to get him to do it again. But things turned a tad more serious.
“Do you mind if I mix things up a bit?” he asked me. How could I deny him anything? He could have asked me to join him on a dive into an active volcano, and I would have said, When & where? So after I told him I didn’t mind, he went to the bedroom area of the loft and brought back a metal lockbox, smaller than a shoebox, but of the same general shape.
When he opened the box, I saw there were a few stray tablets strewn about, a baggie containing something of a shard like substance, and a pipe, the likes of which I had never seen before. I was accustomed to bowls for marijuana, bongs, steamrollers; this was a basic looking object, with a long stem and a bulbous end resembling a gumball. The first thought I had was, Ohmygod, its crack! And if it had been crack, I was going to pounce out the door like grease popping in a frying pan.
But when I asked him what it was, and he replied, “crystal meth,” I untensed dramatically. Pretty stupid, right? Why run from crack, but not meth? Truthfully, I knew very little about meth, but enough about crack to avoid it.
I’d be lying if I said my interest was not piqued, and my eyes watched in rapt attention as he loaded the pipe with the tiny crystalline shards using the cap of a pen. He used a butane torch and let the pipe hover in the space just about the flame. He took a hit, and when he exhaled, the plume of thick smoke rushed out of his mouth like steam out of a locomotive.
It was my turn. He handed me the pipe, but not the torch. “Here,” he said, “I’ll light it. It’s very easy to overheat and burn it all up. Just put your lips on the stem, and when I say so, gently inhale, and twirl the pipe in your fingertips.”
I nodded in acknowledgment and, trying not to shake too much, I waited while he heated up the drug, until he indicated with a quick arch of his eyebrows, it was time for me to breathe in. The feeling was instantaneous. It was an absolute envelopment of seemed relaxation that overcame me entirely. As I let the vapor escape my mouth, that wondrous sense of peace continued to caress my whole body, and as I sat back on the sofa we were on, which now felt like a magic carpet from a fucking Disney movie (!), I noticed the poster hanging on the wall. It was a vintage looking diagram of the anatomy of a silkworm. I remember this, because that’s what everything was for me just then: silken.
I smiled at Monte. We smoked much more of the meth together. We shot gunned it into each other’s mouths, and again I was reminded of how he tasted when we first met. Ah… so that’s what it was, that almost bittersweet flavor. It felt like we were reading each other’s souls over those hours. It’s arduous to try and explain the intense emotions I had for him. Imagine everything you ever desired, everything you ever believed would ideally complement you, and make you whole, all rolled up into a perfect package of physical form.
We decided to go dancing, and before we left for an insanely busy and popular club, he gave me one of the tablets I had seen in his box of treasures: ecstasy.
It was an evening of sweaty gyrations and more drug using, and I was experiencing a high that every drug I had done before could not begin to touch. When our night out had drawn to a close, our night in was just beginning, and since I did not set out to make this my Autobiography of Depravity, I will leave to the imagination what took place between those two satyrs that early, early morning, ten years ago.
*****
The feelings I had for Monte were a one-way street: they were not reciprocated. It was heartbreaking to read an email from him several days later, after I had written him asking him when we could see each other again; in his message, he told me he was not available for anything, that he was addicted to crystal meth, and was basically, a big, hot mess.
This did not deter me, however. In fact, while it killed me to find this out, I was determined to get close to him. This manifested itself into two entire years of abusing crystal meth. It may be a bit confusing, because it is just as taxing trying to explain it, but in my mind, how I was going to get to Monte again was by partying. I believed by venturing into his world, eventually serendipity would bump us together at some P&P gathering, and I could make him fall in love with me. Any shrink would tell you, I was just using Monte as my excuse to get high.
P&P stands for “party & play,” the key letter in “party” being t and t standing for “tina,” which is slang for meth. I would log onto adult chatrooms, find men in Columbus who partied, and they’d come to pick me up in Dayton. Total strangers would scoop me up and we’d head back north, where I’d participate in raucous orgies of sex & drugs, with even more strangers. Some of the acts would make Bacchus blush. Inhibitions were nonexistent as the meth was smoked, the GHB was drunk, and the ecstasy was swallowed.
At bathhouses I reveled in the attention being a young buck brought me. There were free drugs everywhere, and there was nothing—and no one—I would not do. I remember one time when Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” came over the PA system, and I strutted down the hallways, wearing only a black jockstrap, high out of my damned mind, and completely loving every single second of it.
Mind you, though, I still wondered about Monte incessantly. His image was never far from reach in my thoughts. He became a sort of sapient constellation that fueled my fervor, and my efforts to get closer to him were not totally fruitless. I found out about him in tidbits through others, gathering information like so many grains of sand. Everybody I encountered who knew him found him to be beautiful as well. His eccentricities did not end with banning television, no, I was told by one man that he once went to Monte’s loft and found that Monte had painted a picture using his own blood on a section of his wall. I was told I should forget about him; he was unreachable.
The deeds I did while in my “meth years” are likely unspeakable to most. I hopped, skipped & jumped from house to house until the drugs ran dry, then hopped, skipped & jumped to the next. When I first injected meth, it felt like a ghost had passed through my body. It took my breath away, and at first I thought something had gone wrong. But no, that diminished quickly, and the buzz went straight for my groin. I would leave my house for weeks at a time, blitzing myself beyond recognition, then return to my mother’s accusatory questions: What were you doing up there for so long? Have you lost weight? I’d answer that the shirt I’d be wearing was just too big.
I saw Monte two more times after the night we spent together. I will sometimes talk to him on Facebook. The exchanges are few and far between, and certainly always brief, but often they are poignant. Sometimes I think he may realize the profound effect he had one me, other times I believe I was just a blip on his radar. He lives in Georgia now, and is partnered with a man he’s been with for many years now. I have thoughts where I wonder where I’d be if I had never met Monte, or if I had told him I was not interested in him “mixing it up a bit”…
But these thoughts are not lasting, for I know that the paths we walk are destined well before we are even aware we are travelling on them. If there had been no Monte, there would certainly have been an Austin, a Blake, a Mario, somebody there with the butterscotch breath and the crystalline looking-glass.
Click Here for PART ONE
Click Here for PART THREE
No comments:
Post a Comment