by Rick R. Reed
And right now I need to get to work. Get up. One foot in front of the other. Bathroom first. Shower, shave, make that sad mug you call a face presentable to the world. Eat something. Dress. Head out. Catch the bus.
Look at me. I have a plan.
“SO THE best way to get over a man is to get under one.” Don smears pimento cheddar spread on the large pretzel he ordered as an appetizer. He stares at me, a grin playing about his lips and expectation in his eyes. He’s waiting for me to nod and indicate I agree with his sage, canned, Blanche Devereaux advice.
“Oh, come on.” I’m not in the mood. I pick at my Caesar salad, bringing a parmesan crouton to my mouth. Normally savory and delicious, today the crouton tastes like nothing—deep-fried cardboard maybe.
We’re having lunch—Don’s treat—at Brave Horse Tavern in South Lake Union. When I rolled into the office twenty minutes late, Don noticed my demeanor immediately. Before I even sat down, his head popped up over our shared cubicle and he asked, “Who died?”
Sometimes I think Don doesn’t have an original thought in his head. Thank God his heart is in the right place, though. We went for coffee, and I spilled the whole sordid story as we sat outside Starbucks at one of the three small metal table and chair sets out there.
He listened without being a smartass. He wasn’t even judgmental about my letting JD into my house once upon a time, other than musing that a “pretty face can open many doors.” Fact was, he could have called me stupid, naïve, overly trusting. He could have said I had been thinking, as usual, with my dick instead of my head—the big one, up top. He could have chastised me for being too trusting, told me I got off easy, and that it was lucky I lived to tell the tale. He could have very reasonably asked what the fuck was wrong with me.
He would have been right to ask every one of those questions.
But he didn’t. He only placed a chubby, pinky-ring hand over mine and cocked his head—his way of showing sympathy.
“I’ve never shared this with anyone before,” I told him in a weak little voice barely above a whisper. “I was always so ashamed about what happened. I just wanted to forget.”
“You have nothing to be ashamed of, honey. You didn’t do anything wrong.” He grins for a moment. “Other than looking for love in all the wrong places.” He took another bite, chewed, and then said, “We all do that.”
Now he goes on to inform me of the same stuff I told myself this morning, through a mouthful of fried chicken sandwich. The advice and the image of his half-eaten food are both rather ugly and unsettling. Even if the advice is true.
“No, seriously. Go out on a date. Get laid. Let yourself go. Be a wanton slut. Be one for me.” His expression goes a little wistful, his gaze faraway. “Please.” And I wonder if he’s thinking he wishes he had my problems.
“I don’t know.” The course of action he’s proposing has about as much appeal as this salad before me. It all but turns my stomach. I bring up the four agreements because I’d read the book at his urging.
I force myself to take a bite of salad, chew, and swallow. I can eat if I make it mechanical like this. “I’m trying not to take it personally.”
“You shouldn’t.” He gets out his phone and scrolls. “Ah,” he says. “Here it is. My own little Throwback Thursday.” He sets the phone on the table. I look down to see a picture of a much-younger Don. I only recognize the man because he’s showed me pictures from his San Francisco past before.
“Wasn’t he gorgeous?” Don taps the picture on his screen. “Time’s a bitch!” He bursts into laughter.
The man in the picture bears no resemblance to the man sitting across from me now. Young Don is blindingly handsome, with thick blond hair, a porn-star handlebar mustache, a tan to die for—I’m not kidding—and perfect white teeth. It’s obvious he’s at least forty pounds lighter, even though it’s a head shot. He’s wearing a blue shirt of some satiny fabric, unbuttoned halfway down so you can see his smooth-muscled chest. A thick gold chain encircles his neck.
“You were hot,” I say, agreeing out loud only with the first of his assertions, even though I have to sadly agree with the second as well.
“Were being the operative word. Don’t apologize. No one knows the truth better than yours truly.
“That was somewhere around the late seventies, early eighties. You wouldn’t know it by looking at me, but I was the biggest cokehead in the Castro. I had a dealer—gorgeous Turkish man—who would show up in his BMW outside my apartment and deliver an eight ball anytime of the day or night. He was outside my place so often, people in my building were beginning to think he was my boyfriend, even if he was as straight as they come.” Don sighs. “Believe me, I know. I tried to seduce him more than once.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
He shrugs. “Because I’m a big old drug addict myself, sweetie.” He hastens to add, “Recovering, of course. We’re always recovering.” He finishes up his sandwich and casts a gaze across the table at my salad like it’s prey. “You gonna finish that?”
I slide it across to him. He continues eating and talking. “I’m telling you this because you really shouldn’t take what this JD or Jimmy fella did personally because, honey, his behavior is all about him, not you.”
“It would be pretty to think so,” I say.
“No. No. I am serious. I know what it’s like—addiction. And I can tell you two things.
“One, nobody asks to be an addict. Just like nobody asks for cancer.
“And two, when we’re high, we are not ourselves. Drugs, especially shit like meth and coke, take over. They possess you just like that demon in The Exorcist. Yeah… they turn normally nice people into monsters.” For once Don’s composure falters, and I can see the scared confusion and sadness in his expression, even if he tries to quickly divert my attention by staring down at the table and taking another bite of salad.
When he looks up to return his gaze to me, his eyes are glassy with tears. “Let me tell you what I did.”
“You don’t have to.”
“No. I think you should know. So you understand exactly why you mustn’t take this personally.
“I almost died,” he says, his usually loud voice pitched just above a whisper. His gaze shifts to the big window in front of us that looks out on Terry Avenue, where a streetcar passes by. Some people call it the SLUT, short for Seattle Lake Union Trolley, even though it’s not properly a trolley. But the acronym is oddly appropriate for our conversation.
“You did? When was this?” I seldom touch my friend, and I realize that’s a failing in me. Because he’s older, I often let him take the mentor/parent/comforter role, and I realize, guiltily, that I’m seldom there for him in the same way. I squeeze his hand.
“Back in the eighties, hon, when we were all doin’ coke like there was no tomorrow. And for me, there almost wasn’t!” He chortles, but the mirth doesn’t reach his eyes, which look sad in contrast.
“Anyway, it’s an old story. Weekend-long binge at my place. I snorted up an eight ball while plying my trade on the phone sex line.” He laughs again. “You probably don’t even know about those! Not with Grindr and Scruff and Craigslist around these days. But back then, we pioneers who wanted a quick hookup and to have our dick delivered like a pizza, we called the 900 numbers.” He shrugged. “It worked surprisingly well, much the same as being online does now. Minus the pictures, of course.”
“Anyway, I had this one guy over, and he brought his own stash. I was in heaven. He was a hot Italian with a nine-inch dick, and I felt like it was snowing cocaine. We were drinking tequila and beer and trying to get our dicks hard. It was stupid. No Viagra back then either, and coke isn’t exactly good for getting or keeping an erection. Still…. We kept snorting, line after line, chasing that dragon, knowing that when at least one of our dicks got hard, bliss awaited us both.
“Except after this one big line, I suddenly felt like I couldn’t breathe. I fell onto the floor, clutching my chest. No matte
r how hard I tried, I just couldn’t draw any air into my lungs.” I can see the panic in his eyes as he remembers.
“Good thing you weren’t alone.”
“Oh, but I was. I was! My big-dicked friend saw my condition, got worried, and took a powder, no pun intended.”
“He just left you laying there?” I asked, disbelieving. “You could have died.”
“Tell me about it. I probably would have, too, if my buddy hadn’t had at least a little remorse and called—anonymously, of course—from a phone booth at the corner.” He laughs. “A phone booth! Yet another blast from the past! Anyway, he did do me the kindness of calling an ambulance. And even if he was a coward and didn’t stick around to see if I was okay or, God forbid, try to help me, he did save my life.”
Don goes quiet for a while, and I can see how vivid the memory is for him, even all these years later. He shakes his head. “He saved my life in more ways than one. I mean, physically, I had started into cardiac arrest, but the way he really saved me was by helping me hit bottom. The docs said if my buddy hadn’t made that call when he did, I’d have died right there on my living room floor.”
“I’m so sorry, Don.”
“Don’t be. I got clean after that. Thank God!”
We sit in silence for a few minutes. I know it’s time to head back to work, regardless of the revelations that have gone down between us.
“You know why I told you this story?”
“Probably. But why don’t you tell me?”
He throws down three twenties on the table. “C’mon, we’re gonna be late. I’ll tell you on the way back.”
It’s a fairly long walk, and along the way, Don reiterates that he was so into his drugs back then, he almost killed himself for them. “And what happened wasn’t totally accidental. I mean, especially that night, I knew I was crossing a line, doing way more than I should. Hell, I had tissue stuffed up my nose at one point because of the blood! And even with that, I kept doing it, willing to risk my life to chase after that high. So stupid!”
I nod.
“But you know what? You know what this has to do with your friend? And not taking things personally?”
I finish for him. “He was out of his head.”
Don squeezes my shoulder as we walk. “Right.” He stops and turns me to him. “From what you told me, he’s not the person he was two years ago. You need to remember that.”
I don’t say anything until we get back to work, until we’re in our cubicles. Until right now, as I stand and look over my cubicle and say softly to Don, “Thanks for today. And I know you’re right. I just don’t know that I can forgive and forget. Something’s broken, and I’m not sure it can be fixed.”
He nods. But then he just turns back to his computer. I guess his silence is saying a lot—the biggest thing is that I need to figure things out for myself, decide what’s right for me.
IT DOESN’T come to me until I’m lying in bed that night.
I don’t know if I’m an addict, but I did have my problems, with sex, with porn, with love… with wanting all three so badly, and sometimes simultaneously, that I made unhealthy choices. I threw common sense out the window in pursuit of them. I chased after them when I was pretty sure I didn’t even want them.
I’m not sure why I did the last, but lying here now, with no one to contradict me, to tell me what a good guy I am, I can see I had my own addictive tendencies.
So maybe I wasn’t much better than JD that night.
We’d met on Adam4Adam.
I remember how I was back then. I just couldn’t seem to keep off the site. As soon as I got home from work, I logged on, and often I’d be on far into the night, sometimes forgoing dinner, dragging myself to bed in the wee hours of the morning, eyes red from staring at the monitor. The only thing that might have saved me from that fate was if, in fact, I had quote-unquote normal plans like going out to dinner or a movie with a friend like Don, or if scrolling through all those dick and ass pictures netted me a hookup.
Hookups happened a lot, too, back in those days. There was an endless parade of guys in and out of my bedroom, some nice, some not so nice, some out of my league, and some so far beneath me I’d be embarrassed if anyone in my building saw me letting them in.
It seems pretty much all my free time back in those days was wrapped up in chasing dick online.
And the night Jimmy—or JD—came over was no different.
I’d noticed his profile before. But I was always a little intimidated by it. I mean, he was pretty rough looking, with his piercings and his dreadlocks. There were not only those things, but his pictures were all of him in kind of rough-trade getups—leather chaps, combat boots, mirrored aviator sunglasses, with a leatherman biker cap pulled low over his eyes.
He was a little scary.
And I remember that night feeling like he was not only what I needed, but what I deserved. That deserved part? That’s just coming to me now in retrospect.
I crossed a line that night. I wanted someone hard-edged, maybe a little mean. I wanted a man who was outside my comfort zone of white-bread normalcy.
And so, instead of responding to the perfectly nice guy in Green Lake whose profile pic was not of his dick, but of him on Alki Beach in West Seattle, skipping a stone across the Sound, I shot a message to JD.
And set things in motion.
I don’t think we exchanged more than a few messages before he had my address and was headed over. I remember him asking me if I partied, and I was so naïve at the time that I thought he meant drinking or maybe smoking a little weed.
You’d think, from cruising sex lines and hookup sites, I would have been familiar with what partying—or pnp—meant: doing crystal meth and “playing.” But I, even at my most promiscuous, tended to stick to the guys who were most like myself, just your average Joe types, guys who’d been to college, guys who could pass for straight, guys who came over clean and whose tastes always, always ran toward the vanilla.
For whatever reason, the night of JD, I wanted something different.
Maybe I was becoming jaded.
Maybe the wholesome dudes didn’t do it for me anymore.
So I told JD I partied a bit and invited him over. The moment I’d given him my address and phone number, I started having misgivings. I remember I even typed out a text to him, saying something had come up and I’d have to call things off.
But I never sent it.
There was part of me that wanted everything that happened.
When he arrived, I was still keyed up, nervous. When I saw this wild, sweaty guy who was still cute despite the obvious signs of drug abuse, I again wondered if there was a way I could get out of things.
But I persisted. Something kept me relentlessly marching forward.
Even when he brought out the pipe.
Even when he tried to fist me. By the way, it didn’t happen!
Even when I had an inkling he was stealing. I wasn’t so stupid, I realize now, that I didn’t have some idea he was up to no good. I knew! I just didn’t want to admit it to myself—because that would make me, in a way, complicit. It would make me a fool for even letting him in the door in the first place, ignoring the million or so red flags that flapped in my face throughout our whole encounter, beginning with our online time.
Plus… I was afraid of him. Afraid of what he might do if I confronted him. Now, mind you, I didn’t notice the extent of what he’d stolen from me that night until he was gone. In fact, it took days to find things I just assumed were there, weren’t. I didn’t notice they were missing until I needed them and went looking for them, which was probably something he counted on.
And…. This is something I hate to admit, because it makes me sound so weak. But in spite of the drugs, the edgy appearance, the stealing, there was something inherently sweet about him and about that night. Isn’t that shocking? How pathetic does it make me to even think that? Sweet? For Christ’s sake!
It sounds crazy, I know, but there w
as this need for love that radiated off him. We had lots of sex that night, sure, but what I really remember is how late in the night, when the rest of the world had gone to sleep, he wanted so badly to simply be held. To lie in my arms with his head on my chest.
That image is so at odds with everything else, it leaves me perplexed.
I could practically taste his hunger—not for sex but for closeness, warmth, and human connection.
And now, as I think of it, it brings tears to my eyes.
Jimmy’s nothing more than a little boy lost, trying to find his way.
I turn over in bed and stare at the wall. In spite of this realization, I doubt I can forgive. And I certainly doubt I could ever trust.
I slip off into a troubled sleep, one with huge white clouds that part to reveal Jimmy’s face.
His outstretched hand… pleading.
Chapter 11
JIMMY
MANGROVES. IT’S a charming name, isn’t it? Conjuring up images of white sand beaches along the Gulf coast, oases of shade where you relish the sound of the surf and the aroma of briny saltwater-tinged air. Yeah, right….
So I’m in a place I swore I’d never set foot in again. But damn it, right now, what I need is this—a place without windows, a place that smells like bleach, come, and sweat, a place where darkness is untouched by the light of day outside, a place where tired electronica drones over the speakers nonstop. A place where it’s endless night.
An alternate universe where men with only towels wrapped around their waists are permitted to go.
Yes, I’m at the baths. The one just east of downtown, where the Capitol Hill neighborhood is just beginning to take shape along its eastern slopes.
Mangroves.
I swore two years ago that I’d never come back here, because the baths are one gigantic trigger. I swear to God, 90 percent of the guys who check in at the little glassed-off office up front have meth and a pipe or a couple syringes secreted on their person as they inform the clerk of their preference for a room or a locker.
