I Need a New Drug

It seems as though each new town I move to raises the stakes in terms of which drugs I do. In SF, it was all about pot. I did brownies, mainly. Once I’d made my break from the drudgery of 9-5, I started a marijuana excursion that would eventually bring me up to a brownie a day. Talk about the high life… But it was the way of the Bay Area – the pursuit of higher consciousness and all. Plus it helped me do my job. As a full-time sexworker, regularly ingesting a chemical that increased my sensual awareness and sexuality proved to be an effective career booster. THC was downright motivational. My love affair with pot went further than that, though. It got to the point where, through the lens of the herb, I couldn’t see anything but ridiculousness in just about everything our "Goddamned Western Patriarchal Society,” as I had come to know it, had created. Pot brought me to the brink of camp implosion. I became too cool to be happy, or to do just about anything other than continue being cool.

My getting drunk in San Francisco was limited to once a week and was attained with just a few beers or several glasses of wine. On festive occasions I would hit the hard liquor, in the form of Margaritas at a Mexican restaurant or Scorpion Bowls at the Tonga Room in the Fairmont, but that was about it for alcohol consumption during the SF phase.

In LA, I studied bartending, which put me on a direct course to Martiniville. The brownies persisted in affecting my consciousness, but they took a back seat to alcohol – the infamous curse of the working class. Soon after my stint with bartending, I re-entered corporate America, in the form of being an Executive Assistant for three female Ad Execs. That job steered me onto the course that serves so many of this great nation’s working class. Alcohol, the one and only church- and state-sanctified mind altering device, became my security blanket. Up until then, I had never thought I’d travel the same road as my functioning-alcoholic parents, becoming one myself. All through the years in San Francisco I thought I’d beaten those odds. I figured, “Better a stoner than a lush.” But thanks to the wonderfully isolated and overly critical city of Los Angeles, which provided me with ample time to wonder where a sensitive simpleton like myself could fit in, I was able to uncover a latent Irish gene. By the time I was ready to leave not only the job but also the city, I had been deemed a drunk.

And a drunk I was when I arrived at JFK in June of ’03. A drunk AND a stoner. That’s a California combination quite unprepared to meet the nitty-gritty, “This-is-it-so-roll-up-your-sleeves” New York mentality. But somehow I made it work. Cruising the East and West Villages at night, swaying back and forth from touristy overindulgence, I fit right in. As a tourist, that is. And there isn’t much difference between a new arrival and a tourist. That rule applies to all three cities I’m talking about. So I was able to ride out my initiation to New York via my two previously-established addictions. Pot got me high for the train ride in from Park Slope and booze kept my hands and mouth busy all night long.

Now I should mention here that the previous descriptions are not entire. Or should I say, they don’t list all of the chemicals I had induced up to those times in my life. Indeed, I had tried not only pot but also mescalin in high school; I had dabbled in acid during college and had also done my fair share of it in SF. SF had also introduced me to crystal meth, but at that point the stoner in me found it repugnant. I also felt this way about heroin. When I started losing as many friends to heroin, in the form of “speed bumps” (combination crystal and smack), as I had lost to AIDS over the previous years, I decided to leave SF for LA. I figured at least LA – the home of gay meth – had the ability to handle the vicious compound without rendering it lethal.

And so, right before I left Los Angeles forever, I faced its biggest demon head-on. I got into meth. Not on a weekly basis, or even a bi-monthly. But monthly, definitely. Just about every four weeks I rolled into the mood for a total pick-me-up. I had gotten into sexwork again, after over close to two years of not doing much of it, and the field had become infected with the insatiability of crystal. More and more potential clients were asking, “Do you party?” And that didn’t mean pot, or even cocaine.

I didn’t mind answering, “Yeah,” because I was curious. Despite my having declared a “No Tweeker” policy in San Francisco (and being able to adhere to it), I couldn’t help but notice that the face of the tweeker had changed over the five years I’d lived in LA. Sure, they were still tweeky, but they were more productive and less conspicuous – as messes, that is. In other words, you could spot them but they weren’t being the total hospital cases that they had been in the early years of meth. They looked cagey but not helpless. They had what LA strives to always have. They had style. Was it the town’s influence or was the drug changing? It was a little of both. Even though LA pushes for stylistic perfection, the drug had been noticably refined.

The meth I’d done in SF sent me reeling into a world of unrelenting and insipid thoughts. It was as if my inner Mother Critic (not to be confused with any nurturing Mother figure) had been given the mental floor, indefintiely. Thoughts like, “Maybe we should…” and “What if we…???” prevailed; indeed, they never ceased. It was a state of consciousness in maddening contradiction to every New Age Bay Area platitude I’d learned during my 10 years in the city. I was NOT in the moment. I was NOT at peace. I was NOWHERE NEAR omniscience or Nirvana. I was just busy with petty details. And that was when I was high. When I crashed, I wanted nothing less than escape from this thing we call life.

LA meth, while it did often send me on a similar high, didn’t bring me down to such a drastic crash. The life cycle of the drug had been modified – smoothed out – so as not to leave the participant suicidal (unless perhaps they’d been doing it for days on end and had suddenly stopped). And something about me had changed by the time I was exploring crystal in LA. I was once again performing petty duties on a daily basis, so entering that area of thought had become routine, which meant it no longer posed such a threat to my sensibility. In fact, meth became my task-oriented friend. Whenever I found myself faced with a mountian of filing or a garden that needed hoeing, I found myself wondering if Tina, as she had come to be known, might be able to lend a helping hand.

Damn if she didn’t! With my new friend Tina, I was able to take on any extensive project around the house. All I had to do was factor in two days for recovery (the second day is really just an extension of the first – it’s the day after the day after that’s a downer) and I was all set. But you see, this is because I’m one of what I hear is a minority within the gay male world. I’m one of the task-oriented tweekers. That means I prefer to use crystal for projects instead of for three-day long binges at bath houses. Apparently the majority of gay men find Tina to be more suitable as a dance partner and a sex facilitator.

Boy, but how I do NOT envy the majority of gay men.

Anyway, lest you think my move to NY has rendered me a crystal queen, I should let you know, it hasn’t. While I have embarked on a few crystal trips, it has (almost) always been for the purpose of getting projects done. After all, turning a tiny studio apartment on the edge of Bushwick and next to a live poultry store into something inhabitable – even by bohemian standards – isn’t easy. While the paint is drying, or after the wood has been cut and the sawdust swept up, that’s when I sit in the tub and ponder as only a tweeker can. Something about having been productive for 24-48 hours up until that point makes it easier to come down, so I do, without thoughts of suicide. Because I have the fruit of my labor to keep me content.

No, the drug I’ve encountered here in NYC isn’t crystal – it’s good old fashioned coke. When I started visiting with the intention of exploring for potential relocation, it came as quite a surprise to my West Hollywood conditioning, to be honest, when NY guys would offer me a line. “Oh, cocaine,” I would say, “how retro.” I wasn’t being completely bitchy. I was truly warmed over with nostalgia for the days of Studio 54. It appeared to me, as it still appears to me, that New York doesn’t want to let go of that era.

There’s something precious about cocaine. I can’t put my finger on it. So brief, yet so high. So crisp in comparison to pot. Sure, that’s what the Tina freaks insist about their drug of choice, but Tina is such a commitment. With coke, you can have your intensity and still go to work the next day. Coke is the mocha cappuccino of narcotics. When done in moderation, it lifts you up without rendering you useless. And its reputation for brevity is a myth. If you’re sensitive enough, you can feel cocaine for hours, not just 20 minutes.

Coke puts you in touch with your inner achiever – politely, as opposed to the gruffness of crystal. Coke opens your eyes and enhances your sensuality. Coke lifts you up where you belong. Coke is OK. And when you do it all night, it leaves you so damned horny you can’t think straight. (Or even “assimilationist gay,” for that matter…)

I’m no fool. I know that when I came to New York, coke didn’t find me. I found it. The intensity of the city made me instantly crave a higher high. And like I said: for me, that higher high can’t be found in crystal. I had to have the real thing. I had to have what I’d put off doing the entire time I lived on the west coast. Thank the gods ‘80s retro is alive and well here in NYC, 'cuz I’m ready for it. I’ve been wanting to take this ride for 20 fucking years -- since the '80s themselves.

LA can never come close to NY. Neither can my beloved SF. Here, I have a need that I never had in either of those towns. And I can’t be the only one with that need, ‘cuz I keep getting offers to do more lines…

So I need a new drug. And I’ve found it. Let’s just hope, despite the odds, that it doesn’t dominate my psychological landscape the way the previous fuckers have. After all, I still have them to fall back on.