Methed out on the edge of Minneapolis: a short story

I'm not sure why I shrugged my shoulders, picked up the car keys, downed the last sips of the last ten beers all in a row, found the trees somehow amazingly beautiful as though this would be the last time I would glide under their canopies, or sighed one last time, heavily, before dialing the two boys to tell them I was on my way, but I did all that last night after working out at the gym, having some organic Annie's macaroni and cheese and some coffee, and then low and behold, couldn't sleep. I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling for a long time. I felt my hands, how they were folded together on my chest. I watched the glows of cars traveling down 26th cross the ceiling before diving behind the potted plant. No sleep. I logged on to a gay sex online chat hookup thingy, and within seconds, as though he were waiting for someone like me to come along, I got a message from Nick.

Now Nick is someone I've messaged before. He's nineteen, photos show a manish face under boyish hair, says he loves to fiddle with ships in a bottle, here's one of him in black sweater, pouty lips, another one, fingers splayed, so contrived, who the hell takes these things? I had always demurred from Nick. He likes to party and bareback the whole fucking world deep inside of him, or so he says, at four in the morning, two loads to the wind, drunk as a sheet. Meet me on the corner of 26th and Hennepin. In the dawn of that shivery morning, we should all be going to bed, I would stumble down to Trafalgar Square and catch the last night bus home to Brixton. I'm strictly an armchair traveler these days. But Nick messages me and I have time to kill before the caffeine wears off.

Nick is having a good time. He's barebacking this entire apartment on the edge of Minneapolis, in the suburb of Robinsdale, with his friend Erik, who is twenty years old and into bondage or something and they want me to join them at Erik's apartment on the edge of Minneapolis which is the edge of rationality. In Robinsdale. He rolled onto his back, the phone tucked under his chin, the unlit cigarette threatening to fall off his fingertips. His legs are spread, he is wide open the world. Eyeballs dilated.

I'm not into meth; I've never done it and never will. I have a rule about not allowing it within two degrees of separation. And yet, I am fascinated by its movements within both a particular bloodstream and a broader social context. In Britain, meth can be quite sexy and sane; a Christmas Day spent doing meth and fucking has been lauded as a queer alternative to the otherwise mainstream Christian holiday. Here in the states, here in Minneapolis, here in Austin, Minnesota, here in Mankato, the small farm, the town I grew up in, meth is a pestilence or a pest. Meth mouth. Meth labs. It is as corrosive as battery acid. I do not make light of its powerful attraction and its devastating effects. Kids who do meth are usually fucked-up and tragic and even worse than that, incredibly boring, as most addicts are incredibly boring unless you catch the ones in their quick crash-and-burns. As a friend of mine would say, I've already dated that. But I was curious--not to experience its influence upon my brain but to see others in its throes. I wanted to see the attraction, the ecstasy, the easy sex. I imagined this Nick kid rubbing his sex upon walls, bedclothes, anyone who happened to pass by, smearing his joy across the ceiling, licking his love off of the walls. So I drove out to the edge of Minneapolis, straddling the city limits at eleven pm on a plain Tuesday evening. Empty streets of North Minneapolis. Backs of men turned to me. Sleeping bodies. The blacked out eyes of a corner store. A cemetery on my right going on blocks. I called when I was close; was directed down a street lined on both sides by saplings, orange streetlamps. Look for the rainbow flag hanging respectably from the awning.

Erik lived in the upper floor of the house; the landlord lived on the ground floor and was sleeping. I was met at the back door by Nick, licking the ring in his bottom lip, cute, round, full in the face, bouncy, eyes like Christmas, tanned legs strumming each other like the legs of a grasshopper as he hopped on one stockinged foot and then the other waiting for me to navigate the flagstones. He...I told myself he heard a music I could not hear.

As we walked up the stairs Nick told me that he is called Nick, but also sometimes Cole, and sometimes Jeremy. I could call him one of these or make up my own if I wanted. Erik's apartment was really just one small room tucked up into the peaks of the roof, which sloped down and made the sides of the room. There was a large, king-sized bed, stripped of its sheets, spotlight like an examination table. Clothes on a rocking chair, a teddy bear. Dirty dishes strewn about. In one corner a computer streamed gay porn. Beside that was half a wall, which at first I thought was hiding a kitchen, but upon closer inspection hid only a toilet, stuck out there in the middle of everything, and a large sink. No door. There were so many empty bookshelves!

These two were rather lucid, if writhing. Erik whipped up another chalky drink of liquid meth, mixing a powder with Pepsi. We lit Marlboro 100s and talked about really boring shit for a very long time. A porno shoot in California. Our butt hair. Millions of pauses. Nice legs. We touched each other slowly. In between the long expositions we made out, took off our clothes, lolled about like dolls with broken necks. Maybe I want to be you. Maybe I don't. That's what sex is, this long drawn out answering of a similar question. I kept thinking about how I was never this bored when I was that young. Intermittent breaks to go soft and smoke cigarettes. Of course, no climaxes. Up in the peaks of the roof the walls were hot and the air clouded up and fell like ash. My eyes kept going back to this guy's teddy bear. Cheap bikini briefs lay on the floor like superfluous appendages. They were crawling away from me. Next time I looked up from someone's bush they had amassed in the corner, stretchy as ligaments but lacking a skeleton and they were harmless and fell upon us, beating us as hard as they could, snapping us with spandex. We laughed in their faces.

Points of entry. Osmosis. Porous. Nick sweated out his meth and rubbed the sweat on my body. I became hyper aware of my gums, my mucous membranes. Everything began to get very boring and I think I napped. My finger slipped into someone's ass and kept him from deflating. He was sagging and half-a-man on my finger, barely rising above the bed, I let him go and he floated to the apex of the ceiling on the expulsion of air before floating onto the pile of litter. He had been Erik before.

I'm not sure what I expected. Insane sex. Group sex! Ten guys, daisy chain, awesome orgasms. Gay face fucks. Or, more...better...spontaneous poetry? Odd pronouncements from the mouths of babes? Methed-out peals of truth, screamed to the rafters? Should it have not expanded the confines of subjectivity, installed new software, improved upon the limitations of human cognition? Instead, at two am, Erik told us we had to leave. He had to drive to a friend's house, as they were flying to San Francisco the next day to star in a Tom "Ropes" McGurk porno. Nick followed me out talking a mile a minute on the street which was so still it seemed to be made of sugar. The combination of colors and darkness made me wish I wore glasses. Such a respectable street. Rock gardens and decorative flags proceeding down the hill to a leafy intersection. We talked about Nick's job at Hot Topic in the mall and how boring it is and ohmygod...I had the feeling that his night was just starting. He said he wanted to be a writer. For a moment my own subjectivity did expand slightly, on this street, and I wish I could go back to this street, I mean I wish I remember what the street was called so I could go back there today, to the rock gardens, and see the imprint this brief expansion of subjectivity made on the sidewalk, but I had been doing nothing, huffing gas, you won't find any record in my follicles. I smiled at him in the dark and he told me he wanted to call my again, not just to have sex but maybe just to hang out. We were standing by his parents SUV. "You don't seem...empty," he said, moving his finger in front of my face, "empty like the rest of them..." I knew it was the meth talking.

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