Austin's Drop

My house was in a vortex, spiraling downward into something smelly until it would deposit me in a pill relapse, so I decided to get out for the night. On my way out the door, I spilled a red plastic cup filled with cigarette butts and yellow water. It stained my carpet but I disregarded it. I left the house at around 8 pm. It was brisk and damp outside, the air smelling like potential rain. The sky was clear though. I began walking down the street, past several houses, a gas station, grocery store, and a shopping center.

I walked slowly and with each step, thought of a name to push my thoughts away from pain pills. There was Edward, my most recent failure. We’d been seeing each other for two months when he decided to reveal to me that during our time together, he had also been dating two other guys in a triad relationship. When he told me that, I felt the jealousy and betrayal rising in my throat, up to my face as hot venom. I remembered the time I ran into him at a bar, after he ignored my texts, and seeing him with two people, who he introduced as his friends. It made sense now.

Next step. Jack. He expressed great interest when we talked online. We finally decided to meet. I walked to the pho joint several blocks from my house. He showed up; I thought he was more handsome in person. He thought the opposite. He ate quickly. After dinner, we had plans to watch Rick and Morty together, but he said he was actually really tired. He hugged me, drove off, and I never heard from him again.

Another step. I paused—Duncan flashed through my mind. I moved away from the suburbs five years ago because of him. I was freshly eighteen when I moved. I’ve lived in the city north of the suburbs ever since. I pushed him from my mind and hoped he was dead. His words punched at the inside of my head.

You’re so desperate.

I resumed walking. Next step. There was Dan. I’ve never had better sex in my life than the first night I met Dan. It was the last day of Pride, I was coked out and drunk, checked my messages on my phone and saw that he had hit me up online. Perhaps it was my inebriation, perhaps it was my loneliness at the time, but from the instant I saw his pictures, I was doomed to meet him. I couldn’t say no. After that first long, passionate night, we met again a few times. I couldn’t repeat my performance of that first night and I think he noticed. It was when I asked him if he wanted to go on a date sometime, instead of just meeting for sex, that he stopped talking to me. A few weeks later, I heard that he had actually found a boyfriend, someone he had been seeing while we were seeing each other. Each step felt like, rather than walking along a flat sidewalk, I was walking downstairs. Each name that rattled in my head pushed every stride forward as I descended into somewhere dark, dank, and cold.

I sighed and picked up my pace before noticing that I had already reached my destination—the Black Bear, the neighborhood gay bar I frequented.

As much as I hated living in the city, the loud, shitty town filled with loud, shitty people, I was at least glad that it was a progressive enough town to have numerous gay bars where I could go and feel like I didn’t have to filter myself.

I walked inside. One of the Chris’ was bartending. I liked him. He gave me free drinks. He was a shorter, middle-aged man who often worked shirtless.

“Austin! There he is,” he called, pouring me a vodka cranberry before I could respond. “How are you?” he asked. I shrugged and made a noise like deflating balloon. Chris nodded and after I took a big sip from my drink, he topped it off with more vodka.

He left to tend to other customers. For a Wednesday night, there was a decent crowd. Maybe fifteen people, most at the bar, some at tables. I didn’t look at any of them—I wasn’t in the mood for any lusty eye contact. I just wanted to drink to forget that I really wanted opiates.

When Duncan punched me in the face five years ago, it was like he knocked something straight within me—a sense of determination or focus brought on by the sudden onset of betrayal. I decided I was going to move away without telling him or anyone. I did and started working as a busser in the city. Turns out, other food service employees love drugs. I was soon smoking weed with the other bussers, snorting speed with the kitchen staff, and eventually, popping pain pills with the waiters. It was the overdose of one of them that reminded me of my old friend Money’s overdose on heroin and made me put the pills down. That was almost a year ago.

By the time I finished my third drink, I was craving a cigarette, so I went out onto the bar’s tiny patio. The night had gotten colder and there was only one other person smoking outside. He was older, small in stature, and his hair seemed greasy due to lack of hygiene—not my type at all. I sat away from him and lit my cigarette, then pulled out my phone. I had recently discovered a song I liked, so I started playing it softly from my phone.

“Is that chillwave?” the man asked after he listened to my song for a second. He caught me off guard—I turned to look at him. His face betrayed the rest of his presence—while still just as oily looking as his hair, his expression was soft, his eyes had a depth to them that was rare to see in a gay bar.

“I think it’s more lo-fi,” I responded. Honestly I didn’t know the specific differences between the two genres of music.

“I love lo-fi. It’s so good to think to.” He paused to take a drag of his cigarette. “You like electronic music?”

“It’s my favorite kind,” I responded.

“I was thinking about going to this club that has a really good DJ.”

“Which club?” I asked.

“The Drop. Heard of that one?”

After my half decade in the city, which included visiting every gay club at least once, not to mention all the dive bars and holes in the wall, I’d never heard of The Drop.

“Is it new?” I asked.

“New? No. It’s been around forever.” As he pulled his cigarette away from his mouth, I couldn’t help but notice how under his fingernails was black filth. “It’s awesome. Anything goes there. I wanna go and party.”

“Party how?” I asked, referring to the multitudes of meanings ‘party’ can have in the community. He grinned and rubbed his nostril, the universal symbol for snorting cocaine.

“I’ll pay for everything if you go with me,” he added.

I tried to give it more deliberation before I spoke, but I remembered all of the names I thought of with each step while I walked to the bar. And I remembered more. If it had been a longer walk, I could have thought of a name for every step. They were all interchangeable, all unimportant, when mind alteration presented itself.

Shortly after quitting pain pills last year, I took myself to a few twelve step meetings. Once, an old lady at one of the afternoon meetings talked about using ‘at’ people. She told a story about how her husband left her many years ago, because he hated her drinking and drugging. For years, she was constantly drunk and high, justifying her actions to herself by thinking ‘If he hates my drinking, I’ll just keep on doing it, to piss him off.’ Of course, she was drinking alone in her house that had been foreclosed on and he wasn’t around anymore, but she had still found a twisted sense of satisfaction, drinking at him even though he was long gone.

“Sounds fun,” I told the greasy small man sitting across from me. “Where is it?”

“You know the sex shop on Fontanero?”

“The one next to the diner?”

“Yeah. It’s right above that.”

I’d been to that sex shop a few times—it was a one story building. But the three cocktails I had were muffling my logic. I looked at him, he grinned. I looked away.

There was a long silence, during which it felt like the air around my head was flexing. Maybe it was my deliberation, my thinking of the pros and cons of going out and partying with this stranger, that fluxed my brain so hard that it was causing the air outside of my head to spin and contract. I looked back at him—he was still grinning. If he wasn’t so greasy, it would have been endearing.

“Well, there are a few things I need from the shop. Did you drive here?” I said.

“Sure did,” he responded. He stood up and stubbed out his cigarette. “I’m Ren, by the way.”

“I’m Austin.”

We shook hands then went inside. He bought us a round of shots, four total, then paid for both of us.

Ren was one of those petite men who drove a giant truck. It was a lifted Ford F-something-50, customized interior, upgraded stereo, all that. It was cleaner than my car. On the backseat there were clothes and a silver tray. He lit another cigarette.

Between Ren’s cigarette and his next words, Duncan floated through my head again, as if he were thinking about me, like thinking thinking about me. All I could remember about him was the time I asked if he wanted to date and he sneered, late that summer, two years after high school was over. Fuck him, but also, I wasn’t going to use at him.

“It’s been rough ever since my ex-wife died,” he said. I responded,

“What?”

“My ex wife, my second ex-wife, just committed suicide last week. So did my first one, but that was years ago.” We sat at a stoplight. It was red even though know one was coming from the other directions.

“Oh. Shit.” I said, figuring it was the only thing I could have. I quickly added, “Sorry.” I felt a little

weird apologizing to him for his own hardships. I wanted to say ‘sorry for your loss’ but that felt strangely formal.

“It’s okay,” he responded while pulling forward through the stoplight. He went straight a few blocks, past a mixture of old run-down houses and manicured, historic mansions. The closer we got to

Fontanero Boulevard, the smaller and dirtier the houses became.

“We gotta make a stop first,” he said.

“Where?” I asked.

“Just at this gas station real quick.”

I peeked out the window, saw the 7-11 with its collection of vagabonds and crackheads out

front.

“Really? This one?” I asked. Not hearing me, he said, “Let me borrow fifty bucks. I’ll get you back tomorrow.”

“For what?” I asked. He huffed.

“Do you wanna party or not?” He pulled next to a gas pump and looked at me.

“You have to pay me back though,” I replied, reaching for my wallet. “I came out only because you offered to pay for everything.” I grinned at him but was only mostly kidding.

Something about Ren’s words just then reminded me of the night Money overdosed in front of me. How she asked me for cash after promising to show me out for the night. To be honest, my first time trying opiates was with her, but nothing as hard as heroin. She gave me some Vicodin, and that’s what started all the things that happened until the night I asked Duncan for cash to get some percs—the next level up for painkillers—and he called me desperate.

I don’t know how many shots Money had taken at that point, that night—that world was hers, not mine, and while part of me always wanted to ask to join her, to see what it was like to not feel the world so hard, to, as she put it, “lose your lady-boner for a second” and be okay with being alone, I never was able to make that leap, open that door, to the hard drugs. Just pills for me, back then. But not even that any more.

I handed Ren the fifty and he went inside. He bought gas, came back out, and started talking to one of the skinny addicts outside. After a quick exchange, Ren came back to the truck and started pumping his gas.

He climbed back in after putting the pump away and said,

“He only had a little now, but he’s picking up. We’ll meet him later tonight, he’s coming over to my house. He’s bringing a hooker friend of his.”

I gave a skeptical look at the scraggly man pacing outside the 7-11.

“You trust him?” I asked.

“Jerome? Of course I do.”

He started his car and we drove off. He turned back onto Fontanero and sped downwards for a few blocks until we reached the sex shop he was talking about, Seductions. I looked at the building. Still just one story.

He pulled into a hidden parking lot behind the building, out of the view of the street, and killed the car’s power. He then reached into his pocket, pulled out a thin glass tube and a small baggy filled with a few clearish-white rocks. Before I could ask anything, he put a rock into one end of the pipe, held it up, and grabbed his lighter. He looked at me and asked,

“You know how to do this?”

“What is it?” I asked. He gave me a knowing look, then lit the pipe for himself. He took a long slow drag, melting the rock, then two puffs as if it were a cigar, then he inhaled deeply. He held it for a second, looked at me, pulled my head in, and placed his mouth against mine, exhaling a pungent, sweetish smoke into my mouth. I inhaled and it made my mouth go numb.

After he shotgunned the crack smoke into my mouth, he placed another, smaller rock into the pipe, handed it to me, and said,

“Just do what I did.”

I looked at the pipe for a second. Already, from his shotgun, I felt the tempo of my thoughts increasing and told myself at least it’s not pain pills.

I emulated his smoking methods and found myself with a lungful of hot, numbing smoke.

Orange waves pulsed at the edges of my vision and I had fifty feelings and thoughts at once.

“Sharing is caring,” he said, and pulled me in so I could exhale the smoke into his mouth. He tasted like flat Pepsi and dirt.

“Alright,” he began exhaling a thin wisp of smoke while grabbing the pipe back from me. “You ready to go in?”

We were parked on the side of the sex shop—we walked around to the back. There was a black door against an outcropping of bricks that looked the start of half a staircase. We went up to it and he knocked on the door in a syncopated pattern. It swung open on its own. I looked inside the brick-made tunnel that the door led into, expecting to see half a staircase going up and then meeting the roof of the single-storied building of the sex shop, but instead there was only darkness.

“Come on,” he said, grabbing my hand. He led me up the staircase, the door closed behind us. It was pitch black inside the staircase. Where I expected it to end, it didn’t. Instead, there was another feeling similar to what I felt earlier, talking to Ren on the bar patio—the air began flexing around my head, like changes in pressure, which squeaked in my ears until it turned into the low throb of pounding bass and synthesizer noises. The darkness of the staircase fell away to neon purple and blue ambience, and the music grew louder.

“How long is this staircase?” I asked, my hand still in his. He didn’t answer. The stairs took a sharp right, went on a bit longer, and then we were passing through a doorway lined with multicolored beads. There was a huge man standing just inside the doorway. I couldn’t see his face; the light was too subdued. I reached into my pocket, expecting him to want to check our ID’s, but Ren looked back at me and gave a reassuring nod. We walked past him, down a corridor, and into a large room that blinked in and out of existence with each rapid pulse of strobe lights. His hands were warm if not sweaty and I felt a degree of safety holding them. I tried to keep up with the swiftness of him, the air and energy around me, the everything of the night. There was a bar in one corner of the room, what looked like a lounge area next to it, but the majority of the room was a massive, crowded dancefloor. I couldn’t see where the music was coming from—it was hard-pounding, deep house, but there was no DJ to be seen, or even speakers.

Ren had moved over to the bar so I followed him. The bartender who came up to him was as pale as ivory. Her skin glimmered; she brought us two sparkling drinks immediately. Ren didn’t reach for his wallet but grabbed her hand and looked into her eyes. She giggled, but as she walked away, I saw her make a face like a grimace, hidden between the flashes of multicolored strobe lights.

Ren handed me the drink and led me to the dancefloor. I took a sip—it was heavenly, sweet and strong. He chugged his drink, through his cup, and it floated away. He started dancing, moving his hips in gyrations and unbuttoning his shirt.

Right under his throat, Ren had a tattoo of Medusa’s head. I looked at it, then heard Ren think, You know what this is? He pointed to his tattoo. I opened my mouth to speak, but he shook his finger, then instructed me by pointing at his temple. I thought at him,

No.

He pointed to his tattoo again, replying in thought,

Medusa. Symbol of the Mafioso.

I blinked and replied, Oh. Cool.

I was too lost in the music to decide whether I should believe him or not. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the pipe again and smoked some more. He shotgunned it into my mouth, loaded me some and lit it for me. The colors grew more vivid and the bodies next to me suddenly felt very welcome in my sphere. I looked up—there was no ceiling I could see, or stars, or anything, just darkness sliced by ribbons of flashing purple, green, and blue lights.

It wasn’t often I heard people’s thoughts. Maybe it was the crack Ren had given me. Maybe it was just the memory of Duncan—he was the first person I had ever thought together with, that night when we were the forest together. When I thought of him, my vibes, the pulses coming from every part of me, matched up with his, and I remembered how it felt to be together with someone. For some reason, that’s what I felt with Ren, even though I wasn’t sexually attracted to him like I was to Duncan. I finished my drink and started dancing. Ren tried to pull in close to me but I was sucked into the crowd, my eyes closed, feeling each thrum of the music move me deeper into the organism of dancers. Every time I opened my eyes, I saw a face, a familiar face, ones belonging to the names that matched my steps so much earlier in the night. The names blurred and faded away in my head. Except for Duncan’s. And then I saw Duncan’s face, on a body that may or may not have been his—it had been five years—somewhere in the sea of dancers. He was shirtless, gyrating, and then gone. I tried to move where I saw him, but got absorbed again into the moving bodies, until I felt a hand pull at my sleeve. Ren pulled me out of the crowd, but it felt like I had stayed on the dance floor, looking for Duncan, and my heart and self had stayed while Ren just pulled my empty body away. Ren’s shirt was off too, and I saw he was covered with tattoos—stars and serpents and geometry.

Come over here, he thought. He pulled me along, down the edge of the dancefloor, then into a corridor illuminated by black lights behind silhouettes of couples. He led me into a room, a small one with what looked like a window that opened right up against the bar. He pulled a curtain down over the window. There was a couch, a chair, and no ceiling, but instead, a vista of stars lining the top of the room. He went to sit down, reconsidered,

You want another drink?

Yes

He opened the curtain again and there were already two shimmering drinks on the sill. He took them, handed me one, sat down on the couch and thought,

Do you know how to cancel out magic?

I was hypnotized by the starry non-ceiling and fell into the chair. His thought was a blurry undercurrent to my racing, inebriated thoughts but I focused on it.

Magic? What magic?

He chuckled. The people you think about. There’s a better way to not think about them. He shook his drink at me. I thought he was motioning to drink, but when I took a sip, he laughed. That was it. He was a thinker, like I was a thinker, and Duncan was a thinker, and Money was a thinker when she wasn’t nodding off from heroin. That’s what drew us together that night—drew me to him. It was something outside of a sexual attraction that I had with Duncan, or the childhood kinship I had with Money.

Alcohol can help, but can make you need it too easily, he thought at me, still shaking his cup in my direction.

A montage of different colored pills flashed through my mind, like a nervous-grade schooler clicking through their slideshow presentation way too fast. It was like a mental roulette, which stopped abruptly on my favorite pill from my past—a purple capsule, filled with powdered morphine. He laughed again and I suddenly understood what he was getting at.

Everything like that is a luxury, not a necessity, he thought while pulling out his glass pipe again, along with the baggie of rocks. The baggy looked empty though, and he made a face, before thinking loudly about the man he purchased them from, the one from the 7-11. I thought back at him, So how do I not think about them?

He was distracted, opening the baggy and trying to collect all the crumbs he could.

How do I cancel out magic? I thought again, practically screaming it at him, my eyes wide against his, which shot to mine in sudden focus.

Oh. Easy, he thought.

“Like this,” he said. Suddenly, the room was all black and stars, the air flexed strongly all around me, then it was gone, and we were sitting inside his truck, parked in a carport up against an apartment building. The cold white fluorescent lighting of the place made squint. It felt like I fell into the passenger seat from a height of two inches. I was still holding the shimmering drink.

“You say it out loud. To yourself, the world, or someone else. But,” he took out a cigarette and lit it, “if you say it to someone else, and it’s not someone like us, then it’ll ruin everything. So,” he took a long drag and let it swirl out of his nose slowly. “You can’t tell anyone about The Drop, unless you know, for a fact, that they’re like us.”

I looked at him fully, up and down. He seemed strangely cleaner since the last time I had seen him in full light. The truck smelled like cigarettes and something chemically.

“What do you mean, like us?” I asked. He closed his eyes and focused—I could feel the air flexing again, felt his intent, but couldn’t hone in on what he was trying to think. He sighed. Just then, there was a tap on his window. He jumped and began reaching under his seat for something before looking up and seeing it was the guy from 7-11, Jerome. With him was an older lady, probably around 50 or so, with short black hair and a weary face.

Ren looked at me and whispered,

“How the fuck did he find us?”

“I thought you knew him,” I whispered back.

“No dude, I’ve never met him before tonight.” When he said that, I knew he was a seasoned liar.

I wouldn’t be getting my fifty dollars from earlier back. I suddenly had a strong desire to go home.

Jerome rapped the window harshly.

“We’re here man! Let’s go up!” He exclaimed while holding up a baggy of rocks. Ren shouted, “Hey!” and swung his door open, almost hitting the tired looking woman with it. “Don’t wave that shit around out here! My truck is hot!”

“Man, shut up,” Jerome replied. Ren looked at me while climbing out of his seat and said,

“Come on, Austin.”

I tried to take a sip from my drink but it had vanished. Too drunk to think it strange, I stepped out of the truck and the air around my head felt like it deflated.

We went upstairs to Ren’s apartment and he wasted no time producing his glass pipe. Jerome did the same while the woman he brought with him started cleaning Ren’s apartment. It wasn’t until the next day when I realized she was looking for any drugs Ren might have had laying around—and there were a few. Ren snatched up a handful of pills and jammed them in his pocket. He then grabbed a silver tray of his cluttered table, blew the cigarette ash off of it, and handed it to Jerome. Jerome grabbed it, took a seat on the floor by the couch, and took out a few rocks. He interrupted himself, asking, “Ay man, before we smoke this, y’all want some of this?” and produced a pathetic looking, wrinkled cigarette cellophane filled with weed. It was shitty looking ditch weed. He then took out a pack of cigarettes, took one of them and twisted the tobacco out of it and started slowly crumbling weed into the empty cigarette. Most of the pot ended up on the silver tray, mixing with the crack. I filled the cigarette and handed it to me.

“No thanks,” I said, still reeling from the crack beforehand and the drinks we had at The Drop.

“I loaded this for you playa now you gotta smoke it,” he retorted. I couldn’t tell if he was angry

or if being loud and curt was just his normal setting.

I smoked almost all of the spliff, but got only got one hit of crack from them. Jerome and his lady friend smoked most of the shit in front of us, then tried to fuck each other on the floor by the couch.

Ren and I stepped out onto the patio, smoked a cigarette, and tried not to listen to the noises inside, but Ren could only take so much before storming inside and screaming at them both, threatening to kill them if they didn’t leave.

While he was inside, I noticed his patio was on the second floor. I didn’t think, I jumped and landed on the railing of the patio below. I shifted my weight to avoid twisting my ankle and rolled onto the ground. I stood up, picked a direction, and started walking.

I didn’t know where I was, or which way was home, but there was something in the night sky that looked like a spaceship so I followed that. With each step I took, I tried to think of names, but couldn’t remember any of the except Duncan’s. I didn’t want to think about him so I started thinking about pain pills, but quickly realized that was worse. I looked up at the sky, noticed the flying-saucer-looking-shadow was gone and I was on a familiar street. Without thinking about it, I muttered,

“I won’t think about him or them.” For three peaceful steps, I didn’t, but then I remembered the taste of those purple morphine pills I used to take. A hint, like torture, of their sweet chemical taste dusted across my tongue and through my nose. I repeated myself, talking out loud as I walked home. I felt a little bad about abandoning Ren and his rabbit hole, but was able to forgive myself as soon as I walked through the door of my small home. I didn’t take my clothes off, I just dropped onto bed.

As I drifted to the in-between of sleep and awake, a process that took longer that night because of the stimulants I had smoked, I thought about my subconscious attraction to Ren—an attraction that wasn’t sexual, but still present. And I thought of how he was sexually attracted to me, and then thought that maybe thinkers are drawn to each other, and it sometimes manifests as sexual energy, because the connection to someone through their mind is a closeness only comparable to intimacy. I thought of how certain things dull it, and others enhance it, and how Money pretty much made herself deaf to it with her shots of black tar, and how Duncan could’ve used something to turn himself down like Money because the thoughts are what made him hit me, and of all the years that had passed since I had seen either of them and before I knew it I was asleep.