The drugs came for him later than for some, to fast forward
in this narrative somewhat, but they came just the same. Beers with the boys,
some buds here and there, it just seemed cool and rebellious and lined right up
with both the classic psychedelic rock he listened to and the mid 90's New York
rap that was rife with blunt references.
Harder drugs followed and yet he still went to college and got a job but was always living on the edge, a double life, angry, rebellious, stubborn, gleeful, iconoclastic, suicidal, mystic, loving, unreliable troublemaking, lawbreaker.
He cannot easily describe who he was back then, tempted to only emphasize the childishness and recklessness of dealing and using drugs and fighting and womanizing, he stops and recalls also being at times free of the tyranny of having to be and do what society told him to. He had rejected mainstream morality but was fiercely loyal to friends and always unbending and unyielding on a path toward truth, whatever that is or was. But despite the outward rebellion, he says he was always acting for an invisible audience. He essentially hadn't wholly and totally rebelled against societal influences and norms, in fact his very rebellious lifestyle wasn't a rejection of the norms but an attempt to reconcile divergent ones. Put it like this - the opposite of love is said not to be hate but indifference; so if he really wanted to truly reject society and it's socialization he would have been indifferent to it rather than intimately alternately hating and celebrating different aspects of it. He says his whole life revolved around a twisted idea that it was masculine to sell drugs, to get women to love him without necessarily loving them back and generally subvert society's subtle forms of manliness and competition by being willing to hurt others if they hurt him, compete outside the laws, and seduce and generally beguile women because they would inevitably reject him for a more prototypically masculine man. He says he feel he deserved to get his feel-goods and attention, however he could, for as long as he could.
He was playing with fire though. He casually and with libertine frivolity, coasted through life, trying every drug, meeting and romancing numerous women, partying and exploring and speeding and robbing and having guns pulled on him and fighting and cheating and giving and loving but pulling away or clinging desperately as subtly yet powerfully as storms brew and seasons change and trees bloom and wither and moons descend full of madness and savage gaiety.
He knew not what forces he played with, libido and desire and dopamine and serotonin and rage and grief and rejection and community. His friendships were intense, his loves sweeping but none sustained themselves, built on fantasy and theater and sweat and the spring/summer-like surge of early life's testosterone.
Under it all, he felt sad, different, hurt and inadequate. He stops to ask me as I take notes how I am going to phrase the idea of him being inadequate; even now afraid of being a cliché, as he believed then he was grander than these pop psychology narratives about human developmental dysfunction. But as we talk more he agrees it cannot be reduced or refined more than this simple idea that he didn't feel competent as a male in his world. He didn't feel he could succeed, except on these fringes, succeed at creating an "interesting" life, full of diverse people and some good art and ideas and some primally satisfying music, succeed at getting laid and admired by some relatively decent women, succeed at finding drugs and succeed at selling them to finance this whole lifestyle. When women he claimed he didn't really want long-term left him, when his attempts at art failed in the distraction and whir of daily hustling and partying - because despite the myth of the bohemian and chemically exploring artist, art requires yeoman work - he felt dead and empty and hopeless. He felt like a punk, a pussy. Sure, he had faced guns, beat off attackers in random alcohol-fueled or jealousy over women inspired combats, always escaped the police and provided the drugs people needed, always been into something exciting, always had people who wanted to hang and ride with him, despite all this he couldn't do anything that would last, build anything that endured, he kept accumulating knowledge and experience, but what could he do with it other than use it as his daily con-game to intrigue those humans he floated along with, either entertaining or annoying them or both. He wanted real love; real lasting bonds and part of him hated himself for even wanting it. He slowly fought himself and something was slowly convincing (something winning) him that he was weak, feminine, an unreliable, superficial, sensitive, moody bitch obsessed with appearances and feeling good who had none of the grit and dedication to do anything truly great in life. He could just survive and sustain his sensual desires. He wanted more but thought he had been driven too far into madness and nihilism, degenerate hedonism, and strangely but not really that strangely, if we look at how societies have often subtly labeled homosexuality, he began to think he was gay.
He says that this idea he was gay was both homophobic and self destructive and open-minded and liberating. How could it both? Well how can anyone deal with the myriad of influences they face unless they simply conform and become either updated versions of their parents or their exact foils reacting to their flaws by perfectly modeling opposite traits?
He both used thinking he was homosexual as a cheap shortcut to avoid facing the fact that immaturity and indulgence were his true obstacles to being a successful man and used it as part of a healthy skepticism about all the restrictive roles society may force us to play. He tells me he loved his male friends so deeply it scared him but never physically felt attracted to them, but as is actually pretty normal, he found what adults later find in spouses ,support and intimacy with them, to the extent that petty criminalistic and irresponsible partying overgrown teenagers can give each other such things.
He also describes some positive and lasting spiritual epiphanies he experienced, that weren't necessarily caused by drugs but accompanied the same willingness to reach out into the beyond, past the typical thinking and behavior that doing drugs necessitates. Paradigm-shattering drug and relational experiences these were, as he knew so many people so intensely, people differing widely in culture and class and education and background and shared with them the vital life-force old men dream of possessing again, that by its nature is fleeting and in it being fleeting finds its never-again-but-worth-it power.
He interrupts my note-taking here and asks me to read what I have written down. He listens, then sits back in silence for a moment.
"You can keep all that stuff but write this down - italicize it, bold it whatever, but this is the truth: I fucked and got fucked by men, I have been with dozens of women but that fact remains and you and those who read this can make of it what they will."
He tells me that all the stuff that preceded this bold statement was half-bullshit, self-important, mentally masturbatory, and no one cares about it, they just want to know what he is. He is bisexual and it doesn't matter that he hasn't been with a man in almost a decade and he is now in relationship with a woman he plans to marry, what you do in this life defines you and people don't have time to look at nuance, the outliers, the exceptions and the gray areas, they need you in categories so they can protect themselves from you or use you, life goes too fast and we are too distracted with producing and consuming and escaping and returning to confront the indefinable humanity that stares back at us from our own mirror much less this that we might confront in others.
He wants to stop. He says I can publish what we have so far. But I insist he needs to go on to the parts he alluded to when he first asked me to do this -the parts where the Christians put him in their box based on his same sex experiences and the homosexuals put him in another, and he didn't belong in either he didn't belong in any box, he belonged in freedom and he had claimed he had found this freedom but now he was retreating to his own box once again having his Freedom taken away but this time by himself. He returns to our table and agrees to continue.
So I ask him what is he trying to say here, do here? What about his personal experience is worth hearing? How might it help others?
He tells me the second man he had a sexual experience with was a transsexual. This man hadn't yet become fully a woman but had breasts. My friend had had a few experiences with a gay friend of his before that but hadn't enjoyed them, they occurred during alcohol and cocaine fueled moments and one time out of three there had been a woman present too, a woman my friend was highly attracted to.
The experience with the transsexual was at the end of my friend's addiction; a week after it he stopped doing all drugs altogether and hasn't touched them, not even a drop of alcohol or a puff of marijuana, at all in the ten years since.
Tremendous shame accompanied the last act. It was with a stranger, he paid for it, he had been on large amounts of coke and xanax at the time. He had spent a grand on three other "escorts" a day before but hadn't been able to perform due to the effects of the coke.
His "manhood" had been taken. The incidents with his friend previously hadn't gone that far. He felt dirty and animalistic. He stopped doing drugs partially because of those feelings but also because he was broken up with by a second girl in the span of a year because his moods were so out of control and both women had had substance abuse issues also. He had also gotten laid off as had everyone else at his company and he hadn't prepared for the need to find a new job.
Harder drugs followed and yet he still went to college and got a job but was always living on the edge, a double life, angry, rebellious, stubborn, gleeful, iconoclastic, suicidal, mystic, loving, unreliable troublemaking, lawbreaker.
He cannot easily describe who he was back then, tempted to only emphasize the childishness and recklessness of dealing and using drugs and fighting and womanizing, he stops and recalls also being at times free of the tyranny of having to be and do what society told him to. He had rejected mainstream morality but was fiercely loyal to friends and always unbending and unyielding on a path toward truth, whatever that is or was. But despite the outward rebellion, he says he was always acting for an invisible audience. He essentially hadn't wholly and totally rebelled against societal influences and norms, in fact his very rebellious lifestyle wasn't a rejection of the norms but an attempt to reconcile divergent ones. Put it like this - the opposite of love is said not to be hate but indifference; so if he really wanted to truly reject society and it's socialization he would have been indifferent to it rather than intimately alternately hating and celebrating different aspects of it. He says his whole life revolved around a twisted idea that it was masculine to sell drugs, to get women to love him without necessarily loving them back and generally subvert society's subtle forms of manliness and competition by being willing to hurt others if they hurt him, compete outside the laws, and seduce and generally beguile women because they would inevitably reject him for a more prototypically masculine man. He says he feel he deserved to get his feel-goods and attention, however he could, for as long as he could.
He was playing with fire though. He casually and with libertine frivolity, coasted through life, trying every drug, meeting and romancing numerous women, partying and exploring and speeding and robbing and having guns pulled on him and fighting and cheating and giving and loving but pulling away or clinging desperately as subtly yet powerfully as storms brew and seasons change and trees bloom and wither and moons descend full of madness and savage gaiety.
He knew not what forces he played with, libido and desire and dopamine and serotonin and rage and grief and rejection and community. His friendships were intense, his loves sweeping but none sustained themselves, built on fantasy and theater and sweat and the spring/summer-like surge of early life's testosterone.
Under it all, he felt sad, different, hurt and inadequate. He stops to ask me as I take notes how I am going to phrase the idea of him being inadequate; even now afraid of being a cliché, as he believed then he was grander than these pop psychology narratives about human developmental dysfunction. But as we talk more he agrees it cannot be reduced or refined more than this simple idea that he didn't feel competent as a male in his world. He didn't feel he could succeed, except on these fringes, succeed at creating an "interesting" life, full of diverse people and some good art and ideas and some primally satisfying music, succeed at getting laid and admired by some relatively decent women, succeed at finding drugs and succeed at selling them to finance this whole lifestyle. When women he claimed he didn't really want long-term left him, when his attempts at art failed in the distraction and whir of daily hustling and partying - because despite the myth of the bohemian and chemically exploring artist, art requires yeoman work - he felt dead and empty and hopeless. He felt like a punk, a pussy. Sure, he had faced guns, beat off attackers in random alcohol-fueled or jealousy over women inspired combats, always escaped the police and provided the drugs people needed, always been into something exciting, always had people who wanted to hang and ride with him, despite all this he couldn't do anything that would last, build anything that endured, he kept accumulating knowledge and experience, but what could he do with it other than use it as his daily con-game to intrigue those humans he floated along with, either entertaining or annoying them or both. He wanted real love; real lasting bonds and part of him hated himself for even wanting it. He slowly fought himself and something was slowly convincing (something winning) him that he was weak, feminine, an unreliable, superficial, sensitive, moody bitch obsessed with appearances and feeling good who had none of the grit and dedication to do anything truly great in life. He could just survive and sustain his sensual desires. He wanted more but thought he had been driven too far into madness and nihilism, degenerate hedonism, and strangely but not really that strangely, if we look at how societies have often subtly labeled homosexuality, he began to think he was gay.
He says that this idea he was gay was both homophobic and self destructive and open-minded and liberating. How could it both? Well how can anyone deal with the myriad of influences they face unless they simply conform and become either updated versions of their parents or their exact foils reacting to their flaws by perfectly modeling opposite traits?
He both used thinking he was homosexual as a cheap shortcut to avoid facing the fact that immaturity and indulgence were his true obstacles to being a successful man and used it as part of a healthy skepticism about all the restrictive roles society may force us to play. He tells me he loved his male friends so deeply it scared him but never physically felt attracted to them, but as is actually pretty normal, he found what adults later find in spouses ,support and intimacy with them, to the extent that petty criminalistic and irresponsible partying overgrown teenagers can give each other such things.
He also describes some positive and lasting spiritual epiphanies he experienced, that weren't necessarily caused by drugs but accompanied the same willingness to reach out into the beyond, past the typical thinking and behavior that doing drugs necessitates. Paradigm-shattering drug and relational experiences these were, as he knew so many people so intensely, people differing widely in culture and class and education and background and shared with them the vital life-force old men dream of possessing again, that by its nature is fleeting and in it being fleeting finds its never-again-but-worth-it power.
He interrupts my note-taking here and asks me to read what I have written down. He listens, then sits back in silence for a moment.
"You can keep all that stuff but write this down - italicize it, bold it whatever, but this is the truth: I fucked and got fucked by men, I have been with dozens of women but that fact remains and you and those who read this can make of it what they will."
He tells me that all the stuff that preceded this bold statement was half-bullshit, self-important, mentally masturbatory, and no one cares about it, they just want to know what he is. He is bisexual and it doesn't matter that he hasn't been with a man in almost a decade and he is now in relationship with a woman he plans to marry, what you do in this life defines you and people don't have time to look at nuance, the outliers, the exceptions and the gray areas, they need you in categories so they can protect themselves from you or use you, life goes too fast and we are too distracted with producing and consuming and escaping and returning to confront the indefinable humanity that stares back at us from our own mirror much less this that we might confront in others.
He wants to stop. He says I can publish what we have so far. But I insist he needs to go on to the parts he alluded to when he first asked me to do this -the parts where the Christians put him in their box based on his same sex experiences and the homosexuals put him in another, and he didn't belong in either he didn't belong in any box, he belonged in freedom and he had claimed he had found this freedom but now he was retreating to his own box once again having his Freedom taken away but this time by himself. He returns to our table and agrees to continue.
So I ask him what is he trying to say here, do here? What about his personal experience is worth hearing? How might it help others?
He tells me the second man he had a sexual experience with was a transsexual. This man hadn't yet become fully a woman but had breasts. My friend had had a few experiences with a gay friend of his before that but hadn't enjoyed them, they occurred during alcohol and cocaine fueled moments and one time out of three there had been a woman present too, a woman my friend was highly attracted to.
The experience with the transsexual was at the end of my friend's addiction; a week after it he stopped doing all drugs altogether and hasn't touched them, not even a drop of alcohol or a puff of marijuana, at all in the ten years since.
Tremendous shame accompanied the last act. It was with a stranger, he paid for it, he had been on large amounts of coke and xanax at the time. He had spent a grand on three other "escorts" a day before but hadn't been able to perform due to the effects of the coke.
His "manhood" had been taken. The incidents with his friend previously hadn't gone that far. He felt dirty and animalistic. He stopped doing drugs partially because of those feelings but also because he was broken up with by a second girl in the span of a year because his moods were so out of control and both women had had substance abuse issues also. He had also gotten laid off as had everyone else at his company and he hadn't prepared for the need to find a new job.
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