In high school, my friends and I would drink pitcher after pitcher of margaritas at Las Rocas—where they didn’t ask for ID—then smoke as much pot as possible and sing the words to “Jane Says” until we passed out. We discovered warehouse parties and nightclubs, noise and laughter—the later we stayed out, the better.
I grew up in a world of sadness and longing, and drugs brought me somewhere I could crash from. Ecstasy revealed hidden layers of light beyond darkness, softness in yearning, a lifetime of hope in a Michael Jackson song. I always crashed hard.
Drugs became a world to hold onto, a world where getting up the stairs was an adventure, and everyone carried secrets in their eyes. Addiction was a flowering plant that I watered often. I wanted it to grow. Until I started doing crystal.
Crystal helped me stay up late enough to dance, really dance, after everyone who wanted anything else was gone. I danced so hard that nothing else mattered, until I started to crash. Then I needed more—just another bump, just one more.
Drugs saved my life, but then they became my life. I fled crystal, arriving at a couple of cocktails, maybe a few bumps of coke to get things started, Xanax to take off the edge, Special K to bring it all out of focus, ecstasy to get that feeling of moving diagonally upwards and back. It was all about the eyes—you know what I mean. After-hours meant taking e just before sunrise, then smoking pot until the world vanished.
Drugs took care of me, but I was always fighting that urge to disappear—I never relaxed into the magic of addiction. I fled from drugs. I fled with drugs. I fled.
The last time I got high was three years ago. I’d just moved back to San Francisco, and one night I ended up drinking cocktails and craving K or coke, finding crystal and doing lines with strangers in my apartment at 7am. Everything was so bright, and the colors raced into me; I made miso soup and everyone tried on my clothes. But soon I was shaking on the bathroom floor, too nauseous to stand or even lift my head, better off dead, until someone called a friend to help me.
It was weird finding myself on the way to do a reading at “Tina’s Café,” a night of performance about crystal sponsored by tweaker.org, a peer education project organized to help speed users party safely and make informed decisions about risk-taking. The organizers asked me to read “Neighbors,” a section from my novel, “Pulling Taffy,” about tweakers who lived next door to me (right on Capitol Hill, behind 1562 E Olive Way, #302—look out the window and see if they’re still there).
I was nervous, not because I didn’t think that I could pass as a tweaker, but because the event took place in the heart of San Francisco’s legendary gay Castro district, a neighborhood that has succeeded in replacing the beauty of gay sex with a longing for normalcy at any price. Going to the Castro always makes me desperate.
When I started reading, I was nervous, but the audience—mostly tweakers, or those who could pass—loved it. I read part of my new novel, where it isn’t so clear that I’m not tweaking. That night, I definitely wasn’t clear—I felt welcomed into a special place.
Lately, speed has been blamed for everything from small-town murders to the decline of club life to the rise of bareback sex. Speed isn’t the real problem, it’s the scary families we grow up in, the alienation we fight, and the consume-or-die gay culture that wants us to disappear. I saw something in everyone’s eyes at Tina’s Café: a longing for more.
Mattilda, a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore, will be reading/presenting from her new anthology, “That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation” at Bailey/Coy Books in Seattle on Thursday, September 30 at 7pm, at Powell’s Books in Portland on Wednesday, September 29 at 7:30pm, and at Orca Books in Olympia on Monday, October 4 at 7pm. Check mattbernsteinsycamore.com for complete tour dates and drama.
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