“You do bumps of that,” Hector said feebly, feeling as though he’d quickly lost all his RicanTopStud authority.
Nick smiled at him affectionately. “Come here.” He patted the bed. “This is much better and much more mellow. It’s almost like smoking pot.”
“How can crystal meth be like pot?”
“You’ll see.”
“Will it last long? I have a flight in the morning.”
Nick shook his head. “You’ll be fine.” He’d lightly tapped a few tiny white rocks into the glass globe. He pulled a small lighter from the box, clicking it to produce a fierce blue flame, like a tiny blowtorch.
“Come closer,” Nick instructed Hector.
Hector sidled closer, curious, and Nick put the pipe end between his lips. “Hold it here,” Nick said. “Now wait until you see smoke coming out of the hole in the globe, then inhale, but lightly, not like a bong.”
Hector did as he was told. As he inhaled, he felt every hair on his body stand on end and tiny electric currents rush to the tip of his penis and nipples, his scrotum and his rectum. His belly crumpled inside into a gorgeous velvety rosebud, and the dim room seemed to become three shades brighter.
“Now come here,” instructed Nick, pulling Hector close. “Blow it to me, then we go back and forth. Hold it, then blow it back, and don’t pull away.”
Again, Hector complied. It felt immensely freeing to take orders. As they blew the smoke back and forth, Hector’s arms found their way around Nick. This is it, Hector’s deep-down voice said. This is how it felt. This was his memory of holding Ricky, the I-need-nothing-else-ever perfection of that moment, or the fetish his memory had made of that moment. How strange to feel it again after four years!
Nick sparked the pipe for a few more rounds. Finally, when he put the pipe down, Hector looked at him with large, happy eyes. “Oh, papi,” Hector said, breathless, one hand tugging madly at his shrunken dick. “This is fucking amazing.”
“I told you it was better than bumps.”
“Thank you,” said Hector, pushing Nick up onto the bed, toward the luxurious bank of pillows. “Thank you so much.”
Nick giggled. “It’s just some hits of chrissy.”
But Hector wanted to tell CouverPrtyBud that it was so much more than that. He wanted to say, You just helped me figure out how I’m going to cope with the rest of my life.
Part III. Grown-ups (1992–2021)
Fifteen. Together Again (2012)
Four months after Mateo went briefly to L.A. County Jail, then into a prison-diversion residential program for first-time drug offenders, Milly sat in Terminal 5 at JFK Airport waiting for a plane to L.A., an unread copy of the Friday New York Times by her side. It was November, right after Obama’s reelection, which had been a mild source of happiness for Milly. There she sat, nearly forty-three years old, hair in a loose ponytail, wearing a leather car coat, skinny jeans, and old suede cowboy boots and sipping coffee out of a white-and-red Illy cup, occasionally fussing with her iPhone. Most people still found her a beautiful woman — slim, her face a bit leaner and harder than it had been when she was twenty-four, but her hair was still a gentle mess of loose curls, espresso brown as ever thanks to a color job, which concealed the dozens of wiry gray rebels that had sprung forth.
Sometimes these days, when friends and colleagues engaged Milly for long periods in conversation, they would notice a tic she had, even while she was being perfectly polite and still often very warm and kind. Her eyes would repeatedly glass over, as though she were about to cry, then they would dart away as she fussed with a lock of hair or with her iPhone, emitting a slightly peremptory “Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, ahh, hmm,” to whatever someone was saying to her, as though she were trying to take it in faster, hurry them along a bit, and wrap up the conversation. It was as though, underneath her measured surface, she was saying, Leave me alone, let me be alone again, even if she had no particular reason at that moment to want to be alone. She was still teaching at the arts high school, and on weekends, she would trudge to her little studio and plunk away at her own art, as someone unpracticed plunks at piano keys. But the truth was she had not engaged in her art with true satisfaction in about two years — about as much time as she’d known that Mateo had a drug problem.
And as for her life mate, Jared. . Well, in her most unguarded moments — with herself, that is, not with others, for she would never admit this to others — she would feel a stab of blinding rage toward Jared, her husband of nearly fifteen years and her partner for more than twenty, that startled her because she couldn’t fully account for it. It was something similar to the rage she had felt back in those early years before she’d broken it off briefly with him: a panicked, hysterical feeling that, underneath his ministrations, affection, and stabilizing demeanor, he was holding her back from something big and important that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
It had become strained between them. They flat-out hadn’t had sex in four months, not that that was any surprise given that they’d been in a state of trauma over Mateo’s freshest tumble into disaster. Drew gave reports from L.A. while they went about their lives in New York, amid a version of empty-nest syndrome they hadn’t envisioned while they were raising Mateo: their son across the country, not in some MFA program at, say, CalArts or UCLA, but in a halfway house for drug offenders. Several times a day, Milly would remember this fact and feel a stab of self-recrimination. Where had they gone wrong? Had she overloved him, overneeded him, overtolerated his adolescent aggression because he wasn’t her born child, because she’d felt badly for him? Milly turned over these questions in her head constantly, all the while imperceptibly drifting from things that had long defined her — her painting, her teaching, her friends, her marriage. Then she would remember the incident with the sculpture and shudder and half wonder if perhaps Jared wasn’t right.
Milly picked up the Times, halfheartedly attempted to absorb the front page, then put it down again with a sigh. The truth was, if she were being honest with herself, that even prior to the last few months — that is, in the fairly calm period after Mateo’s first L.A. rehab, when he was cleaning up his act and living with Drew, when everything seemed to be finally going okay, until it no longer was — even in this period of relative calm, Milly and Jared had barely had sex. Sitting there in the JetBlue terminal, she almost winced remembering one Saturday morning when they actually were having it but she mentally checked out from beginning to end — organizing her coming day, shuffling around the timing for various things she wanted to accomplish, like visiting her mother and buying a new, better vacuum — while Jared humped away at her. She made a few obligatory noises to make Jared think that she was coming, or at least engaged, but really she was just bearing up, relieved that he was climaxing. When he finished, he stayed inside her, his heaves subsiding, and they held each other without saying a word, Milly overcome with the deadness she felt.
“I love you so much, Millipede,” Jared finally said.
She smoothed his hair. “I love you, too,” she said back. Which only increased her dead feeling. Not that she didn’t mean it, she was fairly certain. Just that it stirred no warmth in her to say it.
“You got therapy today?” he asked.