BUSINESS PLANS
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FILED BY: KTHOR 5 2 2002 When I first started seeing a therapist about my panic attacks, he asked me if they occurred under the influence of alcohol. I replied, "Everything in my life occurs under the influence of alcohol." I'm a drunk. I drink alcohol to get drunk. Am I an alcoholic? I don't know, but I'm certainly a drunk. And sometimes, of course, that insatiable desire for braindeath gets me into troubles. Last year, before I left New York for awhile, I was attempting to get out and socialize as much as possible, to drink in the atmosphere of the city until I was full of it, to carry it with me as I traveled. One night, I decided to go see a band I liked, the sort of inoffensive Beach Boys-style pop that makes my rocker friends nauseous. I couldn't rustle anybody up to go with me so I trod downtown alone, tight pants and all. I got to the club and reflexively ordered my evening-opener, a shot of Jack Daniels and a bottle of Bass. Throwing the whiskey back in one smooth, sour motion, I replaced the shot glass on the bar and carried my beer into the theater, taking long, thirsty pulls frm the bottle. On the way in, a reedy indie-rock boy stopped me and asked, "Hey, do you know if Miles is back there?" I looked at him slackjawed, no clue in the world why this random stranger was pumping me for information about somebody I didn't even know. "Miles," he repeated. "Is he back there?" Whiskey, my clever shepherd, took over. "Do I look like somebody who keeps track of Miles at all times?" I spit back. "Whoa, " he expectorated in a clueless lunge, "New York atti-tude!" "And where the fuck are you from?" I asked. He started to open his mouth again, but I interrupted with "Actually, I don't give a fuck, just go back there." And with that, I strode confidently into the crowd. The show started, opening bands and the like all unremarkable, additional couplets of whiskey and beer chased each other down the highway of my throat, lining the inside of my stomach with insulation against the world. I had finished six drinks by the time the hedlining band started. And I didn't give a shit about them. It's not that they were bad, or anything, it's just that by that point I was expecting to have my doors blown off and instead was confronted with well-groomed white boys hitting the downstrokes on their guitars like sideways metronomes, songs like farts evaporating into the air. They were nothingness, and I was drunk and enraged. I spilled a beer on a bystander and tornadoed out of the room, eyes reddened with self-loathing and rage. I staggered out onto the street, rage inchoate in my lungs, frantically searching for a target on which to unleash my wrath. I started kicking newspaper boxes over, straining against the lead weights placed in their bases to topple the plastic boxes. I unleashed weak, flashy kung-fu kicks on scaffoldings, fences and bus shelters. I was a Tasmanian Devil of frustrated property damage and I was on a collision course for the rest of town. Eventually, I hit Broadway and Houston, the center of SoHo, and was seized with an anger that even now scares me. I began to blame the Internet for the collapse of my life into dissolute alcoholism, my layoff from UGO that Spring the last straw that crippled my poor camel. I was looking for something to take the collapse of my life out on. I was looking for someone to hurt. And the fancy-dressed yuppies on the street tonight might as well have had bullseyes painted on their Prada bags. I walked up to a couple and accosted them with the question: "Do you have a business plan?" Now, New Yorkers aren't stupid. If they see a wickedly pissed, reeling whiskey-soaked lunatic hollering questions at them, they'll smartly reply "No" and steer themselves away. Unfortunately, not all New Yorkers are smart, either. Some people just had to get cute with me, and when the first well-groomed prettyboy said "Yes" to my inquiries, I reared back and delivered a wobbly fist to his soft stomach. Cackling like the Baba Yaga, I disappeared down an alley, into the darkness. He didn't give chase. Emboldened, I skulked back onto Broadway, a few blocks up, my hatred not yet quashed. I punched at least one other person that night, maybe more my memory is perforated with blackouts. I come back to full consciousness at the Joe's Jr. diner on 9th street, a greasy burger with sautéed mushrooms in my hands, dripping into my lap. I wolfed it down and staggered away. I manage to board the 1 train uptown, struggling to reach the couch on which I now lived. My stomach roiled as the clattering car slowly made its way to 116th street. I couldn't hack it, bailing at 110th to loudly vomit down the side of the car, soaking my shoes with bile. Troglodytic, I hunched out of the station, the 12 blocks walked seeming endless, painful and epic. I hit the couch hard, pants still on, contacts still in, and slept until the sun blazed through the window. As I regained consciousness, I surveyed the dilapidated chaos that my life had become. Written in my notebook in shaky, looping script was "Alcohol is the poison for which there is no cure." |
ALL MY DEAD FRIENDS: CHAPTER 2
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FILED BY: ALIENJACK 5 2 2002 Long hair and sweat and lights and rage and smoke and coke and beer and FIGHT and we are gonna GET IT ON RIGHT NOW MOTHAFUCKA- I stood toe-to-toe with Mike, the singer. My hands alternately grasped empty air and clenched into fists as we shouted at one another. Off the stage, on the floor, a crowd of drunken bikers and their bitches, many in Halloween costumes, gathered to watch the fun. Mike shoved at me, still shouting. His hands never made contact; I swept my arms up and inside his, knocking his hands to either side. I pushed him in turn, sending him back a foot or two. This was it. I was finally going to kill the soft, flabby, primadonna cokehead bitch. He was going to die with my fist lodged in his brainpan. Apparently, even though I could lift him over my head and throw him whereas he couldn't pick up a case of beer without sweating, he thought he had some kind of chance. So we went out the back stage door, away from the crowd, to settle it. As soon as we were out of public scrutiny, he wanted to make up. It figured. "Look, dude, I've had it", I said as he backed against the side of his car, "We're done. It's over. No more band. Blind Pilot dies right here, right now. You have your thing, I have mine, and never the twain shall meet. I'm not going to fucking hit you. Just grab your fucking microphone and go home, like you always do." I turned away in disgust as he did just that, and went back inside to help the rest of my band pack up. Back on the stage, Darrel was wrapping his cords, sipping from his ubiquitous 32-oz travel-cup full of cheap screwdriver. His black eye was getting better, I noted. Rob was carting his bass amp toward the edge of the stage, not looking in my direction. He looked as if he would rather be almost anywhere else at the moment. Obi-Wan LaHoda, Jedi Drummer, was silently breaking down his kit with a look of quiet amusement on his face. I was still too pissed off to speak. I was actually shaking with rage. I had been ready to pound three years of accumulated fury into Mike's face, and my chance had been taken away just when I could taste it. Denied my outlet, I stalked around the stage in silence, hefting the bass bins single-handedly, followed by the mids, horns, and monitors. Usually I did most of the carrying anyway, but when I was pissed off like this (it happened far too frequently these days), these guys knew me well enough to let me do it alone. Their curiosity must have been killing them, but no one spoke for a full ten minutes, until I paused in my cathartic workout to grab my pitcher of beer and drink a huge gulp from it. Twin streams poured out the sides or the pitcher's rim and down my chest as I tried to pour too fast for my mouth to catch it. I sat down on the edge of the stage to finish it all. As usual, it was Darrel who broke the silence. "Well, did you kill the little bitch?" He asked. "You can hide in my basement until the manhunt is over." The beer sprayed from my mouth and nose. Sometimes it wasn't so much what Darrel said as the way he said it that made it so fucking funny. Shit. I was going to have to change shirts now. I looked up at him, irked that he had spoiled such a good rage when I was really enjoying it. Of course, Darrel was impossible to get angry with, so it faded fast. "No, he pussed out," I said, disgusted. "Well, there's always next time", said Darrel. I didn't look at him as I replied; I didn't want to see his statement. "There's not going to be a next time," I said. "We're done. Or at least I am. I am never getting onstage with that piece of shit again. I'm done trying to deal with him." Rob looked nervous when I said that. Obi-Wan looked amused and unconcerned, mercenary that he was. I didn't look at Darrel, though. "Well, what about the gigs?" he asked me. "I don't fucking care about the gigs anymore," I said, "the money just isn't worth it; not to put up with his fucking insanity, not to put up with the fucking covers. He wants to play fucking Green Day, for fuck's sake. I'm just tired of the whole thing." I got up and began breaking down my rig, unplugging cords and pedals and stands, putting the keyboards in their cases. "Yeah, Mikie's a bitch, but, well, you know man, the kids, they want to hear the Green Day and the Lenny Kravitz and the hoppy-hoppy dancy musicŠ we gots to give the kids what they want," said Darrel, squinting at me through his glasses. I looked up at him. Darrel was rock and roll. Completely. Six and a half feet of it, to be exact. From the long, curly hair past the spiked dog collar and the leather vest and the death's-head belt buckle and black jeans down to the black cowboy boots, and out to the black trenchcoat. He wore prescription glasses with fighter-pilot-style, supposedly polarized lenses that somehow never lightened quite enough to let you see his eyes clearly. When we played, he alternated between what I called his "Spy Vs. Spy" hat and a headband worn underneath his hair, with only the part over his forehead showing. Tonight it was the hat, which I preferred. "Fuck the kids, the kids suck, I hate the fucking kids," I burst out. "The kids want to fucking hear what MTV tells them they want to hear. What am I, a jukebox of bad fucking music? No. You give the kids what they want. I'm going to find some fucking grown-ups." I grabbed my amplifier, swung it up onto my shoulder, and headed for the door. Always dramatic, always pissed off; that's me. As I lugged the amp across the stage, I heard from behind the shuffling clack of high heels worn gracelessly, accompanied by a voice I knew and hated. It was what I called The Archetypal Bimbo Voice; a cloying blend of whining, squealing, coy, and saccharine tones, delivered with such piercing insincerity that it scarred the soul, and it belonged to Darrel's girlfriend, Shelly. "DaaaA-rull!" she called. In my head I heard: YOOO-hoo! I'm coming to GEEEET you!' I shuddered. Visibly. CONTINUED NEXT UPDATE. |
DICK BLISTERS
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FILED BY: CLEF 5 2 2002 Sex is ridiculous. Two or more naked people writhing upon each other, exchanging bodily fluids, and making weird faces and groaning noises. It's all very laughable. And if "regular" sex is ridiculous, then I don't have to tell you, gay sex is out of control. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy it, but I would be a liar if I told you there haven't been at least a couple of occasions where one of the fellows I'm sexing up or being sexed up by has either said or done something that has made me come dangerously close to giggling or making one of those snorting Urkel laughs. But I've been lucky, and managed to restrain myself from laughing out loud at any of the people I've had sex with. No, the only time something truly embarrassing has happened to me, it has been of my own doing. And now, I am sharing it with you. Being a gay teenager isn't easy, for obvious reasons. Throughout the majority of high school and my freshman year of college, I struggled with coming to terms with it. For whatever reason, the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college, I decided that I was going to settle my confusion one way or the other and have sex with a dude. Don't ask why I decided to do it then; maybe it had something to with being 18 and never been kissed. All I knew was that I was getting tired of touching my own penis. But how was I going to meet a like-minded individual? My options were limited at best. I was too young for a gay bar or club, and even if I had been 21, the prospect of going out and having someone hit on me would have made me flip out. There was no way I was ready for that. The way I saw it, there was only one option. The internet. And with that, I made my first awkward attempts at making a cyber love connection. I won't go into too much detail, but it has worked surprisingly well for me. No one has been too weird, and I haven't ended up dead in a crawlspace yet. So by the time that summer came to an end, I had actually met and had sex with a couple of guys in real life. So far, so good. Sex had been rather enjoyable, and it had proved that yes, I was quite the poofter. School started in late August, and it was early September when I started talking to Jake. Jake was a businessman that worked in the city, but lived out in the suburbs. We chatted online, and exchanged pictures. He was definitely a stud, and he seemed to like my picture as well. We started talking on the phone, and it was decided that Thursday of that week, Jake and I would meet for dinner. He was staying downtown in a hotel that night because of work, which would allow for a whole night of wild, uninhibited sodomite sex, if we were so inclined. For whatever reason, I had been extremely horny for the past couple of weeks. Who knows what hormones were raging within my sexually frustrated 19 year old body, but I had been jerking it upwards of three times a day. Now I must admit, I'm a fan of the bare palm. No astroglide for me. So you can understand that my cock had been taking quite a flogging. It was two days before I met Jake when the blisters showed up. Two of them, right on the head of my penis. Now, my cock had been beaten raw before, but this was different. These were definitely blisters, and they made my cock look like it had a small, localized case of leprosy. Of course I freaked out. I was supposed to be having sex in less than two days, and at best it looked like I was born with two ugly, Gorbachev birthmarks on my cock. At worst, it looked like I had a raging case of herpes, straight from the gutter. I decided the best thing to do was to leave it alone, and see how it was when Thursday rolled around. Thursday night came, and Jake called. He was at his hotel, and I was going to meet him there in about a half hour, and he told me that he'd really like for me to spend the night. Now, you might ask me why I didn't just call the whole thing off? Well, I could say it was because I'd feel bad having him waste all the money on a hotel room, but that'd be a lie. I was horny, and I NEEDED to have sex. After building this up for so long, a mangled penis was not going to stop me. Besides, the room would be dark, and maybe he wouldn't notice. The whole subway ride to his hotel, I kept trying to think up excuses as to why my cock had blisters on it. Maybe I could tell the truth, and we could share a chuckle over it. Maybe, but probably not. I met Jake in the hotel's lounge (which I realized was the same hotel my senior prom had been held in, shudder). He was shorter than I had hoped, but otherwise, pretty good looking. We talked for a minute, and Jake asked if I wanted to go back to the room, or get food first. Again, my horniness won out, and we went up to his room, making stilted small talk the entire elevator ride. Once we were in the room, we sat on the bed and made out. He took off his shirt, and I undid his pants and he kicked off his underwear. He asked me to stand up so he could undress me. It was the defining moment. When he got me naked, he looked down at my cock, smiling. Then the smile disappeared from his face. He gave me a very odd look and I kind of shrugged. I ended up spending the night with him. We had sex several times that night, and it was good, but not once did he put his mouth anywhere near my poor, mangled cock. |