cigarettes, gin, and lust.

Experimenting in excess

How can one possibly be expected to focus on homework when sitting in a 30-year-old, paint-splattered art studio, listening to the Beatles, with the Painter and the Musician creating all around? That is an unreasonable assignment for the Editor, and so I have put aside my computer for a moment and picked up my journal. I can't really think straight, anyway, through this hangover and lack of sleep, trying to piece together the details of last night that I know are floating in my mind somewhere.

I know that the night ended with Lacey. I know there was gin and PBR, cigarettes, tequila, sex, a sauna, students all around ready to party after the week of restraint...I should more clearly remember the daytime hours that preceded the night, but the combined cognitive effects of alcohol and lack of sleep are stunting my brain's ability to solidify the connections that would place this story in my memory. It was an Editor's day: writing, reading, Editing the novel, coffee and cheap food, movies, and yoga. The soundtrack of the day was Butch Walker, The Lately, Johnny Cash, Sublime, The Films. The day started unexpectedly in the wee hours of Friday morning and ended long after bar close this morning. In one continuous stretch of twenty-four hours, I was able to pack in every bit of productivity and fun I had planned for the whole weekend, and I am left wondering what to possibly do with the next two days.

“I desperately want to fuck you.” The Doctor's call woke me yesterday at four a.m. I could hear the truth of it in his voice.

I let out a shaky sigh.

“Vulgar, I know,” he added sweetly before I could reply. “But true.”

I grinned to myself. God dammit. It was a terrible irony that his desperate cries through this distance only made me want him more.

I hadn't seen the Doctor in three weeks. Three weeks. Lust was fully clouding my mind at this point; my vibrator no longer had the charm it once had. Everything seemed cold; I longed for human touch, to be held and kissed, the warmth of another hand on my flesh, another being to absorb the desperate heat that radiated from every pore at every moment of my day. The desperation was driving me mad; I had been drowning it out with alcohol for about two weeks, but even that was losing its power.

This lust and desperation had taken over my mind; it kept me awake at night. I was keeping myself as busy as I could, but it was no longer enough to distract me. I needed to give in. I needed to experience pleasure, decadence, superfluous pampering of my body, heart, soul, mind, all of my senses. No mechanical orgasm or weak buzz was enough to replace the hands of the Doctor. Nothing would be, but my mind continued to search for something to give in to, something made of primitive pleasure and depravity in an attractive package.

I tried gin. I was pre-gaming at the Painter's house, and she is a fanatic of the gin and tonic. That was tasty, but not satisfying. I was in no mood for smooth, tasty booze. The Musician offered me PBR; it was cheap and simple, a touch of bitterness. That was more like it; my body needed the sting of bitterness. I drank cheap, harsh tequila shots with the Painter's roommates. That was fucking disgusting. Such a painful version of my favorite shot was a shock to my system, a body that heard the word “tequila” and began to salivate in anticipation.  Perfect; in the absence of the pleasure they lusted after, my senses needed a jolt now and then to clear the clouds in my mind.

The Musician offered me cigarettes all night, as usual, and I refused. The first three. By his fourth cigarette, the house was filled with Coasties curling their hair and a hipster poet naked under a barbeque apron. I was getting frantic texts from a friend with boy troubles. The Lust Beasts had begun to arrive, reminding me of the easy opportunities I was passing up as I waited for the next visit from the Doctor. Fuck this scene. I joined the group of guys hiding on the porch drinking PBR and shivering in the fall air. Before he could offer again, I asked the Musician for a cigarette. That was satisfying; my mind relaxed and cleared a bit as my hand fell comfortably into a position that held the cigarette and my beer while I talked.

It's a damn shame that the things are so filthy, because they are really fucking effective and so damn cool. Throughout the night I smoked around six cigarettes, and I have quickly found that this is a shocking amount. “You don't even smoke!” one friend exclaimed. “That's a lot.” Why the fuck would I do something as stupid as smoking cigarettes if I were only going to tease myself with one? Where is the satisfaction in that? I was ready to give in, and that meant enjoying the freedom to smoke like a fucking smoker. Cigarettes came as the relief I needed to distract me from the damn Coasties, hipsters, drama, and lust for a few hours. Primitive pleasure, depravity, and attractive as hell.

After a few hours' pre-gaming at the house, the group headed downtown en masse to find a bar. Floating along in my buzz and clouds, I didn't realize where we were headed until I almost followed the crowd through the door of the loudest, reddest, sports bar on State.

"Wait a minute!” I exclaimed as I stopped short in the doorway. I turned to the Lust Beast standing closest behind me. “Do you want to go somewhere else?”

He nodded, relief in his wide eyes. How had we found ourselves following Coasties around to bro bars for the night? Lust is bad for the brain.

“I'll call Lacey,” I said as we turned to leave. “We can meet her somewhere.”

“Lacey...?  Is she single?” He was already grinning eagerly.

I pointed a stern finger at him while the phone rang. “She's mine tonight.”  I had been wanting to indulge Lacey's bi-curiosity for months now; it was time.

He raised an eyebrow at me, then held his hand out to shake mine. “Oh, it's on.”

I shook his hand as Lacey answered the call, and we made plans to meet her at a dive a few blocks down. That was more like it. We bid farewell to the Painter and the Musician and left the Coasties behind.

We ordered a pitcher of PBR and crowded into a corner booth and waited about ten more minutes for Lacey to show up. When she did, there was a guy at her side, whom she introduced as her boyfriend. I caught the Lust Beast's eye. He groaned, and I held back a frustrated laugh as she slid into the booth beside us. We spent a short time catching up; I hadn't seen her all summer, so there was a lot of small talk to be had before any of us could dive into blatant flirtation. When she and her boyfriend stepped up to the bar for another round, I turned to my competitor.

“You know that means I win,” I said, indicating the boyfriend with a glance.

He sighed and nodded. I wasn't as sure of my chances as I sounded, but we both knew he had no hope of hooking up with Lacey this night. We toasted and finished our beers, and he headed home when the first pitcher was gone. When the couple returned, I continued the small talk and tried to decide how far to take it. I wasn't really available for a threesome in the Doctor's absence, but I wasn't sure I would get any time alone with Lacey. Besides that, even though Lacey had always been flirtatious in the past, she had this boyfriend to go home with now, so her bi-curious interest may have waned.

But, she looked at me all night with the wide, longing eyes that I remembered from Spring, and they invited me to try out the sauna at their apartment building as the bar closed. A sauna, you say? What a lovely perk in downtown housing. That ought to satisfy my need for decadence, at least.

In the sauna, there was drinking, flirting, petting, kissing, sweating. I had the sense to drink a few glasses of water, and that combined with the sauna's heat began to cleanse my body of the night's booze and cigarettes. I stayed committed to waiting for the Doctor's next visit, so I didn't follow the couple back to their room. I toed the line and gave in to Lacey's touch, allowed myself to share in the heat and lust that radiated from her longing eyes. My night was topped off with a few minutes of giving into this passion, wrapped in her arms with her mouth pressed against mine, entwined in our bathing suits and towels, hair falling loose from the sauna's steam. I drank the moment in, lived on the passion for a few minutes. I ran my fingers desperately through her hair and over her half-exposed breasts and her thighs and back and shoulders. Three weeks of loneliness were driving my exhausted and drunk mind, this need to give in bursting from my pores and loving the flesh and the smell and the kiss and the touch and the desirous eyes of the woman in my arms.

The eyes of the Painter become much more dreamy as she moves to a spot in her painting where the realistic structure of the building she's painting must melt into the atmosphere of the fantastical world around it. No longer glancing to the photo that was guiding her, no longer searching for accuracy in the details, but CREATING now, purely from some place in the mind, simply creating what this part of this world will be. Quizzical and imaginative, eyes that are not looking in front of her but inside of her, for just a moment. Eyes lost in the depths of an artists' world.


These are my Quiet Days, and I am giving into them as they come to me.  A damn good story is always floating in the air, and I cannot ignore it.  I will stay awake for it, I will find it in a sauna at three a.m., I will set aside these mundane obligations to capture it in the middle of this art studio in the middle of this artists' life.

I left Lacey's house last night far from satiated, still longing for the Doctor, but exhausted and satisfied to end this day and its outbursts of excess. I wandered in my haze back to the Painter's house, where the Musician met me at the door. We tiptoed through a maze of sleeping Coasties in the living room, and he laid out a bed of blankets on the floor of the Painter's room for me. After he lay back down in the Painter's bed, I found his jeans on the floor and fished a cigarette from the pocket. I stole away to the porch and the brisk cold and called the Doctor.

“I desperately want to fuck you,” I whispered sleepily into the phone, laughed drunkenly, and lit the cigarette.