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.

the first thursday.

scenes from campus life

The semester had begun, and I was easing into my new schedule, which now began at eight each morning. For the first time in months, I was waking to an alarm. I had started to work nights over the summer vacation, and I was used to waking only when the superfluous honking of horns on the street, chatter of yuppie pedestrians outside of my window, and sunshine through my broken vertical blinds became too much to sleep through. I was happy for the added hours in my day forced upon me by this early rising, but it was taking a lot more coffee and a lot more weed to put me in shape to leave the house so early each day.

It was Thursday, which meant my journalism class at nine-thirty. We analyzed the novelty and relevance of an article in the campus paper about a twenty-year-long study by the University that proved that “boozing” before exams will lower test scores. We all agreed that it was entertaining to read officially what we all knew from years of experience, but that not a single student on campus was going to change his behavior after reading this article. It was yet another quaint warning from the University that we ought to watch our drinking if we were to be at all successful in our college careers. Much appreciated.

After class I headed to the library, where I passed the computer lab and the cafe to reach the library stacks in a dimly-lit corner on the third floor, exchanged my copy of Anais Nin's Diary for the next volume, then settled into the cafe for more coffee, free internet, and lunch. After six hours of homework, correspondence, and Editing in the cafe, I caught a bus back home, made supper, stole a quick nap, and headed to work.

I stopped to buy a bottle of vodka, as I wouldn't be out until long after the liquor stores were closed. Next to me, pondering over 6-packs in the adjacent cooler, were two girls, maybe nineteen, barely passing for twenty-one tonight.

“Lindsay, you can't just have a liquid dinner again tonight! We should order pizza when we get home,” one said to the other.

“No! No more drunk food,” the one called Lindsay replied. “I am totally addicted! I'll get fat while I'm in Wisconsin.”

As I waited in the long line at the counter, I noticed an unusual number of Vikings jerseys and Brett Favre t-shirts all around me. Ah, football season had begun. Good; the store was not going to be busy tonight.

So, instead of waiting on lines of customers, I spent the night swapping coming-of-age stories with my coworker.

“I got my first tattoo when I was fifteen,” he told me. “A friend of mine needed practice, so he took a bunch of underage kids to some sketchy hotel room downtown and gave us all free tattoos. I got my nose pierced when I was sixteen by some chick in the back of a cafe. I don't think that was legal...”

Throughout the night, drunk couples and groups from the bar next door wandered in to buy munchies and condoms and coffee to top off their nights. Even our regulars were more drunk than expected, everyone friendly as hell and smelling like stale booze even early in the night.

As the night wore on, we could feel the madness of downtown Madison growing around us. Students whose money hadn't run out yet, who had no class on Fridays and no homework assigned yet, who had just recently left their parents' house for the year, and who had stayed sober for four days straight, were ready to fucking party that night. We could hear shouting, techno music, and the general din of debauchery floating into the store each time the door opened for a second.

“I never knew it before moving to Madison,” my boss noted, “but the weekend actually starts on Thursday. And the first Thursday of the semester is like a fucking national holiday in this town.”

And the kids were celebrating, getting this weekend started in bro bars with football and cheap beer and fake IDs. Unfortunately, many of these kids were from out of state or underage, early in their college careers, so most didn't yet know how to handle their alcohol. When I left the store at 1am, the streets were swarming with kids stumbling, puking, wandering, screaming; lost, confused, and wasted .

A couple passed me in the crosswalk, the girl stumbling with as much indignation as she could muster in her wobbly high heels, and the guy behind her shouting, “Yeah, here we go again: I'm not as sensitive as you. I don't care as much as you. You love me so much more than I love you. Whatever, babe. I'll just fucking drop you. Fuck that; I don't have to put up with this shit.”

Two blocks down State Street, I ducked into the bus shelter and settled onto the wooden bench to wait the twenty minutes for the next bus. The shelter was directly across the street from the most Badger-red, bro-filled sports bar downtown, and I watched from behind the glass as groups of young drunks wandered out of its doors.

“Hey bra, hey bra,” drunken taunting across the street. Two of a group of three guys in front me were starting a fake fight with each other, one shouting these words in his Jersey accent and tapping the chest of his friend, puffing out his own. They crouched and raised loose fists to each other, slapped at the air a couple of times, then collapsed into a drunken hug with their third companion. “Nah, man, I'm just messing around. We're cool.”

Taxis were running slowly down the street, stopping in front of the bars as the drivers searched the masses for whatever incoherent group had called them and forgotten by now that they were waiting for a cab. Kids knocked on their windows and tried to climb in random cabs, but the doors were all locked, and the drivers just kept moving. Good Samaritans guided their friends into the taxis with empty pitchers or buckets to puke in, gave the driver directions on where to take their friends, handed them a few dollars to cover the fare, and returned to the bars with the weight of that guy off of their shoulders. Assholes left their friends behind to pass out in the bathroom stalls.

I pulled a joint from my bag and lit it, calming my mind as I took in the madness swirling around me from the other side of the glass shelter. I watched one guy walking down the middle of the street stop and stand in place, staring straight ahead of him with huge pupils for about five minutes without moving. I watched another trip over his own toes and fall face first onto his cheek on the sidewalk. I grimaced with pity as his friends helped him stand up.

Behind me, a girl shouted, “Oh my god! I love that jacket!”

She had stopped while she and her friends walked down the sidewalk, and now she was leaning against a storefront window and tapping the glass to point out the jacket to her friends.

“I'll come buy it tomorrow,” she said as they walked away. “Mañana. El sábado. Per favore,” she chattered to her oblivious friends. “Oh wait! Por favor, I mean!” She laughed. “I shouldn't have taken Spanish and Italian in the same semester.” She waved a hand in the air and shook her head. Even drunk, this town is so goddamn academic.

Across the street, a pair of Madison police officers, one man and one woman, strolled around the corner to patrol down State Street. I hastily put out the joint on the bench and tucked it back into my bag, but they didn't even glance my way. They were chatting with each other, counting on their mere presence to maintain order in the streets. They rounded the corner and walked away from the bro bar just as two people walked out, first a guy in a black-and-white-checkered Abercrombie hoodie sweatshirt, followed by a bitching girl in a short dress and high-heeled sandals.

“You wanna do this?” the bitch screamed at him. They wandered a few feet into an open space on the sidewalk and silently taunted each other for a few seconds. She clumsily slipped out of her sandals and threw her cardigan on the ground next to her. She squared herself and patted him on the cheek to egg him on.

“Aw, come on, baby,” he slurred to her, then reached for her waist. She slapped him again lightly on the other cheek, and he stepped back. They were both so drunk and weak and completely unable to engage in this battle that it unfolded practically in slow motion before me. The guy shook his head at her and unzipped his hoodie and tossed it to the ground a few feet behind him.

They continued to bat at each other a couple of times before a group of five girls poured out of the bar and surrounded them. They tried to coax the two to cut it out while their friend was screaming, “This fucker was trying to start shit with me!” and swatting at the air in front of the guy.

Behind these girls, a group of three guys came out of the bar and watched the fight from a few feet back without interfering. One of the guys noticed the sweatshirt lying on the ground and picked it up, eying the fighting couple carefully as he did. He chuckled to his companions as they dug into the shirt's pockets and pulled out a cell phone and a wallet, stuffed them in their own pockets, and dropped the sweatshirt back to the ground. None of the group just a few feet away noticed this, and finally the girls were able to pull their friend away and sit her down to help her strap her sandals back on. The guy turned away with a snarl, picked up his sweatshirt, and joined the three guys, apparently his own companions. They greeted him and patted his back, calling the girl a bitch and laughing drunkenly as they all walked away down the street.

When I finally exited the bus in my neighborhood, I found myself behind a couple of girls leaving the Gyro shop on the corner. As they weaved a path down the sidewalk, they threw arms around each others' shoulders and held their phones at arms' length to snap a picture to remember the moment. I was walking a lot faster and steadier than they were, unintentionally gaining on them. As I approached quietly within a few feet, about to pass them, the brunette turned around suddenly and gasped.

“Holy shit!” she shouted, but rested a hand kindly on my shoulder after a moment. “I'm sorry-- you scared the crap out me!” She giggled and caught her breath.

I apologized for nothing in particular and laughed too, shrugging my shoulders and rolling my eyes.

“Here.” She passed me a bottle of Coke mixed with cheap rum from inside her purse, and we walked another block together. I introduced myself, and she took a picture of me with her phone before they turned the corner and left me alone but thankful for the warmth of the rum in my belly on this cool night. I finished my joint on the way home, set my alarm for eight a.m., and settled into bed content. I am not much of a fan of football, or bros, or gaggles of drunk young girls; but they do put on a pretty good show to kick off a Madison weekend.