This story was originally published in the Spring 2007 issue of Karamu, the literary journal of Eastern Illinois University.

Sexless in Montreal

by Sam J. Miller

When I wake up, it’s snowing. In the apartment. On me, anyway, on the couch under the windows Matt left open to let the pot smoke out. “God,” I mutter, bunching up blankets and covering my face with a pillow. My head’s still murky from the three Valiums: I can’t separate the things that happened from the things I dreamed, and the things I’ve seen in movies, and the things I’ve read about in books. Hopefully the metal taste of blood in my mouth was caused by some big brute of a boy biting my lips. Then I hear the clatter of Matt’s keyboard, and it all comes back, but it is just us doing drugs and staring at his computer. They weren’t fun party drugs like cocaine or crystal meth, but boring hippie loser sedatives: marijuana and Valium. And the blood taste is from intense vomiting.

“Wake up Shaney Shane, sleepyhead,” Matt says, and then sings: “cheer up sleepy jean-oh what can it mean-to a daydream believer and a homecoming queen?”

“Mm,” I say, and come out from under the covers. Above me is a whole wall of windows, with bright Montreal light pouring over me. The sleazy party where I danced ecstatically with strange men-the sick obscene sex-the flagrant rebellion against all ideas of morality that I’d been plotting for months-none of it happened. What a drag. But my spring break is young.

“How did you sleep?” he asks. “Do you want a joint? How was the couch?”

“Do you have a stove in this place? I’d like a cup of tea.”

“Stove…” He gets up to check and then hollers “yeah, I do.”

“Can you make me some tea? Do you have a kettle, a mug, a tea bag?”

“Hmm…” He rummages. “Yes. To all of it. How funny. I had no idea.”

“All right, I’ll have a cup of tea.”

You’d be surprised how long it takes him to fill the kettle and turn on the gas, unless you know Matt. When that’s done he comes to sit down in his filthy recliner, looking real proud. Above his head is a long black smear that could be blood. Matt’s got a ton of money-an IBM exec dad-but he’s also very lazy. I can see him dragging this chair up from the trash pile at the curb rather than actually going out to a store and shopping and talking to people.

“So how did you sleep?” he asks. “How was the couch?”

“I slept alright,” I said. “That shit really knocked me out.”

“Once you stopped throwing up.”

“Yeah. That.”

Matt leans back, and his features lose their focus. Staying stoned 24-7, it takes real effort to express emotions. After a few minutes staring into the corners of the tiny, pricey apartment he fled to, he gets up and sits back down at his computer.

Matt sings some more, and clicks something on his computer, and the song starts. Super-expensive speakers say: cheer up sleepy jean, oh what can it mean?

“I fucking hate that song,” I say. “I hate the Monkees.”

“They make me feel like I’m eight years old again,” he says. “So I love them. On this computer I have every song they ever put out.”

“Really? What else is on there?”

“Pretty much everything you ever heard in your life.”

“Okay,” I say, and think, and say, “Metallica’s Fade to Black?”

That song starts.

“Neat.”

“That’s how I spend my days. Downloading music.”

“Madonna, Like a Prayer.”

Madonna asks: “God?” and a gospel choir comes in, moaning.

“Wow.”

I’ve only used a computer twice before, so they still seem like something from a science fiction film. Last night we played violent video games until the heroine got torn to shreds by zombies, which, combined with the pot and the Valium, was what sent me running for the bathroom. “The Weather Girls, It’s Raining Men.”

“That’s a little gay, even for me. But I can get it. Gimme a second.” He fiddles. Ten seconds later he says “it’s downloading,” without looking away from the screen. Madonna’s prayer continues.

“Unbelievable. What a world.”

“Welcome to life after capitalism,” he says, “where we only need to wish for something and we can get it.”

“If you’re rich enough to own a computer.” I notice Matt doesn’t really like to look away from the computer, even when there’s nothing going on on-screen.

“Yeah, sure, that.”

Somewhere in this long pause, the kettle starts to shriek.

“Ooh, your tea is ready,” he says, sprinting for the kitchen. “Your majesty.”

I listen as he crashes into things in there. Who would think pouring water into a mug could be so complicated? But it is. On his computer I scroll through a list of songs I love. Maybe it’s just the Valium, but I feel like Matt lives in some fabulous fantasy world. Where any wish can be granted, as long as it doesn’t involve another human being. Last night he showed me

old-school video games I played when I was ten, and video clips of kitschy classic commercials. Then we listened to theme songs from Saturday morning cartoons canceled a decade ago.

“Here it is,” he says, and brings me a mug. An oily film stands on top of my tea.

“Do you have any sugar, lemon, honey, milk?”

“Mm. No. I don’t need to go check-I know that for a fact.”

The tea is bitter, and too hot. I take it back to the couch, and he follows me. Madonna says: “I’m down on my knees.”

“How long are you going to be in Montreal?” I ask.

“No idea. A while, I think. I can’t go back to school. I can’t handle that scene anymore.”

“Why don’t you just change majors? I mean, I’m still in high school, so what the fuck do I know, but that’s what people do on television shows, when they can’t handle college anymore.” After my third sip I’m convinced the tea was here when Matt moved in. Alone in a cabinet with crumbs and roaches. Waiting for me.

“It’s not the school part. It’s my social life. My sex life. That scene just got too weird, too complex. Downright scary. Really. I know that makes me sound like a big fat drama queen, but that’s what it is. I honestly had to get the fuck out of that city.”

“Oh.” I’m picturing whips and chains, blood and children, constellations of cigarette burns across his back.

“I’ve been here two months. Honestly, except for my drug dealers, I have no social interactions whatsoever.” He flashes his credit card, whose bills still go straight to dad. “Even getting cash, I just go to the ATM. No need to speak or smile at anyone. Except the lady at the bakery who sells me my baguettes, maybe.”

“And the kids in Kansas and Korea you play video games with, of course.”

“Yes. Speaking of which-” and he does some clicking and Madonna stops in mid-sentence (”oh god I think I’m falling, out of the sky-”) and the game starts again. Thanks to an expensive internet hookup, Matt can play against computer nerds all over the world.

Matt is an orc. The orc’s name is i_fucked_yr_mom. He prowls through the drippy corridors of an empty ancient temple, picking up runes that make his weapon get bigger and sharper. Other players sneak past him, get hacked to pieces, try to hack him. Matt must spend an awful lot of time with his orc, because he’s miles ahead of all the other players. After playing for ten minutes he’s killed thirty-six people and hasn’t gotten so much as a scratch. That makes me feel sad for him. Exiled to dank underground caves, reduced to savagery, forsaking his father’s throne.

“Damn, you’re a maniac,” I say, and he nods.

Just like that, he’s tuned me out. I go back to his hyper-uncomfortable couch and root through my backpack. Nothing’s in there but two magazines I read three times on the nine-hour train ride. No books. And Matt’s apartment doesn’t have any either-doesn’t have much of anything, besides his computer and his drugs. Monster after monster falls before Matt’s orc’s axe: corpses collapsing thick as snow. When I met Matt, at a punk show at the Poughkeepsie Elks Lodge, I was blown away by how brilliantly he could challenge all the machismo in the room. How he’d stare down cute boys, how he’d talk even the most straight-laced thug into a bathroom stall blowjob. Queer desire, which I’d been keeping up bottled up, was in Matt’s hands a nuclear bomb to break down the oppression of the civilized world. So I’m sad to see him like this, dazed and befuddled, with all that revolutionary instinct defused.

“So we’re going to out to some clubs tonight, right?”

“Mmm,” he mutters, blind and deaf to everything but the game.

I just got in last night, but already I can see how this trip isn’t going to be as exciting as I thought. I imagined Matt dragging me to crazy parties full of fags and drugs and no scruples. Whenever he called me from New York the subject was always hangovers and regrets, what a crazy wild time he’d had, how many boys he’d messed around with, how long it took for the cuts to heal. It all sounded very jet-set, and I spent the whole train ride up with my heart going a mile a minute, imagining elaborate sex scenes starring me. Me in some rich man’s penthouse with two junky hustlers and a drunk twelve-year-old. Me in a sling, in a packed back room somewhere, loving every second of it. The sort of scenes that would make my father throw up if he could see them. 

Matt and I barely know each other. That’s why he asked me to come spend spring break with him. He likes me because from the first time we met I’d call up like the total ignorant hick I am, desperate for any details about gay life and gay sex and the big gay city where he went to college. He dug playing Gay Guide, Gay Guru, Cynical Jaded Gay Guy. Laying out all his random hook-ups, drawing detailed pictures of the crazy shit he saw at late-night clubs and skuzzy parties. 

“You got any interest in doing acid?” he asks, not turning away from the game.

“Hm,” I say. I meant to say no, flat-out, but I’m already super-bored.

“I’m getting some brought by tonight, you should take some. It’s a blast.”

“Never done it before.”

“I know that,” he says. “You said, last night, when you took the valium, ‘I’ve never done anything stronger than Robitussin.’ A couple of times, actually. You said the same thing later, when we started smoking the pot.”

“I was exaggerating,” I say. “I’ve been drunk a couple times.”

He gets up from his computer and turns toward me. Somehow, Matt isn’t cute at all. I mean, he’s cute, but I’m not into him. It’s the hair-longish, artisty. On the train I kept thinking Matt would demand sex, in exchange for all the guidance he’s given me and all the life-changing gay sex he’d be hooking me up with at wild Montreal parties. But now it’s clear he’s gone to great lengths to short-circuit his sex drive with drugs, and he won’t be asking anything of me.

“Come on,” he says. “You’ll love it.”

I’m picturing crazy hallucinations: dust bunnies coming to life and talking to me, dragons and rainbows streaming in the window. Little men pouring out of his computer screen to tell me the secrets of the universe. I’m also picturing the possibility of spending the next several days trying to make conversation with Matt, with his brain’s volume turned almost all the way down. Which is why I say:

“All right, sure.”

“Great! Let me call my guy.”

He goes out into the hall to call his guy from the pay phone. I spend the next five minutes watching the street, filling up with snow fourteen floors down. Flakes come down in huge clumps. No clocks grace Matt’s walls, and my watch is somewhere in my backpack, so I have no idea what time it is, but it must be late in the day. The city, shrouded in white, is turning blue.

“Dude,” I yell, when he comes back in. “It’s my fucking spring break. How it can be so fucking cold in this city?”

“We’re practically at the North Pole,” he says. “It’s always like this, I think. That’s why I came here. I was going to run away to Florida, live on the beach, but I liked the idea of freezing cold wasteland. If there were boys running around in bathing suits, my will power would fly out the window.”

“Makes sense.”

“Did I tell you about my cat?” he asks.

“You said you had a cat named Leo in your dorm.”

“Yeah. So I never told you what happened to Leo?”

“No.”

“Well.” He gets up and starts to pace. “Did you ever see anyone get a cat high? It’s the craziest thing. You put it in a cabinet and then blow smoke in, until it’s totally full of smoke, and then you leave him in for like ten minutes. When it comes out it’s hilarious, it can’t walk straight, it’s twitching and shit. Hilarious.” He goes to the window and lights up a cigarette. For someone who spends his entire life in a narcotic haze, it’s funny how fussy he is about smoke in the air. He’d rather the place be freezing than have it smell of smoke. “So anyway I used to get Leo high all the time. And then one day I was out, right? And Leo jumped out the fucking window.”

“Are you serious?”

“Totally serious. And I lived on the tenth floor!” There’s that smile, cute as hell, but sort of cracked. Unfocused.

“Oh my god.”

“Yeah. Poor fucking Leo. I’m a terrible person. The moral of this story is: don’t get your pets high too often.”

Once the cigarette’s done, Matt keeps pacing until his drug dealer shows up. A shady, typical sort of guy. Scruffy hippy with thinning blond hair. He breezes in and out; he must not realize he’s Matt’s only friend.

“How come you’re using a pay phone?” I ask Matt, once Dealer leaves. “What happened to your cell phone?”

“Oh, man, I’m glad you asked. How much of a drama queen am I? On my way to Penn Station, I went to the piers and threw it in the Hudson River.”

“That’s deep.”

“Yeah, on a couple different levels. And then I called it from Penn Station. No one answered.”

“I imagine not.”

He puts the tab on my tongue and tells me to keep it there for half an hour. His finger tastes like smoke and ash in my mouth. I’m remembering horror stories we heard in Health class about acid laced with poison that turned smart kids into vegetables. And at the same time I’m excited-this is so bad-ass!  I am such a little punk. One more winning skirmish in the war on the status quo that started the first time I fantasized about swallowing some boy’s sperm.

Ten minutes in, Matt’s giddy and jumpy. “Are you feeling that? That feeling in your stomach?”

“Yes.” It was tingly, like nervousness.

He claps his hands. “I fucking love acid. I try to do it every day. It’s dirt cheap in Montreal. About half what it is in New York.”

“Am I going to see things that aren’t really there?”

“Nah, that’s mostly myth. You’ll see stuff, but nothing like monsters or people with horse heads. Just colors and lights. And trails. Whenever something moves, it leaves a trail. It’s not so much that it makes you see things, it’s that it changes the way you see things. Like, you’re used to seeing things from ground level, and now you’re looking down on things from the sky. So you’re seeing the same stuff, you’re just seeing it totally different.”

“Ah.”

“Acid comes directly from God. Forget the Bible-acid is God’s revelation of his will. When you’re on acid, everything makes sense. The meaning of life.” He sprawls himself across the couch, face down, kicking his legs like a swimmer, edgy with energy. “You’re at peace. You don’t want anything. Not sex, not money, not power. It’s like achieving Buddhist nirvana for eight straight hours. The problem is, you can’t take it with you. Once it wears off, you forget it. The secrets of the universe.”

“Why don’t you write it down while you’re high?”

“No good. I’ve tried. Everybody tries. It’s gibberish the next day. It’s not about any words, or meaning. It’s a new perspective-a whole shift in the way you see things.”

“That must be why hippie art sucks so bad,” I say. “Pink Floyd? I fucking hate that shit.”

“You’ll see. I’ll play you some Pink Floyd and you’ll fucking love it. I guarantee it. It’s fascinating.”

“I don’t think I want a drug that would make me like Pink Floyd.”

“Too late, dude!” Matt claps his hands some more, a fast flutter like hummingbird wings. “It’s working its way through your spinal column even as we speak.”

“So, let’s go back to the no sex thing. When you’re on acid you don’t want sex?”

“Yeah. That’s really what I love about it. Back at school I was doing a lot of Ecstasy, and drinking a lot, and those are both drugs that make you really crave intimacy, sex, people, love. What’s so great about acid is, it wipes all that away. Makes you see how much bullshit it all is-other people. Society. You know?  You see how there’s no difference between a brick or a building or a cow or a person. How we’re all just little blocks of matter. Nothing matters to anything. We all just happen to share this space.”

“Jeez, that sure sounds like something I’d want.”

“I know, it sounds scary, but it’s not. It’s totally liberating. Like-everything you stress, everything you’re afraid of, everything you want, it’s all meaningless. So it has no power over you.”

“Great,” I say.

“You’ll see.”

“I don’t think I want to see that everything I want or care about is meaningless.”

“Relax, Shane, for Christ’s sake. If you think negative, you’ll have a negative trip.”

Here are some of the things that happen to me:

• Things start leaving trails. My arm, raising a water glass to my lips. The headlights of taxis, fourteen stories down. The snow, falling.
• Pink Floyd does fascinate me. Especially accompanied by some kind of light show screen saver on Matt’s computer. We spend several hours watching it.
• The water I drink feels wrong, like instead of drinking water I’m engaged in some new biological process my body wasn’t capable of before. Which is a direct result of:
• All physical sensation strikes me as totally new, and unexciting. I pinch and pull at my own flesh and think: hmm. Sort of interesting. But not really.
• I’m not deranged with horniness. I spend a long time staring out Matt’s window, watching Montreal from this new perspective, and it’s amazing, a feeling of bliss so intense I’m close to tears, like the human world with all its ugliness and all the things I want so bad has lost its power to make me miserable anymore. The world makes sense.
• When I close my eyes, I can still see. When I try to go to sleep, I can’t.

But this is not a story about acid, and I won’t go rapturous detail like Matt does. Mostly I’m just feeling like every thing I see has been cut off from its context: its past, its personality, its purpose. I watch a guy shuffle along the sidewalk and I think to myself I bet he’s homeless-but I can’t for the life of me picture where he’s going or where he’s coming from. This is why acid appeals to Matt so much. Because it makes it seem like things don’t change, like we’re not living beings caught in processes bigger than us. Acid lets Matt believe he’ll stay in that apartment forever and never end up like that guy in the street, or his father, his savage bloodthirsty corporate-god-dad, with the three mistresses and the filing cabinet of pornography. 

He’s right: you can’t take it with you. The revelations dry up as the acid wears off. When I wake up to a grey in-between time that might be twilight but is probably dawn, most of my clarity and knowledge is gone.

Matt’s building bends into a half-circle, so I can see across into the apartment of some other guy on the same floor. He’s unpacking groceries; he’s about fifty. Just past handsome, well-dressed and living in a classy pad. In a flash, so vivid I suspect it’s a leftover fragment of LSD rattling around in my brain, I see myself in that apartment, in that life, boxed in by those eggshell-colored curtains.

My skin in the morning mirror is green, and my mouth is full of tin foil. It’s an odd hangover: I’m dehydrated, but after two glasses of water it becomes clear my body’s also thirsting for some weird nutrient that figures in no multi-vitamins. Only Matt’s computer has it.

Matt sleeps in his seat, shut eyes watching his screen saver. Color loops swirl and burst. Without waking him, I shuffle around until I find Madonna. The song picks up where it stopped, and I stand at the window watching Montreal shift from-or into-darkness. Snow still drifts. “Oh God, I think I’m falling,” the speakers say, and so we are.