Rehab

You come from a dream/But I can’t close my eyes anymore

How do women have sex?, asks “the little queer” (according to the schizophrenic junkie from Ketchickan, Alaska: “my schizo-oh-FRAY-nia,” he calls it, like a lost half-brother, a fetus in fetu with the gift of prophecy, but also the habits of a sodomite, or like one of the girls he fucks in Seattle in exchange for meth, climbing out the window after he finally cums to sleep on the streets, to float in the deranged idiom of his dreams, the dreams of a simultaneous pimp and gigalo). He brings me and X cups of tea as we court each other. He’s hoping for a threesome, though his dick doesn’t work, he keeps complaining. I can’t even jerk off in this fucking place, he says. He looks like a balding Jim Morrison at twenty-three. He’s terminally unlikable and only knows the beginning of a couple songs on the piano, which he plays incessantly (“Imagine”…). He  hangs around with us at night, the last ones up on the smoking patio. I made the mistake of telling him I was bisexual. It caused him to freak out. So, like, you let dudes suck your dick?, he says. If I told him I only sucked dick he wouldn’t understand. He agrees with Milo Yiannopolous on flamboyant gay people. He wears a rosary and talks to his mom on the phone every day, conversations that always end with him bawling. She controls his life. He punched his dad and got sent to Santa Rita. He has a court case pending and talks a lot about the fate of his ass in prison. He’s stumbled out of a Genet novel, the sacrificial victim. X came in last night, or the night before. I don’t know, I’m worried I have anteretrograde amnesia. She’s been here five or six times before, knows the entire staff, used to party with some of them in San Francisco, later in Santa Rosa. She’s black and native, has face tats. She’s the only “brown person” in the place besides the chicano tweaker from San Antonio who sides eternally with the gringos at the Alamo, sees the ghosts of Civil War soldiers two or three times a year, and tells the story to anyone who will listen about how “bad pussy” was his downfall, a story involving the almost pornographic malice of an ex-wife and her succubus best friend working with a phantasmagoria of narcos and hackers to ruin his life. X was still high when she came in (they say she came in with something, but I choose not to believe them). She’s fanatically self-destructive and beautiful. I think she’s saintly in her recklessness, the way she keeps her eyes open in this amniotic joke of a world, always one step ahead, even when she’s sentimental and repetitive (everyone’s sentimental and repetitive, especially here), especially when she’s lying. I was born with meth in my blood, on the rez, she likes to say. She always manages to have her own room because she steals from all her roommates. Of course I fall in love with her. She tells me to google her to see her mugshot in the Santa Rosa newspapers. A high-speed chase in a stolen vehicle, drugs and weapons recovered, etc. The other guy’s my dealer, maybe my boyfriend. He says he’s in love with me but he has three children and a wife. I look at his mugshot. He’s a white guy who’s almost ugly. Her first boyfriend used to beat her viciously while she was pregnant and she lost the baby. But I only find this out later. She has a tattoo of her birthmom’s initials in the shape of an H on her right cheek (she has the high cheekbones of an actress: she looks a lot like Tessa Thompson: I don’t tell her that, I wonder if I think that just because she’s a hot light-skinned black girl). H because she died of an overdose, she says. Her birthmom used to write her letters from prison when she was a kid but her adoptive parents kept them from her until she was eighteen. She went to Arizona to see her. They had two year together, as mother and daughter, before she OD’d. That’s when I really started using, she says. One night she sits outside my room in a chair she brought from her room as she relaxes her hair. I was living on the streets in the Tenderloin, she says, that’s why I look like shit right now. Well that and the meth, she laughs. I don’t think she looks like shit at all. I tell her that (the little queer is always telling her, You’re so beautiful, you know, like he’s trying out heterosexuality, heterosexual sentimentality). She talks a lot about meth but it’s fentanyl that’s going to kill her, or alcohol. We share a blanket through the doorway so as not to break any rules. We’re about to break a lot of rules but we’re both enjoying this ridiculous eroticism, this ridiculous regression. A parody of innocence, the only paradise I’ll ever know, or want to know. I’m thirty-three years old. She’s ten years younger. The girls in their thirties here look at me with the most abject horror, like the wild-eyed Dostoevskian fuckboi I am (or the one I see in the mirror: this dialectical behavioral therapy isn’t working, I think, it’s a barbarous mockery of dialectics, it requires the total abolition of mirrors). I think a couple of them are fucking the guy who looks like a cartoon version of a shiny, bald, priapic IDF colonel. He’s very spiritual and talkative, completely Oedipal. We hate each other but only express it with our homicidal eyes. I’m waiting for him to say something so I can bash his skull in. Some of the girls in their thirties read Ken Kesey and Brave New World. What have I been reading? Only books about drugs. A little Burroughs until I remember that I hate Burroughs (a pig who turned his homosexuality inside out until it operated as surveillant sadism, a kind of Ur-Border Patrol agent). A book on harm reduction so that I can fantasize about a future with alcohol in it, a future that in my mind, for some reason, contains the image or the imago of Huey Newton drinking mojitos on the beaches of Havana, inertial and depressed, languishing in the long hangover of the revolutionary 1970s, a hangover that never truly ended. A book that retells the history of the Second World War as a projection on the screen of Hitler’s drug-addled brain, a book in which injections from the testicles of various animals into Hitler’s bloodstream count for more, for Weltgeschichte, than the entire Red Army. A book about the opiate and heroin epidemics spreading through middle America through the unconscious symbiosis of Mexican goblins (mom-and-pop cartels from Nayarit) and Communist/Jewish demons (the Sackler family). And Pierre Guyotat, who I conclude is the only true bisexual. I don’t jerk off in rehab, but unlike the little queer, it’s not because I can’t. I don’t know why I’m becoming a left-wing practitioner of Nofap. I find myself overtaken by the unfamiliar desire to “make love,” without recourse to humiliation, sadomasochism, or fantasy. The night X sits outside my room, I tell her about the assignment my therapist gave me: prove to me you are worthless. I read what I scribbled down out loud to her (the insufficiency of my love, no sense of spirituality, obsessed with sex in a misogynist world, etc.). Then I turn the page in my notebook. Each page has a subject box. I write “X’s worthlessness” and hand the notebook to her. She writes for a while, her face poised in a look of concentration I’ve never seen from her. She hands it back. “Obsessed w/ ruining all good relationships in my life because I believe I deserve no love in my life. Any sex I have I think the other person deserves all the pleasure…all the self loathing has to do with the fact that I am not beautiful and I have never never”…The text trails off. I turn the page and write, “X deserves.” She writes: “sex because she is a human being who has never felt any compassion for herself and always cared way too much about what others thought about her…I have had a total of two legit boyfriends and have not cum more”…We don’t make love that night. I lean into smell her neck after her shower. My sense of smell is coming back. I feel myself getting hard from mutual tenderness, maybe for the first time. I’d like to have a vagina for a day, the little queer says the next night. Everyone should, X says. It’s nice…She looks at me with the look she’s been giving me since she got here, that look of sultry expectation, an almost pleading look. At the end, when my alcoholism had gotten to a place of pure dionysian suicidal sickness, I decided I wanted to be a woman. I texted M and told her I was going to transition. What’s your hbogo password?, she texted back. Now I feel my peculiar form of masculinity, of heterosexuality, coming back (Lou Reed’s heterosexuality, Guyotat’s bisexuality, Pasolini’s homosexuality, etc.). I can’t remember if I fell in love with X before or after we fucked. Probably after. I don’t know when she fell out of love with me, or if she did. This is my first rehab, and the first time I’ve fallen in love in rehab. Before this I used to go to detox centers with no intention of getting sober, in order to reboot my system. At every detox center I met a girl, but I never fell in love with any of them. We would fuck in the bathrooms, or on the couch late at night, or we’d fuck when we got out. We’d break our sobrieties together, like breaking a fast. My therapist here says that I’m a sex and love addict. I don’t disagree, but I don’t see anything wrong with it. I’m serious about getting sober though. It’s getting late, well past lights out, and the little queer isn’t taking any hints. Someone from the staff comes out every ten minutes to tell us to go to bed. After this cigarette. It would be easier if Bill were working tonight. Bill’s a 300-pound bodybuilder with Iron Cross tattoos and a heart of gold. The tattoos are presumably from a past life, probably a life in prison, a life he’s put behind him. Tonight it’s Denise, who’s making things hard for us. It’s because she’s a black woman, X says. She knows I was raised by white parents and she sees me chasing after a white boy. Wants to be the black mama I never had. Fuck her. The little queer goes inside to get something from the kitchen and I follow him. Hey man, would you mind giving us some space for a bit?, I ask him. I’ve bummed him a total of three or four packs of cigarettes and I’ve always been nice to him, even when everyone else stopped talking to him. Still, something like this could set him off. He gets a little sniffly. Are you two gonna’ fuck?, he asks. No, I assure him. We just want to talk. I’m never one to come between true love, he says, almost too sincerely, and goes to his room. X takes me by the hand to the side of the house. This is where all the rehab babies are made, she says. I don’t want children, but with X I do, the desire to have children with her erupts in me from some dark, Cambrian place. She’s already brought the topic of us having kids up. Fuck, she says. This place used to just be grass. Now it’s a big patio, brightly lit even in the middle of the night. We return to the front of the house towards a little garden that’s plunged in shadows. There are cameras out here, she says, abstractly. We kiss for the first time. I want her desperately, but I feel no urgency. What I feel is a cold, anonymous desire, the nocturnal desire of a secret agent or an arsonist. She gets on her knees and takes my pants off, starts to suck my dick. I think the other person deserves all the pleasure. Relax, she says. After a minute or two I lift her up and kiss her again. Now I go down on my knees and take her pants off. She has thick pubic hair. I don’t know why I notice this, or why I like it. I start to eat her pussy. Fuck me, she says. She leans against the house and I slip inside her from behind. I don’t use a condom, naturally. I never use a condom anymore, I’m not even sure when I stopped using them (these little rituals of social hygiene have lost all meaning for me). I want to make her cum and I want, of course, to cum inside her. Then I hear a loud bang. There’s a man I’ve never seen before standing behind the door, about twenty feet away. We laugh and put our clothes on in a hurry. I grope on the ground for my glasses, find them. We go back to the smoker’s patio and light cigarettes. You have a nice dick, she says. Thanks, I say. The next morning my therapist calls me into her office. I don’t listen to most of her harangue. I smirk like the permanent adolescent I am. I crack up when she says, We don’t fuck the other patients in rehab. Why the first person plural?, I wonder. I’m thirty-three years old, I tell her, axiomatically. X and I sign contracts to never be alone together. That day we don’t say a word to each other. I don’t go to classes (truthfully my attendance was never that exemplary in the first place). I spend my time chain-smoking and reading in my room, or staring off into space. Love always triggers an intense, sensual depression in me. I’ve talked about this with my therapist. My balls ache, I touch myself for a bit thinking of X, but I have no desire to cum. I have to do something to take the edge off this depression, this inner collapse, so I start writing questions down for X, insane questions in my indecipherable handwriting, questions that aren’t meant to elicit answers so much as provoke mania. Questions like: “Are you completely sincere?”, “If you were in love with someone, could you fuck for days w/out stopping, w/out drugs or shame?”, “Does it turn you on to be fucked by someone who doesn’t love or respect you?”, “Would you follow someone you loved to the brink of madness/catastrophe?,” “Can you make yourself cum?”, “Do you like to get fucked in the ass?”, “Is it better to be dead?”, “Are you loyal to the point of masochism?”, “Do you believe violence is inevitable?”, “What do you think about when you masturbate?”, “How do you envision the end of the world? of capitalism?”, “Who had the biggest dick of the guys you’ve fucked? Who fucked you the best?” “Is naivete a crime?”, “What do you do with brutal people?”, etc. etc. That night Alexander waddles out onto the smoking patio. He has that goofy, conspiratorial expression he makes when he wants to start a conversation. I know he knows about X. The staff like to talk. Alexander works here. He used to party with X back in San Francisco. He must have been a completely sloppy, degenerate drug user, I think. He’s obese and has Aspergers, though he denies he has Aspergers. X says he’s madly in love with her. I believe her. Alexander is definitely a virgin, in that no man’s land between incel and volcel. He likes to talk to me about inane philosophical puzzles, hacktivism, his schemes to make money, systems theory (whatever that is), the meaning of addiction. Tonight, for once, he doesn’t have his dinner leftovers dribbling down his face. He wants to talk about X, play the big brother role. Something about her past, her trauma. She hangs with a lot of dangerous people, he says, seemingly out of nowhere. I can handle myself, I say. Be careful, is all I’m saying. He gets up and walks away. The days start going by faster. I find out my insurance won’t cover me past the end of the week. I smoke more, work out less. I try to get to know the local fauna (the fainting goats, the water buffalo, etc.) but I get bored. I play basketball by myself or with my Alaskan friend. He likes to play horse because each letter in succession constitutes an enigmatic signifier for drugs or sex. I teach him how to make a Facebook account so we can stay in touch, but I know he’ll forget his password (he knows if he ever gets a phone he’ll sell it for dope). The little queer leaves because, he concludes, everyone in this house is fucking crazy. He’s mostly right. X and I keep our distance from each other. She’s started hanging out with this roly-poly guy who just got out of jail, who’s also adopted, a rich kid deadbeat with a seven-year prison sentence hanging over his head if he fucks up, which he will. The guy’s kind of a joke, but I’m not jealous. I’m depressed, I’m madly in love with her, I think about her all the time, but I’m not jealous. I’ve gained a certain capacity for distance, for ephemerality, for Buddhism, or the pseudo-Buddhism they teach here. Maybe to get even I start talking to her ex-roommate, an exuberant girl from Orange County who’s still loudly making drug deals on the phone. I want to get out of here. I want to be sober. I want to go back to Oakland. I want to go to Tijuana. I want to fuck someone else. I’m more convinced than ever that we are in the midst of a genocide the scale and malignity of which we’ve never seen, and that drugs, as always, are an essential weapon of necropolitics, of extermination. For the first time I can remember, I feel hopeful. I’m thirty-three years old. I don’t think I’ll make it to forty.