Lads, page 15
We had made a commitment of our own to Parker, that we would stay and celebrate with him until the bitter end, but once we’d gotten over the novelty of the custom that dictates the bride and groom must kiss each other every time we rang our wineglasses with our spoons, and when we’d seen Keith and his wife toss pieces of bread at each other for about a half hour, we were bored. One by one, my four traveling companions got up from our table and migrated to a darkened corner of the ballroom, and I decided to follow.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Max reached into her purse and handed us each a single white pill, about the same size and consistency as generic aspirin. “This,” she informed me, “is Ecstasy, and we’re going to take it.”
“We wanted to invite you,” Ethan explained, “but we weren’t sure how you would react.” Understandably, I was shocked—shocked that my friends would assume I’d never done it before, even though I hadn’t, and shocked that they’d conclude I’d be afraid to try it, even though I was. And while I probably could have come up with a dozen cogent reasons why someone with a family history of drug abuse should not consume a highly potent controlled substance at a close friend’s wedding party, my curiosity and my outrage compelled me to pop that pill in my mouth and swallow it whole.
Max smiled at me. “Welcome to the summer of love,” she said.
The next several minutes were spent staring at our watches and into one another’s eyes, waiting for the drug’s effects to kick in. Not knowing what to expect, I could feel my pulse fluctuating rapidly, partly from the amphetamines that the Ecstasy had been cut with and partly from my apprehension that I would be the one person in a million who had an unpredictable, adverse reaction to it, the one who dropped dead on the spot, the one whose senseless passing would prompt headlines like STUPID JEW DIES IN EXPERIMENTAL DRUG BINGE; BEREAVED PARENTS ASK, “HOW COULD HE DO THIS TO US?” And then I became utterly convinced that these were my last moments to live, and my heart was going like mad and no I thought to myself no I mustn’t no and then—
Well.
The annals of recreational drug use are littered with forgotten pharmaceuticals that have tarnished the experience by failing to live up to their street names, but Ecstasy is not one of them. Once it takes effect, the high is so profound and all-encompassing that I can only describe it as religious—with just a single dose I wanted to rededicate my life to proselytizing its good deeds and converting the uninitiated. What if I told you that there existed a pill that would allow you to comprehend euphoria at the molecular level, that would let you feel every nerve ending in your body simultaneously and translate the slightest touch against your skin, by woman or by man, into the greatest, most relaxing sensation you had ever felt—would you take it? And if I said that this drug would take all the anxieties and social dysfunctions you’ve been harboring and melt them into ether, and let you enjoy loud Top 40 music and group sex and shiny, pulsating lights with equal gratification—would you want to try it? And if you knew there was a .01 percent probability of sustaining permanent spinal damage from ingesting it, would you still want to take it? Hell, even if there were a 78 percent chance of suffering a stroke and a 99 percent possibility that two of your limbs would fall off, would you still be interested? You’re goddamn right you would.
“Wow,” I said. “Wow. Wow.” My partners in crime laughed approvingly, each of us experiencing the onset of the drug differently—Alicia and Max carelessly holding each other’s hands for comfort, Harold and Ethan stumbling over themselves as they discarded their ties and loosened their collars. What I wanted to do most of all was make a phone call to my parents: I wanted to tell my mother and father that everything was going to be okay, that whatever had transpired between us was in the past, and that as human beings we could move forward, learn to help one another and love one another—that maybe one day, when they were ready for it, they could take the same trip I was currently on—we’d all do it together, and we’d all be able to see into one another’s souls with the same degree of clarity I was now enjoying. Then I realized these were precisely the sorts of things my father used to say to us when he got high.
Before I could find a phone, however, I was gripped by another impulse—a rush of blood to my bowels that had me sprinting madly for the nearest bathroom. I was being reborn, and now I was going to waste the earliest minutes of my second infancy sitting on the toilet. After finishing, I charged out of the men’s room and collided with Keith, who was on his way in. “Hey, sorry about that,” he said, apologizing for doing nothing wrong.
“Hey, Keith,” I gasped. I was gulping down air and trying to bite my front teeth with my lower jaw. “I gotta say, I think it’s fantastic that you came out to Parker’s wedding. It says a lot about you. You know, you’ve got a group of guys working for you who would do just about anything for you. You really saved us, you know that? I mean, we built this magazine with our hands—all of us did—with our blood and our sweat. It’s in us, it’s a part of us. We want it to succeed. And we want you to succeed. Sure, maybe we have some problems, but once we get them worked out, nobody’s gonna be able to stop us. It’s gonna be awesome. It’s—it’s just gonna be awesome.”
Keith nodded at my every word as if it all meant something. “I know, man, I know,” he said, placing his hands on my shoulders. “But I really have to take a piss.”
Back inside the ballroom, I spotted Max standing at the perimeter of the dance floor and propped myself up against her spindly frame for support. “You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?” she asked.
My fingers were making only a microscopic amount of contact with her waist, but with the sensation magnified by a factor of one million, it was at once more pleasurable than the most deviant sex act I had ever engaged in. “Could I ask you a question?” I said to her. “Would you make out with me? It wouldn’t have to mean anything. I just want to see what it feels like.”
“No!” she shrieked. “I am not going to make out with you. Why don’t you go find Alicia?” I had been shot down, yet the rejection stung not even one tiny bit. It was comical—I actually felt better about myself for having asked and having been turned away. Boy, if only life were really like this!
Max was right, though—it would be fun to share this with Alicia. But the ballroom had become a demolition derby of sweaty guys, slam-dancing groomsmen colliding into one another, and aged husbands momentarily freed from their drunken wives making spastic, fist-shaking motions in an effort to keep up with the youngsters. Occasionally I’d see Alicia’s head bob up, looking lost in her own universe, the makeup melting off her skin and a plastic glow-in-the-dark band wrapped around her head as if it were a crown of laurels. Surrounded as she was, I could not bring myself to approach her—I was living through every depressing bar mitzvah celebration, every miserable high school social, all over again, except that this time I was tripping my face off.
Finally, somebody invited me to take a whirl around the room, only it was my boss’s wife. “You wanna dance?” Leslie demanded, one of her eyelids half-shut and the other fluttering wildly. She stood a good foot and a half shorter than Keith, but she was a compact powerhouse of a woman whose itty-bitty body had carried two children to term and cranked them out into the world. She had trained the well-behaved tots almost as perfectly as her husband, who had an uncanny sense for when Leslie was about to call him and would smother his phone as if it were a live grenade whenever he suspected she was on the line. If Keith couldn’t fight her, what chance did I have?
“I don’t really like to dance,” I argued unconvincingly.
“C’mon,” she persisted. “What’re you, shy?” With the conviction of someone who knew shy when she saw it, she grabbed me by a floppy arm and pulled me onto the dance floor.
Now I realize that I am not arriving at a deep anthropological insight by stating that a dance shared between a man and a woman is not merely about arrhythmic gyrations poorly timed to some prefabricated pop song—it is a means of gauging a potential partner’s attraction to you while communicating your own level of interest. If Leslie understood this as well, she expressed herself by gently placing a hand on each of my buttocks. Like a divining rod desperately pointing the way to sustenance, my body responded in the only way it knew how.
“Leslie,” I whispered, “you’re going to get me fired.”
“Loosen up,” she said. “Do you think Keith cares?” She pointed to her husband standing among the wallflowers. He was smiling pleasantly at us while I did my best not to grind my erection into his wife’s pelvis. So I dropped my resistance and let my hands find her hips, let them work their way lower and lower along her body, waiting for a cry of “Stop it!” that never came. And somewhere in Parker’s wedding album, there is probably a photograph of me dancing with Leslie, me with my tousled hair and my fogged-up glasses, she practically falling out of her dress, both of us looking like hell, with the devil in our eyes. But between the two of us, only I can legitimately claim that I was under the influence of a synthetic psychoactive neurotoxin.
My good name and my livelihood were rescued by Max’s timely intervention, by her forcibly inserting herself between Leslie and me at the start of the next song. I was set free to explore the crowd in my state of cosmic awareness, to ricochet indiscriminately from Max and Leslie, who wanted to playfully assault me with their rear ends; to Ethan and Harold, who seemed not at all uncomfortable dancing with each other; to Parker, who in spite of everything was easily the most overjoyed person in the room, looking like a Chippendales dancer, stripped down to his tuxedo pants and shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his biceps; and, at last, to Alicia.
“Hey, baby,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “Having a good time?”
“I don’t think I could possibly be any happier to see you,” I said. I draped my weary, perspiring self around her, and she carried me around the room, slow-dancing to our own imaginary sound track, while she ran the tips of her fingers along my scalp to let me feel the electricity in her hands. “You wanna get out of here?” she asked me.
“You know it,” I told her.
She put her hand in mine and hustled us out of the ballroom, past friends and relatives without so much as saying good-bye, past the hotel clerks and concierge, and out into the night, all the while our fingers tapping out coded messages to each other as we ran. It was not even ten o’clock, but the streets were empty, as if everyone in the entire country had gone to bed. Alicia sat at the edge of a fountain in the hotel courtyard, and though I could visualize myself tearing off all my clothes and diving in, I stopped short at peeling off my shoes and socks and dipping my toes in the coin-filled pond.
“I’m mad at you, you know,” she said, watching the fountain jets shoot streams of water into the air.
“What? Why?”
“I don’t understand why Max and I weren’t allowed to come to the bachelor party.”
“Alicia, may I point out that I am higher than I have ever been before? Is this really the best time to bring this up?”
“Well, I’m sorry, but we’re both really pissed off about it.”
“Who says I’m the one that makes the rules? It’s a bachelor party—that means no women allowed. If you don’t like it, take it up with the other guys.”
“I’m not taking it up with the other guys. I’m taking it up with you. I don’t think of you like the other guys, all right? I thought you were better than that.”
“Let me explain something to you: I am not better than anyone else. I am not sweet, and I am not caring, and I am not special. I’m just a guy, okay? And I’m just like every other guy you’ve ever known. Nothing more.”
She was silent, except for the sound of her teeth grinding against themselves. “So that’s it, then? So I guess I don’t mean anything more to you than anyone else in that office? I’m just another coworker who goes in and out of your life?”
Under the cover of Ecstasy, it was tempting to admit that she meant so much to me that I would have been willing to give up my life for her—and that I almost did—and that at this moment I would have liked nothing more than to bury my face between her legs until the Québécois were given their own independent state. “This job is meaningless,” I told her. “It has been a waste of time since the day I showed up, and every time I think it’s going to get better, it gets worse. But if having met you is all I get out of it, then it was worthwhile, and I’m a better person for it.”
“You really mean that?” she asked.
I thought I did, so I nodded yes.
“C’mere, babe.” She reached out and lowered my head into her lap. “Do you like Leonard Cohen?” she asked.
“I don’t know his music that well,” I said, turning over to look up at her. “It’s kind of a gap in my education.”
“That’s too bad.” We had all of Canada to ourselves, and as she continued to tickle my scalp, Alicia started to sing:
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
I know that Leonard Cohen songs are supposed to sound ominous and frightening, but when you are high and someone you are deeply attracted to is massaging your temples and singing them to you, they’re just sublime. Try it for yourself sometime and tell me if you disagree.
The passage of my life can be measured out in missed opportunities and misread signals, in women who, at a certain time, might have gone out with me or gone down on me, if only I had been a different person in those circumstances. Those circumstances made me the person I am, and they are the regrets I will carry, and occasionally masturbate to, for the rest of my life. Just this once, though, I was content to let the moment slip past me, knowing there was nothing to regret because there was no more intimacy to be gained. I didn’t know how much further she would have been willing to go, and I didn’t need to know. She was fully clothed, and she was showing me everything.
“We should probably go find everyone else,” Alicia said, and we put our wet feet back into our socks and shoes and walked back to the hotel.
“Hey, do people have sex on this stuff?” I wondered.
“I can’t see how,” she said. “It’s supposedly really difficult for guys to get it up while they’re high.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure of that.”
The festivities had since been relocated to Keith’s hotel suite, and I couldn’t even tell you how Alicia and I knew this or how we found ourselves there. Harold, Ethan, and Max were sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor, while Leslie had tucked herself into bed and Keith had stripped down to just a T-shirt and boxer shorts. The air was thick with marijuana smoke, and Keith’s eyes were squinty and pink with blood. I’d picked up hints from his behavior that he was a man who enjoyed a rich, satisfying toke—his proficiency with paper clips, his encyclopedic recall of the lyrics of Steely Dan—but I had never before seen him in action while he was stoned, and he was a markedly improved person. The closet comedian inside of him was unleashed, and everything he saw or touched became the subject of a comic riff. He was dynamic, alert, and clever—the complete opposite of what every other human being on earth becomes when they smoke pot—and the rest of us sat in rapturous amazement at the recital of his marijuanalogue.
On a thin hotel pen Keith found lying next to his telephone: “This pen is the perfect size and shape required for rolling joints. Do you think the people who designed this hotel were secretly stoners? I bet that all the lamps in this room are bongs in disguise.”
On a tiny pair of high-heeled pumps that Max had crammed her feet into: “You can tell this shoe must have been designed by a man, because it’s actually a portable torture device. If you want to see conclusive proof that men really hate women, just take a look at women’s shoes.”
On a basket of multicolored candies sitting on his minibar: “What if you were a superhero, but your only power was being able to tell what flavor a candy was before you tasted it? You have teammates who can fly, who have X-ray vision—you can look at a green candy and tell whether it’s apple or watermelon. When is that ability going to be useful?”
I had to believe that Keith and Leslie were the coolest married couple in the world. Right now their children were safe in the hands of grandparents or a baby-sitter, safe in the belief that their mom and dad were loving caregivers and reliable providers, while their parents were getting drunk and smoking dope and partying in their pajamas with a bunch of E’d-up guests a decade their junior. They had it all, and I cursed myself for all the years I’d spent in fear of drugs, carrying a needless and prudish aversion to the tools we give ourselves to cope with our intermittently underwhelming and overwhelming lives, all because of one guy who couldn’t find a middle ground between abstinence and excess.
As we left Keith’s room, we were crashing pretty hard. Ecstasy is a tough drug to come down from, not just physically, but spiritually: One moment you are having the absolute best time of your entire life, and the next you’re having only the second best, and the degree of difference between the two states is immeasurable, and it is crushing. When you know that you have it within you to experience that heightened state of bliss, how can you stand to look at the world as it is, without that enhanced perception, without that special shine, ever again? Harold did not even have the strength to get himself into bed—he paused to rest on the floor, and that was where his evening came to an end. For all the carnality that had been in the air and in our serotonin receptors that night, none of us had benefited from it. When I woke up around noon the next day, everyone was sound asleep in his or her respective bed, except for Harold, who was still on the floor.
There was a farewell breakfast scheduled for the new Mr. and Mrs., before they departed on their honeymoon hike across the Appalachian Trail, where Parker and his wife would consummate their marriage as jagged rocks poked her in the ass, but we had slept through it. There was nothing to do except pile back into the van and begin the return trip to New York, nursing the kind of hangover whose severity had not been seen since Sodom and Gomorrah were wiped off the map. In a manner known only to himself, Harold had somehow burst a blood vessel on his face and was sporting a black eye.
