Me and ___…summer, 1994

"I have a drug problem and a love issue. Or maybe I have a love problem and a drug issue…"
-Alley Sheedy, "High Art"

He held the little brown bottle underneath my left nostril while I was on top and inside him. After inhaling while pushing in the opposite nostril, we would repeat the process on the right. Then I’d hold the bottle for him while he did the same. And then, our systems would flood and rush, expand and contract, our vision becoming blurry, then focused. Sometimes we could return the bottle to the nightstand before total immersion in our passion was complete. The feeling of being inside him, kissing him deeply, cradling his naked body, joined, locked, not wanting to breathe, under the influence of this drug amyl nitrate, was love itself.
We would meet each other’s thrusts, changing positions, clinging to the other with feverish intensity. Total arousal, spiritual and physical one-ness, an overwhelming sense of everything pleasurable and good, saturation of psychic and empirical senses, all possible from the contents of that little brown bottle.

The feeling would last only a few minutes, then we would do more, usually still joined, before the effects of the drug wore off entirely. Little yellow dots would appear before my eyes, travelling across my vision before dissipating. ___’s eyes were wide; his breathing in gasps, while his sphincter muscles tightened and relaxed around my penis. It was complete and total, sensual over-load. I would bring him closer to me, no space between our torsos, arms wrapped and clinging to the other, flooded with love, in physical and gaseous form.

"This isn’t wrong – how could this be wrong if it feels so good? I’m not bad – this isn’t bad, is it?" He would ask these types of questions during intercourse. He needed re-assurance. He needed to be told he was good. And I would always re-assure him, holding him close, both of us close to sexual ecstasy, that he was not bad, that we were not bad, that we were in love. Our passion, rising, our thrusts, synchronized, our orgasms, imminent.

By the time we came, our eyes were bloodshot, and our skin had taken on a yellowish, jaundiced pallor. This was the down side of constant inhalation and use of amyl nitrate. Afterward, the walls would return, the intense emotions of the recent past, were forgotten. His psychic distance, the aloof posturing, always came back.

Other than this altered state, emotional penetration of ______ was denied.

Sexual penetration was all he would ever allow.