Free Shuck by Daniel Allen Cox Page B

judgmental people ready to label you an addict, conveniently forgetting the substances they funnel into their own bodies, and the reasons they do it. Maybe you’re one of them.
    Like you’ve never loaded up on sugar to keep depression from dragging you down. You have never saturated your bloodstream with caffeine to give yourself just one more hour, frantically wasting another sixty minutes of your life. You have never been swimming in so much alcohol that drowning sounded like a fun proposition.

    You have never worshipped a little cylindrical god packed with nicotine, pausing before you lit it to make sure you had at least one more left.
    You have never used another person as a tool to hit that orgasmic sweet spot.
    In the words of my friend Richard: yeah, right.
    Another reason I don’t talk about it is because it’s impossible to describe how tweaking feels. I can say that when I shovel a thumb of meth into a can of Red Bull for midnight breakfast, it coasts into me like it’s riding in a limousine, but you won’t understand unless you’ve done it. I can say that there’s a little animal that tickles me with its furry hooves, but it would be meaningless. You won’t understand the high of staying up for three days straight and rooting through trash cans for fun things to take apart, like inferior shoes held together with glue. You won’t understand the thrill of watching the city from a distance—the morning coffee scramble, the screams and fights and sales pitches, the squeals and crashes and depressed laughing, the scrape of shoes and tires, the drunken yawns and stumbling home—and being immune to it all.
    It’s impossible to explain what being a vampire feels like.
    The main reason I don’t talk about it, though, is because I’m not addicted. There’s a difference between a user and an abuser. I know better than to let a drug take over my life.

    Guys I’d like to fuck:
    Lower East Side nihilists, twenty-four, twenty-five. Subdermal implants
and other body modification that fucks with the social order one patch of skin at a time. Pants slung low on the hips, and truck mud flaps sewn on the ass, dragging down six inches of crack as a statement. Trucker hats are their only nod to pop culture. They stomp around with this sexy look on their face like they would rather you committed suicide. Inexplicable yet pleasingly macho fascination with trucks.
    Computer geeks, nineteen, twenty. Tall, lanky, hunching around with laptops underarm. The sexy rings under their eyes attest to long nights trawling for Internet porn. Don’t get enough sunlight to grow their patchy facial hair more evenly. You can see their dangly cocks flopping commando-style in their pants, cocks as long as their nailbitten typing fingers. They stink gloriously of B.O. and semen.
    Queer-as-fuck goth boys. They hurt too beautifully.
    I’m also a boyeurist and a bona fide homeless-sexual. The more scruffy and out-of-pocket, the better.

    Shiatsu rub with circulatory something.
    Honcho cover, July 1999. Gay life partners Kim and Rick shoot me in front of a giant American flag, combing my pubic hair, doting over me like I was their prize poodle. I’m wearing an army jacket that’s so big it’s falling off. I wrap myself in the flag and give them my toughest sneers. It’s not military enough, so I have to wave around this black plastic revolver. After the shoot, they insist that I watch them have sex. Weird.
    Fan letter to Honcho , August 1999:
    Dear Honcho ,
    Can I have Jaeven’s email address? If not, please tell him that I served in Iraq in the Gulf War, and every day I prayed I would run into someone as hunky as him in the munitions shed or in the showers after all the other soldiers had left. When are you going to do a shower scene with him? I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s asked. It would be great to see that ass all lathered up. I wouldn’t