True to his word
Gives back to the community
Conscious of conserving the environment and community resources
I need him to recognize we are not the first creatures here and we won’t be the last.
Will never cheat on me in any way
Again, relationship PTSD is a motherfucker.
Communicates with me openly and honestly
Likes his nipples kissed and sucked
What I really mean here is that he doesn’t let the performance of masculinity keep him from enjoying pleasure.
Pays attention to me
Acknowledges me
I’ve been with men who wanted to keep me secret, and I need a man who loves openly.
Moves with me when I travel
Doesn’t mind the occasional hard times or struggle
Please don’t bail as soon as things get rough.
Willing to get a vasectomy after we’ve had all the children we want
Again, I don’t know about children, but I still want him to get a vasectomy so we don’t have to worry about any accidents.
Enjoys sharing learning opportunities
Receptive to learning new things
Shares interests with me
Supportive and encouraging
This is last, but it’s not the least important to me at all. I added it after being in two relationships back-to-back in which my professional successes triggered my boyfriends into either trying to knock me down a peg or thinking of their own failures, so their congratulations were weak and sad. One time, when I’d gotten accepted into a writer’s retreat, my then boyfriend avoided my eyes as he said all the right words, and the next day, he entered the start of a depressive episode and boxed me out of his life. It made me feel like shit that my good news sent him spiraling. I vowed to myself that I’d never again be with someone who covered my good news in ashes.
The Night I Took Shrooms
I love Valentine’s Day. That’s probably not surprising, considering my love of romance novels (and heart-shaped earrings, which is a secret only my mother and the most observant would know about me). It’s become “cool” to shit on Valentine’s Day, to scold people who want big, sloppy expressions of love. “It’s a made-up holiday!” “You should tell people you love them every day!” “It’s about a massacre!” “You don’t have to spend money to celebrate love!” No shit, Sherlock. Every holiday is something someone made up. I’m not sure how people have translated Valentine’s Day into the only day you’re allowed to say “I love you.” I’ve never heard anyone say that. It’s like…if you celebrate your birthday, why don’t you celebrate it every day? You should be glad you’re alive every day, if we’re following that same logic, right?
Now I do agree that spending excessive amounts of money is unnecessary, but I think as social media has grown, people give big, ridiculous gifts in hopes of virality. People also want to prove they have someone who loves them lavishly. It’s why we have weddings and receptions, baby showers and gender reveals. It’s not just a joining of families; it’s acknowledgment. It’s verification. “I am human and I need to be loved,” and all that, like the Smiths said.
From elementary school until adulthood, I’ve always put more thought into giving Valentine’s Day gifts than their recipients did for me. I gave one boy what I thought was the perfect Garfield valentine—that said something about how cute he was—which he promptly showed to his friends, who laughed at me. Sometimes I’d build gift baskets of my boyfriend’s favorite things plus something he’d mentioned offhandedly. You know, to show I’d been paying attention to him. In return, I’d get a single red rose and a bunch of baby’s breath in red cellophane, bought from a hustler on the side of the road.
When I was dating The Russian, he made it clear he didn’t celebrate the holiday because it’s stupid American nonsense.
“Vhat is all thiis red? How minny holidays do yu people haff?” he asked me one day after he came back from the grocery store.
“It’s Valentine’s Day!” I chirped back at him, trying not to bounce in my seat. He clearly wasn’t feeling it.
“I don’t celebrate thet crap,” he sneered, but he kept his eyes lowered, knowing I probably liked it.
“Well, I do,” I said, deciding to take a stand. I used to back down and try to prove I was a Cool Girl who didn’t want anything sweet or goofy on the day. You know—see how low-maintenance I am? But I no longer wanted to pretend about any of the things that bring me pleasure or make me happy. Yes, sometimes I want a bouquet of luscious red roses and a restaurant date where I wear a red dress.
When the day came around, I gave him an anti-Valentine card that he put on his refrigerator. He made me a cup of tea.
On a day that’s supposed to celebrate having love in your life, I’ve usually been alone, even when I was with someone.
* * *
I met The Hippie on Bumble during summer 2018. He was such a gentrified Brooklyn white boy: scrawny, beard, long hair. There was one selfie in his profile of him standing on a cliff or maybe some hiking trail. I don’t know. There’s a beautiful vista of mountains and a periwinkle sky behind him. He’s looking, unsmiling, into the camera, his hair pulled back into a bun, his crow’s-feet oddly pronounced. He could’ve been twenty-five or forty-five, but I could tell by his eyes that he knew things. Things that would leave my body a quivering, satisfied mess. So I swiped right and it was a match.
He was from the West Coast and into landscaping and gardening, hiking, biking, and rock climbing, and he played guitar. Add in the long hair and the beard, and the reason for his nickname is clear. He spoke with the measured, unbothered tone of a Berkeley stoner, even though he didn’t smoke weed (anymore). He was very laid-back about everything, quick to smile, but he also questioned everything before answering—in a very annoying guy way.
ME: Hey. Have you seen this movie about the couple who bought a farm?
HIM: Why?
ME: CAN YOU JUST ANSWER THE QUESTION?
He was emotionally hard to read. We started out as a hookup situation. I met him at a restaurant bar not far from my shoebox apartment in Bed-Stuy. He rode his bike there. I asked a lot of questions, like had he ever been with a Black woman before, because I wanted to know if I was an item to check off a bucket list and I wondered if he was uncomfortable being the only white person in the place. He looked annoyed, but he answered me. His energy was weird, and his face was very closed-off, beyond the quick frown when I’d ask a blunt question, so I figured he wasn’t feeling me, even though I wanted to jump his bony bones. As I prepared to ask for the check, he asked if I wanted him to walk me back to my place, and I knew he was down.
It was maybe a five-minute walk to my building. He was ten years younger and maybe my height, although he swore he was two inches taller. (Don’t they all?) I’m pretty sure I outweighed him by at least fifty pounds, which was fine. I like skinny men. They fuck like the ocean. Rolling waves of pleasure that take you under and leave you gasping. And this boy…
I let him spend the night. I do not let men spend the night. I will kick you out at three in the morning. Hookups are not allowed to see the sun with me: Don’t get comfy. You’ve done what I needed you to do, now good night.
But The Hippie…I fell into a deep, snoring sleep almost immediately after that first round. Wow.
We weren’t really compatible. There was the age gap. He was still getting over an ex, and I was rebound practice. I wanted dick on a weekly basis, but he was too busy and I lived too far away for convenient booty calls. I texted more than he liked. He was not a good communicator and definitely didn’t sext. He assumed any kindness on my part meant I was falling in love. He didn’t give compliments…unless he was drunk or microdosing.
The Hippie would go camping and come back glowing. That’s how much he loved nature. One time I was house-sitting for some friends in the Catskills, and they let me invite him up. He spent one night out in the woods somewhere, and when he
came back the next morning, he looked like he was levitating. It was honestly kind of beautiful. He also came back with a weird collection of mushrooms. We sat at the dinner table, and he flipped through an encyclopedic book on fungi, hoping to catalog the types he’d found. I do not like mushrooms—not to eat, not to look at. They have no taste, and they remind me of death and neglect. Meanwhile, this skinny pile of orgasms goes out and forages for the things and makes psychedelics from them.
The Hippie told me about microdosing, and obviously I knew about shrooms and the like since the days of reading Go Ask Alice. I’ve listened to “White Rabbit.” I’m hip. But my mom had warned me about how that “white people shit,” also known as acid or LSD, had messed with my uncle and father, so that’s kept me away from anything harder than alcohol or weed.
One of my mom’s younger brothers was an artist. He’d gone to school thirty to forty-five minutes outside of Nashville in the 1970s and started hanging out with other artsy students, most of them white. One day, my grandmother got a call to come get him. He’d had a bad trip on something, no one knew what, and none of his so-called friends were around. Supposedly, he never got over the experience and, as a result, became an alcoholic, and he wouldn’t take his psychiatric medicine because it interacted poorly with his liquor. I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation with him. He was the silent uncle who stayed in his room at the back of the house. No one saw him unless he shuffled through, looking like a ghost, into the kitchen and back to his room.
“My brother could draw. He was doing really well. Then he did that white people shit, and he ain’t been right since,” Mama spat out more than once in my childhood.
When my father had dabbled with drugs, he’d been in the navy, and my mom and sister joined him in San Diego. This was before I came along, but Mama said she tried to get pregnant with me while out there, hoping to enjoy his military benefits and to get him to act right. He’d already been displaying abusive behavior, but Mama thought if she gave him his own baby, he’d grow up and stop “smoking dope.” This was the mid-1970s, and there was a group of “dopeheads,” as my mother called them, living in the same apartment building. My father would spend most of his time with them when on leave from the base.
One day (it’s always some random clear-blue day), Mama got a call to come see my father in the military hospital. He’d had some kind of episode. When she arrived, my father stared at her like he had no idea who she was. His eyes were wide and scared. She said he looked like he was seeing things that weren’t there. He never told her what happened, and none of his superiors would tell Mama either. He was given an honorable discharge and was never the same. They moved back to Nashville, and Mama got pregnant with me. She thinks he had some “white people shit” that sent him on a bad trip and caused a mental breakdown.
“We can’t do the same stuff they can. They can take all that acid shit and be all right, but we can’t,” she told me. “It’s just like how white people gave the Indians liquor and it killed them. We all human but we ain’t the same.”
Even after the breakdown, my father used to do coke. The living room was next to my brother’s and my bedroom. Sometimes late at night, I’d hear him snorting, and I’d check under my pillow to make sure the knives I kept were still there. I’d purposefully rusted them, scratching at them with rocks and pouring alcohol and water over the blades before letting them sit out in the sun. I knew if I had to stab him in order to defend Mama from his coked-out, drunken rages, I wouldn’t be able to put a lot of power behind it, but maybe he could get an infection and die from that. (I’d read a lot of historical romances that featured war veterans and battlefield doctors—shout-out to Ashes in the Wind1 by the god Kathleen Woodiwiss.)
I recently had to put my virtual therapy on hold, but it doesn’t take a therapy session to know the real reason I tend to stay away from hard shit is because it always makes me think of my father and the pain he caused our household, especially Mama. There’s a history of addiction on both sides of my family, and I’ve spent my whole life trying to break all the damaging cycles I could. I didn’t want to risk becoming like my father—or dying over some bad shit, which honestly feels like it would be the same.
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t had the chance to try it. In high school, a classmate would drop acid in her eye and write some incredible disjointed poetry and prose. Another classmate offered me ecstasy to get me loose enough to take advantage of me. (I declined.) An ex told me all about raves and rolling, but I’ve always been afraid, my mother’s stories never far from my mind. That shit can leave you vulnerable to predators, vomiting, jail, and death. For all the beautiful colors and heady sexual encounters you might have, maybe someone, in the middle of a trip or in his desperation to go score again, will tie you up in bed and then abandon you all day, like in the movie Spun, and you have no idea how you’ll be able to get out. I don’t want to deal with any of that.
My thoughts about “hard” drugs changed after an experiment in my late thirties. A colleague turned friend gave me some GHB, the date rape drug, which was also supposedly a gay guy party drug. He told me he took it on a monthly basis, and since he was still a functioning member of society, I reasoned maybe I wouldn’t have a bad experience with it. Plus I felt like I’d been trying so many new things after years of following all the main rules, which had not given me the relationship or career everyone said it would. I’d taken a chance on exploring BDSM and dating white men. Why not a little G? Fuck it.
He gave me detailed instructions on how to use it—a clear liquid with the viscosity of water—and I combed the internet for all the horror stories I could find. I read the expected reports about men using it to rape people. But also personal essay after personal essay about men who’d lost best friends and lovers to overdoses at sex parties and raves. Too much of it could send you into a coma. I kept texting my friend for clarity: How often do you use this? What does it feel like? What should I look out for?
I was 75 percent sure I’d finally try some serious shit and die in my sister’s guest bedroom.
My friend told me to take a specific amount in some juice, so I took nine-tenths of the amount he suggested. I put it in some orange juice and chugged it. My heart was a nervous drum inside my chest. I had water and my phone next to me while I lay on my back in bed. I tried to pay attention to how much time had passed and began to wonder if maybe I wasn’t going to feel anything. Then my crotch got warm. My nipples had a pulse. Every erogenous zone on my body felt like a fairy with a surprisingly large tongue was licking it. My entire body grew hot, and a smile spread across my face. I felt very good.
When I get too high, I feel colors. At a party once, after a bunch of layoffs had affected me and my team, people kept pressing me for details and gossip. I was cross-faded, drunk and high as hell, and because all anyone wanted to talk about was reliving this terrible, unpredictable thing, I had to leave. I told the host, “I feel like cracked blue, and everyone is peeling me.” Sometimes, when the environment is good, I feel like a gold shimmer.
That evening on G, I felt like a bright, humming green. The pulses of my body drew my hands and fingers, and the orgasm was probably the loudest I’d ever had while alone. I pressed my face into my pillows, even though no one else was home; then I got scared I’d suffocate so I threw the pillows to the floor and promptly fell asleep. My friend had told me not to go to sleep, to try to walk around with the high, but I felt too good, and I definitely didn’t want my sister or nephew to come home and find me lying out on the floor.
It was the most restful sleep I’d ever had. When I woke up, I felt a bit of a hangover, like when you sleep too much. And yet I woke up. I didn’t die, and I didn’t feel some incredible jones to do it again. In fact, I kept the vial of G hidden away and took it only one more time after I’d moved to New York. I think I used even less than what I’d taken before, because I didn’t feel anything the second time and ended up pouring it down the toilet. I have no idea how expensive tha
t stuff is, and I hope I didn’t get any sewer creatures fucked-up, but I felt like I’d proven something to myself: I could make informed decisions and not be punished with death. I wouldn’t turn into my father.
* * *
When The Hippie was microdosing, he’d send me random, unexpected selfies: pictures of him smiling mysteriously on the subway, cradling his guitar case close, his pupils pushing any blue into slivers; pictures of himself from a friend’s art studio, the sun crinkles of his face smooth. He would also become much more effusive and open. In person, he’d talk my face off, and over text, he’d tell me how awesome I was and how he could have such interesting conversations with me.
With the sober Hippie, things were always straightforward, brief.
ME: Do you like ketchup?
HIM: It’s cool. Why?
But a little fucked-up and he’d crack open.
ME: Do you like ketchup?
HIM: Oh man. If you have a really good grade of beef and make a killer hamburger with some good, dark leafy greens, some onion, maybe like red onion, raw, and the burger is medium, with some killer truffle fries. Add some sea salt to the fries, some pepper, and then the ketchup…*chef’s kiss*
When he’d come over, I’d always try to get him drunk. I’m not necessarily proud of that, but it was the easiest way to stop him from being so closed-off. If it helps, I was honest with him about why his whiskey glass was never empty, and when he wanted to stop drinking, I never pressured him to keep going. When he was drunk and would text me little thoughtful things or be much more communicative, I’d call him out on it, and he’d get irritated.
Are you drinking?
Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be Page 16