Studs: Gay Erotic Fiction by Emanuel Xavier Richard Labonté Page A

clothes, faux-fallen rock star chic. He’s always unshaven, a limp cigarette at the corner of his mouth, and though young his cheeks are jowly from constant drinking. The lines of his neck look dark, as if filled with dirt. He always wears a black knit cap low, right to his eyebrows. Often his eyes are secreted behind cheap, mirrored aviator glasses, the lens marred by huge, blurry fingerprints. He’ll slide smoothly into our booth, waving over a drink, tipping the bartenders with a handshake laden with slim baggies of coke. This pays for his drinks and his right to do business here. We score over small talk. He treats us like friends, using our names way too often, in an unusually high voice. It’s a forced, crackly casualness that over time has become authentic: the weight of paranoia that comes with his profession, subsumed by the sing-song breeziness he’s adopted to counteract nuanced fear.
    He likes Sung more than me. He sits next to me so he can look at Sung while he talks to us. Everyone likes Sung. He greets everyone by nodding his head and smiling. It’s such a simplistic act of immediate approval I’m surprised it works so succinctly, so consistently. And his smile. His uneven teeth the opposite of ugly, Sung’s smile is a roller coaster, a carnival billboard inviting everyone in for a good time. It gets free coke out of Lonnie. Or at least he’ll front a bag or two before payday. After handshakes exchanging twenties and drugs, Lonnie takes his place in the bathroom, his roost between two sour urinals. The bar’s patrons shuffle to the back, one after another, to score. He’ll hang out in the bathroom for two hours, then leave. On the way out he always slaps me on the back. Passing the table he points his finger like a gun at Sung and makes like he’s shooting him. Sung always laughs, grabs his chest and falls back into his seat. By now Sung has been able to do two or three bumps of coke off his wrist, so it’s quite natural for him to show off the insane delight that is his smile.
    I’ve done an equal number of rounds of Ketamine off my wrist, but where coke draws Sung’s lips over his teeth and animates his eyes, K lures me inward.
    Here kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty.
    I love this drug.
    I’ll forget I’ve lit a cigarette and light another. Laughing, Sung will smoke my other cigarette without comment. Worse, I’ll forget I’ve done a bump and do another. Forgetting that one, I’ll do another. Once I went to the bathroom and forgot to come out. It was just so nice in there. Of course Sung didn’t notice I was missing until he went to the bathroom to piss, and there I was, crouched on the wet floor, rolling a slimy, pisssoaked mothball I’d retrieved from one of the urinals between my fingers. Smiling away, I’m sure.
     
    I didn’t move here to erase myself. However, once K’s smoky, marshmallow fungus began to converge on my memories, snuffing them out, I surrendered. It was like falling into a boiling parachute, the tentacles of its shredded tethers reaching out to pull me in.
    I started smoking Marlboro Lights not because Sung did, but because I like the look of their cool stem, the gray-white smoke, new ingredients for my saltless soul.
    This city is a picnic for sleepwalkers; everyone is together but completely separated, imprisoned in the library of his own particular dreamworld. This is a language of memory, one of images and places stitched together with bloody thread, thread stolen from the corpses of soldiers filling trenches with brown blood, so that your bedroom leads to your kindergarten class; the classroom’s window looks out on an ocean of burning questions. No wonder the thread that bridges these incomparable places smells like kerosene. Or mothballs.
    I need this drug.
    I miss reading, though. I just can’t seem to concentrate anymore. I’ll sit on the train, a thick tome swiped from the Strand on my lap. The words make perfect sense, I mean, I get it . But I don’t get