Tweakerworld

by Jason Yamas

You’re 15 when you fall in love with every one of your straight male friends, cementing the impossible as the desired. You’re 17 when you spend summer vacation tracking down every hometown guy who’s come out since leaving for college, and you realize that secrecy might be the spiciest ingredient of sex. You’re 18 when you shoot your first film about an ambitious fool teeming with homosexual undertones, and you fail at coming out to the community through creative osmosis.

In heteronormative circles, finding crystal meth may be challenging, but in modern gay culture, it’s a click away. I’d used Grindr countless times as a single or part of a couple seeking a third. My profile explicitly stated No PnP. By proclaiming that I was not interested in parTy ’n’ play, I’d avoid messages from men seeking chemsex: the combination of crystal meth and other drugs with high-risk, often anonymous sexual activity. (It is, I should point out, a mostly clinical term—I’ve never heard anyone who engages in that lifestyle use the term chemsex.)

I learned that you don’t need to generate emotion from memory or lived experience. Rather, every emotion is accessible through bodily engagement.

Enshrouded below my entitlement is abject fear: fear that if I admit I’m an addict, not just addicted to stimulants, as I’d prefer, I’ll carry that label with me for the rest of my life.

I’m comforted knowing I’m unlike these chumps who come here daily, whose lives center around meth and sex. As in the past, I’m just a tourist taking in the scenery, participating in the culture, but this isn’t my culture. No one here has talents and ambitions like mine.

In the small wins, in the mundane, I can’t find the joy I need to persist. No—drown me in a pool of indulgence. Blind me to the sight of grief. Give me good. Give me great. Make me feel unstoppable, unbeatable, unassailable.

Meth nowadays comes from Mexico. I watched Breaking Bad and should’ve known that. I always pictured meth cooked in basements by toothless bumpkins. Regardless, meth remains a societal punch line. Perpetuating it as a joke distracts from the fact of its widespread attraction. Tweakers, I’m learning, come in all shapes and sizes.

This world subdues my higher self.

Blaine furrows his brow, silently disapproving, yet sacrificing his values for shelter. My pining for a deeper connection with him is foolish. I’ll eventually learn how feelings on meth and GBL are artificial compounds of fleeting stimuli disguised as emotion—but not today.

And perhaps this explains my attraction to meth: the courage it provides to overcome fear-based sexual borders I’ve drawn for myself.

I’m exhausted by Rick’s passivity. Dom/sub dynamics are so bane.

It feels good at first, but eventually it’s all we know, so we stay. We’re zombies. When they go to bed, we roam, searching for a lair to hide, get high, and fuck so we won’t recall why we gave up living a real life.

There are sober living communities. Medicaid pays six months in sober living housing for HIV-positive addicts who undergo inpatient treatment and attend twelve-step meetings. Once the stipend ends, many will return to rehab, starting the process again. I wonder what aspect of the system is broken. Is the quality of rehabilitation so insufficient that it permits financed addictions? What must rehabs do to inspire greater potential? Should they abolish the stipend, leaving addicts without the crutch?

Mom is the one whom I’ve gone to first whenever life feels uncertain. She’s always got the right words, but more than that, she has a core belief in her gut that everything will always work out; we may not yet know the how or when, but her certainty is contagious, in the best way.

Why must I do this? Is it money? That’s part of it, but it’s not the driving force. If I were hooked up to a polygraph and my life depended on a truthful answer, I’d have to admit that it’s simply exciting. I am a boring middle-class white boy from the suburbs. Most people (I like to think) describe me as a nice guy. A prosaic existence, after too long, makes me want to vomit. I want to be bad. I want to be good at being bad. But that’s the lie detector answer. I dig a little deeper for how I might negotiate this choice within the identity I’ve already chosen for myself: artist.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that most artists need to be unhinged to be brilliant. My turn.

My best friend, Drew, the person I spent every summer day through high school with, the person I picked up on my way to school each morning, the person with whom I discovered my love for cinema, the person who’s been there for me no matter the circumstance, has sent me so many texts using words like abandoned and erased that I’ve had to block his number. I wonder, Can I live this way, compartmentalizing myself to fit an irreconcilable duality?

Guillaume loves me like a brother, so I capitalize on that and launch into victimhood, explaining how my breakup and stalled career have driven me to becoming a temporary Ryde driver. An actor plays an action, and my role now is to elicit empathy.

Does being an adult mean settling for someone who’ll keep me steady rather than someone who makes my blood bubble?

“They know,” Landon says, referring to the precociously dressed children on every block. I can’t explain it, but I know exactly what he means. The sober adults, the normies, the non-zombies, they haven’t a clue what plane we’re on, but there’s something in the leer of a child. They know.

The thought of contracting HIV conjures the image of a lesion-covered Tom Hanks slow dancing with a dashing Antonio Banderas in a sailor suit. Philadelphia was a goddamn horror flick for a gay boy in the nineties.

The next year, auditioning for NYU, I rehearsed a monologue from The Boys in the Band that recounted the woes of a thirty-something drug-addled homosexual. I performed it for my family. I was trying to come out to them by embodying the direst outcome, certain I would at worst fall short. Why could no one hear me? It felt like I was shouting, much like now.

I correlate drug and sex addiction to homelessness. I paint a cast of colorful characters: Tennessee Tim with his slow drawl who demands I take my shoes off and wear slippers inside his flat; he’ll die eighteen months later of pneumonia stemming from AIDS. Cool Lips Kevin whose husband is sober but allows him to parTy; he will wake twenty-two months later from a G coma covered in feces and discover his legs no longer work. Designer Jake who instructs his assistant to make me a vegan milkshake and smokes meth in front of his entire staff; his heart will stop beating in twenty-six months after suffering bradycardia from daily GBL use. Nurse Geoff who married an eighteen-year-old Colombian who became his houseboy in exchange for citizenship; his immigrant husband will stab him in the neck thirty-one months later, believing he’s an intruder after suffering weeks of sleep deprivation. Antonio who owns a hair salon and makes me bring him a chai latte so the stylists will believe he’s ordered Postmates; he’ll be in a coma thirty-three months from now after suffering a stroke from missing the vein. Guillaume shakes his head. “These are some of the saddest things I’ve ever heard.” “But they aren’t what you’d expect when you hear of a meth user,” I reply. “People picture toothless rednecks.” “I think,” Guillaume retorts, “that you think you are better than them.”

The answer is so obvious. All creators start off thinking we can do it all ourselves. What we learn as we fail is that it takes a village. Ever sit through the credits and try to read all the names of even a low-budget movie? No one who expects success can remain an island. Even mobsters like Jimmy Hoffa realized their violent tactics weren’t as effective as getting in bed with the labor unions. I’m going to start something, a “collective,” we’ll call it. That’s cute, right? Like how weed dealers are “budtenders” at “dispensaries.” Ah, it’s astounding how a home-cooked meal can summon clarity.

“How did you go from who you were to who you are now?” Zander replies. “It’s Neverland.” Byron, a legend and social influencer, had lost his lover to the plague, and rather than continuing to fight the good fight, he capitulated to escapism. One might argue meth is a coping mechanism for the onset of HIV, yet the genesis for its perpetuation.

As she plods away, I beg her not to worry, assuring her that us tweakers look out for one another like a family, how I’ve never experienced anything like it. Community is what I’ve been searching for my entire adult life. But as the words leave my lips, I wonder if I’m projecting a utopia onto a culture that in fact represents the antithesis of unity, that maybe we’re drawn to one another over shared traumas and a need to forget how we’ve always felt misplaced. A profusion of sex can easily be mistaken as love to anyone who’s never learned the difference.

A single hit of meth can last days in terms of keeping you awake, but the body will inevitably dip into slumber to preserve functionality, or perhaps you have a friend like Jack who sneaks GBL into your soda when you’ve been up for five days straight and refuse to lie down. I sleep an average of six hours per week. I can’t yet conceive the wickedness of this pattern compounded over time. An infatuation with unceasing elation has plagued me since childhood.

Cocaine is cyclical. It leaves you chasing that unattainable first spike, whereas meth is unremitting and thus a comfort to my personality type. Whenever I did cocaine, I felt like a degenerate, hiding the drug, bleeding my savings. Doing meth, I’m high functioning, wise, at the pinnacle of creation. I feel powerful, impervious. Yet it’s cocaine that society often deems to be a highbrow drug. Cocaine is done off trays with rolled-up hundred-dollar bills. Crack, despite being derived from the same drug, is smoked out of a pipe, a consumption method that’s grossly frowned upon. Being smoked out of the same kind of pipe, that negative association carries over to meth. Crack is known to be prevalent in the Black community, at no fault of its own, rather a result of the CIA’s targeting of minority communities to fund the contras’ war in Nicaragua during the Reagan administration. White people fucking Black people’s lives up? Surprise, surprise. I’m not defending meth here, but one must wonder: if society’s vehement aversion to meth is mostly in how it’s consumed, perhaps it’s more about race and racism than we care to acknowledge. Amphetamine in pill form? Give it to the kids! Amphetamine smoked out of a crack pipe? You nasty.

My addiction has already shapeshifted, that hankering like a parasite, always demanding one more hit or one more fuck; now it beseeches for just one deal. I can’t let it shift again. Where will it end?

If we mentioned doing coke or Molly, no one would bat an eye. Meth is a bad word, an impetus for ostracism. Yet I’ve found ways to normalize it: by making it my currency, my purpose, my identity, and my story.

I start vertical expansion here in SF by offering a deal of four ounces for $900 to all the suppliers who used to supply my team of dealers before I pilfered their workers. Sure, I’ll make only $100 for every quarter pound I sell, but profit isn’t the priority yet. Uber and Netflix weren’t profitable during their first years in business. It’s about market share. Build an ecosystem wherein you’re indispensable, then you’ll have carte blanche to hike prices later. I worry that I’m fast becoming the greedy British wine mogul from my drive to Napa but am assuaged to remember that the real Jason Yamas is an empath; it’s the character Jason who’s a usurious capitalist.

If meth is gasoline, GBL is motor oil. Meth powers my mind and body while GBL mollifies any internal misgivings. Meth’s false confidence compounded with GBL’s artificial serenity renders me invincible.

Okay, who was I kidding? I’ve experienced a tinge of paranoia every time I meet other gay people, imagining what they’ve heard about me—that I’m not like them. Sure, we might get off to the same kind of porn, but I don’t fit in with them. I don’t speak their language, and I’m certain—I’ve been certain—that they all know I’m a fraud and they have communicated this fact to one another. There’s a room somewhere in a location undisclosed to me where my picture is hanging with the words Fake Gay in huge block letters.

And I did love him, but that didn’t make him mine.

Zander’s comment that all fishies start small until they eat and eat some more because they don’t know how to stop is making more sense. I wonder why I can’t stop. Addicts don’t become someone else when they use. We inhabit our worst self.

In these moments, right before a person changes forever, the surge of adrenaline is something new, something extraordinary.

I want a room that explodes with color: purple walls, geometric shapes, art deco rug, plants every six inches, artwork with so much life it might just jump out and grab you. I never had that growing up either. We moved so frequently, and I was too removed from my authentic queerness to craft a space where I could both thrive and convalesce.

I’ll read twenty articles about psychosis before accepting the slightest possibility that I was hallucinating. Science has shown just how deep a vulnerability lack of sleep can be, suggesting that humans would have evolved millennia ago to eradicate or lessen our need for sleep if it were possible to maintain our inherent biological integrity. It’s not. Using chemicals to stay awake for days is a direct challenge to God, if you will. Oh, the creativity one’s mind will employ to get its needs met! Yet, how could something so vivid be a mirage?

I spent a decade trying to reconcile homosexual desire with a longing for approval, resulting in paralyzing shame. I discovered a potion that quashes discomfort and emboldens reckless sexual practices, masquerading as free love. I invented a thousand ways to rationalize my addiction while eagerly waiting to hear the words that would never come: Sweet boy, you are righteous in your sexuality. Your compulsion is fear. Your anger is your pain. Your love is beautiful. It need not hide in the darkness nor be lubricated by artificial compounds. Love vastly and proudly. Love others with cause. Love yourself without pause. For as long as you’re breathing, it is never too late.

My father cannot find these words, these thoughts. My dad never rejected me or threw me out because of my sexuality. He simply never addressed it, and that perhaps hurt even more.

They believe that I’ve never accepted my sexuality, that I numb myself to partake. Christopher throws around terms like brain plasticity and sexual templates, and suddenly he’s an expert because he can conceptualize my daily reality through scientific goggles.

Meth addiction doesn’t remake a man. It unearths his darkness, manifesting unspeakable fantasies, exorcising arcane demons.

Harry had to have processed much of this narrative during his brief sobriety. His story rolls off his tongue with little effort. His traumas are staggering, yet textbook accounts of what attracts addiction. I don’t deserve my addiction. I’m an entitled snob with a penchant for a wild ride, a poser. Harry’s wounds have manifested into gentleness. Psychologists believe we stop growing emotionally at the age we begin abusing substances or suffer sexual abuse.

I’m not some artist masquerading as a criminal as I’ve wanted to believe. I am, simply, a criminal.

“You know what the best scene in your movie will be?” Jonas asks. “What’s that?” I respond. “When you realize that you were your own villain the entire time.”

That’s why I originally joined and surely why I stayed in this community. While none of it is good for us, it all feels too damn good.

Harry jumps for joy seeing me arrive home early, but I don’t want him. He cares too much for me to ever find him sexy.

Keeping Harry nearby is a survival tactic. He’s a maelstrom of perpetual destruction, but he’s my rock. He loves me unconditionally. He provides glimmers of hope that I might escape this lifestyle and become the man he needs me to be, the man I need me to be. I blame my inadequacy on the drugs and on my vocation, but these patterns have been with me my entire adult life. Intimacy is ice cream, and sex is vinegar—two things I love, yet the thought of combining them makes me sick to my stomach. I could unfetter him and live a burden-free existence, but that would release the potentiality that I might become better.

Despite Curt’s grieving his mother’s recent demise, I was hell-bent on serving up a Christmas to remember. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see the forest for the Christmas tree. I printed and framed twenty different massive pictures of him with his mother taken over the years, wrapping each one individually, thinking it would be the kindest gift. Overkill feels entirely normal on speed. Every box he unwrapped was another brick stacked between us. By the time he opened the final photo, I couldn’t reach him, and I never did again.

There’s nothing more frustrating than being in the middle of hurting someone and not finding the courage to pivot.