So You Sneezed When You Tried to Take Poppers

So, here you are, after giving your first unsuccessful partially drug induced blowjob. And by partially unsuccessful, I mean that you sneezed, on both the drugs and the penis. What do you do now? How did you get here? Why are the drinks here $10?

You’re kneeling in front of a Miles Teller doppelgänger in a dark room in Provincetown trying to figure out where his dick is. Like I said, it’s a dark room. In Provincetown. It’s in a place called Club Purgatory, which, dick in mouth and St. Andrew’s Cross in the same vicinity, makes you wonder if there’s a similarly themed club called Catholic Guilt.

You are here because of your job. Yes, your job, for which you pare being paid $10 an hour and a little bit of dignity, requires you to be here, though the job description was “photographer”, not “professional fellator”. (Then again, any kind of sex these days feels like homework.) The guy you are with you met three days ago, and assumed that, because he was white and conventionally attractive, that he would not be interested in you, a dweeby, scrawny Asian boy. This guy, let’s call him Andrew since he had been tied to the eponymous St. Andrew’s Cross earlier that evening for no reason whatsoever, kind of looks like a teenager but with the facial hair someone who tells people that he lives in Williamsburg. When you met him, he was wearing a blue jean jacket, like a 12 year old emulating Bruce Springsteen. This is not unattractive.

It’s crowded at this club, and that texture brushing up against your skin without your consent is a mix of sweaty skin, sweaty rubber, sweaty leather, and sweaty pleather. It’s too loud and this is the fortieth time you’ve heard the remix of “It’s Raining Men” in 7 hours. You can only assume the rain in the song is a referent to sweat. There are only party lights and, because you are literally being crushed by these (mostly white) dudes, you mostly hate everyone in the room. Your social anxiety has not been exacerbated by this scenario, or by your presence in Provincetown in general. Instead, you’ve embraced the slow, but persistent death of your interior state. On the upside, one of your Coca Cola has three cherries in it.

You have learned, over the course of the summer, to tie a cherry stem in your mouth. You put this on your dating profile. It does not improve your odds. However, your joke about Chekhov does see an increase of messages from the 45+ demographic.

Earlier in the evening at this event, which is called Mates Leather Weekend — which, if you couldn’t tell, is a weekend for leather men — this guy was talking you up. You did not notice that he was doing this because you are both oblivious to your social surroundings and the only drink you’ve had in the evening is absolutely no drink whatsoever. You only realize that he is interested in you when he looks you in the face and says, “You wanna blow me?” He says this in a straightforward fashion. His tone is matter of fact. It’s not dispassionate or what one could call Mussolini-esque, it is just frank.

He offers you poppers. You smile, and then look up what poppers are on Wikipedia. You say that you want to check with your boss if it’s okay to get intoxicated, because you’re the exact kind of person who would want to ask their boss if it was okay to get intoxicated.

To be fair, your boss bought you a drink earlier that night. And the night before. And the night before that. The drink was 9 part vodka, 8 parts ice, and 1 part cranberry. You’re reminded of the time you had a paradise martini and threw up two hours later. And of the time you had a shot of rum and half a shot of vodka in Boston and, 90 minutes later, threw up. And of the time…

The only other experience you’ve had with narcotics was with marijuana, something so eagerly anticipated your friends made a Facebook event for it and invited a dozen people to watch you get stoned. Besides being rendered speechless when finally getting lit, as the kids say, you are told the next day you ate an entire bag of corn chips and took your pants off. There is a video of the proceedings, which you have had destroyed by a court order.

Unable to find your boss because you only looked for thirty seconds, you agree to doing poppers. You are brought to the dark room, which is seven feet away from where you were originally standing by the bar. It’s pitch black, because, as I said, it’s a dark room. Someone hands you a vial. You shake it a little like a wrapped Hanukkah present. As you are about to pour it into your mouth, you are told it is an inhalant. With dick touching your snub nose and vial now under your nostrils, you try to sniff.

And then you sneeze. The vial falls, snot and poppers fly onto the dick, Club Purgatory is sent into the abyss of Hell, the undercut sporting white gays start growing out mullets, Neil Patrick Harris and his husband divorce sending his children into therapy, the straights turn on John Mayer, your $27 drink is knocked over by an old naked man’s leather boot, and all is right with the world.

You look up to Andrew, and apologize profusely. You apologize for a solid three minutes, and because it’s a dark room, you do not realize that he has moved to another man who is currently taking him from behind. And yet you have been facing him this entire conversation. You notice he looks bored. You can identify with that.

The night is almost over, so you make your way past the door person, take a few last minute pictures to justify your presence, and implicitly your very existence, and, perfectly aware that the reactions from your friends back in Connecticut to this story will amount to a complete and total lack of shock, walk back home, the rain drenching you in sweetness.