Jamie Iredell

We drank steaming Glintwein and nibbled shashlik while all around us children milled in frilled jackets, each breath a puff of hot life.

I had all these teachers who taught me how to safely use firearms, and I had my dad who simply didn’t like them at all, and neither of those things could’ve stopped me from being an idiot with my best friend when I was a freshman in high school.

But like I said before: who cares about the story or the “reality” of the story? It’s about the sex, right? But here’s where I say that’s it’s not about the sex, really, at all.

When you were young, people would gather at parties to watch you imbibe and exclaim, How does he keep on drinking without getting drunk or sick? This was your training ground.

Some idiot once told you that it was good for your plants if you put your butts into the soil, and you want a cigarette bad enough to retrieve even these molding spent cigs, turning some shade between green and blue.

At the park on a weekend, one sees so many hardbodies you’d think you accidentally stepped into a fitness magazine’s photo shoot. Abs jog along the concreted and graveled paths. Everyone playing volleyball does so in bikini and Speedo, and does so gracefully, beautifully.

Euphoria washed over me. I felt elated, a welling of good emotion, like I knew that something wonderful was about to happen and I just couldn’t wait for whoever it was to bust through that door and Surprise! Happy Birthday! or whatever.

By the time I was old enough to realize that it was odd for two grown men to have been “roommates” for so long, when I asked my mother and she laughed and said, “Oh, honey, they’re gay; I thought you knew,” it made sense to me.

I met J at the University of Nevada, outside the English Department on a winter day, the cottonwoods of the quad leafless, as J cupped his palms around his cigarette to light it and I bummed that light off him…

When I found the little folded patch of tinfoil in the slot built to house pens and pencils, I remembered the three hits of acid I’d stored there and had one of those why not? moments before the tabs found my tongue.

When the doctor showed up he didn’t say anything till after he’d looked in my eyes, then he asked how I felt, which was, other than a little grogginess and the aforementioned throat pain, fine. Then the doctor looked at me steadily and said, “Your girlfriend’s here. Do you want to see her?”

It was with my friends and coworkers at The Pub that I first took morphine. Chris scored a few 30 mg pills and we each washed one down with Budweiser. We kept drinking through the night and the morphine crept in and made for this light, float-y high…

There I ate bacon cheeseburgers and drank no fewer than thirteen PBRs a night. I became what they call a regular and the other regulars and the bartenders pushed Jaeger and Strega shots my way.