Relapse Grindr by Nicholas Pullen

     Karen Blakeman CC


Relapse Grindr


Sex these days is sometimes born from terse, laconic bursts of text, flying through the snowy air on unseen wings like little bullets of lust. That’s how I met Jim.

​He had given me the address of his apartment, up near Yonge and St. Clair, and I was shivering through the snow towards him listening to deep house from the bathhouses of seventies Detroit. It seemed appropriate. This was our music, after all. Music for secret trysts in dark rooms and loneliness and isolation and liberation. I was 30 days sober. But I’d already popped a stolen Viagra from my dad’s medicine cabinet to avoid embarrassment, so who’s counting? I crossed the Beltline bridge and looked with sullen apprehension at the midtown skyline, glowing dimly behind a curtain of swirling flakes.

His apartment loomed like a Soviet tenement, dull yellow brick against grey, cruddy snow. I rang his door, and he buzzed me up. I searched the frail timbre of his voice for nerves or signs of cold feet. Finding nothing, I entered. The lobby had that dingy, stale, despairing smell that the accumulated cigarette smoke of decades inevitably leaves, and that no amount of bylaws or regulations will ever take away. It was a congealed, hopeless sort of smell. Yellowed terrazzo floors squeaked underfoot and a few sad palm trees lined the lobby. The melting snow slipped under my boots.

On the eleventh floor a sweet-looking old lady boarded the elevator and smiled at me through her plastic reading glasses. I smiled back, marveling at the incongruity of this ancient ritual of politeness and the thoroughly post-modern sordidness of what I was doing and what I was about to do. I’m always struck by what other people could be doing and thinking, as they go about their lives: the dazzling clash of refracting worlds would blind us as we walked the streets if only we could see it.

I’m not closeted, or anything like that. I’m a sort of token of diversity and inclusion among my friends. I came out the year gay marriage was legalized, and was trotted out as everybody’s first gay friend, like a debutante at a ball. Common decency and courtesy were suddenly on my side, and the sullen glares of the straight men who felt differently were easy to ignore. My friends would giggle at my breathless descriptions of my first tentative escapades, what feels like eons ago. They don’t know the whole truth, though. Nobody knows that but me. And God, if he’s paying attention.

The whole truth was that I was on the seventeenth floor of a faded old building, and just down the hall in apartment 2106 someone was waiting for me. The dim flicker of fluorescent lights showed me the way down the hall. The carpet was the sort of geometric pattern that might have been fashionable in 1982, faded and stained with salt. I knocked on the door. Here was the moment of revelation. The seductive promises of a thumbnail can so often deceive. What was in store? The air trembled with our shared anticipation as the frame swung quickly open.

He would do, I decided. A little fuller around the edges than the picture had led me to believe, but such small deceptions are commonplace. This would be fine.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Come on in.” He was wearing a baggy t shirt with Fuck Trump stamped in black letters, the odd ketchup stain, and striped pajama bottoms. I gauged his anxiety, and found it roughly mirrored my own. Good.

The room had a familiar funk. Of cigarettes, old weed, and desperation. A political thriller flickered on the television screen, providing the only light. Clothes and inexplicable pieces of crumpled paper were scattered everywhere. Bits of stale tobacco, bottlecaps, an old metropass. That unmistakable alcoholic filth, that transcends the merely messy to speak of genuine unconcern with the bourgeois details. A mirror to a soul in equal disorder.

“Want a hit?” He proffered a green plastic bong as we both sat down on the battered linen loveseat. I didn’t hesitate. The 30-day chip in my pocket didn’t save me.

“Sure.” It was already batched and packed. How hospitable. I fumbled for a moment with the lighter and inhaled deeply.

I’d never been much for bongs. I’d always preferred the languid smoothness of a well rolled joint. Soft, relaxed hits; not insisting, but caressing. Bongs were too harsh and immediate. But I was past caring. The old, familiar choke seized me, and the warm clutch filled my chest as I coughed. I relaxed and lay back on the couch. Soon now.

I made desultory small talk for a few more minutes, as the tendrils wisped away through the fetid air, and the chemicals danced in our respective skulls. Eventually we were fucking. He was a bottom, which suited me fine.

I was ragingly hard, glorying in my clever little artifice of an hour earlier. The pathetic reality is I would have been helpless without my dad’s medication. I insisted on a condom, at least.

He had this annoying habit of looking up at me as I fucked him, right into my eyes. As though this meant something.

“Yeah, you feel so good inside me…fuck yeah…harder.” The lame porn dialogue began to grate. I kept mum, myself. The stone was beginning, numbing me to all feeling. The effort became strenuous and forced.

Even with my chemically induced erection, climax wouldn’t come without work. A drudging chore. What was I doing? Eventually I gave up. I faked an orgasm and went away to throw the empty condom out before he could see.

“That was incredible.”

“Mmm?”

“That was incredible.”

“Thanks.” Some lucid part of me rolled my eyes, mostly in self-disgust. The stone was coursing through my system now. Just as it had for eight horrible years. And suddenly I was right back where I’d been a month ago. In the blink of an eye I was a sad little stoner again, with nothing to live for and no reason to go on; alone, angry and miserable in a stranger’s apartment. I was fucking sick of this. How had I ended up here?

“You want a drink?” He appeared in the hallway with two glasses of whiskey on the rocks. Jack Daniels, from the smell of it. If it had been scotch, I might have been tempted, because I’m a pretentious cunt. He extended the glass with his shoulders hunched. He had a strong disease in his soul, I realized, but I could recognize the symptoms because they were my own.

His whole apartment was like home to me. It even smelled familiar, like month old laundry and stale sweat and closed windows. Filthy, unkempt, and pathetic. Like us both.

“No.” As though that made everything ok.

“Suit yourself.” And he drained my glass with a practiced motion. We sat down again.

“I guess I should tell you something.”

“Oh?” His face took on a deer-in-the-headlights fear. I realized he thought I had HIV.

“I’m in AA.”

“Oh.” Relief flooded his eyes, before eventually being replaced by a sullen apprehension at what was coming next. “Oh, ok.”

“This was a relapse for me.”

​“Oh. Sorry.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” He really didn’t, and neither did I, but it certainly felt like the appropriate response. “I just feel like shit now.”

“You and me both.” We looked at each other glumly.

It turned out he’d been to the same treatment center as I had. Not only that, but it turned out the nightmare had finally happened, and I’d fucked someone from my WASPy little social circle. We swapped names, places, and stories. We laughed uproariously. We skirted around the dangerous characters we both knew from the drug trade. He ranted about Dick Cheney and the American fascists. He was angry, he was drunk, he was scared, and he was alone. His parents were slowly cutting him off, he couldn’t hold down a job, and he wanted to die. I could relate. We talked for four hours.

I didn't cry until I was in the elevator heading back out into the snowy night. I wracked my brain for a reason I could tell myself I had done this sordid thing, other than the obvious certainty, when he texted, that he would have drugs. I couldn't think of anything. If I think of a reason, I’ll let you know. I twitched and shivered in the cold, the rush of icy January wind dispelling my high like so much smoke in the breeze. I tried not to think of the obscure motive force hanging over me, the inexplicable drive, whipping me to seek escape. I tried not to think of the shame of facing the people who had tried to help me, who I’d let down again. I tried not to think of the love I had abandoned that summer in the cool rain outside Spadina station. To get sober, of all things.

I tried not to think of the other boy, the sweet boy who had loved me, stood by me, done drugs with me, protected me and sheltered me from the wrath of my parents, and never, ever judged me. And who I had betrayed. With this little escapade, and with others. I tried not to think about what I was going to do now. What he was doing now. He seemed to be doing well, from what I’d heard. A new boyfriend. A new life. No more worrying about me. But when I took a good look at myself, I couldn’t blame him. When I looked at how I was dancing to the tune called by the apps, at the panoply of my inexplicable compulsions, I realized that I was looking for what I thought I deserved. And that was a lot less than love.

Jim came to a meeting with me the next day, and watched me pick up a desire chip. It’s been three years of sobriety since then, and I haven’t seen him since. He’s probably still out there somewhere, but who knows, maybe Grindr brought a guy to God? Maybe someday I’ll see him in the rooms transformed. Maybe in this fucked up, aimless, miserable universe, a tool of reckless, weaponized desire, of what an earlier era would have called evil, can be used to share the light with someone, and to heal one poor kid’s soul with the festering wounds of another. A kind of spiritual penicillin. Maybe then my insane compulsions will be justified and forgiven by this higher power they speak of. Or maybe just by myself. Maybe then I'll deserve love. If not God’s, and if not that of another man, then maybe my own love. For myself. What seems to be the hardest kind of all to give.

​

Nicholas Pullen was born and raised in Toronto, and has spent the last decade bouncing around the settler colonial world to Oxford, to London, to Ottawa, to Montreal, and most recently to Quebec City, where he shivers in the dark, works hard to improve his French, clocks in for the government and writes to make use of the solitude. He has a BA in history from Somerville College, Oxford University, and an MA in history from McGill. He is gay, and a good friend of Bill's.

---