Meth sends dopamine flooding the neuro-receptors. Six hundred times the normal upload. All aimed at the pleasure center. The lower chakras. It’s some kind of biochemical reaction. Meth goes right to the penis. It’s scientific fact. The last thing you remember is dread. A wrong-eyed white woman. Sharky mouth and a scent like vinegar. Then—what? All you know is you come to fucking (No one goes to sleep on meth—they crash and pass out. And when you pass out, you don’t wake up. You come to. Same on heroin. Once, on smack, you came to standing up in your fridge, eight hours after you’d opened the refrigerator door. On speed, though, you came to fucking. You look at your dick, and think: this is science. Though you never really went out. You just forgot you were conscious. So that, try and keep track, one minute you’re brain-dead and obliterated. But not asleep. The next you are awake-awake, banging away, with a full Dopa-Boner. You remembered you weren’t dead—then looked at your cock throbbing red, dripping blood, and thought, but maybe I will be. The hard-but-ragged unit, still going in and out, is now numb as a frostbit foot. It might as well be a rolling pin hot-glued to your belly. You look closer, realize what you thought was blood—product of God knows what unspeakable brand of penetration, something off-menu—is actually a special effect: the result of sex-induced juice glistening on the mysteriously festive red condom (supplied by Planned Parenthood, who no doubt had their own reason for passing out blood-colored rubbers, though the message this shock visual sent out would seem to be more in line with the abortion-is-murder, doctor-killing, pro-life contingent. And the bigger question—Who am I fucking? The trouble with not sleeping—when you wake up, you’re already there.) It’s hard to explain. But mostly it’s just hard. You wake up surgically attached, like the joke about the tweaker who took Viagra and then runs over to see his ex-wife. When he opens the door and she sees his raging hard-on, she says, “Oh honey, did you come to make me happy?” And the tweaker says, “Make you happy? I came to beat you to death.”

Did having an eighteen-hour erection make you a romantic? The eternal question.

Since you stopped imbibing—what was it, a century ago?—you have never really stopped being tired. Nap-adjacent. If they opened you up, would your Adrenals be as draggy as the blown-out dugs of a mother of twelve?

Why did it make you take a day and a half to get to your climax, and three seconds to come? You needed to fuck all the time but couldn’t bear the feel of air outside your home. The sky was just up there. Waiting. You needed to rub your junk on something but you couldn’t leave. Agorophobi-sex. If you had enough crank on hand you could always get a live-in. And if their hygiene wasn’t perfect—nature provided.

Is it any accident that bathtub crank scorches off your sense of smell? If you could smell, you’d be gagging, not just from the bouquet, human effluvium, but from the dead mice under the couch. Unsuspecting rodents would eat the speed crumbs on the floor. After which they’d scuttle off, ecstatic, and have little mouse heart attacks. Some nights, you could hear them. You recognized the death-squeak. You pictured Mickey Mouse clutching his chest and keeling over. (Walt Disney was a Jew-hating fascist fuck.) After two or three days the ants ate their fur off, and the stricken mice looked like dried up, premature human babies. So you kicked them under the couch. You couldn’t smell them. You couldn’t smell anything. If you could smell, you’d be gagging from the rotting food in the sink, putrefied to crud and roach paste. If cocaine was freezer-burn, snorting meth was performing a lobotomy on horseback with a cheese grater and soldering iron, straight up through the nostril. At night.