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Louise weighed 300 pounds and loved it when you called her "little slut-girl." It was the little, I think, that got her hot, but I didn't think about it much at the time. With enough smack in my arm, I didn't think about anything, which was pretty much the point. I'd pop by Louise's when I needed dope money. Sweetheart that she  was, she'd slip me a C-note up front. I'd score downtown, then roll back to West Hollywood and fix in her pink bathroom while my pay-date hunkered, jellied thighs spread wide on her fluffy toilet seat, and watched me bleed with her lips around my cock.
Grim but true. Louise lived on Holloway, two doors from the garage where they found Sal Mineo. And sometimes, if the dope was decent, I'd see his ghost peeping in the window. He looked sad-eyed, and a little drooly, like he knew what it felt like to do what I was about to do. But he'd done worse, probably much worse . . .
That's the thing about sex and heroin: it takes work to get you hard, but once you are, it takes an A-bomb to get you soft again. And coming, whatever that is, is pretty much out of the question. After the brain-splattering ecstasy of a serious dope rush, orgasm is redundant. Smack-sex isn't about consummation, it's about getting to feel like the King of Dick. Staying erect in the saddle for so long, you can satisfy a woman in ways a normal human never could, assuming she's not looking for a shared experience. Which is why, for better or worse, sex with another dope fiend was something less than thrilling. Whatever friction-fueled delights may be garnished in bed will always come up short compared to the drug itself. 
Around this time, as it happened, I had a girlfriend named Swirl, a freelance dominatrix who made junk money paddling the odd orthodontist, peeing on attorneys and generally humiliating well-heeled entertainment types. I wouldn't exactly call this "foreplay," but after a hard day of rich-smacking, my gal would feel something akin to lust. We'd take her cash, cop some chiva and slog back to her Echo Park basement dive to get ourselves off. And sometimes, once the shit kicked in, sex seemed almost possible.
"Should we?" Swirl would murmur through slack lips, plucking the rig from her arm and falling back on her ratty davenport.
"Should we what ?" I'd say, knowing full well her response would be to pull up her skirt and show me the babyshaved slit beneath. Which was fine, for the first few giddy minutes. But once we stood up we always stood up,  it fed the rush and actually engaged, something strange would happen. Next thing you know, one of us would jerk to life, look out the window and it would be three hours later. It would be dark, but I'd still be in her. Completely hard and numb as a dead man's thumb.
Every time the two of us shot up and fucked, the same thing happened: we went statue. It never failed. Like some late-'80s outtake from They Shoot Horses, Don't They? we'd pass out standing, in mid-coitus, so gowed our minds oozed away while our bodies remained rigid. Sometimes we stayed stoned and upright for hours, like flesh and blood relics from some low-rent Pompeii.
Doped-up sex works fine as a concept think Keith Richard, lazing around with nine sixteen-year-olds lapping milk off his hamstrings but when it comes to translating abstract arousal into actual physicality, the pleasure generated by hardcore sex can't compare to the simmering, opiated bliss you get by not moving a muscle. And so, inevitably, after jerking back to consciousness (or what passes for consciousness after banging five bags of schmeck), my girl Swirl and I would cancel our inanimate union, stagger back to the kitchen table, cook up what was left of the dope and shoot our way back to static, solitary narcoblivion, pretty much where we wanted to be all along.
Which takes me back to Louise. My hefty benefactress, God bless her, liked it back doorstyle, imploring me to hoist her monstro buttocks so I could simultaneously prang and spank and still have one hand free to work the remote on her big screen TV. The last, I hasten to add, was fine with Lou. Provided I stayed hard and kept pumping, she didn't mind if I got down with CNN or "The  Flintstones." However many hours she required, I'd stand and deliver. And why not? It wasn't making love but it was making gratification, which is arguably just as worthy. Our record was seven hours, and even then we only stopped because her downstairs neighbor called the landlord. As jobs go, it beat waiting tables.
The cosmic punchline to sex on heroin is that, while dope drains your libido, your very apathy acts as a catalyst for frantic interest on the part of busloads of beautiful women. Used to every shmohawk in boxers panting at the sight of them, these lovelies can't help but be intrigued by a guy whose eyes glaze when they walk in the room.
Call it Stahl's Law of Strung-Out Sex Appeal: a woman's desire increases in direct proportion to the man's addiction to a drug that quashes his desire entirely. Until, that is, our friendly junkie finally tries to kick then it's a whole new ball game. In the throes of withdrawal, the same stud who couldn't come with a gun to his neck now squirts when a breeze blows on his penis. Indeed, in mid-kick, a man will rub himself until his organ morphs into beef jerky (I've got the scar tissue to prove it). But once you're off, with no endorphins left, the dope-sick ex-fiend grabs at the one relief the narco-gods have left him: the old-fashioned orgasm. Only then, with his body wracked and psyche shattered, any woman who stoops to screw the erstwhile King Dick can expect no more than a thirty-second ride. At which point, the newly clean addict will twitch, squirt, lie back on his sweat-soaked mattress and remember why he needed heroin in the first place. |
©1999 Jerry Stahl and hooksexup.com
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