boysbriefs: More on Drugs

boysbriefs: More on Drugs:

Seconds before she injected my mouth full of Novocaine, Dr. Hopper leaned close to my face and whispered, "You behave yourself this weekend?"

"Huh?" I responded.

"Did you do any partying?" she asked as she balled her hand into a fist and dragged the side of it against her nose, the universal sign for inhaling narcotics like coke and crystal meth.

"I don't know what you're talking about." I played dumb.

"You don't have to tell me anything," she said. "But I won't be able to get you numb." With that, she stabbed the needle into my gum.

Great. My dentist thinks I'm a crackhead. I can't imagine what gave her that idea. Let's hope it's because she has a strong gay clientele, and before she got married last year she would often go drinking with her gay buddies at Midtown clubs. She may be a straight, 50-something, female dentist from Georgia, but she ain't dumb. She knows what goes on in the bathrooms of those places. I imagine her patient charts look like a wacky combination of dental records and Manhunt profiles: Greg Smith, last cleaning and X-rays September '04, observe decay in left 4B, likes to PNP.



The sad truth is she probably remembers the time two years ago when she attempted to give me a filling. Though it was a Tuesday morning and I had gotten a full night's sleep, I had been doing Tina the previous weekend. No matter how much Novocaine she gave me, my mouth would not go numb. As she drilled into one of my molars, I squirmed in the chair and nearly ripped its arms off. I felt the whole thing.

This story provides a solid metaphor for my frequent drug use over the last six years. I was a weekend warrior. I established strict rules for myself and I followed them: Only do drugs on the weekend, never do drugs during the week, catch up on your sleep before going out again the following weekend. I never once felt a physical craving for drugs. It was just something I enjoyed doing during my free time. It was a lot like being a social smoker, but with a glass pipe and blowtorch.

Despite these rules, drugs still became pervasive in my life. They began to effect everything, even routine dental visits. As the weekends wore on, the recovery period seemed to take longer and longer. My relationships revolved around this cycle, most of my friendships were confined to the dancefloor, and I even began to budget portions of my paycheck to partying. I didn't need rehab; I needed to rethink my priorities.

Here's the point of all this: I'm not giving up drugs because I have a problem. I'm giving them up because they've become my sole identity. That seems so one dimensional to me, and I want to experience much more than that. In my life, I strive to be a well rounded person, so it bothers me to think that I have nothing else going for me. Is the only thing I'm good at partying?

It's the same reason that I never wanted to be identified as gay when I was first coming out. That was just one aspect of my life. I wanted people to think of me like this: "Do you know Chris? Journalism major, brown hair, nice smile. He plays soccer, reads comic books, DJs the industrial music show at the college radio station." Then they'd say, "Oh, and he's gay," as if it was an afterthought.



My biggest fear about writing these posts is that I won't live up to the promise I've made myself. What if I regress and start getting cracked out again one weekend? I'd feel ashamed, immature and, worst of all, one dimensional. It's going to be tough. The summer party season is rapidly approaching, it's been less than three months since the last time I partied, and my boyfriend lives out of state so I may be bored and lonely some Saturday nights.

It's time for me to make some serious changes. If you know any hardcore circuit boys, you probably know that they keep their supplies stashed in a carefully hidden, but easily accessible place like a small bag under the bed or a shoebox in the back of the closet. I have a whole drawer. To prevent any further temptation, I've just emptied out my drug drawer. Two glass pipes, a torch, a bottle of butane, a couple of properly cut straws, and a whole bunch of empty baggies just got tossed in the dumpster. But most important of all, my drawer has been harboring the remains of an eight-ball of Tina. I just flushed her down the toilet.