Below is one of my short stories. The intent in posting it here is not to publish it, but rather to put it in the running for publication at a fantastic magazine called Fiction Circus I hope you all like it. .
Dr. Tyler Nightly’s Arrest for Trying to Buy Ecstasy at a Rave
In hindsight, I probably should’ve left Carmine last night when he confessed to being a sociopath. But as I watched his confession come out of that tight and toned twenty two year old body, I just couldn’t walk away because, as a former therapist, I understand that there are some things we just can’t control. I have to admit that at thirty-five I felt a little ridiculous dating a twenty-two year old, but you have to understand that I’d just come out of a ten year relationship and Carmine made me feel attractive again. And I did feel ridiculous walking into that rave tonight, and even more ridiculous while a circle of kids as young as twelve, with blinking lights clipped to their hair, watched the undercover cop who’d sold me ecstasy only minutes earlier handcuff me.
I had never been to a rave before Carmine. I’d heard of them, of course, but only through news reports that warned of the scene’s drug use, where the reporter uses an undercover camera to record the underage kids dancing and smiling, their visors pulled over irises widened from the ecstasy.
The rave took place at a roller rink on the west side of downtown Asbury Park, a city on the Jersey shore. The roller rink stood a few blocks west of the train tracks, beyond the reach of Asbury’s recent seaside gentrification, and beyond the Asbury I frequented. Carmine promised we wouldn’t have to wait in line; he was good friends with the promoter and we’d be on his list. But our names were nowhere to be found on any list and I suspected the whole promoter connection was a lie, something sociopaths specialize in. So instead we had to wait in line with everyone else. I wore my usual jeans and polo shirt. Carmine had squeezed himself into black spandex pants, leg warmers covered in pink fur he called “furries,” and a tight pink T-shirt that read PRINCESS in rainbow lettering. I read the news regularly and knew what happened in this part of Asbury; recently an innocent man, around my age, had been critically injured by a stray bullet launched from a drive-by gang shooting. I feared a stray bullet would find me any minute now. I resented Carmine for lying to me. If he had told me the truth, I never would’ve agreed to this.
Inside, I paid cover for myself and Carmine. I received a few coins made of cheap metal and painted copper, and a stick of thin cardboard tickets resembling the raffle tickets I earned as a kid in the arcades on the boardwalk about twenty minutes south of here in Seaside Heights. I would grasp the small ceramic ball and, in deep concentration, release it rolling from my palm. It would make a cracking sound as it hit the wooden runway and thundered forward. It would catapult using a small bump at the runway’s end and circle like draining bathwater into one of four holes surrounded by circular plastic barriers that drew smaller towards the center.
I looked forward every summer to our trip down the shore to play that game, perhaps because no one else in my family, my high strung older sister, my melodramatic mother whom after my years of clinical work suspect now of having histrionic personality disorder, and my push over father, never cared for the game. Therefore, I could successfully escape them, if only for an evening. In those few and secluded instances, I felt in total control. Winning or losing depended on me, on my ability to spin that ceramic ball at just the right speed to pop into the higher value openings. In those moments I had agency, something impossible while trapped inside a tiny two-bedroom house with no yard in Secaucus, cut off on all sides by highways forever teeming with traffic, where we pretended my mother was normal despite her compulsive need for attention, despite our neighborhood’s open secret of her numerous affairs with neighbors’ husbands, despite her struts in full make up and low cut shirts in front of my few guy friends in high school. Whatever the reason, it’s most likely why I gravitated from my childhood home in the congestion of Secaucus to the calmer seaside Asbury Park as an adult, first to start my practice, then to begin teaching at the local community college.
Carmine and I entered the space surrounding the rink. Cinder block walls painted in primary colors were covered in words I didn’t recognize and assumed were slang such as SICK, TIGHT, and WICKED. The words were painted as graffiti, in shadowed letters that shined and sparkled, in the same vein of graphics I’d noticed littering the abandoned buildings on this side of Asbury during my numerous travels from the beach to the Garden State Parkway en route to my college classes.
I also heard sounds I didn’t recognize, a melody and bass line that snaked their way in loops through a heavy, syncopated beat. Although the sounds were foreign, at times their assembly was not, containing the more traditional verse bridge and chorus song structures I remembered hearing in the vocal house music I’d consumed in the Chelsea section of Manhattan when I’d been Carmine’s age a little over a decade ago. With his hand on his spandex hip and head cocked backwards in my direction, Carmine recognized the puzzlement that instinctively pulled my plucked eyebrows together.
“This is New Breaks,” he informed me.
“Okay,” I replied, nodding once strongly, trying to feign being fully informed. I hated looking like a fool in front of Carmine because it made me vulnerable. But then I would remember that Carmine, that gorgeous Carmine, wanted me, and that vulnerability would vanish as quickly as it had appeared.
Some kids were already skating around the rink. One wore jeans and a T-shirt, his pale skin covered in tattoos that blurred as he rolled past. A couple rolled past, she in a dress with her brown hair pulled into two buns and accentuated with red flowers, he in a white shirt and red jeans. Another had orange and white extensions running through his brown hair, and orange and white furries hugging his twig-like legs.
I feared I’d have to dance with Carmine, and once again look like a fool, unable to dance the way I saw these kids dancing around me, jumping around to these “New Breaks,” movements that didn’t resemble the grinding I had done at Carmine’s age in the gay clubs of late nineties Midtown Manhattan. Fortunately, Carmine recognized the boy in the orange and white furries. Carmine bent over the waist level bright yellow partition surrounding the roller rink and stopped the boy from skating to catch up. In a small area at the far corner stood a cluster of games that held a strong nostalgic quality for me as a boy in Seaside Heights, such as pinball machines or the claw crane in which you use a metal claw to grasp a miniature doll from a pile surrounded by mirrors. To my pleasant surprise, I spotted something even better, the skee ball machines I’d had so many good memories of, tucked away against the far wall of the rink.
I hurried over, coins in hand, and plunked them into the slot below the mouth of the wooden runway. The machine lit up, a square digital zero appearing in the square sign above the target, but the balls didn’t come out to line up at the game’s start as I’d remembered. I put in another coin. No clay balls. Then another. No clay balls again. Then another. Until I’d run out of coins. The machine must have been malfunctioning. All I wanted, if only for a moment, was to feel the same bliss I had felt as a child playing this game. Was that too much to ask? I wanted to scream out in frustration, scream until my voice was hoarse, for the first time scream and not care what kind of scene I was creating, the same kinds of public scenes my mother had created and used to manipulate me. But what would be the use? Instead, I dropped my head in disappointment, broken.
I felt Carmine’s slender hands grasp my bony shoulders, his mouth against the back of my neck. “I want you to get us ecstasy,” he said.
****
“I was diagnosed as a sociopath with narcissistic tendencies,” Carmine announced. He stood at the master bath’s entrance and toweled off his nude body, which glistened from the shower water. Across from him I lay atop a golden pool of high end satin sheets in the queen sized bed, a bed I had only recently stopped sharing with Gil after I’d walked in on him almost two weeks ago fucking someone else, the stranger moaning with each thrust as his feet dangled at Gil’s shoulder blades. The mattress was made of an expensive material that bowed to the body that slept on it, and it still held the feminine contours of Carmine’s body in the empty space beside me. As I watched him rub the towel roughly into his brown hair, I remembered when we’d met almost a week ago. It was late July, during Asbury Park’s speedo party, where those lucky enough to still be 18-25 pay their age as cover and the rest of us pay fifty dollars. He rose from the ocean foam like Aphrodite, his hairless body set against the horizon and copper nipples shining like coins as the sunlight hit the drops of ocean still clinging to his body. He caught me watching him and immediately approached. His sinewy copper muscles stretched and contracted in confidence with every step. He played coy and made up a story about forgetting his towel. I gave him my only one. He sat down and began talking. Carmine’s every movement, his every syllable, did not simply demand uninterrupted attention; they demanded uninterrupted devotion.
I doubted Carmine’s diagnosis at first, knowing that, as a former therapist, diagnosing sociopathy is a slippery business. Sociopathy is a complex disease, most likely caused by maladaptive behavior in which, at a very early age, patients take on a superior false self as a defense against extreme trauma, such as molestation. Sociopaths are both snakes and chameleons, using their lies to slither into and stay in another’s life, changing themselves whenever necessary to obtain whatever is desired at that moment. But his stories convinced me that his diagnosis was, in fact, correct. After drying himself he lay next to me, still naked, and told me about his attempted suicide which he admitted was simply for attention. About getting his ex-boyfriend fired because he broke up with Carmine at Carmine’s best friend’s birthday party and ruined her party. About breaking up another best friend and his partner by telling each lies about the other because this best friend spent more time with his partner than with Carmine. As a therapist I knew this relationship was dangerous, even potentially deadly, territory. Sociopaths do not view others as equals, as humans, and therefore, any malicious behavior, assault or even murder, is easily justified. But, as a therapist, again, I understand that we can not always control our actions, especially in regards to relationships. Carmine made me feel young again, feel wanted, feel special. And, after the predictability that monogamy with Gil had transformed my life into with the precision and brutality of a dictator, I needed Carmine’s danger.
Carmine’s confessions reminded me of the only other experience I had with a sociopath. Well, it was the sociopath’s husband, a client of mine. He and his wife were high school sweethearts, married at eighteen and nineteen respectively, and now at 39 he was finally wondering what he’d gotten himself into. During our sessions, as his heavy Italian hands, worn and cracked from years of factory work, waved through the air between us, he told the same kinds of stories, stories of his wife sabotaging relationships, targeting and attempting to ruin friends’ lives for minor infractions she viewed as monumental and unforgivable attacks on her personhood. In one session he confessed he’d looked up ‘sociopath’ on the internet and felt the symptoms fit his wife.
“Do you think she’s a sociopath, doc?” he asked me, his brown unibrow rising in anticipation of my answer.
“I can’t say for sure. I don’t know her.”
“I just wished I’d known when we were teenagers,” he said, his hazel eyes focused in reflection on his lap.
“You wished you’d known…”
“That she was a snake. I would’ve cut it off early. All the times she bit me. And my friends. I’m such an idiot.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“It’s not as simple as logic. Both of you are working on compulsion. Each fulfills needs in the other neither of you fully understand.”
“Compulsion?” He looked perplexed.
“Yes.” I reached for a comparison. “It’s almost like instinct in an animal. They act without knowing why they act. We do the same thing in our relationships…sort of.”
He nodded, his face relaxing in what I hoped was satisfaction.
Carmine finished confessing and waited. He anticipated a positive response from me, to tell him it was okay, that I understood completely why he did what he did. But I said nothing. He sobbed into the satin pillow, telling me, between sniffles, he should’ve never said anything. I knew he didn’t actually feel sad; sociopaths can not feel emotions as you and I can. Whereas our tears come from a sadness so real we feel as if we’re drowning, a sociopath’s tears are simply a wavering reflection, an imitation of what he or she has seen others do. Carmine’s tears were, in actuality, an attempt to make me feel guilty for not reassuring him that unhealthy behavior was in fact healthy. This is classic sociopath behavior.
Now, if you have the slightest education in psychology, you’re probably sitting there with a smug look on your face, convinced you know the reason why I didn’t break up with Carmine and found myself in legal trouble less than twenty-four hours later. You think that because my mother had a personality disorder, and I had no agency when interacting with her, that I continued to interact with Carmine whom displays many of the same symptoms, as a way of trying to master the trauma of being denied my mother’s love. But this just isn’t so. You don’t know about the intense therapy I underwent when my mother died a year back, the exercises I engaged in: writing her letters, role playing with my therapist. Besides, I’m a therapist, remember? I am nothing if not self-reflective. I intimately understand how the human mind works. Therefore, it can be safely (and rightly) assumed that I know how my mind works. Understanding the reasons we behave in a certain manner is the first step in positively altering those behaviors.
***
“I want you to buy us ecstasy,” Carmine reiterated. I didn’t answer him the first time because there was no way in hell I was buying ecstasy for anyone. I was only an adjunct at my university, adjunct being a glorified term for contract work, and an arrest could easily sever that tenuous relationship. And, more importantly, I’d most likely lose my license to practice this time around, rather than squeaking out with a fine and black mark on my professional record as I had with the last incident.
But after this gut reaction subsided, I reconsidered. I had always wanted to experiment with ecstasy; I’d read case studies on the drug when it was used in therapy in the late seventies and early eighties, before the FDA banned it after the drug had found its way from the hands of respected therapists to dirty drug-addict ravers. Perhaps the experience could bring Carmine and me closer; perhaps I could help him overcome the narcissistic tendencies which caused his sociopathy, convince him of how rewarding real emotion is in contrast to its reflection.
I turned and faced him. “Okay. I’ll do it. But you need to know I’m doing this because I want to, not because you want me to.”
“I’ll make a note of it,” he responded playfully, the corner of his lip curling and creating a subtle smile. “Thank you,” he said, kissing me once quickly. He pointed out the dealer to me.
The dealer dressed like most of the other dancers, in pants that looked like bags of material tied to his thick legs and a tight shirt that clung to his block of a chest. As I approached him, his face came into focus. His smooth skin and cheeks pink from shaving suggested youth, but the creases cutting into his forehead and lines growing from the corners of his mouth countered that suggestion. Looking back, I probably should’ve been suspicious. I didn’t know much about raves, but I knew it was primarily a youth subculture and he looked older than most of the other ravers. Therefore, there was little reason for him to be there, and the chances of him also legitimately selling narcotics was slim at best.
Somewhere between the time I attempted skeeball and I attempted to acquire ecstasy, the music had changed from New Breaks to what Carmine informed me was Drum and Bass. Unlike New Breaks, each of these songs only offered a repetitious and syncopated beat and bass line; a foreign language with no reference points for me to een begin understanding it, void of any semblance of verses, bridges, or choruses.
I refocused on my task on hand. I wondered what I would say when I finally reached the dealer. I’d never bought drugs before. How does one act in this situation? Do I say I want ecstasy? Is there a street name I should know? If I don’t know it, will I be denied the drugs? And how will the actual transaction work? Will he give me a dollar amount or will that be in some sort of code also? Do I just stand there, pull out the money, count it, and give to him? Won’t that be conspicuous?
When I finally reached the dealer he waved me over to a dark corner.
“How many?” he asked.
“Two,” I responded. I concentrated on keeping my voice steady to conceal my anxiety.
“Fifty.”
I stared at him, unsure what to do. He glanced around the room. Then locked eyes with me. “You can count it out here. It’s cool.”
I nodded. Though I doubted his authority, I pulled out a wad of cash, counted out the amount, and handed it to him.
After that, things become a blur. I heard someone yell something like “Freeze!” I felt my arms pulled behind my back and the sharp click of handcuffs. As I was paraded through the crowd towards the exit, the handcuffs pinning my hands behind me and stretching my chest back, I briefly identified with Jesus Christ being dragged though those vicious Roman crowds before being nailed to the cross. Carmine jumped in front of me, assuring me he would do everything in his power to get me out of jail, that he’d have his mother contact her lawyer to fight this entrapment. I knew that he was lying, that his only concern was securing his ecstasy, that he was seizing my arrest as an opportunity to play the role of the concerned boyfriend to our onlookers.
Back out on the street, surrounded by abandoned buildings, the undercover cop told me to watch my head as he pushed me into the back of a police car. I knew this part of Asbury was ruled by local gangs and I imagined what went on behind those bordered up windows. I imagined a cacophony of counting machines sorting drug money while extensively tattooed gang members stood guard with semi-automatic weapons at the rooms’ entrances.
How dare these cops arrest me for trying to buy a little ecstasy! Would my ecstasy use kill anyone? Was my ecstasy use holding entire neighborhoods of hard working and honest folk hostage at gun point? Of course not. Then why were these cops singling me out? Couldn’t their resources be better spent going after the drug dealers in this city? My arrest must’ve been some sort of maladaptive behavior by this police force; my arrest made them feel better about themselves, reduced their anxiety regarding Asbury’s crime and danger, but, in the end, was unproductive because I was not the one causing the real crime.
As the sirens geared up and the cop car screeched away, I tried to imagine what would happen next. I’d never been arrested. I gleaned my possible immediate future from television and movies. A cop would manhandle my fingers, rolling each first in a pad of black ink then on a white square for the precinct’s records. I’d be blinded momentarily by a flash of white light as my mugshot was captured on film. And then the phone call. I’d be allowed one phone call. I wondered who’d I call. It wouldn’t be Carmine, that was for sure. He couldn’t be counted on; I’d bet my therapy license that I’d never see his mother’s lawyer. But what about Gil?
I knew Gil would come to the rescue. I imagined his response to my pleas to be released from prison. His voice would stay calm. He’d choose his words carefully, as to maximize my guilt without overtly telling me I was wrong. He never told me I was wrong. Even when I’d been sanctioned by the American Psychiatric Association for screwing one of my clients, a slim, seventeen year old blonde boy whom knew exactly what he had been doing when he seduced me; when he would wear tight jeans and parade his tight little teenage ass in front of me, pretending that he just felt more comfortable talking about his feelings when he strutted around the room rather than sitting on the couch; or when he would pretend that we kept the office too warm (he was the only client who complained about this) and would unbutton his shirt to just before his navel, showing off his baby smooth skin.
Even after that, after I could no longer practice and had to change careers, becoming an adjunct professor at the local community college and having my salary cut by two thirds, Gil stayed. He double-downed on his devotion to me, increasing his caseload and even taking clients in on the side using our study as an office (Gil’s a therapist also). Of course, this behavior was not born from altruism. No human behavior is. He enjoyed taking care of me because he subconsciously enjoyed perceiving himself as better than I was.
Which is why I could easily imagine the cocky clicks of Gil’s imported shoes making their way towards my cell, his four foot seven frame inside one of his tailored three piece suits, the smug look on his face, his skin smoothed and evened out with a high priced moisturizer and sunscreen combo. After he paid my bail, no words would be uttered because the silence would be sufficient; Gil would be secure in the knowledge that I understood my dependence on him..
But what he didn’t want to understand was that he couldn’t function without me. Which was why I knew he’d come to my rescue. I imagined his last two weeks without me, meandering though a lonely life (I’m sure the man I had caught him with didn’t hang around), his professional work as his only structure. From our innumerable midnight conversations conducted with my head set on his bare chest, I knew his work did not fulfill him. He had confessed that, after some self-introspection, he only found true fulfillment in his success in relationships . Gil needed me not only because I inflated his ego, but because saving me from myself gave him his only true purpose.
The backseat of the police car smelled like new leather and the ride felt smooth as we pulled into the precinct’s parking lot. I wondered if this was a new police car, most likely bought with the money made from bogus arrests like mine. The cop car stopped short which pushed me backwards. The handcuffs shifted and one pinched my wrists. At that moment I thought about my Italian factory worker client. I had been bitten by a snake as well. But unlike my client who lamented his lack of knowledge, that lament acting as an attempt to control the situation, I was smarter and more self-reflective than he was; I knew there was no way to control these kinds of relationships. Carmine and I, Gil and I, even you, operate on compulsion, much like an animal operates on instinct. Whether we want to admit it or not, our intimate relationships transcend reason.
