DOSE:

180 mg

oral

MDMA

BODY WEIGHT:

170 lb

Alexis is late, and it’s pissing me off. Vegas party girls are not generally known for their reliability or organizational skills, but Alexis’s texts with me over several weeks are flirtatious and articulate and responsive and fairly open, and even at times bemused. The last thing I want for the evening is deception, and Alexis dissembling about her lateness isn’t a good beginning. I’m pleased to find that she can definitely keep up her end of a conversation. I already knew she was no dope, but she’s interesting and funny and charming and very definitely sexy. She has a tattoo on her thigh:“nothing is forever.” She points out that it is inevitable rather than sad.

It’s an interesting take. I think she’s right but, Martin doesn’t want a connection at this level. Alexis gets in touch with another friend of hers, Taylor, and shows her picture to Martin. He approves, and loosens up a little, but he’s still frustrated.

Taylor arrives. She does no justice to her pictures. Her face is pretty enough, but she is emaciated and on the road to toothlessness. Her tattoos are artless, and she is a wild chatterbox who starts to talk about nothing. Her words do not connect or bind and express no ideas, but instead are an insecure attempt to fill otherwise empty air. Taylor is night to Alexis’s day, and it is obvious even to me that meth is the likely culprit. Screw it, though, we’re committed, and each of us drops 180mg of MDMA with a round of drinks, my third.

Because of a dance festival, the line at the club is mercifully short. Martin and I pass the search and get stamped on the wrist, but the massive bouncer finds a bottle of pills in Taylor’s bag and bars her until she gets rid of them. I’m pissed off at the fat girl and it doesn’t occur to me to take the bag and the pills up to the room, which is very close. Instead, Alexis and Taylor head to Alexis’s car to drop them there. I’m sure they’ll return, if only because I haven’t paid them yet. Alexis, I think, would return even if I had. After they leave, Martin hands me some bills and says “I don’t like Taylor at all.” I’m at a mild loss as to what to do, as it’s my connection with Alexis that got us here, so I pass time by chatting with the security guys. They are surprisingly amiable and understanding of the situation, at least to me.

I have never taken MDMA before but it is obvious to me that I do not want it to hit me while I’m in a conversation about nothing with two security guards in a nondescript hallway , amiable though they may be, so I take my leave and head up to the club.

Ghost Bar is fifty-one stories up and looks back over the Strip from a quarter-mile West. The rails are glass and the city spreads out into the night as would some sort of dewy spider web. It’s physically gorgeous. But the beat is heavy and pounding and the music is nothing I know or like or ever will or ever wish to. No conversation can possibly occur and it is precisely everything that I dislike. Martin is nowhere to be found and for all I know, Alexis and Taylor are chasing a monkey in the parking lot. I’m twenty years older than anyone else in the place. Fuck.

I’m tempted to punt the entire affair and head down to my room. But I instead walk to the rail and stare out at the spiderweb lights. I’m doing that when I hear “It’s really a testament to capitalism, don’t you think?” A short somewhat dumpy man is standing next to me. A slight sensation shimmers over me, and I take an immediate liking to him. So I say, “turn, and look at the people.” He does. “They look happy, don’t they?” “They do,” he says. “That is a veneer, a surface image of joy and camaraderie and youthful exuberance. Look out at the city.” He does. “All of that, out there, that you’re talking about thins down that veneer, and reveals the insecurity and the pain and the neurosis and the vice that’s just underneath. Sure, it’s a testament to capitalism. And it’s gorgeous and awful and honest all at the same time. It rather reflects humanity, don’t you think?” He considers the point. “You know what,” he says, “I agree. You know what else? I really didn’t expect to find anything thoughtful at Ghost Bar this evening, but I have.” He gives me a hug. I return it. I say “I need to find my friends now. But I wish you and yours the best of everything.” He smiles and I turn away.

And then my perceptions somehow dissolve and reform in a slightly different way. I’m entirely aware of circumstances. I’m no longer angry at the fat girl, but rather sad and sorry for her insecurity. I will never like the awful music but it no longer irritates me and instead almost flows through me as an abstraction. My vision blurs and vibrates from side to side and I can’t focus on anything but it oddly does not diminish my sight but rather enhances it.

And then Alexis is there. My image of her is crystalline: She is indeed tall and slender and beautiful. In that time and space, among the crowd and noise and heat and breeze of the desert night, she is the apotheosis of all desire. It is the molly, but the molly only exaggerates what is already there and there is truth in my vision. I kiss her there, among the crowd. She breaks it too soon and says “not here.” Rather than sting as the rejection it is, her words instead say, “yes, elsewhere.” I know what she is and what I am and I believe she knows the same, but there is at that moment very little distance between us. We sit and talk, and for some reason the din is no barrier to conversation. I do not remember exactly what stories she told of her life nor me of mine. I am sure they were shallow and perhaps even banal, but they did not seem so at the time. Then we are standing and Martin appears. He gropes Alexis’s ass and asks her for her underwear. It is crass and unnecessary but somewhat fitting and it reminds us that it is somehow on us to resolve the situation with Taylor. Alexis leaves to find her and I remain, along with my intense desire to connect with her. We text:

You are sweet and I’m sorry the world has been shitty to you.

Aw well thank you and you are sweet as well. But no I don’t want you to think I want pity or anything like that I have also made my choices in life so I don’t blame the world for my bad luck and my bad luck isn’t all bad LOL.

It is not pity I feel but sympathy. I do not mean to patronize.

No I didn’t think you were I know you are just relating to me.

Alex Alex Alex. Where are you come back I do not want to lose this moment of ethereal intimacy by being alone.

I get a text from Martin. He is with Taylor and the molly has overcome him as it has me and he no longer sees her flaws. That occurs to me in the moment but I cannot see the hard edge that life’s roughness has put on Alexis but which is surely there and instead see her purely as she otherwise might be.

The night blurs for a while. Alexis and I are watching people and talking, and we are for that time the only people in the world. Then we are in an elevator and I am looking at her with anticipation in the bright light and she knows it and does not mind. I do not remember going to my room or taking off her dress, but I do remember that it was gone, along with a complicated choker that wrapped around her neck thrice. But she was on the bed in her underwear and asked me to massage her feet. I have never felt that feet were in any way sexual but it occurs to me in the candlelight to suck her toes and I do. The sweet tinkle of her laugh washes over me. Time passes and it is filled with laughter and sweetness, but eventually a sad song comes on and she gets a slightly distant look that says she is thinking about difficulties far away from skyscraper views and plush carpet and quiet candlelight and the smooth soft quietude of our suite. And I am sad and sorry that I could not and did not lift her away from those difficulties for a time as I should have. Instead I say out loud a thought that I know even as I say it that it was better left unspoken. I do not remember it now. It was neither rude nor cruel, but it in any event causes her distance to come to the surface and she says she needs to leave. My desire to have her stay is obvious. I do not need to say it; I know it and she knows that I do. But she needs to leave anyway, and I accept that. The distance between us suddenly seems both immense and unbridgeable.

It is after five. It does not seem possible for so much time to have passed; I would have sworn it was not later than two. I walk Alexis to her car. I do so not out of longing to extend our time together but instead as a measure of respect. I have long believed that respect does not relate to money or status but rather to authenticity. It is a hopelessly naïve view, in many ways childish. As we walk, I do not think one bit less of Alexis because of what she is. I suppose I do not want to know the details of the difficulties she has had or the choices she has made. The world is rough and often cruel and I can be as well but in this respect I am not. But there is no possibility of expressing this thought in a way that will seem to be anything but an accusation, and that will only separate us further. It is rather that it is liberating in certain circumstances to tell no lies and keep no secrets, and if I could do one thing differently, it would be to convince her of that point. The intimacy that comes from doing so is of course temporary, but that does not mean it cannot be cherished. It seems to me that no intimacy is really any different: as I think she reminds herself daily, nothing is forever. All moments and memories must end. It has always been so, and always will be, and is cause for neither sadness nor pain.

P.S. Most of this is about set and setting. I'd done no prior research on MDMA and did not know what to expect. Martin convinced me earlier in the day to try it and I reluctantly agreed. My conclusion: how on earth could I have gone through 53 years without ever having experienced this before? After researching it since, I've put myself on a 60-day clock and use it only on that schedule. I hope to be able to use it for the rest of my life. It's that extraordinary.

Exp Year: 2017	ExpID: 111256
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 53
Published: Mar 9, 2018	Views: 821
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MDMA (3) : Club / Bar (25), Music Discussion (22), First Times (2)