Cedric Con't

     Before rehab, Cedric would have never thought of himself as an addict. He just enjoyed getting his party on, even if it meant waking up on the last stop of the N train in a puddle of his own urine. And so there were addicts and there was him, the responsible meth user.
     He hated that Renata and Billy were beginning to catch on. They’d both seen enough cautionary after-school specials that ended with the valedictorian OD’ing on stage at his high school graduation. They didn’t want Cedric’s story to become fodder for hack TV writers.
     “Where were you last night?” He remembered Renata asking four years earlier, when it all began to crumble. They were waiting for Billy to arrive at Quaint, their favorite Sunday brunch spot. Cedric hated when it was just the two of them, it increased the chances of her having one of her very special talks. They had all gone to a party the night before and Cedric disappeared to hook up at a sex party and smoke meth.
     She’s lucky I even made it to brunch, he thought. He was only there because the party had run out of meth and he didn’t feel like fucking anymore.
     “I was sick,” he sheepishly replied. Renata has worked as a drug counselor on Rikers Island and had a bullshit meter that was even more accurate than a polygraph test.


“Sick?”


“Yes, sick. I’m aloud to get sick, aren’t I?”


“There’s sick, Ced, and there’s sick. Which sick are you? She looked at his arms for track marks, scared that he’d begun injecting the drug. He noticed her stare. Bitch, I’m not a fucking junkie, he thought.


“I had a stomach bug, but I’m better today,” he said as Billy entered the restaurant.


“You look like shit,” were the first words out of his mouth.


“He’s sick,” Renata she said making air quotes and snapping open the menu. “Very sick.”


Thinking back, that was the first of many times Renata tried to intervene. He hated her for it then and sometimes he even hated her now. But he’d made many amends to her over the last four years of his recovery. He knew she cared. And he wished he’d listened to her sooner.


What made Cedric enter rehab came in a messy package of a patient named Jake Bloom, a gorgeous 28 year-old aspiring model/actors/spokesperson who both intimidated and intrigued Cedric. Gorgeous clients always made Cedric nervous – he wasn’t bad looking, but a model he was not. He just couldn’t understand how creatures like Jake could even have problems. When you looked like him, didn’t life get handed to you on a silver platter?


Cedric made up for his own self diagnosed short comings with a lithe and lean body and an ass that benefitted from a squat heavy workout regimen. It was the only body part he ever concentrated on. If he was going to be a power bottom, the ass needed to look as fuckable as possible. It didn’t matter that he’s just finished his PhD in psychology and had published a book. He knew what guys wanted. It wasn’t brains, but an ass like a shelf that you could stack books on. In an online profile once he even invited men to “put their library books in his shelves”


Cedric opened a small private practice on 34th street at The Institute of Wellness that budding therapist’s referred to as the Therapy Whorehouse because of its hourly rates. If he saw even a few patients he could charge enough to pay rent and have enough left over to support his meth habit.


Cedric had worked with Jake for several sessions but the session that was underway felt oddly more intimate than he remembered. This sometimes happened in therapy and he thought it was simply because they were doing good work together.


“I just found out I’m positive,” Jake said. “And I think I’m a meth head.”


Jake hadn’t mentioned meth in their intake. Cedric shifted in his chair, a fine mist of sweat formed on his upper lip.


“I see. You tested positive when?


“Two days ago."


And when was the last time you used meth?”


“Two days, ago. Doctor. You don’t remember.”


“Now why would I remember,” Cedric said, immediately understanding this new found intimacy with Jake.


“I last used meth with you. Before I fucked you.”


Jake reached into his wallet and handed Cedric a business card: it was familiar to Cedric because it was his own.


“You told me to come see you if you wanted a therapist. You were so fucked up, you didn’t even know it was me, you just begged to get fucked.


“Get out.”


“Fuck you! You’re supposed to help me! Fucking help me! How the fuck you gonna help me? Look at you!”







With a slam of the door, Jake was gone.







Cedric slumped to floor. He needed to get on the HIV morning after pill, but he only had 72 hours. He knew he last used on Sat and partied with a number of men. With a shaking hand he called the nearest clinic and made an emergency appointment.







***

With-in a moth, he closed up his private practice, said goodbye to the few remaining friends who would speak to him and went to a month long rehab at The Pride Institute in fucking Minnesota and another year in a sober house while he got better. It was there that he did part-time work in a LGBT homeless shelter. And it was there that he felt most connected to his clients for the first time in his professional career.


After he left Minnesota it was back to NYC where he floundered a bit, but didn't relapse. And then he found his dream job. For the last 3 years Cedric had been a junior psychologist and counselor at The Addictions Clinic in Midtown Manhattan. He ran the LGBT unit and was a skilled and respected lecturer on trauma and this community, his community.







Each morning he had rounds on the addictions unit and then a group. He didn't have to run a group, but this was special to him and so he didn’t as a silent gesture of giving back. The group was called Man 2 Man and it was for gay black men in recovery.







These were boys like him. The outcasts, the freaks, the trannies and the kids who worked the runway at The Christopher Street piers. He had a similar life in Chicago, trolling public bathroom for sex with anyone who'd give him attention and drugs. Since he got clean all he wanted to do was give back to the men he saw as brothers, friends and sons. It was the first time in his life that he felt parental. He even wondered if he might adopt, provided he and his boyfriend had enough cash to adopt a child. He was thinking Malawi but was hoping Madonna would start adopting children from places that had cheaper airfare – she was often his barometer for what to do. Since becoming sober, he was far more responsible with his money.


Remembering the boys at the clinic in Minnesota reminded him he needed to make a meeting. This was always the struggle, between self-care and self-destruction. He shrugged and figured it might always be that way. At least now, my self destruction is Mountain Dew and online gaming. He logged off of WOW and slipped into a pair of boxers.







***


"Hey Ronnie, I'm returning your call. I know, it's been a few days. I need to make a meeting. I'm okay, minor World of War craft diversion, but I'm feeling a little alone."


They decided on the open meeting at the 46th Street Clubhouse and then brunch.


What he didn't tell Ronnie was that for the first time in months he'd thought of using. He’d seen an episode of Breaking Bad and then another, until he’d watched the entire first season. He wanted to step through that TV screen and sit in the room with the characters as the made meth. He could smell the acrid smoke as it wafted through the air. He even reached for the screen, convinced he would be transported to this alternate universe where he could act the part of the addict. He had sense enough to know that this fantasy could be trouble and so he made a call. He had done enough acting in his life already.

Renata

Renata Forcelli was 43, big busted and broke. These were the only attributes she could think of as she wrote her third online profile of the month. She knew the big boobs would reel many guys in, but she wasn't exactly going to use that as her headline, at least not yet. Plus she knew the broke part, and especially the age part, balanced out her breasts so that her chances were always going to be 50/50, on a good day. Guys didn't want hot and older, the wanted hot and younger. And dumb. Or at least dumber than her. Surely, I've got to be at least partially dumb to invest so much time and money in these online personals, she occasionally thought to herself. Her last date ended in a failed attempt at sex which she stopped when Nate, a Brooklyn based freelance writer, answered a text while he was going down on her. "Unless you put that on vibrate and then in your mouth, this date is over," she said as she pushed Nate from between her thighs and off her bed. That night she immediately de-activated her account. But now she was back on after a self-imposed hiatus and cautiously hopeful that she might meet someone who could actually pay attention to her instead of an iPhone.

I'm sure as hell not gonna waste these babies, she thought as she cropped another photo just below the bust line. She hated when she thought like a straight guy. She knew she was more than just big boobs, but did they?

The website she just became a member of  was Nerve.com. She heard from a couple of single girlfriends that most guys here were looking for sex, but to be honest, she was too. She'd just like it to last several months or even years instead of one or two awkward nights. And throw in actual conversation, a few romantic candle lit wine infused dinners and semblance of commitment and she'd have it all.  Plus she heard the guys on Nerve were cute. The men winking at her on Match mostly recently resembled: Gene Simmons with a hair lip, Paulie Walnuts  from the Sopranos and lastly, Golda Meir.

Renata loved her Friday nights with Billy and Cedric and his boyfriend Michael, but it was tough. After dinner and a movie, she knew Cedric and Michael were going home to each other and Billy would slink off to the East Village do god knows what with whom in clubs called The Cock or The Fist Palace. She thought he might have made that second one up, but she never knew with Billy. All she had was a cat, Clancy, who she recently adopted from the Humane Society. This was her third cat in as many years. They kept dying, due to no fault of her own. The first one, Dewey, had an aneurysm underneath her dining room table, the second, Sasha, a beautiful Maine Coon, was in the last stages of FIV, the feline version of AIDS, when she adopted her and wasn’t long for the world. She hoped her luck would be different with Clancy. He was bright eyed and young-ish and she hoped he would last.

“My first cat committed suicide.” She told Billy one night after she lost Sasha to FIV. 

“How is that even possible?” Billy asked, between a heaping mound of chocolate peanut butter ice cream they’d gotten from the Cold Stone on 9th Avenue.

“It was when my mother and father were splitting up and fighting all the time. The cat would scamper away whenever my father would come home drunk. The cat remembered the time my father came down hard on his tail as he was sleeping on the top step of the porch. 

Billy had never heard this story before, despite their nearly 20 year friendship. He knew her parents split when she was 8, that her dad had a brief but spectacular period as a fall down drunk, and that Renata accompanied her mother through several marriages, rebirths and communes.They became friends when they met working at The Bronxville Field Club, a rich and snooty private club were they worked as a receptionist and groundsmen, respectively. Billy quit his job much sooner than Renata, as his 7 til 3 shift made it difficult to get home in time without missing the first 10 minutes of Oprah. There was a time, years before she splashed her face across every month of her feel good magazine, when he couldn't miss an Oprah.

“So how, exactly, uh, did the cat die?”

“He just walked out to the middle of the street, sat on the yellow dividing line and waited until a truck came and smashed him to death.”

“That’s freaking horrible. And you saw this?”

“No, my neighbor did. She swore that the cat watched all morning for the right time, calmly sauntered to the road and just waited.”

“That’s not true.” Billy rarely questioned Renata, but this story was too unbelievable.

“Believe me,  It is. I wasn’t even sad at the time. I didn’t even ball my eyes out. I was relieved for him. He lived in fear of being crushed by my father. With the truck, he was at least in control of it. Sometimes, I wished it was me, she said, finishing off the last of the ice cream. “Come on, let’s get on the 7 at 42^nd Street, we can make it home and I can see if I still have a living cat or not.
All Billy could do was grab her arm and lead her to the train and hope that Clancy was there to head-butt her and weave between her legs when she got home, and not in a small cold heap under her dining room table.

Cedric

Cedric had been up all night. Again. I've got to stop doing this, he thought to himself as he turned on the shower and stood there statue-like as the cold water cascaded down his body. It was the eight all-nighter he'd pulled in two weeks and he was exhausted. Playing could do that to him. And when he played, he played hard. The first day of the rest of your life, he told himself. God, he hated the 12 step cliches, but had to admit they worked. I'll stop tonight. Or cut down. Yes cutting down was the trick. That would have to wait.  Right now he wanted to get back to the game.

Saturday meant he could play all day long and do nothing else. No calls from neurotic sisters, no slurring stepmothers and most of all, no pain-in-the-ass boyfriend checking in. Pepe was on a business trip for the last two weeks, which allowed Cedric even longer play times. He hurried out of the shower, half-dried and powered up the computer. He'd log on and find some "friends" and then time would evaporate and he'd get lost in it all. And nobody, not Billy, not Renata, his subway-stop coffee clatch and best friends, would have anything to say about it. He was annoyed, to say the least, by their concern, about how tired they said he looked, or asking why he was running so late. He knew the concern masked something deeper; a fear that he'd relapsed and was back to his old ways. It wasn't any of their business why he looked any way. Today he could look as strung out as he wanted to and they couldn't say a thing.

The computer whirred and beeped alive and Cedric dropped his towel and sat naked at his desk. He didn't need clothes for this. There was no modesty in this game, he could be whoever he wanted. He loved the escape, chasing the high, the anonymity of it all. Online, nobody really knew who he was. And nobody had to. The didn't know the past or the present and that was just fine with him. If he wanted to be a human he could. But he preferred to be a Dwarf for the Alliance and this morning he seriously had to kick some Orc ass. Theses fuckers were impossible to kill and his online teammates were off their game lately. World of Warcraft was not for the faint of heart, although he was getting concerned that it was becoming his only social outlet -- many of the guys in the fellowship, including his sponsor, were calling and he hadn't returned a single call. Cedric hadn't been to a meeting in a few days which was unusual for him. But WoW was getting so good, which he knew was an excuse.

What really was bothering him was that Darnell showed up at a meeting the other night. They partied together in the early 2000's, even had a fling when they thought they could save each other from meth. They hadn't parted on good terms -- Darnell stole the last of Cedric's meth and a credit card that thankfully he was able to cancel before Darnell ordered the entire collection of Racquel Welch wigs from a late night TV infomercial for one of his disastrous meth induced drag performances.

Cedric was sober for the last four years. If you didn't count World of Warcraft. Was this a problem he had to address as well? He decided he was being hard on himself. WoW was not crystal. At least he wasn't on red-eye flights from Chicago to NY for the the Black Party or to Los Angeles for whichever color party was happening that weekend. That was pretty much his life in the meth years -- back to back circuit parties and sex with as many hot, cracked-out boys he could get his hands on. In comparison, WoW was like doing the stations of the cross with cloistered nuns.

I fucking miss crystal, even though it totally fucked my shit up, he thought as he swigged from a glass of Mountain Dew. At least he could admit it. He knew so many guys in denial about missing the drug. And he new just as many who relapsed because the were Pollyanna's about their abstinence. "Every thing is great, don't miss it at all," friends would tell him and a week later they'd be in a psych ward hallucinating that the KGB had video taped him and his boyfriend having sex at the Olive Garden in Times Square. Cedric could admit two things: 1) that the drug made him feel amazing, better than ever and 2) it almost cost him him his freedom and his life. Spending a night in the downtown Tombs, the the massive jail on Centre Street and then another week on Rikers Island had that affect.

The stay at Riker's was fortuitous -- it's where he met Victoria St.Claire, a Brooklyn luscious former addict turned jail psychologist, who kicked his ass right off the drug and inspired him to refocus his psychology career to addictions. First his own, then to others.

"You need to find yourself a higher power, you little fool," He remembered her telling him with a drag queen worthy head snap. Of course, she was right and as soon as he could, he found a good Baptist church in Harlem and he got right with God. And then he got right with himself.

Billy

Billy moved to Astoria, Queens  in 1998, a week after George Michael was arrested for soliciting a police officer in a public bathroom in Los Angeles. The event pretty much ended  the singer's career as a pop star but did signal his new role as world-wide professional homosexual and major league fuck-up. Like George, Billy began his life as a professional homosexual at the same time, with less disastrous results. He attributed this to one simple fact: his coming out began in a modest one-bedroom apartment across the street from the Top Tomato grocery store on Ditmars Boulevard and not at a pubic urinal while he showed an undercover cop his schlong.

The apartment was in a 5 floor walk-up, above a Japanese restaurant and a video store. It was his first apartment without roommates and the first time he truly lived on his own. He painted each room a different color of the primary color wheel. His living room was a pale yellow, because he'd seen it on HGTV, the kitchen a fiery red, and the bedroom was painted periwinkle. Everything in the room was painted periwinkle, too -- the window sills, ceilings, the radiators. He played cool blues and Sigur Ros, the eclectic Icelandic band that moaned a lot but rarely sang a lyric, although one time he swore they sang "Yves St. Laurent" over and over until the song faded into oblivion (they didn't). The small lamps on his Ikea bed tables each had blue party lights, which cast deep blue hues in every direction. Lying in the bed, and depending on his mood, he either felt like he was submerged in water or rocketing skyward into the twilight of the day.

"It's my sexy bang room," He told anyone who would listen, although it was almost a year before he had sex with a person other than himself in this underwater fantasy.

When the news broke about George Michael's public shaming Billy immediately got a call from Joseph an old friend from high school who lived in a new high rise in Long Island City and with whom he'd  been in-and-out of touch with for several years. Joseph, a soft-spoken adorable cub of a boy, had come out bravely and publicly the year they turned 20.  He adored George Michael since he was a chubby 7th grader at Emerson Middle School in Yonkers, NY and could often be heard defending George on the merits of his voice and his songwriting, when really what attracted him was his bubble-ass and strong chin.  Joseph and Billy both knew that the other was gay as far back as they could remember. Joseph waited patiently for years for Billy's self-realization. Waiting turned into patient exhaustion for him and he used the George Michael incident as a springboard to finally find out about his former best friend.

"George Michael is gay," He blurted out moments after the news had been delivered on CNN.
"I know, who doesn't know that?" Billy offered in return. "He wore Richard Simmons short-shorts and neon gloves in that video."
"It's confirmed, he was waving his dick at a cop in a bathroom."
"Eww. Why?"
"I don't know, a bathroom is the last place I'm horny.
There was a pause.
"So are you?"
"Horny?"
"No, are you gay?"
"Yes."

And that was the answer that reunited them. Billy was finally ready.

That was a long time ago. Joseph, who now goes by Jose, although he's not Hispanic, and Billy are, at best, estranged. Daily phone calls dwindled to weekly chats, and finally to once a month email check -ins. Now, they were lucky to exchange quick "how are you?" texts. The last three Billy had sent had gone unanswered and he was beginning to worry. Although they never lived more than a few train stops away from one another, lately, it seemed liked they were a world apart.

Billy lived longest at the place he was at now -- 36-08 and 40th Street, in Sunnyside, a surprisingly gorgeous community right off the 7 train that was relatively undiscovered territory until New York Magazine listed it as an up-and-coming neighborhood several years ago. Since that time rents have increased, as had the preponderance of hipsters and young professionals all priced out of their respective Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods. Thank god I'm in a rent stabilized pre-war building, Billy often thought. His large studio was twice the size of a Manhattan one-bedroom. Because Billy didn't have kids or a significant other right now this was what he bragged about the most.

It's wasn't a lot, but sometimes, in this city, it was enough.