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looked at you when you stopped trying to cram your sixteen-year-old shame-handle into her. Look at you. Twenty years later, the episode still has you assuming the Cringe Position. You raised your sweaty face, your eyes met hers, and she looked at you like you were some kind of a cripple. A sex-gimp . Crashing is that feeling. That kind of fun—some version of—nonstop. From the minute you wake up. (If you sleep, which you don’t. You’re not an amateur.) If you died and the coroner knew what he was doing, your cause of death would read: Extreme Awareness . Every conversation was toe-curling in real time, and worse when you relived it later, which you did, without surcease, even when you were having another conversation. There was the babbling in your head, the babbling from the person in front of you, and then all the Other Random Voices. You ceased to think. You only obsess.
    WHAT PEOPLE WHO WERE NEVER ADDICTED DON’T UNDERSTAND. You did not do this shit for pleasure. You did it for relief. (Plus the voices. Did you mention them? How you’d miss them when they were not around?) But when it was working and you felt good and you were really smooook, when every cell in the universe was humming to you, in the key of happy hell, and you were humming with them—when that shit was going on, and you felt abso-fucking-lutely tingly-tits optimistic … it was … it was … it was … Shoot enough and the world whooshed to quiet, and you were content just to sit, maybe drool a little, calm as a hyperactive toddler after his first lick of a Ritalin lollipop. When that happened, you never thought: “I am only this optimistic and one-with-the-cosmos because I’m on amphetamines.” When a drug works, you don’t feel like you’re on a drug. You’re just focused and vaguely orgasmic. Body and brain in stunning sync, running full-throttle. One cunthair from complete loss of control, but perfectperfectperfect .
    WHAT A GOOD DRUG DOES. Is make you believe perfection is what you are going to feel forever. Then take it away … Throw you out of the cushioned fun-car onto a rocky shoulder. Shrink your 900-page thoughts back to garble. De–Dorian Gray your brain. Which makes you go from want to need. (“Maybe things weren’t moving fast, or maybe things were moving too fast. I don’t even remember anymore. I had it made. And I woke up. One morning. I looked down. And fell off my life.” Paul Newman , WUSA. Screenplay by Robert Stone.) This is what’s making crashing so … uncomfortable. So disappointing. So—ARE YOU STILL TALKING? Remember the fake punk in Berlin who bit off his finger?
    Be honest, Sparkle-pony, how’s your life going? Really? Have you looked in the mirror lately? No, really looked. Good for you. Hold onto that magic.
    (Of course you have ADHD. It’s not like there’s not a medical reason to stand in a puddle and stick your finger in a socket.) You were talking about—what was her name? Not Lurleen, now that you think of it, it was something showbiz … Dee-Lay! Dee-Lilah! Dee-Neero, maybe? One of Dee-Neero’s through-the-pantie shots ended up abscessing—giving her what she called “cauliflower vagina.” “That’s pretty good,” you said. And she said she had a degree in English, but they didn’t pay her to talk about Chaucer with her thong pulled sideways. Which—it made sense at the time—led to her splashing the customers way before the “Squirt Craze.” Which you found out about thanks to the social elixir that was quality trailer-park methamphetamine. Which—are you going to do this all fucking night? Speed never made you smarter. It just let you be what you already were longer. It turbocharged stupid. (The weird thing about Dee, you just remembered, was that she wanted to have a stroke. “ Like, if I can shut off my whole left brain, it’d be just