Ten minutes he’d been inside the studio, waiting for someone to come by dispensing home-brewed, over-the-counter anti-depressant pharmaceutical products so the night could get started. Silently, as if marching to their deaths, hundreds of identically unique individuals marched by, clad in uniforms of fluorescent-colored plastic. The sheer number of facemasks, white gloves, battery-operated flashing lights, and laser pointers was overwhelming. The processional into the studio (actually an empty warehouse in the industrial district) was coordinated to the staccato thump of five hundred synchronized fifteen-inch speakers. The overlords focused their mind-controlling subsonics into vinyl discs and produced a thousand candy-clad slaves undulating in time to the commands provided by the music. His eyes, fueled by caffeine and orange juice, lingered on the specimens of youth suitable enough to lavish affection on. Perhaps, he thought, one or another will introduce himself to me when I’m too far-gone to care any longer. His wandering eye landed, finally, on a familiar orange hat in a collection of loiterers and interrupted his reverie. Jones waited across the empty concrete sea for people who knew his inventory of hallucinogenics to make requests. When Jones wasn’t dealing, he was a chemistry student at the University of Washington. Jones maintained that drugs could be manufactured with common household chemicals, but nobody believed him since his apartment looked like something from a Lon Chaney film produced by Ed Wood. Twenty-two years and this is the sum total of my life, he thought bitterly as he stepped into Jones’ sphere of influence. The hems on their enormous trousers touched even though they were a foot apart. They greeted each other cautiously, evaluating the world carefully so as not to be observed trading illicit goods for money. "Art fag," Jones began. "Jonesy," Jared replied, holding out his hands to show them empty and open. Jones grabbed the left one and removed a sponge wrapped in plastic from his pocket, then wiped it over Jared’s wrist. "Freebie," Jones said, "DMSO and liquid." Jared could already taste the sponge and the bitter-sour of the LSD on his wrist from the DMSO dilating his pores. "What else," Jared asked. "You know, rinsing out the beakers," Jones said. Which meant anything from Life cereal to Toluene could be mixed into the solution. "I need five by five, my man," Jared said, beginning the business side of the relationship. His eyes never met Jones’ but instead drifted to those pieces of meat clad in baggy pants marching about, following the siren whump of house speakers. "You know," Jones said as he counted out gelatin capsules of ecstasy, "none out of ten of those will land you in jail." Jared laughed out loud at the statement delivered from the stern-faced dealer. Gawking at a seventeen year-old boy wasn’t much compared with carrying enough drugs to supply a Wal-Mart pharmacy and still have enough left over to get the whole of Liechtenstein fried. If the irony was lost on Jones, Jared wasn’t going to mention it. Jared swallowed two of the bitter capsules and washed them down with a too-expensive bottle of water from the ad-hoc bar set up outside the studio entrance. Walking was beginning to be a bit of an issue, since he was unused to the LSD hitting so quickly. Anything to escape Steve, he thought with agrimace. He fought his feet to make progress into the first room of the studio. Regaining ones balance when on drugs can be a feat of epic proportion. The oddesy through the crowd fraught with peril. Lights shot forth their photon spears to blind, daze and confuse. Music like liquid sex wrapped him in its fiery grip. The dull throb from the opposite wall beckoned him with thick-fingered grace a barely audible whisper from the ear-shattering speakers saying: kiss me. Always obedient, Jared made to comply. His gait not so much a walk or a canter as an open-armed meandering, his fingers brushing faces, hands, bodies, and breasts. Dervishes with glow-in-the-dark toys gyrated about, providing a swirling distraction from outside stimulus. A strange hand from the darkness grabbed his and placed a fuzzy vibrating thing into it for just a moment, then began to caress his skull with it. By the time Jared whipped around to see, a boy with a pierced tongue and a mouth full of glow-stix was waving and moving along to tease another set of nerve endings. "The good ones always get away," Jared whined, half to himself. He continued through the gantlet of caresses and hands. Great strength of will was required to continue forward in favor of aural sex above random flesh-contact with complete strangers. This close to the speakers, the force of vibrating air was like being hit with a car five times a second. Jared joined the other worshippers at the altar of Techno by pressing his lean frame against the grill face of the loudspeaker. His body began to melt from the inside as the speaker’s driving magnets projected an MRI of his entire body on the opposite wall. Harsh vibrations shattered the small stones forming in his kidneys, and the minerals in his blood disrupted its flow by swirling in the chaos caused by fifteen thousand watts of electricity. The combination of drugs, sound, and sensation performed a feat nothing else in existence could. It filled that hole inside him where misery normally made a home. It was a struggle to stay in place against the fiberboard box of the speaker. More and more candy clad anti-puritans had discovered Jones’ medicine cabinet and were migrating to the speaker’s siren song. If speakers ate people this would have been a Greek tragedy. And the vibrating air pushed him away from the box as he rushed back to it. Within two minutes of his arrival at the speaker, though, he found himself unable to escape. The reason for that, as it turned out, was six-foot-two and one hundred sixty pounds. Jared’s face joined the speaker’s with a rough shove from behind. Immediately following was a body longer and leaner than Jared’s. Teeth sank into his neck from behind as Jared’s knees transmuted to chewed gum. He fought to stand on his own instead of being held up by the hands on his hips and the shoulders digging into his back. "The way the monkey took the miller’s wife," a voice behind him spoke, almost breathless in his ear. "By surprise and from behind," Jared finished the phrase he knew too well. "Aren’t you going to say hello, lover," Steve said and ran his tongue up Jared’s neck. Jared winced at the stimulus, and stood a little taller. His hands reached back and grabbed his ex-lover’s hair, pulling his mouth back onto his neck. They stayed there for a minute or more, kissing against the speaker, then Steve hit the floor. He looked up at Jared with a look of shock. "What the fuck," he screamed inaudibly. Jared shook his head. "Never again," Jared shouted back. Adrenaline marched through his veins, eating away the last of the neurological stimulants in a matter of microseconds. He could stand on his own, straight and tall, without wobble, much to his delight. He began a march of his own, out into the open air of the parking lot. Steve followed. "I thought you loved me," Steve pleaded, obviously on some sort of drug, himself. "Used to," Jared said, "but your inability to keep yourself in my bed instead of hopping from one to the other rather wears thin on my heart." "But," Steve said. "Yeah, apparently. Lovely chatting with you, Steve, but I’ve got to be going," Jared said. "But," Steve repeated. "Give me a call sometime," Jared said as he walked away, his right hand waving over his shoulder. This turned out to be a pretty good night, he thought as he made his way out to his car...