Joshua (or "J.J."
as he
preferred to be called, which I never did) was a young man of nineteen from
rural Southwest Virginia, Vinton (near Roanoke) to be more specific. He was very attractive, short of
stature, with deep hazel eyes and a soft Southern drawl. When I
first saw him at Club 216, he was a glow stick wielding tribal dancer. He danced with wild abandon, like a savage
from an undiscovered country.
One night I can vividly recall with
Joshua is quite an unpleasant one. He and I had been invited by a drag queen
and her boyfriend to a dance club called Velvet Nation in Washington D.C. The two plus hour trip to the club was quite
enjoyable, as Joshua and I made out for its duration. Once we arrived at the club, the
atmosphere was pretty damn awesome; three floors were packed with partygoers;
it was the biggest gay club I had ever seen.
The one disconcerting aspect of Velvet
(this was in the late 1990’s) was that drugs, prominently Ecstasy, were being
passed around like candy at Halloween.
In his not so distant past, Joshua had struggled successfully to break a
dependency to drugs, and I feared he would give into temptation. I wanted to leave and go to another club
that was less of a pharmacy, but the drag queen who had driven us stated she
had come for Velvet and wasn’t leaving until closing time (five a.m. the next
morning).
Then, I made a huge mistake. Josh had been clinging to me from the moment we walked in the door, and my loner tendencies were going into overdrive. I asked him to give me twenty minutes alone to explore the club; in the time I was away I suggested he amaze everyone with his dancing.
When I returned, I
knew something was wrong. When he spoke, his
teeth were chattering; he couldn’t stop grinding them. I asked if he had taken any drugs; he
admitted he had, something he had been told was Ecstasy.
I hit the roof. I had left him alone for twenty minutes, and it seemed the second
I had left, he had taken the first drug that was offered to him. We were on the third floor of Velvet, and
with the way I ripped into him, the people on the first probably heard me
screaming. Earlier that day, he had
given me a necklace, which I ripped off and launched at him.
I’m a horror show when made angry, and
that poor kid was backing away from me like the devil had appeared before
him. I demanded to know who had given
him the drugs, and with tears streaming down his face he confessed that it had
been the drag queen who had brought us.
And then all hell broke loose. I was beyond livid because ‘she’ had known
about Joshua’s past dependency and still had offered him the drugs. I went after her, but her boyfriend saw me
coming, saw the look of fury on my face and came between us. He and another guy restrained me, but they
couldn’t restrain my mouth. I was
screaming at the top of my lungs, shouting every profanity I knew and more than
likely inventing a few new ones along the way.
Why I wasn’t tossed out, I’ll never know; the only explanation I can
offer is that everyone was spaced out on drugs and the music was so loud that a
bomb exploding would have went unnoticed.
Then, I went still, because Joshua had
come near to us, and he was doubled over.
The two men released me, and I went to him, and he told me he needed to
go a hospital. I yelled out to the drag
queen’s boyfriend to call an ambulance, but instead of doing so he came over to
where Joshua and I were. He said that
if Josh went to the hospital, they would draw his blood, and they would find
out that he was on drugs, and he would go to jail.
“Better in jail than dead,” I
replied.
But the boyfriend ignored me and said to
Joshua, “It’s your call, kid.”
And Josh reneged on calling an
ambulance, which made me even angrier towards him. But I wasn’t so much a monster as to not realize that I was all
Josh had. I took him up to the less
crowded third floor, and he lay with his head in my lap while I held a
water-soaked bar towel to his forehead.
This all occurred sometime around one in the morning, but that fucked up drag
queen kept her vow of not leaving Velvet until it had closed. By that time, thankfully, Joshua was fully
recovered.
The car ride home was misery. It began with the drag queen trying to get
behind the wheel and me ripping the keys out of her hands. She had been doing both drugs and alcohol
that night, as had her boyfriend. There
was no way in hell they were driving me anywhere. I offered them two choices:
either I drove, or I would start out in a dead run with the keys and not
look back. They saw things my way, and
wisely so, because within twenty minutes of getting in the backseat, both of
them were unconscious and dead to the world.
Josh and I didn’t speak on the way
home; at one point, he tried to rest his head on my shoulder, but I shoved him
away. When we returned to Charlottesville,
I dropped him off at the home of his friend, and I told him that was the end of
us. Then, I took the car to the parking
lot of Club 216, left "Tweedle Dum" and "Tweedle Dick" sleeping in the back seat,
and walked the two blocks to my apartment.
A few months later, I received a letter
from Josh in which he admitted that he understood why I had been angry, and he
went on to state that he would always love me.
Additionally, he confessed his life at home had become a hell; he wasn't getting along with his
mother. I replied and suggested that he save up enough money to
move to Charlottesville, where he
could live a better life.
Two weeks later, he showed up at my
door (having taken a Greyhound bus from Roanoke), with only the clothes on his
back, saying that he had come to move in with me. I lived in a one-room efficiency, and my landlords had forbidden me
to cohabitate with anyone due to the size of the apartment. Josh suggested that I get an apartment big
enough for both of us, but I
explained that I couldn’t uproot my life on a moment’s notice; it went
beyond all reason. Furthermore, he
didn’t have any money saved or any employment prospects.
He seemed so crestfallen, and I
genuinely felt pity for him. I took him
in, gave him a fresh set of clothing, fed him, and said that the solution was
an easy one. He would just stay in
Charlottesville with his lesbian friend, Laurie, as he had done on previous
occasions until he found a job and a place of his own.
I even offered to pay his first two months of rent and to keep him fed
until he got on his feet.
He said it sounded like a good plan, so
he called Laurie to have her come pick him up.
Five
hours passed, and, out of curiosity if a living arrangement had been agreed
upon, I called Laurie, who said Joshua was no longer with her.
Distraught that I had 'rejected' him, he had taken a bus home to Roanoke.
Whatever became of him I do not know.