Early on, if he were too demanding or too obtuse, I would dawdle, sometimes even cancel, to assert my dominance. But with each subsequent meeting—one night together turning into 24 hours, turning into a weekend, turning into a long weekend—a certain allure bewitched my senses, becoming almost as addictive, and certainly as insidious, as the party favors I packed. Now I was conditioned.

The swirling eruptions of oxytocin, dopamine, and dehydroepiandrosterone that would soon cloud my brain were welcome obfuscations of my mind's eye's chronic rubbernecking at my recent breakup and the wreck it left behind. Until now, I had been searching for fillers to stuff inside a hollow shell so it wouldn't cave in on itself. I tried eating junk food, or food as junky as I would allow myself to eat, but it became embarrassing to be caught waiting in line at Van Leeuwen's each night for another cone of vegan peanut butter brownie honeycomb. I tried pottery, even purchasing a wheel and a set of tools that looked like they belonged in the operating room of the Templo Mayor, but I began running out of room for asymmetrical vessels too small to contain plants and too large to serve soup. I immediately nixed joining the National Audubon Society once I discovered that the National Audubon Society meant bird-watching.

I'd been stuck at home too long, and frankly, I was paying far too much for a home to spend all my time there, since I was paying mostly for everything outside it. Besides, that home contained too many memories of a past I was moving on from—not to mention empty ice cream cartons, misshapen ceramics, and torn-up little birds that once roosted on glossy promotional pamphlets. I needed an escape. My mind and heart needed novelty, excitement; a dazzling, daring voyage. Ironically, or maybe not, I found this escape in my own ZIP code.

It began a few months earlier with the ritualistic logging on to one of the many hookup apps found on any gay man's phone, geolocating my next suitor on an interactive map.

Growing like a good season's crop from a well-fertilized orchard were circles all over a map of New York City, swelling membranes containing photos of bare torsos, silhouetted heads, bulging buttocks, and gargantuan penises, scattered with wild abandon like Monsanto seeds across every borough. Certain clusters were denser in the corners of Hell's Kitchen, or flanked the East River along the shores of the East Village and Williamsburg. There was always a dense concentration down near City Hall, though those territories remained uncharted for me.

These little seeds plumped into a robust offering that could satiate anyone's daily, weekly, or monthly serving of fruit: peaches that looked freshly plucked, their fine fuzz glistening with morning dew; pairs of pears that appeared either shriveled, dried in a musty basement, or engorged in a stew of their own juices adulterated with heavy syrup; chile peppers so old and shriveled they seemed to have lost all traces of their former spice.

In the course of sampling as much of this fruit salad as I could, one night I thought I'd finally found my Japanese Crown Melon: Ash Lee Honeycutt.

Though, at the time, I knew him only as a portrait of sculpted Apollonian dimples under the username “Honeypottom.” I'm not entirely sure which moniker was worse, but a bro by any other name would make me swell like a cat in heat, so long as he had that body.

“Hey there,” I wrote, employing my standard salutation.

“Hi,” he responded eight minutes later, setting off a conversation that could so easily have been copied and pasted into any of my other chats, complete with the typical reporting of penis sizes and medical histories, with concomitant favorable exaggeration and clinical precision, respectively; reductive compartmentalization of our identities according to which position we tended to assume during penetrative sex; what drugs we did and what drugs we'd done; what drugs we had on us and what drugs had done to us; vague coordinates and work schedules; which fruits in the salad we'd both sampled and which we were allergic to; whether we wanted to invite others into the smoothie.

As neither of us could host—me, because of unspecified messiness in my apartment; him, unspecified messiness in his commitments—we decided to book a hotel room, which he would foot the bill for if I provided the party favors. An agreeable agreement, evidently, since in a flash it became a weekly occurrence, the very one I was now preparing for with all the vigor of my perverted Pavlovian pedigree.

He was always at the hotel first; I always stumbled in late, sometimes using only my overstuffed bag to cover my bare torso, since I never wanted to keep him waiting. As nonchalantly as a shirtless guy with a duffel bag bulging with dildos and drugs could be, I attempted a tiptoe bypass of the concierge who, by now, if he couldn't recognize me by each point of my platinum mohawk, would certainly catch me by the reverberating clacks of my five-inch wooden platform pointe shoes.

“Name?” he said without looking up, stapling some papers that probably didn't need to be conjoined but gave him an excuse not to look me in the eye.

“Guest of Ash Lee Honeycutt.”

“Her real name, please.”

“That is his real name.” He knew damn well that was his real name. He was just keeping me on my toes. Literally. “It's an ‘Ash’ separate from a ‘Lee,’ with a finishing drizzle of H-O-N-E-Y-C-DOUBLE-T.”

He typed slowly, searching for my name on Ash's reservation. I continued chewing his ear off, hoping that wearing down his patience would speed up his performance.

“Not that it matters that it's two names that sound like one—he was born in 1980, when that was, in fact, a rather popular name for boys. ‘Ashley,’ that is, the one that's one name. And why must names be gendered anyway? I mean, the semen-soaked semantics of gendered language should confound even the most limited mind, so long as it's capable of rationality and logic. How on earth is a dishwasher feminine in German and masculine in French? I mean, what kind of Alsace-Lorraine gender translation must have occurred—”

“Okay, all right, here—here you are, sir…er…pal. Room 1311.”

He handed me a little purple plastic card boldly marked with a single word: “Moxy.”

“Merci.”

Though Ash and I had tried many hotels around the city, from the YMCA at Columbus Circle, which forced us to figure out the mechanics of semi-public bunk-bed sex, to opulent uptown dens that burned the sheets immediately upon our checkout, we eventually settled on the Moxy on East 11th Street.

A Marriott property across from Webster Hall, the Moxy's East Village location occupies a block that once housed beautiful nineteenth-century houses, razed to raise the glass-and-gray cube the hotel now inhabits. As its shaky foundation (spiritually speaking, that is) might indicate, the Moxy is a “disruptive” brand, one that rebels against the beige and greige of its corporate parent in favor of an exuberant atmosphere splashed in shades of chartreuse and fuchsia.

It's a setting designed as a backdrop for curated Instagram photoshoots, not family vacation snapshots. “Rooms for play” where “size matters” were among the amenities outlined on its website in lines of playfully puerile promotional copy, lending the place an overall provocative spirit (provided you never said these lines aloud, lest you hear just how cheesy they were and practically taste it).

Merely stepping into the neon glow of the lobby gave the sensory impression of entering a club where you had to bribe the bouncer to get in (and this hotel did, indeed, have a bouncer some nights), sending a swarm of butterflies flapping around your stomach in anticipation of the amusement and/or judgment awaiting behind one of the many doors lining its Kubrickian hallways.

As I advanced toward the elevators, the air transported me back to our first visits, constantly perfumed with a particularly sweet sweat scent, the kind generated by men in mid-coital states, burning off the last fumes of Viktor & Rolf's Spicebomb left sizzling on their skin. Perhaps Ash knew we weren't the only ones hypnotized by the concocted coolness the place oozed. One look at the map on my app showed the Moxy as a veritable breeding ground after dark (unless the post office across the street converted into a sex club at dusk—that's one way for the Pony Express to keep running, I suppose).

I swiveled en pointe and pliéd toward the last lobby-level lift, squeezing through the closing doors into a massive glass prism mirroring every angle of the space within.

I looked upon a reverse panopticon of tunnels reflected in reflections of tunnels. Outside the infinity of darkness, you could see only yourself inside a dark infinity, reproduced thousands of times, a stiff ribbon of repetition stretching into the ether in four cardinal directions. A cross of reflections encircled your actual self in a hypnotic hurricane generated by a single movement. It compelled you to take selfies in a place where you could no longer recognize your own beginning or end.

I burst into room 1311, a suite larger than any we'd stayed in before, tossing my bag and kicking off my shoes before leaping onto the bed with a big, buoyant bounce that gave me a head rush I hadn't felt since childhood.

“I didn't realize this place had a thirteenth floor,” I called out. “Do they not do that anymore? Not build a thirteenth floor?”

He was in the bathroom, clouds of condensation or chemicals billowing out into the triangular shaft of light leaking through the door ajar.

“Well, I mean, I know they build a thirteenth floor. It's not like a twenty-seven-story building has a vacuum in the middle, sandwiched between two sets of thirteen stories of steel and concrete. But it's interesting that it would be thirteen stories on each side to balance a gap where the thirteenth floor should be. Right? Twenty-seven divided by two is thirteen and a half. Thirteen floors up, the gap containing two halves of a whole floor but really containing nothing, then another thirteen floors. So you really never escape that number. Maybe it's a European thing. I don't remember if they have thirteenth floors or not. Aren't you an architect? Don't you know anything about this?”

“Shut up. Sit down,” he said, emerging from the bathroom.

I tried to pose nonchalantly, to do my best Venus of Urbino on the bed, but I was naturally stiff and confrontational, more like Olympia. I was still catching my breath from either the calisthenics, the nerves, or both.

I slid to the edge of the bed. He pulled the desk chair in front of me, wearing the scratchy terry-cloth robe from the bathroom and nothing else, his hairy chest exposed, his stare an intensity of clear, unwavering blue flowing directly into my pupils. His legs spread so that mine could slip, closed together, between his massive thighs.

I noticed his beard had been trimmed recently, uniformly, with the tiniest pink bumps exposing raw pores—the same as the film of filaments across his skull that gave him (and me, frankly) peace of mind that he wasn't completely bald yet. My eyes darted to the closet, where he always fastidiously hung his clothes. A suit jacket, black or navy—I couldn't tell in the cold, dim glow of the tiny bedside lamp. A buttoned-up departure from his typically casual closet of flannels and jeans.

“Popper me up, baby boy,” he said, slightly annoyed, I could tell, because I wasn't looking at him.

In a flash, days had passed.

It was either Sunday or Monday. Labor Day, rather. Even with a full-time job that took little time out of my day, official days off still felt different. Even in this haze, or especially so, they felt different.

I guess when you're on psychoactive substances, fueled only by the sugars and vitamins in a green juice, rejuvenated only by a handful of twenty-minute catnaps, getting very close to the bodies of people who are very far from where your head is, the space-time continuum doesn't just curve. It folds over and under and in on itself like an elaborate origami wormhole.

Ash was on his phone, as usual, when I decided to open my eyes in earnest.

“What time is it?”

He continued typing for a beat longer than polite.

“7:30.”

AM? PM? I didn't ask. I couldn't remember which fold of the wormhole I'd fallen asleep on, but I didn't think I'd slept through the creases of too many new ones. I guess it didn't matter.

He got up and sat back down in front of me.

“Popper me up, baby boy.”

I turned back and relocked with his stare, grabbing a bottle of amyl nitrite from within the folds of the sheets, unscrewing the top to liberate the fumes into his nostrils. The smell of black permanent markers, barbecue briquettes, bicycle shops, and workout centers filled the space between us, giving me a contact high, throwing us both back down a rabbit hole into a place where everyone fucked like bunnies but no one could ever reproduce a thing—especially the high of first taking the plunge.

I was beginning to realize that illicit elusions elicit illusions. This escape into a fantasy realm of sex and drugs, hormones and highs, orgasms and opioids, barely offered an escape anymore. Only distractions that consumed all my energy, attention, and money.

When the balls were all sunk in their holes, someone would come along and rack 'em back up again.

***