i'm disgusting when i drink

For a short while there, in England, Fitzcarraldo and I were best friends. He was gay but we started fucking anyway. This was right before he got his name, but I’ll refer to him as Fitz, to make things easier. Our first fuck was on December 5th 1995, in Oxford. Sterling was still in the States. She knows about this but not everything. She knows something's missing, she's been knowing that. Anyway, the student house where we lived threw one of its impromptu parties. We blasted Orbital and Annie Lennox remixes and got plastered on Victory Gin. I was so drunk that I came up with a theory that gin was originally a secret weapon developed by British spies. It went down as easy as water: you could drink an entire liter and it wouldn’t hit you until three hours later, at which point you unceremoniously said everything that came to mind before the lights went out. The last thing I remember I was sitting on the flat red carpet of my little room upstairs having a terrible argument with Fitz over the meaning of the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer”. When I woke up he was in my bed lying next to me. We were both naked beneath the comforter. I’ll never know how we got there. The shade hadn’t been drawn: gray light streamed through the window. There were at least thirty condoms scattered across the floor, none of them opened. The shiny wrappers made streaks across my vision. My eyes were burning; the lids were puffed and sickly smooth as they get after I’ve been sobbing. I made out an overturned CD in the corner, its silver surface covered with cigarette butts. Outside the morning bell began its flat, melancholic whine. What happened? I wondered, absurdly recalling the last scene of Kids, when Casper faces the camera, bleary eyed and hung over, and asks the same question. My hangover hadn’t hit yet but I knew it wouldn’t be long. I started to wiggle over to the edge of the bed when I felt a warm arm drape around my waist, gently tugging me back. Fitz muttered hello and pressed himself against me. I waited, stunned and frozen, until I felt him getting hard, then I said something about needing to get up and the bubble was broken. The morning bell ended its whine. I dragged my underwear and t-shirt into the bed and pulled them on under the comforter while Fitz rolled over and searched for a cigarette on the pile of plastic crates that served as a bedside table. I realized that in all the time I’d stayed in the room I’d never before woken up without the shade drawn, and the overwhelming brilliance of the gray light turned the place bleak and foreign. It gave everything I looked at the appearance of being forced out and exposed.

"What happened?" I whispered to the mirror over the dresser, which must have seen it all.