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Advertisements rush past them as they glide across state lines. Nick has his elbow on the sill of the car window, leaning his head out like a movie heroine. He's thinking of doing the most illicit drug money can buy. He doesn't know what that would be because he's phony like that. Every billboard for health insurance blinking in his periphery is telling him secrets held in the bowels of the nation. Jeffrey Epstein was just one of many honeypot operations run by the CIA. All histories of post war clandestine operations are limited hangouts. Ruling class solidarity will never be surmounted. It's too late.
He's been trying to tell Adam about all this (in between the usual 'I'm gonna put a bullet in your head and mine' bullshit) for what feels like days. What returns is platitudes one might dole out to a feverish child. The jolt of hatred Nick feels for him after the third "I feel you man" of the hour is so strong it scares even himself. Nick questions if he's making it up. Strangely when he asks himself if Adam suspects he is, the answer he comes up with is definite: Adam really seems scared for him. He can't decide whether he hates him for that too.
"It's all done is what I'm saying. It's all lined up and ready to go. Once the refugees start piling in it's nuclear holocaust."
"That sucks."
Nick tries to calm himself down so he doesn't murder the person who's essentially his best friend since Amber moved out west by remembering movies where two people drive around. Not exactly Riemannian geometry. He was the bug-eyed speed-freak whose name he can't remember from River's Edge, the retarded seductress in Wild at Heart, he could be Anna Karina confused at where this mysterious audience was if they were doing the classics. It concerned him that between him and Adam Friedland he could only picture himself as the woman. Not because Adam was so manly or anything obviously, but because Nick was hellbent on embodying the abject surrender of kino romance. And it was romantic; Adam deliberately taking the wrong route to hit the double whammy of not letting Nick kill himself in a motel but allowing him instead to berate how useless he has to be to fail at driving home from a gig they've played every six months for the past seven years.
Nick is not feeling very well. Simultaneously it feels like he's about to jump out of his skin and also never be able to move again. The extreme physical discomfort sparingly gave way to a deep boredom. Or ennui? He couldn't think of a name for the feeling of wanting to perform hermeneutics on menu items served in hole-in-the-walls off the thruway. The truth is he was never bored. It was just a thing he said to frighten people into doing something entertaining. But the catch is the only way to alleviate the feeling is to do it yourself. If he had so much fun, too much fun, it would all break open.
"If I asked you to blow me, would you do it?"
Adam scrunches his nose like a girl trying to look cute.
"What the fuck?"
Nick waits in total tranquility. With a harassed look on his face Adam finally answers,
"I'm not gay, man. We're not gay guys."
"Yes you fucking genius, we're not gay guys. That's why I'm asking."
Adam leans his forehead on his hands where they're gathered on top of the wheel. The car swerves lightly, grazing the dashed white line of the 87.
John Lennon singing baby, you're a rich fag jew on that second LSD album won't leave his head as Adam rummages through his bedside drawers for a BlueChew. He wonders if no New York gay-straight guy being able to get it up is a minor copy of the pedophile elite chasing the highest, worst thrill through transgressing the most taboo aspect of sexuality. If impotence is all that was bred from American decadence.
Adam is not a very titillating person. Even in the best of circumstances — which, just having driven four and a half hours in a smelly air conditioned sedan, all while fending off Nick's end-of-the world proselytizing, he was not in. Their dicks not working without chemical assistance probably should have been a comfort for Nick, since it was proof that neither of them were gay guys. But after the umpteenth dubious interaction with men (although far more attractive than Adam Friedland) it was a difficult bit of casuistry to maintain. The last time he even glanced at Adam in a way that rang alarm bells was nine years ago. They could barely have been considered friends then. Nick had sniffed (he never did needles) a speedball — one without heroin because he isn't a fucking idiot — and he was bored. Or lackadaisical. Or disconsolate. Mentally euthanized. He had to be to go down on Adam. High mostly on shrooms himself, he giggled and let it happen, if memory serves. After, he had to be even meaner to Adam than normal. He had to. Adam let that happen too, plainly regarding it as clichéd overcompensation. Nick knew the charade was all see through and pathetic but he couldn't stop. How else could he have gone about it.
"So... what do you want to do?"
Adam's fake casual voice shook him out of his reminiscence. Sitting on the corner of the bed, he was resting his chin on the heel of his hand. He really was quite bug-like sometimes.
Nick is a provocateur. That meant he could do anything and it not mean anything. He kissed Adam and laid him down. Hovering over him, he squinted at the nightstand Adam neglected to close to try and locate some sort of lubricant (left there by a pink haired screenwriter with vaginismus). Adam, pawing at his chest, mumbled,
"I don't want to, um."
This sentiment was slightly undercut by his sildenafil-ed out dick rubbing up against Nick's thigh.
"Don't worry."
He dug out a tube of aloe vera and squeezed it directly on Adam's thin penis.
"What are we doing again?"
He asked with mirth in his voice.
"Your cock is going in me. Alright?"
Adam began laughing at him in earnest then seemed to think better of it.
Penetration was not as pleasant as routine practitioners would have you believe. Doing it without readying himself was clearly not a good idea, but he couldn't stomach the thought of Adam's insectine fingers inside him. The veritable concoction of pills coursing through Adam's veins giving his every movement an agitated quality couldn't help either. Still, Nick tilted his head back to let him kiss his Adam's apple in a vampiristic motion. He felt he took it as far as he could with each collision of their skinny bodies, and the next ones when they're gone. And the next.
Dick pills made communication comically difficult. That appeared to be the lesson of the day. But Nick was different now. He didn't do speedballs (shot or snorted). He didn't even drink, not really. What he took was medication that stopped him from hallucinating and made his dick limp. He can't kill himself immediately after fucking his best friend. That would be embarrassing (and more than a little rude). He can't be doing the same things over and over either. Because he isn't insane anymore. Meaning he's gonna have to be nicer to Adam for a while. Even though he's never been.