~ i wrote ~

I found the real community-of-party design genius in the bathroom, where the stall door bottoms stop a good six or nine inches above the toilet seat, such that I imagine anyone with the inclination could get a good look at the user’s netherparts — the face is what’s kept private — which is not so excellent an arrangement for an uneasy American who has come alone and dressed all wrong (yoga clothes?? Backpacking I may be, but in hindsight it was the worst possible solution I could’ve settled on with the tools at my disposal) and is sweating at the ever-growing prospect that she will have to spend the night dancing sober with the cello-wrapped cardboard cartridge she fashioned to smuggle in a joint and some scraps of psychedelica lodged in her vagina because she cannot get it out and, without the aid of its contents, won’t have the disposition to solicit a stranger in this sort-of sex club for help.

It’s a fine length for taking drugs in a group in a standing position, though, and after I got the thing out and made some friends I partook of a few additional substances in a few additional stalls with a hardbodied oncologist wearing perfect Aryan features whom I later enjoyed watching in some kind of heated and highly homoerotic exchange with the Persian radiologist who’d initially drafted me into their circle, and later still after that, when Omar came to me and said, Dieter say maybe you like to go for threesome with us, I said, Why, yes, maybe I would. Because I mean, wow, that’s the dream. Hot boys who want to make out with each other and let me watch AND do stuff with me? Ja, bitte schön, und danke.

But it turned out that Dieter doesn’t actually like Omar that much, and that Omar is more like some sort of blowhard, a talker of big game, and in the cab ride — they ridiculed my wanting to walk — This isn’t New York, they said — they arrived, beyond my linguistic ken, at some agreement that, actually, Omar had to work in a few hours and would be bailing, and Dieter and I would be on our own. Regarding which I thought, Thank the gods, for going home with a man met on a night out has almost never gone well for me — they don’t understand! How rarely they understand — and this promised, actually, to be exactly that times two. And the titillating closeness of their bodies and faces as they smiled and argued in a hazy, throbbing toilet was a far cognitive cry from the 6 am silence and brilliance of Germany in June, and how on earth could I have found my way from the other back to the one?