Column VII: Plug Gone Wild
“Can you turn off the lights?” he interrupted me, his voice carrying that familiar edge.
“The lights are off,” I sighed.
“Even those LED pink ones,” he moaned.
On a clear Monday night, I pulled myself up from my knees just to make my bedroom pitch dark. Whatever eagerness I had been nursing went flat in the shadows. Kneeling on my hardwood floor in the pitch black, my skin felt dry and ashy. I was playing with my dealer, using my reckless mouth to keep the peace while feeling steadily annoyed by his disgruntled, impatient grunts.
Two days ago, I met a boy whose curiosity mirrored my own, and that mutual allure had drawn us into this room. I knew Niko wouldn’t play by the rules, and if I’m being honest, that unpredictability was exactly what had intrigued me. My best friend, Blossom, had looked me dead in the eye and said, “Stay away from him, girl.” But their warning only gave me a fever. I insisted on breaking myself.
Niko was anchored to Canarsie, born and raised as the middle child of three boys in a cramped two-bedroom apartment where the boys only wore blue and black. He and his brothers were programmed by their pops to perform manhood. It was a performative regimen of athletics: basketball, American football, baseball, designed to build armor around them. His family were Muslim Afro-American, carrying a heavy, street reputation. Niko’s father, grandfather, uncles, cousins, and brothers never played about that gay shit in public. Yet, half of those men had been shipped off to the military or prison, while the ones who stayed behind remained busy instilling suffocating, toxic masculinity into their sons.
And still, behind closed doors and carefully locked closets, so many of them experimented with the gurls and the gays. Niko’s mental closet wasn't just his own; it was an heirloom, inherited from the generations of men who came before him. I lay there wondering if there was ever a real chance he could break free from it and just be a man without the performance. I was a woman, certainly, just never built to be anyone's quiet, compliant tradwife.
“I’m about to bust,” Niko grunted, his voice tight.
Finally, I thought.
He let himself release inside my mouth. I immediately sucked in my cheeks, squeezing my eyes shut in the dark to mask my reaction to the taste of spoiled milk on my tongue. When I finally opened them, looking up at him through bloodshot eyes, I was searching for some sense of warmth: a smile, a moment of genuine connection.
Instead, he leaned down and whispered: “Remember, let's keep this between you and me.”
The next morning, Blossom invited me to join them and their roommate, Lee, for breakfast at The Bushwick Diner. I arrived fifteen minutes late, per my usual logistics, but for the first time all summer, I dragged myself out of the house in oversized pajamas, my eyes still heavy and red from the night before.
Blossom took one look at my disheveled arrival, stirring their coffee with a knowing smirk. “Seems like someone had a good night,” they laughed.
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