Though a large percentage of my lovers have been needle users, only one was using. All but one shot up heroin, the exception did crystal meth.

The woman who was using only used heroin for a period of several months which was typical of all of them (I believe one may have used for about a year).

I call her a lover but the relationship was complex. We had sporadic sex over a period of about eight years; she loved me and I didn’t love her, not enough for either of us. She considered me her knight; I thought she never saw me realistically. I knew too well my failings in the knight department.

I can’t remember us having sex two nights in a row and can only remember once having sex the next morning after a long night. I think this was the only night I slept at her place — she usually came to mine. The night before I’d gotten unreasonably drunk, was literally unable to get up out of the gutter. She had several friends carry me to her studio, leave me in the middle of the floor where for hours she used my cock and mouth. I remember her roommate stepping over us to get things so the roommate could sleep elsewhere and I remember waking up the next morning and taking her from the rear.

That pretty well describes one aspect of our relationship. Another is her naked on my bed telling me to whip her. Another time I had her on her back on the dining room table, her legs up and against my chest, and my housemates walked in, this look on their faces. The time she said she wanted my child and I told her if she talked like that we could never see each other. Her at a party, naked, asking me if I wanted a blowjob. At another party, this time at her house, she drew me into a room and told me we couldn’t have sex because of her guests, as if she were begging me not to make her. And all the times when I said no and we did it anyway.

None of this explains or shows the self-loathing I felt after I had sex with her or her extreme jealousy.

I thought I’d managed things so as to not hurt her but I was wrong and it was after a series of disastrous run-ins that she began using heroin.

The heroin was used as a club, but I don’t think it was directed solely at me. After shooting up she’d appear on my doorstep dressed in black. The sex was somber and drawn out. I argued with her about the heroin and I think she liked the attention I gave her in her new role as neophyte playing with addiction. We never talked much, maybe didn’t know how and instead tried to use our bodies to express what we felt — my lust and diffidence, her lust and affection.

I think the happiest I saw her in that period was after a successful needle run. She’d spent hours dressing and using her theatrical skills in make up to appear aged in her forties. The box of syringes was the sign of her success at the pharmacy.

2.

The thing about needles is that they are sexual. Denying, possibly, sex in one way, they offer it in another. I’ve met needle men, men who turn women (and men) onto junk, but outside of needle men who I’ve met but didn’t know, all the people I’ve loved who shot up were women and all I suspect were turned on by a man.

I know the crystal meth user was — her man did everything for her (the heroin women eventually did it themselves, without a man). Meth for her, injecting it, was intensely sexual, something I find hard to imagine. She was the only person I did meth with — not injected. She had a prescription for methedrine given to her “by this old guy who’s a doctor” (I never knew what that entailed) and we got off in a field, tall grass and flowers all around us, like lovers, though we never touched during the ensuing hours and many miles traveled.

The lover who was using required sex, I think that’s the way to put it, demanded is too harsh. I could always refuse though I never did. It was hard for me on so many levels to feel her need. The sex was perfunctory; she was passive and unresponsive, though not utterly. It wasn’t like having sex with an unconscious woman, there was resistance, but I don’t think she ever had an orgasm while on heroin.

That she had to shoot up in order to have sex with me says something as does the fact that I could never ever be truly honest with her. I wasn’t honest with myself and I did like her, though not as she wished and needed. I never could do that, even though I tried. She’s the only other woman I could have lived with. Thirty years later my memories of her, and Kelcey too of course, are richest.

I have an image from years after, her house, always a bit of a wreck, filled with plants and, because of a leaky pipe, cockroaches, and the rifle she kept by the front door. She’d been raped, the man had a weapon, and now she did too. The rifle was rusty and I always thought it was for show. I remember her getting up from bed, naked, to answer the door; we’d been having sex and it was much more satisfactory than during that dark time. The postman and she chatted for a moment, and I’m thinking, She doesn’t have any clothes on, and then she came back to bed.

3.

Of course that’s not the end. Something like this doesn’t end, even when one of the people involved dies. Kelcey saw her a few years before she died and she asked if Kelcey had a photo of me. When she saw it she said, “He looks exactly the same.” I have a book she sent where her inscription mentions all the good times we had together and a card where she said she was sorry. I didn’t get a chance to say I was sorry or to thank her for all the good times we had together.