Page 65 of Going Solo (The Brent Boys #2)
From Dirty Little Secret, by Jasper Horner
New York might be the city that never sleeps, but Cole physically could not sleep. He had been on a four-day cocaine bender. He was jittery, and his eyes were so dark and bloodshot, he looked like a corpse. I was sleepless, too, terrified that if this continued, a corpse was exactly what I’d wake up next to.
Cole couldn’t perform. He was useless onstage. Chase and Joey were carrying his parts. The management team travelling with us had confiscated and flushed his drugs at least five times on the US tour up to this point. The thing about addicts is, they’re resourceful and they’re sneaky. They always seem to know where to get more gear. Cole never went without. No sooner had one lot been flushed than another little baggie would appear out of a pocket or a satchel or a pair of socks. For illegal drugs, it was mostly coke. For the legal (but illegally obtained) it was a predictable cocktail of uppers and downers. Adderall. Dexedrine. Xanax. Ambien. Except for the night we went to Punk, the infamous New York club, well known for its free-for-all orgies. That night, someone sold, or gave, Cole a tab of Ecstasy.
“I’m going to Punk,” he’d announced, standing in the bathroom door of our hotel room, in his pants.
“You’re not going to Punk,” I said, patiently. He’d come offstage two hours earlier, skipped the meet-and-greet, and because it was a Friday night, wanted to go blow off some steam in a club. That’s a normal thing for a guy in his twenties to want to do, and we had security with us, but Cole was in no fit state to go out in public—and Punk is no ordinary club.
“A guy on GayHoller is picking me up,” Cole said. “He’s going to be downstairs in five minutes. I need to get ready.”
He held up his phone and showed me a picture of a blond beefcake with shoulders like motorcycle helmets. He looked like a Viking.
Needless to say, I was not having Cole go clubbing with a random from a hook-up app. We argued about it for five, ten, fifteen minutes—I have no idea. What I remember is, he was so belligerent I finally agreed to let him go, as long as I went with him and Totally Records’ security drove us there. In truth, I doubted the venue would let him in. He was way too out of it. I thought we’d be back at the hotel inside half an hour.
“We need to think about the paps,” I said. “You can’t be seen going into a sex dungeon. It’d be the end of the band.”
“You do costumes, make me a disguise!” he said, waving his arms in the air like I could magic up an outfit out of nothing. In the end, that’s exactly what I did. Punk is avant-garde and post-gender—I could dress him up in almost anything. The key was he couldn’t be recognisably Cole. I borrowed a blond wig and a silver sequined dress from the backup singers’ wardrobe, put him in false eyelashes and some heavy make-up to disguise his face, and away we went.
Forty minutes later, we were in a grimy warehouse nightclub. Two storeys were dance floors, but the basement was strewn with mattresses and filled with groups of naked, sweaty men indulging in the kinds of sex I’d only heard about in theory. Our security detail—Anton, Dexter, and Michelle, all ex-military—waited outside. A chain of communication had been arranged with the club’s bouncers. If we got into trouble, our security team would be inside in a flash. For our guys, it was as much as their union would let them do—and more than they should have had to put up with. While I went to the bar and got us both some water, Cole took a pill. MDMA always made Cole incredibly horny. I returned to see him disappearing into the crowded dance floor. I lost him for maybe five or ten minutes. When I found him again, he was in a toilet cubicle with a broken door, the dress hitched up around his waist, with a huge Viking bent over him—and a queue of half-naked men lined up to take their turn. My heart was broken. I loved Cole. I had given him everything of me. I was torn between fury and eviscerating pain. But I had to protect him.
“That’s my boyfriend,” I shouted. “Get away from him.”
The men laughed. The Viking roared and spent himself, and I screamed for security. But two of the other men grabbed me, covered my mouth, and held me back. I was forced to watch, helpless, as the Viking pulled his jockstrap back up, and the next man took his place. And Cole? When he finally looked back and I caught his eye, all I got was a stupid gurning smile, and a thumbs up.