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    Bad Sex On Speed: A Novel
    Bad Sex On Speed: A Novel
    Bad Sex On Speed: A Novel
    Ebook83 pages1 hour

    Bad Sex On Speed: A Novel

    By Jerry Stahl

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Bad Sex On Speed is a savage, careening, hyper-real nightmare of a novel, taking us to the depths of Amphetamine America. Told with no concession to traditional narrative, in the voices of those in the grips and on the fringes, the stories that emerge are at once devastating, hysterical, andperhaps most terrifying of allgoing on all around you, all the time. Stahl digs deep into the psyche of the most demented and dispossessed among us, returning with a vision so unsparing that those not prepared to experience the screaming depths of speed psychosis up close and on the page should back slowly away and return to their lives unscathed.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRare Bird Books, A Barnacle Book
    Release dateFeb 19, 2013
    ISBN9781940207001
    Author

    Jerry Stahl

    Jerry Stahl is the author of the narcotic memoir Permanent Midnight and Perv—a Love Story, both Los Angeles Times bestsellers, as well as the acclaimed novels Pain Killers, Plainclothes Naked, and I, Fatty. He has written extensively for film and television.

    Read more from Jerry Stahl

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    Reviews for Bad Sex On Speed

    3.5/5

    7 ratings1 review

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    • 3/5
      Edgy short fiction, read during my 'edgy' phase, when I was hungry for anything and everything that even remotely resembled Hunter S. Thompson.

      I remember cringing a lot. So many bodily fluids mentioned.

      And, despite its gorgeous cover, it's so not-memorable.

    Book preview

    Bad Sex On Speed - Jerry Stahl

    19675.png19682.png

    THIS IS A GENUINE BARNACLE BOOK

    19689.png

    A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books

    453 South Spring Street, Suite 531

    Los Angeles, CA 90013

    abarnaclebook.com

    rarebirdbooks.com

    Copyright ©2013 by Jerry Stahl

    All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For more information, address: Rare Bird Books | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 453 South Spring Street, Suite 531, Los Angeles, CA 90013.

    Portions of this book have been previously published in The Speed Chronicles (Akashic Books, 2011) and Slake: Los Angeles, A City and Its Stories no. 3: War and Peace (Slake, 2011)

    Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

    Stahl, Jerry.

    Bad sex on speed / Jerry Stahl.

    p. cm.

    ISBN-13: 9781940207001

    1. Methamphetamine abuse—Fiction. 2. Drug abuse—Fiction. 3. Heroin—Fiction. 4. Addicts—Fiction. 5. Sex—Fiction. I. Title.

    PS3569.T3125 B23 2013

    813.54—dc23

    19769.png19803.png

    CONTENTS

    BAD SEX ON SPEED

    IN THE DE-SPEED WING

    AMERICAN GIRL

    SMURF

    DOPA BONER

    TO BE ALIVE IS TO BE ADDICTED

    POINT COUNTERPOINT

    JIMMY CRYSTAL

    SHALOM REST HOME

    THE MINDER

    SHALOM REST HOME TWICE

    CRANK-TASTICS

    TIMES SQUARE

    BAD SEX ON SPEED

    Jerry Stahl

    19694.png

    BAD SEX ON SPEED

    THE RUSH! THE TERROR! The acrid stink of your sweat soaking through furniture three blocks away! Speaking of stink—what  is that? Did somebody piss under your arms? Is that possible? Could they have pissed in your armpits three weeks ago, and you just now noticed? Like, say, when you get in a cab, and the seat’s wet after a pack of frat boys beer-up too hard and leave Bud puddles. Hop inside and—QUESTION: Why does your God hate you?—you hear the splat when you hit the seat. But—ANSWER: Because you’re a tweaker!— you don’t know you’re full wet-ass till you squish out of the cab. (People never call the police until it’s wet-ass time. Al Pacino, Sea of Love.) Speed keeps you so clammy you can’t feel damp. Just one of the many advantages!

    Fucking alcoholics! Where’s the dignity? Remember that dancer—Lola? Lurleen? Patricia?—with the misspelled devil ink

    on her neck. HAIL SATIN! It’s not a mistake, it’s a statement! It was Lurleen. She had some kind of jailhouse harelip that slurred her words to the left. You ass-maggot, you think I’m a fucking creatine? Upscale. After eleven vodka tonics you’d see day-workers hand her five sweaty dollar bills to lift her skirt and gaze in her labia, which weirdly resembled a pair of chimp ears. You’d seen one once, in a French Quarter Voodoo store. It was supposed to bring its owner lifelong protection and success. From the moment the Sisters of Marie Laveau Gift Shop door hissed shut behind you, you knew you should have bought the thing. Everything would have been different. Why are you such an asshole?

    Are you crying?

    Want to talk about how Lurleen (Darla? No, Zelda) would boot her vag-needle, let it stand up and quiver by itself, then grand finale with a Heimlich-like shudder and pass out forehead-first on the bar with the rig sticking out between her legs? The pink tip made it weirdly like a little dog’s organ, aroused. (You suffer compulsive thoughts—sometimes just images—that you do not want to think, but cannot stop thinking. This is one of them.) Sometimes she’d wet herself. Who wouldn’t? Five more bucks! she’d croak, when she came to and saw her condition. (Remember when mysterious Chasids began to speak to you out of the ceiling? A rabbi would just appear: You’d realize you were staring at him, and that he was talking. You’d think, maybe he was always there. And it took THIS MUCH crystal to see him. The sad old shtetl eyes followed you as he spoke. Vaguely reassuring, vaguely menacing. Does your life ever feel like a continuum of one aberration, mis-reflected in a series of cracked rearview mirrors? You’d think: mis-reflected? What a lame. Then you’d re-think. He’s right! Every speed-freak car you ever twitched in did have a crack in the rearview. You once drove across the state of Utah, steering the wheel from the passenger side when the three hundred pound Cherokee fellow who picked you up hitchhiking snorted something that gave him a heart attack going ninety-five on a dead-empty interstate. You couldn’t move him, so you just steered until his husk of an Impala rolled to a stop on I-15, outside of Bountiful.) All the Tweak-mobiles had cracked rearview mirrors. How does that even happen once? And how does Rabbi Bowlstein know?

    You don’t even want to talk about this, but here you are, talking about it. Keep babbling, Chatty Speed Guy. People are really into it. You’re crushing them. Sartre knew what hell was—and it wasn’t other people. That’s a mis-translation. His translator had the twitches from le meth and spilled vin rouge on the words dans ta tete. THE OTHER PEOPLE WERE IN YOUR HEAD. If you were on speed, you’d know what he knew; speed means being your own audience for the running commentary of death. Or worse than death. More of this. What you’re feeling right now.

    CRASHING TWO: WHAT’S THAT LIKE? Remember how you felt the first time you couldn’t get it up? The scalding rage. The way Cheeto-dry Cindy Carmunuci looked at you when you stopped trying to cram your sixteen year old shame-handle into her. Look at you. Twenty years later, the episode still has you assuming the Cringe Position. You raised your sweaty face, your eyes met hers, and she looked at you like you were some kind of a cripple. A sex-gimp. Crashing is that feeling. That kind of fun—some version of—nonstop. From the minute you wake up. (If you sleep, which you don’t; you’re not an amateur.) If you died and the coroner knew what he was doing, your CAUSE OF DEATH [toe-tag] would read: Extreme Awareness. Every conversation was toe-curling in real time, and worse when

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