Bay Windows - August 19, 2004
Mubarak Dahir

"I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it," he concedes. In the beginning, the drug seemed transformational.

Tim, who asked that his and his lover's names be changed, had always been a little "uptight" about sex. Previously, he was somehow unable to totally let go during sex. "I always held back," he explains. "Crystal made it seem OK to be a sex pig."

Unlike many men who use the drug, Tim never had problems with an erection while doing crystal. "That made me extremely popular at the sex parties," he says.

It also seemed to give him an "in" with the A-list crowd, something he'd never really had before, something that, as a gay man living in one of the gayest neighborhoods in America, he had always craved.

"All these seemingly beautiful gay men who never showed me anything but attitude before were now always hanging around," Tim recalls. "I felt like I'd 'made it.'"

The first time Tim did crystal, he didn't even know what it was. His lover, Pat, put the powder on a plate, cut it into lines with a credit card, and rolled up a dollar bill. Before Tim knew it, he was snorting.

"I was doing it with my partner, we were doing it together," says Tim now. "He seemed to know what he was doing. I loved him, and I trusted him, and so I thought it was OK."

Within a few months, Tim and Pat went from using crystal sporadically to enhance their sex life, to using it on a regular pattern.

As soon as Pat got off work on Friday, he'd go score some Tina. Once home, he'd get on the computer and start looking for other men to invite over for sex parties. The more, the better.

The first time it happened, Tim came home from work and Pat told him he had a "surprise" for him. Pat grabbed Tim's hand and guided him to the bedroom. There, Tim found a hunky stranger in bed, already high on crystal and waiting to be the couple's playmate.

But when they were doing crystal, Tim and Pat could never seem to get enough sex. After the first trick left, they'd be back on the computer, encouraging more men to come over, enticing them with crystal and the promise of unbridled sex.

It wasn't long before Tim and Pat's entire weekends were dedicated to partying and screwing.

"As it was happening, there was a little voice in the back of my head that was screaming danger. But it was so scary, I felt like we were in so deep, I didn't know how to turn back, or what would happen if I did," Tim says now. "Would Pat leave me? Would I lose all my new, beautiful-people friends? So then I'd take a bump to silence the voices."

Still, Tim did worry. Though Pat denied it, Tim was suspicious that Pat was doing crystal during the week. Pat, once a built, stocky man at 6'-2" and 260 pounds, had lost 75 pounds. Occasionally, Tim and Pat would run into former friends - people they had once regularly socialized with but whom they rarely saw anymore. Their old friends would always express alarm at Pat's appearance.

"He told everyone he was doing the Atkin's diet," Tim says.

After a year of this, Tim did try to talk to Pat about his concerns. But Pat turned belligerent. Whenever Tim expressed doubts about what crystal might be doing to their lives, Pat would threaten to leave.

Tim wanted desperately to salvage the decade of love he had shared with Pat. At least if they were doing crystal together, he continued to think, they could watch out for each other.

But then one Sunday morning, Tim got out of bed to find half a dozen strangers laying around naked in the living room. Pat was seated on the sofa, with a guy on either side of him. Everyone was "tweaked out of their minds," says Tim.

"They were all sitting around watching a porno movie, trying to masturbate," Tim recalls. "But none of them really could, because they were all flaccid. They weren't even touching each other, and they all had these blank stares on their faces," Tim recounts. "And I realized how pathetic we had become."

For Tim, it was a turning point. "I decided right then that I wasn't going to do crystal again."

He still thought he could save his lover and relationship.

But Pat wouldn't talk about it. Any time Tim tried to raise the subject, Pat would get moody and angry. Before long, it seemed the only time the two were talking was when they were fighting.

Tim began noticing, too, just how much money was disappearing from their bank account. Pat would often make $300 withdrawals, sometimes twice a day. When he confronted his lover, Pat would simply brush it off as a "business expense" for work.

But it wasn't long before Pat, who had earned a solid six-figure salary, lost his job. At the time, he told Tim he quit, but Tim suspected he had been fired. Pat did land a second job, but soon started missing appointments and meetings with clients.

Tim was now convinced that crystal was wrecking their lives. He pleaded with Pat to go with him to get professional help. He tried begging, crying, screaming, threatening, cajoling, promising. But Pat wouldn't, or couldn't, stop using.

Then Pat got sick. For ten days, Pat was in bed, sweating and soiling the sheets. His body became covered in spots from second stage syphilis. Both Tim and Pat got scared.

They went and got tested. They both had syphilis. And Pat's HIV test came back positive.

It was hard news, bad news, but Tim thought that maybe it would somehow be a turning point for them. He hoped it would shock Pat into realizing how out of hand the crystal had become, how it was destroying their lives.

Tim still loved Pat. He could deal with the HIV. "I thought maybe, in a weird way, this would save him and our relationship."

But Pat looked at it differently.

"I've already got HIV, so now I can do anything I want," Pat told Tim.

For several more months, Tim still tried to hang on, to win back from the crystal the man he had once loved.

Then one weekend, Pat disappeared for three days, without a word. Later, Tim would find out he had gone on a crystal and sex binge.

"I didn't know if he was dead or alive," Tim says.

But Tim knew what he had to do. After two years of struggling with the devastation of crystal, Tim left both Pat and the drug that had consumed him.

Tim still loves Pat, and still sees him occasionally. The last time the two talked, Pat told Tim he had finally quit. But Tim found out from other friends that Pat was now "slamming": injecting crystal into his arms.

Tim is still saddened by what happened.

"We had survived so many other things in our relationship: job losses and parents dying and affairs with other men. But this one was too big. The crystal did us in."

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