Tweakerworld

By Jason Yamas

Meet Jason: a college educated documentary film producer, cat parent of two, and one of San Francisco’s top drug dealers. 

After Jason’s world falls apart in LA, he moves to Berkeley for a fresh start with his kid brother. Just one problem: his long-closeted Adderall addiction has exploded into an out-of-control crystal meth binge. Within weeks, Jason plunges into the sprawling ParTy n’ ’Play subculture of the Bay Area’s gay community. It is a wildly decadent scene of drugs, group sex, and criminals, and yet it is also filled with surprising characters, people who are continually subverting Jason’s own presumptions of the stereotypical tweaker. 

Soon Jason becomes a dealer on the pretense of researching this tweaker world for a project that will carry him, like a life raft, back to the shores of a normal life. But his friendly entrepreneurial spirit and trusting disposition disarm clients and rival dealers alike. The money begins to roll in as demand increases to frightening levels. Suddenly, Jason is in control of the entire crystal meth market for San Francisco’s gay community, even as he finds himself nodding off behind the wheel of his car, or walking down the sidewalk. As friends and family work frantically to steer him towards recovery, Jason resists, chasing something else: a sleepless nirvana fueled by sex, drugs, and the Tweakerworld. 

With painful honesty, Jason Yamas has crafted a landmark narrative that is not just a personal account of addiction, but a portrait of a vulnerable, largely undocumented community of people who, for many reasons, have been marginalized to the point of invisibility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Unnamed Press
• Release date: Mar 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781951213763

Jason Yamas

Jason Yamas is a queer fiction and nonfiction writer making his prose debut as author of Tweakerworld: A Memoir (Unnamed Press, 2023). Prior to his foray into literature, he produced documentary and narrative films such as Jonathan Caouette's Walk Away Renee (SundanceNow) and Stephen Winter's Jason & Shirley (Criterion). He produced charity arts and music projects in Detroit with the late great songwriter Allee Willis ("September", The Friends Theme, The Color Purple.) His self-directed and produced feature Not Me, Murphy premiered at the MIX NYC Film Festival. He's currently writing his first novel and pursuing acting training at the Sanford Meisner Center. He holds a BFA from NYU, Tisch School of the Arts in Drama and has performed in and directed in the experimental downtown New York theatre scene. With the publication of Tweakerworld, he intends to shine a bright light on the worsening epidemic of crystal meth in the LGBTQ+ community.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

First 30

You are him and he is you.

You’re 4 when you ascend your first stage. You’re singing Have a Heart, by Bonnie Raitt, to Bonnie Raitt at the Mann Music Center in Philadelphia, and someone shouts that you’re a star. You don’t know what that means, but you know you fucking love it.

You’re 5 when you sip your first Rolling Rock and encounter the phenomenon of chemical alteration.

You’re 7 when you become an older brother to Christopher and swear that you’ll forever look after this tiny human while knowing in your gut—even then—that you’ll hurt him.

You’re 8 when you start a word-processing business and recite the word entrepreneur in the mirror, not knowing its true definition, only that it’s what people call your hardworking father, who through sweat and tears just purchased a forty-room hotel in Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley.

You’re 11 when you try on your mother’s bra, stuff it with cotton balls, and lip-synch to Whitney Houston.

You’re 12 when you spend your allowance on bright orange pants that make you feel like a rock star, and the kids call you faggot when you wear them.

You’re 14 when you make a small fortune selling Beanie Babies on the black market in back rooms at regional antique shops and indoor Amish markets, learning how a commodity relies on a perception of necessity.

You’re 15 when you fall in love with every one of your straight male friends, cementing the impossible as the desired.

You’re 17 when you spend summer vacation tracking down every hometown guy who’s come out since leaving for college, and you realize that secrecy might be the spiciest ingredient of sex.

You’re 18 when you shoot your first film about an ambitious fool teeming with homosexual undertones, and you fail at coming out to the community through creative osmosis.

You’re 19 when your parents divorce, and you now fear you’ll never cultivate the intimate relationship you’ve wanted with your father all through childhood.

You’re 20 when you’re suspended for selling magic mushrooms, and you spend a year finding your voice as a screenwriter, becoming obsessed with elevating stories of mental illness and redemption.

You’re 21 when you fall in love for the first time and immediately withhold your heart, plagued by an echo chamber of what you assume are other people’s judgments.

You’re 24 when you abandon acting and take a producer job, only to become a functional cokehead instead.

You’re 25 when you admit to a therapist that you’re an addict, then never return to her office.

You’re 26 when you believe you’ve contracted HIV and contemplate suicide for one day.

You’re 27 when you visit your brother in California; he guides you across the Golden Gate Bridge telling you his dreams. You see him for the first time as an individual rather than a reflection of all the qualities you hate about yourself, and you discover friendship has been an option all along.

You’re 28 when you do crystal meth for the first time, a surreptitious binge that lasts two weeks, and you train your brain so well to forget it, to pretend the binge never even happened, so that this is the first time you’ll ever admit it did.

You’re 29 when you fall madly in love, and you know your compulsions will destroy it.

You’re 30 when this narrative begins, but your story is, of course, already well under way.

PART 1

INCUBATION

1

I haven’t slept in four days, although I’ve spooned Curt each night to create the illusion, an art form I’ll soon master. I’ve been smoking crystal meth in my car, hidden as best as possible in normally unlit cul-de-sacs across North Hollywood that are still glistening iridescent with Christmas lights spiraling up the trunks of every palm tree. It’s January 2016, and sure, I’ve dabbled with this drug a handful of times in past anonymous sexual scenarios, but never to this extent, never for this reason.

Curt wants the boyfriend who will hold him, kiss him, and allow him to be low, especially in these agonizing weeks following his mother’s death, but an addiction to speed insists on false exuberance and optimism—not at all what Curt needs.

I’d fallen into an Adderall addiction a couple of years ago as a way to cope with a perpetually discontent boss and my chronic perfectionism. Recently, I had resolved to quit cold turkey, determined to salvage my relationship. Then Moira died, and I realized that I couldn’t face the trip to Illinois to help Curt and his dad with the arrangements—not without reinforcements. Problem was, I had run out of Adderall last week, and my 30mg prescription wouldn’t be renewed for another two weeks. My dealer who supplemented my supply so I could achieve my now 120mg daily fix would sell only entire bottles. Not wanting to spend hundreds of dollars on a full bottle I had no intention of using, I considered other options. I remembered an article floating around Facebook, a pediatrician’s open letter to parents allowing their offspring to be prescribed Adderall, comparing its chemical structure with that of crystal meth, arguing the drugs were essentially the same. It was a scare tactic aimed at dissuading parents from making their children amphetamine dependent, but that’s not how I read it. A light bulb went on.

In heteronormative circles, finding crystal meth may be challenging, but in modern gay culture, it’s a click away. I’d used Grindr countless times as a single or part of a couple seeking a third. My profile explicitly stated No PnP. By proclaiming that I was not interested in parTy ’n’ play, I’d avoid messages from men seeking chemsex: the combination of crystal meth and other drugs with high-risk, often anonymous sexual activity. (It is, I should point out, a mostly clinical term—I’ve never heard anyone who engages in that lifestyle use the term chemsex.)

I’d avoided this scene because I was certain I wanted something else: specifically, a family life in a midcentury modern designed home financed by my film career, with two children, annual globetrotting vacations, and Curt as my husband. I knew these dreams did not align with those of men who smoke meth in dark rooms, having unprotected sex with strangers for days on end.

So, you see, my decision to purchase a small bag of crystal meth was for the purpose of quitting amphetamines altogether. We would fly to Illinois tomorrow to help Curt’s father pack up his deceased mother’s belongings. I’d rise to the occasion (with one last blast to help me get through this stressful time ahead of the trip), and then I’d learn how to relax, how to be with Curt, calm, complacent, unaltered. Which means I’ve spent the past seven hours organizing the apartment, labeling, alphabetizing, and purging. I packed each of us a tablet loaded with the same six episodes of The Sopranos so we can watch simultaneously on the plane. Now, I’m preparing snack packs. Curt’s snacks consist of peanut butter–filled pretzels, wasabi peas, dried bananas, and extra-dark cocoa artisanal chocolates from Trader Joe’s. I demonstrate my love by ensuring he has tasty treats that won’t deplete him of the necessary nutrients that a nonvegan takes for granted.

I can’t stop replaying the moment from two months ago when Curt and I were in Illinois, watching episode after episode of Fawlty Towers with his dad, waiting for his mother to pass. When the call from the hospital finally came, Curt’s father took him into his arms and said, It’s just us now, Curt … just us. I couldn’t help but wonder if any event, no less a tragedy of this proportion, could ever bring me and my dad this close.

As I zipper the snack packs, a worrisome exhaustion overtakes me. Nearly two hours ago, at 4:00 A.M., I chucked the baggie of meth shards along with my pipe and torch into the dumpster behind our building. I flip on my favorite episode of Veep, knowing it’s the brand of humor that’ll make me laugh internally so I won’t wake Curt. My weighted eyelids fall and rise like faulty garage doors, and I picture the hours ahead, checking luggage, waiting at TSA, boarding the flight. These simple tasks become sources of increasing anxiety. Yes, any idiot can suffer them. They aren’t difficult, yet they’re impossible if I’m asleep. I pause Veep, slip on my sneakers, and creep out the door. I manage a chuckle, imagining a neighbor finding two dainty legs hanging from the dumpster. Over the course of the last few days (and nights), I’ve made sure to never hit the pipe within a mile radius of our home, avoiding the nearby street tourists frequent to take selfies outside the Brady Bunch house, finding instead unpopulated nooks and crannies where I could spark my torch under the bulbous end of the glass pipe as the shards melt into a brown liquid, rotating left, then right, and inhaling until the diameter of my pupils expand and it feels as though my lungs have quadrupled in size, as a blissfully eager smile stretches upon my face. But Curt’s 6:00 A.M. alarm is fast approaching, so I decide to stay in our lot. This is a quick fix, an instant recharge. The last I will ever need. That pediatrician’s letter citing how meth and Adderall are essentially the same wasn’t wrong, but what he neglected to tell readers is that meth, in addition to matching Adderall’s productive qualities, also makes you happy. On Adderall, there was always something missing. I needed to mix it with the nicotine from a cigarette or the alcohol from a beer or the THC from a spliff. With meth, I’m jubilant, no notes.

I use tweezers to place a shard into the round opening atop the bulbous end when a heart-stopping sound startles me.

Knock-knock.

Curt is banging on the window. I frantically tuck the pipe and baggie in my sleeve and give him a just one sec finger before rolling the window down a crack.

Curt glares through squinted eyes: Open the door.

I remain still, avoiding eye contact, trying to come up with a diversion.

What is that? he asks, reaching through the window. I roll the window up, not considering his arm. He shrieks in agony. I toss the torch under the seat then emerge, besmearing him in apologies.

I was looking for my headphones, I tell him.

Curt clutches my sleeve. I chuck the pipe over the fence, causing the baggie to fall. He tears at the baggie, spewing shards across the asphalt.

Meth? he asks.

It’s not! I cry, as if saying so might make it true.

You’re a meth addict, he says. This fact doesn’t confound him. No. The truth makes sense. We’ve been together three years and the warning signs from me have been there. Back in New York, he borrowed my iPad and found a slew of messages between me and another guy planning to hook up, then others reflecting on how much we enjoyed it after we had. My first boyfriend had stepped out on his first boyfriend. Every gay man I knew in New York did. I thought this was just how we are. Either way, I swore up and down to Curt that it would never happen again.

Curt’s eyes well into geysers. He runs. I follow, pleading to explain. He turns: You’ve been cheating again, haven’t you? You probably gave me HIV. I have to get tested. We’re supposed to leave right now to help my dad pack my mom— He pauses. Don’t follow me, he hollers, or I’ll call the fucking cops!

I grab his shoulder. Wait!

He snaps around so quickly that I flinch instinctively, but Curt would never resort to violence. He turns away, and I see his freckled face for the last time, now purple and saturated; he’s aged a decade in two terrible minutes.

I scream as he gets smaller: I love you.

I haven’t loved you in a long time, he yells back.

I pace, foraging the parking lot for some magical undo button. The bottom falling out is so unfamiliar, it feels inconceivable. You’re a writer, I think, use your words. I bolt up the stairs and am about to stick my key in the lock when I hear Curt’s sobs reverberating through the wall. It sounds less like crying and more like food poisoning, trying to expel every bit of retched bile from his system.

Outside, I glance at the front-facing windows, our curtains pulled back ever so slightly, allowing me to see Curt’s silhouette one final time. After purchasing a pack of American Spirits at Sunoco, I tear a page from the car owner’s manual and scrape any lingering shards from the floor mats. As dawn threatens to break, the weight of Curt’s reaction settles on me heavily. His response is entirely understandable, and I contemplate—very briefly—chucking it into the trash. Instead, I place it in the glove compartment, accelerate, and light a cigarette, hoping each puff might quell the rising tide of hysteria. Minutes later, I park in an alleyway, place my driver’s license over the folded paper of shards, and press down. This is how I’d break up chunks of cocaine back in college. The shards pulverize into dust, and I scrape a bump then snort it, then another and another until the page is empty, as if someone’s taken a stick of chalk to the text. Snorting meth is hardly like snorting cocaine. Cocaine offers an instant tingly gratification like dunking one’s head into cold water. Snorting meth throbs and makes one eye bulge out of its socket. The high takes several minutes to be felt. I’m desperate for that euphoria. I don’t anticipate the bulging eye effect and its successive involuntary watering.

During my years as an experimental theater major at NYU studying the Grotowski method, I learned that you don’t need to generate emotion from memory or lived experience. Rather, every emotion is accessible through bodily engagement. An actor playing a character who’s been hit by a car can start with the limp, and the emotions surrounding the trauma will follow. Tears will transform into insurmountable sobs. Someone once told me smoking a cigarette is the easiest way to stop crying. That’s not working now. There are no more drugs to ingest, so I head to Canoga Park and my little brother, Christopher.

His bushy eyebrows peer from above a towering rosemary plant as I pull into the driveway of his girlfriend Jonnie’s house. He’s been waiting outside since I called, to make sure I don’t wake up the rest of the family.

What the hell happened? Christopher asks.

All my friends who live in LA aren’t from LA and thus are back home with their families for the holiday, and those who did grow up here are friends within a professional context. Showing up on their doorstep strung out on meth would be mortifying. So, here I am, laying the burden on my younger brother by seven years, a person so determined to help others, he’s studying political science because he still thinks humanity is salvageable.

I tell him everything as we drive to a Jewish deli in Reseda. We sit on the same side of a booth while I force-feed myself chicken noodle soup that’s so delicious even the meth can’t stop me from slurping it down. We’re on speakerphone, consulting our uncle John, who’s back in Pennsylvania and has twenty years in the program.

Jason has to check into rehab, he tells us both.

Christopher gives me an intrepid look, a facade he learned long ago from me, one that’s more about denial than conviction.

This I know: artists dabble in mind-expanding chemicals. Creative types don’t abuse drugs; we utilize them. We devise our own rules. We differ from the hoi polloi in cubicles, falling in line like sheep. It’s these ingrained beliefs that make rehab feel farcical. But at the urging of Uncle John and Christopher, I agree to go to rehab.

An addict doesn’t recognize wreckage as it occurs, Uncle John tells us.

I know rehab will appease my family, but my objective in this harsh morning light is getting Curt back. Surely, if I remain steadfast, he’ll return, and he’ll love me deeper for having surrendered.

2

When I enter our apartment the next day, the cats greet me with their normal upbeat cries that sound like We love you but are actually Feed us, asshole. I pet Buffy, the cat who’s been with me for over ten years since rescuing her from a Russian hoarder in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. I then pet the youngest cat, Bonstein, whom I adopted amid a brawl with my ex-boyfriend Brantley, hoping a kitten might ease tensions at home. I then notice Piquo’s absence. Curt has taken back the cat he brought into this relationship. We’re no longer a family of five.

I glance around and the absence comes into focus. The bookshelf contains half the publications. The record collection has been pruned. Curt’s closet is bare aside from three shirts I gifted him over the years. An empty frame hangs on the wall; the photograph of us laughing atop Runyon Canyon is missing. Curt has removed any evidence he ever lived between these walls. This is no longer a home, it’s a glorified storage unit. I scan the space where we watched Criterion movies, snuggled, folded laundry, made love, and clinked our glasses at the stroke of midnight just nights earlier. I wonder if Curt took any of the snack bags I’d made on his flight. I wonder if he made it to Chicago safely. I wonder, between he and his father, who is now comforting whom. I realize now I cannot fix this.

Soon, Mom arrives from Pennsylvania, a professional healer by trade, and boy, do I need her services more than ever. She helps me retire this home, packing boxes, double wrapping each plate in newspaper with the delicate tenderness only a mother can provide. In two days, I’ll drop my two remaining cats off with my other ex, Brantley, who’s now in law school at USC, then I’ll enter a rehab center located in the heart of Laurel Canyon founded by the husband of a bigwig film producer I met last year. It’s not the celebrity-studded Malibu retreat Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan attended, but it’s well above our means. I borrow nearly $20,000 from my grandmother to attend, believing I deserve this degree of opulence. When Mom drops me off at rehab, it’s as if the past twenty-five years were inconsequential, and I am the same weeping child on his first day of kindergarten.

Eight days later: I storm into my counselor’s office, whipping around a crudely highlighted schedule, caviling about promised yoga classes and the spiritual adviser who never materialized. Enshrouded below my entitlement is abject fear: fear that if I admit I’m an addict, not just addicted to stimulants, as I’d prefer, I’ll carry that label with me for the rest of my life. Men won’t want to date me. Friends will have conversations behind my back in preparation for seeing me, analyzing how they should alter their behaviors so weak and addicted Jason won’t be triggered. No, that’s not for me.

I’m leaving, I tell my counselor.

If you leave, she replies calmly, you’ll be hitting the pipe within the week.

I can’t help but wonder if she’s right, but I do know that leaving is the only surefire way to prove her wrong. Brantley allows me to crash on his couch for a few nights while I figure out my next moves and before I must break the news of my escape to the family. But for now, I need a distraction. I need affection. I need to feel wanted. I get on Tinder. While on Grindr one will ask, Top or bttm? in lieu of hello, Tinder remains a place a gay men might seek meaningful connection. Soon, I’m meeting Andrew to lick matcha gelato cones circling Echo Park Lake. I boast about my filmmaking career and the avant-garde performances I’ve directed, educating him on the man I aspire to be: ambitious, inventive, prolific—the way Curt once viewed me. I cook at Andrew’s apartment, convenient since I am meant to be in rehab and my pans are all in storage.

Andrew lights candles, shining dim pink shadows while I braise chicken thighs and simmer a balsamic reduction. We repeat this domesticated date the next night, and I’ve swiftly crafted an imaginary relationship with all the accouterments. It feels right. It feels familiar.

And then, as I tell myself things will work out, that I am all right and have no need for rehab, I get a call from my boss. My boss is a famous songwriter who’s written Grammy and Tony Award–winning radio hits for the past thirty years. Talented as she is, for her to generate work, she requires a collaborator who brings the hustle and the discipline. We’ve spent the past three years working together, twelve hours a day, texting even on holidays and often in the middle of the night, putting all our energy into a music and film project about the great underappreciated city of Detroit, her hometown. She’s written a love song to the city, and over the course of fifteen trips to Detroit, we’ve recorded and filmed tens of thousands of its residents, all culminating in the release of a record, multiple music videos, and a feature-length documentary. I have lived and breathed this project. Until this moment, it has felt as much mine as it is hers. Unfortunately, Curt has now informed her of my alleged meth addiction. Despite our closeness these past few years, she’s always on the lookout for her next devil, someone on whom she can lay the blame for her inadequacies. She’s thrown person after person under the bus, and I’ve just opened the door for her to do it again.

She says my name will be expunged from the credits of our forthcoming documentary. Three years of work evaporates with one signature. Losing Curt was calamitous, but this blow evokes an unfamiliar sensation: worthlessness. Naturally, Andrew cannot understand the depths of this loss. I need numbness. Luckily, there is Flex—a bathhouse essentially, but one with no steam rooms or saunas, only private rooms and larger public spaces with dividing structures so one need not view the face of the individual inserting himself. I whisper, "Are you parTying?" to a dark figure passing in the hall, and within a minute, I’m in his room hitting the pipe. Within a few more minutes, I’m having gloriously savage sex until light gleams upon his face, assigning humanity to the figure, and I must peruse the halls for my next encounter shrouded in darkness. I’m comforted knowing I’m unlike these chumps who come here daily, whose lives center around meth and sex. As in the past, I’m just a tourist taking in the scenery, participating in the culture, but this isn’t my culture. No one here has talents and ambitions like mine.

The hours melt away, as happens on meth in gloomy rooms with no clocks. Andrew expects me for dinner. I text him, apologizing that I’ve been called in to work. He’ll understand, right? And if he doesn’t, then we aren’t a good match anyway. How could I be with someone who doesn’t understand that filmmaking and artistry require long hours? I’ve contrived a relationship for the explicit purpose of having someone to whom I can lie, perpetuating the bliss I’ve come to associate with unfaithful, deviant behavior. When I stumble out of the sex club sixteen hours later, I mull over my options. Though the thrill is considerably worthwhile, it’s unsustainable. Masking the effects of too little sleep and all the behavioral alterations is laborious. I tell myself I can’t keep doing this. I need to keep myself clean. And I need a fresh start.

A few days later, I load up a U-Haul with all my items, which have barely collected dust in the storage unit. With the cats by my side in the front seat, I leave LA for Berkeley, where Christopher and Jonnie have a spare room in their apartment on Ellis Street. I contact my friends back in Brooklyn and here in LA—those who aren’t ghosting me after hearing from Curt—explaining how I had a temporary setback involving some brief experimentation with harder drugs, but that I’m headed north for a fresh start, perhaps to write a story, to finally put myself first.

3

We see what we need to see. Christopher sees a brother restoring his life, installing lighting fixtures, constructing Zen gardens; a brother who’s humbled himself from the Hollywood producer who months before was hobnobbing at premieres and is now driving what (for the purposes of this tale) we will call Ryde to make rent; a brother who fills the fridge with healthy foods, preparing nightly dinners before heading to recovery meetings. Christopher is overjoyed to have his older brother here. We haven’t lived together since he was in sixth grade and I was a graduating senior who barely gave him the time of day. His girlfriend, Jonnie, gets into the habit of tearing up whatever meat we’re eating and feeding it to the cats so we all can share in the dining experience together. The cats, I’m quite sure, think they’ve died and gone to kitty heaven.

I tell Christopher I’m attending SMART Recovery meetings, an alternative group that doesn’t dogmatically surrender to higher powers or insist one admit one is powerless to addiction. Rather, I become a card-carrying member at the Berkeley-based bathhouse Steamworks, where I can piggyback on to the more dire addicts who buy their meth, as I’ve made a vow to never buy my own. The Bay Area parTy ’n’ play (PnP) scene, it turns out, is burgeoning, topped only by some areas of Thailand. What’s with the capital T? It’s an abbreviation for Tina, a folksy nickname for crystal meth that’s meant to lighten the connotations.

I’m someone who finds pleasure in purpose and productivity. But driving Ryde, having all my ambitions wiped clean, losing the love of my life—it’s all too much to overcome. In the small wins, in the mundane, I can’t find the joy I need to persist. No—drown me in a pool of indulgence. Blind me to the sight of grief. Give me good. Give me great. Make me feel unstoppable,