Or, How I Learned to Love Dancing
Right as Larry rudely interrupted, Todo was in his spandex, moving his hands away from his face in explosive motions while The Smiths were strumming their guitars and singing about a man with a big nose who knows. Larry was his housemate. A relatively harmless guy but one that you couldn’t really depend on, and one who seemed to be in a permanent state of looking-for-the-remote, which was what the interruption regarded.
“Stop bothering me, man. I don’t know where it is. I’m locked in on this dance thing. Really feeling it today. It’s all getting very inspired.”
When Larry dared to ask if he could stop dancing for a second and help look, Todo shot him a scornful gaze. Larry seemed to get a bit of a fright, and so Todo felt a glimmer of pride at how well his gaze worked. After a short period of hard-to-interpret eye contact, Larry said: “Your eyeballs, dude. For a second I thought there was no iris left. Nothing but pupil. What did you take?”
A sharp shock of disappointment raced through Todo’s stomach. He had overestimated his ability to scorn. “Metocin, man. It makes me see.” Metocin, or 4-HO-MET, was Todo’s psychedelic of choice. It’s a psilocin analogue, similar in structure to psilocybin, the chemical that makes you trip if you eat the right mushroom. It felt the same as shrooms to him, but way more visual, alongside a very clear headspace that allowed him to keep focused on his dancing while tripping balls.
“Haha, nice. Can I have some?” Asked Larry, greedily.
“No, sorry. I need it to finally break through with this interpretive dance thing. It gets my juices flowing. My creative juices.” Todo conveniently forgot to mention that Metocin tolerance builds up quickly, to the point where he would feel absolutely nothing if he took a pill in the next two weeks, and that he could order more online, right now, and it would arrive the next day. “Besides, if you took some now our trips would be totally, like, out of sync. I would be peaking when you would be chilling, and I would be chilling when you would be peaking. Total vibe-killer.” It was his thing. He was the one dancing, he bought the drugs, he found out about them in the first place. So, Todo went back to dancing.
He had started working on his routine around six months earlier. It had been a long process of figuring out how to make a dance routine and what drugs he could take that not only allowed him to still dance but also enhanced the experience. Synthetic opioids like O-DSMT and U47700 were an immediate no. They made him feel amazing but also very, very dumb and lazy. No dancing was going to happen under the reign of an opioid. 6-APB, like XTC but way stronger, made him dance like never before, until he videoed himself once and saw that he was a sweaty fish on land on the substance. Cathinone stimulants he loved the most, and God had it been a journey to figure out which one worked best. While all of them felt like XTC and cocaine made sweet love and had a baby in the form of a crystally powder, not all cathinones were equal. 4-MMC was too dopamine heavy, 2-MMC reminded him too much of the cheap speed he took in high school, any CMC variant was always just a little worse than the MMC variant, but 3-MMC hit like nothing else. Todo truly believed he could take 3-MMC every single day and not only live a good life but become a world-famous interpretive dancer.
His obsession with dance had started during a particularly introspective trip. He had somehow come across a broadcast of Mark Morris’ L’Allegor, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, a contemporary neoclassical piece that particularly spoke to the imagination in a psychedelic state due to its synchronized movement and bright colorful outfits. The sudden shifts in emotion and tight classical choreography felt a bit unheimlich, but it made him feel like he was staring his purpose right into its eyes. So from that day on, Todo was a dancer.
That didn’t mean he was any good. The first two months of practice included very little dancing and a lot of online shopping. He went on binges of various stimulants and spent hours researching the best spandex unitards and wallmirrors. He finally settled on a blue unitard that, according to him, showed just enough bulge to give the ladies a good show but not so much that it took the attention away from his dancing. When it arrived, he realized that his current audience consisted only of Larry, and could not remember why he had found it so important that Larry saw his crotch. Deciding not to dwell on this thought for too long, he went on to spend a few days remodeling their guestroom into his own studio and then spent another few days resenting the fact that he was finally done with the easy part and now actually had to start dancing.
He had sort of assumed that through raw emotion and a lot of willpower, the dancing would come easy. He was thoroughly bummed when he found out this was not the case. Because he was so bummed, he decided to reward himself with a few big lines of NEP (a slightly less intense version of cocaine). The NEP made him feel confident. Within an hour he was in possession of a recording of him doing an elaborate dance to Cocteau Twins’ Cherry-coloured Funk. According to Larry it looked more like summoning an ancient daemon than dancing, but Larry also genuinely thought that Dude, where’s my car? was a cinematic masterpiece, so what did he know?
As the months went by Todo surprised himself by actually sticking with a routine. He spent most mornings getting stoned and watching Mark Morris choreographies. In the afternoon he took some type of stimulant to get rid of the weed’s drowsiness, making sure to always mix up the type of stimulant so that he could keep telling himself he was not dependent on anything. After a few hours of drug-fueled dancing he would be so riled up he needed some type of downer to get some rest in the evening. He started out with kratom, a natural opioid made from leaves, but soon that stopped scratching the itch and he figured that while the heavier opioids stopped him from dancing, it wouldn’t stop him from anything if he took them after he was done dancing. Not long after, he found himself researching how to safely use needles.
It starts in the neck. He feels the fake heroin he bought on the internet in his neck first. Then it climbs down his spine. Like a warm, relaxing shower he feels the substance running over his body top to bottom and all he can do is lie there and moan a bit and hope to god that nobody needs him for the next hour because it’s going to be a while before he’s able to get up and pack up his needles and hide his drugs in his little puzzle box again. Besides, he won’t actually pack it up. If he’s able to clean up that means that he can get higher. When Todo IV’s U47700 there is no past and there is no future and there probably isn’t even a present. He imagines that this is what the Buddhists are talking about when they talk about enlightenment. He imagines this is what babies feel in the womb. He imagines that every time he’s at a barbecue and someone plops down in the sun on one of those white chairs with a beer and a big slab of meat and asks “Does it get any better than this?” he will give them a syringe filled with the stuff and a tourniquet to tie off their arm and show them how good it can truly get.
But Todo wasn’t attending any barbecues anymore. He wasn’t even dancing anymore. Sure, he was still taking stimulants in the afternoon, but they were getting injected as well. He was still watching Mark Morris choreographies, he had seen around 87 out of 150 so far, but they weren’t really registering. It became noise and shapes and movement. Maybe this had been his true calling all along. The one thing he was really good at. Doing drugs and nodding off and perhaps, on the right substance, masturbating for hours until the act itself hurt and there was blood in his ejaculation and then going on for a while longer.
At first, Larry believed that Todo was really spending his time in the studio dancing, and he dared not risk asking for help with finding the remote anymore after last time. But after a while, the music stopped. Todo got too apathetic to even pretend there was something still happening in the studio and really only still shot up in there. After three weeks of no music at all Larry decided that he was going to pretend that he thought Todo was not there because of the lack of music and everything and barged in to act like he was still on his ongoing remote-search and found Todo lying there in the corner with the needle still in his arm, distant eyes and the inability to write a complete sentence.
An ultimatum was given. Todo would go clean for a month or Larry would inform the landlord of what was happening in the apartment and Todo would have to figure out for himself where he would live in the future.
For about 2.6 weeks he managed to do it, but he was not happy about it. He only did it because if he could last the month he could go back to shooting up. The initial detox was not the hard part. It consisted mostly of sleeping, feeling like shit and eating a lot of canned soup for a few days. The hard part was when he didn’t feel sick anymore. When life became a big emptiness. When he had to go from experiencing the ultimate pleasures that existed in this world to the great big boringness of sitting next to Larry on the couch every day and maybe sometimes doing groceries. When he realized that addiction was not just physical dependency. When he realized that the drugs weren’t the problem, they were a temporary cure to his problem. When he suddenly found himself in possession of 2 grams of U47700 that got stuck in customs after he ordered it a few weeks ago. That’s when it really got hard.
He had built up to it. He had started dancing again, this time with the door open, so that Larry could see that he was really getting better. He had started closing the door while dancing to see if Larry trusted him and didn’t barge in. It took three barges and one angry outburst to regain his privacy. He had prepared the needles beforehand. He had researched the right way to find veins in his thighs so that Larry wouldn’t notice anything if he tried to check his arms for track marks. He had placed the remote on the coffee table in front of the TV so that he was sure there was not a single way that Larry could not find it. And then he had loaded up 8mg of U47700 that he injected straight into his leg and let the drug wash over him. It had always seemed funny to him that a drug that gave you such a warm feeling could also give you shivers and cold sweats as if he was freezing. It was especially bad this time. He was lying on the floor in a steadily growing pool of his own sweat just shivering and shivering and shivering and sill it had felt like coming home. Like holding your breath under water and then finally coming up and getting that first gasp of oxygen back into your lungs. Like taking tight shoes off after a long day of walking. The pool of sweat was still growing. So much even, that he started floating a little. He closed his eyes and let himself float and felt how little waves started forming and still he kept his eyes closed and let the sea wash over him. He smelled the salt of the water and noticed his own nakedness and just kept floating until he finally floated far enough and felt the sand of the beach between his toes and then he opened his eyes and looked at the mountains surrounding him and understood for the first time what he really had to do. So he hummed a tune about a man with a big nose who knows and started dancing.
Levi van Dartel recently completed a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature at Utrecht University and will begin a master’s in editing at the University of Amsterdam this fall. Moving toward a career in publishing, he is drawn to the full arc of how literature is made, from the first draft to the finished book. His fiction tends to orbit characters of spectacular self-delusion; people whose ambitions and vices are, in the end, the same impulse in different clothes. His ambition is both practical and immodest: to work in publishing and, somewhere alongside it, to write novels.
