Asexual Healing Asexual Healing I hadn’t even done ...

I hadn't even done that much speed. I wasn't out of my mind, rushing mad, buzzy flies in my head. In fact, I was ready to fall?if not asleep?into bed with my occasional date, a stunning Czech named Jana who'd graced me with her affections once before. In her two-bedroom apartment, she had a rare, American-style king-size bed bought at an embassy flea market. She also had a son, but he wouldn't be there until the weekend.

The night started at a music bar called Belzepub. I had a small bag of meth tucked away somewhere in my cargo pants and nothing better to do. As soon as the band's set was over, I hopped a tram to Abaton, a dance club a couple kilometers outside of the city center. There, I spent some time chatting up an acquaintance onto whom I was considering plying my inconsiderable seduction skills. Around two, I hit the baggie and went back to the center, having decided to keep moving rather than concentrate on what would likely be a fruitless pursuit. She wasn't even dancing.

Jana was coming off her bartending shift, so we met up, shared a rail in the bathroom and started drinking. Had it been summertime, the sun would've been rising when we left the bar, but in the dead of Prague winter, daylight disappears at six and returns 14 hours later. At her place, we showered, rolled a joint and fumbling attempted to fuck. Frustration, like love and hate, like acceptance of banality and obsession over the trivial, becomes amplified on drugs. Then I remembered the liquor, weed and muscle relaxants, and I forgave myself for being impotent. Twas neither a sexual nor structural problem, but instead a drug-fueled corporal protest.

Screwing on crank (and, for that matter, on ecstasy) is foreign to me. I catch the pull and become as crinkly and touchy as the next user?and feel-good bathroom blowjobs that don't continue to completion are always fine?but when I'm high on stimulants, I'm more inclined to be social than sexual.

I was very social during my year in Prague. In a town where ecstasy costs less than $7 per pill, strong Czech pot is $5 a gram and the locals abuse more of their homegrown speed than either coke or heroin, it's hard to stay straight.

No matter what I said at the time, no matter the grandiose claims of being a journeyman aspirant with plans to live new-nomad and circle the globe, I left New York City to get over a girl. We'd crashed spectacularly yet slowly at the end of the previous year, as marked by an uncharacteristic bout of violence laid down upon an arguably undeserving ex-boyfriend (and resulting in a definitely undeserving bystander going to the hospital). Months after that, she was gone, leaving me alone in a ghost town of memories.

For two months, night after night, I walked the Brooklyn streets with my dog, drinking bottle after bottle of deli beer, head low, lost, scared, lonely, sad. I knew I was meant to leave town, to travel somewhere?anywhere?and finally feel the wind of the world blow on my face. But I had little money and even less bravery.

A concerned friend finally snapped me out of my self-pity.

"She's not coming back," he told me. "Just leave."

Three weeks later, I'd sold just about everything I owned, given up my apartment and bequeathed my dog to my parents. I arrived in Prague with my laptop, two pairs of pants, one pair of shoes, undergarments and a couple shirts. Finally, at the age of 33, I'd undertaken the trip I should've made a decade earlier.

The Czech capital lured me with its promise of cheap living, enough English speakers to offer a soft cushion and a beautiful city. I even had a place to crash when I landed, courtesy of a Czech friend who'd extended an open invitation two years before. Zdenek picked me up from the airport and gave me his couch for five weeks.

Yet, even in a foreign city, immersed in a foreign culture, much of my Brooklyn routine continued. Every evening after a long day of walking new streets and meeting new people and obsessively checking email for signs of attention from my long-gone love, I sat on a bench overlooking the strip in Mala Strana. Working my way through a joint and a couple bottles of Staropramen, I catalogued the ghosts that had followed me across the ocean. I purged myself by trying to forget, trying not to cry, welding shut the steel doors that I wished would cover my heart.

My new friends, Alex and Micah, gave me my first Czech-side taste of speed. They assured me it wasn't straight Pervitin, also known as pico, an ephedrine derivative that was patented by the Nazis and fed to special divisions of the SS and Wermacht. (It was also given to Kamikaze pilots.) Our drug for the weekend was more likely a batch of expat-made, American-style bathtub meth cut with the usual soap, drain cleaner and boogers.

The three of us ran the town the way a poolshark runs a table. We hit strip clubs and bars and strip clubs again, getting more drunk than we realized, until finally coming down with an early-morning walk across the Charles Bridge. We endured a sleepless crash at Alex's studio apartment and, in the afternoon, rode out the hangovers on an excruciating bus ride to the sleepy town of Liberec near the Polish border, where another night of warm-wash runaround awaited.

Monday morning came without a pause for night, and I eventually fell on Zdenek's couch, still lost but also invigorated. I'd had my first peak moments in months. Those bursts of rush that course through like laser beams of sunlight after a summertime thunderstorm could still be had; my body and mind weren't busted after all.

One night, we met a quartet of Swedes at Radost, a popular but still decent nightclub in Vinohrady. I already had two pills in me, with two more in my pocket to push through the night. Four men living in Prague with four women stopping through for a couple days?we spent the night crawling through the city, eventually ending up at Industry, a grating but effective after-hours joint that remains open deep into the next day. The dance floor was filled with slithering Euro kids, sweaty and saucer-eyed and waiting for the pilot to announce that descent has begun.

That night ended in the afternoon, with me, Alex and two of the ladies riding the comedown on Petrin Hill, a beautiful, grassy slope just south of Prague's famous castle. We had four unopened cans of beer, four uneaten sandwiches and two unkissed Swedes. I never even made a move.

Eventually, of course, I met a woman I liked and actually had sex. And then another. My seven months of celibate reflection had served me well. I'd proven that I could handle recreational drug use; I made several good friends; I ate breakfast without haste each morning; I even opened the steel doors a bit.

A friend recently wrote from Prague. In her letter, she revealed that the city was "starting to get to where the good points are turning into bad points."

Doing drugs and dancing all night, having good sex with strangers, living on $500 a month?these are the good points of that city. For one summer, it was a fantastic experience. Problem is, my friend has been there for several years.

Some activities are meant for one season. They're meant to be discovered, enjoyed and savored?and then discontinued before you attempt to build an entire lifestyle around them. My own summer lasted more than the season, but it ended at just the right time: shortly after discovering that all the drugs and runaround and lightning bolts of adrenaline could make me impotent. That was too much to handle, even for one night.