Five Stories: Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll

Our readers share their debaucherous adventures.

This edition of Nerve's "Five Stories" is in collaboration with Vol. 1 Brooklyn. For more sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll stories, check out Vol. 1's three-minute reading series, this Thursday, August 18. For more information, click here. 

Dorian Gray

One night at a party, as I smoked a cigarette through a porcelain holder, I asked a girl I’d never met, “Would you mind holding this for a second?”  I was also wearing a tuxedo jacket with tails. She said sure.

I put my top hat in her hands, removed a rolled-up twenty from my back pocket, leaned towards the girl, and snorted a line of cocaine from the hat’s crown. I checked the brim for crumbs and thanked her for her help. 

That night was the last time I ever got to use my signature move. Even though I managed to sleep with the girl, my top-hat routine came to an end, unfortunately, because of something that had, over the past few years, become even more of a routine.

Recently, my trysts had been ruined by a bodily fluid that’s not ordinarily part of sex. Puddles of it had ruined my couch. Streaks of it had stained my wall. In the years leading up to that night, I’d had at least five sexual experiences during which, at some point, the girl I was sleeping with vomited.

What I liked best about the girl who’d held my top hat was that she didn’t seem the type to lose a meal. Between our third and fourth round of shots, she asked me why I was dressed like Slash from Guns ‘n’ Roses, and between our fifth and sixth round of shots, I told her I was dressed like Jeeves from Wodehouse. Not once did she grimace at the burn from the booze.

Back then I really did consider myself a sort of novelistic rock star, someone who was smarter, better-looking, and wittier than myself, if only to relieve the anguish of my own mediocrity. Often I asked myself one question. What would Dorian Gray do? He would seduce a woman while wearing a tuxedo jacket with tails. He would blow a line of cocaine off the surface of a top hat. The part I got wrong was that someone like Dorian Gray would have noticed, while having sex with a girl on the sofa in his living room, the volume of her stomach growls.

Suddenly she sat upright. “I shouldn’t have,” the girl mumbled against her palm, “eaten those shrooms.” Only one logical receptacle lay within reach. I grabbed it just in time.

After that night, I’ll never have to speculate what a quart of partially-digested, hallucinogenic fungi sound like splashing into a top hat bought for $44.99, plus shipping and handling, on eBay.

There in the living room, naked and splattered with bits of throw-up, I wondered what Dorian Gray would do. Then I just decided to get her a drink of water and a towel. — Snowden Wright

Submit to our next round-up: memorable one-night stands. We want the good, the bad, and the (coyote) ugly. Tell us all the hilarious specifics in 75-100 words. Send to submissions@nerve.com.