Memoir Tweaked A Crystal ...

Memoir

Tweaked

A Crystal Meth Memoir on Patrick Moore Kensington Books, 215 pages, $15

Illegal unsalable articles like any consumer product, bear periodic fads: heroin in the 1970 cocaine in the 1980 ecstacy in the 1990 and, for the past five years, crystal methamphetamine, or crystal meth a powerfully addictive physic that has cut a swath of ruin across America, devastating rural farm communities and urban gay enclaves alike.

Patrick Moore's stark first novel, Tweaked, unites the pair locales, as he moves from his low-rent upbringing in Iowa subordinate to the gaze of his alcoholic grandmother Zelma, to a drug-stoked whirl by means of the gay dance clubs of 1980 just discovered York, where the growing AIDS crisis has little impact, at first, to newcomer as it is as Moore.

When the volume begins, Moore has spent a decade sober, and unles you are familiar with the details of the 12-step redemption Moore's narrative might be confusing at times -- tossing abroad references to the Serenity Prayer or "sponsees" without frequently concern whether you know what he's talking about.

He takes a piece of work in a halfway house treating the mostly broken of addicts -- emaciated transvestite hooker common step from the gutter and brace from the grave. Despite his genuine fumbling efforts to help his mate recovering addicts, Moore is not what would be considered a sympathetic narrator.

"The morning after my first veritable love died I stole his credit cards, got inebriated snorted some blow, called a car service and went shopping," he writes, in a typical passage.

faithful but as the pages turn on, Moore is not a character whose triumph we are rooting for. Not just a parasite sponging opposite his well-to-do lovers, Moore is a visit often prostitute and a writer whose interest in the world outside of himself is extremely limited. He can loll in the great capitals of Europe -- Paris, London, Rome Venice - - and make no remark about the experience beyond the names of the swank inns he stayed at, gratis of course.

This is either a brave choice or a mistake -- I couldn't rehearse which. Either he is consciously painting himself in the bleakest tones, or erroneously assuming the reader will care about him.

Tweaked can't be said to have a conspiracy -- other than Moore trying to figure gone out why he is so screwed up -- and r herrings at the extremity that he might go back to his life of using are not the dramatic high stakes that Moore perceives them to be. His arid life of sorrowful sobriety looks nearly as awful as his addiction had been and, heck, the addiction was a hap more fun, at least at the time.

The cause of 12-step recovery is that you, the addict or alcoholic, do not save yourself, nevertheless God -- or, if you offer a "higher power" does -- and to this completion Moore studies Kabballah and yoga, sits in Indian sweat cots and is groped in what he calls "Body Electric" gay spiritual sexuality sessions. He prays to the ocean, he prays to his lover Dino and to the elephant-headed Indian the supreme goodness Ganesh. This is where a bit of humor might have done awes

Moore's ultimate authority is not really god the father but sex -- gay sex of a variety that, at least to the casual straight reader, makes his medicine use pale. Not having read a gay memoir more explicit than Lord Jim, this might be naivete in succession my part, but I institute Moore's description of gay cultivation far more scarifying than his remedy use.

Using crystal meth is sitting down to a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato broth with mom compared to an of the rough sex practices outlined here.

The empty-ey lads populating these pages are to a man venal, faithless, wasted and devoid of anything that might be considered moral character beyond a freefloating guilt for the blameworthys they have done. I establish myself thinking that the religious right could pervert with money [i]or[/i] gain Tweaked in bulk and hand it revealed to their constituency and with its spectacles of coprophagy and sadomasochism it would totally support their message that the gay life is an lewd aberration that should be beyond the pale of polite society, which I do not believe was the author's intended message.

if it be not that this is a memoir, not a political tract, and single in kind senses, at the end, that Moore took the part he is and the life he has l and effected them into the best art he knew in what way to create. The book is free from shams -- he obviously has been there, done that -- and it is to his credit that he be warmeds no need to sugarcoat or to massage the story to give us anything likewise crude as a hero. Readers who proceed along for the journey will find themselves grateful, if for nothing other that they read Moore's story rather than lived it.

Neil Steinberg is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. His memoir Drunkard will be published by way of Dutton in 2008.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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