Rude Awakenings (Jim)

Rude Awakenings 11/30/2005

I never saw it coming - that blinding light as I left the bar, that made my knees weak, as I fell back against the wall, knowing in my gut that some great truth was about to be realized. Then there it was - I was trying to kill myself!

A few things had changed but I’d continued to live in a highly productive numbness, till this moment. I worked everyday, secure in my great paying job, and drank every night. So what was new? I was drinking a bit less, and maybe a bit more bitterly. And there was this blaring siren going off in my head, as I went home to shelters and halfway houses each night with HIV+ men, on their last breath. In the numbness I barely concerned myself with why, though.

There was something attractive about them having one foot in the grave, about their nearness to death, about their crossing beyond. Something freeing too, in their clammy skin, their raspy breath, in our rash, reckless, love making, that made it all the more real. It might be their/my last moment. I wanted to be as close to death as possible. I was making love to death.

Something had changed to in me too, when I came back from Germany. It was an unbelievable two weeks, outside my confines. Two weeks of families taking us in, of breads and honeys, and cheeses and grains for breakfast. Of castles and cathedral spires and organs for lunch, of bike rides along the wall. Of beautiful, alarmingly dangerous men, restless, idle, and out of work, on the streets. Of wines and violin for dinner and ales from the cellar in the evenings. When I returned to my life it was too small, too constricting, suffocating, dead. This had been my world for 20 years! A single tiny grain of sand shifted then to the other side of the teeter-tauter, changing my whole balance within.

As I stood stunned with my back to the wall, I saw that I was like Humpty-Dumpty on the wall, about to take a great fall. I had known I was gay since I’d left Pat at 20, and yet here I was 40, and still on this wall. To survive this near brush with death, I had to come down from the wall. It was going to be messy, indeed.

For another year, things continued pretty much as they had before the insane recklessness. I saw a therapist once a week, who looking utterly bored, told me my hour had started and then had ended, and said nothing in between. And I didn’t know what to say. As the year progressed though I would begin earlier and earlier to wonder what it was that I wanted to talk about, till eventually I was wondering it all day, every day. But I hadn’t a clue. A noose was tightening around my throat.

One night I had a panic attack. It began with just a creepy feeling about the world, that grew into a realization that I wasn’t wanted in this world. Not only did the world not want me, as I was, but neither did I want to be me. That began a panic in my soul, that I couldn’t escape. I called my friend Joe to spend the night with me, but all I could do was pace, feeling I would die. I’d run outside thinking it was too close inside, and outside, with the stars, it was too unconstrained. With survival threatened within, I forgot to eat, sleep, or drink, so that my body was wracked with fevers and chills, in different parts of me, all at the same time. I envisioned myself as a snake that so desperately wanted to shed it’s skin. It chafed me raw. The panic itself felt like a whirlpool, sucking me deeper and deeper in, till I could see less and less beyond it. It finally ended, some 20 hours later, when I latched on to anything outside of me, to pull me out.

The panic attacks came and went for about a year after that first one. My soul was mortified that I had only decided not to die, but not that I wanted to live. I lived because others wanted me too. The anxiety was around knowing that part of me was in agreement with those that didn’t want me to be, that said I shouldn’t exist. So still flirting with death, my capacities began to shut down. I couldn’t work. I’d be at church and a best friend would walk up and suddenly, I knew I knew them, but couldn’t remember them. Or suddenly I’d forget how to speak and understand English. Words were just a meaningless garble of sounds. I was scared, not knowing where it would lead, or end.

The paradox that had given me hope though, while facing the awful truth, was that some people (friends and family) would not want it to end for me here, in this way. So if I had to fall from the wall, I’d splatter on the side of self-acceptance, as gay. It was not the way I’d always hoped to come out to my family, though. I’d always hoped I’d be so in love, anyone could see it, and be happy for me. Instead I crawled home utterly broken, and in front of my parents, my brothers and sisters and their spouses, I groveled, ‘I need you to see me and love me, as I am. I never wanted to hurt you by telling you this, but I can no longer carry it. Can you still love me?’ Splat!

That was the beginning though, not the end of visibility and acceptance. Since I was naked in this small initial clearing, I’d try to continue the revealing, but it was always met with pregnant silence. Once, I had gone on a canoe trip down the Current river in Missouri, with gay friends from Atlanta. I felt so dirty coming back, that I imagined that I had to get away from them immediately, and shower and go to church for a whole day, but once back in Atlanta, the need was gone. Another time with Ty, my black lover, in a restaurant in Atlanta, I could feel all eyes on us as we came in. I saw an elderly couple boring a hole in me of contempt, and suddenly their feelings and judgement were mine. I had to choose whose feelings I wanted, mine or theirs. Did where I was, change who I was? I was so porous.

Any love for me still came from outside of me and not from within.

Assignment 5 (Jim) - The Early Years

Jung associates memories, dreams and visions with inner life. Of inner life he says, ‘The only events in my life worth telling are when the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one... other memories of travels, or people, or surroundings have largely faded or disappeared. beside these interior happenings.’ He continues, ‘other people are established inalienably in my memories only if their names were entered in the scrolls of my destiny from the beginning, so that encountering them was at the same time a kind of recollection.’ For ‘life is... like a plant that lives on its rhizome... something lives and endures underneath the eternal flux.’ Thus he speaks chiefly of inner experiences. He concludes, for ‘I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings.’ To get at what lies underneath the flux, my inner life, I begin thus with my earliest memories that endure.

I am the oldest of six children, all are roughly a year apart, from each other. I have two sisters, the third oldest and the youngest, and four brothers. My parents married when my Dad returned from service in the Korean conflict, which he never left the U.S. for. My Dad was 24 at that time and my Mom was 21. I was born a year later on April 22nd of 1956, when they promptly moved to an apartment in St. Louis, Missouri, where my Dad had begun work as a CPA for Price Waterhouse. My parents and I only stayed one year in St. Louis. During that year, my Mom says that I was a sickly, pasty baby, that cried the whole time except for when I was held by an elderly neighbor lady. They thought they were terrible parents, until Tom, the 2nd oldest, was born. He was a beautiful, plump, smiling cherub, with black curls.

I remember none of that, but the family story continues, that my parents both lived for the weekends. Dad found his work very stimulating, traveling during the week, while the children were being born, but Mom was quite homesick and overwhelmed with raising the kids alone. So every other weekend, and for weeks during the summers, we stayed at the farm where my Mom had grown up.

Something I do remember, very early on, is the feeling of a presence, of a monstrous ferocious black panther, that lived under my bed. It was both terror and protection. Terror in that I dare not move, relax, or leave my bed, till morning light, when it had gone. And safety in that no one, or no thing could get to me either, while I slept. That was also a magical time. I never misused it, but I was certain that I had the power to control the weather. I also was certain I could fly, and that I did so regularly, yet secretly.

And I remember the farm, fondly. The farm connected us, it was our rich roots and our escape. We had descended, it seems, from nomadic, gypsy like Irish shepherds that lived with their flock, trailing it night and day in a brightly painted covered wagon. My Dad’s great-grandfather had been a German carpenter. I remember that my Mom’s father seemed to know everyone. One day he took us to the livestock auction. On the way he rarely watched the old county roads, swerving the last second when a rare car crossed our path. His eyes were on every house we passed during the hour long drive. He was remembering and reciting each family and their family tree. During the winters he had done a little of everything, from being a policeman, to lumbering, to working in the mines and for the railroad. He often took drifters in. And so Grandpa had great stories and he would wrestle all six of us kids and all our cousins at once. Every Sunday after church growing up, he and the town boys, would have glorious fights out back.

There was an old rodeo horse, that much to my Mom’s chagrin, was named Marge, after her. Marge would tolerate us on her back for a while, then would gently raise up on her hind legs so that we slid off. Tom was so mad at my Grandfather, when Marge dropped him in a mud puddle, that he wouldn’t speak to him for days. Worse, Grandpa laughed and laughed over it. Another time Tom and I fought with Marge at every step to take us to the far end of the pasture, but once we turned to head back, she put her head down and ran full speed, with us hanging on for dear life. There were our cousins to play with there, there were trees to climb, livestock, a milking barn, granaries, a hayloft, a chicken house and a silo with pigeons, there. There was always homemade bread and rolls, real butter and raw milk, popcorn and homemade ice-cream. It would take our parents hours to get us to come out of hiding in the hayloft to return home again.

And there are other memory fragments from while we still lived on the border between Belleville and East St. Louis, Illinois, before my 4th grade, but these stand out in singularity, like islands, in a vast sea, whose connections lie deep below the surface. I remember my brother Tom and I smashing the fenders on each others new Schwinn bicycles with baseball bats, for example. I remember tunneling in the wheat field, and fearing the farmer would catch us. One day three blocks of dry wheat went up in a flash in a huge fire behind our house. The fire trucks tore through our yard, but were helpless. The neighborhood kids had lost the trash can lid they used to put out the fires they lit, before losing control of it. I also remember flying the apple tree, calling pilot, to co-pilot, to bombardier, with my brother Tom and our neighbor Greg. And I remember, wanting Greg (my confirmation name) Sinclair to be my best friend, but my brother Tom and him beating me up instead. I remember stepping on a rusty nail that ran all the way through my foot and out the other side. I told no one, till my Mom discovered the blood in my sheets, days later. I remember once riding way past our neighborhood and deep into E. St. Louis and being confronted at knife point. I remember my youngest brother Dick, opening the car door and swinging out into the street as we rounded a curve, till Mom snatched him back in. And finally I remember the heavy wooden crucifix on my parents bedroom wall being blown across the room as the Kroger, two blocks away blew up. We moved, the next week, to St. Louis County.

One summer, we tried to see how many kids could ride on a bicycle at one time. My foot slipped and went between the frame and spokes, tearing away all the skin, muscle and tendons on my right ankle. My Mom had c-sections with the last two prenancies, and so we had a maid, Orlean, to help her out. Orlean was the first black person us kids had ever seen in the flesh. My Mom was mortally embarrassed but Orlean didn’t mind when we asked why her palms were white and everything else was black. I went to Orlean when I couldn’t train my hair to stay in place. She me one of her huge old nylons to put on my head at night to train it. She and my Mom, soaked my ankle everyday and then drug me around the house, that summer, so my bones would atrophy. Orlean was always there for me.

Erratum and Addition (B. Lapin)

Dear Pals --

Excuse this sudden interruption in the festivities. With your kind indulgence, I have taken the liberty of enabling the comments function on the blog. This will allow anyone who so chooses the liberty to make comments on specific posts without posting to the main blog.

Also, please to note a minor, but important, alteration in the final two paragraphs of the passage I posted earlier.

Thankee.

Dream Angel - Al

11/28/05

Every angel is terrifying, says Rilke. and in my dream this AM, there was an angel, making its first appearance, a cameo. No wings, at least visible. Simple white miniskirt length tunic. A young RuPaul without the drag, hair pulled back, light skinned black complexion. Lasted for all of 2 seconds.

The appearance was completely without context. No story he interrupted, just a flash on the screen. And my response: I screamed, a dream-scream, not an audible one. As I look back on who he was and how he appeared, there was no reason to scream, but I did.

I have loved the Rilke quote, and though of it earlier in the workshop. Tried to use it once to sound clever or erudite, but didn’t have any success in working it into the conversation. And, quote-wise, I believe it. I encourage people in AA not to wish for burning bushes, since the fire doesn’t tend to stay contained to the thing we need to be rid off – it can burn a lot more than the bush. You’re lucky if your burning bush doesn’t catch the whole house on fire.

I had an angelic figure once before: a beautiful young man, black hair, white skin, huge wings, wearing a white button-down shirt. He came to some dreams and I tried dialoging with him, his name was Michael, and he looked like a young version of my friend Raven. I don’t think I ever accomplished what it was he was trying to lure me into. And I did not scream upon his arrival.

And so it took an angel to get me to write again. The fear over the job situation and the end of unemployment had my attention for a long time over these last two weeks. My usual strategy of keeping fear at bay by not paying much attention to it was working fine as long as the money was in something of an equilibrium. And now I have been de-equilibrated.

I called Paul and asked if they needed any seasonal help and Barnes & Noble and he said yes. The guy who’s hiring, Josh, looked and acted like it was a done deal, but we’ll see as the week progresses.

I have to run, on this busy, perhaps last day of unemployment. But I’m back at the computer. Let’s see if I can stay here.

*****

11/29

Angel dialogue

Q: Hi there.

A: Hi

Q: Are you an Angel of Un-Stuckness?

A: You wanna be Unstuck?

Q: Yeah.

A: You could have fooled me. The way to Unstuck is Taking Action. At least you came back tonight.

Q: More Unstuck, I hope. A job, maybe tomorrow. An odd call on the phone tonight. Something is moving.

A: So do you want to be Unstuck about Alabama?

Q: I’ve been ambivalent about that lately. Doesn’t seem like the right topic.

A: When was the last thing that felt like the right topic that you Stuck with?

Q: That’s a good point.

A: You saw me, you sat for two hours, you hooked up with Anna, you went to the gym, you hooked up with David, you got a call about a job interview, you hooked up with Matthew, you never came back to me, until now.

You wanna be a writer?

Q: It seems like too much work, sometimes. I sit at the typewriter and it feels like I’ll be here for hours before I accomplish something. I wonder how I can sit here for hours if it's going to take hours to get a page. It feels like I ought to be doing something else.

A: Only if you don’t want to be a writer. If you want to be a CD seller, then your job should be pursued before me. Fortunately they’re not paying you enough to really want to blow me off … I guess I win until somebody with real money comes along.

I wonder if those guys are waiting about calling you until you decide whether you want to be a writer or not….

Cause the job you take might be very different if you want to be a writer than if you don’t.

Yeah, it would indeed be good to be out of the house, earning something during the holidays. And if you had a job, a Barnes & Noble job might not be a bad one for a writer.

But you know, when you come home and the TV comes on, and then you get up in the morning and the TV comes on, and then you get home and the TV comes on…. maybe you want to be a TV watcher.

A writer stares at the blank page, not the face of Bill O’Reilly, or even Charlie Rose. Or at least the blank page should be in the running for more time than those guys, whoever they’re talking to.

If Alabama’s not the right topic, then change. Cliff didn’t say you couldn’t change. But I think you haven’t gone far enough down the road to Alabama to know if Alabama’s the wrong topic. Just like that “Heart of Sobriety” folder you had on your desktop for however long you had it. Or the history of Body Electric idea you bounced around for awhile. Or that Sobriety for the Non-Sober file you had for awhile. Or that Gay Marriage op-ed you thought about sending off to Southern Voice. Or the AJC guest editorial. Or the AJC book review lady’s phone number you didn’t call.

You write too well to not write, a lot of people think. All the ones who ask you where you’re writing nowadays. The ones who still come up and remember something you wrote 10 years ago, or your picture on top of your column and that you wrote something.

Write about desire, about the fear for reaching for it, that Alabama seems to have bred into your bones. Write about how they’ll hate you if you write the truth about them, or about how much you loved the good-hearted part of the state, but not the cussed closed-mindedness. Write some pages about any of this and see if they seem to be pointed in the one direction, or three… Write about how they avoid modernity and would reinstitute horses and buggies if they didn’t like NASCAR so much. Bless their hearts and tell them the truth, and let the sawdust fall where it may.

Q: Do you have a name?

A: Nathan.

Q: I used that as a pseudonym once.

A: If you need it again, you’re welcome to it.

Jeff - Relationships

Jeff
Week 1

Relationships…a psychic told me recently that I would only have two relationships in my lifetime. I feel shortchanged. During my vacation this year, I was married and divorced many, many times…and that was exactly my intention. Not that I want to be “really” married and divorced countless times but two…only two? Since I’ve already had one relationship, maybe that means that I will finally find the right man and get married and settle down?

But I’m not sure if I should count my 14 year relationship with Ron or not? I question it because in so many ways, I kept myself separate from Ron. We never combined our finances, I wouldn’t allow it because I felt that he was irresponsible with money…like I wasn’t then and am not now. We never bought a house or car together, split all expenses like good roommates would do. There were times when we slept separately for extended periods of time. He would probably say that was all my doing. Even when we slept together, I would move to my side of the bed after fucking him. And it was always me fucking him…ahhh, the words of a power top. I let him fuck me a few times, but frankly, his cock was too small and he fucked like a rabbit, really fast and short…seemingly, all for his pleasure. Of course, I didn’t and don’t fuck that way. I loved him and I told him so, but not in “that” way…the way a married couple should, whatever that is.

Throughout the 14 years, I spent much of my time trying to devise a plan to divorce. Leaving him and being free to do what I wanted, when I wanted was always the topic. Yes, I felt crappy and devious and dishonest and wimpy about feeling that way. Finally, in 1997, I took a job out of town. So our separation began. But, still not able to break completely, I commuted for four years. It took four years and airfares and rental cars totaling thousands of dollars for me (us) to finally end it.

It wasn’t that it was so awful, I just always felt that Ron wasn’t “the one” and I wanted to be free. I have nothing but good things to say about Ron and I used to say that I have no regrets. Now, however, I do regret that I took so long. I did enjoy fucking him…we fucked and fucked and fucked and like many “monogamous” couples, after the first year or so, I always fucked him bareback…and I love to fuck bareback. Now that I can’t do that, sometimes I fantasize of times when I’m married again and I can fuck my partner bareback. Hmmm, I will decide whether Ron counts or not later. Clearly, relationships are not one of my strong points but I want to think that I can have more than two.


Jeff
Week 2

Probably as soon as I felt connected to Ron, I disconnected…was I ever really connected? Our relationship felt heavy to me, he was heavy. He was always pulling at me, needing me, wanting me to fix something. It was just too much. I was independent, why couldn’t he take care of himself. It was so much work for me to take care of him too. He exhausted me.

I think I gravitate toward guys who are needy, who require some propping up. Maybe I need to be needed. Maybe I need to be in charge even though I feel burdened when that’s the case. Sometimes I feel sorry for them and truly want to make their lives better at the expense of my own. Despite how much of myself that I give, I always think that I’ll be ok because I think that I’m stronger than they are, more independent, more in charge.

The guys I end up with usually want and pursue me…I don’t really want them but take them on as a project??? And then, 14 years go by…UGH.

Always feeling like I’m not making someone else happy or that I’m not doing what they want me to do.

I don’t want to be a caretaker, period.

I don’t want to speak for someone else…or interpret.

Jeff - Loyalty and Devotion

Jeff
Week 1

My friend Brian once told me, “You’ll be married before you’re engaged”. I think his comment was based on his experience with me because very quickly after we met, I started talking to him about this “powerful” connection that I felt between us and that I was drawn to him. Once I feel a connection like that, I also become devoted and loyal…to a fault. Our dialogue wasn’t completely one sided, he said he felt something too. But I think I came on really strong because I remember him telling me that he had “no plans to leave his husband” and that he “hoped that our situation/relationship wasn’t preventing me from getting involved with someone else”. Honestly, since Brian lives in out of town, our situation/relationship wasn’t stopping me from looking, which is what I told him…but in reality, I wasn’t looking, Brian was my focus. In my head, Brian and I had a relationship and I thought that one day we would be together. I think Brian truly liked me but what I perceived as a connection was just a physical attraction…cruising. And probably the only connection the Brian wanted with me was my big cock down his throat. I gave him what he wanted several times.

My loyalty and devotion “messes” up my head and I misdirect it frequently and quickly. One evening in a bathhouse, I met a sort of nondescript, average kind of guy in the steam room who sucked my cock for a while. It was going well so I invited him to my room. At some point during the two hours or so that we were having sex, I felt a connection…it was probably while he was fucking me. Anyway, we had made a real mess in the room, so I suggested that we shower, get new linens and come back for more. He was agreeable. While we were in the shower, which is a big open space with naked men all around, a really, really hot guy walked in. Everyone noticed him. My cock was still heavy from all of the sex with Average Dick. The hot guy came up to me and grabbed my cock…he wanted some. For a few seconds I thought about it…but I thanked Hot Dick and told him that “we were on our way back to my room to rest”. I rejected him because I had a focus…my loyalty and devotion had already kicked in…even though I was in a fucking bathhouse.


Jeff
Week 2

Why am I in such a hurry? Am I afraid that he’ll get away? Do I have to latch on to every possibility?

I think I only latch on to the guys I really want to be with…not every guy I meet. And I am in a hurry because I fear he’ll escape my grasp. Why? Because I don’t see myself as worthy.

After we danced around for a couple of days, I finally showed Brian my cock. I resisted because I wanted to know that he was interested in me, just me. But, I had to make sure…and that’s all it took. Now I was humiliated but confident he would call. What would have happened if I hadn’t done that? Would he have ever called? Who knows, who cares.

I really go after guys I like. Stalker. I can find anyone…it’s easy.

Desperation is an ugly thing.

Jeff - First Sex

Jeff
Week 1

I started having sex at an early age. Although there were several boys in the neighborhood that I “played” with (sometimes in a group), Rob was my main sex partner…and sex with him was great. It was just sex…no strings, no kissing, no love involved. When we got together, we just had sex. But when I realized that sex with guys wasn’t just a phase and that gay was the thing that was different about me, my view of sex changed.

In my mind, sex would no longer be just a physical activity, it needed to be an expression of love. I created rules and parameters for sex. I had to be selective. I needed to feel something for my sex partners…I couldn’t just have sex for the sake of having sex anymore. I had to date someone before sex was possible. I needed romance and atmosphere. No one night stands. No sex clubs. Lots of rules. So, sex didn’t happen often.

Since I have an unapproachable quality, an arrogance, I wasn’t very successful at dating. But I stuck to my rules…and spent most of my early twenties in a sexual fantasyland more than anything else. If there was an exception to my rules, it was usually because alcohol was involved.


Jeff
Week 2

On those days when we found ourselves alone together, I always felt an electricity in the air. My energy became charged and rushed around my body. My focus would quickly move to my cock, which was already hard beneath my pants, straining the fabric. We both knew what was about to happen but we took our time, savoring the nervousness that we felt, listening to each others trembling voices. Our dance was exhilarating but at the same time exasperating. Since it was a game that always ended the same, clothes flying off, bodies pressed together, erections strong and imposing, I quickly grew impatient. I wanted to smell him and feel his cock in my mouth. And I needed to feel his mouth on my cock.

Sex with Rob was like a tug-of-war. I really wanted to do it because it felt so good and was so exciting. But I was also scared of it because what we were doing seemed so taboo and wrong. I was always afraid of getting caught which strangely made what we were doing even more titillating. If we had a whole afternoon, our sex would last and last, getting right to that edge and stopping, over and over again. Finally, the afternoon would end with both of us coming, one after the other…but rarely at the same time because we both wanted to watch and feel the other as he shot. The intensity was amazing. Sometimes, as I ejaculated, I felt like the head of my cock was exploding. It was like my other senses were put on hold, all other external input paused. If our time was limited, we did it quickly, taking turns sucking each other off. I can still feel his cum hitting the back of my throat or my cock pulsing as I ejaculated into his mouth.

Afterwards, we would get dressed quickly and go our separate ways. I hated myself and would always say that I should stop, would stop, that this had been the last time. It was a very confusing time. For a day or so after sex with Rob, I continued to beat myself up, felt like I was bad, wondered if I might be gay. But then I rationalized that I was just like every other kid who just wanted to get off, that I wasn’t hurting anyone and I wasn’t gay. Right…sex with Rob was hot, and it shaped my sexuality.

Rob blowing me on the front porch, swallowing.

Another day behind the shed, Mom inside cooking dinner.

Jeff - JO Buddies

Jeff
Week 1

We had been living together for a few years when I started secretly going to the gay beach. I went late in the day when most of the serious beach goers were already gone and the guys who remained were looking for sex. I wasn’t really looking for “real” sex…I was just looking for guys to beat off with…to watch and be watched.

Years earlier, while still in high school, my buddy Eric and I would get together and beat off. We never touched each other, we just watched. It started at the beach and happened there for a long time. Then we progressed to doing it in the car, at my house, at his house…we were teenagers who wanted to beat off constantly and wanted to do it together. Since I had already had a lengthly “hands-on” sexual relationship with my friend Rob, this watching relationship with Eric was very interesting. We openly discussed our cocks, our technique and our ejaculation. We called our time beating off together “a session” and worked at making them last as long as possible, ending by coming together, watching our cum fly.

So long after I had moved away from Eric and while I was living in a “committed” relationship, I was once again looking for a JO buddy, for “a session”. JO buddies were easy to find at the beach. Some were hot, others were not. Many became frustrated with me because they wanted to do more that beat off…I always refused because I was married. We would both just move on to the next guy. Fun times.

I started to travel for work so I graduated to sex clubs, bath houses, etc. Still just to beat off. I liked the sex clubs better because there were usually public areas where all of the masturbators could do their thing. And in public areas, there was less pressure for contact so I could beat off for as long as I wanted without having to address my “no contact” rule with anyone. That’s when I started to call what I was doing “putting on my show”. Because I had learned to control my orgasm so well during sessions with Eric, my shows could last for quite a long time. The audience I began with were rarely around for my finale. But that was fine because I was there to be seen by as many guys as possible. It became about being watched than watching. I was there to show off.


Jeff Week 2

Of course I felt guilty. I was in a committed, monogamous relationship. But as long as I didn’t have contact with anyone, I still considered myself monogamous, even though I never missed an opportunity to go to a sex venue. Every time I was told to schedule a business trip, I immediately felt a rush of excitement, my mind racing with thoughts of sex clubs, nude beaches, etc. And I planned my trips accordingly, making sure that I would have plenty of time to play.

I loved my shows. While being watched, I felt hot, popular, desired…quite the opposite of how I felt with my clothes on. And while I was in the moment, I allowed myself to think that it was me that was hot and wanted, not just my cock. It didn’t matter who was watching, I did my best to please them, showing different angles, letting them come in closer but never to touch. Sometimes so close that I could feel their breathe on my cock. I loved hearing their comments…”look at that”, “I’d love to feel that up my ass”, etc. At times, I actually felt proud. Throughout my show, I felt like I was in charge of the room and had everyone’s attention. I was the focus, I was the one they were talking about. Was it really me? No…it was my cock. But I didn’t allow that reality to intrude. I continued to enjoy it and feel the rush of showing off. It wasn’t until later, afterwards, that I would berate myself…telling myself that it was my cock that got the attention, not me. Well, of course it was, I was in a sex club…cock is the focus.

Cock is the focus. Can it ever be big enough?

Jeff - Fifth Grade

Jeff
Week 1

“What can I do to help you”, he asked. My reply was a typical “nothing”, followed by a sigh that said, “I don’t need your help, how dare you ask the question”. He whispered, “ahhhhhh, Mr. Independent, you’re an island”. Eek, is that me??? An island? As a child, I loved the show “Gilligan’s Island” and always wanted to live there. The trails, the huts, the banana cream pies, the other side of the island…I saw myself in that place. But not trying to get rescued, rather living there happily. It seemed like paradise…peaceful.

Am I an island? Of course I am. I’ve always been independent and have always taken care of myself. Well, not always. As a toddler, my not much older sister thought of me as her doll. She pulled me around in the wagon and entertained me…she also took care of me, protected me. Her caretaking continued until I went into fifth grade. That year, my sister and my older brother went into junior high school. Since I was the only child left in elementary school, my parents decided to move me to a different school…to make things easier. Fifth grade was my first year in school without my sister, my first time on a school bus…lots of firsts. Because of overcrowding, I attended the afternoon session from 12:30PM to 5:30PM.

My parents and siblings left our house early each morning. I didn’t get on the bus until noon, so my mornings were spent watching TV. The atmosphere of the school was grim and I didn’t know anyone. I was not happy and couldn’t understand why my parents made me leave my old school…oh yeah, it was more convenient for them. So basically, I was a kid who didn’t like to be alone all morning, didn’t like his new school and didn’t want to do it. So, the second week of school, I got sick…vomiting was easy.

I would get up for breakfast, eat a little and then throw up. No one cared for it very much. At first, my mother believed that I was sick…I believed I was sick…lots of trips to the doctor, lots of days home alone all day. One time the doctor said my liver was enlarged…I was particularly pleased that day.

I think they realized that this situation was all in my head. But they never addressed it with me directly. Everyone but my mother ignored my situation although my dad would take me to the doctor once in a while. My mother would make stern comments like, “I can’t understand what’s making you so sick” or “children like you should be in school every day” or “your Aunt can’t keep coming to pick you up because you have a little stomachache”. My Aunt was the only one who got it…but I don’t think my mother would listen to her.

Up until that year, I had perfect attendance at school. In fifth grade, I was absent more that 30 days. But I learned a lot that year…how to make my body seem sick when it wasn’t (although I’m not sure how I enlarged my liver), how to manipulate, how to be alone and independent, how to take care of myself and not need “them”. I became an island that year…as I watched episode after episode of Gilligan’s Island.

Jeff Week 2

I felt like my parents, really my mother, didn’t care what I wanted. I single out my mom because my dad really didn’t get involved with us, my siblings and me. Mom never asked me and I guess I didn’t speak up for some reason. But I knew it scared me. I was afraid of all of it…the long bus ride with kids I didn’t know, the smelly school that had been condemned prior to that year, the new teachers…all of it. I was angry and felt like I didn’t matter. At times, my mother lovingly called me “her baby”, which made me feel really special. No one else could be the baby of the family. But I didn’t feel very special when she decided I would change schools…I felt like I was in the way, that I wasn’t worth the trouble to keep me in my current school. And I couldn’t understand why my mother didn’t know how I felt, I shouldn’t have had to tell her. Didn’t she know me? Couldn’t she tell that I didn’t want to go? Maybe she did know but thought I would adjust…but how could she have thought that? I was always such a “mama’s boy” who was afraid to go on sleepovers or be away from home. “Titty baby”, that’s what me dad called me. I don’t think I even understood what that meant, but when he said those words, I became very angry and disliked him even more, if that was possible. He seemed so entertained by my reaction.

I remember that first morning that I got sick. It was like my stomach was in a constant churn. My throat was thick and it was an effort to swallow. I didn’t want to eat but did anyway. I really didn’t know what was going to happen until I threw up all over my plate. Of course I was embarrassed but I was also confused. Was I really sick? Is that why I woke up really early that morning and felt so strange? Was this what the flu felt like? My mom reacted…she got me cleaned up and looked me over. “No fever”, she said, “but you do feel clammy”. She told me to go back to bed and that she would check on me before school. I had gotten her attention.

Eventually, I realized that what I was feeling was nervousness, a nervous stomach, butterflies, big butterflies. But I didn’t tell anyone. I just continued to say that I didn’t feel good. It wasn’t like I planned to vomit. Emotionally, I wasn’t able to cope with all of the changes, so my body took over… my body took care of me. As I understood myself more, I knew the signs of “it”, my illness. Sometimes I didn’t care when it came back but other times I tried to fight it because I truly wanted to get past it. I didn’t want to be a “mama’s boy” or “titty baby” anymore, I wanted to be able to be away from home without the fear. I wanted to be adapt, I wanted to be strong.

I felt like someone should have helped me but no one did. At some point, I think I realized that is was my problem so I let go of my anger and frustration and I got through it on my own. But at the same time, I detached and pulled away…I didn’t want to feel dependent on anyone and certainly didn’t want anyone to think that I needed them. Being alone started to feel good. Earlier in life, I had always been able to entertain myself and play alone but I needed the safety net of knowing that someone else was around. After fifth grade, that was no longer the case. When I was alone, I didn’t care if anyone else was home or nearby. I had established my independence.

Man Who Invented History - Opening (B. Lapin)

First off, I want to say that I am not the person who recently outraged public opinion by performing a strip tease on the steps of a nearby college dorm while loudly reciting selected passages from the Book of Revelations.

Nor for that matter am I the middle-aged gentleman who pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in the mysterious theft and wanton destruction of 132 garden gnomes.

I am also not the same dude who is alleged to have had sexual relations with a sheep used in a local funeral home’s nativity scene. Nor the judge who was accused of surreptitiously pleasuring himself with a “penis pump” device during the course of two murder trials. Nor am I the young man who, after murdering two male lovers, disemboweled them and flushed their organs down the toilet.

I can also affirm that I am not the well-known anti-abortion activist sentenced to 18 years in prison for molesting a teenager at the home for troubled girls which he operated in Pensacola, Florida. Nor the mother who produced and sold videotapes of the repeated rape of her 9-year-old son in scenic Pompano Beach.

Furthermore, I have no connection whatsoever to the photographer whose “art project” consisted of depictions of autopsied bodies posed with inanimate objects, the Australian murderer who shot his neighbor dead because he claimed to be a woman trapped in a man’s body or the sex-starved teenager charged with raping his own mother.

Last, but not least, I wish to categorically state that I am not the individual who abducted and shamelessly murdered a certain blonde-haired, blue-eyed youth with the unlikely name of Beau Bridges Hoogenboom and who to this day remains, if not unknown, then very much at large.

It is, however, with said abduction and murder that I will begin.

Beyond Me and Us - Dream (Jim)

Dreams 11/28/2005

Monday, November 28th, 2005 - (Miraculous)
“Beyond Me and Us”

This mornings dream had the mystical feel of the ‘Talking Eagles’ dream, or of the 2nd Reiki vision (3 levels of love). It also has the feel of deep connection that I associate with Bocko at the mud pond or at the Mississippi River cliffs.

I dream that it’s summer, and out in the fields, I’m drinking a Squirt soda. It’s good but I imagine how much infinitely better it’d be if I drank it as I free fall from the sky. Now I’m one of two crazy love dogs, chasing one another through the meadow. As we near the ridge, it’s my young, human male, bare-chested lover, I chase. He pauses at the crest, and coming up behind him, I grab his waist and spin him around to face me. I say, “I love you - Don’t ever leave me.’ He says something wistful, that I can’t remember, in reply, as he looks almost through me, seeing and loving beyond me and the moment. I’m taken back by his response, but pull him tight to me.

Usurped Religion - Dream (Jim)

Dreams 11/27/2005

Saturday, November 26th, 2005 - (Powerlessness)
“Usurped Religion”

Last nights dream seems to continue on the role of sabotage began in the previous dream “Trivializing Spirituality”, where I was in agreement with the terrorist organization in its hatred of the commercialization of religion.

I dream that I am part of a religious ceremony where George Bush is faking his death, to prepare the country for the possibility. So that everyone knows that he’s not actually dead, he is lying crossways in the casket and has his eyes open and looking around. A woman cleric puts oil on his forehead and says the blessing, then the public is allowed to come by for the viewing. The public can then have a sip of wine but must also consume a wafer, which is designed to counteract the effects of the wine. One viewer, dressed as a Roman Catholic priest in full robes, will not stop consuming wine and fake wafers however, so security approaches him, but just before they reach him, he climbs atop the alter and walks across it and away.

Later during the mass which follows, I am a server. As I go for the decanters of wine and water for the offertory, they are gone. I must go back into the robe room for more. Then later, I can not help with communion because the pattens are also stolen. The priest tells me to wash the cups used for the earlier wine and the fake wafers, instead. I secretly relish the saboteurs disruptions of Bush’s ceremony.

Blasphemy (Jim)

Dreams 11/23/2005

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005 - (Job and Powerlessness)
“Trivializing Spirituality”

Yesterday I had actually considered writing my memoirs, as something I’d publish. Then I dreamed this last night:

My Memoirs have been published and I’m now part of a team producing a video game version of them. I’m defending my reasoning for creating a separate error module, to another programmer. I am also on my way to a support group I hold for people writing their own spiritual memoirs, but do not feel up to speed on how the corporation now teaches it is to be done. I feel lost leading the group. After work I then head out to the parking lot, which is a ways away, with a 7 year old, participant in the group. Turning the corner into our parking lot, we see a huge C-5 cargo plane armed to the hilt, with Arnold Swartzenager at the controls, aiming to blow us a away. He’s contracted by a terrorist group that’s furious at how the U.S. has commercialized religion. I shoot the plane before he can shoot us, which explodes, but Arnold remains standing as he drops through the collapsing floors of the plane, and he hits the ground running, after us, with a weapon. As we flee, I am separated from the boy, who, as he turns down a dark alley, is raped by the street people there.

Everything has felt so wrong with the job but I desperately need it to pay bills. I agree with the terrorists in principal but not in method. I now also blame myself for the boys rape, since he was with me. His rape was the last straw. I can’t work and I fear I’ll soon be fired. Confused I think my car was blown up too, and I worry how I’ll get to work and around, but it’s still unscathed in the parking lot. I don’t worry though about the terrorists, or take any precautions concerning them.

In the End (Jim)

Dad 11/22/2005

As I watched my Dad fight for his life and slowly lose the battle, month after month, I was struck by many, many things about his character. For one he never, ever, shirked the truth, no matter how bitter the reality of it. He sweated the details. I hide from it, forget. He held onto life with a tenacity, too, that I knew I’d never possess. I didn’t want to live that bad. He’d frequently bitterly bemoan that with what it cost him, this was not living. He was hardest on my Mom, the one he loved most. If anything brought him down, it was this. He also was faithfully spiritual, praying every night with family, something I had thought he’d just worn for appearances. His primary focus though was on wrapping things up well in all areas, with work, community, God and family.

So I’m left with, how had this man I’d despised so, become such a tower of strength, when undermined the most? I’d deeply misjudged him.

I watch my Mom every morning, stop by his grave site now, to say a few words, as she starts her day.

Who Am I? (Jim)

Belonging 11/22/2005

A sense of belonging, of being wanted, valued, loved, is the best words for describing how senior year of high school felt but it went beyond just a physical worldly experience of it onto an other-worldly spiritual one, for me. With enough nourishment (emotional and physical) we can all blossom to our capacity, I think. Perhaps I internalized my source for fear of losing it. After high school, I again found myself isolated and alone. I again blamed myself, just as I had when I’d gone away to prep seminary.

Feelings are a funny thing. They may not be the truth but seem more real than reality. They’ve frequently led to my demise. For example, Mickey and I were perfectly safe fooling around in his basement or at the cliffs, but I wanted to make love in my room, in the bright light of day. It was the desire to redeem myself, to escape me, that also led to the demon experience. After that I shut down all feelings and drank, for twenty years. More than anything I wanted my feelings back, though, even if they were all bad, when I fought to arise from the ashes of my depression at age 40. Without them I was lost, a total stranger to myself. Are my feelings me?

Two days ago Ty called me at work. I hadn’t given him my number at home and had insisted he call Ron, my CODA sponsor and friend of 25 years, to reach me. Ty has terrible boundaries and little respect for others. So calling me at work was him naturally going around mine. Though we’d been apart for a year and a half, he’d called a lot in the last two weeks.

My feelings are so confusing to me. I love him! I feel elated. Yet he’s awful for me. How can my feelings betray me so? They feel so like the truth but are not the reality of my experience with him. He loves me, in order to use me and perhaps I him. When I try to save him, or to redeem myself through rescuing him, I only earn his resentment. I see the dream more than the reality. How can I contain these opposites, both my feelings, so I know me, and the reality of my experience?

Rumi says, love is not found in another, but when it already exists within their selves. Does it exist in reality or is it an illusion, on this plane?

Reply to Peggy (Jim)

Outside Influences 11/22/2005

Peggy wrote a very supportive note on the 16th, with some great questions in it. She says ‘My fascination makes me want more details: just what happened in those nightmares?’ ‘What transpired in your conversations with your mentor?’ ‘Did the “outside” world have any influence on you at this time?’ ‘With who did you share your doubts and epiphanies?’ ‘How was your first seminary different from the Benedictine experience, in everyday textures, encounters, duties? etc. & etc. & etc.’

I wish I could answer these questions myself, but memory eludes me, or probably some defense still exists around the demon experience. For instance, I don’t remember the content of the nightmares at all, butI do remember they were terrifying. Likewise I remember few specific conversations with my mentor, Fr. Miriani, but I remember the feelings of our union and how it completely changed me. I do remember the one conversation when he said, ‘I am the son he always wished he had had’, just as I remember my Dad saying ‘there’s not room in this house for the two of us - one must go.’ My Dad doesn’t remember that specific conversation nor, I’m sure, does Fr.Miriani remember his words. But I do, because they capture my conflict within, am I loved? A conflict that’s repeated in my spirituality and relationships. All of which leads very nicely into Peggy's third question, ‘Did the “Outside” world have any influences on you at this time?’

I don’t know what she refers to with ‘during this time’, however? Does she mean during the early prep seminary years, or senior year with Fr. Miriani, or at the college diocesan Chicago seminary or at the Benedictine one, or during the demon experience? Since I’ve already relayed my reasons for and the circumstances around my going to the prep seminaries, none of which were spiritual, I’ll begin now with my senior year of high school, and the circumstances that swirled around my Fr. Miriani experience.

As I look back I was ripe for a spiritual possession. I say possession because that conveys how powerfully I was captured by spirituality, that began in my senior year of high school and lasted through the demon experience, when the spell was broken.

New to the Catholic, rural, high school, I posted my self, silently, with my back against the point of the corner of the hallway intersection, in front of the cafeteria, near the library and on the way to the gym. It was the hub of social life there. I was a mystery to all of them here and they to me. I was dark haired, they were blond, I was from the dangerous, wild city of St. Louis, while most of them had never ever left their county! Nothing changed here, and I epitomized difference. In the huge public high school in St. Louis, I had been invisible, but here, where my parents were from, everyone was related to me somehow and assumed they already knew me well, by lineage. My father was a banker amongst farmers. As such, I was part of a wealthy elite, with a huge chip on my shoulders. Here, the girls kept pinching my ass. So I was silently brooding, warily, with my flanks protected, wondering on what planet had I landed.

I had on a huge ‘DO NOT DISTURB’ sign, that I embodied, but Fr. Miriani must not have seen it, as he posted himself, in like manner, next to me each day. I had bluntly told him to get lost, that he’d ruin my image, but still he came back each day. I cynically thought, when he asked me to go on a retreat, though, that I now saw through his facade, and so I completely shut him out. I smugly thought I was rid of him till Mr. Senesac, the huge overweight speech teacher, continued the assault. He said I was afraid to go. I was angry now. So I agreed to go, to make them lament the day they’d first seen me.

Everything was so different here than St. Louis. There were no gangs, nor drugs (much), nor sex parties. Everyone was lost in St.Louis. All the suburbs were new and everyone transplanted. At the prep seminaries, we were all away from our families, but here, at Mater Dei, no one had been uprooted ever, it seemed. They all belonged to groups, within groups, within groups, ad nauseam. And everyone was so wholesome, sincere, and strappingly buff.

For the first time in my life, I had a girl-friend too; a perk, I’m sure, of my celebrity status here. Eventually I also found my own group (clic), I fit with. I actually felt included but not their equal. We were not the jocks, nor the intellectual elite, nor the political leaders, but we were leaders none-the-less - about 15 or 20 of us. I had no doubt they’d all be highly successful, influential, and important. I was less sure about myself.

These changed circumstances enfolded me that year but none captured me like the spiritual. Here’s how that began.

At the retreat, I continued my brooding resistance until it was Judge Henkins time to speak. As a judge he epitomized the authority figures I so despised, so I sat up to listen, but there he stood, a grown man, crying and crying, so uncontrollably that he couldn’t utter a word. I was totally drawn in by it. What was happening here? This made no sense.

Before everything else (by Jim)

Before, after and in-between high school seminaries, until I moved to Carlyle in my senior year, there was “Bocko”, Bill Bockingkamp. I include Bocko in my spiritual memoirs, because he was the fisherman, the salt of the sea, the earthy Jesus, the flip side of the mountain-top God, whose bonds held me just as fast. God I loved Bocko!

Like me Bocko was a loner, an outcast, like his brother Dickie, until Dickie overnight went from toad to prince. Bocko and I spent everyday exploring in rugged Ozark mountain foothill woods. The suburbs west of St. Louis was being sprinkled with subdivisions and corporations, which is where I came in, but Bocko lived in a vast unspoiled stretch of huge rolling hills, bulls and pastures, woods and power lines, and a Quonset hut. Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to Be Wild, was our song. We lived for danger, adventure, rebellion.

Bill’s parents had moved there 20 years before and would outrun the sprawl soon, again. His father had bird dogs out back, and called his sons by similar names, like Dukie, and I think he was mostly unaware of his daughter Anne. His parents threw loud, drunken parties, blasting Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’. At work he was notorious for shattering his phone weekly, as he slammed it down into its cradle. Free-spirits. The opposite of my parents - very cool.

Let me tell you of some of our adventures.

First I remember, when Anne invited Bocko and I to join her college friends on a canoe trip. It was the first of many canoe trips, usually down the Current river, deep in the Missouri Ozarks. The rest would float but Bill and I paddled all day, giving us time to rerun the rapids, to climb and leap from the cliffs and bridges, to come quickly around a bend in the river and catch two young gay lovers, on a rock, at it. I remember, Anne had one college dude along who wore a cap all day, so at days end, I was totally taken in by his glistening hair.

Years later, we would again go to the Current river, but finishing up a three day trip in the first afternoon, we returned to Bocko’s house. Grabbing a bottle of his parents whisky, we headed out then for the Mississippi River, but we could never get to it. Finally far out in the country, racing down field roads, along dirt levees, we see an opening, and turning hard, skid to a stop atop it. An artist painting below on the river side of the levee, screams, knocking her easel over and runs off. This is perfect. We’ll camp here tonight, beside the river levee.

The Mississippi is easily a mile or more wide here. I want to cross it tomorrow in our canoe, but Bill’s leery. I talk him into staying near the shore and paddling upstream for a mile to see if we can fight the current. It’s so powerful, we have to paddle hard the whole time to make progress against it. About a mile down we see a damn ahead, spanning the whole width, with locks to the side. We decide we can do it.

That night, after the suns set, as we get looped on the whisky, beside a huge fire, we see lights cris-crossing the river. Running up and down the shore excitedly, we think we are witnessing an escaped felon hunt. As we sleep in the Vega that night, huge lightning and thunder split the sky, and it pours and pours down rain. I listen for water running beneath the car, as I imagine the river rising, but to drunk to care I drift back to sleep.
The next morning, pointing the canoe three-quarters of the way upstream and one-quarter towards the far side of the river, we start across. It’s amazing the waves on the river are about a foot high. Half way across Bill decides he want to swim. I think it is a bad idea, since we have to paddle hard just to stay even with our camp-site, but agree if he’ll tie a rope to himself and the boat. Just as he climbs back in, the Coast Guard boat hails us, and asks if we need help. We say, no. Two-thirds of the way across, a chain of barges and a tug-boat, in the main channel, send huge three foot waves across the river at us. We change our angle to ride them out.

Reaching the far side of the river, we land between two monstrous hills, and head up a steep pasture full of sheep and billy goats, between them. Coming from the backside, we reach the peak of one of them. Now over 300 feet above the river, on the edge of a shear cliff, we see the Ohio split off the Mississippi river. Bill wanting to sit on the edge, lands right on a cactus, and nearly leaps off.

Many other times, we’d been in the Quonset hut on old man Finney’s land. Bocko, on his own, had discovered a huge old Liberty bell there, though. We schemed of anchoring it in the Vega and letting it peel as we sped through the subdivisions. So several nights a week, I’d sneak out my bedroom window and thumb it over to Bill’s, and we’d drag it several hundred feet, then bury it again. In between times, I had gotten a guilty conscience, and so with another friend would drag it back towards the hut. When Bill heard on the police scanner that it was noticed missing, we rediscovered it and returned it.

Another time Bocko and I, and Dickie and his friend, piled into his ‘63 Volkswagen bug, us with two gallons of Tequila Sunrise, and them with a case of beer, to watch an all-nighter James Bond run at the drive-in. After finishing our tequila and polishing off their beer, we headed back to Bill’s house. They were building a mall at the top of Bill’s lane, so after shoving down some construction signs, we climbed atop a castle turret and watched the Interstate far below. Later we waded into huge ponds there that had filled three feet deep with mud. Afterwards we talked about the future. How we didn’t want to be swallowed up by the world. How we’d run away to the mountains together, and how nothing would ever part us.

Senior Year of High School (Jim)

Ecstacy 11/17/2005

How can I explain an ecstacy to you, that deepens day by day, moment by moment, that bewitches me body and soul? I don’t know that I can, but I will try.

It’s a relationship, based in gratitude and praise, that I nourish and feed and stay in connection with all day, no matter where I am or what I do. It begins with a brief, jubilant, exhilarating burst of praise as I awake and ends wrapped in a longer contemplative worship at days end. In between I take in each moment, taste and relish and return in praise the beauty of it all. The connection I use be caught up in only in unaware breathtaking instances, that’d stop me and make me step aside for, I’ve now taken within me, and it’s constant. I walk on hollowed ground everywhere.

The union feeds though on making regular space for moments of even deeper intimacy. Many brief interludes of prayer with Fr. Miriani are this, but evening prayer is much more so. I love the Our Father prayer. In a church behind its alter, with a lone candle, I, on my knees, with my face to the ground, whisper ‘Hollowed be thy name’, ‘Thy kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven’ - (for it is here in me now). With a sharp intake of air, I take it in. Rising slightly and opening outward, I breath, ‘Give US this day our daily bread’ (that which makes us know we are alive) and forgive US (exactly as we forgive others). Having gone from divine to earthly relationship, I ex-hail. I breath in again - DELIVER US! I rise to a crouch and closing in on the flame, taking in a deep breath, I soar, ‘For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory - forever.’ I sigh ‘So be it’. Is it not a deeply centering prayer? I am back in right relationship with all.

Mass is also an hour of great intimacy and emotion for me. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, enfolds me. The ‘Kyrie eleison’ puts me back on my knees, face to the ground, in humility. The Word takes me into its confidence. The remembrance of the Last Supper wastes me. I, a son of God, eating with twelve of my closest friends, say to them and to all others beyond, ‘This is my Body’ (everything I have and am materially) that I give up for you, consume me. Then I look at each one and soulfully say, ‘This is my Blood’ (everything I have and am in spirit) that I give up for you, drink me up. I am one with all.

Because the relationship is grounded in gratitude and praise, the more I give back, the more realized and richer I become. The joy grows and grows till it consumes me.

Dreams (Jim)

Monday, November 14th, 2005 - (Tom, my brother)
"Left Out"

The city of Chicago has figured a way to get a trailer of bicycles to Lake Shore Drive Park for rental, from the inner city by tunneling under Lake Shore Drive. My family and Mickey's (my first lover) family go there to ride. We fill out huge applications on placards, with both our names and the bike companies name on it. Tom hogs the supplies (placards, magic markers, etc.). I am the last served and they won't accept credit cards, so as the guys drink shots of brandy and honey, I head out to the street to get money. I need $63 dollars. I run in front of a huge semi out the the exit. On the street I see Tom's three kids and ask them if they've seen Mickey. They say he went to some awful movie. The only reason I can figure he'd go is that he must be babysitting nieces or nephews kids for them. I want him all to myself!


Saturday, November 12th, 2005 - (Tom)
"Dependence"

Tom signs the car note for me and pays the down payment but wants me to make the monthly payments. He says, if I can't make them he'll pick them up, but he really wants me to try to make them.


Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 - (Miraculous)
"Stoned"

We are at my Mom's house, picking out stones to surround Dad's tombstone with, with our names inscribed on them. The album we're selecting from has a high tech photo, with moving stone angels swooping down just over peoples head, at a burial in a cemetary.

For Ray, from Jim

I reread your 10/19 post titled 'The Psyche and Literal Mindness', and took it as your take on how to relate to your muse best. I loved it all over again. I'm pulling up close to it as I try to work past my fear of intimacy, that blocks expression of my dreams. Thanks again!

For Brad, from Jim

I just reread your 'Entries to an Option' ypu wrote on 10/18. It was really interesting, especially in light of last nights readings about our muse and imagination and how we relate with it or don't. Your relationship in this writing in October, with reality as imagined, has some tension with it. 'Billy boy - everyone's life's a fiction - it's insufficient for the day.' It made me curious how you now meet and relate to your muse.

It's excellent writing. I like the first part particularly about the mirror, with a lineage of faces, fading back into strangers, then bare skeletons, and finally to near dust. Great image!

Tell me more, tell me more!

Wretched piety (by Al)

The wretched piety of my youth: There isn’t much from the family. Mom and Dad started taking us to the Methodist Church when we were young. I never had any sense that they believed any of it, so it must have been done for our (Brent’s and my) benefit. I remember some Sunday school classes, but only in Talladega, where we moved in the middle of my fourth grade year. Did we even go in Eutaw? Can’t say.

My biggest moment of getting caught not being pious was when I broke my arm riding my bike on Easter Sunday. In fact, now I remember – it was during the 11AM service. We had gone to Sunday school, and then went home with my mother, but my father stayed behind for the service, perhaps to usher. I was riding my bike in front of the school just down from the house, same street, and hit a bump on the sidewalk, and over I went. I got up crying and ran home, and we had to get in the car and go get Dad out of church to go to the hospital.

My only memories of going to church were from Hamilton, where we moved between 6th and 7th grade. We went from a town of 20,000 to one of about 5,000, and church seemed to work for me. I remember not wanting to sit with my family, so I would sit down front, by myself, in the second pew. Sometimes my brother would want to come and sit with me, but I didn’t want him to. I was like that – I liked being alone. (When we shopping even, I would try to get lost in the store, away from the family. Brent also wanted to follow me there, to and I did try to lose him. I didn’t want him to slow me down, or to have to watch after him.)

The pastor there was Brother Railey, an older man with a speech impediment that made his sermons hard to listen to. He was transferred there almost the same time we were, and Mom and Dad really liked him. I remember that when he was about to be transferred, Mom and Dad made Brent and me join the church – they hoped that his getting a lot of new members might persuade them to not to transfer him. It failed. He was transferred, about the same time we were almost transferred to Auburn. In came Dan Kitchens, a younger guy who I liked a lot.

For my senior year, I finally joined MYF – Methodist Youth Fellowship – again, because of something I wanted. In the summer before my senior year, MYF went to see the Carpenters, my favorite group. The first album I ever bought was “Close to You,” and the MYF was going and I wasn’t a member so I didn’t get to go. (There is some debate about whether my mother would have let me go anyway, as over-protective as she was.) So I joined right after that, and the next year we went to see Elton John in Tuscaloosa. I had a good time.

Since the greatest joy of Methodists comes when they get out of church on time, we were always driving home at 12:05PM on Sunday afternoon, past full churches of Baptists and Church of Christ people, and yet the roast would always be cooked dry in the oven anyway. Bless her heart, my mother was always concerned about food poisoning, so my only experience with rare meat came in adulthood.

Perhaps the only true introjection of piety that happened in my life happened in 8th grade. I remember someone telling me the week before Easter that the world would end on Easter Sunday. I was 13, I’m guessing, and I spent the week in terror that it was true. I remember not sleeping well, and not focusing well in classes sometimes, but I never told anyone. I remember going to bed on Sunday evening, and I believe I didn’t fall asleep til after midnight, and when I woke up the next morning, I was relieved, and probably also relieved of my faith in United Methodism. Even though it wasn’t the Methodists who told me this – I’m SURE it was the Baptists – I pretty much resolved never to be scared of retribution for sins after that.

And so there I was, in the conservative heart of Northwest Alabama, where there was nothing but dry counties as far as the eye could see – people had to go to Tupelo for a liquor store, if they chose to ignore the bootleggers – a budding young gay adolescent with no faith to help out. It was a retrospective opinion, not one I consciously remember having at the time, that the loneliness that I felt growing up gay was in some way the neglectful church’s fault. There we were, attending the most liberal of Christian bastions in Hamilton, and I knew there would be no help for the feelings that I had no explanation for.

I believe it was in the 9th grade when I stopped sitting up front at the church and started sitting in the back, as an usher and passer of the collection plate. Hanging out with the older guys, one of whom was really cute, Eddie Bannister, a year older than me, straight black hair and beautiful eyes. Beautiful to look at, but no particular connection with him – I never really felt connected to Hamilton, in the way that people born there were connected, because I wasn’t born there. We fit into Hamilton pretty well, but it’s not like being born there. In fact, the high school clique I connected with were band people and people who had moved in from out of town – Susan, who lived in De-troit but came to Hamilton because the school was better and her mother taught here; Chip and Cindy, both of whom moved between junior and senior year, Chip from Decatur and Cindy from Michigan, and both of who ended up beating me out for valedictorian because of that damned B in trigonometry; Rita and Allen from the band; a few others; and the Moseses and the Greggs. I believe Allen was gay, but I still don’t have any confirmation of that. His brother Jimmy was also very cute. As were David Wigginton and Johnny Tyra, but those are other stories.

My group was smart, primarily not athletes, usually in the band and usually Methodists and Baptists and others who were less driven by the need to define themselves by their religion. I didn’t have to worry about any of them telling me the world was going to end on Easter Sunday, or any other day. I could be genuine with them, and there wasn’t a one I didn’t like a lot. They saw me at some of my adolescent worst, the times I avoided things while growing up.

So I enjoyed being alone, and yet hated being alone in understanding my sexual orientation. I didn’t want things to change, and to the extent they could, my family tried to keep that from happening. From all the moving, I didn’t like the way change felt. And one of the things I most wanted was that, when Alabama changed, it would go forward, become gradually a better place for “people like me,” people who wanted to live a life without thinking that the world was going to end on Easter Sunday. I wanted continual progress for my home state, a place I could stay in, or go back to, if I wanted. I wanted a hometown that wanted me.

Assignment 5, Part D (Jim)

Assignment 5, Part D - Imagination Battles 11/15/2005


I wish I could say I was more committed to developing my imagination than the reality of it. It’s more like a commitment to the gym than a passion in me. At best I can say I’m consistent, which goes a long way in getting fit, but real breakthroughs take creativity and drive behind them too. I schedule in an appointment for spontaneity, and want no relationship with it the rest of the time. Not the way it works.

What inhibits me most from creating then is the intimacy of it. I want to be in control, lay out the steps, and most of all I want to measure out how I’m affected, bit by bit.

A very strange thing happened on the way to rediscovering what turns me on. Ecstacy was always followed with equal amounts of depression or rage. What’s that about? It sure throws cold water on your lovers, pride over his performance. I think I was angry I lost control. So I’d ecstatically lose myself in desire, then utterly hang myself out to dry for it later. Sexual and spiritual imagination take very similar paths in me.

There’s a basic deep mistrust in wanting to measure, control, and ration out affect. Do I not trust myself, not trust others, or not trust God? I remember when I bought my first car, a Ford Escort derivative, the two-seated EXP, I was afraid anything nice would be taken from me. And at the time maybe there was a sense that it should be that way. I should stay low.

There’s another twist to my imaginal life. It’s difficult to be both creative and responsible. It’s hard to pay bills, look for work, etc. while being creative. They don’t like to share the day. My body, meanwhile, either wants to sleep, run around restlessly, visit or do chores, to avoid the imaginal.

I’m afraid of intimacy.

# 5, Part C - Beginning of Formal Memoir (Jim)

Assignment 5, Part C - Formal Beginning of Memoir (Jim) 11/15/2005

I am a mystic, like the apostle Paul. Paul’s ‘death of the old self’ and ‘birth of the new’, of ‘unveiled faces’, and ‘glory’ (radiant presence), is classic mystical language. I always knew I would die young. Life beyond forty is a second life.

A mystic is a particular kind of religious personality. Mystics don’t simply believe in God, we know God! The defining core of mysticism is experiential: mystics have direct, vivid, and often frequent experiences of the sacred. The Road to Damascus, mystic experience Paul had, was the basis of his identity and of his call to be an apostle, it was the ground of his conviction.

Most of us live in an equilibrium. It’s not where we want to be but it’s home. The compromise I had with my sexual identity before forty had nearly collapsed, becoming unliveable, but I couldn’t shake it. Miserable as it became, the pendulum of change would still swing in me just so far, then come rushing back equally far to the opposite extreme. No progress was made. Body Electric was the experience that I shoved my sexual-identity balance off the cliff with. Mystic experiences however, gave me the conviction and space for the revolution in the first place, and then healed the rift within, as I found new peace with my sexuality.

There’s always been a split in me between sexuality and spirituality, where I could powerfully have one or the other present in me, but never the two together. So at peak spiritual times I was nearly void of sexuality and vice versa. Interestingly, the 2nd Reiki vision I had, which healed the rift, came in three parts, two parts of which is unfinished. First I made sexual love to self and a beloved, then I made love with all others. Finally I made love with God. The vision seems largely prophetic.

First it brought the ground, on which I torn down my sexual inhibitions, in my relationship with Ty. I also came to love myself. So Part 1 has generally come to past.

However relationships with others remains dependent, abusive and destructive, which leaves me still very much alone. I am working hard on healing the rift on this level, in many ways. Through CODA (codependent-anonymous), I am seeking intimacy and trust, in my relationships with partners, family and society. I am trying to catch up with my family, whom are way ahead of me on closing the rift. And lastly, attaining my Masters in Psychology, was also a huge step forward with society.

The third level of the rift, healed in the vision, was with God. This is probably the deepest wounded part of me, and what I most wish to heal. I’d like to be knocked from my horse and struck blind, either literally or metaphorically, for three days, till I grasp a new balance. I believe a mystic experience, yet to come, will ground my conviction here. Do I first need to shove my spiritual equilibrium balance off a cliff, though?

So I am writing of my spiritual and mystic experiences to prime the pump, as I search out ways to fulfill the third level of the prophecy. This is my journey, thus far.

The Alabama Ex-Patriot Movement (by Al)

Each memoir is a manifesto. It begins when a writer (or even a person who is not yet a writer) decides that he has something to say that needs to be said, whether or not you, dear reader, want to hear it. It may be as simple as an assertion that “People shouldn’t be treated that way,” or “Boy, is that stupid behavior, or what?” Perhaps it’s something as aggressive as “This is the way it is, and I don’t like it!” Something as provocative as “These people are betraying their region, and all the beliefs their country was founded on.” Something as compassionate as “I hope we can keep others from going through something like this.” Or even something as simplistic “Don’t do that!”

And I confess: as an ex-patriot Alabamian, I have had all of these feelings about my home state. The love/hate relationship that I have seen in so many of my fellow Alabama émigrés is a complex node of anger, compassion, nostalgia, incredulity and dread – of what they will do next, that seems to be reinforced every time I receive a dispatch from my home state. Every time they have an election and choose a person whose lack of qualification for office are so obviously manifest (Fob James and Guy Hunt jump immediately to mind), or whose main avenue to power is their family name (Jim Folsom, Jr., George Wallace Jr., and Lucy Baxley, to name three), or choose someone because their parochial and backward-looking views brought them national attention (George Wallace was simply the first; Jeff Session and Roy Moore are the latest incarnations). I cringe. I had hoped, against, hope, for better.

The state’s reputation is like a wall, and every time I try improve it by behaving as someone who is not “like that,” I find my efforts undermined by the next brick-headed politician, the choice of whom they use to plaster and mortar over the hole some many of us émigrés have dug out. I don’t want my home state to forever be the laughingstock of the country, the place where obsolete attitudes about gays and creationism and the like go to hide during the interregnum before being reborn.

And what’s most frustrating – I know the good heart that beats inside the typical Alabamian. The care for neighbors, the helpfulness that is instinctively offered toward strangers who are in trouble (at least the ones who look somewhat like the person who is extending himself), the absolutely genuine desire to love God and live a good life. I know that is inherent in the way people are brought up there and who they want to be. Some types of generosity and good-heartedness are almost competitive sports in Alabama. On a day-to-day basis, the care and solicitude have a sweetness that puts their iced tea to shame.

And yet they are defending something that I find indefensible. At first it was slavery, then racism, then on to homophobia and intolerant Christianity, which when combined seem to total up to a nostalgia for a retro-bucolic way of life that is anti-Modern to its core. It jumps from one issue to the next – when one fight is so obviously and irretrievably over, the indefensible defense chooses the next place to make its stand, to find another rock ledge to hang on to for dear life, to keep from falling into the abyss of Progressivism that seems, in the minds of retro-Alabamians to threaten everything their state stands for. The state’s motto – translated from the Latin as “We dare defend our rights” – is there for a reason.

Saunders--Memoir--Wk of 11-09

11-09

Cliff keeps at me about not remembering, or noticing, or mentioning anything good my father ever said to me. He indicates this is my dualistic, black/white way of seeing my father; says it’s a trap that I have to get out of. I would dearly love to remember my father having said kind, encouraging things, having shown a father's love in some tender, supportive way, but I can't find those memories. I don't know where they are or why I might have hidden them.

I do, indeed, have problems remembering my father ever having said anything positive about me. When I graduated from high school with honors, having been chosen to give a valedictory speech because I was honored as most outstanding senior, all my father did was complain about having to go to the ceremony, and complained about having to suffer the ride (it was a little over a mile) with my mother’s parents in the car with him. This was how my father reacted to my accomplishments, and I had a lot of them. Where did I get the motivation to do so well in school? Was it my parents? I don’t remember that it was. I don’t remember reading at home, or being encouraged to pick up a book. I remember my teachers encouraging me, remember them paying attention to the fact that I read much better than the other kids, and remember how much they enjoyed the fact that I was able to read seventh grade stuff in the fourth grade. They gave me my encouragement, my parents were too busy dealing with their depression and their general disappointment to be much help to either my sister or me. Did I ever get any help with my homework? Never. Did I ever get any encouragement to do a science project or read a book? No. All the encouragement I got as a child came from my teachers, not one bit of it came from my parents.

The fact was that school was more often than not a blessed escape from family life, so I dove into it. Life at home was never much fun, so reading was a natural, easy escape, and it came naturally to me, and I got lots of help finding good books, so that’s what I gravitated towards. I had awful science and math teachers, hateful, nasty bullies all of them, so I didn’t develop much of an interest in either science or math until high school. Unfortunately, I reached the ninth grade before I found good science teachers, and they were so good they helped me overcome years of indifferent instruction and actually want to learn about science. Mrs. Carpenter, my chemistry teacher, and Miss Blalock, my biology teacher, saved me from a life of hating science.

Dorothy Lockhart taught me to love words. She was my English and French teacher from fourth through seventh grade. She found me when I was in the fourth grade, newly arrived in Atlanta from Jacksonville, and she kept a watchful eye on me. She gave me books to read, and she delighted in the fact that I could read better than the other kids. When I got into trouble, she disciplined me by putting me in a pilot French class program, and both of us were happy at the results. I took to French very well, and responded to her encouragement by working harder to get better at writing and to read more books. So it was from Mrs. Lockhart that I got the words I needed, and from Mrs. Carpenter and Miss Blalock. No words came to me from my father saying, Good job, son or even, That’ll do, pig.

Did I know or not know my father loved me as I was growing up? He never said those words, never hugged me, never shook my hand. The only physical contact I ever had from my father was the beatings he handed out. He never congratulated me on my successes in school, and I had many of them. He never asked me about my school work or about my interests, and he never ever offered to get involved in any father/son activities. Did I want him to? No. I never regarded him as a friend. I saw him as an ogre who lived with us, who could and would, at any time, blow up and hurt somebody and the first choice for hurting someone was always, always me. I understood that he wasn’t always in a state of dangerous, hurtful rage, but I always knew, from experience, that he could erupt at any moment.

I took my cues in dealing with my father from the way my mother dealt with him. She vacillated between being friendly and happy with him, being scared of him, and fighting with him. It was very clear to me, even though I couldn’t have articulated this when I was a kid, that my father felt and acted very differently with my mother than he did with me or with my sister. My father would never have raised his hand against my mother, no matter how heated their fighting became or how harshly she berated him, and they could go at it fiercely. They often fought about money, about how badly my mother was managing the household finances or sometimes about how much of a bully my father was.

My sister used to call these fights suitcase drills. Mama and Daddy would fight, and Mama would decide we needed to go home to her parents because she couldn’t take it any more. She’d pack my sister and me up, and we’d go stay with my maternal grandparents. Daddy would beg her not to leave, and she’d read him for how he treated her and us, and they’d go back and forth, and sometimes we’d actually make it out the house and all the way to grandma’s house, and sometimes the packed suitcases would just get unpacked, my sister and I would be sent back to bed, and Mama and Daddy would go back in their room and close the door. As for kind or tender words from my father, I do remember him apologizing once during a suitcase drill that happened around the time I was twelve or so. Mama and he decided they were going to get a divorce, because he was a bully and Mama couldn’t take it any more. He pleaded, she said No. Then one of my mother’s sisters was summoned, usually Aunt Hilda, the de facto matron of my mother’s side of the family, and eventually a truce was declared, followed by a slow, sullen reconciliation.

Did my father ever say a single thing about me that was positive, that was fatherly, that was helpful in any way? All I can say is that I remember my address was 8089 Lourdes Drive North in Jacksonville Florida when I was six years old; I can remember having pneumonia when I was two and a half; I can remember all kinds of things from early life, from my youth, from the time up until his death, and I can’t, honestly, remember a single kind, appreciative, positive, helpful thing the man ever said about me.

So what did I think made my father attend to his duties as a father? He never said anything that would indicate he liked or wanted to be a father. I think he believed he met his obligation to me by going to work, by bringing home the bacon, by providing a roof, clothes. I think of him like the father of August Wilson’s “Fences,” the angry bully who eventually dies alone after having driven everyone away. But like that character, I think my Dad saw himself as doing much better than his own father had done. If my father was a bully, his own father was a far more terrible animal, and the fact that my father didn’t do to me what his father had done to him was, in fact, an extraordinary triumph.

11-12

More that I know about my family on my father's side: that my great grandfather Saunders came to America from England in the 1850s to present a gift of a team of horses from Queen Victoria to the Governor of South Carolina. That he stayed in America rather than going back to England, and that he was in his sixties when he arrived. That he served in the British military in India for much of his career, and then became attached to the Queen's Stables after that, hence the position that led to his being sent to America. That he worked on the railroad when he came to America, working on the building of the rail lines in the Southeastern U.S. That he wound up in Saint Augustine, Florida, where he met an married a woman of Spanish decent, by whom he had several children. That he left her some time afterwards, moved to Georgia, and there met my great grandmother, by whom he had a number of children, including my grandfather, Frederick Lee Saunders. My great grandfather was thus over seventy by the time he started his second American family. There used to be a portrait photograph of Great Grandfather Saunders in the house of my Aunt Lucy Belle Darden, Granddaddy Fred's sister, in Homerville, Georgia, a small hamlet on the edge of the Okeefenokee swamp. The portrait of Great Grandfather Saunders was very imposing. He looked much younger than his years (probably from all that sex) and looked, in fact, a lot like Friedrich Nietzsche with his big bushy moustaches and his sharp jaw.

That Grandfather Fred was born into a family of some means, and that he led a privileged childhood in Waycross and Homerville, Georgia. That Grandfather Fred grew up to become a very industrious entrepreneur in his youth, amassing a network of grocery stores throughout south Georgia and north Florida. That he met and courted my grandmother, Ruth Jernigan, and regarded it as more than a coup when he got her to agree to marry him. That they were almost immediately visited by discord, which followed them through to the end of their marriage. Grandmother Ruth had social pretensions, and Granddaddy Fred was a boisterous, wild man who was given to riding around in a brand new car and shooting up the countryside. He was known for showing up at his own house to find guests there, being entertained by my grandmother, which he took to be an invasion of burglars. To this he responded, on more than one occasion, having arrived drunk from a lengthy excursion of whoring, hunting, and boozing, by shooting up the whole house and frightening the quests nearly to death. As far as I know, Granddaddy Fred never killed anyone except in wartime, but he surely seems to have scared a lot of people.

I know very little else about my great grandfather. I believe he was Welsh. Don't know a thing about his family going further back. I've thought about calling or writing my uncle Bob, my father's only surviving sibling, and asking him what he can tell me about the family. Uncle Bob was always kind towards me, but I know in recent years he has become deeply committed to his evangelical faith, mostly as a way of reconciling himself to having committed murder during the Vietnam war, where he evidently tortured civilians. I may yet contact uncle Bob, if I can work up the nerve. I feel nervous and uncomfortable around him because he's very much like my father, resembles him greatly, and is one of the most volatile, crazy people I've ever known.

11-14

This past weekend I went to one of the few sex clubs in town. No-nonsense, no pretense about being a "spa" or anything silly like that, it's just for sex. I like the honesty of that, though I think the idea of places like my sex club is almost always far rosier than the realization. Having done a modest survey of sex clubs in the United States (in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Jacksonville and Fort Lauderdale) and in Europe (in Paris, alas nowhere else) I find that Atlanta's contribution to this genre is about as dreary as one can imagine. I have many theories as to why this is true, just as I have many theories about most things. Call me the Andy Rooney of gay life. Only I trim my eyebrows and use skin cream.

I think cities have a definite character, a kind of collective personality. Not a very revolutionary idea, is it? New York has its energy, which is decidedly male, ambitious, highly focused on money. Atlanta is a more feminine place--after all, it identifies with a fictional virago, Scarlett O'Hara, and I think her mystique penetrates far deeper than some people might admit. Unspeakably vain, decidedly anti-social, focused on getting what she wants, Scarlett never shines quite so sweetly as in the scene that comes just after she's gotten the shit fucked out of her by someone even more conniving than she is. And so it is with Atlanta: a city of power bottoms, hungry for bling, driven by the most sanguinary urge to acquire, to amass, to own. This translates into a city of snobbish, paradoxically (perhaps) promiscuous, often quite charming vampires. Nobody dates much here, but there's lots of fucking going on, and a whole lot more character assassination during the non-fucking intervals.

And this set of facts, in turn, colors the sexual underground of such a place. In a city such as Atlanta, I don't even know that sex clubs like the one I go to properly belong to the sexual underground. They may, instead, be merely the convenience stores on the ground floor. Private sex parties, organized over the internet, through gyms, or through word of mouth at bars--that's the real sexual underground in this town, and I'm not a member. Too old, don't have a big enough dick or a big enough bank account. Oh, well.

So in a place like Atlanta, sex clubs are sort of dank and dreary and sad, all that goes with something approaching a democratic approach to sex. Didn't use to be that way in this town: before the Babbitts invaded the place, Atlanta was a pretty warm and fuzzy place, but that all dried up in the 80s. Were we visited by an invasion of pod people around that time? I know I'm not the only one who asks that question.
So the sex club I go to is democratic, which means a good many of the men aren't what some people would call "hot." Hotness is represented there, but it doesn't rule. I think it's really a shame that sex clubs tend to be such sad places. I think of the legends I hear about the Continental Baths when Bette Middler sang there, and I think our lives are not better, there are just twice as many of us as there were back then.
I go to sex clubs as much for the affection as for the fucking and sucking. Actually a sex club is a dangerous place. I' don't want to romanticize places like that, because people in them get carried away and fuck without condoms (I don't, dear reader--don't want to pass my viral load on to anyone else), so it's very hard work to have a good time without exposing yourself to some really gratuitous and awful risk. The thing is, you don't really have to; you always have a choice. I go places like that to be with other men, to have safe sex, and to get a little cuddle time in.
My problem with men (or at least one of them) is that I love not wisely but too well. When someone asks me what my type is, I always quote Mae West: "There's only two kinds of guy I go for: domestic and foreign." Since I stopped drinking, I don't do the voice when I repeat that line. Since I live in a town where men don't date, where I've lived beyond my best if used-by date without falling completely apart, and where it's easier to find affection and tenderness in a sex club than anywhere else I know of, I go, from time to time, I try to balance the act of making love against the threat of causing harm, and I grope my way through the dark with the rest of my brothers.

11-15

In all that I have said about my father, I haven’t said much about his childhood. It’s important for me to talk about what I know in this connection, because it has formed so much of my own experience. Throughout my own boyhood I often heard stories about my father’s early life—almost never from him, of course. He never was one to talk much about the past, least of all subjects. He didn’t much care to hear about the past, either, unless someone else told the story. As for his own story, I learned most of it from my mother and her sisters, especially my Aunts Frances and Hilda.
My Aunt Frances was a wonderful person. She was the oldest of the children in my mother’s family who survived to adulthood. She lived most her life in a modest life in Jacksonville, Florida, and died a mostly happy death after a long, difficult, painful life. She was a free spirit. If Armistead Maupin had known her, he would have made her a heroine in one of his novels. My favorite story about her is about how once, when she was around seventy or so, she was cruising the intracoastal waterway near Jacksonville with one of our robber baron cousins in his pleasure boat bought with ill-gotten gains. Someone spotted an alligator in the water, and Aunt Frances, having had a few drinks, asked for a harpoon. There was one on board, and she used it, nailed the gator, hauled it on board and cooked it on the grill that night. Everybody loved her; she was the best kind of doll.

Aunt Frances complicated the family tree a good bit by marrying my father’s mother’s brother. My uncle Woody Jernigan, brother to my Grandmother Ruth Jernigan Saunders, started out a blacksmith and ended up a drunk. Most of his life he sat in his lounge chair and waited to die. Aunt Frances stayed by him, nursed him through his many brushes with death, and after he died she married, in succession, two more drunks and a sober, rich old man. Luckily her fourth husband left her rolling in dough. She earned it.

Along the way, nursing drunks and their grudges, my Aunt Frances became the chronicler of my father’s family. She was the one who passed down what the rest of us knew about what happened to my father’s family and why things fell apart. It is primarily from my memories of what she told me that I have a recollection of how my father came to be the brute he was.

When my father was born, his mother and father were rich, powerful and prominent in their community. They lived part of the time in Brunswick, and part of the time on Jekyll Island. My grandfather led his wild life pretty much apart from my grandmother, who pursued her career as a teacher and a social activist to the dismay of her husband. Granddaddy Fred was interested in hunting, boozing and whoring. How he managed to amass the fortune he did is something I’ve never figured out—I suppose he must have charmed the money out of people’s pockets. He did have powerful and prominent friends, like R. J. Reynolds and Herman Talmadge, but how that translated into what appears to have been a great pile of wealth I’ve never exactly understood. Grandmother Ruth, in the meantime, went about her business, working in the temperance movement, advocating for birth control, and being a teacher. She also entertained pretty lavishly, at least by the local standards—local to Brunswick, Georgia, in the twenties, that is.

The Stock Market Crash of 1929 didn’t affect my grandfather immediately. In 1930, however, his whole world was dismantled when my Grandmother died. The story goes that, having endured enough of his drunken shenanigans, she told him she intended to have no more children by him. At this time they had three sons: Kenneth, the eldest, my father William, then aged five, and the youngest, Robert, then aged three. What precipitated this pronouncement from my Grandmother—about remaining married in name only—remains a mystery. At some point afterwards, however, she got pregnant, and when it became clear that she was, indeed, pregnant, she sought the services of an abortionist. Abortion was illegal at this time, of course. Her abortion was not a success, and she died.

Her death left my Grandfather in a rage rather than a more conventional state of mourning. He abandoned his three children, disappeared, and left them with his sister, Lucy Belle Darden. Aunt Lucy Belle, whom I remember from my youth, was delusional most of her life, and by all accounts, she wasn’t much better when she supposedly took up the task of raising my father as a step-child than she was at the time I saw her. Periodically my grandfather would blow back into town drunk at Aunt Lucy Belle’s house, his only purpose being to rant to my father that his mother had killed herself out of anger with him, with my father. So, my father was raised by a crazy aunt, a delusional cocaine addict, living in a sad, dark old house in a small town on the edge of the Okeefenokee Swamp, being told over and over again that he was responsible for his mother’s death. He was old enough when she died to be aware of being suddenly thrown from a life of considerable luxury to one of Dickensian gloom, and all he had, all that time, was his father’s curse.