Nuclear Winter

I tell no one about the relationship substitutes I am hiring. My mother calls asking if I'm seeing anyone special. Mom, they're all special.

Being truly intimate on a longterm basis, getting romantically close to people, seems unattainable. It isn't that I don't want to take someone home, have them go back to Texas with me and meet Mom and my stepfather, David. I crave the normalcy. I'm just not getting any better at figuring out how.

In fact I am regressing. The astrologer's demand that I love and be loved seems ever more Sisyphean and unreal. The great thing about paying for love is always being in control, even while giving my body over to someone. It's a love life devoid of emotional risk. The fact that I even think of it as a love life is probably more telling than I might wish, and more pathetic.

I stop writing here, worrying that I'm making myself appear pathetic. Should I go back, erase all of this? Talk about something less personal, like the size of my penis?

The need for control grows stronger. Like a metastasized cancer it spreads into all the crevices of my life. The massage habit is only one symptom. I develop a fetish for spring-cleaning in every season. In truth I will always look at the idea of reorganizing a closet as a fun and satisfying way to spend the afternoon. But I start getting weird about stuff, like an old person, obsessive and set in my ways. Towels have to be folded a certain way. Dishes stacked just so. Physical and emotional encounters continue to have clear boundaries. I liked cutting things away, starting from scratch. There is a destructive element to it all. You might imagine being able to put stuff in perfect, Germanic order is less a destructive activity than one of building or creating, but I don't think it's that at all. What I like is the ruthless clearing away, the garbage bags crammed full of trash, the shredded financial records.

I also develop a thing for what it feels like after the exterminator comes. There is an eerie stillness, no sound, nothing stirring, like nuclear winter, which I think of as comforting. I can stay in bed in my bomb shelter forever. Comments? Questions? Email me.

Happy Endings

If you talk about Marianne Williamson and Eastern religious beliefs before and after, is it still prostitution?

After my friend Pam's suicide, and once I settle in Los Angeles, seeking a new life (again) amid all the raucous, Technicolor flora, I find spiritual connection with practitioners of sensual massage and erotic release.

That's how it's worded in their ads. Or they call it a Happy Ending, which I guess is less legally suspect. The masseurs embrace a retro '70s gay-lib attitude of all things having to do with sexuality being beautiful. Death and love feel close and connected to me. Pam stays around as ghostly subtext, not a haunting, more like having someone possess me. It is far easier to seek the touch of a stranger than a Jewish exorcist.

Paid-for sensualists bring moments of contained happiness, and a new, if temporary, friendship. It's uncomplicated, perfect; a little expensive maybe, but often more reasonable than you might expect. So reasonable I sometimes feel guilty. Sensualists have to eat too. There is this one really skinny guy who does an hour and a half for $25.00. That's less than a grocery checker makes. The skinny masseur's dog sniffs around you sometimes while you're on the table, occasionally licking something private, which is a little disconcerting, but the guy is very nice. He speaks his poetry aloud while he works on me, my moans drowning out the words. (Just for the record I'm talking about moans from the deep tissue work, not from the happy ending.) After he finishes he likes to talk about writing and his spiritual journey. He believes in divine purpose. In things happening for a reason. I say I believe that too, and sometimes I do. Whatever else it is, this is not prostitution. There's also a guy in the Valley who's truly gifted at both parts of the massage. The whole thing becomes a bi-weekly ritual; the shiatsu moves, the almost-but-not-quite painful upper back work, the moment when I hear his shorts drop to the floor, the precise time for him to climb on the table and lower himself on top of me. His smile is so genuine it never fails to move me, and his blonde, blue-eyed Waspness seems exotic. He is happy. He exudes it in a way I can never imagine myself doing. A part of me gets bored by the ritualized repetition of his healing touch, but I grow to like the routine, to feel safe in knowing what I can expect and getting it every time.

Sometimes when I go to someone new I'm not always sure whether it's okay for it to go farther than the massage itself, and I don't want to insult anyone or be inappropriate, so I can feel awkward, but not once do I find someone who isn't perfectly comfortable exploring further, releasing me, finding me. They may not bring joy exactly, but it is incredibly joyful.

I don't have health insurance at the time. Paying for sex is much cheaper than going to a shrink.

The massage is almost always great, no matter who the guy is. So is the release. Sometimes I am moved to reciprocate, wanting them to feel what I feel, wanting them to like me. More than a few times men ask me not to pay, which I guess is the highest compliment a hooker can give you. That's just for cheap effect. I've already established they aren't hookers. Either that or definitions of prostitution should be widened. Actually, now that I think of it, Mary Magdalene was supposed to be sort of like these guys, cooling and healing with her ointments, showing Jesus he was still made of flesh and engorged blood, even if he was destined to be non-corporeal.

Comments? Questions? Email me.

The Glamorous Life

This is my life in New York: The alarm goes off and I have a glass of water, an amphetamine pill, and a caffeine pill on my bedside table. I take both pills and stumble into the shower.

By the time I towel off I'm bouncing off the walls, ready to face a new day. When I want to go to sleep I take a sleeping pill. I love the idea of it, since it's all so very "Valley of the Dolls."

Maybe tonight I'll take two. After all, it's New Year's Eve.

It is never actually as dramatic, or as Mickey and Judy as I like to tell people. The couple of months after I stop taking the pep pills are a real drag, but I can't say for sure whether during that time I don't want to get out of bed because I'm in withdrawal, depressed, or just being lazy. Sometimes I get myself out of bed and spend the day lying in the bathtub with the shower running, eating boxes of donuts and smoking, destroying the bathroom walls from the constant moisture. I resent having to get out of the tub to order nachos from the Mexican food restaurant on the corner, but a cordless phone around all that water seems unwise.

Lethargy mixes with an almost subconscious fear, not of anyone who lives in New York, but of my father coming to attack me. I have security alarms on my windows, again, not because of robber or rapists or killers, but because I dream about my dad, Adam, shooting me dead. He probably thinks about me rather less often than I imagine. And murdering me isn't a likely part of his mindset.

No matter how glamorous I pretend my life is (since glamour is absolutely defined by eating donuts and smoking in the shower, waiting on tables between bouts of depression, and occasionally stumbling home with a stranger) I'm finding it hard to shake the past.

I look back now on the crazy restaurant where I vent my fury by hurling entire trays of water glasses at the wall, shattering them into a million little pieces for real, with a perverse kind of affection. I haven't had any job since where I can get away with chucking sour cream and destroying property with impunity.

At the time I don't connect my frequent bouts of rage with anything having to do with my family. I'm just blowing off steam. It's normal. Right? I remember people I wait tables with there, I can see their faces more clearly than some friends I've known for years. Restaurant staffs are good to one another, creating family, even if it lasts as little as a week or two.

I first learn about workplace family life from my mother. During the last ten years or so of her life she is the manager of a department store, first in Austin, then in Georgetown, Texas. She cooks for the women who work for her. She gets involved in their lives, warning this one that her boyfriend is treating her badly, helping that one with a sick child. I don't connect those dots at the time. I don't understand how much I absorb from my mother during the six years I live with her. It's all subtext waiting to be fully realized later.

The camaraderie of the wait staff is exactly the same though. And the lonely 4:30 A.M. shift notwithstanding, we usually travel in packs after work, getting hammered together, hanging out in all-night diners, having sex. A shift is like a performance of a show. Sometimes I even pretend to have a different name. I tell phony stories about my background, use accents, or I even sometimes fake a limp. After a shift there is this leftover energy to burn off. We aren't the lifers - the waiters and waitresses who make it a career - so we can party.

It's a wonder we don't all get mugged or killed once we split up to make our separate ways home, drunkenly wandering the streets of New York in our tell-tale uniforms of white shirts and black pants, our pockets full of cash.

The glamour of it all still astounds me.

Comments? Questions? Email me.