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While I've been honest about all this to my girlfriend and the other objects of my affection, I haven't come clean in public until now. It's an odd omission. I've tried to write as candidly as possible about my other deviations from standard American morality. I'm in the lucky position of being so de-institutionalized that I can say whatever I like without fear of adverse economic consequences. Indeed, lunatic candor seems to be my primary product these days. Like Hunter S. Thompson, the badder I get, the better I get paid.
A bad reputation can set you free. After all, if you've already declared yourself to be a pot-smoking, acid-addled slut, your opponents are forced to oppose your ideas on their merits, rather than strategically revealing your hidden depravities. Shame is no weapon against the shameless.
In fact, part of what motivates this public revelation is a belief that I am behaving morally, despite following a course that society would generally condemn. My conscience is clear, a fact that is not simply due to poor memory or an unwillingness to examine it carefully.
These admissions are also related to the fact that I find myself a few gray hair-breadths away from turning fifty, an age beyond which surreptitious ladies' men become pathetic in direct proportion to the uneasiness they feel with their own lascivious impulses.
The phrase "dirty old man" begins to haunt me, especially as I continue to find my pot-bellied old self attracted to the same youthful feminine specifications that put steel in my poker when I was twenty-five. Yet that's not all there is to it: for me, it is the combination of these two beauties, the inner and the outer, that draws me most compellingly. There are plenty of perfectly formed surfaces that have no light within them and they don't do much for me. At the same time, there are beautiful souls within bodies that are the female equivalent of my own, and while some of these are close friends, they lack the sexual spice that really fuels most discourse between the sexes.
I thus remain convinced that there is something holy about beauty, whether attached to a woman or a waterfall, and I have the entire history of art -- at least until the Twentieth Century -- to back me up on this. I don't think of beauty as being something that is part of a woman, but rather something like a mist that gathers around her that becomes more beautiful if illuminated brightly from within. The real beauty, the part that lasts, is in the soul and not the skin.
Even when one is seeking sex between souls, the "prostheses" they wear are not irrelevant.
King Dick Meets My Inner Lesbian
But ironically enough, a lot of being sexy means getting past the root-level sex drive. One of the great moments in my sexual education came some years back when Dick Cavett was interviewing Raquel Welch at the height of her va-va-voomishness. "Tell me, Raquel," he leered, "what's your favorite erogenous zone?"
She paused, gave him a level look that completely revised my opinion of her intelligence, and said crisply, "My mind, Dick."
The mind, I have since discovered, is just about every woman's favorite erogenous zone, but it is mystical terrain and must be explored with care and time. The dick, in its youthful phase, is not big on care or time. It is the very definition of urgency. It makes non-negotiable demands of its bearer that are related to the inner nature of its target only to the extent that some knowledge of her has strategic value in getting her into bed.
Now my formerly dictatorial appendage is more like an old sidekick. A fellow veteran. It doesn't have the same reload rate of old, but there's no ejaculatio praecox to worry about either. The old soldier can pace itself. And if it can't spit five shots in quick succession, it's no longer calling my shots as it once did. Into the vacuum of its diminished authority has risen my heretofore undiscovered inner lesbian.
My inner lesbian is a wonderful accomplice, since she knows a lot about what turns women on, is more attuned to sensuality than the old in-out, and believes strongly that the journey is the reward. This doesn't mean that she is not interested in orgasms, but she knows that one great thing about being a woman is that if you can come at all -- which a lamentably high percentage cannot -- you can usually come a lot and in a variety of ways. She makes it a lot easier to get away from my own sexual objectives and into the multifarious delights of the joint critter, the one Shakespeare called "the beast with two backs."
And creating that larger organism, making the Other into the Self, merging the Self into the Other is, after all, what sex is ultimately about. And of course, the point is not to have a self at all. To be Everything.
The Infinity of Love
All said, you're probably wondering why any woman would want to become emotionally or physically involved with a man whose promiscuity is so freely confessed. Of course, many of them don't. I eliminate a lot of opportunity by wearing my Don Juan warning placard so visibly (even then, the hesitant don't leave me entirely bereft).
But most of the resistance to becoming involved with a self-admitted playboy has to do with that all-important female perception of being special. It is hard to feel that knowing there are others out there. But there is an answer to this, and finding it has enabled me to feel a deeper sense of connection not only with women but with all the rest of my species.
The answer is that everyone is special. So also is every relationship. The creature that forms between any one person and another is like no other creature in the world. It is theirs and theirs alone. Furthermore, while time and space and attention may be painfully finite, love is not. Love has no quantity to exhaust. It is a quality, a living thing, that grows stronger the more it is felt. The vigorous practice of love expands the heart and opens its apertures to the world.
In other words, to love a lot of women, you have to love them, without a trace of bullshit, one woman at a time. You have to bring each of them with you into the perfectly present, creating there a private zone of space and time that can be filled with that particular love. You won't have any of the comforting (though generally broken) social conventions to assure you that your vulnerability is safe. There are no assurances at all except for those that come directly from the feeling of connection you can make together. You are, in effect, beating back the darkness with the light you generate yourselves.
When I judge myself, there is one question I ask: Would I want my daughters to encounter a man like me? And because I want them to be brave in their love, because I want their faith to be annealed by experience on the edge, I hope they find a few of my kind. But I hope they don't bring too many of us home.
While I've been honest about all this to my girlfriend and the other objects of my affection, I haven't come clean in public until now. It's an odd omission. I've tried to write as candidly as possible about my other deviations from standard American morality. I'm in the lucky position of being so de-institutionalized that I can say whatever I like without fear of adverse economic consequences. Indeed, lunatic candor seems to be my primary product these days. Like Hunter S. Thompson, the badder I get, the better I get paid.
Yet that's not all there is to it: for me, it is the combination of these two beauties, the inner and the outer, that draws me most compellingly. There are plenty of perfectly formed surfaces that have no light within them and they don't do much for me. At the same time, there are beautiful souls within bodies that are the female equivalent of my own, and while some of these are close friends, they lack the sexual spice that really fuels most discourse between the sexes.
mystical terrain and must be explored with care and time. The dick, in its youthful phase, is not big on care or time. It is the very definition of urgency. It makes non-negotiable demands of its bearer that are related to the inner nature of its target only to the extent that some knowledge of her has strategic value in getting her into bed.
others out there. But there is an answer to this, and finding it has enabled me to feel a deeper sense of connection not only with women but with all the rest of my species.
