The church doors were locked. "Um, are you here for the meeting?" I called out to the fellow approaching me and my boyfriend, Johnny.
"The SLAA meeting?"
His eyes were like little lamps. How could eyes be so bright? Then I realized: I (and my husband) had sex with this person a couple of years ago at a club.
"Right," I said.
"Down this way." He recognized me too, I'm pretty sure, though it was dark the one time we met, and people look different without clothes. Laughter rose like balloons from my stomach up my esophagus. I swallowed it back down. Certain people make my chest and chin and bum lift, my lips part, make me scared and ready at the same time. I feel their desire, and it feels inevitable. I'm an expatriate happening upon someone speaking the language of my homeland. I can't not hear. I can't not respond.
In the church basement, people formed a circle and talked about their struggles and unhappiness. I waited for Mr. Ice-Chip Eyes to take his turn. "My name is Andrew," he said — ah, so that was it. "I'm a sex addict."
promotion
"Hi Andrew," everyone said.
"Hi Andrew," I murmured, a beat behind.
"Funny story,"said Andrew. "When you walk into the back room at the video store in my neighborhood, into the porn section, there are saloon doors. When you open them, there is a loud creak, and everyone turns to look. The other day, I was determined to not enter those doors, and I found my body going there against my will, and when that creak came and heads turned, I realized what the sound was: nobility dying. My weakness, my mistake."
He's weak! He makes mistakes! I felt alive, I felt desire. I wanted to rush him, help him, take my clothes off.
"I like to watch," Andrew added inappropriately, and I shifted in my chair. No one else spoke like that. In fact, the group leader instructed us at the beginning to not be graphic or suggestive. "I like to watch" is what Andrew said to me and my husband when he opened the door to our private room at the club. "I like to be watched," I'd answered.
Sex addicts, I've read, have their key phrases, as integral to the act as their genitals or hands. My key phrase was "I like . . . " followed by their key phrase, whatever and whomever it was. I was not addicted to sex. I was addicted to addicts, to being a dream, because then I didn't have to be me.
I squeezed Johnny's hand. His mouth was slightly open, his eyes mostly closed. He wasn't able just then to watch or be watched, to dream or be dreamt. He looked like he wanted to die.
I met Johnny in a Las Vegas hotel room. From talking to him on the phone, I already knew he was a mess. All his stories ended in the hospital, jail, or the pawnshop. He destroyed all that he touched. I wanted that. I remember gazing up at myself in the mirrored ceiling of the warped copper elevator on my way to his room, my face split in two, wide at the cheeks. I thought I was just going to be with him, in that room, for three days: long enough to clean all the accumulated middle class out of my system, then I'd never see him again. But lying underneath him on the saggy hotel bed, it was as if I straightened out, as if I'd always been distorted like the image in the elevator ceiling, and suddenly I felt okay. I never knew I hadn't felt okay before, because not okay was all I'd ever known.
I was naked glistening nothing in a crappy, drafty apartment with my son and no furniture and Johnny coming over most nights, naked glistening nothing too.
My son is in a wheelchair. When Johnny came to meet Beau, he brought a basketball and said, "C'mon, let's go play a game of ball." Beau agreed immediately, as if people always treated him like that. Because Johnny had no sense of future, he felt no frustration over what might happen in to Beau — even once he became close to him. He felt no advance fury at those who would betray Beau: girls he'd like who wouldn't like him back, employers. I was filled with anger at future phantoms for Beau's sake, which, in my sorrowful heart, sometimes got twisted into anger at Beau.
I once saw a tarantula shed its skin. It simply stepped out of itself, left a ghostly husk in the shape of a tarantula behind it. I did, too. I left my husband, my stuff, my health insurance, my future behind. I was naked glistening nothing in a crappy, drafty apartment with my son and no furniture and Johnny coming over most nights, naked glistening nothing too, and I was happy.
But after a while, restlessness crawled up to Johnny again. I could feel him slipping away, and after a while, I started following him. When I caught him the second time, he agreed to meetings, and all the rest of it.
