Texas Star
by Julie Mitoraj
August 14, 2006
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."
"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.
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.
At the next meeting, the old guy whose wife kicked him out cried. Andrew bragged that his ex-girlfriend thought he was a god, even though he told her she had to find her own higher power and support network.
"That poor girl is threatening to commit suicide over him, and he's relishing the power of it," I complained during my post-meeting wrap-up with Johnny. We were strolling beneath gray-barked, ancient trees that were unfurling fresh new green flags into the pale springtime sky. "And that's the step we were supposed to be learning today: realizing our powerlessness! One thing I learned from everyone's sad stories is that all those anonymous people I had sex with, they're real human beings who were badly used as children, and when I think about them like that, I know I can't continue to exploit them. You know? Or that I can't let them exploit me because that's really me exploiting them? Like there's an invisible chessboard beneath our feet, and I can no more do something different from how I'm programmed than, say, a bishop could suddenly move straight or sideways instead of diagonally. I mean, I could move forward or backward if there were no other pieces on the board to remind me what the game is. But the second someone else appears, moving the way they're supposed to, it all clicks into place."
"Do you need me to come over tonight?" Johnny asked.
I looked at him to determine if he meant what I thought he meant. He did. "God, yes!" I cried. Then: "No! I'm sorry! We quit, remember? Hearing this stuff at meetings actually brings up good memories for me, though. If only I'd met you ten years ago. Why did you tell me you wanted to be monogamous?"
"Because I wanted to be," he said. "I wanted to keep all that sleazy stuff separate from you. I thought that was what you wanted."
"I did. I do!"
"I wanted to be the perfect boyfriend for you. It seemed like you'd done everything, and just being faithful was the one thing you hadn't. Is there anything you haven't done?"
"Yes. The Texas Star. That's with five guys. One in each hand and all three holes."
"I want to do that with you."
"I want to do that with you!"
I decided it would be fastest and smoothest to look for the four other fellows online. I'd never gone to swinging sites before; it seemed too premeditated. It had been my habit to find people in real life; it felt more like chance that way. But a Texas Star was beyond chance.
"We don't have to tell Don, right?" I said.
Johnny had sex-addiction phone therapy with Don in Colorado once a week. Sometimes I sat in on the call. The nature of sex between us had changed as per Don's instructions: only do it missionary, looking into each other's eyes. It was the sweetest feeling. "This is what it's going to feel like when we're making a baby," Johnny said. That his cock had been in and out of thousands of mouths — maybe even days ago — didn't bother me in the least (at least, once I got the clean bill of health from the clinic). It had done so because it was hungry to plunge into a home; it had urgency. That made me like it — and its owner — more. I never cared for the hypocrisy of wanting to but holding back. There's something chintzy about restraint and exclusivity. Johnny would fuck anything. I liked that, that he'd always err on the side of having done too much rather than less.
I figured he was going to leave me in the end, just because I was the best thing that had ever happened to him. I liked that, too. (Philosophically; on a personal level, it was terrifying). All men loved by a good woman will fantasize about leaving her, quitting their job, running away from home, but they don't. Johnny did everything he dreamed of. That's how I was, before Beau was born and my brain turned organized and undestructive. But I was still that way — the leaving way — inside.
I didn't need to explain anything to Johnny or be told anything. I looked into his eyes and was naked. Not my body, which had been naked a million times before, but the part of me that normally morphs into whatever the other person in the room wants, because, in its real form, it's so terrible and wrong I know that I must hide and transform it always.
"Sex addiction is not the problem," Don told us. "It's only a symptom of the real problem, which is emptiness." He offered Johnny practical methods for curing the symptom, like putting a rubber band around his wrist and snapping it each time he has a non-intimate sexual impulse, so that he'll rewire his brain to associate porn or anonymous sex with pain rather than escape. But, he reminded us, the emptiness would still be there, and without Johnny's anxiety-relieving ritualistic risk-taking, the feeling of emptiness would get worse, feel more urgent, and Johnny better determine the source of it in regular therapy, or everything would blow up.
Because sex addiction wasn't the problem, surely one last Texas Star wouldn't hurt anyone. But oh, perusing these swingers with sober eyes was dreadful! The grammar, and the tacky furniture these people pose naked in front of! It's not like I have great furniture. But I would at least find a bare wall to stand in front of instead. Oh, the flowered, tattered couches! The pictures on the walls! I don't want to know these things!
"I fear I shall remain Texas Starless forever," I sighed to Johnny. "Well, maybe it's for the best. Remember the English woman we nearly had a threeway with? She reeked of perfume and cigarette smoke." Those were two of Johnny's triggers — things that reminded him of something bad, scared him and made him mean.
"You don't wear perfume or smoke," Johnny said reverently, as if he'd just heard about me winning an Emmy, and he moved closer.
"And you don't stand naked in front of a flowered couch," I agreed. "I'm happy with you. I'm not happy with the world. Why did we think it was a good idea to leap into their midst?"
His breath mixed with mine, and our hands tangled. "We must have been drunk," he said.
"I'll be back in two weeks," was the last thing he said to me. "I'll call you every day." That was late spring; then it was undeniably summertime. At the request of Johnny's roommates, I cleaned what was left of his stuff out of the sunroom where they'd piled it: baby oil, porn-store tokens, various videotapes of Angry Anal 1 through 35, a hotel receipt, a notice that he'd been fired, overdrafts from the bank and a hardcover therapy book with the pages cut out at the center and what I guess was a crack pipe inside — something like a charred test tube. When I lived in Chicago, those things littered the stairwell. "Well," I thought, "at least he didn't bring any of this with him. Maybe he thought he wouldn't need it in his new life thousands of miles away."
At home, I stuck Angry Anal 10 in the VCR. I watched two men simultaneously fuck a woman who moaned and moaned. The men took turns losing their erections, pulling out, making her suck them until they got hard again, then sticking it back into her asshole or her cunt. She just kept moaning.
I tried to imagine what this must have looked like to Johnny when he started being shown these movies as a five year old. Was hardcore porn for him what easy listening was to me? Another world we could pretend we inhabited, instead of the one we really did? Even now, a song from my childhood will come on the radio, like "Brandy," and I forget who I am and where I am; for two-and-a-half minutes, I am a barmaid in a port town. I love a sailor; I see the ocean in his eyes, the flashing rage and glory, and though I am beautiful and faithful and kind, he will never make me his bride, for he is already married to the sea, and I won't even mind.
My sister and friends were furious at Johnny's rude defection, and even more furious at my lack of fury. This cheater, this liar, this money-blower! How could I still speak of him affectionately? But I thought the world was a better place for having him in it. "In what possible way does he make anything better?" my sister spat. "He's a con man. A spoiled brat. So he had a rough childhood. Boo hoo. Who hasn't?" My husband was bitterest of all. He'd given me everything, and Johnny had given me nothing, yet it was my husband I hated.
Everywhere I walked, living things were in bloom. I hoped my husband's new woman was taking care of mine. My husband had no interest in landscaping. I'd let him think, since he enjoyed thinking it, that clerks took advantage of my ignorance, and that's why I'd come home with the scrawniest, dyingest, saddest of bushes, plants, baby trees. But of course I chose them. If there was no hope of bringing them back to life with tender care, then there was no hope for any of us, was there?
Throughout my strange, tenuous marriage, I'd dreamt about my plants at night and by day I fought back the onslaught against them — slugs, drought, my husband's random placement of lawn furniture. My successful, fit, jocular husband felt like blight to me. One Mother's Day, I went out into the back yard and found seven baby trees dug up, a six-foot weeping willow ensconced in their place.
"What did you do?" I cried.
"You said you like weeping willows," he said. "And you're always trying to get me involved in your yard stuff. I thought you'd be happy."
"You killed my baby trees."
"They were gonna die anyway. They were all brown and going bald, honey! C'mon, didn't I get you a nice tree?"
There is something so deliberate and vicious about the healthy, the faithful and unlying. Or maybe it just seems that way to me, because we are different species. The cat is not evil; he just seems that way to the mouse. The prosperous and sleek are so far away from my understanding, it's almost as if they aren't really alive. They are a myth we whisper to each other, we huddled survivors of the apocalypse as we stitch each other up.
©2006 Julie Mitoraj & hooksexup.com