Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2021 21:25:07 -0500 From: Estlin Adams Subject: Sleeping As Others, 5 Chapter 5: Gay Gospel 23. Mark walked through the door with `zzas in a greasy cardboard box and said what was getting to be his usual line, "You're John?" I confirm I am and he looks me over. The eyes are more sunken, jaundiced than you would like, from staring at the screen too long. A paunch hangs over an average frame, for the sedentary stance from the same reason and the same activity. The nostrils betray some traces of recent popper use, corresponding with the bloodshot eyeballs that are probably blinking back at him. I figure he's thinking, needs a little work, but he's someone John would do. If only he knew. We eat the zza's and catch up: his latest flight and the annoying passengers du jour. In between swallows and after hunting down napkins: my latest hosts, only I don't say they've been virtual and electronic--until I do say so, the info having, umm, slipped out. "What, man, you need porn, with the guys you've . . ."-- he pauses in speech, looking at me for cues on how to say this, "the guys you've been lately?" "Yeah well, it's not like I can just go ahead and sleep with them." "But you have gone ahead and slept with. . . how many is it now?" We half-seriously count Trent and lumberjack and Asian man and Bryan and porn-boy and the dick of a different dimension (which I then have to explain), and additional slices of pizza soothe my existential crises and jog his memories of recent Johns: there was almost a Tony, until we just talked about it, and another Tony was up, as it were, in a few days. I explain that, as with Mark himself, guys have acquired an aura of "look but don't touch," or "ogle but don't fuck," lest ye be he whom ye admire. He scorns my limerick-like, faux Middle English, but he gets the point. I've told him, too, that I especially love jacking off with what's to me a new dick, and how that discovery almost compensates for the man this new vampire-me has sexually but also actually devoured--well, devoured, in a sense. I can't get through the whole story without sighing. It makes the drooping eyelids heavier, I can tell, the bloodshot eyes even worse, and even more lifeless. Time for a beer. Time for explaining how the mere desire to jerk off a new dick had led to turning on the porn, had led to a seemingly endless tube site, had led to my current incarnation, tube-addict man, in the flesh. Over a local microbrewery's bottles I tell him about the transcript of my conversation with Matt, and I start to say I felt trapped and unable to help him. Mark doesn't grasp why I can't get out to Matt and we have to go through it all again--the porn, the poppers, the tube, the staticky mystery dick. His eyes are bugging out in disbelief and he's actually telling himself--I can tell--that he is believing me, no matter how bizarrely far-fetched my story is getting. Again, why would anyone make up such a twisted, wild adventure? Still, how do I know all of the intimate details of my former life with Mark, if I'm not John? And: why would John tell someone else so much about his best fuckbuddy, and how could that someone possibly remember all that this other supposed John had told him? And, of course: what motivation could one fuckbuddy possibly have to keep telling this tale to the other? Perhaps, so as not to have sex? It's occurred to him for the umpteenth time this could be some psychotic version of I-have-a-headache and it's all my, John's, attempt to put him off. So I kiss him as John used to kiss him (half-convinced it's the shape of the lips physiologically, not the intention of the soul romantically, that does the kissing) and make it clear I do want to fuck him, but want to keep him him, and we both know what would happen (we've kept saying) if we go back to being fuckbuddies, plural. We would finish afterward as fuckbuddy, singular. John and Mark would go in, like two of the four Gospels, but what, or who would come out would be John, or Johns, solo. Or, so I've been claiming all along, according to what he still thinks is a ruse. He wants reassurance. He wants dick. He's out of `zza. I want to talk about Matt and what I'm going to do about Matt and about Luke tomorrow when I return to work. The look in Mark's eyes over the smooching tells me I'll have no luck changing the subject, and possibly no luck keeping my clothes on. This could be bad. We're kissing more and more passionately, and we're getting as worked up as Asian boy and Bryan at the bathhouse. Sinking feelings, alienated eyelids, coils of anticipated guilt, clench me again and it's worse this time, as it's Mark, my best buddy, my most loyal fuck of them all, we're talking about--that we're kissing about. That we're French kissing about. This could be bad. "Really, Mark, you know this can't happen." Sighing, "Well, I suppose, but you started it happening." "I just kissed you to show you it was me. It's John," the guy with hollowed out eyes, the video-game and video-porn, popper addict, who was channeling me for the moment, managed to say. He looked me over again and facial expressions telegraphed mental calculations, that video-porn boy was apparently worth sleeping with, when Mark, marvelous Mark, he gathered, was not. But Mark still didn't know the circumstances of first meeting up with the dick of a different dimension, the dick currently rising in video-porn boy's shorts. Mark did know from my stories so far the dangers of sleeping with the current me--sleeping as the current me. But it looked like I was willing to take those risks, incur those dangers with some guys, just not with Mark. And even if it meant the end of Mark being Mark, I guessed from his facial expression, still, that had to hurt. Which was touching, in its way. Mark's handsome winsomeness made it so he could have any guy he wanted, and still he wanted me. I wasn't even the John anymore he had grown to know and love, and still he kept arriving at my door every month with pizza. We'd both had tricks and boyfriends we'd told the other all about, partners we had shared in bed, and partners we had traded, bed to bed. Here he was, coming back when none of the rest of them had come back, lasting longer than any of the others had. I saw in his eyes I wasn't just another trick or fuckbuddy to him. I read reflected in his eyes the projected judgment that he must be just another such trick to me, to John, if, even now, John wouldn't sleep with--wouldn't sleep as--Mark himself. That was loyalty, that was friendship. That was even, I thought, rubbing tube-man's already swollen eyes, feeling tube-man's massive tool subside, a kind of marriage. Not tonight, dear, I'm not cruel enough to say to him--I'll name it an existential headache that I'm, that we're, quite acutely suffering from. 24. "My name is Mark." "Hi, Mark" rings across the room, as if they're all some half-hearted zombie chorus. "I'm not a sex addict. I'm just here," I say, lifting the current John's hand, some video-porn addict's hand, in mine. "To support my bud." There's a general groan in response to what they think is denial. I give John a frustrated, but, I hope, still supportive glance. He swallows and assures a circle of jaded burn-outs on plastic chairs in a concrete-floored church basement, I am indeed there for him I wish I could be happier about this. But I can't, for several reasons, be very happy about it. First, there's the homophobia. I catch people glaring openly at us, mocking us to one another behind our backs, and dropping a sour look, a snarl about the nose, when they realize, or assume we're "together." One guy in very straight-laced attire, as though trying to signal conservatism in a crowd of admitted addicts, clearly looks at us contemptuously, implies we're light in loafers, not real men, but, of course, insatiable sex addicts: "you know how gay men are, after all." My reply, "no, how are, we, gay men?" leads to a stony silence, but it seems the guy has more sympathizers in the circle of about twenty people than we've got. We're only twenty minutes into the first Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting I've ever been to and at this rate, there won't be a second. There's the insistence on married monogamy. Others spilling their proverbial guts tell us exactly how many days and months have passed since their last straying, in occasionally graphic detail that seems accepted by the company and that gets me thinking we're with the fapstronauts--masturbation anonymous groups, with their mascots, Fappy the don't-jack-off . . . what is it, a dolphin? A penguin? Some improbably aquatic, anthropomorphic creature, at any rate--instead of the sex addicts. They eventually mention partners, spouses, general abstinence from them all. But "falling off the wagon" according to these guys and gals seems to mean any straying from wedded bliss, even Jimmy Carter-esque sinning in the heart, when one actually and in reality keeps it in one's pants. The man's former comment about gay men's promiscuity hangs palpably in the air and several are looking at us with accusing glances, artfully arranged eyebrows, as others swear their addiction days are behind them and monogamy is the way, the one way--and abstinence, entirely, failing that. I sigh louder than I mean to, and it's louder than many of the statements these people have mumbled in the last few minutes, intending, half-heartedly, to say them aloud. They don't seem inclined, either, to believe John's story about becoming the man he's slept with--on the literal level where John means it, or on a more metaphorical level, where it flies in the face of what appears to be the group's philosophy. I can't blame them for not believing what is hard for me to swallow, and they're not even there every other week or so, with a new John in the old John's--or at least, the previous John's--shoes. John's way of telling it, too, his already-bloodshot eyes drooping with apparent, recent, abundant porn use, isn't exactly compelling to this group, either. "I know going into it, I'm going to wake up as somebody else if I go through with it," he'll say. They'll wait for a moment, seeing if he corrects himself. Somebody will politely cough and then say, they think, for him, "Nah, man. It's always you. You gotta accept responsibility." "No," I try to say for John, "he's not ducking responsibility. He really comes out of it, a different person than he had been." "Man, you're just encouraging him," the same guy will say back to me. "Yeah," John will say, unhelpfully, trying to stick up for me. "He's the best encouragement I've got." Looking directly at me, "he's the only one who comes close to understanding." This warms my heart for a moment, until I replay the "comes close" part, and wonder what part I've still been missing. We go through it again, assure the group John's been through several metamorphoses, and they think we mean metamorphoses, metaphorically. "No, really," John finds himself insisting, "literally, I'm not the same person the next day." "The sex is that good?" someone rasps from the next row. "Well, yeah, it's that good, but I don't just mean I'm transported from excellent sex." Again, he's looking at me while he's supposed to be addressing the crowd, "I mean I find out I am--" and he looks out again, aware of how silly it all sounds to others' ears--"I am the man I've slept with." Some eyeballs raised in sarcasm, some under-the-breath tsk-tsks, someone tittering that maybe this wouldn't happen, if John could get himself a good lady and a good lay. We're both sighing and thinking this was a bad idea when a voice we hadn't heard before, one with a noticeably gay lilt to its intonations, offers, "You are the man you slept with." We look at him hopefully until he completes his thought: "you're you. You're yourself. Pretending it makes you someone else, probably"--and now he's returning our glance--"probably makes you want it even more." And, we're back to sighing. He's not uncute, and he's at least buying John's experiences with other johns, if not accepting the existence of multiple Johns. At least we have an uncomprehending ally, in an otherwise unimaginative and hostile crowd. But just when we'd been making progress, he's mouthing Twelve Step philosophy all over again, just in a different, gay-friendly way. There's also the fact that they're so damned self-righteous about that philosophy. We admit we're powerless, blah blah. We make reparations to those we've hurt, blah blah blah. We resolve to contact a sponsor whenever we're slipping--blah, blah--and that sponsor can't, evidently, just be your fuckbuddy, even if you're the only fuckbuddy in one another's lives. John and I have already said we aren't, but that we're okay with that in a way this group doubts--in a way this group just can't comprehend. The folks in AA can--they say--purge alcohol from their lives entirely and find something else to trigger or not trigger their slips of the soul. Narc Anon can mean removing the Narc part and proverbially carrying on. But over-eaters and overzealous fuckers need some measure of their addictions back in their lives, as one can't fully purge sex or fully deny one's self food and hope to live on much longer in those respective, abstinent states. Having sex, then, is backsliding toward one's addiction unless one dances the backward hocus-pocus of admitting powerlessness, etc. Or, it's just addiction and relapse until you're married and say "I do," and until you do have apparently powerless sex. It's enough, I'm deciding as the circle just passes on to the guy next to John--the not uncute twink who'd tried to comprehend--to drive you to drink. And maybe in turn, it would be frustration enough to drive someone who's trying not to drink, to fuck instead, if it at least meant less frustration. The "admitting we're powerless" stuff rubs me the wrong way. I am powerless to keep John John, or to get the original John back again, though I had loved him--I suppose--at the time, and just hadn't wanted to admit it. Powerless not to love a man I'm just fucking, or on occasion, not powerful enough to resist loving a man I'll let fuck me. It isn't sheer force of will for either of us, so I guess this power of love stuff is bigger than either of us. Mentally I enter the pants of the latest John I'd come close to playing with and, my, that's mighty big. A woman's going on about feeling wretched after a party that I would have enjoyed going to, and she's mentally and verbally gouging her eyes out before the company with excoriating guilt. The company seems to want, I realize, the same kind of heartfelt confessions from me, and occasionally glances back at me accusingly, as they recall what they thought had been my denial. My next sigh (of a lot of them) wordlessly expresses my realization I am powerless--powerless to keep this hellish Twelve-Step conversation from going on. And, I suppose if I'm going to be honest about it, they insist I examine my own grounds for believing what John--what the Johns, plural--tell me. "So you mean," one of the zombies attempts to summarize back at me, "you hang out with whatever guy is at John's house, even when John's not there?" "John is there," I find myself insisting, making eye contact, mostly, with the latest in what's getting to be a long line of Johns. "But you said he wasn't." "No, I said," I say, closing my eyes to reflect the fact that none of it makes sense to me, either, "John's there, but it's not the John I know and love." I mean this casually, but John looks right at me with my last words. The look is partly touched, partly awed, but wholly muted with this latest porn-watcher's perpetually dimmed expression. The looks around the company suggest they're barely humoring me. "How do you know it's him?" someone asks, again. Another asks, right on the first question's heels, "And you sleep with this new guy every time?" The second question is more salacious, though it also has the edge of judgment and sends a few of the `phobes into titters of tsk-tsks in the far arcs of the circle. I sigh and choose to answer the second question. "No, I haven't slept with him since . . ." They let me trail off. After a moment, "since when?" "I haven't slept with him since he's stopped being . . . John," I swallow the name and it comes out softly. It doesn't even sound right to my ears. "So, you haven't really been seeing John?" asks the same summarizer, the strains of trying to believe me palpable in the tone. I stammer through saying I have been seeing John, but I haven't been seeing John, with extra emphasis and an obscene gesture helping me to make my point. Knowing again the words aren't making any sense, I also offer that I have been seeing John all along, it just isn't the same John, the same body containing the same soul, each time. The soul part has enough of a spiritual tinge to it, they pause, then just let it all hang in the air around us, half-convinced I'm still in denial. Someone breaks the silence to say, "So, you really don't know, though, that it's the same John, who's just decided not to fuck you any longer." This strikes me as too presumptuous, coming from a straight stranger, not to counter. "He tells me why we're not having sex," I say, again looking at a John whose exasperation shows on his face. "And I thought you guys were against sex outside of marriage and committed unions." The quiet pause is a collective shrug that concedes this. "And I know when. . . "--this has to be said looking right at John: "I know when he kisses me." Saying each John kisses like the John I used to know, doesn't cut it with these cynical realists. They have too little faith in love to believe John's soul puckers out through some relative stranger's lips. They speak doubts I'd been having lately, that it's not the same kiss, exactly, but the closest approximation the physiological lips of the latest john can come to the original's smooches. They faintly echo something John himself had said, that it's the soul that expresses itself through the body's lips, and not the body that obeys the soul's commands. They think I have the mental level of a teenager who's content to stop with making out, and yet they've heard I want to go ahead and have sex with the John proxies, the John hosts, whatever, and that John's the one who doesn't want to. Attention turns to him and there's a grin on pornboy's face that just has the slightest of the original John's glints, a look in the corner of his eye that wouldn't look out of place in the first John's mien. We draw together in the company and kiss--more of a peck than unbridled affection, more of an unspoken thank you for sticking with him than an open display of how we feel for one another. And yet it's there--the taste, the texture, the feeling, the familiarity, and a vision of John as I used to know him materializes between us and stays there, like the playing cards teenagers try to keep between teir puckered lips during kissing games. I'm picturing the other John and this John probably thinks about the other John, the former John, kissing me, too; and with two sets of lips it's like three of us are actually there, or it's like I'm not cheating on that John in kissing this John. This John is channeling the former, or it's like he's said to me once, that it's like a spiritual menage a trois, but with only deux of the trois visible to everyone but John and me. We're still lightly kissing and the original John's spirit is emerging and my loins are stirring and I can feel I'm getting flush with embarrassment at kissing so openly in public--so openly in front of straights, so brazenly at Sex and Love Addicts Anon, so candidly a part of John's ongoing freakshow. The not uncute boy next to John can't look away, and mirrors my blushing redness--hmmm. John's smiling though we're still kissing, and I have the sense he's reading my thoughts, though he hasn't yet added clairvoyance to the powers he's claiming--my! There's a low chorus of tsk-tsks, but also latent awws, mixing approval with empathy with vestiges of shock and surprise. I look back at the not uncute boy, still not looking away, and manage a slight wink, bringing John into the circuit of our glances. I realize John has kept silent through this whole last exchange, the last five or six minutes before the kiss, and that the kiss is all he's done with his mouth for the last part of the meeting. I realize I'm okay with that. I see that there's a glow in his eyes (perhaps it's just the leftover look of staring at too much porn) akin to flatly enamored love. I know I've used that word, love, with all these zombies as witnesses, to mean my best (yeah, my best) fuckbuddy. And I know he hasn't used it in the same company, during the same addicts' gathering, to mean me. He hasn't used it. Not yet, anyway. 25. Not quite yet, John decided, once again. John's fingers squeezed the squeaky rubber of the helium balloon as he stood on the doorstep, and as he delayed for five more seconds before ringing Tony's--the second Tony's--bell. Those few extra seconds proliferated. The out-sized red balloons looked no less ridiculous, no less conspicuous, with him on some near-stranger's porch. He rang the bell, already. Tony had answered the phone the day before almost instantly, after all. His voice was so full of glee at the suggestion they meet up again, nothing in their conversation told John that Tony had recognized it was an unfamiliar voice Tony was hearing. Tony had so jubilantly agreed to see him again, and so soon, it appeared Tony's calendar was empty. By the time he had hung up, Tony must have been ready--he was flinging open the door and showing himself to be standing waist-deep in a pile of them--balloons. John again squeezed the rubber of the balloon in his hands, heard the squeak, tried to smile. It was time to go through this again with the second Tony, Tony the helium freak. But Tony's look was quizzical, already hesitant. This Tony was tall, hairline receding, glasses wire-rimmed; but, too widely round to be counter-cultural or cool, they landed somewhere in between librarian and grammarian. Beady eyes and puffy dolled face followed suit, and John had always thought this Tony might as well have neon, flashing "dork" sign on a chain around his neck. "But I thought . . ." he was stammering out, looking back and forth between the balloons around him and his not-quite expected guest. "I thought it was John coming over to play." He lifted the balloon in his hands between them as a peace offering, an intended sign he was the John he'd wanted to play with, but he could tell already they would have to navigate a too-familiar conversation first, before Tony would even let him in. Bouncing rubber receptacles everywhere seemed somehow to exhale disappointment, to float a little less buoyantly with the unspoken news. John watched his reflection in the wire rimmed glasses as they talked, the junkie's eyes looking more alert, less porn-inclined, in lenses meant to magnify The Dork Within. At a street fair in a neighborhood near his house, seven or eight years ago at the height of summer, a guy John hadn't yet known as Tony just started talking to him unprompted. The pitch, the tone, even the subject matter for a random stranger on a sidewalk, had struck John as so pathetically, so hopelessly uber-nerd, he'd talked to the man out of shear scholarly pity, fellow nerd-dom, miserable commiseration John had instinctively felt for a soul so much more evidently maladjusted than he. They'd had a common home state they had both moved away from as children. They remembered some random landmark--a model convertible at the top of a tall poll, occupied by a perpetually waving statue of a driver, visible from the nearby spur of the Interstate, unmistakable to the five-year-olds they had been as they had whizzed by in the backs of family cars in 1973. John somehow knew, even as they traded recollections of long irrelevant details, he then had a friend for life. Tony spent the afternoon spouting hometown details uninterrupted, for half hours at a time. Looking back at his reflection in not-cool-enough-to-be-aviator's glasses, John watched them talk their way through the conversation where John demonstrated to a former john--in this case, the second Tony--that only he could be John, because of private, intimate info only John would know. In this case, the info revolved around the balloon in his hand and the helium tank somewhere behind Tony. Behind John's reflection in the glasses, meanwhile, in the glints in Tony's eyes, John noted he was less skeptical of the man now in his entryway, and a slight bit more interested in playing with the balloons in their midst. It had taken a year after the street festival, a half dozen occasions of wasting time getting to know one another at six- or eight-week intervals, before this Tony had brought John to his apartment, and had begun to unveil his fetish, had disclosed, even, his kink. John had honestly spent most of the first time cringing from loud sounds, stifling giggly laughter, and picking up a jaw that had dropped amid shocked surprise. Remembering that session and recounting it now as vividly as he could to Tony, he could see further hints of recognition playing about Tony's mouth and eyes. John put the over-inflated red balloon he'd brought with him flush against his cheek, made the rabbit-ear hand-signal (last cool, circa 1981), with his other hand, and gave the combination leer and snarl a poser would have used that same year in a semi-sarcastic "surf's up!" And yet, instead of saying it, John had pricked the balloon with the sharp point of his fingernail and let it pop loudly and instantly, the nearest ear already ringing from the sound. After the automatic cringe loosened and once the ringing died down, he focused back on Tony, and saw on him the most animated possible expression of pure delight. With that first (of dozens, hundreds) of pops, Tony had either decided he was the John of old despite his new appearances--or that Tony so got off on his popped-helium balloon kink, he didn't care if it was John or not, as long as he kept on popping. So they popped, and popped, exploded and annihilated, popped, popped again just for variety and they smashed to smithereens. The experienced jarringly interrupted, incoherent thoughts, with all of the violent, explosive popping going on. They bobbed on colorful globes like toddlers in balloon pits at amusement-park pizza pla---. They jumped with pins held aloft with their highest fingers, torpedoing heliums gathering at the---. They soaked one another with water balloons, tee shirts transparent with warm gushers, shorts sticking to calves as water ran down shins and ankles to puddle amid even more---. They pelted one another's faces with balloons filled to capacity, pricked them to pieces near enough to one another's faces to leave red eyes and cheeks, reached incessantly for half-hours worth of balloon rapid-fires for elaborate wars no eight year olds had ever had the endurance and wherewithal to---. Neighbors looked in to investigate the sounds, saw their maniacal games and thought better of inter---. Blasted rubber remains coated door frames, lay in piles, spoke--squeaked, honked, of former rubber glory. Tony's grin spread clear across his ever-dorky face, the frames of his glasses wet with water and rimmed with more vestiges of---. John often laughed along with him long enough to keep from cringing, often fought long enough to stave off self-consciousness, often waited until he could hear again from a much too-proximate---. They'd played this way twice before and this Tony's sex was the least sexual sex John had ever--- It was getting ridiculously, jubilantly, almost--he thought, brow once again battered by already sputtering balloon-bladder--raucously so. Somebody, circa 1986, had to have so beaten up this Tony he'd left his popping signature on poor Tony's repressed sexual soul. He needed a sneering bully staring into his face, speaking a modified mid-eighties Valley Girl brogue, taunting his supposed lack of masculinity, wielding, somehow, the first of several rogue balloons. He kept telling John how far back to curl his lips, just when to pop the next one with just how much proximity, just how much swagger to put into his insults, all to time-warp Tony to some thirty-year-old torture that combined humiliated agony with orgasmically popped toy balloons. John has to stop himself from laughing. Had to wait until the restoration of hearing. Had to reach for the next helium or quickly inflate the next blow-up balloon. He had to--had to hand it to this Tony. For all the weirdness of his fetish, all the elaborateness of the show and the ever extended process of his balloon-punctuated getting-off, he was grinning ear to ear, loving every pop, reveling in the positively juvenile glee he shared with John--or that he shared, it seemed, with anyone nutty enough to play along as John currently was playing along. John as bloodshot-eyed porn-fan looked back at him and fully believed anyone glaring at Tony, anyone lobbing the balloons, anyone with, well, the balls to keep playing along without telling Tony to go pop his perversities, could play with Tony, for as long as either of them could stand it. John was looking into Tony's dork-aviators between pops, and seeing in the dim reflections, his old self, the original John, the one-time playmate of Tony. Tony was clearly, discernibly enjoying himself, tenting his trousers, even quaking in convulsions that hinted he was having more-than-juvenile fun. He was getting closer to getting off than any man John knew could get while he still had his clothes on. Thinking so almost got John laughing, remembering the first he'd been with this Tony, through his fully-clothed orgasm and oddly formal afterglow. Hiding his quivering lip behind a red-tipped reservoir, he looked once again at his old self reflected in this nutty partner's glasses. Clearly reaching the final stages, Tony bounced and buckled, heaved and for a moment clutched at last breaths. Checking to make sure this was what he thought it was, John saw a dark circle of liquid spread at Tony's crotch, the inseams of his shorts the only sites and signs of his sexual excitements. The first time this had happened, he'd expressed disbelief and Tony had told him: he had never come until his mid twenties. He never got over his childhood repression, just channeled it into pop-fetishes, fantasized tormentors, physical bounces suggestive of Freudian leitmotifs. He never removed his clothes with any of his partners, but ejaculated, fully dressed, in shorts pre-selected to show, not hide, the coming. He'd initially answered, when John had first asked him why: "Well, I definitely want to have safe sex." John had nearly bitten his bottom lip in two. The idea, so precious, that safe sex was fully-dressed sex, coincided so well with the circa-1986 setting of his dream tormentor, that was probably all the backstory John needed to piece together Tony's repressed, sexual, AIDS-era fetish tastes. And John knew men who had had to work, literally hard, literally for hours, to have the ejaculations this Tony could have, fully dressed, hands-free, and yes, to overstate the term massively, safe--as safe as a kid's balloon-mobbed birthday party--sex. That party's, for one, signs lay littered on floors and walls and counter tops. Water dripped down walls and pooled on tile. Rubber stretched in bits and pieces everywhere. Tony lay amid it all with the least complicated afterglow he'd ever seen on a partner's face. An odd fetish was an unalloyed bliss, it seemed. Self-satisfied smile signified all the savoring that soul needed to do. The face registered not the least bit of awareness most people would find this juvenile, silly, and not very sexy. Not even John had found it sexy, and John was--he checked to be certain--still the John he had been when he had knocked on Tony's door. He had not merged with balloon-boy, he now had a sense of the minimum threshold of his sexual soul's transformations, and he confirmed his suspicion all along this Tony was the one Tony, and the one partner, with whom sex would not change him into anyone or anything else. It wasn't sex for this Tony's partners, and looking at his grin still pasted across his face, it was easy to believe Tony did not even care about that, provided the balloons kept popping. One of Tony's invitations to these non-stop pop fests, a time or two ago, had been addressed to "the other Mr Helium." The singularity of the term spoke loudest to John, who recollected they had played twice before, with two to three years separating each fest. He wasn't one of several, other Mr. Heliums who played with this Tony. He was the other. It was possible these three odd occasions of incessant popping together constituted all the sex this Tony would have this decade. John, in the two guises, the two Johns, now, whom he'd visited Tony as or in, might have been Tony's only sex partner or sex partners, if you could call him or them that, in this Tony's adulthood--if you could call it that. John looked back at Tony's eyes, sinking back into the head above a smile sublime with satiated ecstasy, and thought John might have been this Tony's first partner, his first, well, john, since who ever had smirked at him amid beach balls, kickstarting this fetish in the first place, making John the only john who had spurred it on. This gave new meaning to pools of water glinting in lowered light, made him look differently at leftover rubber amid long-popped balloons, made him conclude, this fetish, as bizarre as it is for Tony, was partly his doing, too. One last long-range look at poor Tony's apartment, Tony practically falling asleep amid its fall-out; one last survey of what he knew about Tony's fetishes, his origin stories, and his, John's, own singularity; one last consideration that Tony was the only peer he knew who could ejaculate, hands-free and fully clothed; and one last check that, yes, John leaving was the same John he had been, back when he had been John, still arriving--and, letting himself out, he knew everything he had wanted to know, and more. 26. They, the ears, longed for the nonchalantly seductive exhale from lips an inch away. They jolted, they retracted, amid facial cringes whenever louder sounds--rubber balloons popping, hands slapping wobbly flesh, too-loud or ill-timed lover's grunts--emanated, instead, from several feet away. They jutted from scalps and chins ruddied crimson from sexual excitement. They perked, they extended, to strain to hear lovers headed behind one, alongside one, sneaking, divinely, up to one in the dark. They listened to noise, they listened to moderation, they listened hopefully through silence. They told one one's lover's tone when the words belied that tone. They hinted at sarcasm, asked after ventriloquism, started at the sterterous, buzzed at the electronically rhythmic, echoed the songs that make it so one proverbially could not hear one's self think. They made brows lower, eyes contract, heads cock to sides: was that voice one's partner's? What did that tone of voice, that raspy register, that odd departure from idiolect, betray? How much sexual interest, if any, did they hear when that voice said one's name? They joined the body's sexual organs when slow, sweet breaths passed outer ears and low rasps gently rocked inner canals. They carried the body's sexual response when they gently retracted, drew back and wagged as foreheads broadened, eyes rolled back in eye lids, smiles parted lips. They withstood lurid whispers of in-the-act sexplay. They picked out the particularities of disciplinary safe-words. They endured the relentless tongue-fucking of a partner who underestimated his thrusts, battered the eardrum with his tip, and didn't--but wondered why he didn't--get the chance to tongue-fuck the same ear on the same partner, a second time around. They carried sound, they conveyed silence, they harbored incessant ringing, down canals to stirrup and saddle bones, cochlea and equilibrium tubes, Eustacian-sinus connections, inner sanctums that translated vibrations to sounds, sounds to words, words to meanings, words to non-meanings that still, well, meant something in the heats of sexual moments. They struck chords when sounds were half-notes flat. They reminded one of elusive rhythms half an octave away from familiar tones. They carried back songs one had sung to a girlfriend back when one had girlfriends, when it's the same ear, straight or gay, and the same memory, straight, then gay, and while one is thinking this, anyway, one has forgotten the rest of the tune. They remembered other instances, other years, for which one has heard, "they're playing our song." They've heard love. They've sensed snarls. They've remembered phrases and echoes of old that have turned present-day arguments, well, on their ears. They ring with near-constant popping. They sting with the assaults of deafening dins. They make one long for noise-canceling headphones. They make you wish such cancellations also worked inwardly, canceling a damned tune one cannot squelch in one's head. They demand one put one's palms to the sides of one's head, canceling more primitively an inconsiderate, loud partner's glee. They make one wonder, waveringly, if one is really going to go on with this much longer as the pops continue. They make one recall late-night, early-twenty-something "club disease," with which one shouts at one's fellow club goers at supposed after-parties in all-night pancake houses, though the waitresses are not the least bit amused. They make one think pityingly of life-long rock stars, their hearing sacrificed to decades of amplified feedback, their fans' voices forever muted to them, their own songs merely subsisting as half-heard melodies, now merely sung out of habit. They bring back what an oddly intelligent roommate once said, that he wished ears heard more like the eyes saw--trained and focused, instead, on one source of sound that one particularly, deliberately wanted to hear. He wished that eyes saw more as the ears heard--broadly inclusive, instead, of every detail within range, whether one wanted to see it or not. The roommate had gone on to say that, eyes come from humans' predatory evolutionary past: all the better to see the animal we were hunting down. Ears, though, come from our evolutionary past as we were preyed upon: all the better to hear every movement, lest some predator silently sneak up. Ears perked up then, at a silent partner's stealth, steeling one's self against the divinely delicious joy of imagining a predatory partner devouring us. Ears retracted, self-protectingly shutting out sounds like balloons incessantly popping, knowing it wasn't love, knowing it wasn't one's self being lost, this time, to this lover's supposed sweet song. 27. He, Mark, just stopped rolling his eyes long enough to laugh, then snapped his fingers as a test, very near to my still-ringing ears, in amused, somewhat skeptical sympathy. He only looked away again to look at Simon, who'd joined us after putting Mark's number into his phone at SLAA, and who looked to stare at both of us, vaguely but also fixedly entranced. Though Simon seemed a cute kid, and though my ears were still ringing from Tony's pops, I already sensed some signs of trouble. For one thing, Simon had been all judgmental at the meetings, frowning as everyone else did on anything short of monogamy, even knowing what he knew about us randy gay men. Now his smirks seemed to mean flirtation, his glances business, his lingering looks a kind of pouting willingness, as if asking in spoiled silence, why we hadn't returned his flirting yet. For another thing, Mark did seem to return that incipient affection, then make significant eye-contact with me, as if to see how I would take it. Mark clearly cared more about Simon, not that I blamed him, than about the story I'd been telling him about the latest Tony, not that that story wasn't also absurd. And yet Mark had recently, and for the first time, professed his love for me, and I had believed him--even as I was no longer myself, a few times over, and even as his eye, even now, roamed instead in Simon's direction. You had better be cute, kid, my mindset mused mutely at Simon. And you'd better, I thought, concentrating mental energy on Mark again, have a good reason for this. And yet all they did was share notes on SLAA folks, past and present, hypocrisies flying and looks, at me and at one another, lingering longer and longer. Sponsors' relative merits were gone over. Anonymous confidences were, by first names at least, repeatedly broken. Juicy stories repeated hook-ups long passed. Trashy backsliding recurred, in the telling, as well as, it seemed, in the history of the group as long as Simon had known it--which couldn't, to look at him, have been all that long. Giggles animated dimples and laughs sounded too young to belong to that throat. Steps out of the Twelve, standards drawn from straight people, sounded out of place in the mouth of this queer twenty-something. The stories, I noticed, weren't about Simon himself or about his relapses, but were gossip against other addicts' honor codes. And yet the confidant's sly smile reassured, even as the tongue wagged at others' expense, even as he winked--didn't he?-- mid-sentence at Mark, and even as he winked twice--oh, yes--mid-next-sentence at me. Time to call this boy on it, if there ever was a time. "What about your one-month medallion or whatever?," I asked him pointedly. "What about your relapses and such?" I added, with something noticeable in the tone that implied, what about them, compared to the ones you're so gleefully telling us about? The smile, the winks, returned. "I'm three months sober," he said, then clarified, sober in the sexual sense. For the first month he'd had a steady boyfriend, though, and counted sex with him as "sober" celibacy because they'd been committed to one another at the time. That didn't strike me as a high standard to aspire to. I said as much. "Well, seeing as," he says, "it was recently rare to go as long as three days," and he smiles in Mark's direction. Steadiness with an ex, and being a good boy since he'd left, counted in SLAA's book. Mark encouraged him, something along the lines of a pat on the back, one pat per month of sexual, celibate sobriety. "You're impressed by that?," I quizzed him. "That isn't even half of one of your crazy workweeks," I remind him, remembering myself Mark had said he'd been too scared to play in his layovers in Germany, Spain, or France. Mark can't stay home long enough to tend to a house pet, but he tends to his own needs, evidently, at some point during each extended trip he takes. Simon doesn't seem to know this about Mark, but smiles self-assuredly, eyes roving up and down the flight attendant's physique, pupils reflecting his guessing, probably, about Mark's past with me, maybe--eyes brightening subtly, about our present time together, too. "You gentlemen manage mo-nog-a-my"--he comically draws out exaggerated syllables --"when he spends so many days on the road?" It's a personal question for a visitor and a recent acquaintance, but we had been talking frankly about sex and relationships. Mark and I eye one another and I know from his glance, the subject didn't come up when I was off popping balloons. We hadn't talked monogamy. We had been going through my odd sexual schizophrenias. We hadn't either, until recently, said we'd loved on another. Now, here was Simon asking us frankly, in turn. I think both of us wanted to know the other's answer. I also wanted to know, did Simon want to know the answer for his own, or for SLAA's sake? I say something about Mark having as much fun as he wants to have when he's traveling abroad, though I know, without saying, he passes up on chances for fun with deutsch, francais, et espaniol beaus. Mark matches my coyness by saying he still never knows who will be in my old apartment next, and we remind him I've been changing bodies lately, in still unexplained ways. Simon shows no signs of recognition nor judgmental hypocrisy, warming to these notions and watching the subtle nonverbal cues Mark and I send one another throughout the conversation. He tries to pick up on our vibe. He remembers he should admonish and scold, toward monogamy modeled on heteros. He's too intrigued. We're tickling his fancy. He's reasoning, too, why would anyone make up a story as outlandish as mine? Light, sensual fingertips of Simon's glide up the undersides of Mark's bared arms, three months of supposed sexual sobriety evaporating with charged yet superficial touch. Mark's look in return reminds me of lumberjack Pete's Tom-of-Finland smile. I'm off to get the three of us drinks, because it will distract me from them, because I'm intrigued too, and because I'm back to feeling my now-familiar tinge of existential vertigo. Back with scotch and waters and Simon's sobriety is nowhere to be found. Mutual fingertips roam and encircle forearms, clasp wrists, examine the hairs on biceps, and mean collectively, this visit is headed somewhere expected yet unpredicted--not openly, expressly predicted by any of the three of us, anyway. Yet looks from a distance, glances back at me, also tell me Simon and Mark know what's at stake, for my story, for my love for Mark, for Mark's love for me, for Simon's means of testing all of this, to be believable, to be real, to be what he in a way, also, wants this visit to be. Mark's looks search my glances, look over my reactions, silently ask, how am I taking, what will I say, not about his loving me directly and thereby losing himself, but about loving this boy in a threesome, and seeing what happens, seeing what we're risking with that. A tilt of the head asks what Simon's flirtation means to me, what jealousy bubbles to surfaces, what willingness to share I manifest, and what distance I'll keep, should this suddenly and by necessity become a party of two, not three. A second look, with Simon between us, sees if I reflect his willingness or balk, appreciate Simon's beauty or reject him as Mark's type, not mine, or recall Simon's cant at SLAA, rather than his palpable willingness now. Mark and I had shared stories of boys before, and had shared bodies of boys, but not since my bodies had shared the spirits of other boys' bodies--Luke's, Trent's, Bryan's, the others, whom I tried not to think about now. Not since we'd said in front of strangers we loved each other, and not since the strangers had been ones that professed couplehood as healing for addictive straying. Not since I'd told a room of strangers I'd lost myself, and told them how further acts of losing myself, would necessarily mean the loss of one's partner, too. Mark's look in his later glances, openly kissing Simon now, who wasn't resisting, either, ask me wordlessly if I would trust him, if I thought I would still be here afterward, if Simon would be a sacrifice, willing or not, to whatever we had recently decided and said we were. All of that, spelled out in Mark's eyes, and me, remembering again my odd roommate's comments, about eyes that saw more as ears heard, ears that heard more as eyes saw: I wanted, ear-like, to take all of Mark and Simon's sex-dance in, instead of, eye-like, training my sights on what appeared to be my fuckbuddy-boyfriend's lust for another, especially a not-uncute, man. Simon the not-uncute's glances, in turn, searched for answers from me and from Mark, as he asked for permission from one boyfriend to initiate an uninvited menage a trois. As he openly defied the prudish monogamy-cant he'd reiterated twenty minutes earlier. As he worried--I was sure, from the tentativeness of his looks--one of us would throw him out, should he stray too far with the other. He also worried, though--I wasn't so sure--one of us would sniff and dismiss him, too, if, with the other, Simon didn't stray far enough. His glance would grow indistinct and it would be obvious subtle implications which were suggesting themselves in his head, if Mark really did regularly jet off to other continents and away from buddies, boyfriends, and beaus; if he really did believe SLAA's philosophy of committed monogamy, despite his own budding addictions; if I really did do as I'd fantastically said I'd done, and woke up as the man I had bedded, or as the man who had bedded me. Why, he probably again wondered, would a couple conspire to tell as crazy a story as that, and what kind of guy was he--he wasn't the first figure in this drama to wonder--if he went along with the lunatic fantasy all the same? Glancing at Mark in between us, transferring a light, hesitant kiss from Mark's lips to mine, ear-like eyes, eye-like ears, transferred to me all of these impressions already--and I hadn't, if I was even going to, transformatively, transmogrifyingly slept with him, slept as him yet. Mental mirrors, of course, also returned me my own looks, as I perceived them, through porn-addict-man's imagined point of view. I had no problem shedding porn boy's persona, though there was latent cruelty in leaving another host, another body, so carelessly behind me. I wondered about my relationship with Mark, newly redefined, if we engaged in this threesome, knowing what we'd recently said, knowing what Mark said he believed about my transformations. I wondered about Simon's willingness, if he believed what Mark and I had been telling him, and if we still were willing. His was a beautiful boy's body to have fun with, to live within, to have a three-man orgy with--but was it so much so, one could still do it, knowing three would go in, as it were, and only two were likely to emerge? Could I do that to someone like Simon, just to express love, if that's what it was, for Mark? Could I abandon the body of porn-addict boy, just because the chance to be sex-addict boy Simon had come along? Could I do that to myself, knowing I still had three Tonys to go, knowing I was getting further and further away from the original John--whom Simon had never met, whom Mark had recently said he loved, whom this John felt increasingly further and further from? Clothing was coming off and I still couldn't answer. The time to stop was nearing and I wasn't yet going into the next room to let Mark and Simon have more private fun. Fingertips were collective, light pressure points, without even knowing who was feeling, who was being felt by, whom. All I had was the irrelevant but lingering, inconclusive but pressing thought: eyes that saw more as ears heard. Ears that heard more as eyes saw. Men who loved another, third man, more as those two men loved.