The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace (31 page)

As soon as I returned to Jodi’s that night, I called Henry. I sat cross-legged in an armchair and spoke in a torrent. I told him all about the evening. The men and women who’d talked. The plans, the sponsors, the steps. The few times Henry and I had circled the subject of compulsion, it had been so difficult, fraught with my shame, a slow pulling of teeth. But the context of my discovering the group gave the subject a sudden space and light.

“It’s amazing to find this,” I said. “There are a lot of meetings in New York too.”

“That’s good. That’s good, I’m glad,” he kept saying.

“Are you all right, me talking about all of this?”

“Yes, yes. Just hurry home.”

I felt as if Henry was curled right there in the chair with me. Our two heads leaning together, talking out the dark and tangled mess. The demons and the hope. Nearly eight years now we’d been together, and in so many ways we were closer than ever. We’d weathered rough patches of doubt and distance. Two ex-Catholics often reticent to articulate feelings. But hard days had always grown into good ones, and here we were still together. Phone to my ear, I felt him listening the way he does, the way I tried to when he talked of his own very different demons and depressions.
This is it
, I thought.
This is the work of love. The drawing close
.

“I’m getting better, you know,” I told him. “Promise.”

Though I often hated it, wished to God it wasn’t necessary, for some years to come I got myself to those good and god-awful meetings. Grateful or grumpy, depending on the day, I would sit in circles of folding chairs and listen and talk about one day at a time and letting go, letting God. The phrases (like the meetings) were inspiring, vapid, life-saving, exasperating. There were moments when I wanted to scream at myself, at every one in the room,
How did we manage to make such a lovely thing as sex so complicated?
It was as if we’d become the embodiment of Buddha’s second Noble Truth:
The cause of all suffering is desire
. At times I felt like we were products, prisoners, of a culture gone haywire, a society fraught and frightened about sex. As if we’d gotten all twisted up by the voices of politicians and prelates and priests who’d unleashed their Western brand of shame (not to mention their legions of sad offenders) onto our bodies. Enough navel-gazing. Lighten up.
Let’s get out of here and play! Let’s move to Bali!

I had a million theories, a million methods, to distance myself from the matter at hand—health. Whatever the complicated truth of how we’d come to be who we are, and however absurd or frustrating the meetings seemed at times, I knew this work was important and good because, in the end, it had to do with awareness. It’s a deadly experience to have an addiction living you rather than you living your blessed, precious life. It’s a drag to use something as magnificent as sex to drug yourself. And here was one way of shedding much needed light, of untying the knots of a compulsion that wanted to yank you its own direction, usurp your day. For me, the opportunity to talk about this stuff was a way toward reclaiming, rediscovering sexuality as an utmost expression of presence and consciousness. Not a crazy loop of learned behavior, of disappearance, not a numbed-out habit of turning humans into soulless matter, but as an act of divine communion. As fun and life affirming. Whether gay or straight, monogamous or not, it was about being free and responsible enough, it seemed to me, to make your own
conscious
choices. The gratitude I felt that I was able to turn my feet toward a meeting and not down an alley, was enormous. Grace of this group, my compulsions began to lift for wonderful stretches of well-being. I grew more alive in my work, with my friends and family and certainly with Henry. Health brings with it peace.

But I would find, as time went on, that I had things to say and work to do that I couldn’t seem to get to in these 12-step rooms, and I would eventually drift away from attending meetings.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was walking over the rumble of something unresolved. Something stronger and smarter than me that still had a hold on things. I wasn’t really free. Not from the compulsions, not from the depressions, not from the grip of it. But the grip of what, exactly? I couldn’t name it. It was a kind of shadow, a yearning, a riddle. I thought there must be a key. A code. And if I prayed hard enough, one day I’d crack it and everything would tumble, restfully, into place. I tried to look for the key in the present, inside the good life around me.

I remained embarrassed, reticent, when things about Bob would pop out of my mouth or, more often, onto the pages of one of my countless journals. When I spoke or wrote of it I’d think:
There it is
. I’ve stumbled again upon that boring story of the boy and his counselor. That lame excuse for being a lousy adult. Enough of that.
Old news
. Get back to life. Get back to work. Get back to
here
. Have a good rehearsal. A good audition. Get home to Henry. You’re thirty-three years old, for chrissakes. Live in the now.

Funny, though, how much energy it takes in the present, to continually dismiss the past. To stomp over what you’ve so stubbornly buried. I moved through the days wondering if I’d ever arrive at the point where I could pull together the pieces of this puzzle that were waiting, but refusing, to come together to make a whole picture, a whole life.

I
T’S EASTER AGAIN;
1993. Spring is ready to burst after a long winter of forgetting. I’m on a visit to Denver. Mom still lives in the old house. She hasn’t retired and moved to New Mexico yet. I’m sleeping over the squeaky springs of my childhood bed. I yearn for this—to come home. It beckons. I arrive and find it unbearable.

It’s a bright, April afternoon. I’m sitting on the edge of my mother’s bed, staring at the phone. I’ve just finished talking with my old high school friend Dave. We’ve made plans to go see a film later that evening—a comedy. We both agreed that it’d be good to laugh. The house is empty, Mom at work, brother and sisters grown and moved away. Midafternoon, suburban silence. Deadly. Not even a lawn mower . . . too early in the season. I sit, frozen, staring at the pale yellow rotary-dial phone, trying to take measure of the storm inside my chest, wondering just what name to give it on this particular day—high anxiety? Deep depression? Plain old self-pity? Why, why is it so hard to come home? What is this thing clawing its way up the back of my throat, banging at the underside of my sternum? It’s like some body within my body—wanting out. Badly. A living thing pressing up, trying to push the stone aside to say:
Here, look at me. Deal
. A gigantic nap seems the next best move. And it is then, gazing at the carefully painted-to-look-like-an-antique nightstand, that the idea shoots through me. An electric current. A dangerous fancy.

Call him
.

It’s never actually occurred to me before. Not in this concrete way. And now it blossoms through my brain like a hit from a bong and my heart beats out a furious protest:
Absolutely not. What the fuck are you thinking. Why open that crazy door? Past is past. Period
.

“I don’t know,” I whisper, “aren’t you the least bit curious if he’s alive? If he’s out of prison? Where he might be . . . if he even fucking remembers you?”

NO
.

OK. Calm down. Just an idea
.

I walk to the kitchen and sit at the table and I think, once again, of Passover dinner the night before.

I was the gentile guest, the beloved goy, at Jodi’s parents’ home. I’d even won the game of finding the hidden matzo—the afiko-men—before the seder began. Jodi’s dad beamed as he handed me five bucks for discovering the cracker behind a photo on the windowsill. He patted me on the back.
Ah, if only you were straight
, his twinkling eyes seemed to say,
if only you were Jewish, if only Jodi and you cared to, you’d make a great son-in-law
. There was a lot of warmth there among the if-onlys.

I sat at the table next to the place left empty for the prophet Elijah and directly across from Jodi’s young cousin, Zack. Blue blazer, blond hair, sharp red tie. Handsome devil. He was twelve and rather sullen. His parents, Jodi had whispered to me in the kitchen, were in the midst of a nasty divorce, and the split, it seemed to me, was written all across his adorable face. So there I was to the left of absent Elijah, not far from the bitter herbs, athwart the handsome cousin. There I was, thirty-three facing twelve, and the equation rose up within me like an explosion:
This was nearly the math with me and Bob, but now I’m the larger sum
.

I’d quite forgotten what twelve looked like. I kept glancing at the boy, the way tufts of his hair poked up over the Passover Haggadah as he bent his face to read. He turned the pages backwards; I did, too, that’s how it worked in Hebrew—as if we were playing with the sequence of things, moving in reverse to uncover the lessons. I kept looking up, stealing peeks, thinking how it’s the details that kill me, that bring on the rush of tenderness. The fuzz across his lip and down the back of his fine neck. The two tiny pimples next to his right nostril. The way, when he stood, he jammed his hands in his pockets and leaned into his left hip, cool, casual little man. The way a quick blush moved over his smooth cheeks when I’d asked him about school, what subjects he liked. “French,” he mumbled. “Français, moi aussi,” I’d said, glad for the connection, the chance to show off. “J’adore la langue française.” His lips were deep red and tough-sweet, on-the-cusp-of-becoming. That’s it. That’s what gets me. This particular age, this particular bursting beauty. The just-about-to-become-a-man part of it. I am touched by it. Attracted. Moved. I want to tousle his hair. I want to hear again the soprano of his voice with the raspy air wrapped around it. Is this akin to the affection a parent feels sitting on the edge of the bed in the minutes before their child falls asleep? Or is this more like how it starts with coaches and counselors and priests and lonely neighbors? Does it begin with this unbearable tenderness? This longing to help the boy, to reach out? And is the fondness you are feeling a fondness for the boy in front of you or, really, some yearning that has to do with the lonesome kid within? Are you really just reaching, wanting, to offer tenderness to the boy you once were . . . before? Back there? Is this a reaching that could transform itself into manipulation, exploitation? To violation? Could you turn beauty here into prey?

At one point, after Zack read the Four Questions
(Why is this night different from all other nights?)
, I reached across the table and squeezed his arm. A rush of affection moved through me even as my own internal secret service erupted inside my head, guns drawn and voices screaming:
Drop your hands, asshole!
And, withdrawing my fingers gently from his shoulder, I felt like guilt sitting across from innocence.
What is this chaos?
I wondered.

Mr. B. asked me to read a passage.

Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who has kept us in this life, sustained us and enabled us to reach this festive season. . . .

What would it take for a scoutmaster or a camp counselor to cross the line? To get this kid in the sack? Imagine the kind of planning it would take to create that situation. Imagine the blind need, the insanity to touch this child sexually, to cross that boundary, that moral precipice.

To reach the season of our freedom in remembrance . . .

But that’s it!
I thought. I could never, ever, in a million years do that. I would never wish that turmoil on a young person. On any person. No way. Look into the eyes of that boy and see.
See
.

Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe . . .

What did Bob
see
when he looked at me? Did he look at me with tenderness, a kind of caring? Was he even capable of that? He was sick, wasn’t he? Something was wrong with him, had happened to him, how else to explain? It wasn’t me he saw or loved or was drawn to. It was an image in his own head that turned me into a thing. He took what he wanted, gave what little he could. Why do these things happen? What makes us reach across and take what we want at the expense of another? In one way or another, it rests in all of us, doesn’t it? The capability to harm.

And it was then, all this stuff roiling in my head, somewhere around the recitation of the Ten Plagues, as we dripped red wine for each disaster, that I excused myself and went to the bathroom off Jodi’s old bedroom to have a cry.
That’s twelve
, I kept thinking.
Look how little he is, how tender. He is to be cherished, protected
. And in the midst of this sorrow I was grateful, because for a moment I grasped the trespass, understood what had been lost. The thing
that matters
. My tears felt like a layer melting away, getting me closer to the thing worth being angry about. The thing worth examining.

And this was clear. Looking across at twelve, I understood that I was different from Bob. I was not and could not ever be
that
. A predator. And I understood that my care for that beautiful boy across the table was something good.

All the way home from Passover dinner my thoughts, my tears, kept tumbling.
Who knows Twelve? Twelve are the tribes of Israel . . . Who knows Twelve?
We’d sung from the Haggadah at the end of the meal. I’d forgotten. Twelve hit me like a thirty-ton truck. I was so glad to shake Zack’s firm little hand when I left Jodi’s house. “I wish you all the best, young man. You deserve it. You’re a champ.” The way he dropped his head and blushed touched me to no end.

I’m on the edge of Mom’s bed again. I’m holding a Mountain Bell phone book. I talk to my pounding chest:
Look, it’s not possible that he’ll be in here, this will all be over in a second, just looking, calm down
. I open the pages and begin to run my fingers down columns of names beginning with
C
. I keep repeating it, the hard consonant, as if it’s something caught in my throat. I hate to see that my hand is shaking. It makes me feel foolish and weak.
This’ll be over in a sec . . .