Rust and Bone: Stories

FRICTION

My name is Sam. I’m a sex addict.

Welcome, Sam.

Thanks, all of you. So, when did I first realize I had a problem—that’s the question, is it? Guess it’d be in my teens; fifteen, maybe sixteen. Standing in a bodega in the city where I grew up, only place you could find Black Bart licorice gum— remember that stuff? This woman came in for cigarettes. She wasn’t remarkable in any tangible way. I recall her elbow. The, um, inside of it—crook of her arm, really. When she reached over the counter to pay you saw these downy hairs, a raised blue vein and I wanted to touch that spot, smell and taste it. Crazy, but I wanted to shrink myself, atomize like those scientists in Fantastic Voyage, view things on a cellular level. I wanted to know everything about it—not her, you understand, I didn’t care about her history or goals or fears, any of that. Just be intimate with that unthinking portion of her. That was the first time I felt that way—my whole world collapsing in a single gesture or stimulus. Same way Hank Aaron must’ve felt swinging a bat for the first time, Ray Charles tickling those ivories. So this is it, huh? My life’s purpose. Crush homeruns. Write great music. Obsess about a woman’s elbow. Oh. To some the wheat, others the chaff. But you make do, right?

I’VE GOT THE GIRL bent over a glasstop desk with her ass in the air, my hands on her hips, thrusting diligently. Her name’s Caitlin—no, Kitten. Glass fogged under Kitten’s armpits and her nipple rings produce a glasscutter clink on the tabletop. She’s blowing Wayne and every so often pauses to exhort me to Fuck her, Fuck her hard, Fill her up, Harder, Faster, Make her cum, et cetera. Klieg lights hot on my skin and a cameraman between my spread legs, zoomed in for an insertion shot. Give it a little swizzlestick action and Kitten moans at this pedestrian maneuver. Wayne’s leaning forward, red flushmarks across his thighs caused by pressure from the table. An eagle spread-winged across Kitten’s lower back, red rose clutched in each talon.

“Give it to me,” she says. “Give it to your little whore.”

“Cut!” The director barks. “Take twenty, people.”

Break for a set change. The cameraman slots a fresh tape into his handheld, the sound tech adjusts his levels, a gopher swabs the desktop with Windex. Towel wrapped round my waist, I consult the craft table’s meager offerings—mesh sack of oranges, box of Triscuits, brown-looking bananas—select an orange and sit on the sofa.

I’m peeling the orange and stuffing rinds between the cushions when a girl sits beside me. She approaches from behind, barefooted, easing herself down stealthily as though her intention is to catch me unawares. Moderately tall, maybe five-six, long legs, narrow waist, high breasts. Naked as a jaybird. Untucking the towel, she takes me in her hand.

“Thanks,” I tell her, sectioning the orange.

“Just doing my job. Want some oil or anything?”

“That’s okay. You got a soft touch. Not like the last fluffer—like pulling weeds.”

“There are those who believe I have healing hands.”

The girl’s eyes swim with gold flecks like you’d find floating in a bottle of Goldschlager and she’s looking off across the set, into darkened corners filled with dusty props and costume racks. The boom mike guy sits on an overturned milk crate, watching. She laughs softly, though at what I’m unsure.

The orange is dry and gross, like a pulp-sucking vampire’s been at it. “Want some?”

“Hands are sorta full, here.”

“My name is Samuel. Sam Chancey. And yours is …?”

“Do you really need to know, Samuel Chancey? I mean, would it enhance any of this?”

“No,” I say. “Well, I mean, possibly. Who knows? Just like to know, is all.”

“And I’d like to fuck Douglas Fairbanks. Ain’t gonna happen.”

“Okay, well then, are you new—like, to the city?”

“What’s with the small talk? We’re way past that stage—I’m in your pants already.” She snorts out her nostrils like a pissed-off bull. “What are you, one of those touchy-feely New Age types? Bet you got healing crystals in your nightstand.”

“Don’t even know what’s in there. Toenail clippers and Dristan nasal spray, I think.”

This gets a laugh and I ask her where she’s from. She takes my hand and draws it between her legs. “Make yourself useful.” She’s wet—I mean sopping—and I’m rubbing her pussy gingerly, then faster. Her face pinches up and she makes a noise like she’s stifling a sneeze, orgasming twice in rapid succession. “Okay,” she’s whispering, more to herself than me. “Okay, okay, oooo-kay.” Breathing heavily, splotches of color on her throat, clitoris the size of a pomegranate seed. She butts her chin against my shoulder, opening her mouth to orgasm again; when she pulls away thin crescent-shaped divots, the imprint of her teeth, are visible in my flesh.

“Thanks.” A slight shudder. “That was pretty alright.”

“You’re not that hard to please.”

“I’m hypersensitive. There are drugs, but I don’t take them.”

“Drugs to do what?”

“Y’know, like, dampen the sensation. Anyway, don’t like them. Like my entire body is packed in cotton batten or something.”

“Who wants that?”

“I know, right?” She kicks a thigh over mine, hooks her foot around my calf, draws my legs wider. “Sure, it’d probably make things better in the long run, but we are who we are.”

“You betcha.” My winning smile. “Warts and all.”

Wayne Harvey sits on the sofa. A silverhaired veteran, women love my co-star’s gallant demeanor: he treats starlets as though their maidenhood remains unsullied. Overlooking the bowlegs and turkey wattle, he’s quite dashing: the Jimmy Stewart of hardcore porn. The fluffer takes him in her other hand.

“I thank you for your efforts, milady,” Wayne says. “But I’m afraid your kindly ministrations will have no effect.”

“Why—what’s the matter?”

“Wayne’s penis is broken,” I inform her.

He shoots me a sour look. “True, Samuel—if crudely put.”

It happened a few years back. Wayne was in a solo scene with this acrobatic little blonde: she was jerking and bucking and practically doing the loop-de-loop. Wayne was sweating buckets and holding on for dear life, now she’s riding him, Wayne’s thrusting up to meet her and the gal’s biting her bottom lip begging for more but they come together awkwardly and something just went snap.

Shocking but true: you can break your dick. A fibrous sheath, the tunica albunginea, surrounds the tubes and blood vessels; when erect, the sheath is stretched tight and hard beneath the skin. Severe trauma can rupture the tunica: roughly the same force it would take to, say, bust your nose. The medical term is a penile fracture—though doctors familiar with the injury use the euphemism “bent wick.”

I was standing off set and heard this awful noise: the closest comparison I can manage is the sound of a drumstick torn from a roast turkey. Then the girl’s screaming and Wayne’s hopping around hollering. His cock hung buckled at this hideous jackknifed angle and the taut skin kept it bent, no way to release to the pressure. The tip a dusky eggplant bulb and a fearsome hematoma, this dark grape-sized bubble, swelling along the break. There’s poor Wayne staring down at his mangled unit, black as blood sausage, squeezing it at the root as though that might help. I’m not going to lie: it was pretty fucking revolting.

Thankfully this story has a happy ending. Unable to summon a screenworthy erection, Wayne underwent IPP surgery—Inflatable Penis Prosthetic. The urologist made an incision at the base of Wayne’s penis and threaded an expandable bladder up the shaft, then another incision in the testicular sac to deposit a pump the size and weight of a triple-A battery. A hole drilled into his hipbone anchored the prosthesis; the sundry tubes and wires were tucked behind his abdominal wall. Damn thing works like a charm: Wayne pumps up and wades on in, then deflates and lounges around until it’s time to re-inflate for action. Porno’s Six Million Dollar Man.

“Are you sure?” the fluff girl asks him. “Really, I don’t mind.”

“Well, if it’s no bother.” Wayne smiles. “But please view my lack of arousal as an expression of my physical limitations, not a comment on your skills.”

The two of them fall into an easy repartee, the sort Wayne excels at: meaningless and lighthearted, subjects ranging from recent movies to stale jokes to articles he’s read on some humanitarian topic: Save the Monkey-Eating Eagles, Liberate the Goatherds of East Timor, Thalidomide Babies March for World Peace, et cetera. She even laughs at Wayne’s ghastly puns: I once knew a bailiff who moonlighted as a bartender, my dear. He served subpoena coladas. Get the girl off and she won’t even pay attention to me—how’s that for gratitude? My nose is distinctly out of joint.

Before the final scene we experience what might be charitably described as a “technical malfunction.” More pointedly, Wayne’s prosthesis … well, explodes. The guy’s pumping up, cock rising steadily, then this panicked expression crosses his face and he’s scrabbling at his crotch crying, “Sweet lord!,” clawing at his balls and I’m wondering is he looking for the pump in there, an off switch or something and his cock’s just monstrous, I mean red and swollen and Wayne’s staring down with an expression of sick dread then this pop, not loud exactly but percussive like a pistol fired under wet sand and his cock—Christ, it expands and Wayne’s on the floor screaming bloody blue murder and there’s this noise like when you blow up a balloon and let go except it’s coming out his pisshole.

“Man down!” hollers the director. “Jesus, man down! ”

Wayne’s rolling around with his eyes rolled to the white, mouth open but no sound coming out. Two minutes ago you’re cracking one-liners and detailing the plight of East Timorian shepherds; now your penis is curled like a fishhook and blood’s leaking out. It’s a funny old world.

The fluff girl kneels beside him. “Call an ambulance!”

I snatch Kitten’s cellphone—she’s actually talking to someone as all this goes on—and dial 911. “God, man—are you okay?”

The way Wayne’s glaring at me—yeesh, if looks could kill. Of course, I’ve now found myself on hand at both his penile catastrophes. Could he think I’m somehow responsible—a voodoo doll? A miniature wax penis stuck full of pins?

When the ambulance arrives the attendants look puzzled, then, after a quick examination of the set and its players, get the idea. They

heap cold packs onto Wayne’s groin, strap him to a stretcher. “Look on the bright side,” the cameraman says. “Makes for a dilly of a lawsuit.” The fluff girl insists on accompanying Wayne to Emerge. I offer to tag along but the attendants won’t allow it. As the ambulance pulls away she’s staring wistfully out the rear window—who’s she looking at, if not me?

My name is Sam. I’m a sex addict.

Welcome, Sam.

Thanks, everyone. So, what have I lost—that’s tonight’s question? Everything, I guess you could say. Job, family, security. The normal life. Not that you’d find it surprising. The support of such systems requires some sort of a … veneer. A veneer of normalcy, right? Repeat the mantra: Happy family, happy family, happy family. But the secret was doing more damage than the truth. Told my friends, my boss, my co-workers. Full disclosure; the unobstructed facts. Four hundred sexual partners over the past five years, nameless and unremembered. What else can you do? Beg forgiveness. Grovel. I was demoted but kept my job. My wife and I entered counseling. Inside I realized it couldn’t last. The person I was desperately trying to be—the husband, the family man—was a fraud. I’m incapable of that change. It’s not that I’m weak or spineless: the process of transformation demands you become a whole new person. I’m not saying change is impossible or that you or you or you won’t make a clean break; I sincerely wish it for everyone. But it’s simply not in me and I won’t apologize. Right now it’s about learning how to cope, make my way as best I can without hurting anyone. That’s why I do dirty movies: no commitment, no lies, no guilt, nobody gets harmed. Love and responsibility do not factor into the equation. Like those signs you see in national parks: Take only pictures, Leave only footprints.

EARLY EVENING by the time we wrap. A crease of sunset lines the horizon, interrupted by the high rises of downtown: buildings I’d once travailed in, wheeled and dealed, buildings I’m now effectively banned from. Bright pinprick spires burn in foothills beyond the city, derricks venting sour gas, flames frayed by a south-blowing wind. A pale crescent moon sits like a toy boat in the gap between two dark mountains. Across the road an empty lot hosts abandoned shopping carts, old tires and castoff watertanks rusting in the nettles, a junked car with garbage bags taped over its shattered windows. A huge scavenger bird with a raw boiledlooking head perches on the car’s spavined roof: a buzzard, though to the best of my knowledge such creatures are not native to this part of the planet.

Take a Phillips screwdriver from my glovebox, remove the license plates from Wayne’s Buick Century, screw them to my Chevy Cavalier. A dastardly deed but Wayne won’t catch any heat: got to figure he’ll be laid up for a week. Ironclad alibi. Settle behind the driver’s seat, doff my trousers, arrange a layer of Kleenex between my spread legs. Rev the engine, pull out of the lot.

This old Western movie crystalized it for me. Black-and-white, which generally I cannot abide. There was this cowboy and his horse, a Palomino. The cowboy doted on his mount—fed it apples and sugar cubes, brushed cockleburrs out of its mane with a wire comb. Towards the end they’re on a wagontrain trekking through the Sierra Madres when the horse is slowed by a split hoof. The cowboy jams his pistol to the horse’s eye and pulls the trigger. Why’d you do that? the wagon-master says. Thought you loved that horse. The cowboy spits and says, Nossir, but I do love horses. That is to say, I cherish the nature of horses— hardworking, reliable, docile. But alla them is that way. Can always find y’self another horse.

Now, it’s conceivable to cherish the nature of women, right? They’re beauteous and supple, willing to accommodate the man who knows how best to stroke them. But that’s on a whole: you might feel nothing on a case-by-case basis. A sex addict’s relationship is with sex, not people. For addicts it’s crucial to break any object of desire down to its base elements: tits, asses, lips, hips, cocks, cunts. The process of dehumanization is like a moral imperative.

I dearly cherish the nature of woman.

Cruise streets in the gray twilight, past decrepit rowhouses and shops with gated windows, homeless persons and lean winter dogs hunched at the mouths of go-nowhere alleys, a boarded church cloaked in the shadowy overhang of tall maples, through cones of lamplight casting their blue nocturnal glow, on over a swing bridge spanning the blighted waterway. Mammoth construction cranes stand still as obelisks against the quilted sky. Difficult to shift gears with my pants rucked around my ankles.

Scan the sidewalks but fail to spot a suitable candidate: here a bagwoman, less human being than agglomeration of filthy ponchos trundling a shopping cart with a frozen wheel; there a chick resembling an ambulatory fire hydrant, bull-dyke by the looks of it, hieing a chowdog on a length of heavy-gauge chain. Real slim pickens. Call my pal Danny Dewson; we co-sponsor one another through Sexaholics Anonymous.

“Hey. It’s me.”

“It’s you,” says Danny. “How goes the battle?”

“Gotta be honest with you …”

“Honesty’s the best policy, Samuel.”

“So here it is: I’m cruising. Right now, cruising.”

Silence on his end. “Are you, like, past the point of no return? Stripped and ready to rip?”

“Cocked, locked, ready to rock,” I tell him.

“Oh, man.” Danny clicks his tongue. “Oh, man-oh-man. Where are you?”

“Corner of Bonita and Empress. Between the peepshow theater and that rub-n-tug joint.”

“Sure, near that bar with the room in the back.” Danny’s fingers drum the wall beside his phone. “Listen, you probably ought to just let yourself go on this one, okay? You can fall off the wagon every once in a while, so long as you hop right back on.”

This is exactly what I need to hear. “Everyone cheats a little now and then, isn’t that so? I mean, it’s not the end of the world, is it?”

“Of course it isn’t,” says Danny. “Of course not.”

“And hey, not like I’m committing a mortal sin or anything.”

“Well I’m really not up on all that, Samuel.”

“But you think it’s okay? This one time?”

“I’m gonna greenlight you, here.”

“Bless you, Danny. Bless your heart.”

“Stay strong, brother.”

The moment I hang up she’s walking down the sidewalk—we’re talking on cue. Materializing out of thinned mist like an apparition, some vaporous half-glimpsed angel, not entirely real. Wearing tight blue jeans ripped at the knee and some sort of fur-trimmed coat. Too far to make out exact features but that’s not critical.

Pull alongside her, roll down the window. “Excuse me? Excuse me, miss?”

She checks up and hunkers down on the sidewalk. At this unforgiving range her face does not hold up: teeth shot to hell and this oddshaped growth, a carbuncle I guess you’d say, growing out the side of her nose.

“Lookin’ for somethin’?”

“Well, you see, I’m sort of lost.” It’s a struggle to keep my body still, I’m masturbating so furiously. “Do you know the way … to the highway?”

She leans forward, resting her wrists on the windowframe. “That what you’re really after, cowboy?” Her eyelashes are clotted with pebbles of mascara and the furred collar of her coat smells like a drowned rodent—Christ, she’s not making this easy. “Let’s not pussyfoot around.”

“Well, maybe we can work something out. If you could just … lean a bit closer …”

She thrusts her head through the window, face inches from mine as though this forced intimacy might somehow seal the deal and I surrender control with a moan, splashing the steering column as a feeling of absolute peace floods through me, ecstatic well-being of a sort experienced only by Buddhist monks and perhaps tiny infants—enlightening peace. I’m beset by these heartwarming thoughts towards this woman, dreams of a good life and healthy future, happiness and love but this mini-satori is fleeting and I’m overtaken by a sense of futility known to few on earth, brought about by the inconceivability of these dreams for this woman or myself or anyone really, staring through the windshield at a night sky spread with stars, the conceivable worlds couched in those dark sprawling spaces between the light host to alien lifeforms possessed of such nobility and decency as I will never even fathom, and this sense of incalculable desolation draws about me, I who remain so trivial, insignificant, tenuous, and specklike.

Among addicts, the act of release frequently triggers feelings of ecstatic euphoria followed by periods of profound remorse, paranoia, and depression.

“Well,” the woman assumes in a pragmatic tone, “you’re not a cop.” Her eyes narrow to feline slits. “Really should charge you for that.”

“Thanks.” Slip the gearshift into first, work a crumpled twenty out of my pants pocket, toss it on the street and pull away. “Sorry about that.”

“Hey, anytime …”

There are over three trillion nerve receptors in the human body. Fully seventy percent are located in erogenous zones. This is what you’re fighting. Every minute of every day. It’s an uphill battle.

My name is Sam. I’m a sex addict.

Welcome, Sam.

Lisa, my wife—ex-wife—and a six-year-old daughter. Met Lisa out East; went to the same college. She had this air like she’d swallow you up and blow you out in bubbles if you strayed too near. I mistook the effect she had on me for love. She could’ve had anyone. She chose me. I don’t love her, but I do care. If she were penniless, I’d support her. If she were dying I’d give her blood, a kidney, whatever. Her mistake was believing it was within her power to change me. My daughter, Ellie … I love her deeply. Looking at her I realize I’m still capable of that. When I think of her in idle moments, it’s always some mundane task—brushing her teeth, tying her shoelaces. Silly, day-to-day stuff. I never allow a week to pass without seeing her, calling her, letting it be known how much I care for her. I used to wish the love I felt for Ellie were somehow able to … stretch, encompass more people. But it can’t, and that’s okay. I once believed my heart was somehow impoverished, but now I recognize it’s no larger or smaller than the next man’s—my heart is simply different.

THE HOUSE IS AN AWKWARD DUPLEX with swayback roof, mullioned windows, a single-car drive. We used to live in a big house on the ritzy side of town back in the Days of Yore, epoch of the Steady Job and Frequent Promotions and Healthy Bank Balance, also the Weekly Business Junkets and Late Nights at the Office and Dirty Dark Secret.

Lisa answers my knock in a housecoat, hair wet from a bath. In the darkened family room the TV casts flickering luminescence on the walls.

“Hi there. Hoping maybe I could see Ellie for a bit.”

“What are you doing here?” My ex-wife crosses her arms over her breasts. “You get Ellie every other weekend, you know that.”

“Well, yeah, of course, but I was hoping maybe a few minutes …”

“You stink, Sam.”

“Do I?” It’s genuinely upsetting I failed to recognize this. “Oh, jeez. Could I wash up?”

Lisa purses her lips. I consider the single worst act I’d committed during our marriage. Probably the time I returned from a whorefilled weekender, gave her the clap, then halfheartedly argued she’d given it to me. Yeah, that’s the one.

“I wouldn’t ask but I’d really like to see her. Half an hour and I’m out of your hair.”

She steps aside. “Okay, for a little while. But clean yourself up.”

In the bathroom scrub at a stiff patch on my jeans then dry off with Lisa’s Conair. Unzip my fly and push the blowdryer into my pants until the heat becomes unbearable and switch it off. In the medicine cabinet find a bottle of perfume and give myself a liberal spritzing.

My daughter sits on the sofa watching a kids’ show. In the room’s muted light she appears somehow insubstantial, a flickering hologram of herself.

“Hey, kiddo.”

When she smiles I see she’s lost a baby tooth, upper left canine. “What’re you doing here, Daddy?”

“Seemed like the thing to do at the time.” Sitting beside her, the cushions compress in such a way that Ellie’s body tilts into the soft crook beneath my arm. “What ya watching?”

“The animals talk.” Her body shrugs against mine. “They live on a river. The guinea pig’s funny.”

On the TV screen a mob of industrious creatures—hamster and mouse, turtle, a duck—cavort in a drift of popcorn. The guinea pig’s voice reminds me of Jimmy Cagney: Youuu doity raaat! Youuu kilt my bruddah!

“You smell like a girl,” Ellie says and for a moment I’m filled with a dark and predatory dread until I realize she’s talking about the perfume.

“Spilled some of your mom’s smelly stuff on me. You don’t like it?”

Another shrug. “Okay, I guess.”

I settle my arm around her shoulders and squeeze. Feel the movement of her chest and try to match my breathing to hers, our lungs expanding and contracting in perfect synchronism until I fear hyperventilation. We watch in silence; I’m content to simply be near her, drinking in her warmth and calm as a camel does water for a long desert trek.

Lisa comes in with a tray of milk and Fig Newtons. When she hands me a glass our fingers brush and she pulls away as though burned. Ellie finishes one cookie and reaches for another.

“No more,” Lisa says. “Too much sugar before bed gives you nightmares.”

“I like nightmares,” my daughter reasons.

The program reaches a heartwarming conclusion, riverbank denizens throwing a party. The hamster’s zipping around in a miniature motorboat, shiny black eyes bugged out in abject terror. Sitting with my daughter’s head rested in the crook of my arm watching the rodents frolic all I can think about is female genitalia, a sheer wall of vaginas like some sort of cliff, furred pussies, shaved pussies, blond and black and ginger-haired pussies, and I’m standing at the base of this forbidding structure stark naked wearing a pair of blue-tinted skigoggles and then I’m climbing, grabbing onto labias for purchase, searching for sure handholds in the loosest ones, jamming toes and fingers into moist slits wishing for crampons or a bag of talc. Ellie shifts against me and I’m trying desperately to think of anything else, marigolds–seahorses–merry-go-rounds but nothing works, I’m stuck with the pussy-cliff, scaling its slick alien veneer like an intrepid mountaineer tackling the perilous northface ascent on K2.

What kind of person harbors such thoughts? I mean, really, what kind?

Addicts are frequently beset by bitter self-loathing in response to erotic fantasies over which they exercise no control.

“Well,” I say, “about time I hit the dusty trail.”

“Stay,” Ellie says. “VeggieTales is on next.”

Giant talking cucumbers. Yes, just what the doctor ordered.

“I’d better not, honey. Got to get to my meeting. See you this weekend, ’kay?”

Give her a big hug. Crumbs on her top lip, breath smelling of milk. Lisa follows me to the door.

“You’re good with her, Sam. I’ll give you that.”

“What can I say. I love her, I guess.”

She smiles in a way that makes me sad. Perhaps intuiting something, she asks, “What are you thinking about?”

Scaling a cliff of vaginas.

“Oh, nothing.”

“C’mon.”

“Well, okay … I was reading this book the other day. There was a character who … well, he screwed watermelons. At night he’d cross into his neighbor’s melon patch, cut a hole in a watermelon with a penknife. The Moonlight Melonhumper. And I guess I got to thinking it wouldn’t be so bad, would it—balling melons? Grow some in your backyard or just, y’know, keep a few on hand. Whenever the urge struck you could slip away and take care of business. What I’m saying is, it’d be possible to lead a normal life.” A brittle laugh. “Humping watermelons. Jesus Christ, Lisa, wish that did it for me.”

“Is this something they advocate in your group?” she says. “This kind of … frankness?”

“Sort of. I’m not certain.”

“Well,” she says stiffly, “goodnight. I’ll drop Ellie off Saturday morning.”

It’s 8:45, giving me fifteen minutes to make group. Crossing the front lawn the cellphone buzzes in my pocket. It’s set to vibrate on account of the pleasant shiver it sends up my balls; I’ve been known to slip it into my underwear and ring myself from payphones.

“It’s me,” says Danny Dewson.

“It’s you. How goes the battle?”

“Well, Samuel, I’m gonna level with you—”

“Always pays to keep things on the level.”

“Right. So here it is: I’d really like to stick my … rod … through this … hole.”

“Where are you?”

“That peepjoint off Sanford. Between the second-run porno house and the strip club.”

“Right, a ways up from that place with the secret knock.” Unlock the car, settle into the driver’s seat. “I think it’s okay this time. As setbacks go, it’s minor.”

“That’s true, isn’t it? Not like I’m some kind of devil for wanting to do this, right?”

“Of course you aren’t, Danny. Of course not.”

“And hey, there might not even be a girl on the other side, right?”

“Sure,” I tell him. “Who knows what’s on the other side.”

“So you think it’s okay? This one time?”

“Gonna give you a free pass.”

“Hey, that’s super, Samuel. Just super.”

“Stay strong, brother.”

My name is Sam. I’m a sex addict.

Welcome, Sam.

Nothing extraordinary. My dad was a freelance contractor;Mom a teacher. I can only imagine their sex life was normal,maybe a bit dreary. It wasn’t like Dad would’ve beat me had he caught me masturbating; Mom didn’t breastfeed me till I was fifteen. Hope I don’t come off like an asshole, but I think the Deep Dark Secret rationale is a crock. Don’t know why I am the way I am, but it doesn’t boil down to one particular event or deep emotional scar. No one’s to blame. Some people are built differently, that’s all. The problem I see is when we stand against our nature, try to be someone else. The whole martyr mentality makes me sick—the nobility of suffering, to hurt is to love, all that bullshit. Somewhere along the line it’s become fashionable to be who we’re not, squeeze ourselves into cubbyholes, spend our lives in abject misery to disguise our basic selves. Hey, if your nature is selfless, giving, honorable, open, unabashed, forthright, decent or whatever great—wonderful, bully for you. We’re not all built the same way. Doesn’t mean we’re degenerates.

SEXUAL COMPULSIVES ANONYMOUS gathers Tuesdays in the Louis Riel Library’s conference room. I frequent several groups: Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (Wednesdays in St. Peter’s parish hall), Sexaholics Anonymous (Friday afternoons at the Live and Let Live Club), Renewal from Sexual Addiction (Sundays at First United Methodist). Every once in a while I’ll spot a familiar face on the street or in a restaurant and realize I am part of a secret cabal, a roaming addictive underclass inhabiting this, and every, city.

Nod to the librarian, eyeing her legs, weave my way through periodical racks and paperback carousels and newspapers threaded on wooden dowels to the conference room. The room’s decorated in a Thanksgiving motif: shellacked gourds and ears of maize, pie-plate turkeys with tissue paper tails. Table scattered with crayons and children’s books left over from the Reading Buddies program: Digging Dinosaurs, Where the Wild Things Are, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. The usual suspects: Baney Jones and Owen and Bette. Seat myself beside the fourth person, who I’m surprised and more than a little excited to find here.

“Hey,” I say to her. “How’s Wayne? He going to be alright?”

“He’ll be fine,” the fluff girl answers in a whisper. “Ambulance guy shot him up with morphine so he wasn’t feeling much of anything. I’m going to check back on him tomorrow.”

“Great news. Maybe I can come with?”

She shakes her head. “Don’t think so. Wayne isn’t your biggest fan.”

“Why—what did I ever do?”

She cocks an eyebrow.

“Are you insinuating I wished Wayne’s dick would break? That I somehow rigged his penis to … explode? ”

“Mr. Chancey.” The addiction counselor is maybe twenty-five, recent college grad with this high breathy voice like he’s got a penny-whistle lodged in his throat. “If you could save your conversation for the break. Bette, please go on.”

Bette O’Neal is a large woman: I believe the euphemism is Rubenesque. She’s a dual addict: an overeating nymphomaniac.

“Well, okay, so I’m at my son’s high-school basketball game, alright? He’s seventeen, a senior. The ah, the point guard or something. So they’re playing and it’s a close game, five points, around that and I’m in the stands which’re crowded but not too crowded—not a playoff game or like that.” Bette sips from the liter bottle of Pepsi she’s brought. “There’s this guy on the other team—boy I guess I should say, but who knows? What’s the legal age nowadays?”

“Eighteen.” The counselor’s name is Joey. “The legal age of adulthood is eighteen.”

“Oh. So okay, maybe legally he’s a boy, but a lot of it depends on maturity and … like, upbringing, doesn’t it? Not like I actually did anything—I mean, physically speaking. Anyway this guy, boy, whatever, he’s tall and lanky and … lithe I guess, which I know’d usually describe a girl or like a cat but this boy, he really was lithe. I’m sitting there in the stands totally consumed—can’t take my eyes off him, the way he’s running up and down the court. The gym’s got that smell you get when guys or gals or people, just any old people, find themselves in close contact. Like sweat but I don’t know, deeper than sweat. Know what I’m talking about?” A few people nod and Bette says, “So I’m staring at this boy and touching myself. Brought a coat on account of the chill and lay it across my lap. Strange but I didn’t imagine fucking, his hands on my tits, my mouth on his cock, any of that—just watching him run and jump was enough. The biggest turn-on was his youth: he was young and clean and probably disease-free, which, even though I wasn’t fucking him I still felt was, y’know, a plus. Orgasmed five times real quick, like a string of firecrackers going off.” Sip of Pepsi. “That was my week.”

“Thank you for sharing, Bette.” Joey’d winced every time Bette used the words fucking, cock, or tits. “While it’s commendable you didn’t act on your urges, you must admit such behavior is not socially acceptable.”

“Ah, lay offa her,” says Baney Jones, a sixty-three-year-old serial exposer.

“I’m not on her, Mr. Jones,” says Joey. “We’re trying to create a supportive and honest environment. That means critical appraisal of—”

“Ah, your mother wears army boots!” Baney slaps a liverspotted palm on the table. “You’re giving her the gears! Reading her the riot act!”

“It’s okay,” Bette says. “I’m a big girl, sweetheart; I can handle it.”

Baney tugs a plaid-pattern porkpie hat tight over his skull, shooting Joey a glare from beneath the brim. Joey elects to move on. “Owen, is there anything you’d like to contribute this evening?”

Early twenties with a mop of sandy-reddish hair, Owen Traylor’s a tragic case: working a summer construction crew on break from college, he was struck—impaled, is I guess the right word—with a length of rebar: it split the left side of his head behind the eye and the pressure forced a portion of Owen’s brain through the wound. Thankfully the hospital’s got a crack neurosurgeon on staff who was able to patch Owen’s skull in a grueling ten-hour procedure. He’s damn lucky but something’s still jakey in his noggin, a few mis-crossed wires because Owen’s blowing his load all the time. We’re talking fifteen, twenty times a day. Riding the bus, say, or shopping for deli meats at the supermarket and blammo—Mount Vesuvius. Poor bastard wears adult diapers but the constant convulsions have turned his abs hard as granite. Owen’s not an addict so much as a neurological anomaly but attends regular as clockwork, and if it helps him, hey, that’s peachy.

“Went on a date the other night,” he says. “Sandy, that girl in my sociology class.”

“You handed round a photo, didn’t you?” I ask. “Black hair, right? Green eyes?”

“Ah, yes,” Baney says. “Fine bosoms, as I recall. High and proud.”

“Right,” Owen goes on, “that’s her. She’s real smart and talented— she painted my portrait, did I tell you?—and, I don’t know, just, oh you could say, great. She’s got a fantastic laugh and I’m not a funny guy, not naturally, but still I’m always trying to say something to crack her up.”

Joey taps his ballpoint pen on a legal pad. “Is Sandy aware of your physical handicap?”

“It never came up.” Owen shifts uncomfortably in his orange cafeteria-style chair. “We been seeing each other for a month or so, on and off. The other night things got, well … intimate.”

Everybody leans forward perceptibly. Baney says, “Now we’re down to brass tacks.”

“Mr. Jones,” Joey warns, “please.”

“So we’re at her place watching TV on the couch. One thing led to another and …”

“How did one thing lead to another?” Bette wants to know. “Don’t skimp, Owen. Don’t give us the ole dot-dot-dot to skip past the good bits.”

“This is a sexual recovery group,” says Joey, “not Penthouse Forum.”

“Well,” Owen says, “we kissed and then, uh, then some other stuff. But when we were, y’know, expressing our love, I found I couldn’t … it was impossible to … like, do what it is I do twenty times a day.”

“Are you saying,” Joey asks, “you had difficulty reaching orgasm?”

“The guy who loses it in elevators and movie theaters and in church, for god’s sake, this same guy can’t deliver when it counts.” Owen shakes his head. “Can you believe the irony?”

“So what?” says Bette. “Did she get off?”

“Think so.”

“So what’s the big deal?”

“I thought,” Owen says, confused, “it was important to a woman that she satisfy her man. Like, a confirmation of her skills or something.”

The fluff girl snorts. “Don’t care so long as I get mine.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Bette says.

Owen looks relieved. “So you think it’s okay?”

“Did you go down on her ungrudgingly?” I ask.

Owen nods, blushing.

“Then she’s yours for life, m’man.”

Joey claps his hands and clicks his teeth. “Moving on! We have a new member with us tonight. Please introduce yourself and tell us a little.”

The fluff girl speaks. “Hello, everyone. My name is Beatrice. I’m a sex addict.”

“Welcome, Beatrice,” we say in unison.

“Just moved to town. I grew up out East but lived all over. I’ve got reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome; basically, I’m hypersensitve to touch.” As if to prove this, she traces a finger along the tabletop and down the cool steel leg. “Feel everything at a heightened sensory level. When I get with a man I’m not looking for love or even sex … I’m after friction. Men are just … vehicles, is the medical term. Friction delivery systems.”

“I see,” says Joey. “What do you hope to accomplish here?”

“I’m hoping to get laid.”

“I like your moxie!” Baney says.

“Beatrice,” Joey says dourly, “that is not at all the ob-jec-tive.”

“Wait a minute, now, hear me out.” She holds her hands out in the manner of a policewoman halting traffic. “We’re all addicts here, aren’t we? And the nature of addiction—all addiction—is to hurt. Hurt yourself, hurt others. Am I lying?” Beatrice’s fingertips running over the weave of her jeans. “And our addiction’s different, isn’t it? Alcoholics don’t romance the bottle or apologize after drinking it; drug addicts don’t worry about knocking their needles up. Our addiction is intensely personal so we need to be responsible. Find that fine line between our needs and the existence of others.” Beatrice’s fingertips moving along the table’s gum-pebbled underside. “It’s okay for a viper to lie down with another viper—all vipers know their nature, right? Problem’s when the viper lies down with the lamb.”

“Is that how you see yourself—a viper?” Joey asks. “And the others here—vipers?”

Beatrice shrugs. “I’ve been to a lot of these groups. One thing never changes: people don’t admit their flaws. Always the rough childhood, the cold wife, stress at the office, the same old piss and moan. Nobody ever stands up and says, Listen: the awful things I do come from a defect in my basic human character, deeply rooted and inseparable from who I am. Never once will you hear that. So, yeah, guess I’m a viper. Safe childhood, caring parents, but still. Don’t wish to harm anyone but your urges get the better of you sometimes, right? That’s why I’m here: searching for someone like me. Only responsible way to go.”

ME AND OWEN hunker outside the library doors, smoking. Wind whips through the courtyard, litter scuttling along the cement walls. Two empty vodka bottles wrapped in a white plastic bag perch atop an overflowing garbage can. Beatrice steps out in a leather windjammer.

“Could I bum one of those?” she asks me.

“Don’t know—do vipers share cigarettes? I mean, in the wild?”

Standing there in the courtyard’s thin yellow light I am again struck by just how beautiful this girl is: Helen of Troy, sack-the-city-torchthe-ramparts kind of beauty, the sort that leaves a wake of helpless shattered men, man-husks eaten out and hollow and left to contemplate the paths they’d taken to claim that beauty in those foolish moments when they felt themselves capable.

“You’re pretty hot, Beatrice.” Hand over my pack. “I’m saying, for a reptile and all.”

“Aw, ain’t you a peach.”

“Just got to town, huh? Where from?”

“Couple different places.”

“So, why here?”

“Weary of the same places, the same faces.” She hums the opening bars of a song which, though familiar, I cannot place. “Moving on down the line.”

“You found a job pretty quick.”

“Yeah, well, I worked for a director out West. He made a call.”

“You do good work.”

Beatrice’s long pale fingers caress the cigarette. “Nothing much to it, is there? Not talking rocket science. And how long you been in the biz?”

“Few years. Started after my divorce.”

“Like it?”

“What’s not to like?” Then: “Anyway, it’s safer. Everyone knows the stakes. Everything’s laid out in black and white.”

She fixes me with a look, the import of which I cannot fully discern. “You think?”

“Yeah I think. Sure I think.” A shrug. “Or something. Just my dime-store philosophy.”

Baney and Bette return from a coffee shop up the street. We stand in the frosty courtyard, knit shoulder-to-shoulder against the wind. The doors open and shut, mothers and children, college students, old women with satchels of paperback romances passing into and out of the library’s welcoming light. I wonder whether any of them pause to consider us huddled here—what might they think? Beatrice’s hand moves against Owen’s side, a catlike pawing gesture and Owen smiles feebly, looking away. When she laughs the plume of her cinnamoned breath wafts past my face.

Bette shivers. “Got to get out of this cold. Fat chick with thin blood—I’m an enigma.”

Baney says, “I could use an enema myself.”

The others head inside. Beatrice grinds the butt under her boot heel. “You had a wife?”

“For six years. Swell job, big house.”

“Kids?”

“A daughter.”

“Love them?”

“Don’t know I ever loved my wife. Thought I did for a while. Love my kid to death. Wish there was more room in my heart.”

“So, you’ve hurt people.”

“A lot. Haven’t you?”

She nods. “Tell them up front who you are and what you’re about but still, everyone thinks they’re the one’s gonna change you. I’m not gonna change. Sure it’s miserable sometimes, but it’s constant misery trying to be something else. This is …”

“The lesser of two evils.”

“Yeah.” A smile. “Like that.”

Down the street two faceless women scream at one another in an unknown dialect until the rumble of a watertruck drowns their voices and through a gap in the courtyard’s security fence, a lengthwise slit between decaying housing projects, the moon shivers on the hammered face of the canal.

“What are you thinking?” Beatrice says.

“Don’t know.” I shrug, suddenly despondent. “Fucking.”

“Fucking who?”

“You. Bette. The librarian. Anyone. The ‘who’ isn’t critical—that’s the problem.”

“Head back inside?”

“I’m easy.”

She grasps my jacket sleeve. “Come on.”

My name is Sam. I’m a sex addict.

Welcome, Sam.

Do I believe love is possible? Sure. I mean, of course. Certainly as an abstract concept: immaculate love, God’s love, whatever. And you see it every day: a couple passes you on the street and you get this sense that, man, those two really love one another. The way I feel about Ellie—that’s love, isn’t it? I don’t really know. It’s possible, in that anything is possible. But I’ve made a vow to be totally honest about who and what I am; how many rational women would want to involve themselves? Still, I’m an optimist. The understandings and intensities would be different, but there’s always that chance. It may not be love by anyone else’s definition, but whatever works, right? So, yeah, I think it’s possible. Absolutely I do.

STREETS AGLITTER WITH FROST. My eyes follow the yellow dash-dash-dash of the median strip running along dark tarmac. Roads forlorn and devoid of human life. A sickle moon cuts through a bank of threadbare nightclouds to grace shops and offices with a washed-out pall. Beatrice in the passenger’s seat fiddling with the radio; every so often she says, “Left here,” or “Hang a right at the doughnut shop,” leading me through the city grid to an unknown destination. A lamplit billboard towers over the shipyard, the tanned blow-dried visage of some local paragon I should recognize but do not staring down benevolently and I’m left feeling ashamed, the way you feel bumping into a person who knows your name when you cannot recall theirs— ashamed for being unable to remember what it was you’d shared together, however meaningless. Beatrice twists the radio knob and the speakers come to life: a string of garbled syllables devolving into a scream or howl, low and mournful and ongoing, the signal weak, crackling with static and I imagine a ghostly deep-space transmission, some doomed cosmonaut shrieking into an intercom, fishbowl helmet starred with cracks and the steamwhistle screech of pressure hammering his eardrums, a dead man’s voice traveling through the empty vacuum of space like a message in a bottle washed ashore on the far reaches of the AM dial.

“Weird,” Beatrice says.

“Yeah. Freaky.”

“Swing left up at the side street. Almost there.”

The building is a deteriorating five-story in the packing district. Faded scorchmarks rise, black tongues against the gouged masonry, scars of some long-ago fire. The intermittent signature of a strobelight flashes across high casement windows. Adjacent parking lot uncommonly packed: BMWs and Mercedes rowed alongside pickups and rusteaten Dodges.

“What is this place? Looks like it should be foreclosed.”

“Most likely is,” Beatrice says. “This is a one-night-only sort of deal.”

Trail her to a green-painted door set between a pair of dumpsters. Her knock is answered by a black man with the rough dimensions of a Morgan Fort gun safe. Beatrice whispers something: apparently the safeword because the man steps aside, allowing just enough room for her to squeeze past. The man is easing his planetary bulk back into position when Beatrice informs him I’m her escort; with a world-weary sigh, he steps aside once more.

“What’s the story?” Follow Beatrice up a narrow staircase. Walls graffiti tagged, holes punched through plaster to reveal corroded wires and sodden pink insulation. “Are you leading me into ruin? A snuff film crew? Black-market organ farmers?”

“It’s a traveling showcase.” She stops, glancing back at me. “Different cities, different participants. I’ve done it a few times.” A wink. “Surprised you don’t know about it.”

At the top of the stairs a girl with a pierced bellybutton stands beneath a sign reading Coat Check. Doff my jacket and hand it over. She taps the sign with a hot-pink fingernail and I notice it in fact reads Clothes Check. Beatrice and I strip, turning our shirts and jeans over to the girl. She hands me a claim chit but I’ve no idea where to stow it. Beatrice slips hers under her tongue. I do the same.

The girl positions herself before a sliding metal door. Spraypainted on the door in pink letters matching her fingernails is the word GOMORRAH.

“Pitter-patter,” says Beatrice, hopping lightly from one foot to the other, “let’s get at ’er.”

The first thing to hit you is heat: this warmth closing around your body. The second is smell: sweet and bitter at once, the scent of bodies in close contact. The way Bette said: like sweat, but deeper. As my eyes adjust I see we’re in a warehouse. Steel girders row the vaulted ceiling; small creatures, birds or mice, scuttle across rusted A-beams. Strobelights set on telescopic tripods throw kinetic pinwheels on the walls and floor. A DJ spins trance music on a pair of portable turntables.

“Welcome to the viper’s nest.” Beatrice’s lips next to my ear. “Or is it viper’s pit?”

She leads me to the clutch of naked bodies. Thirty or forty people sprawled on swaths of thick velvet. Arms and elbows, calves and knees; occasionally a head will crest, person taking a deep breath as though they’ve been trapped under water. No one speaks; no voices at all save the sporadic sigh or shuddering exhale. Beatrice is gone, her body twined with a dozen others, amalgamate now, indistinguishable.

Wade in slowly, as a swimmer immerses himself in cold surf. A hand reaches out, grabbing my calf, pulling me down; I’ll go willingly enough. Bodies press against mine, limbs hairy and smooth; breasts pushed into my face, a perfumed arm wrapped round my head urging me on; someone’s hand, cold and brittle as a talon, clamps onto my leg and delivers a nasty pinch; my lips on thighs and asses, in vaginas and mouths, the crooks of elbows, the undersides of knees; a hard cock crosses the underside of my throat, across lips, gone. A faceless stranger with a dextrous tongue, woman or man I cannot tell, performs fellatio with such wanton bravado I’m left on the verge of weeping. Men and women congregate in well-dressed groups in the warehouse shadows, silent observers. A man stands amidst the teeming surge and emits a high gibbering shriek like some jungle creature and in the plated moonlight falling through the casement windows he appears skinless and I’m thinking about my daughter standing in a green summer field, Ellie’s smiling face lit by the July sun. Peace and serenity I’m thinking. Wayne’s mangled cock I’m thinking. Pussy tits ass I’m thinking. Admit the existence of a higher power I’m thinking. Flesh I’m thinking. Flesh flesh flesh flesh …

At some point I am standing. Beatrice faces me: hands on hips, head cocked to one side, appraising me with a slight smile. She’s kicking off this unearthly glow as though her veins rush with phosphorus. Her beauty is crushing and I feel minuscule. Bodies seethe at our feet but in this moment nothing else exists. She brushes at a lock of hair fallen over her eyes and it’s ludicrous but I’m envisioning the country cottage and white picket fence, the words SAMUEL + BEATRICE encircled by a heart carved into the wood of an oak tree, all these childish insupportable fantasies. And sure, I’ve run through this script enough times to know how it turns out but before the guilt and recrimination there exists a state of grace—right … now—a fleeting span of limitless possibility and hope.

“Think it always has to be this way?”

“The viper bites,” Beatrice says. “Can’t help itself.”

She reaches for me and I pull away. Can’t bear to touch her. My body’s electric; tongues of blue static lick and pop off the ends of my fingertips. You’re gonna exit this world with regrets; it’s an absolute given. And okay, I’ve been burned before—haven’t we all? All I’m saying is, there’s that chance, right? A longshot, fine, a million to one. Still—it’s there.

Maybe. That’s as far as I’ll go. Just maybe.