The Tricky Part

by Martin Moran

  And I knew it. Absolutely knew that this kid was in trouble. I felt how every nerve of his body was scrambling to hide, to make sense of, what had just happened. How he’d woken with his underpants missing, his innards going haywire. I could see him perched there on the tractor, fine boned, numb. I knew the exact place. I knew the date, the exact morning. I knew the kid. It’s like his skin was folded inside of mine, pushing hard to get out.

  And I thought: It matters. It does.

  I went to my dog-eared Webster’s that night: Trauma.

  A wound to living tissue caused by an extrinsic agent.

  A disordered psychic or behavioral state resulting from mental or emotional stress or injury.

  The following Thursday there was a long and colorful list on the board. Frequent Issues Faced by Survivors of Sexual Abuse. Among them were compulsive sexual activity, anger, extreme anxiety, suicidal thoughts. That night the doctors launched into a description of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). I was back to staring at the floor, back to my profound discomfort of things (of me) being reduced to lists. To some sorry syndrome.

  What a load of psychobabble crap, came a familiar iteration (my father’s? An old highschool priest’s? my own?) ringing in my head. I could certainly accept how this syndrome might apply to those who’d survived the horror of war, but not to those who’d stumbled into the vagaries of early sex. As I struggled to listen, the doctors came to a word that seized me. Compartmentalize. Compartments. It made me think of Max, the guy on the old TV show Get Smart, and his silly secret compartments. “It’s very common for a victim (that fucking word) to have a public self and an entirely hidden other self. A split. A fragmentation. This is a prevalent condition among survivors of trauma. Compartmentalizing things as a way to survive. It can become a pattern. A way of life.”

  And I thought:

  That’s really true.

  And I thought:

  Yeah, the brain takes a box with a very tight lid and stashes the stuff away.

  And I thought:

  Stuck in my compartment are countless unspeakable items.

  • A sexually active altar boy

  • One molesting camp counselor

  • The counselor’s naked girlfriend

  • One lying little cuss

  • One unfaithful lover

  So many items tucked away tight:

  • One San Francisco dance professor. Remember? He was sixty, for God’s sake. You, nineteen. He offered attention, free classes. You gave out. Secret rent boy, feeling trapped.

  • One brief and frightening transgression with an underage boy in a Coney Island men’s room. Never forgotten.

  • One massage advertisement. Remember? Placed by you, way back, your early days in New York. Student with a swimmer’s body, trained hands. You rang the doors of Upper East Side gentlemen. Seventy bucks a pop. You got to be, wanted to be, the young, adored one. Never told anyone. Little hustler killing time, soul going bankrupt while you scrambled for rent.

  Ad infinitum. The secrets.

  How often have I said to Henry when he tells me that he loves me, “If you really knew me, you wouldn’t.”

  “Why do you always say that?” he’d ask, irritated, and I’d shrug, continuing to wash the dishes or fold the sheets, feeling the corrosion seep from my secret compartment and stick itself, like a dark wedge, between us.

  Somewhere near the end of the eight-week course, I’d begun to talk more with Henry about why I was attending these Thursday-night meetings. I didn’t use the word survivor, another tag I hated. Like I was in some club of fellows who’d made it through a shipwreck. I did, though, begin to mention this man Bob as one might talk of a creepy junior high school teacher or the distant memory of a groping priest. I’d begun to speak more seriously about how I felt this counselor had left a mark. That I had stuff to figure out. “I’m thirty-two years old,” I said to Henry, “and for some reason this is bubbling up bad and I realize I feel so much shame about it. About who I am.”

  One night, I was reading Mike Lew’s book in bed. Henry was next to me. We’d had a good day. Saw an Italian film at Lincoln Center that got us talking about Italy, about planning another trip. We’d been there two summers before and it’d been glorious. Especially Venice. Henry’s crazy for Venice. As I lay there, I was making my way slowly through chapters like, “Is Recovery Possible?” “Breaking Secrecy,” “Sex, Trust, and Caring,” and, at some point, I tossed the book on the floor.

  “This shit gives me the creeps,” I said. “It’s all so pathetic and I hate the cutesy little photo on the front cover. I mean, it’s a little boy in culottes holding a kitten, for God’s sake. Have you seen that?”

  Henry stopped reading and turned to me. “I think it’s brave that you’re looking at all this stuff.”

  Suddenly my heart was trying to somersault its way through my ribs.

  “Henry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know how I always say to you that if you really knew me, you wouldn’t love me? And how much that bugs you and how you always ask me what I mean and tell me not to say that?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, I want to explain to you what I mean. I’m struggling with being . . . I’m really compulsive.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I mean, compulsive about sex. I go into parks or men’s rooms and stuff and look for anonymous sex. It’s like a craziness. An addiction thing, I guess. It has to do maybe with all of this. With when I was a kid or some screwed-up Catholic thing in me. I don’t know. I’m getting better, I think.”

  He was silent.

  “I’m sorry. I know it’s weird. I love you. It doesn’t have to do with you. It’s this problem, my problem. It’s not totally out of control . . . I’m not fucking anyone . . . I don’t understand it.”

  He was silent.

  “Do you hate me right now? Do you need me to go away?”

  “No. I don’t want you to go away. What do you mean, ‘compulsive’? What do you do?”

  I explained, as calmly as my pounding heart would allow, that the form my compulsivity took was, at least from a sexually transmitting point of view, guarded. That I’d maintained at least that much sanity and was determined to stop. When as much as we could handle for the moment was said and done, Henry looked at me and said, “Promise me you’ll be safe. For us.”

  He let one hand drift over and rest near my shoulder. I lay still, looking at him for a long time. In silence, I asked, Even like this? Even like this you love me?

  Everything in his presence said: Yes.

  When those two months were over, I thanked the good doctors (and, wherever he was, Mike Lew) and walked away thinking, Please, God, that had to have been enough digging. Case closed.

  14

  IN THE FALL of 1992, my old high school friend and former New York roommate, Jodi, purchased a used Toyota in our hometown, Denver. She needed to drive it to Los Angeles, where she lived, and called to ask if I wanted to fly out and take a western road trip. Mesa Verde, Four Corners, Grand Canyon. A rare chance to catch up. Henry was starting a new play; I was unemployed (or currently unenjoyed, as we’d taken to calling it). The timing was good.

  As we worked our way over Wolf Creek Pass and cut through the canyons of the eastern slope, Jodi began to discuss her thoughts on alcoholism. “Do you think you have a problem?” I asked. She nodded. Said she’d made a decision to join AA. “Wow,” I said. “Good for you.” She’d brought six cassettes on the 12 steps and, as we approached Utah, asked if I’d mind listening. I didn’t know much about the famous program and she was so bravely gung ho that I silenced my cynic and told her sure, play them.

  By the time we reached the spooky formations of Zion National Park, the disembodied voice on the stereo was walking us through the final stages out of addiction and into spiritual awakening. Tunneling through the vast walls of red rock and under the otherworldly arches, surrender to a “higher power” seemed only natural. At a Zion café that
night, over my cabernet and her coffee, Jodi and I watched a bloodred sunset as she laid it all out about the depressions and the cocktails and I poured forth about the anxiety and the secret sex. We’d been confidants since senior year of high school and, though we didn’t see each other often, we always cut to the chase.

  “Sex addiction. That’s harsh,” she said, running a hand through her thick, black hair.

  “I wouldn’t call it that. No, no. Not addiction. It’s an occasional obsession . . . like, when I’m really depressed or out of work it’ll come over me. It’s getting better, or it gets better, sometimes, and then it’s not, I’m ashamed to say.” I took a gulp of water, then of cabernet. “My old therapist used to call it ‘acting out.’ It’s like the illicit and the erotic got fused in me, somehow, in this crushing way. I mean, sex is a gift, right? A joy, no matter how much they bashed it in Catholic school. But I experience it sometimes as this curse. Hen and I have talked about it. I told him I’m getting healthier. I promised. I’ve got stuff to figure out.”

  I watched Jodi rip open a packet of brown sugar, sprinkle some in her coffee. “Thank God you’ve got Henry,” she said. “After this last breakup I feel like I’ll be alone forever. Not even a cocktail for company.”

  “You’ll meet someone.”

  “It’s good you guys talk.”

  “It’s hard, but we’ve talked about it. To a point. Some things are private. There’s a difference, though, between private and secret. Privacy has to do with respect, I think, with not needing to share with him every psychosexual drama or personal struggle that passes through my life, my brain. But secrecy is something different, it eats away at things. I hate the sense that there’s a hidden, bad me. That I’m going to ruin everything. It’s juvenile.”

  A young woman with an amazingly long ponytail refilled Jodi’s coffee.

  “When did this start, with the alcohol?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, exactly. I just suddenly realized I could never stop at two. Or three.” She wrapped her hands around her mug. “How’s your wine?”

  I raised my glass, she her cup. We gazed out the large window at all the crazy, jagged forms of rock. Huge creatures, frozen in time.

  “Beautiful,” I said. “It’s so eerie.”

  “Yeah, like in a disaster movie.” She smiled.

  When we arrived in LA, Jodi suggested that I come with her to a meeting. What the hell, I thought. Maybe I’ll learn something about my Irish heritage. We walked to an old church not far from her apartment in West Hollywood. She led the way up a stairwell to a second-floor room. Three tall windows, gleaming with the California light, faced west. Several rows of folding chairs were arranged in a semicircle, but most folks were still standing, grouped around one of several pillars along the center of the room or gathered near the table with the coffee urn. Moms and Dads, it seemed, and bikers with helmets and gay guys with boyfriends. Big and small and black and white and everything in between. The cheery hubbub was not at all the image I’d had in my head, of a somber room with men in dark suits, faces taut with remorse. We sat in the back row. The meeting began with individual hellos. I was startled when it came to Jodi and she ended with the actual words, “and I’m an alcoholic.” I mumbled my name and pointed. “I’m with her.”

  Material was read that I recognized from the tapes, stuff about lives becoming unmanageable and turning our will over to God as we understood God. I bounced between hearing the stuff as some morose admission of defeat and as the wisest words in the world. Saint Anselm’s proof kept running through my mind: God is that than which nothing greater can be thought. In any case, I was busy judging as folks began to raise their hands and talk. A ruddy-faced guy, jacket and tie, said he needed to speak. He’d been sober and was approaching, he said, the one-year mark from when he’d fallen off the wagon and forgot to pick up the kids, lied to his wife. He was struggling today with the shame of it and wanted a drink in the worst way. His candor was remarkable, disarming. It was as if, as he spoke, he was peeling off a mask, a mid-forties business-guy mask, and written there across the wrinkles and scars of his suddenly soft and one and only face was the simple truth. It cost him. It took courage to speak, that was clear. People near me were nodding. His words seemed to yank everybody into the present, to galvanize the room. There were many others, then, who spoke off the cuff and from the heart. I gathered that this is what happened at these meetings. It was one of the most sane and impressive things I’d ever witnessed.

  When the final prayer was over (reminiscent of the “Go in Peace” I’d heard for years at Mass), Jodi informed me that there’d be another meeting following. Same 12 steps, different addiction. “Maybe you should check it out,” she suggested. “It’s to do with sex.” I shrugged, my cheeks already burning with her mere mention of it. She gave me a hug and went on her way.

  The chairs remained in their same semicircle, the coffeepot, the blackboard, the same. But now there was a new group, generally younger, not quite as many people. I took the very last seat in the very last row and acquainted myself with the silver doorknob that led out to the street.

  I found the hellos harrowing. The calmness with which people were saying, “Hi, I’m a sex addict,” was unnerving. The voices were cavalier, but the designation sounded so dire, so collapsed-in-the-alley-with-a-needle-in-your-arm. When it came to me, I muttered my name and something about “first time.”

  The sun by now had set and the windows gone dark. I stared out to where a street lamp illuminated two palm trees. The fronds shimmered sickly under fluorescent light. My stomach churned. How did I get here? Washed up at the end of a continent, end of the line. Land of Manson and Moonies and me and God knows what. I glanced at the doorknob.

  As in the previous meeting, there were readings about the group and its purpose. About admitting powerlessness, in this case over sexual behavior. A young woman began reciting from a list of characteristics common to the group. She read one and passed the booklet to the next person. It talked, among other things, about using sex as a drug, as a way to avoid feelings such as anxiety, how we’d compartmentalized it rather than integrated sex into our lives in a healthy way. I watched the pamphlet move from lap to lap, stunned that such an accurate inventory of my secret struggle existed in the world, that it had been written without me.

  A slim guy with a wool sweater and Levis took a seat front and center. He was the main speaker for that evening. He crossed one leg over the other, leaned forward so that his bearded chin was in his hand and his elbow upon his knee, and he began, quietly, to tell his story. He’d been an altar boy at a parish in the South. A man there, a deacon, seduced him when he was thirteen. First sex he ever had. It was a shock, a crazy jolt, a kind of high. He described how, after his initial fear and confusion, he felt weirdly flattered by this man. Adored, even. But that, over time, it became nothing but destructive. He began to feel like an object. I was so struck by the word, the articulation of that idea. He explained how he felt stuck. But how he was hooked into it. The pleasure of being touched like that.

  “The most awful part,” he said, “was the secrecy and the guilt. It went on until I went to high school. I never told a soul.”

  He was scratching his beard as he spoke, looking down at his boots. He had the gentle manner of someone who’d been through hell, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. It was as if all my life I’d had an appointment to hear this guy. He talked of his sexual confusion and depression and how he’d fallen in love and married, had two kids. How, in his late twenties and thirties he started sneaking off to have sex in arcades with men. Porn places. He said he didn’t know why. That his feet took him there, like they were wired, and he never told anyone. Was sure he never would.

  “But I got AIDS,” he said. “I had to tell my wife, had to get help. My kids think I have leukemia. I don’t want them to know, they’re too young. Maybe that’s wrong, but I’m doing the best I can. One day at a time. I’m sober now, for more than two years. Life, my hea
lth, is good right now. I’m so grateful for the help of this program. Thank you.”

  He was smiling as he finished. Shrugged his shoulders. My throat had clamped shut. The room, my chair, my chest, felt electrified. Pay attention, I was telling myself. Look at the consequences of what happened when this man was young. I felt livid about what that deacon had dared to do, and I was astonished at the direct connection this man made between what happened when he was a kid and what came to pass in his adult life. I thought I understood the connection; I believed it. I felt for him a compassion and a fury that I could not seem to find for myself. And this baffled me.

  A woman talked of losing her job because of the seemingly uncontrollable obsessions she experienced in relation to coworkers. She clutched a ring of keys as she spoke of her determination to turn it over, turn it around, ask for help. A young man talked of the fortune he’d spent on female prostitutes. In a hoarse voice, hands clasped, he told of the experience of having been abused by his mother. His sense of how this sexualized him in a way that he was only just beginning to understand. He talked of his progress and how, one day at a time, following his plan for sobriety, he hadn’t called a prostitute for seventy-three days. Creating a specific plan, I learned, with a mentor, was one of the tools used here. For most, a sexually sober life wasn’t about abstention but about mindfulness and balance.

  When the meeting was over I found myself asking for literature and schedules. And I realized I couldn’t leave without saying something to the bearded man. I walked over to where he was sitting speaking with friends.

  “Thanks for that.”

  He stood and took my hand. “Welcome,” he said.

  It astonished me that humans had figured out a way, found the guts, to come together and talk of healing from this compulsion. (It would be months before I could use the dreaded word addiction.) My heart sank at seeing so clearly that I belonged here, even as I felt enormous relief, a wild wave of hope, at finding these concepts, this fellowship.

  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.