A woman introducing herself as Sandra appeared in the café where I wrote one day and struck up a conversation. Short, pretty, with a thick mane of jet-black hair, large breasts, and a slender waist, she came from Texas and made her living as an artist. We arranged to take a stroll through the Botanical Garden. Then I took her to dinner at Le Colonial. After, we went straight to my place. Had no idea what might turn her on. I soon learned.
“I’m into S and M,” she said flat-out, giving barely a glance at my coffee-table quick-reference guide to kink.
“Oh,” I said, acting surprised. I was, in a way. Is this what happened once you tried it? Candidates appeared? Out came the table. Ropes. Blindfold. Etcetera.
Unlike Pia, Sandra brought out my severity, if not cruelty. She panted gratefully, slavishly, as I undressed her. Stood there blindfolded, hands bound behind, in high heels, my leather belt clasped in her teeth, imploring me to belt her.
Chuckling to myself, I barked: “Down on your knees!”
“Yes, Sir,” she barely garbled out.
I made her crawl on all fours like a dog with the belt in her mouth. Hoisted her onto the table and banged her bluntly, face to face, and dragged her over to an armchair where I sprawled with limbs akimbo as she sucked me off. Then back onto the table with her, splayed, hands and feet secured, a stack of cushions under her little buttocks as I teased her clit with my bobbing tongue, lathered her vaginal lips, one finger hooked into her G-spot, stroking. She wriggled like a fish, had so many orgasms, one after another, that she nearly fainted. She never giggled, joked, or laughed. Called me “Master” with complete seriousness. I half took it seriously myself. Sometimes left her there on the table moaning and writhing and walked into the kitchen to make myself some tea and peruse the day’s unopened mail, skim through the week’s issue of the New Yorker.
She took cabs to my home dressed in fishnet body sleeves, high heels, and a tan belted raincoat. I liked the look. French Existentialist. She also knew more about literature than Pia, who, I was learning, was not especially bright, all pose and seduction but hardly any substance. Pia shelved books but didn’t read them. The only literature in her room was copies of Cosmo and Vanity Fair.
In many ways, Sandra was more fun—demanded nothing and could discourse brightly on almost anything from Dickens to the Cold War. But Pia commanded my full attention. She was the main act—Sandra a sideshow. Hard to say why. In a radical effort at complete honesty, I told both women about each other. Both claimed not to care. I believed Sandra but not Pia. Sometimes cruelly went down to Pia’s studio still smelling of Sandra and entered her. She received my thrusts with a concentration and solemnity that showed me that she knew I’d been with Sandra only minutes before. It was touching. But there was as yet no love in her eyes. And until it was there—and I was, for reasons unknown to me to this day, determined that it would be—I was prepared to hurt her into loving me.
But Pia launched her own campaign to make me jealous. She succeeded. I became like a madman. The truth is, I was in love with her. Once, I caught her embracing a fat pimply man named Erik in front of our building and walked past, indignant, pretending not to see. I couldn’t sleep for days after that. Another time, she told me that she was going to a reunion dance at her alma mater and later that evening I saw her well-spanked behind sheathed in an evening gown vanish sparkling into the depths of a black stretch limo parked at the curb. Peering in as I passed, saw a tuxedoed older man in the gloom, waiting. Should have felt amused; was instead outraged.
Sandra, by contrast, never provoked so much as a single snappish remark from me; though she too tried the jealousy route, at all times I was winsome smiles and chuckling pleasantries. Pia had tapped into my central nervous system, and it felt to me like terror. Oddly, my physical pleasure with Pia never equaled that with Sandra—in every way, Sandra was the better lover—but with Sandra there simply wasn’t the depth of emotion or even arousal that I experienced with Pia. Pia had a lock on my libido.
When I came in Pia, a world of emotion fueled my ejaculation. There was love, pride, hope, but also hatred, distrust, sheer incomprehension. She ruled my lust like a fickle deity, not really even trying. I was as helpless before her as Van Gogh before nature; ate her pussy the way Vincent devoured the paints that poisoned and drove him mad. Tried to push her flesh into love, the way Van Gogh tried to make colors perform beyond their capacity.
He succeeded. I failed. In some strange way, she was dead inside. In the way that Van Gogh quite literally painted himself to death, I almost succeeded, with Pia, at killing myself banging her. But where he left behind masterpieces, I produced only suicided spermatozoa and ashen emotions.
Sandra left town to spend a weekend in Chicago with an old flame. Would she sleep with him, I wondered aloud. Absolutely not, she said. They were just good friends. I searched my feelings, wondered if I cared one way or another. Didn’t.
When she returned, she cabbed over dressed in the usual fishnet body stocking and belted tan raincoat. Seemed a bit distraught, paler than usual, eyes sleepless. Threw her arms around my neck. “I missed you so much!” she announced. Kissed my neck, cheeks, eyes, and we made love, forgoing the table. I went down on her. She tasted funny. The smell different. Alien, another person’s.
Lifted my face, a bit dismayed, and said: “You slept with him.” “Yes, Sir,” she said.
“Oh, drop all that Sir stuff! I thought you didn’t plan to.”
“I didn’t. It was unplanned. Just happened.”
“More than once, I would say?”
“Yes, more than once.”
“Huh!” Came to my feet, retired to an armchair to think. She crawled over and took my member in her mouth, began pulling on it with little kitten mewlings. I let her. Stroked her face. But couldn’t rid my mouth and nose of that brassy alien taste. My erection wilted.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I don’t know. It’s strange. But I feel not only a complete lack of jealousy but an equal sexual disgust. I don’t want our bodies to touch.”
She froze, tears in her eyes.
“Sweetheart,” I said sincerely, “I don’t wish to hurt your feelings. But it feels like there’s a third in bed with us, some man, and it turns me off. Turns my stomach, actually.”
She stood up and dressed. “Will you call me a taxi, please?” Said with great dignity.
“Of course.”
Now all my focus was on Pia. A mistake. Unknown to me, Sandra had served as a buffer against the feelings that now erupted. I was madly in love with Pia, insanely jealous, and she was in love with me, a condition that I soon learned rendered her monstrous.
78
AT FIRST, BECAUSE SHE DID NOT ACTUALLY SAY SO, I was able to tell that Pia loved me by a certain doelike gentling of her eyes during sex, each time I penetrated her. Her face softened, grew focused and watchful and sad with pleasure.
To compensate for her new vulnerability, she became workaholic. Pulled long shifts at the job and came home and worked more on her computer. I didn’t see her for days at a time.
“You’re terrified of chaos,” I said.
“Yes. How do you know?”
“Your strict routine makes no allowance for fun. Work, work, work, and more work.”
“That’s not true. I spend time with you.”
“We don’t even sleep together. I ball and leave. Or you ball and go. It’s more like we’re hygiene partners. Getting our biweekly sex. A pedicure for your pussy.”
She laughed. “I like that!”
“Fine with me,” I lied. “But you love me and you’re terrified.”
Her liaisons with other men continued. Each time, I swore to leave, and stayed.
Once, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, by the Martin Luther King waterfall, in a violent display of feeling I berated her as a pathological liar because I had caught her out in a lie. I insisted that she remove a ring I had bought her and hurled it across the grass knolls, sailing over
sunbathers’ heads and into traffic, where it vanished, crushed under wheels. She wept. I left. Days later, passing her door as I descended the stairs to the lobby, glimpsed her standing at her open door, as if she’d been waiting for me, wearing a look of despair so abject that I next found myself lodged firmly inside her, all thought of desertion gone.
When I mentioned this to my sponsor, he said, simply: “You’re addicted to her.”
“How?”
By now, Old Ray had learned the whole sordid score. He leaned forward, hands clasped, lips set in a bemused smile. “You’ve just told me that everything inside you screams that she’s no good for you, yet you can’t seem to stay away. Isn’t that what happens to the alcoholic around alcohol, the drug addict around drugs? The head telling you to stop even as the bottle goes to your lips and you swallow enough to paralyze ten normal men. And then drink some more. Has the frequency of your sex escalated?”
“Yes,” I admitted, ashamed.
“How often are you having sex?”
“A better question would be, when am I not having sex?”
“Are you seeing friends?”
“No.”
“How’s the writing?”
I laughed sadly. “I live to have her.”
“It feels good.”
“Yeah. I guess. Not always.”
“Like drinking. It’s not the pleasure that increases but the compulsivity, the frequency, in direct proportion to which the pleasure actually decreases.”
“Oh, shit!” I said solemnly. “You’re right! I’m hooked.”
“Just keep in mind,” Old Ray said, “knowing that you’re hooked won’t necessarily help. You’ll know it and still return for more.”
“What will help?”
“Only your Higher Power.”
And now ensued an anguish and torment such as I had never experienced except in the throes of my worst PTSD paranoia—somehow even worse, since I had no alcohol or drugs to lessen the pain. This was not terror unfolding in complex patterns of fantastical plots but a mounting wave of inconsolable grief and shame. I cried continually. It must have been some form of nervous breakdown. A mere inquiry after my welfare reduced me to a sobbing, quivering mess of indescribable sorrow. My friends were deeply concerned. No one seemed to understand except Mel, a cab driver acquaintance, who would appear at my door with the cab left running downstairs, drag me out, and haul me, off the meter, to 12-step meetings where I sat in the back rows, an unremarked wall speck unable to hear, see, speak, or think, a raw, exposed nerve ending sensitized to a level of intensity that no human was meant to endure, let alone survive. I swore now that I must not see her.
All of me at every moment hungered to copulate with her, just one more time.
She wouldn’t leave me alone. Once came up to me outside her door as I descended the stairs, took me in her arms, and squeezing my buttocks said, smiling lecherously: “We don’t have to be in a relationship just to do this. We can still have our fun.”
I pulled her hands off, left, crushed. Thought that night of sleeping outdoors in the streets. Homelessness beckoned. Madness. Anywhere I walked I scanned streets for outdoor nooks to colonize. Under a stairwell downtown, an alley that looked safe and inviting, a bench in a deserted part of the park. And yet, the one ingredient that would propel me into the gutter for good, alcohol, never even crossed my thoughts. Miraculously, I felt not a single urge to drink, only to die.
Finally, it came down to suicide. I decided, calmly, that I could not endure a single day more of such anguish. Calmly, en route home from a 12-step meeting, knew that I would simply climb to the roof of my building that evening and jump off. Smiled at the thought. Felt no fear at all, just relief. One knows when one has reached the absolute limits of endurance: I had reached mine.
I paused on the sidewalk, closed my eyes. Listened to the night.
My last on earth.
A single thought entered my suicidal mind. Flew about my skull like a silver sprite. Touched my crippled brain with a lovely wand. The Shekinah. “What if,” she whispered, ever so softly, “you somehow managed to survive this ordeal? Think of the great strength of experience you’ll have to share with others. Think of how much service you can bring. Survive, so that you can pass it on, so that others may live. By saving them, you can save yourself.”
I stood on the dark, empty street and laughed aloud. Called out to the sky: “Don’t I even get to kill myself in peace?” And the quiet voice of the Shekinah whispered: “You tried to do that for twenty-two years. Now you have only the right to live as best and meaningfully as you can.”
By the time I reached my door, all thought of death was gone.
I would see Pia now and then, in the corridors, the street. I made the request that she move. Explained that I’d resided in the building all these years, the only stable home I’d ever known, rent-controlled, and would she consider changing residences?
To my amazement, she agreed.
Shortly after, I began to meet, all in a row, one recovering alcoholic man after another who was broken-hearted over a blonde, owned a gun, and struggled desperately against an overpowering urge to put the barrel in his mouth. In time, I worked the steps with some of these, befriended others, and tried to set an example based on my experience. I reminded them that years ten to twelve in recovery were for some reason a period notorious for sober suicides, but somehow we’d been spared.
Grateful, we formed a little coterie that we called the “Guns and Blondes Club.” Now and then, drove cars to a local firing range, where we discharged weapons at paper silhouettes rather than ourselves. Afterward, over lunch, we recalled our survival of what each of us agreed was the worst pain we had ever endured sober: withdrawal from sex and love addiction.
79
IN 2002 IT SEEMED AS IF EACH TIME I WENT ONLINE to scan for news, another bus bombing had taken place in Israel’s major cities, Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, or at a bus stop near an army base or in a café. The Internet was filled with photographs of the decimated hulks of destroyed buses. I found on one website a sequence that displayed a bus, its roof blown off and inside a tangle of metal, Israeli passengers slumped in their seats, eyes closed, with chalky faces snuffed by the concussive blast. Not all the seats were filled, though the bus would have been packed tight, as Israeli buses are—the missing passengers blown to pieces or hurled with the roof in a hundred directions, a head impaled on a lamppost, a hand lying in the road.
The frequency of the attacks took a toll on my nerves. Tried to call Isadora, but Esther refused to let us speak to her or even to provide details of how she was. By the time summer came, I was distraught.
I asked my Higher Power what to do.
And one day, during meditation, came a calm whispery voice: Go to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, offer prayers there.
I set about making arrangements with an editor at the San Francisco Chronicle to obtain a letter from the paper appointing me as a correspondent and requesting of the Israeli government foreign press credentials. This would give me a free hand to enter trouble zones and hot spots from which the bombings emanated—and perhaps generate articles, for I intended not only to see Isadora but to say something about the human cost of these murderous attacks.
On arriving in Jerusalem my first act was to attend a 12-step meeting that evening. Many of the same faces who had welcomed me during my last visit welcomed me now. Warm outstretched hands shook mine all around. Isadora was asked after: they remembered. I explained my purpose in coming. Their faces saddened.
“You will find the city much changed since you’ve last been here,” one said.
“How so?”
“You’ll see.”
Being among them gave me the sense that I belonged, reminded me that before all things I am an alcoholic and the bottle but a symptom of a deeper underlying malaise, which, in my case—having sought and tried innumerable remedies and panaceas, from psychotherapy to sex, ambition to physical exertion—was answerable in
the final analysis only by a spiritual solution. As my friend Si, an old-timer, would say: “The solution is simple. The solution is spiritual. And the solution has nothing to do with the problem.”
Strange to realize here, in the seat of three world religions, that even religion could not suffice to answer the need within me.
As I walked that evening through Jerusalem, I thought of what a strange path mine had been—a Jew who found his best approach to YHWH or the Shekinah through nonsecular prayers such as the Serenity Prayer or through the diligent practice of Zen meditation, a persistent mindfulness; who had reached new visions of his role in Jewish life and the world at large through helping drunks, only some of whom, a mere handful, were Jews, who might come from every conceivable background and belief system and included desperate former criminals, fallen neo-Nazis, motorcycle gang members, ex-gangbangers, reformed stickup men, and muggers. Anyone who reached a hand out asking for help with drinking, I must freely help. Only together could we survive and transcend a fatal and incurable disease. I needed them as much as they me.
But the 12 steps cannot save the world, only drunks and addicts. For the steps to work, one must be in serious pain and ready, at all costs, to change.
In the morning, I rose early and went down to Ben Yehuda Street, a busy main thoroughfare of shops situated between King George Street and Jaffa Road. The cafés here were sure to be overflowing with all manner of Jerusalemites, crowding into cafés for their early-morning coffee and strudel.
Drunken Angel (9781936740062) Page 34
