The Story of Us

THE STORY OF US PART FIVE: FAIRY TALES

The Story of Us

None of it was easy, not in the beginning, but looking back on it now I realize it was just life doing what life does: spinning endlessly and wildly: always a little too fast, a little too intense, so it was hard to catch up: hard to see what was happening. So many things had happened, so many changes and new additions to my life that I had no idea how to incorporate this new love, this whole new idea of who we were into that madly shifting existence.

I remember when I found out my mother had cancer. I was in the middle of my drug relapse. I was at a job in Hollywood and I walked out into the alley in the back, off Wilcox, just below Hollywood Blvd, standing a few feet away from a street actor dressed like Michael Jackson and a strange alien-esque looking Trannie in hot pink lycra pants and a silver top smoking a joint.

My mother’s voice was calm at first. And then it wasn’t.

It is a strange kind of heart break listening to your mother cry and know there is nothing you can do. You are powerless.

Life is barreling toward us: full speed: a train roaring through the night and we stand, star struck by some simmering light in the sky, unaware that we are about to be hit, smashed, destroyed and left behind.

And afterward we find a way to stand back up and climb our way back into some newly precarious situation: mesmerized again by some startling little piece of beauty, walking endlessly off the cliff.

I have said this before: Jon was supposed to be a trick. Just some sexy dude from Orange County who was going to come over and fuck me with my boyfriend and then go home.

Alex and I were excited. Finding tops is not easy in this town. Mostly Alex and I fucked other bottoms together. Jon was a rare and magical find: that second top.

We pre-met at the Faultline where I was working the door. We went into a small back dressing room and made out. It was sexy. I remember the way my heart beat, pounding inside my chest: nervous and excited. I had to help Jon walk through the crowd: it was busy, sweaty, half naked men everywhere: the music invasively loud: porn playing on video screens through out the large open space: I remember moving men out of the way for him. People know me there. They tend to move out of the way when I am coming through.

I like to look back at moments.   To see the truth of them. But of course, looking back at the moment and assigning truth is like telling a lie: creating a story: a fairy tale re-remembering through vastly different lenses then the ones we were looking through in the present. I like to think I fell in love instantly with Jon. That I knew, in that moment, somewhere in my pounding heart, that Jon was special.

Maybe I did. It’s possible. Or maybe, like most things in the present, I was so lost in the swirling chaos and the rabid fury of my thoughts that I noticed nothing: life seems to hold all it’s meaning in retrospect, never in the moment.

Here is what I do know: it is a fact, an actual truth: we made plans to meet again. I can’t say for sure if my motives were two dicks or potential love (though, for those of you who know me I’m sure you are all thinking the same thing: two dicks) but either way, we made a plan. David Bowie’s Cracked Actor Documentary and Pizza. And then Alex was going to show Jon our assortment of butt toys. And what he likes to do with them: to me.

I wonder, looking back and trying to find meaning, if everything had gone perfectly: if they had fucked me in that relentless fashion I was hoping for: holding me down and grounding me, centering me in that way that only seems to happen when you are being thoroughly fucked: if we had actually broken out the toys, if we had that hour and a half of porn quality fantasy inducing sex: would we have ever seen Jon again? Maybe it was the flaws: the nervous dicks, the anxious kisses, the awkward fumblings of three men trying to find a place for themselves on that bed: maybe it was the lack of “truly amazing” that first time that allowed the door to crack open onto something better: a glimpse at who we really were: strange and awkward and insecure, nervous and scared and hopeful: wanting and needing and funny. There was an energy there, a kind of crazy and creative magic that I do know I felt because each kiss burned bright in my mind: each time the three of us held hands, the taste of sweat, the overwhelming body heat: there was a kind of emotional intensity to each contact, each passing moment.

We all came. And afterward we lay there, kind of stunned. I was trying to piece together what had just happened: empirically speaking it was not the best sex I had ever had, but those last few moments when the two of them were lying next to me, touching me and kissing me while I jerked off: I felt like I was on fire: burning through my life: lit up in flames and exploding.

There is a kind of sex that is for one night stands and there is a kind of sex that is for the building of love. One night stands are intense and brilliant because they stand alone: they are chemical: animal: they are connections without the burden. There is something beautiful and violent and magical about those experiences.   And then there is the kind of sex that builds: it grows and expands: it lives inside you even when you aren’t together: it merges into your daily thoughts and living: it is a slow burn, an expanding, growing kind of hunger.

I have laid in bed, Jon and Alex kneeling over me, kissing each other, their hands rubbing my belly, stroking me while I watch them, playing with me: and I am lost inside the two of them: the love I can see in those kisses, in the way they hold each other; when Alex is inside me and Jon holds me, kissing me, looking into my eyes: watching me: seeing me: pinning me there in that moment: that present that extends out beyond the three of us into some kind of eternity we can only catch glimpses of like flares shot over a dark and endless ocean or comets shooting through a vast and eternal night, disappearing faster than they appear: lighting up the whole world only to fade, leaving shadows and memory.

In those moments, when the two of them are inside me, I think I can see the whole of it: I can feel my skin, my body, my soul all collapsing.

And then there are times when I want to break it all. Because lets be real: I can be a fucking brat.

Recently Alex came home for the weekend from Spokane where he is working on a TV show, ZNation. Jon and I have been living alone. Seeing Alex for weekends once or twice a month. The three of us struggling to maintain the three of us: and mostly succeeding. Doing impossibly well considering that one third of us is gone six months out of the year.

There is a thing that I like to do. I love to give them both head while watching them make out. It drives me crazy. It is sexy beyond sexy. I can see everything in those moments: I can see the love and the passion and the desire: I can see it all in how they kiss each other.

But for some reason, that weekend, I was feeling insecure. I was angry. I was in my head: terrible deracinating thoughts about abandonment and failure and betrayal. I imagined all the ways they would leave me. I saw, in those kisses, while I was sucking their dicks: true love: more love than either of them could ever feel for me. I saw a passion I suddenly decided they didn’t have for me.

Now, if I were being rational, if I were thinking in any kind of sane way I would have seen how crazy this is: I am the bottom in my relationship to Jon and Alex. I am the object of desire. I am sucking their dicks. I am jumping on them and kissing them and they are always touching me and hugging me and saying sexy things to me: I am so loved it is almost unfair. And: I want them to be in love: I want them to feel all of those things for each other: without that: without all of us loving each other this can’t work. It can’t survive: it is essential.

But in that moment I wasn’t thinking rational. So when it was my turn to take my place between them, the two of them cuddling up to me, while I began to jerk off: I stopped and jumped out of the bed and said:

“Forget it. I’m not going to cum.” Then I looked at the two of them and said, “You know, I like when people kiss me too.”
What was I even talking about? I had been lying there for about three seconds, they were just beginning to touch me, just beginning recover from the blowjobs I had given them: if I had given them a few more seconds I know what would have happened: they would have kissed me and touched me and guided me and I would have had one of those amazing explosive orgasms that only seems to come when the three of us are all together.

But it wasn’t possible. Because I had allowed the thoughts to poison me way before we ever go to that moment. I had been pre-fighting with them for hours. This is a game I like to play: where I hold whole conversations and fights in my head: trying out every angle, every possible terrible outcome.

So even though we hadn’t fought, even though nothing was wrong: I felt like we had been fighting for hours: and in the end, that is how I reacted. Toward them.

That moment turned into one of those endless arguments were we broke up, I kicked Jon out, stood outside till sunrise not letting Jon leave until finally, exhausted, we all fell asleep.

Like I said: I can be a real brat.

I’d like to say this was a one time thing: but it isn’t. I’ve done this exact thing a few times. It’s what happens when I start pre-thinking. I think a lot about the power of our thoughts. I am pre-disposed to certain aspects of magical thinking. But what is undeniable to me, what I can not escape: the way I am thinking does effect the shifting contours of my life. If I had been thinking about love and how lucky I was to have these two guys then I would have gotten them off in one of my favorite ways possible, and then been able to get off with the two of them next to me, kissing me and touching me and it would have been hot and intense and amazing. Instead, the whole experience turned into a six hour fight and I never came.

There is real power to our thoughts. I have suffered whole days of terrible insidious jealousy and insecurity that if I had been thinking clearly I would have seen was not in any way backed up by the facts. But again, that is only knowable in retrospect: in the moment I am often too lost in the swirling chaos to have any idea what truth would even look like.

So here is what I would like to say: in that moment, in the small dressing room at the Faultline, when I first saw Alex and Jon kiss, when I first kissed Jon while Alex held my hand, when the three of us pulled in tight, into our circle, hands held, eyes closed, breathing each other’s breath: taking turns kissing: I would like to say I knew that this moment was a foretelling: it was a prediction of something beautiful, something wonderful: and in my mind that is the truth: that is what I know. I mean, what else is the truth than what I remember it to be? If you were to show me a picture of that moment I know this is how it would look: the three of us connected, eyes half closed, hands holding on, pushing into each other, safe. Real.

And yet I know there is another truth: a darker truth, and yet no less beautiful: that I was scared. That I am still scared. Because I have no idea what any of it means. That there are no guarantees.

My mother didn’t die of cancer like they said she would. She fought. She didn’t beat it but she’s held it at bay, its chopping gnashing teeth just inches from her face: never gone, always there, but not destroying her.

Life is relentless like that. It is beautiful and violent and it is kind and terrifying and it holds secrets that we can catch only vague shadowy glimpses of: candles blowing out in a discordant wind, flares across a broken sky, in the way we kiss and hold each other, the sweat off his back pressed against my chest, the way he cries in front of us, the palm of his hand over his face trying to hide: knowing that we can see him.

Whether I knew it or not in that small dressing room: destiny was occurring: regardless of my fear, of my insecurities, regardless of all the fights and the despair: something beautiful happened in those moments: something that would grow in spite of us: because of us: through us.

I am predisposed towards optimism. I am predisposed to believe my life will always turn out well. And I can’t help but think that is a kind of magick all its own.

THE STORY OF US PART FOUR

The Story of Us

THE STORY OF US PART FOUR

It is important to explain that Alex had been gone for six months. He came home, in October, from Season One of Znation. Our focus was supposed to be on our wedding. That was supposed to be the only thing we thought about.

We decided that I would fly to Spokane and meet Alex and we would drive North to Vancouver and then slowly, over three weeks, back down to LA. It was a strange period in my life. It was almost a year ago that I had found out I was HIV positive. Alex had been gone for six months. I would be getting married. Life was changing in strange and mysterious ways. Just three years ago I was still a drug addict. October is a heavy month for me. It is the month I got sober and the month I found out my status.

In a strange way I like to link these things to Rosh ha Shanna and Yom Kippur. I am not religious and I certainly don’t believe in the kind of God described by Judaism, but there is something healing in the idea of a new year and redemption, forgiveness.

I once asked a Rabbi why the Jews blow the shofar at Rosh ha Shanna. He told me the Jews have a contract with God, and every year, for Rosh ha Shanna, we renew that contract. That each year mankind’s fate hangs in a sort of existential balance. Will this be the year God finally gives up on us? Or will he find something beautiful, something worthwhile in man, and be our King for one more year?

One of my favorite things to do is go listen to the Rabbi blow the shofar. The sound does something to me, conjures something up inside me: it reminds me of something I think I have forgotten. There is a magick to it. The Rabbi told me that we blow the shofar in order to cry out to God, imploring him, reminding him that we are worth another year of existence. Begging him not to give up on us: to renew the contract between man and deity. But it is also the cry of humanity into the great darkness, the void, the endless scream, howling for our creator: because we have been severed, cut off from the source, and the cry of the shofar is the cry of our pain, calling out to God to know us. To believe in us. To have faith in us.

In some strange way I believe this. The sound of the ram’s horn blowing, the Rabbi standing there, dark and mysterious and wrapped in cloth: it is desolate, full of despair and pain, full of loneliness and terror: the sound pierces me. For one brief moment, wrapped in that wail, I am the one standing alone, trembling, shaking, waiting for God to decide: am I worth it? Am I worthy of this existence?

In Seattle we fucked a sexy bartender we had met on Scruff. We had spent the night wandering around Seattle’s Capital Hill, eating dinner, checking out all the bars: we flirted with a sexy bear couple, watched a drag queen do karaoke, sat on stone walls and watched as people walked by, the endless parade of humanity that fills cities on weekend nights: are we happy? Is this fun? Is this it? Is this everything? Is there more? Can I be more?… a silent chant flickering in the eyes of everyone we saw.

We had seen the bartender at one of the many gay bars we had been to. I was unclear on how sexy I thought he was until he sent us a picture of his ass: he had one of those asses that you don’t say no to.

It was four am. We were staying in a studio we had rented on airbnb. Alex was drunk. I told the guy to come over, get naked, bend over the couch, and just let us do what we wanted. He seemed to like that idea. I went down stairs to let the guy in. When we came back, Alex was sitting on the couch, a drunken silly-sexy smile on his face, completely naked, hardon sticking up proud as ever. I fell so madly in love with him in that moment. He was outrageous and funny and ridiculous and stupid sexy all at the same time.

We fucked that bartender with the amazing ass until none of us could stand, and then we sent him home, Alex and I curling up in the small loft bed, the sun coming up, birds loud and obnoxious out the window, and held each other as we fell asleep.

I tell this story because it stands out for me as a visceral and gorgeous testimonial to my love for Alex. He was the first guy I was ever able to truly be myself with. In all aspects. I didn’t have to hide my sexual sides: the dirty dog who wanted to fuck some dude bent over the couch at 4am and than send him home, barely speaking two words, and then cuddling with my lover, wrapped in sweat and cum and ass funk, and laugh at how amazing our lives were. I could be vulnerable with him and stupid with him and scared: he has never rejected me, never looked at me like something was wrong inside me, never found a flaw with my desires or fears or insecurities, he has never made me feel dirty or unworthy. And it makes me think of that shofar: the two of us standing on a mountain top, the world vast and endless, the sky above us eternal: infinite in its alien intelligence, and suddenly I no longer feel so alone: together we will wail and scream and howl at the world, at God, at the terror: and together we will celebrate ourselves: in all our dirty, shit mongering, diseased, beautiful, disastrous ways.

And it will be okay. We will all be okay.

The next day we drove to Vancouver. We had rented an amazing one-bedroom apartment at the End of Davie, at the sea-wall, on the 18th floor overlooking the beach and the ocean in one direction, and the city and the mountains in the other. We spent three days in Vancouver eating bagels on Granville, wandering the City, meeting new friends and fucking on the couch overlooking that incredible view.

Then we drove the long drive to Portland: I don’t really get Portland as a City. It feels strangely detached and cold to me, sexless in an oversexed way, but the food was fucking amazing. Seriously, I’ve had some amazing meals in that town.

In San Francisco we became friends with our Uber driver: I still regret not inviting him up to our apartment and fucking senselessly: it was so obvious we all wanted it, but it just didn’t happen. He did meet us later that night and we’ve all become friends, but have no doubt: I plan to fuck that Uber driver into the ground the first chance I get (or maybe let him fuck me into the ground, Alex and Jon holding me down). We made out with a sexy bearded man at the Eagle, and stayed up all night sitting on the balcony of the house we rented in Twin Peaks and watched as the fog devoured the City, enshrouding it in a kind of ecstatic gloom. During the day we drank Phil’s Coffee and wandered used book stores and magick shops and bought a new dildo for me: I love the reverence Alex shows towards my ass, an idolatry toward it: this makes me want to show it off for him, put myself on display: offer myself up to him: when it is just us my whole being becomes focused on his pleasure: submissive and hungry and madly in love.

We decided on a wedding date. February 21. I had grand ideas about our wedding at first. I thought about renting a house in Cambria or Big Sur. I considered Ojai and Idylwild. Moroccan estates in Palm Springs. Beach front properties in Malibu. Then we decided maybe just have it at the house. We have this tiny but amazing 1910 craftsman with original detail in Hollywood. A cute little back courtyard. Why spend thousands of dollars on a wedding when we could save it all for a grand honeymoon adventure…we love travel adventures.

The future was open. We thought we knew the course of things. We had no idea that in a few weeks we were going to meet Jon, fall in love, and invite him in to our adventure.

The Rabbi told me another story. This is when I was 22, in the midst of a dark and heavy heroin addiction. I had been sent to him for counseling. Rehab and AA and therapy hadn’t worked. Maybe a man beholden to a mythical God could save me. He told me about a boy in a small Russian village who had been very sick and was dying. His parents went to the Rabbi and asked for his help. The Rabbi prayed and prayed to God, and still the boy was sick, dying. He brought together all the elite holy men of the village, and they prayed to God, begging for a reprieve, but the boy only got sicker. Then the Rabbi went to the other side of the village, where the thieves and murders and whores lived and he brought them to the boy’s bedside and together, with those thieves and murders and whores he prayed to God. And the boy got better.

“Sometimes, Jeff, it isn’t the good or the holy who save the world. Sometimes we need a thief to break into the kingdom of Heaven and get God’s attention. Sometimes we need a whore to remind God how beautiful we can be. This path you are on, it is your path. We can not judge you for it. We can not condemn you for it. It is the path that you must walk with your Creator. Find a way to make it wondrous, find a way to make it a testament to God.”

When people ask me why I write I think back to that Rabbi, and I think, this is my testament to God. Together my Creator and I wallow in filth and debauchery, in sex and in vile beauties, and together we redeem ourselves, and together we grow: hand in hand, each of us completely dependent upon the other.

TO BE CONTINUED….

THE STORY OF US PART THREE

The Story of Us

The day I found out I was HIV Positive I was working security at the Faultline for a Sunday Beer Bust. It was October 13, 2013. I’m sure there is some kind of numerological magic to the date. A testing truck was parked in the parking lot. I don’t know what made me think to get tested. It just seemed like the thing to do. The tester was bored. He wanted to be inside getting drunk. He looked at the results and then at me and he said,

“Oh, I’m really sorry.” Then he looked outside and waved to someone in the parking lot.

“Excuse me?” I said. Looking back, I’m not sure why I was so surprised. There had been clues. Choices made that should have made this less of a surprise, but still…I just didn’t think I would find something like that out from such an uninterested asshole in the parking lot of the Faultline.

I think it was the banality that upset me more than anything else. And the fact that he was so unattractive. It just didn’t seem fair.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and kind of shrugged. “The results are positive. Would you like me to make you an appointment with someone?”

“Other than you? Yes. Please.”

I made up some excuse to leave work. I think I said that the sink exploded at the house, or that Alex had set himself on fire, something outrageous. I had to get home. Away. Just for a few minutes. I had to see Alex.

If I could just see Alex than maybe this might make some kind of sense.

And I had to know if he would still love me.

We had guests staying at the house. I told Alex I needed him to come outside. I needed to talk to him. And I stood there, on our front porch, and I looked at him and my heart broke. I burst into tears. He wrapped his arms around me, holding on to me and he kept saying,

“Baby, what is it? What’s wrong?”

I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to answer. I just wanted to stay like that, wrapped in his gigantic arms, forever, safe.

But if I have learned anything in life, it is that the world will keep going: life will keep flowing, and that we are never safe from the inevitable. When I found out that my mother had cancer I learned about inevitabilities: everything I love, everything I hold dear, everything that I find beautiful and wonderful will one day die. That is inevitable. It is a rule of life. When I found out I was HIV Positive I learned that I too will die. Like everything else. One day I will die.

But I also learned something else. I learned that Alex did not pull away from me, he did not tell me to leave, he didn’t yell at me and he did not reject me: instead he held me tighter, and he cried with me, and then he said,

“Okay. We will be okay. We will take care of this.”

And we did. We found me a doctor. We learned that HIV never really leaves the body, it just hides out, in the belly or the brain, always vigilant, so I have to be vigilant too. Every day I have to take my pills. Every day at two Alex sends me a text to remind me. He has been doing this for a year and a half. Together we are vigilant. Together we stand guard.

And I made a decision: that day, October 13, 2013, will have power for me. It will have meaning for me. This thing that lives inside me: it will matter. I will let it change me. I will let it affect me and alter who I am: I will take my inevitable death and I will do something with it: because what is not inevitable is happiness, or success, or beauty: I could fail. It is possible to lose everything. To end up alone. I might relapse, shoot dope, become homeless: these things are all possible with a man like me. But I decided that the world would be different for me: even if I failed I was going to try, I was going to succeed in the doing: my life would have meaning because I was going to give it meaning.

I hear a lot that being HIV positive in this day and age doesn’t mean anything: it’s manageable, it’s not important: it doesn’t mean I will die or get sick, not anymore, and they are right. I am healthy. I am strong. I am not sick, and for today, I am not dying.

But it does mean something. It is like a sign along the way: a reminder: none of this is forever. My mother will die. Alex will die. Jon will die. You will die. Everyone will die. It sounds like such an obvious thing. Of course. But feel it. Really know it. And it changes you. At least it changed me.

I am lucky. I have always been lucky. I have a beautiful life. I am surrounded by love.   I’m happy. Happiness is one of those things that comes easily to me. I want to be happy. I like it. It feels good.

Recently, when the three of us are all together: Alex is gone right now, in Spokane, working on season two of the TV show he is on: But when we are all together I like to lay in bed and listen to the two of them while they sleep. Their breathing encases me, it wraps me in warmth and love. There is a magic in those moments, a power, that is another one of those signs along the way: Yes, you will die, but you will also live. This is living. This is it. Right now.

Sometimes all we are doing is watching TV. Sometimes I am sitting at the desk writing and they are on the couch showing each other stupid tumblr cat gifs and giggling: they do that a lot: look at cat gifs and giggle, sometimes we are arguing or we are fucking, sometimes we are eating ice cream and pop tarts till we are sick, sometimes we are cleaning up cat piss or dog puke or stressing the fuck out or going for a walk: sometimes we are doing nothing and I will see them, or I will catch the light as it falls across them, and I will think: I am the luckiest man alive.

This life is a kind of magic. It is a spell: we are like magicians: conjurers. My mother once told me, you have two choices in life: You either believe in magic or you don’t. It doesn’t matter if it is real. Just choose. Which seems more interesting to you?

Three weeks before we got married we asked Jon to move in. This, in retrospect, seems like a strange choice. Maybe we should have waited a few months, let married life settle in: not just for us but for our families. But things were moving: life was moving. So we kept going with it.

We decided that we would introduce Jon to our families at our wedding. This made a kind of sense at the time: I wonder though, if maybe a pizza night before hand would have been easier. I can still see Jon, in a corner, surrounded by all our family and friends, a little lost, so handsome, and people asking him, “How do you know Jeff? How do you know Alex?” And he would say, “I’m Jon. I’m their boyfriend.”

…TO BE CONTINUED

THE STORY OF US: PART TWO

The Story of Us

THE STORY OF US PART 2

For much of my life I had been a heroin addict, and then, in 1998, I stopped. I had been living in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn next to a dominatrix named Zanny. Zanny was saving up all her money working in a Dungeon in Chelsea to move to LA and be a movie star. At least once or twice a week I would sneak across the fire-escape that connected our two apartments and crawl through her window and steal a couple hundred dollars from the shoe box she saved her tips in. I would use this money to buy heroin.

One morning I woke up to find Zanny standing over my bed. She had a gun in her hand. It was pointed at me. In her other hand she had the number to AA. Zanny gave me an ultimatum.

She had this amazing red, curly hair, and a southern accent that reminded you of peaches and cream and sugary deserts, and pale white tits and she laughed a lot and shared her whiskey with me and she loved me and still I stole from her: I can tell you this, the fact that I loved her and the fact that I stole from her never seemed to conflict in my mind. I did love her and I did steal from her. I am surprised at how little these two realities converged until that day I woke to find her pointing a gun in my face.

It was summer when Zanny gave me my ultimatum, July. A week later, broke because of me, the man who stole her dreams of moving to LA, she moved back to North Carolina. And I had seven days sober.

Two years into my sobriety I moved to LA with my partner Jordan. I had convinced him that we needed to be in LA to get our careers started. Jordan bought a beautiful apartment in Los Feliz overlooking the park and downtown. A month later I broke up with him for a guy I met in AA.

I remained sober for 11 years. And then, a week before I was to fly to Amsterdam to meet my mother, I decided maybe I could drink. I spent weeks wandering Paris and Amsterdam and Venice drunk.

That four year relapse was the coldest, darkest place I have ever been. I met strange and captivating demons, monstrous entities inhabited my mind: a darkness flowed through me that was insatiable: I hungered for my own destruction and created palaces of despair, a life of loneliness and isolation. I believe that I had allowed a demon inside me: that I became possessed. My mother told me that she thought maybe I was cursed. It was the only thing she could think of. Someone had cursed me. She believed that by relapsing I had forfeited whatever good will I might have gained in those 11 years sober: and that I would fail. I have a clear memory of some hallucinogenic night standing in front of my bathroom mirror staring at my reflection and a voice telling me to smash my face into the mirror. To jump out the window and fall to the street. To pick up a knife and stab myself with it.

I was possessed by darkness during that time. I lost everything: my home, my mind, my life, my friends, my job, boyfriends and family, all in ways so unexpected and shattering, so horrifying that the very fact that I was eventually able to get sober again and regain even a small percentage of what I once had is mind boggling in its mythic miraculousness.

I have learned something very important from that four year relapse: inside me there is a demon, and he is growing stronger every day. The longer I am sober the more vicious he becomes: and he is waiting for me to fuck up, to make one mistake, so he can pull me back into his darkness. And it is possible that I will fuck up. It is completely possible that one day I will convince myself that I need a xanax or a joint or a glass of wine: something small and innocuous, something harmless in appearance: just to cut the edge, to smooth over the blandness of daily life: I am fucking apocalyptic and if I am not careful I am capable of destroying everything.

I can’t tell you exactly what made me get sober. I had broken up with my boyfriend. I had been evicted and was living in a strange and dark apartment in the building next door (I had created an elaborate lie that lead me to court where I was able to sue the landlord who was evicting me, giving me enough money to move and to live for a few months), my car had been repossessed, and my family was basically done with me. My father, who had been supporting me for years had finally decided, at 43 years old, to cut me off. No more new cars or rent checks or allowances. No more grand trips to Europe when I felt trapped. I would sit in my apartment alone reading old interviews with Allan Ginsberg and jerking off to gang bang porn online. My friends had all moved away. Or were just as fucked up as I was. My life was small and it seemed to just keep getting smaller.

So I went to an AA meeting and I found a sponsor and somehow, a few months later, I got sober.

I was also evicted again and ended up, in some kind of magical moment of grace, moving in to a large and beautiful Silverlake Mansion in the junction with views of the Hollywood Sign and the Observatory and on those incredible clear LA days maybe even a glimmer of reflected sunlight off the Pacific.

And here is the other thing I know about sobriety: there is a grace to it, something strangely magical and miraculous. If I can just get out of the way and let it happen: life seemed to fall into place for me. I went to meetings. I did step work. I meditated and jerked off endlessly and watched a lot of TV and went on epic midnight bike rides through Los Angeles. There were some nights, still detoxing and unable to sleep, that I would ride my bike all the way to Santa Monica and back. Or through the hills of Silverlake, my calves burning. Anything to escape the screaming panic that was my head. For me, that bike, was faith. It was God. It was magic. I rediscovered the world: I rediscovered color and hope and beauty on that bike.

That period in my life, when I was just getting sober, was incredibly magical. But no more or less magical than the dark magic of my relapse. Both events, relapsing and getting sober again, opened me up to a world of spirituality and magic and endless possibility. I learned that I am capable of things that even I, on a surface level, can’t understand. That I make choices and bring about futures that seem unimaginable to me. Every single day I choose between annihilation and success. It is that simple. But around me there are forces rooting for me, pushing me ever forward, hoping for my happiness: just as there would seem to be forces rooting for the opposite: parasitic entities: leeches that have latched themselves to me, feeding off my pain.

Three weeks before my relapse I was walking home from work, east on Sunset Boulevard, toward Silverlake. I was happy. I felt free. I felt connected. I had been meditating and casting spells of intention and I thought I understood the world, I felt strong and good. I looked up into the sky: blue, cloudless, and I watched as a large black bird soared: wings expanding and merging with that endless blue, and for a moment it was as if the layers of reality were pulled back and I could see behind the curtain: an endless flow of energy where time and matter were the illusions, creations of thought. I stumbled and fell, and all the world melted into color: shifting forms, people like burning stars exploding and reforming before my eyes: the street was a river of golden light. In the distance the hills shimmered like diamonds: the world was aflame in light and color and I could feel it all move through me, become one with me and than separate: I understood that that was the constant play of the Universe: becoming one and separate, endlessly moving between the two.

When I got home I sat on my couch and tried to understand what had happened to me. I was completely sober at the time. To this day I sometimes wonder if I had a glimpse at God, at who we really are.

It is strange that three weeks later I decided that I could have a drink. A glass of wine at Stella’s Café with a friend of mine, a new ageist who affirmed for me what I already knew to be true: I didn’t need AA or some God outside of myself: all I needed was will power and intention and to believe in my personal strength: she kept saying, over and over, “The world is what you believe it is. What you say is what you are. We create our realities.”

I now know this is absolutely true and complete bullshit at the same time.

When I met Alex I was a week short of seven months sober. We met on Scruff. He was supposed to be a trick: just a fuck: a really dirty fuck. The first thing we established was that we were both tops. Alex said he was versatile, which, I was later to find out, was a lie, but he has a seduction tool: he has one of those famously large Dominican dicks, what I’ve come to think of as his bottom maker.

We spent a few days talking on scruff. Alex was working on a movie for SciFi at the time: he does special effects make-up and I was spending a lot of time in prisons and jails talking to criminals. We made a plan to get dinner: he insisted we go on a date, I had been hoping we would fuck right away. I like to get the fucking out of the way first: how else do I know if I even want to go on a date with you if I haven’t fucked you? Somehow, over the course of those days, I went from being the top to being the bottom. We had a solid plan: dinner than sex. I hadn’t been fucked in over a year. He sent me a picture of his dick. It made me nervous. But it also turned me on. I liked the idea of getting owned. Of being dominated. Taken.

I was suddenly in the mood to be seriously and righteously fucked.

Alex showed up and still insisted on dinner. This was a date. Later he told me he knew that I was going to be more than just another fuck. He had a feeling about it. I was living in that run down, decayingly beautiful Silverlake Mansion.

We went to a Thai Restaurant in Hollywood.

While at dinner he gave me his card. Which I thought was strange, but somehow endearing. I had recently had some interest in a horror script of mine. He was learning how to network. Looking back, of course, he was networking with me. Months later he told me he thought I was out of his league, “I kept waiting to step into some bad lighting and for you to see me clearly and realize you’d made a mistake.” This idea, of course, is ridiculous. Alex is stunningly handsome. Breathtaking.

Alex insists that two weeks later I gave him the keys to my house. I’m pretty sure I made him wait at least three weeks. He also likes to remind me that I didn’t invite him to my birthday party. We met on May 4th, my birthday was May 8th. I had decided that I couldn’t invite him: what if he bought me a shitty gift? I could never forgive that. It was safer to just not invite him.

I still think that was the right choice. And I still think I made him wait three weeks to give him the keys to my house. Either way, I definitely made him wait 8 months before he could move in.

Magic is strange. The way the world works is strange. Somewhere in the middle of my relapse I met a Persian boy named Arman. He was a dark and violent young man: painfully beautiful. I believed he was going to be the love of my life. The first time we fucked I woke up covered in bruises. Arman liked to hurt me. He enjoyed it. He had a long fat dick that I loved to feel inside me: at first the biting and the brutality seemed sexy, passionate, but there came a point where I thought: can’t we ever just fuck? Like people? Can’t we just have fun and kiss and get off and then go to bed? Does everything always have to be so fucking epic? Sometimes, late at night, I would wake up to hear him in the living room of his West Hollywood apartment talking to himself. I would walk softly to the door and listen to him madly whispering to ghosts or demons; I was never sure which. We spent a weekend at a friend’s family’s estate on Lake Tahoe where we dropped acid and sat on a dock in the lake, looking up at the stars. Arman held me tight, telling me strange stories and somewhere in the middle of that night I knew: he was not mine. He was dangerous. This knowledge flew through me in shadows: as if I were seeing a reflection of the future; I could see the future the way it would play out with us. It was a future neither of us would survive.

Arman’s family was wealthy. They were art dealers and he spent a lot of time with his father in Tokyo and Hong Kong, Paris and Rome. Once, after a trip to Lisbon, he returned to meet me in New York City.

“He’s evil,” my mother said, and I laughed. She said things like that sometimes. Hyperbole was a way of life with us. “He’s dark. Susan saw him standing over you. A knife in his hand. Bloody. You were gasping on the floor, dying.” Susan was my mother’s psychic. She channeled an entity named The Omega. While the name was stupid, something about Susan’s predictions always came true. She had a way with the future. Omega said that time was like a flat plane. It was like looking out over my front yard. That is how he saw our lives. Like blades of grass flickering in the garden: whole existences existing simultaneously: all time like a magnificent pond, shimmering in the afternoon sun. “He will kill you if you stay with him.”

Two nights later he pulled a knife on me. I ran onto the street, and east toward 7th Avenue. I called my mother. I was terrified. She told me to keep heading east, toward the River, where she would meet me. You’d think that would have been the end of Arman. But it wasn’t. He bought me Rayban sunglasses and a beautiful Cartier watch and cried and told me he loved me. We flew back to LA. For a week he was amazing. Gentle and loving. But then the voices came back, the late nights locked in the bathroom, chasing me through the apartment with scissors.

I bring Arman up to say that I was not always the best judge of men. Sometimes, if they fuck me right, I can lose whole years of my life to a man. But Alex…he was different. I felt it in my soul. He was my partner from the beginning.

I have thought a great deal about the idea of a soul mate.  The idea that one person can be everything to me, that there is one person who is magically created to fit me perfectly.  My other half.  This idea gets even more complicated when you know the future and know that we end up with Jon, the three of us coming together to form something new, something larger: but still…I can’t seem to shake the magic that surrounded the events that lead me to Alex.  He protected me.  Sheltered me.  Carried me.

Maybe I believe that there are souls that call out to each other, and once united they are stronger together than they are alone.

I became stronger with Alex.

This is not to say that there hasn’t been darkness.  Remember, I am possessed.  I have a demon living inside of me.  Gnawing at me.  Chewing at me.  Clawing its way out.

But I also have a lightness in me.  And sometimes, in those darkest moments, if I stand really still: I can feel Alex’s love for me and I feel that maybe there is a purpose to all this.  That maybe love does matter.  And that maybe I might find some kind of redemption for my past.

It was almost a year and a half into the relationship that I found out I was HIV positive. And again, I think, the world moves in strange patterns.

To Be Continued….

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The Story of Us (Part One)

The Story of Us

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Lately there have been articles all over the internet, on Vice, or in the New York Times, about Poly-relationships.

“Polyamory is the practice, desire, or acceptance of intimate relationships that are not exclusive with respect to other sexual or intimate relationships, with knowledge and consent of everyone involved.” Wikipedia.

Polygamy makes me think of Mormons, or rich old white guys with a hundred adolescent wives: the word sounds so ugly, so unglamorous, so unlike what I am involved in.

I am in a triad. I have a husband and we have a boyfriend and the three of us all live together in our tiny yellow Craftsman in Hollywood with our three cats and dog and our roommate Rene and somehow, against everything I believed in, we have, and are in the process of, falling in love.

This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I have been against the idea of this kind of a relationship ever since I first heard of them. I’m not the guy who can handle an open relationship. Threeways took a while for me to warm up to. I get jealous. I’m controlling. I want all the love and all the affection. I want everything to be mine always. I don’t share well. I never have. I am volatile and competitive and basically, if I’m not careful, an all around fucking nightmare.

I’ve been in relationships where we had threeways. I’ve had lovers spend the night with me and my boyfriend. I’ve enjoyed waking up to my boyfriend blowing me and some dude we invited over to spend the night. It was hot watching the guy I love get off on some other guy. I even  remember once having to drive the guy we were fucking back to Tustin in Orange County, and having my boyfriend at the time, get in the back seat and make out with him. The two of them ended up fucking while I drove him home. I almost killed us all; I couldn’t stop looking in the rear view mirror.

But then we would fight. And I would get jealous: that ugly kind of jealousy that turns your whole world black.

Or some guy would want him more than me, or me more than him. It was hard to find the perfect match. And I always wanted reassurance. That I was the one loved, that it was me he wanted, that they all wanted.

When I met Alex a lot of that changed. I’ve always felt safe with him. Loved by him. I’ve always known that he wanted me. We had threeways. Lots of threeways. We’ve picked guys up in bars and fucked them in the bathroom. We’ve gone to bathhouses and made out with rosy-cheeked Canadian boys in Vancouver hot tubs, we’ve fucked around with other couples. We’ve done a lot together. We’ve had some amazing adventures as a couple. And mostly it’s gone really well. And sometimes it hasn’t. Sometimes it’s gone really weird (there was that guy on the way to Sedona who wanted us to fart on him, or the dude who turned out to be homeless….even though, honestly, he was super cute, and times when I got mad or he got mad or times when it just didn’t happen, didn’t work out), but mostly it’s been fun. A lot of fun. And now I can’t imagine my life without those adventures.

We aren’t open. We’ve never been open. We have very clear rules. We are allowed to do whatever we want together. Once I sent him to fuck this fuck-buddy of ours without me, but he had to tell me all about it, so it was like I was there. Because I initiated it, I am in control of the situation. He wasn’t just fucking some guy. He was fucking a guy I picked out, a guy I arranged. He was living out my fantasy.

And for us, this has always been monogamy-ish. For us this has been the truest way to honor our own individual sexualities and yet still remain a couple, involved in each other’s sexuality. I never wanted Alex to just go fuck some guy and not know about it. I want to know. I want to fantasize about it, to play with it in my head. I love watching Alex with another man. It turns me on so much. I love watching him kiss another guy. Suddenly, in that moment, he isn’t just my boyfriend: he is more than what I think he is: suddenly he is himself. He is this sexy man, and I get to watch, I get to participate, I get to be there and see who he is with someone else. And that really is the amazing thing: I get to see him in ways most of us never allow the ones we love to be.

He’s different with me, not in any way I can express clearly in words: it’s just something I feel, something I know. Alex is different when he is fucking me. But, and this is key: he is a stud when he is fucking someone else. Three years in and I still think my boyfriend (Now husband) is a stud. Because I’ve seen him. The way he fucks another bottom. Alex is the kind of top who wants his bottoms to love it. He wants them to beg. He wants them to get off on it.

When we met Jon I don’t think any of us saw the changes that were coming. Jon was supposed to just be another adventure, a threeway with a guy we could eat pizza with and watch a movie with. Maybe a friend. We decided early on Jon wouldn’t sleep over. If it moved to “far”, if we began to have feelings, we would end it. Those were the rules we had. If we wanted to negotiate them we could. I think maybe we made those rules because we knew: this was different. And if we continued it would change everything.

The first day we met Jon I was working at the Faultline Bar in East Hollywood. It was a Sunday Beer Bust. The bar was packed. He pulled up in his silver Volkswagon Bug. I remember watching him get out of his car. The way he moved, his shoulders slightly hunched, kind of lost looking, beard and hair writerly unkempt, his lopsided smile when he saw me waiting for him, his off centered crooked nose I learned later was like that because he had broken it.

Alex was bartending at the time.

Jon was so shockingly handsome I wanted to kiss him right then and there, but I knew I had to go get Alex so I did. This was just supposed to be a quick “hi nice to meet you” hug. Jon was driving back to Orange County from his mom’s house in Bakersfield. Hollywood was basically on the way.

We took him into the green room (that’s the room where the strippers prepare themselves) and took turns kissing him. It was all very quick. Alex had to get back to the bar and I was in charge of security. And Jon had to get home to his ex-boyfriend and his cat, Dorian.   We made plans to meet later in the week to watch a David Bowie Documentary, Cracked Actor, and eat pizza, than the two of them were going to fuck me.

I proposed to Alex in May of 2014. We had taken a day trip to Laguna to go for a walk along the coast and then have dinner. Sitting in the middle of town, on a bench at a cross section, I said,

“Look, I know we’ve talked about this a lot, and I don’t know…I love you. And I’ve been thinking off all these ways to ask you this, and honestly, now seems as good of a time as any, right? So maybe…what do you think about getting married?”

I had had all these romantic ideas about how I was going to ask him to marry me. Huge and elaborate plans. Filled with poetry and beauty, but suddenly, there in that Laguna cross section, a fog rolling in off the Pacific, traffic building up around us, I suddenly understood something: I was in love. Deeply and truly. Spiritually. I was awesomely and completely in love and I suddenly knew that I couldn’t wait one more second, I couldn’t wait for that perfect moment because every moment with him was perfect and I wanted him to know, in his fucking bones, how much I loved him.

He laughed at me. And he said, “I’ve been waiting for you to put a ring on it.”

I didn’t have a ring. I hadn’t even thought about rings. I had once given my mother’s wedding ring (she gave it to me when she thought she was dying of cancer) to a boyfriend of mine, and had asked him to marry me, only to later, in a fight, throw it into the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard, losing my mother’s dying (she didn’t end up dying) gift. I was drinking back then and a mess, and throwing my sick mother’s wedding ring into the middle of a busy street was just the kind of thing I would do to punish my boyfriend.

“I’ll get you a ring. I’ll get you whatever you want. I just…I fucking love you.” In retrospect I must have sounded like an idiot. I should have at least waited till dinner. Or till we were on the cliffs over looking the ocean. Or somewhere more romantic than a busy Laguna intersection: Paris or Rome, or maybe on one of those arched bridges over some forgotten Venice canal that my mother and I used to find ourselves on, talking about the future and the past, she would always channel her spirit guides out there, staring into those darkly flowing waters: her face changing in strange ways, her voice growing deeper: Venice made her darker somehow; but like I said, I didn’t think I could make it one more second. It was that kind of a moment. Most moments are like that for me. Urgent. Impossible to withstand.

I am continuously aware of my impending death. And of the death of those I love. These things happen. Guns shots and cancer and car accidents: at any moment one of those Laguna BMW’s could have driven wildly toward us, hitting Alex and killing him while I stood there, helpless, or maybe he would be struck by an aneurism, or a comet would appear in the sky, or an earthquake, the big one finally taking out Southern California and I would not have asked him. Any moment could be our death. Death is like that.

And I would have rather died knowing I had asked him than not.

It was that kind of fucking moment.

When I was a child there was a tree that grew outside my bedroom window. At night, if I opened the window, I could reach out and touch the branches. I once dreamt of a little old man who lived inside that childhood tree. He knocked on my bedroom window, three soft raps. My room was exactly as it had been as a child: bunk bed, purple rug on the floor, my stuffed zebra, the only thing not the same was me: in my dream I am grown, my legs to long for the child-size bed, my feet hanging over the edges. The window glass is cold, frozen with frost. The little old man was dressed in a navy-blue suit and an orange tie, red shoes and a yellow fedora. His ears were pointed and his eyes were slanted like a cats.

I opened the window and stuck my head out into the cold darkness of the night. And the little old man told me a secret. He predicted the outcome of my life only he did it in a language that made sense only in my dream. When I woke up I had no idea what any of the words meant, and I found it impossible to recollect the visions that flew through my mind as he spoke to me.

But I do remember clearly the feeling I had as I struggled back to consciousness, sleep fading away: I had the sense of possibility, that the world was open to me in ways I had never imagined: and I was excited.

This is exactly what I felt the first time I met Alex in person, as if he were the prediction made to me in my dream: as if here the manifestation of all my dreams.

TO BE CONTINUED….