Every Breath You Take: The 101^st Way

by Ian McDuff

There was a brief period in April when I was on deck to pinch-hit in the 100 Ways Challenge, when it briefly appeared there was no one to cover ‘voyeurism.’ Fortunately, Vera stepped in – brilliantly: stop now and go read it; you can always come back to this – but, in the interim, I had mentally outlined, and chosen the bitter ending for, this piece. Since that time, more canon has come our way, and fed into this, and so I present the following non-happy, non-sparkly snapshot: of JC and his tortured, allusive, lyric-sodden mind, in the darkness.

He hated this.

He didn’t want to do it.

He couldn’t resist it.

He could move with obvious reluctance, he could make his hand travel slowly to the mouse, telegraphing his own hatred of the action and his being powerless to resist the overwhelming compulsion: he could posture and pose in the white-hot / spot-light for his one-man show in the theater of his mind, where he played, always and in every action, to an audience of one, himself. But he was going to do it, and he knew it, and he couldn’t, really, help himself.

The images washed over him as he sat there, tense, transfixed, miserable, at night, when all the world’s asleep. He took no pleasure in them, but he was in their thrall.

For a decade now: a third of his life and more: he’d watched. Watched him and watched over him. He’d seen him grow, and he’d seen him change, and he’d seen the difference there is between growth and change, between the slow unfolding of what was always potential in him and the hopeless reinventions of self that he’d tortured himself with in hopes of fitting in. They had all failed him in that, and he himself most of all, leaving him always unsure, insecure, desperate to submit to any expedient at any price to somehow become someone they approved of. And all the time, they had, they had wanted only that he be himself, and he had never felt that to be enough. And whose fault that was, was all too evident.

He’d seen him – Lance: he could say the name to himself, silently: no one was here to hear him – he’d seen Lance grow up, yet never quite grow into himself, never become comfortable in his own skin. Lance wanted, desperately wanted, the world to see him as the man with all the answers (the question to everyone’s answer / Is usually asked from within), as today’s Tom Sawyer, A modern-day warrior / Mean, mean stride. But he had watched Lance, obsessively, for a decade. Seen him follow Chris and Justin blindly – here come the jesters, one-two-three – in hopes of somehow being accepted; seen him adopt their positions and bang his head against the door to their inner sanctum until his brains shattered. Seen him recreate Tara in the Hollywood hills, all façade and trumpery, fake Greek Revival with its Doric portico, and no lush Southern lawn within a thousand miles, a movie-set, back-lot, meretricious mansion without an azalea or a magnolia to be found. Seen him shut himself more and more away, closing off any avenue of approach: seen him learn to hold his tongue and fight his enthusiasm. And why not: every time he thought his dreams were about to come true, as if ’N Sync weren’t enough for one lifetime (and why was it that it was not enough, not for any of them?), every single time, he had been allowed to get his hopes up, had been led on, and only at the last possible moment had been kicked in the balls and left there, crumpled over in agony….

And he knew that he was a part of that. He had never quite been able to make a stand, stand by your man, he’d been obsessive about being outed, he had not been stable enough for Lance to trust and build on, a joker, a smoker, a midnight toker, I take my lovin’ on the run. He had failed Lance, and Lance had failed him, and himself, and they had failed one another all ’round, and now Lance … Always hopeful, yet discontent / He knows changes aren’t permanent / But change is.

And now, now that he had failed Lance, he knew the price of that failure at last and in full.

The price of not knowing truth from falsity. The price of being relegated to this, in this dark room, illumined only by the death-light glow of the monitor’s screen. Like all the world, he had stared in shock and bewilderment at the photos from Fiji, wondering, speculating, sick at heart at having to wonder and speculate. He could call Lance, but he shouldn’t have to call, and he no longer expected that Lance would tell him the truth. If it was a break, an injury … but how? He had no illusions about Lance, although he tried desperately to create and clutch them: this was the Lance who was willing to become the boyband Paul Lynde if it meant going back on ‘Hollywood Squares’ on a day that Mario Lopez was also a guest. Lance had his reasons for being in Fiji: who, after all, was behind the transformation of Nick and Jessica into the new Desi and Lucy, Sonny and Cher, if not a certain Boy Mogul who worshipped at the Desilu Productions altar (that’s the way you do it / Money for nothing): but perhaps he had had a few too many and earned a fist to the face from, say, a suddenly-propositioned and startled Drew? Of course, that would almost justify Jesse’s punching Lance….

If Jesse had struck him – but that was ridiculous. Jesse wouldn’t. In fairness, Jesse simply wouldn’t. No matter what the provocation. He didn’t hate Jesse, he rather liked him, in fact he would have done him, but he did hate him too, innocently, because of what Jesse had and was and where he was privileged to stand, where he had once stood of right until his own follies had intervened. Don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone (they paved Paradise and put up a parking lot). But Jesse? Strike Lance? It was insane, like all the thoughts that came to him in this room, when engaged in this obsession’s acts. And what would they have fought about? Lance’s wandering eye, which Jesse had long since learned to accept? Whether to give money to Kerry rather than to AIPAC? But if Jesse had broken anything of Lance’s – except his heart, which he rather hoped Jesse would, so he could try again with Lance – then Jesse was going to get broken in other places, including his neck. Oh, Tannenbaum, O Maryland, the despot’s heel is on thy shore, if Lance had been hurt….

But Lance was always capable of hurting himself the worst. Only he had ever been able to injure Lance as comprehensively as Lance could injure himself. And if Lance had given himself over to some hack surgeon, marring the nobility of that profile and jeopardizing that voice in some quest for a retrousée nose…. See the man with the lonely eyes. Lance’s smile never reached his eyes any longer, not even with Jesse (every smile you fake, I’ll be watching you). But the black eye to the rest of them would be permanent, not transitory, if they had done no better in ten years than leave Lance as one of those pitiable Hollywood B-listers whose sense of self was so empty they made themselves plastic, malleable, devotees of the plastic surgeon’s scalpel. Like Michael, pathetic and monstrous at once, grotesque: Caliban. God: he mustn’t have, he couldn’t have. Or were he and Jesse going for matching features, like Liberace and his succession of boytoys had? On some people, a nose like that looked well, but on Lance? He looked porcine. It had to be, dear God, it had to be temporary, the result of a facial injury and its consequent swelling.

And he didn’t know. He might as well be a fan, sitting at a computer, speculating wildly, and that was wrong on so many levels it defied analysis: that he didn’t know, hadn’t been told, would surely be asked by the press and had no answers. He shouldn’t have to call and ask. Once, and for a long time, he wouldn’t have had to. Ain’t it funny how time slips away.

All the more reason, then, for this. This obsession. This moment to commit my weekly crime. This CD of images, still and motion, official and candid, and, even, known to none else on earth, the most shameful of them, the few stolen seconds he had pilfered with a hidden, remote camera, of Lance and Jesse, sweat-slick and beautiful, their rutting more balletic than animal, 0:1:49 of footage he had stolen from their privacy with a sick sense of shame that was not enough to have stopped him from doing it or from watching it obsessively. I have hours, only lonely / My love is vengeance / That’s never free. No one would understand; he didn’t understand, himself, and he loathed himself for it, but no one else knew, either, the pain, the pain behind blue eyes, that could be assuaged only by this anodyne. It was helpless, irresistible, Held within the Pleasure Dome / Decreed by Kubla Khan / To taste my bitter triumph.

Yet he watched, rapt, unable not to, over and over, able to live only in a world of illusion – where everything’s peaches and cream – and, ohhhh, really love your peaches / Wanna shake your tree….

His breathing quickened, and he leaned forward, his face almost against the glowing screen. He knew he need not expect release; he achieved that but rarely, wounded as he was. He seldom even hardened as he watched, avidly, the images of his secret worship. The convulsion, the sharp sweet shock of climax, the broken hallelujah, was not the point. Indulging and feeding his obsession, he might or might not find orgasm – probably not. He would most likely not. But he knew that always, always, he would cry bitterly at the end.

END

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