Life changed drastically for me when I became
interested in members of the opposite sex, but not nearly so dramatically
as it did when I finally had sex. I had been masturbating for at
least four years by the time I actually involved another person.
I found out that the orgasm I had with a woman was mind boggling compared
to the ones I had alone. That didn’t stop me from trying to duplicate
the feeling every day, usually more than once a day. I can honestly
say that I was a sexual addict, a satyr, long before I ever had sex.
Having sex just made my problem a lot worse.
The only time in my life I have gone more
than a couple of days without having an orgasm was on the drug wing in
the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison. That was because I needed the
program to improve my chances of getting out and staying out of jail.
If anybody told the counselors you were masturbating they would throw you
off the line. I made it nearly thirty days before I figured out a
way that I could do it at night without anyone noticing. Even after
that I was still too paranoid about getting thrown off the line to do it
too often.
When I was young I used to try to hide my
masturbation problem from everyone, even my girlfriend. As I became
more mature I realized that if anyone thought about it they had to know
that I was doing it, so I stopped being paranoid about it at home.
Of course I still became embarrassed when my dad caught me with lubricant
on my hands one day. I thought I managed to wipe it off. I
saw him staring at my hand. When I looked there was lotion all over
between my fingers. He said, “Jesus, son, get yourself cleaned up!”
I wanted to die. The thought that I had been doing something natural
in the privacy of my own apartment did not even cross my mind.
After I got married I kept on doing it.
Sometimes I did it in front of her because she said it turned her on.
Sometimes she did it for me, which she liked a lot more. That was
even more mind boggling and intense than sex. I became open to being
teased, especially if anything kinky was involved.
I have heard the theory that some sexual addicts,
especially the males, need more and more extreme psychological stimuli
to become aroused. That was never true for me. I started off
at an insanely extreme level and stayed that way. As a teenager who
had never had sex I pleasured myself to literature devoted to sadomasochism,
bondage and domination. The only thing I did differently then was
hide my fascination. As of now I no longer care about keeping these
things a secret. The argument could be made that I have become more
extreme by opening up, and I can see a certain amount of excitement in
the exposure. However, I lost self-serving motives when I decided
to write this. I am definitely not talking about this to turn myself
on. If I wanted to do that it would be a lot juicier. I am
telling everyone about this to help my chances of survival in the world.
If it isn’t a secret my mind won’t allow it to be a big deal anymore.
I have desensitized to the shock value, and no one can hurt me with the
information. I am already considered a failure by the standard of
today’s society. I already have a terrible reputation. The
only way I can go from here is up. So here it is. I am probably
not like most of you. I get off on wild, kinky sex. I always
have, and I always will.
***
When I started doing methamphetamines I became
addicted less because of the physical sensation than because of the mental
euphoria. I stayed up writing and doing super-complicated pieces
of head art for days at a time. My friend Nick and I used to psyche
each other up to keep at it when we lived together on Stanford and on Picket
Street.
After I became schizophrenic I kept on writing.
That was after I had lost all of my friends, at least for the time being.
I was all alone on Highland Road. I found out that all of the things
I told myself about tweak making me creative were lies I told myself as
rationalizations for continuing to use. I had to burn all of the
poetry I wrote during that time. I considered those poems irrefutable
proof that I was completely crazy after all. I wanted to make sure
that no one could find it and use it to have me put away. That may
be a pretty far-fetched paranoia, but then I suffered from drug induced
paranoid schizophrenia on more than one occasion. I didn’t burn any
of the art. Unfortunately most of it was fairly good and people took
it all away. I have always been very generous with my art, especially
if a woman liked it. The plus side of that is that I got to have
sex with the artistic type girls a lot. The negative side of that
is I have very few pieces of some of the best art I ever did. I used
oils, acrylics, pastels, watercolors, pencils, and inks. I don’t
have an ego about it. I am all old and washed up, and all I can do
is write. But once I had the potential to be a great artist.
The first burglary I ever committed I did to get the oil paints out of
a studio because I was running low. They are very expensive.
I never did it again until I was strung out on morphine, but the damage
had been done. The first time had been just too easy.
***
My last semester of high school I had a lot
of friends at L.S.U. A large number of people I sold doses to attended
the university. We had a lot of parties in Power Hall, which was
where most of my friends lived. My friend Gerald stayed in Power
Hall for two semesters, but at the time he didn’t go to college.
Usually we just got drunk and tripped on campus.
One night I met one of Nick’s friends, Gary,
in the parking lot to sell him some doses. He wanted me to smoke
a joint with him. I sat in the car and took several long pulls.
That was when he told me the joint was laced with PCP. Within a minute
I felt like I was being shot out of a cannon. It seemed like time
and space was rushing past my face. It felt like I was walking on
the moon when I got out of the car. Gary gave me a joint of it and
drove off. I wandered around in the parking lot for a little while
before I went inside with the joint.
There were about five people in the dorm room
I had been partying in for two days. Every one was mellow and stoned
waiting to come down from the trip the previous night that still had us
all awake. I lit up the joint without telling anyone it was laced.
It really didn’t occur to me to tell anyone. I was too high to think
about it. When they asked me to pass the joint I did. Within
a few minutes every occupant of the room was loaded on PCP.
Gerald asked me what the fuck was going on.
I told him there was PCP in the joint. “Holy shit,” he said, before
he sat down hard.
No one else seemed capable of understanding
what I had said. Matt ran out of the room. I followed him when
I heard noise in the hall. He was down the hall by the water fountain.
He was on his knees. He kept ramming his head into the water fountain
over and over. When Biff and I tried to stop him he sprinted out
of the building and into the night. Back in the room Chip couldn’t
sit still. He kept saying, “Wow!” I thought that was all he
could say until about twenty minutes later when he asked me if I could
get some more.
That wasn’t the only good time we had at Power
Hall. In those days the dormitory backed up to the campus tennis
courts, and, more to the point, the playground for the University Lab Elementary
School. More than once we took doses or drank mushroom tea and spent
the whole night sitting around in the playground. My first trip ever
had been on a playground. For some reason I felt drawn to playgrounds
whenever I tripped. It was like a designated hallucinogenic zone.
I always had a lot of fun on the swings and the slides when I was hallucinating.
I tripped in playgrounds at night at least twenty-five times. That’s
probably some sort of record in Louisiana.
The cops came to St. Aloysius once.
Gerald and I ran about ten blocks through the middle of the blocks, jumping
a fence each time. I was young and fat at the time. I would
never have thought I could jump that many fences in a row. When the
cops showed up at the Lab School playground we jumped the canal.
We ran across the campus flower gardens and down to the sorority houses
by the lake. We kept on running until we hit the safety of State
Street where there were freaks like us everywhere. After the last
time I had to run from the cops I decided I was getting too old for that
shit. I never tripped in a playground again.
***
I know that I mentioned my fascination with the occult. It was always the idea that supernatural phenomena were possible that interested me the most. The idea of an older religion, a religion that held secrets of the unseen world within its doctrines, captured my thoughts. Belief is a very powerful thing. I believed in the goddess, and for that reason I was punished with a vision of her. All things become possible if you believe. I think you can summon anything if you believe in it strongly enough. When I realized just how serious belief could be I got my mind together. I finally understood if you want positive things in your life you have to court positive ideas, and so I embraced the all-powerful benevolent God once more. It is still hard to forget that the old gods live on, waiting for victims.
***
Maybe you should know I could have had a 4.0
grade point average if that had been my desire. I made a competitive
score on the ACT, and I received a National Merit Academic commendation.
I got scholarships even though I hardly applied myself at all to study.
I struggled in college at first because of drugs and alcohol. After
I got into the swing of things I Dean’s Listed just for the hell of it.
I had all sorts of academic credentials when I tried to get them.
I started college as a sophomore. All of those things have very little
to do with my story. I looked at my education as a job with a lenient
boss. I only did what I had to do to get through it looking halfway
decent. It wasn’t my life. My life took place all around and
on top of my studies.
I spent a lot of time in bars. I hate
to admit that I spent more time in The Bayou than any other bar, but I
did. I could sell more doses and weed there than anywhere else.
A close runner up was a bar called Xanthus. The Zoo followed right
behind it. Whenever I was in New Orleans I was totally at The Abbey
and The Crystal. I spent a lot of time at The Riverfront and The
Bassment (now called The Argosy Sports Bar), and also at The Thirsty Tiger.
The Chimes saw me get drunk about a hundred times, but it’s also a restaurant.
I didn’t hang at The Chimes. I celebrated and indulged there.
I don’t go there at all anymore, not since they fired my friend David.
I stayed sober at a lot of these bars because I had business to take care
of. Each bar had a different variety of clientele, and it wasn’t
always cool to sell drugs drunk. Cops do go to bars.
The Bayou happens to be across the street
from the university. You can buy or sell anything there, to this
day, as long as you know the people in advance. All of the old high-energy
dance bars have disappeared. The Spanish Moon plays dance music,
but it falls short of being an ecstasy bar. I don’t know where the
modern amphetamine addict goes. I have done my best not to find out
by accident. I have nothing but good things to say about The Thirsty
Tiger. The bar is located downtown on Main Street, directly across
from the newspaper. Mostly a lot of older people go there, including
employees from the newspaper. That doesn’t stop it from being a great
place to get whacked and watch life pass by.
I am and have always been afraid of any bars
on the East Side of town. Out there you can stumble on cowboys, rednecks
and other wonders of inbreeding. Those types have never liked my
type, and so I have the good sense to avoid them. I have always had
to go to where the freaks could be found. I love to be around lesbians.
I have several lesbian friends. I also like homosexual men in Baton
Rouge. After a short period of time in Baton Rouge gay bars all of
the customers knew that I was there for no other reason than to supply
them with all of the dope they could do. I never got unwelcome advances.
Reject the generalization if you want to, but most gay men don’t have the
machismo to sling dope the way I did. I am not talking about San
Francisco, New York or Dallas. I am talking about Baton Rouge.
Most gay men had their hands full trying to be gay in such a dogmatic and
prejudiced town. All of my friends made a killing off of selling
homosexuals drugs. I know if there had been a gay drug dealing community
none of us would have been able to do that. One of the good things
about selling drugs to gay people is they already don’t get along too well
with the Baton Rouge City Police (narrow minded, discriminatory pigs).
Very seldom would a homosexual go out of his way to tell anything to a
cop. I don’t care what anybody has to say. I have been there
and done that. I don’t have any insecurities about my sexuality (at
least not at this stage).
The fact that I could sell drugs to homosexuals
and have a lot of skinhead friends could be considered strange if you didn’t
know about the Baton Rouge scene. Most of the skinheads around then
weren’t racist or nazi. They just had shaved heads and clicked together.
The only natural enemy of the punks and skinheads in Baton Rouge were white
fraternity boys. The skinheads and punks banded together because
they liked the same music, and drank beer and smoked weed. The fraternity
boys were rich boys who paid money for their friendships. I hated
them too. Whenever a fight broke out between the two sets I always
sided with the punks and skinheads.
One night some of the skinhead bitches wanted
to fight the punks (us). They tried to get their boyfriends involved,
but the men didn’t give a fuck. They were closer friends with us
than their own whores. I kept my head shaved for many years, but
I was a punk, not a skinhead. I just liked to keep my head shaved.
I never liked hair. It was too much of a hassle, and it could get
pulled if you got in a fight. I wasn’t the only one who shaved my
head because of that. A lot of people did.
***
Around the time I was attempting to finish
college I quit going to bars altogether. I quit selling drugs in
crowds. I knew too many people who got arrested for doing that.
I wouldn’t take anything out of my house at all. I never dealt with
anyone I didn’t know fairly well. I also took special care to keep
talk off of my telephone and make the traffic in and out of my house look
ordinary. I quit selling anything but weed. Everything else
was too dangerous. I was confused.
I believe now that I had no idea what the
good life was really all about. I thought I was living the good life,
but the good life has nothing to do with making a lot of money off of drugs
and not getting caught. I thought life was all about money.
Now I know that money has no meaning if you lose your freedom. Good
life means being free and keeping your mind clear. If you live a
clean life you can make plenty of money legally. I don’t describe
the days when I sold drugs in order to glorify that life. I offer
my descriptions to show how flawed my thinking was. I thought only
of myself. I never thought about anyone else. All I cared about
was getting rich. I was blind to the true nature of happiness.
I have found that happiness has nothing at
all to do with money. Money is a necessary evil that lures weak people
and fools to their doom. I pray to God in my own way that I don’t
fall under its spell again. I ask God to make me strong and help
me keep my mind clear. I ask Him to help me channel my energy positively
into what I do, which is write. Just because my beliefs and prayers
are different from most of the rest of Christianity does not mean they
have any less power than anyone else’s beliefs and prayers. I can
give you my personal guarantee that the God of my understanding, mocked
by believers and unbelievers alike, has made a world of difference in my
life.
God doesn’t tell me what to write. God
doesn’t tell me anything. I do believe that I receive the ability
to communicate from a higher power. God allows me to write.
He lets me do it as well or as poorly as I want to. I could take
the time to write incredibly correct and beautiful things if I wanted to.
I choose to show mistakes and ugliness rather than plod stiffly along,
but all these things are allowed by free will. There can be no thought,
no life and no feeling unless it is the will of the divine creator.
I let my will become molded by that perfect energy so that my existence
will be more meaningful. I slip now and then, or all the time.
I have always been given to rebellion. That’s why I stay in trouble,
another reason I would like to reach a more harmonious state of being.
When I concentrate and clear my mind to write
poetry I can feel the divine energy flowing through me. No one has
to believe that because I believe that. I have faith that the divine
power uses my ability to create beautiful things when I let it, just as
I have faith that when I die the divine power will take me into itself
and my soul will live forever. I believe the experience of reunion
with eternal harmony and power will be blissful, and that it will last
until the end of time. Every other belief I have ever had pales in
comparison with what I can now see so clearly is the truth. Alternative
beliefs are just pitfalls to progress, excuses for mediocrity. I
am willing to work harder to assure my union with eternity than I have
ever worked for anything else. I know that one day it will pay off.
I believe God is loving, a lot more loving
than most people think. He will know all of the things I have done,
right and wrong. He will know how I learned the error of my ways
and struggled to change myself and other people for the better. He
will see the love in my heart and the clarity of my beliefs, and He will
save my soul from the oblivion of eternal darkness. I say these things
so that you can know what it really means to be cool, what I mean when
I say that I have been saved.