Discerning the Spirits: Passion and Addiction

Salvador Dali: The Temptation of St. Anthony

The Desert Fathers and Mothers of early Eastern Christianity developed a spiritual psychology of extraordinary depth and self-awareness. Their lives of withdrawal from the distractions of business-as-usual in the urban centres of Egypt heightened the intensity of the tricks the mind plays on itself. Their mythologized language of demons disguised as angels, and the criteria needed to tell them apart, expressed this dynamic.

But you don’t have to spend three years in the desert to know what it’s like to find out you’ve gone down the wrong path and that you need a way to separate light out from darkness. This quotation from Gabor Maté, a Vancouver-based physician and expert in issues of trauma, addiction, and child development, is reposted from New York sacred intimate Don Shewey’s blog, Another Eye Opens.

The title of Maté's book refers to another mythology for this psychological dynamic: the realm of Hungry Ghosts is a Buddhist hell full of spirits who crave endlessly and can never be satisfied. (Like all Buddhist realms of punishment, this is not an eternal state--there is no such thing as an eternal state--but a region in which the consequences of one's actions are experienced prior to another incarnation.)

"The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates.... Passion is divine fire: it enlivens and makes holy; it gives light and yields inspiration. Passion is generous because it’s not ego-driven; addiction is self-centered. Passion gives and enriches; addiction is a thief. Passion is a source of truth and enlightenment; addictive behaviors lead you into darkness. You’re more alive when you are passionate, and you triumph whether or not you attain your goal. But an addiction requires a specific outcome that feeds the ego; without that outcome, the ego feels empty and deprived. A consuming passion that you are helpless to resist, no matter what the consequences, is an addiction."

--Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

A Queer Utopia: Supple and Turbulent, Chapter Four

4

Something utterly bland droned from the speaker on the windowsill just inside the screen. Jake’s an amateur harpsichord builder. He looked back down the stairs at me and made the international sign of the gag reflex. Not our choice of music, I told myself. I’ll enjoy it because it gives Luke pleasure, and I love Luke.

 

The screen door’s peeling white frame greeted us with a rusty creak. Thank God there were still places like this off the beaten track, I thought, untouched by the synthetic cuteness of every beautiful spot the urban professionals discover as a getaway and then overrun with Audis and designer boutiques.

 

Inside, Luke was standing on his head naked against the wall, a kaftan of deep blue homespun Indian cotton rolled up beside him, a small uncut amethyst mounted in silver wire on a chain carefully piled on top. His arms looked too slight to offer the support the pose needed. But then he’d amazed me time and again with the asanas he could effortlessly assume. You’d never know to see him practice that he’d taken up yoga to keep himself mobile in the face of joint problems that made even Billy’s look like small change. The grace with which he walked in his skin gave his slight frame a phenomenal sexiness. His build dramatically accentuated an asset he was sensitive enough about that the rest of us were careful to lust over it in silence, knowing how anxious he could be that men might only be interested in what he had hanging between his legs. His cock dangled as far as his navel toward his wispy goatee and the page-boy haircut that fell, a little ridiculous in its inversion, from the crown of his head. His face showed no trace that he’d registered our arrival, his eyes still closed, his exhalations even through parted lips. He’d come back to us when he was ready.

 

Hank strode in from the kitchen, telegraphed a quick glance at Luke, then whispered to us in his thickest and most accomplished Phyllis Diller, “Welcome to the cave, girls. Batboy will rejoin us momentarily. If he doesn’t topple over from the weight of that tubesteak and break something.”

 

Kurt snorted, clamped a hand over Hank’s mouth and blew a raspberry into his neck. Hank was wearing a pea-green miniskirt, orange pumps and matching disc earrings.  “Fashion error,” Kurt said. “That skirt cries out for Pepto-Bismol pink.”

 

“Everyone’s a critic,” Hank vamped, “but no one’s willing to design.”

 

You wouldn't peg him for the biggest top of us all, the larger-than-life Italian New Yorker who'd coaxed countless legs on the Upper West Side into the air--when he wasn’t dancing to Nine Inch Nails in the kitchen where he earned his living catering the parties of all the men he’d slept with. Which was to say a good chunk of queer Manhattan above Columbus Circle. What he’d done to Jake’s butt the last time we’d set up the massage table didn’t exactly defy description. But it had stretched more than our imaginations and left Jake babbling happy obscenities as he arched up to clutch Rajiv’s shoulders at the head of the table.

 

“Danny Deever and his Brahmin prince will be down from the loft any day now, as soon as they finish checking each other for ticks. For the eighth time. You can never be too careful in these parts,” Hank camped on.

 

The room smelled of cedar that had seasoned through fifty humid summers and fifty snowy winters in the Smokies. The awning windows, hinged at the tops of their long, narrow frames, all angled out as Jake had propped them when we first arrived. A breeze blew through on its way from the Mississippi toward North Carolina. In the middle of the living room a  hand-braided rug spiralled in a starburst of now-faded colours salvaged from wool clothes someone’s grandparents had worn. Behind the living-room walls ran the passage that gave onto the kitchen and three bedrooms. In the corner a narrow staircase, bookshelves built into its underside, mounted to a railed gallery that overlooked the communal space. A single long, low upper room opened directly onto it, brightened by light that streamed through the windows, filtered by trees that lined the cobbled walk down from the drive above the house. A tangle of sheets twisted and rose above a bed in the back corner, from which Jim and Rajiv extricated themselves like two monarch butterflies sharing a single chrysalis. When they came forward to the gallery, their erections  poked out at us from under the rail. Jim’s blond hair fell lank to his shoulders. He hadn’t cut it since he’d left me. I found myself wondering what it would feel like brushing the inside of Rajiv’s thighs.

 I looked away, wanting to focus on anything but the sight of the two of them together. Luke came out of his headstand, curling down into a crouch with his back to us, then rising to unfold his kaftan and drop it over his head. Draped in its heavily textured folds, he turned around, came forward, took my hand in one of his and laid his other over my heart. His eyes lit up in surprise as he touched me. “You’re refrigerated,” he said.

 “And ready to go back in if you’re coming too,” I said.

 “After lunch, you’ve got a date,” he said. He looked around the room and took in a deep breath. “It’s so easy to see why Pete chose this place. It’s got his energy in every corner.”

Queer Utopias: Supple and Turbulent, Chapter Three

3

“My boyfriend-in-law,” I’d happily called Rajiv in those first heady months when we still thought we could make it work. On Saturday nights, we’d settle into a three-way snuggle with a bottle of wine and a movie. Then I’d kiss them goodnight as they left for Rajiv’s apartment and I went off in search of kindred spirits at the baths. It was bound to happen. The uncomplicated fun between them didn’t carry the baggage of what Jim and I hadn’t sorted through in ten years. I told Jim that I wished we could have found together what he was finding with Rajiv--but was glad he could find it with somebody. It seemed only fair. I was the one, after all, who’d opened Pandora’s Box.

 

I couldn't stop playing the "what if's" over in my head. I was the one who'd first wanted the freedom to explore, frustrated by how little seemed possible between Jim and me in bed. I was the one who took Pete's advice to go off for a week and learn erotic massage with forty guys on a mountain above the Napa wine country. There I discovered the long, slow sexual charge that took the top of my head off and left me euphoric and in love with the whole world for weeks. After that I saw no way of turning back. If I couldn't make that magic with Jim, then I had to find a way to make it on my own. I tried to take the quiet, stable domestic satisfactions of life with Jim for what they were. We made a perfect fit in the house and garden: moving around each other in the kitchen like pros; Jim happy to dig the flower beds I was happy to weed and water. But I'd find what I needed to feel fully alive somewhere else.

 What if I hadn’t gone up that California mountain road? I still found myself asking, even though I knew I’d awakened again from the neck down only by getting to the top of it.

 What if I hadn’t ended up by night in the arms of half a dozen of the guys I’d spent the day with, moving from one plateau of unashamed, open-hearted pleasure to the next?

 What if the sex I had with them hadn’t been so shatteringly gorgeous?

 What if I hadn’t told Jim I needed other men in my life? What if our first threesome, that seemed at the time like such a perfect initiation into a new stage of our life together, hadn’t turned out to be the beginning of the end?

 

What if I hadn't encouraged Jim to give New Age Slut Camp a try for himself, and he hadn't met Rajiv, on top of a massage table, glistening with oil and writhing in pleasure? What if Rajiv hadn't turned out to live a twenty-minute walk from us back at home?

 And who wouldn’t fall for Rajiv? I asked myself. Eyes like the ocean at midnight, biceps that rippled under skin like polished chestnuts, a stark ebony beard, a smile that lit up a room, and the laughing, playful streak of a guy with twenty years’ less mileage on him than any of the rest of us.

 Finally: what if all our lives hadn’t gotten bound up with the end of Pete’s? But that part of the story comes later.

“What if” was killing me slowly, leaching my confidence about everything that had seemed so right in my life for two years, shutting down the future as fast as fast as I tried to embrace it, despite regret and loss and a rising, corrosive tide of self-pity. But then, if joy and loss hadn’t turned out to be two sides of the same coin, I would never have found myself below a Tennessee woodland waterfall with these men. That was the price of the ticket, it had turned out, for each of us.

“Where did you go?” Billy asked me as we climbed out of the pool and gathered up the clothes we weren’t going to have much need of for the rest of the day.

 

"The usual," I said. He'd already heard the story too many times. Telling him again wasn't going to help me get free of it.

“I figured. Just give them a wide birth if you need to. It’s not fair to you or them if you can’t hack it. It’s not like there aren’t enough of us to distract all three of you from each other.” He reached for my nipple. I turned ticklish and giggling as he chased me back up the slope to the deck.

Queer Utopias: Supple and Turbulent, Chapter Two

2

“I thought lunch wasn’t till twelve,” offered the wry voice above me. My eyes had practically rolled to the back of my head, but I looked up and tried to focus. I think Jake planned all along to put on a show for whoever came down the slope first to find us in the water. Level with my face, two wiry calves rose above combat boots and disappeared at the knees into a leather kilt. Enough chain hung looped from the right side of the wide belt to shackle a Harley to a telephone pole. The waistband was slung below Kurt’s tight, lean, flanks. Belying his smirk, two enormous brown eyes recalled an El Greco saint who’d just flagellated himself into ecstasy. His thin, close-cropped hair was bleached white and scruffy over dark roots. From the ring in his ear dangled a Scots terrier made out of twisted wire.

“If you don’t drop that skirt, I’ll ruin it when I pull you in,” I said, grabbing his ankles.

He obliged with one fast tug on his belt buckle and a kick of each unlaced boot, then plopped down on the bank, naked except for a steel cockring, to straddle my shoulders with his legs. I still wasn’t used to the Prince Albert that dangled from the head of his cock, though I’d seen it in March and again in the photos he sent us that night he was too horny to sleep. When he told us he was getting pierced, I should have known not to expect anything less ambitious, and he’d already upped the gauge twice. The weight of it pulled his glans down to just below the curve of his smooth, hairless ballsac.

“If you think I’m going to risk chipping my teeth on that, forget it,” I said, and pulled him by the arms into the pool on top of me. Jake splashed back into the water behind us, sputtering and coughing as he came up.

“Slave overboard,” Billy shouted from where he leaned over the rail of the deck. “Where’s everybody else?” Jake asked Kurt as they fell into a clinch. 
 

“Jim and Rajiv as usual can’t keep their hands off each other and went upstairs. Hank’s already in the kitchen rearranging what you guys did. Luke’s trading in jeans for his kaftan.”

 Billy came trotting down the slope towards us. “Room for one more?” 

“Cost you a blow job,” Kurt offered.

“Cool. Giving or getting?” Billy asked.

“Relax, we won’t collect till sunset,” I said. 

Reaching for his shoulder as he sat on the bank to untie his shoes, I planted my open mouth over his, losing myself in the bushy beard he’d grown out over the last months. On his back, my hands traced the serpentine curve of his spine where it meandered unpredictably back and forth below his shoulder blades.

He showed me an x-ray of it once when I confessed how perplexed I’d been the first time I’d tried to follow it on a massage table. He taught me that sexiness comes in all shapes and sizes. Nothing’s hotter than massaging Billy, leaning forward from the head of the table to lay the length of my arms down his stocky chest, raking his upper thighs and rubbing my frenulum into his forehead. Nobody responds more appreciatively to my attention.

He slipped into the pool, and I rested my chin on the top of his head as he nuzzled his beard into my chest, his mouth just clearing the surface of the water. I gave his belly a few friendly thrusts with my erection by way of hello. He returned the favor against my thigh. But I was already close to my edge, and I knew he just needed to chill after the long drive. Linking hands, we reached out to Jake and Kurt and lay back in the water together, feet to the centre of our magic circle, all going limp as the sound of the water over the rocks sank deeper into us.

“Is it going to be any easier on you this time?” Billy asked me, when we’d all gazed silently for a while at the leaves above us and the sky beyond.

“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know,” I said. “I’m getting used to seeing them together. It’s easier with the rest of you here than when I bump into them on my own.”  

Six months earlier, Jim had left me for Rajiv. It still cut like a knife sometimes, losing the heart of the man I’d lived with for twelve years to the man I welcomed into our relationship when we opened it up.

Queer Utopias: Supple and Turbulent

Here begins the third of my novellas imagining a world where we might be more truly and completely at home.

Supple and Turbulent

1

“This should hold if the wind comes up,” I told Jake, testing the tension on the cords as I tied them to an eye-hook I’d just screwed into the siding at the back of the deck. Converging in lines of yellow, green, red, white, and blue, nine sets of prayer flags floated in the breeze, stretching from points all along a branch of the big oak that rose above the slope below. Prayers printed in a language none of us could read flowed off the cloth into the wind, for the benefit of all sentient beings. Jake practically broke his neck tying them to that branch, but we couldn’t resist the surprise and delight they’d give the others when they arrived.  

“Looks good,” he said, and ticked down his memorized list. “Cabin swept, lunch made, playlists ready, two gallons of sun tea brewing on the deck. I’m sweating like a pig, and. that creek’s calling. Come on.” He nodded down the slope. A stream plunged over the rocks to the left of the cabin into a pool wide enough to hold four or five men up to their chests, and tranquil enough to float in till you’d had enough of the chill and craved the mid-summer sun again. From there the bright water flashed and babbled over rocks along a creek-bed that divided the bottom of the lawn from the top of the woods. 

“Nothing to do till the others get here, at least for an hour,” I said, “even if they get the van right away and the traffic’s light near the airport. I’m right behind you.”

 
He was already down the steps, stripping off his T-shirt and dropping it in the grass as he padded toward the pool. Slabs of loose, aging-farm-boy muscle gleamed across his shoulders in the mid-morning sun. Stopping on the rocks at the edge, he pulled down his cargo shorts and boxers and kicked them aside to sit bare-ass on the cool stone. I just love Jake’s boxers. The pair I traded with him the first weekend we ever had sex still get me hard as soon as I pull them out of the drawer and step into them. 
 
He dangled his feet in the water, leaning over to splash it with his big hand onto his face and into his thinning salt-and-pepper hair. By the time I caught up to him and peeled off my own sweaty clothes, his dick was pointing skywards along the solid, relaxed curve of his belly.

“You here to cool off or get hot?” I grinned. My own cock started to swell as I sat down next to him and pressed my thigh against his. Prodding his foot with my toes and jumping in, I turned around to play at pulling him in by his ankles. “You know we don't want you shooting that thang till tonight. I’m here to keep an eye on you. You better pace yourself, big guy.”  

“That’s real colloquial, dude,” he said. 

I’m not the one with a Ph.D. in macroeconomics. Dude,” I teased him back. He slid off the rock into my arms. Our pricks collided, then settled up against each other’s bellies as we fell into a tight hug. My tongue darted out to take a swipe at the salty sweat that trickled under his jaw-line toward his collarbone.

Then we floated apart to let the water bear us up. A school of minnows came over to investigate our toes. Opposite us, under the shade of a yellowwood, a crawfish scuttled across a shallow ledge of rock just under the surface, its olive body rippled by the play of sun-dappled water just above its back. We leaned back further, floating up to our necks. Above us, sunlight glinted between leaves that still wore the emerald freshness of late spring and plenty of rainfall in the hills of eastern Tennessee.

 
Sometimes, when the stars line up, Jake becomes my perfect daddy, the father I spent my own boyhood dreaming of. I melt every time I hear his voice grow warm with love and pride, speaking of his two grown sons. Somehow, he’s even more that perfect daddy on a massage table with his ass in the air, begging one of us to work fingers a little further into the blossoming rosebud tucked between his big, muscular glutes. I’m only five years younger, but I suspect sometimes I become for him the son he’ll allow himself to get it on with. He’s confessed to me how he’d quietly longed for his own boys as they were becoming men, behind the firewall he put up between them and his desire.
 
Joking with Jake was the only way to negotiate the rising tide of horniness all eight of us had suffered for weeks. We teased each other about perpetual erections by e-mail, on the phone, in person, egging each other on and trying to hold back, both at the same time. Now, at summer solstice, by some miracle, we’d saved up three full months of lust for each other. Eight flaky faerie fuck-monks, Kurt had called us in an e-mail he sent out one night announcing he was so cranked up he couldn’t sleep. Instead of trying, he’d sent us all a dozen digital photos of his fat, perfect perfect, shiny with lube and clenched in his hand, a chain linked up between the oversized Prince Albert protruding through its tip and a studded dog collar buckled firmly around his neck.)

Jake was standing beside me now, scooping my feet off the bottom of the pool, a hand behind my tailbone, another supporting my neck and shoulders, swirling me gently around the deepest part near the centre. Below the flat of his palm supporting my sacrum, his middle finger burrowed gently, a friendly river creature nuzzling easily down the crack of my ass. He shifted his forearm so that it could take over the support of my back, and the pads of his fingers found their bull’s-eye. I took a deep, contented breath into the slow circles massaging me open to the cool water. They felt even more delicious because I knew he wasn’t trying to go any further just now.

 
There was nowhere to go, no goal to get to. Not till the feast at sunset. Just two men in a pool of cool water, along with the fish, under a canopy of leaves, waiting for their tribe to gather.  All I felt was gratitude for my life, and for these men with whom, against all odds, I’d become lovers. Somewhere up in the branches, a dove began its soft, gently mournful five-note song.  As I arched back a little further, my erection bobbed in and out of the water. Jake bent forward to give it a gentle lick, tickled it deliberately with a couple strokes of his moustache, then stood back up, grinning and making a show of smacking his lips.

 
Up the slope, beyond the cabin, car doors slammed and voices drifted down the hill and around the house, just audible over the noise of the waterfall. I started to rise from the pool, but then Jake said, “They’ll make themselves at home and come looking for us if they want. I bet they’ll show up soon enough in the heat.” 

So I lay back into the strength of his arms bearing me up, and into the comfort of his fingertips subtly caressing me, coaxing me to open up. The moans I let out surely encouraged him. He floated me back over to the side. I felt his wide thigh lift beneath my hip to roll me over on my side away from him, and then I was sprawled across a smooth patch of grass, my legs still dangling in the water, my chest pressed into the turf. I felt his hands flatten against my asscheeks, pulling them apart, and again the tickle of his moustache just before the tip of his tongue found my hole, then slid down my perineum, and I felt one of my nuts and then the other roll into the warmth of his mouth.