Magical Thinking (16 page)

He turned toward me on the seat, which was an awkward position for him because the steering wheel was in the way. It struck me as a pose he used often in his work, one of accessibility and compassion. Body language that says “Here I am, open to you.” Father Bill continued, “Well, now that I get a better look at you outside the bar, there’s something in your eyes that makes me think this is not a one-time event, like you told me at the bar? When you apologized for being ‘loaded.’ I think that’s the word you used. Because you had a lousy day at work? Anyway, now something—call it instinct—is telling me you do this a lot. Like every night.”

He was right, of course. My drinking was quite out of hand. And the fact that he was now able to see this impressed me. “Well,” I said. And then we sat silent in the car, and I noticed he didn’t have air-conditioning or a CD player, and this humble fact made me feel tender toward him. I felt strangely connected to him at that moment and became instantly aroused.

He noticed. And this is when I got one of the best blow jobs of my life. Along with, at the end, a piece of paper with the name of a rehab hospital scribbled on it. “It’s in Minnesota. It’s the best. Lots of celebrities go there.”

He seemed to think that this would be something that might impress me, and he was sadly correct. The possibility of seeing Elizabeth Taylor or Robert Downey, Jr., in withdrawal would be enough to make me want to go to rehab whether I was a drunk or not.

I left him then, parked there in the alley. He offered to drive me home, but I told him my apartment was only a few blocks away.

Of course, I never saw him again. I left Chicago and moved back to New York City and went on with my life and my drinking
until my drinking was my life. Then one day I opened an old date book and came across Father Bill’s scribbled note. I’d apparently tucked it away for later, forgetting. And then
later
came. And I called the number on the paper and checked myself into rehab, which, in fact, did save my life.

So you could say he was a scumbag priest who drank, went to gay bars, and picked up guys to have sex with in cars. On the other hand, he did save a life. True, only the life of a gay, alcoholic, ad guy, but a life nonetheless.

So while I’m sure there are many priests out there who have
helped
many people, I wonder what percentage of them can actually claim to have
saved
a life. Surely God is going to look at his checklist and say “Okay, we’ve got this series of blow jobs here, which is gay. Which, you know, I technically can’t allow. On the other hand, you did save a life. So,” clap of the hands, “get into the bus, you’re going up.”

The other memorable Catholic-priest blow job occurred when I was much younger, just fourteen. I suppose this would be the height of fashion now, to receive a blow job from a priest when you are a teenager. This is now, of course, all the rage.

His name was Father Christopher, and he was a priest at the local Catholic Church in western Massachusetts, where I grew up. My mother wasn’t Catholic; my family wasn’t particularly religious. But my mother loved Catholic symbolism, and she enjoyed the services. She was a poet and a painter, so perhaps the rituals appealed to her dramatic side.

Father Christopher was the associate of a priest my mother knew, and I sort of had a crush on him because he was young and almost hunky. He looked like he should be out on a grassy field in a pair of shorts kicking a soccer ball and not indoors in the dark, dressed in a black smock dress lighting candles.

My mother attended church most Sundays, and sometimes, out of boredom, I would go with her. I seldom attended the actual service, instead preferring to walk around the hallways, exploring
the vacant offices that extended from the church itself. I got to look up close at the naked Jesus attached to the cinder-block walls with eight-inch bolts, the inspirational posters that were so corny they made me laugh, and the various implements and accoutrements of the Catholic religion, all of which I found strange and fascinating. I especially loved the brass tithing tray with the long black broom handle on the other end. I wanted, desperately, to steal it and hang it in my room above my bed.

Often on my explorations, I would pass by Father Christopher, and we would exchange a nod and a glance. The first few times, I thought his glance meant “I’m watching you so don’t steal anything.” But then I began to detect something else in his eyes. Something that reminded me of my dog, Brutus. It was hunger that I saw. And being a hungry, attention-starved teenager myself, I gave him back the same look he gave me.

It happened when I went into the men’s room. I’d passed him in the hallway and then turned left and gone into the bathroom with the sole purpose of peeing. But a moment later, the door opened, and in walked Father Christopher. My first thought was, he thinks I’m going to smoke in here. And while I did, from time to time, steal cigarettes and smoke, that wasn’t what was on my mind. But instead of scolding me, he simply walked up to the urinal next to mine and peered over the metal divider.

It was such an unexpected thing. Truly, you really can’t say what you’d do in such a situation until you’re suddenly there.

I pretended not to notice, and then, when I was finished peeing, I looked at him and said, “Hi.”

His eyes were glazed over with some sort of mad glue, and he could not stop staring at my crotch. He was clenching his jaw—I could tell by watching the muscles twitch. And he was sweating, which was odd since the building was always freezing, like a meat locker. His hands were in his pants, and I saw then that he was playing with himself.

Okay, twist my arm. I was fourteen, bored, angry, horny, lonely,
and for various reasons my threshold for strangeness was very high, so I simply dropped my pants and stepped away from the urinal, facing him.

And this turned out to be my first excellent blow job from a Catholic priest.

He sobbed after I came, and I felt terrible. I didn’t feel terrible for me. I mean, it wasn’t like he was somebody I trusted who molested or betrayed me. He was a hunky young guy in the wrong career who got my rocks off. For a straight guy, it would be like being fourteen and having one of the centerfolds from
Playboy
step out of the magazine and hand you a bottle of mineral oil. Like you’d complain? Like you’d go, oh my God, you’ve damaged me! On the other hand, I was unusual. I was an unsupervised youth, old for my age, not a virgin. I wasn’t a good Catholic boy.

But standing there watching, I felt terrible for Father Christopher. He sobbed, and shook and appeared, there on his knees, like he was about to divide into pieces, which in a way I suppose was exactly what was happening. He, the priest, was vulnerable and ruined for that moment. And I, the fourteen-year-old, felt kind of thrilled and kind of like, What do you expect? You worship a naked man; this shit’s bound to happen. There seemed to be nothing to do but step around him and leave, and when I tried to do this, he reached up and grabbed my arm. “Please,” he said.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “You’re going to be fine. Nothing terrible happened.”

When I moved back to Manhattan after my brief stint in Chicago, I thought my priest days were behind me. For somebody who was not a member of the church, it seemed to me that to receive two blow jobs from two different Catholic priests was an extraordinarily rare, nearly miraculous coincidence.

So imagine my shock when it happened a third time.

Only this time, there could have been no way for me to know.

I was in a cab on my way back from J.F.K. I’d been out in L.A. for three weeks shooting a commercial for UPS. As always, I got
loaded in the bar at the airport before boarding the plane and then had more drinks on the plane itself. By the time I landed in New York, I was completely wasted.

The cab driver turned out to be really cute. He did not, for once, smell like a farm animal or wear a filthy turban. He was Irish and in his late thirties, and although I don’t remember what we talked about, I do remember that we kept checking each other out in his rearview mirror. Funny how even a cab can turn into a gay bar when two gay guys are in it. Anyway, by the time we were in Queens, it seemed inevitable that something was going to happen, and I could finally add “cab driver” to my list of sexual partners.

In fact, he pulled into a deserted area in Long Island City and climbed into the backseat. After we were finished, he got back in the driver’s seat, turned on the meter, and continued driving me home.

“You’re a funny cab driver,” I told him. “A lot friskier than any other cab driver I’ve ever had. Plus, you speak English.”

He laughed. “Well, I wasn’t always a cab driver, so that’s why.”

“Oh, don’t tell me. An actor.”

“Actually, I was a Catholic priest.”

M
ARK THE
S
HRINK

 

 

 

L
ast night, Mark the Shrink invited me to dinner at Zucca, a trendy new restaurant in Chelsea, to celebrate the birthday of someone I don’t know. I was wary of crashing the party, but he said it was okay. So I arrived with him, and suddenly we were seven people instead of six. So now we had to wait an hour for a table, on top of the forty-five minutes everybody else had already been waiting before Mark and I got there. But this was not the worst thing. What horrified me most was that they were all shrinks.

A table of shrinks, and me, the alcoholic, high-school dropout, Anne Sexton fan, advertising copywriter who was raised in a cult by a crazy psychiatrist. At first, I just wanted to slide under the table and squat among their legs, unnoticed. I felt profoundly out
of place, like I should be wearing a thin cotton teddy with the back open and paper slippers. Or at the very least, some sort of electronic ankle bracelet. When one of the shrink’s whole fish arrived, I tried to make an ironic comment about how skillfully she removed its head with her knife and how perfect this was for a shrink. She looked at my forehead, smiled politely, and said, “Don’t you like fish?”

I felt like an inpatient who suddenly found himself eating with the doctors. I felt that at any moment, a nurse would come to the table and remove me, apologizing to the others.

Luckily, the shrinks were in a mood to blow off steam or if not to actually blow it off, to smother it with alcohol. So after about half an hour, they were all drunk and telling amusing stories about their very sick patients, all of which made me feel extremely mentally healthy and mature. “I just want to say to her,
If I had your life, I’d want to kill myself, too!
” one of the shrinks said, and the others howled and banged their knives on the table in recognition.

After dinner Mark followed me toward Third Avenue and then invited himself over, making this the second night in a row that we’ve spent the night together. And the puzzling thing is, we still didn’t have sex. And I still don’t know why. I do know that he’s interested in me, physically. But I’m apparently not interested in him. And yet we never discuss the issue. We’re affectionate, but when it starts to become sexual, I shut down. I withdraw. I get my tunnel-vision thing. And I feel like I’m being smothered by wet blankets. And then all thoughts drain from my head, and my face becomes hot, and I shake. This never happened to me when I was drinking, but now that I’ve been sober for a few months, my internal rot is floating to the surface. Mark must know something is wrong with me. But he acts as though my reaction is the most natural reaction in the world, which then makes me confused. He drifts off to sleep. And I remain flat, looking at the ceiling.

When he left this morning, he said, “Maybe we’ll talk before you go to L.A. for your shoot.” But I didn’t know if he meant talk
about last night, about not having sex. Or talk in general. The odd thing is, I have no idea what he’s feeling. And he’s a shrink, for fuck’s sake. But I’m starting to go a little crazy, needing desperately to be in control of the situation and feeling terrified he won’t fall in love with me and knowing that I can’t even know what my own feelings are until I know that he’s safely in love with me so then I can decide.

I don’t want to know what my feelings are until I know what his are. Somehow I know this can’t be right.

Mark is strange, oddly disconnected. If you didn’t know he was a shrink, you would think that there was something wrong with him in a subtle way that you would not be able to put your finger on. Of course, then you would find out he’s a shrink, and that would be it.

Since I left the window open, we were both bitten by mosquitoes in the night. But here’s where our reactions differed: he said, “I’ve got bites on my hand, flea bites or something,” and I thought that I had created the bites myself, with my mind and my own anxiety. So that’s the difference between a neurotic who believes it’s all his fault and a trained medical professional who naturally seeks a cause based in the facts of reality.

He does seem to like me. He seems interested in my odd past life, what little I have told him about growing up. But he doesn’t yet know of my alcoholism and recovery and constant journal writing. He knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I’m writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I’m an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other sixteen. Plus, I’ve had to “minimize” my past. So while he knows my mother had a psychiatrist and that I was close to his family, he doesn’t have any idea just what happened. I wouldn’t want him to think I had a thing for shrinks.