I saw him! At the Amphitheater tonight, in mid-performance, I pivoted, my arm swooping down, my voice rising, “You have to admit how you feel! You have to risk making mistakes and be prepared to pay for them,” and there he was, his beautiful young face shining out from the dim and bobbling masses. Oh! If only I’d acted on my words! How I feel, what I want! Why didn’t I jump down, walk arms outstretched to where he sat, and implore him? Come with me!
(click here for the first episode and here for the previous, Part Two.)
Instead, I fluttered up there. Shuddered, staggered, raked my hands through my hair and mopped my face with my billowy sleeve. “Forget sexual denial,” I yelled, suddenly full of ire. “The nonsexual ideal is a fundamentalist lie! Banning sex leads not to enlightenment, not to purity, but to seething resentment and bitterest intolerance. Do not let the self-righteous and their festering superstitions oppress you!”
I could no longer see Tyler, but knowing he was there my voice sounded naked, my words indulgent and idiotically emphatic. “They object to people having sex because they’re squeamish. And so I’m asking, isn’t total preoccupation with abstinence just as vulgar as it’s opposite? Whatever you categorically deny yourself categorically rules you. These guys are obsessed with sex. To where they just can’t fathom that sex is not the only thing. “Or wait—wait a minute. Maybe. . . now that I mention it. . . maybe sex is the only thing. Maybe whatever you want more than anything, so that you get sick if you have to go without it—whatever it is that drives you, that directs your every endeavor in life—that thing is, for you, tantamount to sex.”
Hitting a low note, I inadvertently let my stomach out and loosened the sash. Drawing myself up, up—Tyler was out there—I knotted it for all to see. I smiled (See, I’m human), and even gaily said, “There, now it won’t come undone.” And, “As I was saying: If an experience such as eating an éclair, waking in a tub of tepid water, or getting stung by a bee reaches a certain intensity, a certain ratio of pleasure to pain, involving your entire consciousness, it is ipso facto sexual. But if it somehow goes further than that, beyond the sexual, beyond the personal, it becomes a spiritual experience.”
At the word “spiritual,” I rose higher, the light that surrounds me on stage glowing warmer, milkier. I reached out my hands as if to touch the boy’s supernaturally beautiful face, gazing luminously, gloriously up at me, from five rows in, two seats left of center. “In which case, maybe those fundamentalists,” I spoke directly to him, “proscribe sex because it looks—and sometimes, though how would they know, even feels—so much like prayer. Not that sex is always pleasurable. I mean, we’ve all had our hideous realizations—what have we done? We think something’s going to be great and it turns out stupid and dull. We’re dull and stupid—we’re fakes.”
I wanted Tyler to know: this magnetism is temporary. A vaudeville number, a spiel, a performance. It’s not me, really.
“I am just like you,” I said, and instantly realized my mistake. “I am just like you. We are the same. Not different.”
And— Shit. I didn’t need to look. I already knew: He was still there but gone from my field of vision. I was aware of him listening, but the brilliant face, so miraculously clear among the blur of anonymous heads, winked and went out, became in the blink of an eye another dot in one of the endless rows of amorphous bliss. I am just like you. Why did I speak the words in my mouth instead of my heart? I bowed and turned—and when I looked up, he’d become invisible.
The crowd was a sea of faces, a field of spots against the all-encompassing darkness. “So okay, maybe I can imagine how total abstinence might look like the shortest, surest path to holiness. . . ” I blah, blah, blahhed. Why didn’t I go to him, take his hand, and lead him away to someplace safe and secluded? What if I missed my only chance; there’s no going back?
Angry and scared—of myself and the boy Tyler, and of my past and bungled present—I veered off track. My powers abandoned me; the magic evaporated, and I heard myself ranting about my childhood religion. “The Catholic priests—” yes, I resorted to talking about the priests!—“claim they’re above erotic love. They refuse to admit their human desires, and thus too often succumb to an inhuman “aberration”—a priestly word for blacking out; for falling into a monstrous spell in which they rape some child. After which, I can just hear the priest telling the boy: ‘Whatever you think just happened, did not happen. It’s a sin to think such a thing, and a worse sin—a mortal sin—to speak of it. Trust in me,’ the priest says, making the Sign of the Cross over the kneeling child’s head, ‘trust in God. Some boys,’ the priest whispers through a gate he’s made, fingers over his mouth, ‘are special, favored.’ He blows a kiss off his fingertips, ‘Till next week then, nothing happened.’ “Of course when the boy goes home and looks in the mirror, he is one of them now; he belongs to the initiate. . .”
In the wings, a bigger throng than usual pressed in on me. They clapped and murmured, “Thank you, thank you.”
“Malcolm, Malcolm.”
You’d think I’d get used to it, but no. The crux of my being is exposed. It’s grotesque and unseemly, and after a big public spillover, I want to hide in a dark, empty room. Except last night, upon seeing the boy Tyler, the sadness pooled deeper and deeper, while all the while a wall of hands patted my back and shoulders, head and chest. Stephanie and her new boyfriend Rafe, Maggie and her trumpet-playing boyfriend Lyle, Louie and his girlfriend, Demetria, Professors Llewlleyn and Smith, the people I knew, clamored for special attention, kisses and handholding.
I noticed Carlos at the top of the staircase. He mouthed “home run” and shook a loosely formed wrist at waist level, a crude promise of a vulgar reward. Bitter disgust welled, bringing fresh tears. Please God, let me find the boy and get him out of here! I kept slogging through the whirlpool, past Shari and Sylvia, Franklin and Fletcher, various erstwhile customers, students, shopkeepers and construction workers, searching for him. Surely the soul of concern, of sweetness, light, peace, joy, and hope was close. I could feel him; he was waiting for me but—I could not reach him. I could not see him. Tyler was near. He was here and then— Too late. I knew only confusion, panic, and remorse. Of all the dozens of people vying to touch me, to thrust bouquets of tulips at me, preview version electronics of all sorts, smartphones boxes of chocolate, where was he?
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