Chapter 9: John, Solo
"You've been how many men already," the last Tony asked me after we'd had all the banter, "and you're just seeking your Yoda now?"
The Yoda, the wise if gnomic shaman, was what I was after. The last Tony I sought, was the first man by that name I'd ever dated--almost the first man I'd ever dated, altogether. It had taken me a day of travel to find him, and he wasn't the same person. In a different way than I wasn't either, he was different from what he'd been when both of us had first come out. The banter was what Mark and I had taken to calling my attempts to explain myself--my selves, plural, to the men I found myself explaining my condition to.
This Tony, the only one whose name wasn't quite Anthony, but something close to it, had squinted with the same look of disbelief his predecessors had. He'd nodded when I'd dredged up mutual memories to remind him of me, and of us. He'd confirmed what only he and I could have known. He came to understand it was too wild a story to make up, sensed my desperation in working my way back through half a dozen Tonys, to find a man I hadn't seen in some twenty odd years, and asked the questions his predecessors had also asked: why, if all of this was true, was I telling him?
But that question seemed to freeze on his lips, as, the banter over and done, he asked me the one about the Yoda instead. He ran his fingers through curly, graying hair. He leaned back on his arms stretched out behind him. He glanced up at the trees shading us on a university quad. He looked the part of the tweedy biology professor between experiments, and he made me wonder which of the students scurrying around us were in his classes. He made me think of the clichés which being "hot for teacher" involved, and I wondered how much biology I could learn from this Tony. Not much, I reflected--his intelligence, notwithstanding.
"I've been in eight or nine hosts now," I said after the pause, mentally counting them until I got to Luke, the bi boyfriend of Teresa, the one-time partner of Matt's dad, and the incarnation of John who had finally lost--perhaps, only, who was losing--his long-time fuckbuddy Mark.
"Over how much time?" he asked scientifically, as if unfolding some mental spreadsheet out before us. I indicated it had been a few months. "And what," he squinted again, "were you hoping to find out from your Yoda now?"
He had the intelligence, and some of the nerdiness, to be the wise old Yoda, and maybe, I reflected, it would have been smarter after all, to start with the other end of the long line of Tonys. "Why this is happening," I began to answer. "How I can stop it. How I can get Mark back. How I can," looking at him directly, "get back to being myself again." All of this landed in unimpressed silence, though I sensed that, unlike with the other Tonys and other men I had tried to explain all of this too, this Tony was understanding and believing the banter.
He'd been the quickest, no doubt about it, of any man I'd ever dated. Mathematical formulas that left the rest of us speechless tumbled from full, pouting lips. Serious eyes would look past you, would look through you, as if he carried around a mental chalkboard and merely paused to read off the figures he thought had been obvious to all. He left dim memories from twenty years ago, when we'd both been students, of dancing as he'd worn a tee shirt reproducing the periodic table. I really looked at inert gases, metallic classifications, between songs, when social graces failed me, and when the terrible d.j. had so trainwrecked his tunes, a song had just disappeared in the middle of the verse. This Tony had once caught someone's stray remark about something as trivial as a Tom Petty song, then repeated five minutes of the conversation, verbatim, two weeks later, just because Tom Petty had come up in conversation once again. Each of us had bobbed our heads in stunned recognition of our own comments, repeated uncannily back to us, then bowed in appreciation of Tony's photographic memory.
Oh, and the bass: the deepest baritone resonated in Tony's words, swelled to surround you, found deeper registers than you had known it was possible for people to speak in. Bringing back that memory, confirming he still spoke so deeply now, I felt shame for my comparatively squeaky recent rendition of Barry White. This white Tony's voice made you tremble deep down in your spine. You listened, shook, quaked with it. Then you wondered which article of your clothing he'd managed to remove, just by his seductive voice alone.
That voice was sighing slightly now, as if reflecting the sense I wasn't equal to the weighty problems he ordinarily considered. "Could this all be," he asked, fixing me as the deep voice did its work, " your version of a Shutter Island?"
"You mean," I took it in, assuming he wouldn't mind my spoiler alert, "the twist, where it turns out the guy who's been investigating the insane asylum. . . "
"Turns out to be one of the inmates, yes."
"And it's all been some delusion," I asked, "all told from the mad man's point of view? You think I'm insane? Criminally so?"
"No," he assured me, "but neither does Leo's character, up until the end, right?"
I rocked back in the grassy shade, somewhat unprepared for this Yoda's wisdom. "So," I said just as Socratically, I thought, "You really don't believe any of this?"
"Well," humoring me, "You're still you inside, right? Could it be you've actually been the same person all along outside, too?"
"But I'm not the same person now," I say.
"Dear," he said, "I haven't seen you in years. I wouldn't know, for my part, if it were the same old you, or someone with a great memory, who's met you, and just miraculously remembered it all."
"But others haven't recognized me either--Mark, Matt, Teresa, everybody. They've taken me to be the last guy I slept with, not the me I thought I had been all along."
"And in Shutter Island, too," he said back, "everybody plays along. They all take it as part of the treatment. They humor him. Maybe I'm just the first person, the first Tony," he smiles, makes the voice so resonant, even this goes down easy, "not to play along."
"What about the feeling of the different bodies? The left-handedness? The hairiness? The different dicks each time?" He's fixing my expression, almost staring me down. I recognize it as a teacherly, professor's move, as if prompting an errant student to answer her own questions, just with a lifted eyebrow, a gently admonishing glare. "You're just saying," I venture, feeling the power of that glare, "it's the power of suggestion?"
"Or," he suggests, "manifestation of something. Body insecurities, or an unstable sense of yourself, coming back to haunt you. Before all of this started happening," he asks, "how did you, John, just feel about being you?"
We'd gone over the last few weeks and months before the tryst with Trent: Mark's comings and goings. Matt's self-harm. Me not knowing what to say to either of them. My doubting the power I thought I should have felt, counseling one of them, and buddying the other. My recognizing my distanced self in Luke's supposed straightness, in Matt's dad's displaced and errant parenting. They sounded like weak reasons to me to go through my shape shifting, but Tony left me considering. Could my body and mind be making me rethink myself, reproducing the feelings of different bodies, just to punish myself for what I had thought was wrong with my mind? What proof did I really have, other than men who might have been humoring me, my shape was really shifting, when it could have all been in my mind? Even as my fingertips slid down myself, Luke's self, checking how I felt I wasn't me, I had to credit Tony's logic. But, wait: "what about the guys turning up oblivious, afterward?"
He really considered, or at least, pretended to. "Well, you sleep with guys who disappear on you before the night is over--you can't remember exactly when." I have to nod at his shaming summation so far.
"When they turn up, sometimes months later, they don't remember any of it." He smiles, as if to cushion the blow. "Could it just be, being with you . . . isn't that memorable?"
Ouch. He senses the embarrassment. He explains Mark's coming back: I haven't slept with Mark since this shape shifting began. He reverts to his own history with me: "You were memorable with me," he says, "but we were kids, practically having our first times. But, it's still memorable, even after some twenty years." Some of his details reconstruct the scenes, from the dancing with the periodic table tee-shirt, to the d.j.'s trainwreck, to why we'd decided, so many years ago now, that this Tony and I should call it quits.
"Just because it's life-altering for me," I venture tentatively, "I guess I have to wonder, you mean, if they're been faking it?" I'm having an existential crisis on a college quad. "Matt hasn't been," I insist, but I haven't, thank goodness, slept with Matt. "Matt's dad," with whom I have, "surely wasn't." We revert to the banter a minute, as I explain, yes, I was Matt's dad, and didn't know Matt's dad's name. I run back through the tricks of the last several weeks. I didn't want it to be a Shutter Island, as little as I had enjoyed it being seemingly real. I bit my tongue and further ventured: "something real, though, some post-traumatic stress or something, first drives Leo's character insane, though, right?"
"Right," he affirms. "So we're back to an origin story, but not for a hero."
"For," I agree, shuddering, "a mental patient this time."
"You've said," his baritone resonates again, "you've come back, for Matt's sake. And if you don't mind my saying," he continues, "not knowing how to explain yourself to him, seems to have been what's bothered you most of all."
I swallow, impressed with my own banter to have established so much with my most brilliant Tony. "I might need to be myself around him, most of all."
And why might being yourself around Matt be a problem--for you, for John, not for him?
Well, I can't just be myself around him. I have to be a professional in what I say to him, and in how I say it. And, he knows me, on the job and off. As John, and as the other Johns I've been.
But I thought you said he always asked how you knew what he'd told other people.
He always does, but I think he understands. I think he's seen through me by now.
So, he's seen through you, he's talked to you when you're not on the job, and you still can't be yourself with him?
Well, I can't be "myself" with anybody, anymore. That's what I'm trying to figure out.
But it's hardest to be yourself with him. Harder than it is with your best fuckbuddy? Harder than it is with your first ever boyfriend?
That's what you're calling . . . yourself?
Yes. Am I wrong?
No, not really. And you're right, it is easier to tell it to you, though it makes no sense, than to keep telling it to Matt.
And why would that be?
Sixty-four thousand dollar question. I think Matt most needs a dad right now, to say the things a dad should say to a guy going through what he's going through. And he thinks his dad, his real dad, can't say those things, and when I was his dad--you know what I mean--I couldn't say them. And when I'm just me, or the latest me, I still can't say them.
Because it wouldn't be professional?
Well, yes, but I can be professional with everybody else, and it's not a problem, even when it's awkward, or even when you would think it would be awkward.
Is it just because being professional means being straight, or acting straight?
Hmmm. . . meaning, I would have to be gay, somehow, with Matt instead?
Well, meaning, maybe, the rules of professionalism are written of, by and for straight people?
Well, they are, or maybe they are. But I've counseled and helped other gay people, who were unlike Matt, and didn't have a problem. It's not just the gay thing. It's not just the dad thing.
It's "the gay dad thing"?
Well, it's possible that his dad is doing the gay dad thing, and won't admit it to him, and when I was his gay dad for a while, I couldn't admit that--not about me, but about his dad--to him then, either.
Well, yes, but we're talking about you now, not about Matt, not about Matt's dad. Why do you think, not why would Matt think, it was hardest to talk to him of all people about the gay dad thing?
Well, obviously, I haven't been a dad. Less obviously, I don't want to be a dad.
And even less obviously still?
Does there have to be a "less obviously still" than that?
I think so.
Okay. Even less obviously . . . I'm not ready to be a dad, even though I'm beyond being old enough to be one? I don't, in my heart of hearts, want to be a dad.
We're about the same age, and neither do I, so, no judgment here.
Thanks. There's probably even more to it. You probably know there's more to it.
Yeah, if you're remembering what I'm remembering, about us, I bet we both know there is, or maybe just, there was, more to it than that.
So: 199-. A couple weeks into the time we're calling it dating. We're on the sidewalk outside the restaurant in College Corners. We're both talking about--
Our other beaus.
Our other beaus. We're twentysomething enough to think it's supposed to be shocking we have other beaus.
We even take some time warming up to telling one another. I broached the subject first.
You did. You told me you called him to tell him you thought you might be falling in love with me.
Your eyes bugged out. You got this look on your face that said, have I got a secret to tell you.
And I told you I had a boyfriend, too. Like we were both afraid it would crush the other person.
It felt like we were cheating. I didn't have the concept of the fuckbuddy down yet, until . . .
Until that's basically what we were.
As much as you can be, newly out, when you're all of twenty-three. And, how much older was he?
Some twenty years older than me. And so was yours.
The guy was almost twice my age. My dad never got over it. He was thrilled when we finally broke up.
I can imagine. So we both had much older boyfriends, very early on in our love lives.
We almost bonded over having older buddies we were cheating on.
But it wasn't cheating. They both knew. They both said we were so young, they couldn't hold us to it.
They gave us their blessing. So we're sitting there at this sidewalks cafe, both of us spooning root beer floats, having this dead earnest conversation about being in love with men old enough to be our fathers.
And both wondering, without either of us saying, why it felt dishonest to date a guy of our own age. As if we had to ask our sugar daddies' permission.
Only they weren't sugar daddies. That would imply it was just for money, or that we were trophy boys. I really loved my guy, though.
I loved mine, too. Enough to wonder why, what it was about that daddy type, that moved me.
All as we were eating those ridiculous root beer floats.
My God. Twenty-plus years, and I remember those still. Obscenely huge, vanilla white knobs of ice cream, sticking up as domes over glass mugs.
Fizzy, white ooze combining soda with melting ice cream.
And we're spooning it and licking the tips. It's overflowing the glass. White gooey puddles everywhere.
We glance at each other over the scoops, deep in thought. I think the suggestiveness hit us both at the same time.
Yes. I actually remember thinking I couldn't write about that in a story or anything.
Because?
It would just be too obvious, obscenely so. We're talking about sexy daddies as first boyfriends, whom we're cheating on. We look up guiltily from those heads we're licking clean. We make eye contact with the boy of our own age group we think we're falling in love with. It's like we're cheating, over insatiable jizm sundaes.
Jizm sundaes. Nice. And we both remember it, so precisely. Why do you think that is?
. . . Damn it, Tony, you could be a shrink.
Yeah. Sixty-four thousand dollar question.
Well, as I said to Matt, when I was supposed to be Matt's dad: we gay dudes sometimes pursue our fathers in our partners. Some of us don't, but enough of us do, you've got to look out for daddy issues. You can't treat your partner as your father or love someone paternally, maybe until you understand what made your father tick. And maybe, as I also tried to say to Matt, we can't make ourselves forget we're attracted to men who remind us of dear old dad. So when that doesn't squick us out to think about it,
Squick us out?
Freak us out. Throw us off. Whatever. Like a straight guy couldn't stand to think of himself openly, oedipally pursuing a girl who reminded him of mom,
We have to make ourselves forget we're looking for daddy. And when daddy was a straight man,
We have to deal with the fact that we learned to be gay boys, at a straight dad's hands.
Meaning? Literally?
Not literally for me. Matt thinks, literally for him. But, being inside Matt's dad, I didn't think so.
So, not sexually learning to be gay thanks to our dads. Most of our dads don't molest us.
No, but as I tried to say, too, what's innocent play for a straight dad,
Could be mistaken as not-so-innocent by a gay-boy son. Exactly. And what about if you think dad probably played around on Mom?
All the more reason to have many fuckbuddies, like he had many ladies?
So, in your multiple beaus, you're still a chip off of the old paternal block?
I hope not. For my sake, and for Mark's sake.
Hmm. How about, if you also think dad played around on Mom, with other dads?
The origins of "not 100%." All the more reason to keep trying to find yourself, also as dear old dad did.
But again, are we talking about John here, or about Matt and Matt's dad?
We're taking about . . . A John who most needs to reassure Matt he's okay pursuing men who remind him of his dad, that that's what most of us gay guys do, but don't admit it to each other, and who eventually . . .
Who eventually. . .?
I don't know. What's the next stage in the daddy life cycle?
You eventually get too old to keep wanting daddies. You eventually get to be the daddy.
I was Matt's daddy for a while, but I'm not ready to be his daddy, or anybody's daddy.
And maybe the shape shifting, if it wasn't just Shutter Island . . .?
What? Was just prompting me to grow up, all along? Was telling me it was time to stop chasing daddies? Was telling me, that as long as I kept chasing other guys. . .
You'd never be yourself?
Well, I'd hate for that to be the moral of the story.
What would be wrong with that? Just because it's trite?
It's trite. It's monogamous. It's normal. It's hetero. It's conservative. If this is all to force some as the nineteen-fifites nuclear family normality on me, I'm not having it.
Fair enough. I'd hate to have you learn something from the experience.
I have learned something from the experience. And it hasn't been set up, as far as I know, to make me act any more monogamous, or like I'm any more straight.
How so?, asked the first and last Tony, whose name wasn't really Tony, as it seemed like they both came out of the same dream. Blinking and disoriented, John inside Luke went back over why his shape-shifting hadn't reinforced monogamy. He'd kept having to advise Matt from the perspective of different bodies, making it hard to model the loyalty of a one-man relationship. He couldn't sleep with Mark without becoming Mark, and neither he nor Mark had wanted that to happen, even when it became obvious Mark would turn up later on, none the wiser. He'd shared a man, Simon, with Matt, as the outcome of a threesome, but even Simon had surfaced again, not remembering any of it. Whatever this was meant to teach him, if anything, it wasn't monogamous, marriage-like love.
"But you said it had taught you something, though," the last Tony had said, as if John were a pupil and he were determined to wring from it a teachable moment. John resented how professorial that sounded, but still played along, or tried to.
"I definitely empathize more now," John said, "I'm a better partner, for being in, fully in," with a glance to make sure this made sense, "someone else." Teresa's breasts, lumberjack's lungs, Asia man's alienation, Black Tony's thoughts on hearing his dick described--all ran through his head.
Tony, though, was fixing his stare and winding up: "You empathize more, you're a better partner." It was like he was setting up the promise, just to knock it down: "You literally can't even tell me some of their names."
Well, there was that. John thought about it, and said as much, that he hadn't known Matt's dad's name, nor porn boy's moniker, but still lived fully in their bodies, and passed those bodies on to their owners', as far he as knew, in no worse state than when he'd found them. Porn boy might even have been improved, for his, that is John's trips as porn boy to SLAA. This track sounded defensive, though, and Tony wasted no time pointing it out.
"Okay," the other conceded, "I should have learned their names, but that's not always important in the heat of the moment. And once I'm him, without understanding people like you around"--he smiled, mock coyly--"how am I supposed to ask people what my name is supposed to be? It's not like I'm an old pro at this."
"So you're telling me, names aren't important, anyway," he offers as another premise, as teacherly as ever.
"Well," John says, remembering something from long ago; "you're the one who played `which would you rather?' with me freshman year, remember?" Tony said he did but looked vague. "Which would you rather," John repeated, "sleep with a guy knowing he wouldn't remember your name the next morning, or have a guy commit your name to memory, because he's too much of a gentleman to sleep with you--or in my case now, sleep as you?"
Tony had to concede he remembered that, and had agreed with that, when we were newly out and all of twentysomething. But it offered him another premise: "so, that means it's still okay, or still what you'd want to do, now?"
"I still would want the fuck," John said, sighing, "and I've been getting to know men in deeper ways than just knowing their names.
Tony said he'd remembered John's empathy from years ago, and said John was already an attentive lover, and a versatile one. How sensitive was it, after all, to be whatever, top or bottom, the man you were with wanted you to be?
John was surprised he'd said that as his younger self, so many years ago. Tony had an intimidating level of recall and was crazy smart--as John wouldn't have said at the time, but as he realized now, had been a factor in their breaking up. His next thought to himself had him concluding he couldn't date someone as much smarter than himself as Tony was. But the thought after that, had him wondering what that conclusion said about the men, unlike Tony, he'd chosen to keep in his life.
Tony seemed determined to keep up his lesson, even in the break between classes. He pushed John further, believing him despite the Shutter Island references, posing as his Yoda despite coming so late in the game, asking what else he'd learned from passing through so many men--or from so many men, passing through him.
"I know what it's like--gayness," John said after a moment, "for so many guys other than me. How did I know if I was the exception or the rule? How did I know if it felt in others' bodies, as it felt in mine? How did I know before this happened, if gayness formed the same part of everybody's psychic silhouettes, or different parts of them?"
Tony'd repeated the phrase, "psychic silhouettes?" John had paraphrased, our mental outlines of ourselves, our facets of personality that our gayness answers for. For some of us, it's chasing daddies. For others, it arises from no imprint you can think of. For Matt's dad, it was just the delicious breaking of a cruel taboo. For Asian boy, it was trying to belong among unequals. For the porn addict trapped weirdly in the ether, it was just trying desperately to revert to something real. For Matt, it was running from the awful, because unknown, hint that he might have been incestuously molested. Every man's gayness was some different part of his psychic silhouette, some facet of his personality that the rest of his life and upbringing had already accounted for. John had assumed, wrongly, it was the same for everybody, and had generalized out from himself, assuming we all had daddy issues, all attracted the macho or the femme as the yin and the yang, and all had a best fuckbuddy of the bunch. Size still mattered to John, he laughed in summing up, only now it was sample size. Now he'd seen gayness, and less than 100% straightness, from inside and out.
"So, how, Yoda," he'd asked, post-summing up, "do I get back to just being John? If I've learned something from this, have I learned how I can make it stop?"
Tony as Yoda had fixed John as Luke's stare and invoked red ruby slippers, "no place like home," and the power that had forever been within him. Back in that first bedroom, when he'd looked in John's mirror and seen Trent instead--the original John of all Johns had to slink back there, oblivious, sometime, right? In fact, one wondered where he had been. John had gone back now and then, as he'd returned to the snoring Bryan or gone back to the bathhouse, but up until joining Teresa, he'd mostly gone from home to successive home, man to successive man, and back to work again. Tony'd said just to look in that mirror, wait as long as it took, share what he'd learned with Matt as he was waiting, and when it seemed his chance had come to regain John, well, as Tony said to him in concluding Yoda's lesson, "show yourself just how versatile you can be."
51
It, the brain, makes the body sentient. The body in all of its sensuousness, sexualizes the being. Body and mind connect and interface. Dendrites pop and axons extend. Lobes expand and head-tilts enable sensuous passageways between cerebral sensations. Synapses sound and craniums encompass. Poppers cloud and headaches dull. Awful thoughts intrude and brain chemistry neutralizes. Almost thoughts impend as dimly remembered facts linger just beyond retrieval. Faces insist you've seen them before but no names emerge for them. Senior moments are first fun to ridicule in others, then embarrassments to be experienced in one's self.
As John's bodies have shape-shifted, the soul via sex has traveled, but the same organism has always remained. Body and mind have intertwined and one's mental moods channel the physical world, and yet one's sensations from outside inform one's moods within. Here was the true orouboros, the body receiving and feeling the world, the brain perceiving and reading the world for the encountering body. The right chemical combinations in the brain's lobes bring about the consciousness, and the being perceives the world. The nutrients and nourishments that precipitate brain chemistry originate outside, and materialize a self from the nourishment that the self consumes. The brain projects a consciousness out through the eyes, the body draws it back in again, and the being perceives the world the brain allows it to receive. Perception brings about conscious existence, and yet an existing, living body must receive the world's stimulation in order to receive. One has occasion to wonder if one knows one's own mind, and how can one, but how can one not? This one is the only brain that everyone, even John, has ever known. One really has occasion to wonder if one perceives the Almighty, once, in death, the body's sensations cease? An atheist knows it is the chemical-body combination that allows the brain to perceive this world in the first place, much less, to imagine the next one. The inward constructs the outward, and projects the receiving soul out onto the world. Once the inward surceases, no outward for ourselves remains, in this world or any other. We are making our own heavens now, even if we think it's just our dreams deferred.
The brain adjusts to accommodate the gay body's innate desires for others, but the personality imprints for same-sex loves. All of the body's organs are sex organs for the fully gay soul. Every sensual act is soulfully gay, even when it is unrelated to sex. Which came to be gay first, the body feeling its desires, or the mind perceiving its individuality? The answer, yes, and both. It and they, the penis, asshole, mouth, nipples, ears, eyes, bald forehead, fingertips, and brain, all embody the spirit. The soul distributes itself in the sexual sparks that one ignites at all these sites in one's self and in one's partners. The soul is gay that accepts and experiences same-sex lovers. He who has same sex lovers experiences them not merely in the body, but in the receptive soul.
John doesn't have to have a dualism of body and mind deep down in his gay soul to experience the constant mind and soul but the changing, sexual body. Mind and body receive and perceive one another. In a way, with all of these men, he's had the same collective gay body. In a way, all of the bodies he's experienced have touched at John's soul. John, solo, has interacted with every john and still stayed John within. All of the johns this John has loved in his body have loved him in their ways with their souls, with their sexual souls. Even for a single man with one sexualized body and the being it has always informed, they have been and have always been Johns, all. And since each of us does change, though not as much as this John does, with each of our loving partners, in a way we are, and we always have been johns, and Johns, all.
Neither Matt nor John remembered it distinctly in their conscious memories. Both of their bodies registered shadows that had fallen across spirits long ago, faint traces of touches remembered as so many reflex actions, responded to even before the impulses had reached the brain. Both sons had felt their fathers' bodies, long before any touch could be sexual for a boy. Both fathers had loved their sons with love that had stayed in bounds, that had been proper and fatherly, that had inspired rapturous infantile joys. Neither the straight or the mostly-straight father had known that cooing infant to be gay, nor had the infants known then they'd respond more to men's hands, men's touches than they would to women's. None of these men's inclinations ever rose beyond imprinting to the level of conscious memory. They never needed deliberate repression. All of them acted on it, recoiled from it, unconsciously conceded it, as a regulated body conveys its conditions, its energies, to a regulating mind. And neither of these men, among gay men, were unusual in these fatherly loves.
John's dad had been young, twenty-four when John was born, blond and bronzed, muscular, compact. On cold, workday winter nights on the northern plains, John's dad would come home tired from work, undress completely, and rest in one of the water beds that were popular at the time. John would climb in with him and they would "wrestle," for a boy and a man then more than twice his size, amid the water bed's waves. John's dad could pin him instantly, ward off the kid's strongest attack, and expend energy just keeping John from accidentally kicking sensitive parts. John would still heave with all of his might, wrap arms around lying torsos, vocalize with grunts the efforts he really thought his dad was taking seriously--until father would roll over on son, really seem concertedly to pin him down, or start to drift off to sleep in the middle of the son's game. This went on seemingly for hours, sometimes at others' houses, and it kept transpiring, just above the threshold of conscious memories, in John's recollections. The first times he had ever known physical, athletic joy within his small boy's body, he'd felt his father's bare flesh pressing down on him from above, the warm waters of the mattress swirling around him below. Wrestling had had intimacy between them, had been what both had looked forward to, though they were a lazy man's means of playing with an overexcited son after too long a day of work. John knew his father's body would never yield, but would never hurt him, would always have patience with his own body's weakness, would always appear to be playing along. Say what John would about nature and nurture, his straight dad had imprinted something upon him those nights in that water bed, each time and every time his daddy had lovingly pretended to pin him down.
Matt's dad, whom John had briefly been, had long before that bathed young Matt on the cheap, joining his toddler son in the kind of old fashioned tub that had four separate legs supporting the tub up from the bathroom floor. He'd washed both bodies, sharing soap, amazing the smooth son with the daddy's body's hairiness. He'd scrubbed sensitive skin, then held teary baby as chemical throbbing passed. He'd had no motive other than saving money on water bills, no rhythm other than speedy baths to save the family time and money. He'd set his son out to try to dry himself as he'd washed his own chest and legs. Matt's eyes bulged way beyond toddlers' usual sizes, and almost never looked away from daddy's body, even the parts of daddy's body daddy didn't wish for the son to see.
But for Matt's dad, as with John's, the straight or mostly straight dad, disrobed, had respected sons, communicated dumbly with a visceral language of shared maleness, and had congratulated himself for his comfort level with the baby--had even talked about it with the wife. For Matt, as for John, old enough to be Matt's dad, and having once been Matt's dad, the overjoyed toddler's body in its contact with daddy, had communicated its desires with the budding brain, and though one couldn't call any of these men gay yet, something had budded, had come to light, in that bath, in those brains, and on that water bed.
John, for all he was worth, concentrated those memories and tried to take his body back to that water bed's sensations. He found the words for that love of daddy with all of its naive innocence intact. He tried to forget all he'd learned about his dad, and about other dads, since then. He communicated it, with and without words, to Matt, who sat, sighed, and eventually telegraphed his recognition. Maybe our dads did something in our childhoods to make us gay. Maybe we already were born gay and our dads couldn't help but bring that gayness out. Maybe some small, gay part of them, without their knowing it, had in its way met their boyhood selves halfway, inside their sons. Something happened and we're both unaware of it in adulthood, we know we look for something of dad in the men in our lives, and we know we know we do so. We push it out of our minds when partners act too much like dads, and eventually we grow up, and stop wanting any such dad in our lives, but want to be those dads, or express our dadliness in our love for others--not as pedophilia, but as displaced fatherhood.
Meanwhile, every male authority figure in our lives who strikes a folksy, fatherly pose with us, starts the same cycles in ourselves of pushing and pulling--the dad who inspired our gayness but isn't gay himself. Who was always going to be there for us, as long as we stayed kids. Who showed himself to be the loving father and yet the budding homophobe. From such figures, we look for love yet expect a repeat of their ultimate rejection of us. We know they will be stern with us, but as in that bath and in the water bed, they will not really hurt us. They love us, but not for who we are as gay boys. In their eyes, we fail as gay men to reflect back to them the straight soul they tried to inspire within us. We can know all of this, and they can know all of this, and they can know we know, and we'll still repeat the cycle, until we grow up to be too old to be their boys--and until we grow to be too old to be our partners' boys--and until the partners whom we treat as loving sons, threaten to grow up, too. All of that said, "Now, get out there, kid," John heard himself saying to an understanding, and appreciating Matt.
I went back to my house, where I'd lived before I'd been with, and before I'd been as, all these other men. I went in the bedroom I'd left behind so many selves ago, and I looked back into the mirror. It still had Trent's smudged fingerprints on it, photographs awry where I had pushed them aside, and the overall look of the morning I'd squinted into it, and met the glance of the first of many men who were not to be me. I looked to see the face I knew as Luke's, a bit worse for wear, blinking back at me, then looking bored as he waited for something to happen, and as I gradually realized, this seemed more of young man's bedroom than that of someone who'd been through all that I had endured.
I had the night to sit in the room that had been mine, and to look into the mirror in which I'd seen my old self. I had time to prepare myself, and to prepare the self that was currently Luke, for the self who would arrive and who would still be John, blissfully unaware of it all. I thought about it all being a Shutter Island, as the last Tony, my Yoda, had said. I thought about what I had learned, as Tony had pressed me on. I wondered if I would really be more hetero, more monogamous, more conventional, after what I had gone through. I wondered, mixing my movie franchises, if my Clark Kent, my stay-at-home alter ego, was about to arrive to be my counterpart. That left me concluding, this superhero's sidekick has a God awful gig.
Then, around dawn, as the clubs were closing, he--that is, the old me--started to arrive. Light switches flipped in corridors and footfalls sounded unevenly--staggeringly?--coming my way. He silhouetted the doorway, lit from behind, so I saw his, my shape first, then watched my own features come into view. If cameras add fifty pounds, I don't know what I expected all of this shape shifting to add or detract, but I didn't look any better or any worse for wear--as hairy as I'd always been, less muscularly toned than lumberjack but breathing much easier, eyes less bloodshot than porn boy, corners of eyes turned down in Caucasian fashion, unlike my Asian phase.
You never see yourself--you only see your reflections in the mirrors, or representations of yourself. I saw myself, in the mirror and in the room next to me. I'd been gone from myself for months, and here I was. I hadn't felt my own body when I'd reached out to touch it for the stays of seven or eight other selves, and there my body was in all its supposed glory. I looked disoriented, confused, as anyone would about to climb into bed at dawn, and as anybody or any body would, what with what my soul had been going through.
"Hey, what the hell," he, that is, I, started saying, "Luke!" and a pause; "what are you doing here?"
And I can't begin the banter again with myself, as there's no way to prove to me that he's not me and that I'm me. There are no details of his, my masturbation I can tell him that only I would know. There's no original trysting spot, as with the others, I can remind him of, no kiss I can bestow on myself, as I can on Mark, that tells him my kiss, his kiss, is unique as a snowflake. To him, I'm Luke, the straight boss who's always struck him, struck me, as potentially, oddly closeted and queer, the man who'd recently said--though this John, this me, won't remember this--that I had to have sex with a straight man, so that doing so would stop me from being gay. To me, I'm John inside Luke, looking at my perplexed, befuddled former self, knowing he, that is I, will not want to have sex with the supposedly straight, supposed stranger, who, surprisingly to him, has shown up in his, in my room.
I am joining him in nakedness. I am pushing us toward my, his bed. I am pep talking myself through what seems hot on the one hand, and a necessary evil on the other. He can see this as a straight man's rape, and he's resisting. I have to see this as regaining John, resuming being myself, and it's getting more and more compulsory. He has no idea because he remembers nothing since I last was him. I can't say who I am as I'm bedding him, as I still don't know the host I am in, Luke, as well as the real Luke knows himself. The real Luke, in fact, should turn up, if true to form, in a few days, reset to a blessed oblivion in which then-he, now-me will remember none of this.
He's, I'm fighting me and I'm not blaming him--I'm having second, ordinal thoughts, in fact. Is it ethical to fuck him, fuck myself, just to be myself again? Is it masturbation, if I'm playing with my own dick, only, as it is part of someone else's body? Is it all egomania, even solipsism, to literally love myself, to climb back into my original self, just to stop the string of men, of hosts, I'd inhabited? Is it sick that I find myself, as another person, sexually attractive? Would it be sick, if I didn't? Am I, as another me, sexually versatile, in my sexual positions, as in my existentialism? If John, that's him, is versatile enough to be whatever, top or bottom, that the man he's with needs him, that's me, to be, would Luke, in turn, choose to be the top? Would I, as the other John, willingly bottom for his, for my, straight boss? Since I never figured out precisely when, among these FAQs, I trade bodies with my buddies, to gain the new host, how far do I need to take this--knowing that's a terrible way to think of sex, any sex--before I am regaining John, before I am myself again?
Ironically--I'm kissing the lips that want to protest--I appear to him to be the straight boss who proposed I sleep with a straight man, who could make him straight, in turn. I was about to sleep with him, sleep as me, to resume my always-gay selfhood. Strangely--I'm sucking his, my dick, thinking it feels so much different, of such different dimensions, in my mouth than in my hand--in reaching out to another sexually, I am becoming more and more myself. Queerly--I'm pushing lube inside his hole, feeling from his quivering he's given up all resisting and begun anticipating--I am confirming, I was right, Luke would be a top. Conscientiously--I'm sliding Luke's dick deep into my own puckered hole, an orouboros, once again--I realize the straight-boy stereotypes involved in bottoming for my supposedly heterosexual boss, and I'm loving, in my heart, his hole, every minute, every inch, every thrust.
Dirty talk spurs on the bucking self-indulgence; I'm getting into this, into him, into me, and I'm about to disappear. I say, just as I realize it's exactly what a creepy straight man would say while forcing himself on someone, "you need this"--that is, I need this--"as much as I do."
So it's one last, naked dialogue?
Yes, that's what it is.
And why end with one of those?
Because, does it really matter, who said what to who, anymore?
So, you, John, slept with John, slept with him again?
I did do him. I am him. I am myself again.
So, he . . wasn't you, wasn't himself at the time. And he thought you were . . .
Luke. To him, his straight boss was coming on to him.
And he was okay with that?
Not at first, but I think he . . I, always had somewhat of a thing for Luke, too. And Luke's . . . body had a thing for John.
Luke's body did?
Yeah. You could say we . . . fit. Literally and figuratively.
Not sure I want to know. Did he, the old John, the old host John, consent, though?
Well, I was John's soul and I wanted to do it. He was John's body, and he was cooperating and encouraging his cute boss . . .
But his straight boss.
Well, Luke wasn't 100%, and neither was Matt's dad, and . . you've blown both, right, gay men and straight men?
Umm, yes.
And is there any difference between them?
You mean, they--
Taste the same. Well, I've been both, or, I've been inside both, and not just in a sexual sense. And they . . . feel the same.
Fair enough. You said to the last Tony, you'd seen more gay perspectives now, and you should know.
Well, yes, but I also said I was doing less, not more generalizing.
What about Matt, and what about Mark?
Matt, I think, understands, and will at least look differently, more intelligently, at the next daddy that comes along. Not necessarily pass him up, but at least know why he's acting as a daddy, and what it might mean if Matt's still attracted to him. That took a lot to tell him, but I think he got it.
And if he comes into the office again, for even more counseling?
I'll know his story amazingly well. I think he'll be shocked, how may details I automatically know, about him. About us. Now Mark. . .
Yes. And Hans, even.
I think I'm forever John again, but I might have to test that theory on someone first.
Test that theory?
Well, how do I know I won't just keep changing? How do I know I wouldn't wake up as Mark, or as Hans?
But isn't that what Tony was driving at, trying to figure out what the shape shifting is teaching you, so you can stop it?
Yes, but he didn't even know if it was all a Shutter Island, right?
And now we do know it wasn't?
I saw the real me, fucked him or fucked myself, and came through it all, playing with my own dick.. I don't see how that could have been someone humoring me, humoring myself.
But you're still not sure if it's stopped now. Couldn't sleeping with someone else just be an elaborate excuse to keep playing around, as if you've learned nothing from the experience?
Well, I did say I loved Mark. Mark said out loud to the whole SLAA group he loved me.
That was before Hans.
And it was when I was changing, so he said he loved me, when he didn't know who I would be next.
So, maybe he loved the capacity to change, more than he loved . . the real John?
No. I could feel it in his kisses, in the way he kept kissing until he knew it was me, knew it was John. He wants, or wanted, to be with me, and once I know I'm permanently myself again, I'll see if he wants to be permanently with me.
See if he wants to be? You don't know for sure?
He said he loved me, but maybe he wants to be with Hans now. Maybe I'll go back to changing, and it won't be what he loves about me. Maybe I'm wrong about that. I've got to give him, and have got to give myself, the chance to figure that out.
And that's as close as we're getting to Happily Ever After?
Well, I saw all of the ordinal Tonys. I think I figured out my origin story. I got to be myself again. It was always the first jacking off, with a new dick, that I loved most of all, and after being Luke, hooking up with John, there I was, with my old dick, but new relationship energy all over again. It was like coming home, if you know what I mean. Matt's dad and Luke got to walk on the wild side and have gay sex for a change, and when they were together, Matt's dad and Luke, I think they got off on transgressing their mutual, suppressed bisexuality. I told Matt what I needed to tell him about daddies, and think I learned some things about daddies and their sons, myself. It's up to Mark to decide to get back to me--
The way it wasn't up to the John you finally met, when you had to sleep with him as Luke.
I told you, I had the free will as John, and I wanted it. Even the other John, who slept with, slept as Luke, wanted to be with Luke, and thereby, wanted to be with me.
So, the self is in the soul, and the part with the soul has the free will. The part that has the body is just the host, and can't choose, as much as the part that has the soul can?
No, or at least, not exactly. The body informs the soul's desires, and the soul channels the body's sensations, fingertip to forehead, sex organ to sex organ.
Interestingly put. So, that John wanted you, this John, and you knew that, feeling it in his body, or feeling it in your body.
Exactly. The moment it became . . . my body, again.
And you want your body to become the same body again, with Mark, too?
Well, not exactly. I love Mark, I don't want to be Mark. I don't want to absorb him. I want to keep being John, but a John who loves Mark, who's still there, to be loved.
You know, I think you've learned a lot from this. I think you know who you are now, more than you used to, from being in, from sleeping as, lots of men other than yourself. And I think once Luke figures out you're now John, solo,
No longer an assortment of Johns, or the leftover residue of the last John to come along--
No longer Johns, but John, regained. Johns, solo. Oh, God.
What now?
I just realized what Mark and Hans will be, if Mark doesn't take you back.
I know. If Mark is exclusively with his German friend, if it's Mark and Hans, monogamously--
God, that's awful. It won't be Johns, solo that he'll have.
I know. But you know what else it is, right?
Yes, I think do. Awful, groan-inspiring wordplay is so very, very John.
So very John. And so-only John, indeed.
Indeed.
Scene.