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I masturbate, I’m a masturbator. Phew, ok. that's done. The Bible says confess your sins one to antoher so I suppose the heavy stuff is over now. Here we go ________________________________________________________________
Brian calls my room ‘the ole masterbratorium’ expecting a laugh. He jokes, unknowingly, and I’m never able to do anything but look away and hope he doesn’t realize how true to life his joke really is. When he says these things I imagine him pouncing on my bed, sniffing like a panther at the stiffened parts of my one velvet red blanket then running off to howl my secret into the night. My blanket, for its part, might as well have a scarlet A embroidered into the fabric in the form of Rorschach looking stains that don’t exactly paint a picture of a pretty butterfly. Every morning I stuff that blanket into the crack at the foot of my bed between the wall and my mattress. That crack, the foxhole where my blanket hunkers during the daylight hours is a place where only shame and foot odor dwell. I keep my blanket there, out of sight, fostering the illusion that the rumples of an unmade bed can hide more than stains.
John knew, or at least strongly suspected. We had bunk beds my freshman year in the dorms. We asked for them specifically because we thought it would be cool. What a terrible idea. I like to think that John slept so soundly because he was rocked gently to sleep every night by the faint quaking of wooden hinges. Every night, as my eyes closed for sleep my brain sparked on, slapping neurons together pinball style in the formation of yet another fantasy. Playing the part of mother goose to our rocking crib of a bunk bed my body would pulsate in a rhythm that swayed the fitted boards of our stacked sleeping bunks. Finished I would sleep, often waking up in the morning to the sound of John’s flat-top haircut flattening even more as he jumped out of bed at 6:00am for PT and invariably slammed his head into the bunk bed drawer I always left open. For my part, most of the time I would be bare-assed, stinking of semen, entangled in the evidence-soaked octopus arms of what was once my blanket. Each night, under the press of my thrashing body, that blanket would transform, turning into the soft spot between the legs of the girl down the hall or the breasts of a high school crush. The fantasies were endless and had their root in the depth of my imagination; an imagination spawned from the long, lonely hours with nothing to do and no one to play with so well known to only children.
I tried to quit, so many times I tried to quit. In the end it was always my imagination, of which I was so proud, that drew me back. I knew masturbation was wrong, both the action and the sexualized way in which I nightly envisioned my classmates, but I just couldn’t do it. I had the general feeling that if I really clamped down on my mind, really took a stab at eradicating those free-floating fantasies I could make a dent in what I came to understand to be my addiction. However, I feared the result. This habit, this thing, had been with me so long what if it took other parts of me with it? If I stopped fantasizing about women would I stop fantasizing about other things? Without daydreaming how would I get through the day?
With doubts like these who needs friends? I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t quit. I’d come close then, with no spine in sight, fall back into the cycle. Like a bulimic, binge and purge. One or two days of concentrated effort, resisting the screaming maw of body and mind, armed with only a sleepy college freshman’s force of will. I’d break, like a twig like a nose like a spine like a thunderbolt bringing down the rain. Three or four days in a row synapses would fire, bunk bed bolts jolting hither and yawn, John snoozing through my nighttime escapades. My own guilt building, burning, magnifying the hot wire of shame that traced loopy cursive A’s into the soft flesh of my brain. Through this, these fits of self-damnation, self-gratification, and self-restraint, I never fully embraced the desire to stop. Just like any addict will tell you there is always a part of you that doesn’t really want to give up. The desires of the flesh are strong and I had no way to fight it.
However, I did learn one thing. I learned that I didn’t have to trade my imagination for a clean conscious. The nights and mornings when my restraint won out and my mattress remained unpulverized my mind opened to the world. I’d look up on the way to class and see clouds shaped like dragons, angel wings in the jet trails of fighter planes. As the fall wind whipped schools of leaves off the branches of trees and flung them violently across the cracked red brick arches of OU campus buildings and through the many walkways that criss-cross the south oval they appeared to me as fish, piranhas haphazardly darting in between students, attacking strangers at random. I would peer into the crisp blue midday sky and barely perceive the blackness of space through the glare of a high noon sun. I would walk through the grass and smell the flowers in the campus gardens. Life was beautiful and visual and sensual in the most pleasant way on those days.
The eyes of others walking to class were what scared me; those other souls sharing my blissfully windswept autumn day. Faces down, eyes focused a few steps ahead, their feet tap-tap-tapping a straightforward concrete song; march of the soldiers march of the citizens march of the masses, the passerbys, the by-standers, the hi-how-are-yas. I’d see wonders in the flickering shadow of clouds overhead then I would look at those people and cling to my imagination like it was the last moment before the fall off the edge of a cliff. I hated my addiction and the used up way my mind worked when my body won out over my self-control but I couldn’t stop.
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