Testimony

5

     Here’s my testimony. It was the summer after my freshman year in college and I was staying at my parents place for a few days visiting some old high school friends. I had been out smoking weed with a couple guys and was just getting in at one in the morning. My parents’ house is a one story with a long hallway and bedroom doors all along one side and a bathroom at the very end. As I was walking down the hall to go to my bedroom when I suddenly snapped back into consciousness, my eyes focused and I realized that I had just been standing still, not moving, in the middle of the hallway for about thirty seconds. Not the kind of zoning out people sometimes do during a boring conversation or even the kind of zoning out that occasionally happens when you’re high but actually out, unconscious, not there for about thirty seconds, then back again. I thought ‘that was weird’ then went and got in bed. I laid down on my back and as I laid there my whole body was flushed with an intense tingling sensation. It was like soft needles running all over my body and I felt as though I was floating. I knew I wasn’t moving but my body felt as though it was lifting off and spinning about eight feet in the air above me. Almost as though my brain was a ball bearing and my body was rotating around it. In my mind I knew it was God.

      Now, I grew up in a very Christian high school in a very Christian state in a very Christian area of the country. Most of my friends said they were Christians and I regularly got invited to church though I usually declined the offer. My parents grew up in Sand Diego, California and were not regular church attenders by any means. I had of course gone to some church services but it just never did anything for me. I didn’t understand the whole thing and I really wasn’t too curious. I wasn’t searching for God or for answers and for the most part I was pretty happy. At the end of the movie The DaVinchi Code Tom Hank’s character says “faith is a gift I haven’t been given yet.” I feel as though this statement really illuminates what happened to me in the hallway and in my bed that night. I was not searching for God, I had not been praying, I did not have any great pressing need. It simply happened.

     The next morning all the tingling was gone except for a single band around the base of my ring finger on my left hand. It was like a ring of sensation right where a wedding band would be. I was a lifeguard at the time and as I would sit on the stand I would say to myself and to God ‘if this is real, if you are real make that sensation stay there,’ and it would. For about two weeks my wedding band stayed with me and anytime I felt it fade or needed confirmation I would just think about it and the feeling would return.

    I knew, in my heart, that this was God. Beyond that I really didn’t know anything else. So I began to think about what it meant to have a relationship with God. I prayed and asked God to deliver me from my addiction and sometimes I would be flooded with that sensation of tingling but in large nothing changed in my life. I still went out and smoked and I still slept around with an occasional girlfriend.

     I thought more and more about how to have a relationship with God and I thought a lot about religion. Something the Christians in high school had always said was that religion was a set of rules and something completely different from an actual spiritual relationship with God. I liked that a lot but when I thought about how to become closer to God, how to let Him influence my life I was somewhat at a loss. To be blunt I didn’t know what I was doing. I needed a teacher, a guide, a purpose, something to put me on the right track. I also realized that religion is just a cultures manifestation of the generally accepted means or way of connecting to God. Religion is, in essence, a guide for becoming connected to God.

Not the ending

4

So here it is, the big finish. Closing statements gentlemen. Let’s all remember that this is real life. Not Hollywood or even Bollywood. There is no car chase, no big explosions. No final solution. It just ends. I’m still doing what I’m doing and the world spins on. Stick the gum to your seat and leave the trash in the aisle, let’s go home. I’ve got a blanket that’s getting lonely.

     That was the ending when I first wrote this. With nothing else to say I figured going out on a short sarcastic note wasn’t all that bad. However, as I said the world does spin on. Much more has happened since then and there is a lot that was left out as well.

High School Ch. 3

3.

    Self-doubt and disgust fermented just below the surface in my mid-teen years, butting up and spilling over into the self-conscious whirlwind of a goofy 15 year olds body. ‘My forehead’s too big,’ ‘too many zits on my neck,’ ‘bags under my eyes,’ and ‘need to lose 10 pounds’ created in me a subconscious and almost constant mental affliction that I soon became somewhat adept at hiding. I grew my bangs out long to cover my forehead. I wore collared shirts and in the summer would lay by the pool for hours tanning my zits into unnoticeable dots. I always turned my head that extra degree trying to catch a glimpse of Ms. New Booty swishing past in the hallways or cafeteria. I never looked people in the eye.

     Out of all these teenage-isms somehow it was my bangs that took precedence. They were constantly pushing to the front of my mind, even through the zits, even through the fantasies of my shameful nightly ritual. I can’t say that my forehead was the problem because although that was the source of the tension it was never my focus. I couldn’t do anything about it. Instead I developed the nervous habit of trying to constantly keep my long thin blonde hair perfectly aligned over my forehead as to never reveal my ‘terrible deformity.’ In a state known for its tornados a 50 mile-an-hour wind was considered commonplace and there I was, terrified of the back draft from a butterfly. Subsequently I knew where every bathroom was in the giant conglomeration of buildings that made up my high school. Between each class and usually once during I would rush to the bathroom, glance guiltily around and if no one was looking hurriedly adjust my bangs in the mirror. I wore baseball caps and hats whenever possible. When I was a sophomore in college I finally got fed up with ridiculous game of hiding who I really was and what I really looked like and shaved my head, looked pretty good actually. Even got some compliments from a cute girl or two. Personally, I was elated. The relief I felt was tremendous and my self-esteem soared. Also, it turns out I hate hats, haven’t worn one since. The zits eventually went away too. Yet the masturbation has remained a constant presence, persevering through the trials and tribulations of my life as only a true addiction can. This thing, this addiction, this anxiety had usurped all others, triumphantly taking the cup and cash prize for biggest ‘what if.’ What if I didn’t have a secret? What if I didn’t have constant underlying tension, shaping who I am and how I think about myself? What if I could talk to my friends about this?

     As a guy, man, male, I am discouraged from talking about my problems. The strength and unwavering image of The Man does not allow for such things. Even without older siblings or close family ties to usher me through the checkpoints of society I was non-the-less able to easily discern what it means to be male. I formed this opinion not through my own wishes and desires but from what I saw of the boys around me, on the playground, in the movies. Their unwillingness to open or express and their awkwardness when I tried to provided all the examples I needed to understand that my problems were my own and my own to deal with. However, this has not stopped me from getting some good advice, some gems from the American collective consciousness. There have been a select few people that I have told about my problem, from them I have heard ‘just think about mannequins’ (ex-girlfriend) ‘take a cold shower’ (therapist) ‘why don’t you just stop!’ (different ex-girlfriend). The best advice being ‘you can’t quit, you’re too old’ (the internet).

Fourth installement coming tomorrow....

I promise they won't all start out like this Ch. 2

2

I like to think that I made an independent discovery of masturbation. Not like most boys who hear about a new kind of tango that doesn’t take two then go home only to be discovered doing the mashed potato in their bathroom when they should be getting ready for their night-night kisses. What a terrible time to be a mother. Little Johnny, 11 years old, wanking it. Not me, I made an independent discovery. One eleven-year-old night I was curled around my teddy bear and things just started happening. It was ok though, that bear and I had been friends for a long time. I’ve heard a lot of relationships start that way. Needless to say I was hooked. I didn’t know it but I was embarking on a long and as of yet unfinished journey that would take its course through many twists and transformations ultimately becoming one of my life’s most adhered to and abhorred rituals.

Of course, at the time I didn’t know all that. I had just found something pleasant, something to look forward to at bed time, something to help me sleep when I couldn’t drown out the sounds of mom and dad screaming at each other. It was all mine, my own little world. I didn’t even know it was masturbating and it was a good span of time before the action and the label became acquainted. Thinking back now I feel as though it was society that turned masturbation against me. With the appropriation of that label I began to understand that masturbation was deemed a ‘not-good.’ It was used as a punch line or an offhand reference. Like the penis in 4th grade anatomy, hinted at but never discussed.

After a time I came to internalize this particular quibble of society’s undiscussed moral code. My midnight rendezvous took on a darker tone and transformed into a source of shame and tension. What was once relief and release from an acutely unpleasant family life now boiled up against me. My parents divorced my sophomore year in high school and as I got older the relief, the get-away that had made masturbation so necessary during my preteen years wasn’t really needed anymore. The white capped waves of a rocky marriage had subsided to the mere swells of post divorce-court life and with it the fervid angst that so drove me to masturbate. All that was left was the release, that one moment in male sexual interaction. Shallow fantasies had lost the air of self-medication and turned into an addiction that had me burning on the inside. Stopping was impossible but so was telling anyone about my problem.


Third installment coming tomorrow...

Gotta get the heavy stuff out of the way first Ch. 1

1.

     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.

Glory to God

Matthew 10: 24-33


"So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell."


    Thank you Lord God for the inspiration and ability to write about the journeys of my life and the development of my spirit. May the path you have led me through be an illumination to another's footsteps. I praise you God for all the beauty and joy you have put before me. All praise and glory go to you Lord while the faults are mine alone. May these words be acceptable in your sight and a blessing to any who may read what you have inspired me to write. Amen