Sexual Kleptomania

I used to make theft sexy.

The first thing I ever stole from a man was a muffin.  Very tame.  It was lemon poppyseed, my favorite flavor all through elementary school.  I was 16.

Jon was 45, and a very successful consumer fraud lawyer.  He worked at an absolutely lush firm in a highrise downtown.  We drove by it once on the way to our first and only real date.  Afterward I’d always remember the brown and gold giant on La Jolla Ave.  Jon was thoroughly a lawyer.  He approached our brief relationship with steely, unforgiving hands, and foreclosed on me like bad assets.

We met through a mutual acquaintance, a man through whom I cultivated an insatiable taste for older, colder, emotionally distant men with more money than they had positive things to say.  I told Jon I was 19, and he told me he had his own house. 

Our first date.  I knew from the moment he ordered something with catfish in it we were doomed.  The logistics of our relationship were just too hilarious.  He was entering middle-age with a solid career and a beautiful home in the Sierra Madre Hills, with a full head of hair and an immaculate physique.  I was 16, passing for 19, and trying to hide acne scars and a wimpy frame with bragger and bravado.  Why people like us pretended to be interested in each other clothed and in a café today still baffles me.  The first date bombed.  Our second night would be our last. 

It was the pretend winter break of my pretend Sophomore year of college.  I drove my mom’s Tahoe to Jon’s house for the date I was actually excited for.  Things went from dull to just plain awful very quickly. 

I came on too strong, without ever coming on.  My touch seemed foolish without even moving.  Jon was playing me, and I was too powerless and naïve to see it.  That night he called me a coward and a runt.  He wouldn’t kiss me on the mouth. I was frustrated, I retaliated.  After an hour of hesitant touching and recoiling, Jon let me know “we” weren’t going to happen.  I was silent, faking understanding.  I felt cheated and stolen from.  My one and only desire was sex.  But I left feeling like the pathetic newbie on the scene spurned by the much matured lover I’d foolishly fallen in love with.  Is this what he got off on?  Luring kids to his house to fuck around with but never fuck?  It was emotional manipulation.  It was theft of desire.  I felt dirty, sexualized but at the same time revolting.

He went for the shower.  Jon invited me in, to “talk it out.” God could see me in the shower, forced into a clammy, claustrophobic cell like a confessional booth – that wasn’t going to happen.  And neither were Jon and I that night.  I tugged on my jeans and wandered into the kitchen, a tacky monument of cherry-oak and stainless steel. I couldn’t accept that all was lost, and my scanning eyes found something that gave my heart hope.  He had stupidly left a succulent, lemon poppyseed muffin under an iron banana tree.  A flame ignited inside of me.  It seemed right to want it.  It was right to assume the muffin was mine.  Suddenly Jon moved his fat, wet body in front of the muffin like a beached seal and mouthed some question to me. I didn’t hear him.  I told him that I was sorry too and yes I was going to head out but of course I’d be coming back again soon and wait had I forgot my wallet on the nightstand? Would he be a dear and go get it?  God, I was damned, but I thought I at least deserved a muffin. 

It began: a sexual kleptomania.

.  .  .

When I first made my sexual debut (gay men don’t really have the privilege or biology to be talking about sex in terms of virginity, we have to be creative), I was a rotten, presumptuous bitch of a lover. 

I cheated everyone I came to know.  I didn’t come out of the closet as gay until I was 18.  While still in the closet, I lived between two different worlds.  I’d spend days at school with friends, I’d do homework and spend time with my family.  Normal high school kid stuff.  After dinner I’d put on pleather booty shorts under my ill-fitting jeans, stuff some angel wings and lube into my backpack and take the 498 into the heart of downtown Los Angeles.  My parents thought I was getting frozen yogurt.  To 98% of the world, I was straight. The only people who knew I was gay were me, and the men I slept with.  When I was gay, sex was the only name of the only game.  And lying, cheating, secrecy, and stealing were the rules.  Being openly gay was not a possibility for me; I could not afford crossover between these worlds. It was a tightly controlled lifestyle, designed to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.  Namely, maximizing the pleasures of being gay, and minimizing the pain of being too terrified to let anyone outside of a motel room know it.

The stealing developed very innocently over the following months.  I’d always assumed I’d be in more legal trouble if I got caught stealing, than  divine trouble if I got caught with a man.  Looking back, stealing little keep-sakes from each of my lovers, knowing I’d never see them again seemed like a  desperate emotional ritual - clawing at fragments of memory, identity, and acceptance.  Maybe they were secular relics I adorned with memories of sin.  Like rosary beads.  At the time, I was just trying to stay entertained.

.  .  .

The Grand Avenue 16 Motel smelled like old cigarette smoke and the gold-colored alcohol my Uncles used to drink after mass.  We were on the second floor.  I stepped into the dingy shower to clear my mind.  From the bathroom peephole of a window I could see the trailer-park my childhood best-friend Mariah grew up in.  I thought about Mariah’s very clean and curated Mormon upbringing.  If my mom could see me scrubbing my body clean in a shower as remote to her as my lover was to me, what would she have thought?  How would I explain to her that I didn’t know why I was doing it either?  It was a toss-up whether she would have been more disgusted in me or the state of the laminate. 

Mariah’s mother Missy Higgins and my mother worked at the elementary school together.  Missy thought they were great friends, and my mother loathed her.  She disapproved of the way Mormon mothers like Missy brought up their children.  She used to say that Mormon households are just like  Catholic ones, “with all the guilt but half the fun.”  My family was the “spiritual, not religious” type.  They were too resigned and skeptical to go back to church, but too guilty and afraid of what might happen if they fully turned away from it.  Catholicism was genetic.  Scripture, humility, ecstasy, and guilt were free-floating coagulants that generations of increasingly secularized children couldn’t ever get rid of.  No matter how I tried, I couldn’t kick that guilt complex.

My Catholic relatives and my Mormon friends told me that pious, humble, heterosexual Jesus was a guy I should look up to.  He cared about me, and he was always watching over me.  Was he the same guy who looked down on me from the tacky tin frame on the wall?  As far as I had seen, the only place Jesus was watching me was from the tattered walls of rest-stop motel rooms.  Like the one I was in now.

I toweled off.  I passed the damp rag to Eric, quickly stuffed my feet into oversized skate shoes and booked it.  A rosy glint caught my eye as I steered towards the door.  Eric had left a hideous pink-faced watch on the dresser, and he was now in the shower.  I would never wear it, and it would be my biggest theft yet.  After 1/10^th of a moment’s consideration I nabbed the watch and whistled down the faux-marble wrapping staircase.  On the car ride home I did my normal routine – get a large milkshake from Jack in the Box while I listen to Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” and just drive.  I wasn’t paying for the gas, didn’t pay for the watch, and I’d get away with the sex too.  I thought a lot about karma and sin and other systems that cycle around shame, guilt, and responsibility.  Perhaps damnation or karma was coming to kick my ass.  Fiona crooned about it, but I hadn’t gotten nicked yet.  The things I stole got more and more intense.  I was nowhere closer to understanding why I did it.  What kind of law was I working under where I could have no-strings-attached sex, steal from my lovers while they shower off my shame, and reward myself with buckets of calories and a self-congratulatory orgy of ambient 90’s angst?  It couldn’t be divine, so why should I pretend like I was?

.  .  .

I stole Randall Kennedy’s Nigger from a black man.  We were intimate, I don’t remember his name.

I can’t remember his name.  When I turned eighteen I stopped trying to remember names.  I realized I didn’t need to remember someone’s name to feel guiltless.  My sexual life became aggressively impersonal.  Lying, though still practical, lost its fun.  I completely checked out.  If asked, I would give a pseudonym – “Evan”.  There were no numbers, no half-assed attempts at romance, and especially no names.  Names were not articles of identity.  They wouldn’t remember a man any better than my touch could.  Professions were better markers of character.  I always remembered my lovers’ jobs.

All I remember about this man was his job.  He was a lieutenant in the marines.  This man, I don’t refer to.  He is nulled space; he is ______. 

His freshly starched uniform hung from a plastic gold light fixture in the bathroom while I took my routine shower.  I initially planned on staying over, but he turned out to be just about as much fun as his evidently “gray” themed house.  We swapped places.  I hadn’t stolen in over two years.  I was a real sophomore in college now and was trying to make my sexual life less reckless.  God had probably stopped watching me – a shower was just a shower, and the disappointment sex usually brought was my own.   I felt disappointed with myself enough at the fact that the lover I had chosen lived in a condo, when that old familiar flamed leaped up inside me.

I’m this horrible accidental neo-colonialist, racist pig and I’d worked my past two years alongside people of all races, genders and background literally trying to END this sort of shit that somehow a half worthwhile sex-act just stumbled me into? I don’t remember his name.  My eyes got greedy, and my hands responded.  “Something small,” I thought.  From off his tiny bookshelf I nabbed a book I recognized the cover art to.  It was a favorite book of one of my high school lit professor.  “Perfect,” I thought.  Some more light, intellectual reading for plane rides or park benches.

I stole from him Randall Kennedy’s Nigger.  An apparently wonderful anthropological exploration behind the etymology, history and usage of the now derisive racial slur that I will never read because I am so ashamed and confused over why of all the books in his shitty white oak Ikea half-shelf I chose NIGGER.  Book in hand and boots in the other I exploded down the staircase.  The drive back home, the rest of that day, and the rest of that year could not contain the shame I felt radiating from the glovebox in my car where I still keep the book locked up.

To this day the n-word cuts deeper than any slur that could get thrown around me.  The cut isn’t mine, and the hurt is indirect.  It hurts because I’m no stranger to identity-based slurs being hurled directly at me.  The pain I feel when I hear it must be hidden, re-packaged and shipped out as some other kind of acute physical response.  It’s a pain that comes from feeling so selfish, so immature and worst of all so young, thinking that my thievery wouldn’t catch up to me at some point.  This pain is witnessed by racism, but can never imitate the pain racial discrimination deals its’ victims.

After my incident with _____  I never stole again.  I never spoke to him again when to him I may have actually spoken again otherwise.  I was finally brought down.  My empire fell to ruin before me with the swoop of a great, mysterious hand. 

But it wasn’t God’s.