What's Stopping You?

A long long time ago, I met the first girl that I ever fell in love with, my Priceless Pearl, and she had an uncle who was a pretty horrible person.

I held space for her on the phone for many nights, as she processed the things he did to her and her cousin (his daughter) before they both "aged out" of his preferred demographic. Before my first kiss, I was taught, in pretty particular detail, exactly how a man can be horrible to a girl.....

Even to this day, it's hard for me to talk about this without getting lost in the things he did to her. The things he made her watch him do to his own daughter.


My entire sexual adolescence, I felt like I was banging against this wall made of time, wishing I could go back and stop him. And because she was so fucked up by him, because she had trusted me with these awful truths, we never dated. Oh, sure, there were moments of intimacy, of exploration, but I was never Hers. She was never Mine. But we were very good friends.

We were such good friends that both of our first spouses were intimidated by, and jealous of, our connection. When I told my ex-wife that I was done trying to save our relationship, the first thing she said to me was, "She's never going to date you." And when my best friend had the same marriage-ending fight, he said to Pearl, "Well, I guess now you can go date [amul] now, that's what you've always wanted, anyway."

-- This is kind of a tangent from what's on my mind, but at some point in high school, I went to one of my teachers to ask for advice, and he basically told me that there was nothing I could do, because I lived so far away, because it was all hearsay from her.

Two years ago, that man, the one I asked for advice from, that childhood mentor of mine, was accused by over 40 men of grooming and sexually assaulting them over the last 50 years.

I'm still processing that. --

But anyway, about a decade ago, her uncle died, and she called me to and asked me to hold space for her, as I had done long ago, so she could process her feelings about the death. I'd been there, after all. I wouldn't interrupt her with questions trying to follow the plot, the players, the tangled sordid mess of violence.

And as Pearl was talking, she..... She talked like an adult talks about the sexual gratification of others. What he was doing, not just what she remembered feeling. In even more specific detail. Shit that haunts her even to this day.

Shit that, perhaps predictably, formed a lot of the basis of my kinks. So much of my sexuality has been about proving that I'm not him.

And then she told me that he had not stopped, as she had previously maintained, when she turned 12. That he'd been doing it until she moved out.

That he'd been raping her all throughout high school.


I've spent a lot of the last decade kind of scrawling notes in the margins of my autobiography. Those last minute cancellations. Those phone calls when she was "inexplicably" recalling traumas from her grade school years.

And it was hard, because she lied to me, and it was hard because I had spent so much of that time wishing I could stop him and I could have stopped him but I didn't know.

She didn't tell me.


We stopped talking for a while after that. Pretty much most of the last decade. But then another one of the monsters from her childhood died last year, and she called, and I held space for her. I opened the book inside my mind that I had shut away, and once again I remembered names and habits and terrors that I had let myself forget.

Pearl spent so much of that call trying to apologize for putting that burden on me, and I kept telling her that she wasn't the one who put that burden on me.

But here's the thing. The thing I realized that night. The perspective shift she blessed me with.

See, I called her all the time, back in high school. Pretty much every night, right after dinner. 8pm.

And when I was on the phone with her, she wasn't alone.

She wasn't anywhere that she could be trapped.


All this time, all the decades that I've spent wishing I could go back in time and stop him, wishing I had known it was still going on so I could stop it. That entire time.


I was protecting her, after all.

-----

My last romantic partner, when we broke up, described my interest in power exchange and consent, in dd/lg stuff, she called all of that "disgusting patriarchal bullshit," and that my desire to save the women I sleeping with was "toxically masculine." 

I can't get a handle on that bit, because I do have this deep unfilled hunger to feel like I'm protecting the people I love. I just don't think it's "toxically male," because it's a trauma response, not some certainty of innate superiority. Because there WAS someone who needed saving, and I loved her.

Don't get me wrong, my savior complex was out of control in my 20s, but I feel like I've got it under control now, and I have fashioned that pain into opportunities for vulnerability. 

I think we're all formed by our traumas, and what should matter is how effectively we turn those traumas into tools.

But during the conversation that led to me end that relationship, she told me that she'd always seen this part of me, always found it disgusting, and the reason she'd kept things casual between us, it wasn't the politics like I had thought, it was because she didn't want to show me any part of herself that I might want to save.

That this is why, when she found herself dating an abuser, she didn't tell me until after the relationship was "over." Why, when she invited her "ex" to move in with her, and that turned out to be exactly as disastrous as I worried, she never reached out to me for any kind of support.

It isn't that there's some little kid inside me whose upset that he couldn't relive that haunting tale, it's that I was AM a man who has studied and fought against sexual and domestic violence for thirty years, and this woman whom I cared about ignored avoided my experience and academic knowledge, because I lived through trauma.


I lived through trauma.

When he did those things to those girls, he traumatized me too.

That's a hard thing to acknowledge, because I never met him. Because they "really" happened to her. Because I'm a boy.

I met Joyous Puppet and This Stranger about 3 years ago at this tantric sex workshop. I flirted with her after the class while the girl I came with flirted with him. A few weeks later, I was in Texas, but JP and I started emailing each other and I ended up topping her first sado-masochism scene with me a month or two later while I was in town.

That scene killed her relationship with This Stranger. He reacted far more intensely than he had predicted, wouldn't talk to her about it, and slowly, the relationship ended.

By that winter, Mirage and I were over, too, and JP & I ended up finding solace in each other. We started dating for real after a few months, and she introduced me to some of her friends. Like, mutual friends of hers and TS's. She and I broke up about a year later. We're still really good friends. I see her more than just about anybody.

This Stranger moved on with his life too, presumbly. I ran into him on the street a couple of times, it was always weird.

Two weeks ago, I'm working this convention, and JP asks me if I still want to go to Lakes of Fire, this regional burn event that I'd been wanting to attend, partially for vacation and partially because I'm dating a burner, and I want to be familiar with what her interests are.
Anyway, JP says she had a friend who has a ticket and was looking for a photographer. This friend says they wanted someone to photograph the camp, to put up on the website, because they'd been doing some good stuff with it and they wanted good low light pictures,
which is something I specialize in.

This is all happening in the middle of a show, and it's all going on via my smartphone, snuck in bits of conversation while on the sales floor. I'm not really paying attention. I find out that Sunday, while in the middle of breaking down my booth and saying goodbye to dozens of people, that This Stranger had died on Friday.

It turns out, he was the head organizer of the campsite that was looking for a photographer.

I barely knew this guy and what few interactions we'd had together had not been particularly cool, you know, so, I found out when they were holding the memorial and made sure not to be there, not wanting to step on anybody's toes.

I just found out tonight that what they wanted, but were to.....I dunno, embarrassed, I guess, to ask for, was they wanted me at the memorial to photograph it for his mom. JP had asked me to photograph the event, but there was some stupid errors with the Google Group, and so it was never clear to me if I would have been welcome there by the people actually attending and.....and anyway, that ball got dropped. I dropped that ball.


I also found out last night that he died by his own hands.

And ever since I found that out, I just keep thinking, "I missed the shot."

You can talk about fault, responsibility, judgement, communication skills, whatever you want to talk about to try to make me feel better about this, but the bottom line in my heart of hearts is, I missed the shot. Say whatever you want, the image isn't in my camera, and as Steve Jobs once said, "real programmers ship on deadline."

Gah. I hate suicides. They're senseless and tragic and you're left with all these pieces that don't fit and no way to know why they don't. You want to jam them in.

I've had more than my fair share of stories like this. At least once a semester back in college, I would have to sit on one of my friends until Western Psyche opened for Admissions in the morning. I learned pretty quickly to tell the difference between the kids doing it for attention and the serious life-threatening cases.

From a very narrow perspective, you could say that keeping my best friend from killing herself was partly what caused my "marriage" to fail.

The first guy within my circle of friends who ever succeeded in killing himself, his girlfriend had known he was feeling depressed. She called him up and offered to come over and make dinner for him. He sat there, the phone in one hand and the gun in the other, and calmly discussed dinner plans and helped her make a grocery list. Then he hung up, and called 911 to let them know that in a second, there'd be an unsupervised, loaded weapon in his room, because he could hear children playing outside, and he didn't want any of them to find the gun.

It's weirdly a comfort to me to know that the last sound on earth he heard was the sound of children playing.


There have been other deaths in my life: overdoses, a girl reacting to her sexual violation, a practical joker buddy who died of some bizarre strain of pneumonia because nobody believed he was paralyzed, and on top of those, more than my fair share of suicides.

Each one has been like a hastily discarded puzzle, tiny shards of someone's life left behind on my floor, vague beyond helping.

In 2010, I danced with this guy's girlfriend without asking him, and now he's dead.
In 2003, his door was locked so I didn't bother knocking. Four days later they found him in a cheap motel room in Texas, the needle still in his veins.
In 1995, I had a beer with this guy at an Irish pub. We complained about the Chips'n'curry and now he's dead.
In 1992, I noticed she wore long sleeves in the summer. When she died, she used the blood from her wrists to write "He wouldn't stop" on the bathroom wall.


Is it just me that inexorably confuses my lack of information with guilt? Or is this some innately human tendency?

It's not like I've come any closer to learning The Whole Truth of those friends of mine who haven't passed away. It's just that I notice how little I know about anyone each time the scoreboard gets counted and put away.

I mentioned before, however obliquely, that a recently-made friend of mine is a cancer survivor who might be experiencing a recurrence.

*long pause*

It is a strange, hard thing. Because it's not just her whose company I enjoy, but her whole social network. There's this strange sort of tribal node-like societal thing that happens like gates into rooms with gates and puzzle traps like a game which distracts me from my thoughts in really provocative ways but I'm avoiding the thing I'm trying to say and I should get back on topic.

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