Golden Knights Trivia: VGK Superstars

Trump never gave order to take anyone out

unlike Biden, who is real criminal here

Eventually, he got used to having sex with me and the boyish tears dried up. He was comfortable and safe. But as soon as we would finish up he would want to start up all over again and again and again. There was no way to continue. After you’ve been going at it for three hours, what the hell is left? A glass of wine and an omelet, I say. I was limp like a shelled bivalve mollusk, but Louis just kept coming at me with his oyster knife.

His situation was more severe than most homosexual cases of “sex addiction” because he had had a more sexually severe childhood. At twelve, his father taught him the birds and the bees by jerking off to climax in front of him. As an introduction to the process he said, “I’m just going to show you.” Then, after he had come all over the place, he said, “And that’s sex.”

On Saturdays, when Louis’s mother went to the beauty parlor for her hair appointment, Louis crawled into bed with his otherwise verbally abusive father and they had sex. Every Saturday. For years. His father arranged the entire thing. Louis admitted this made him feel special. To have a screaming father who bullied all of his kids single you out for such special attention, well, this was like a prize. It was sexy. It was secret. It was consistent.

When Louis was in his mid-teens, his father brought home truckers he had befriended at a local stop and had them pile on top of Louis like the hot teenage boy that he was. There was a network of traveling pedophiles and I guess swapping out your son was something they did in those days. Upon learning all this, I was aghast and amazed. Could I really handle dating someone who had been continuously raped like this? I would like to say that I felt terrible for him, but like some victims, his sexuality was informed and energized by this constant rape. It charged him up. You could see it in his eyes when he talked about it. It was complicated.

“I don’t know if I can handle this,” I told him.

“Oh, James—”

He called me James. My middle name. I liked the way he said it, sexy and warm.

“Louis, really. I mean, even when you talk about this thing with your father, the truckers, you seem excited.”

“It was exciting. That’s the problem with this kind of thing.”

“So, you liked it?”

“Yes. But I’m not alone in that.”

“I understand.”

“James—”

He kissed me, looking into my eyes. I was James, the kid he was now comforting. I was the first boyfriend he ever told about this childhood mess. I was the one who could handle him during this healing time.

“Oh, Louis—”

“James—”

Now he was saying James like I was someone else. He had left his body. The discomfort and draw of the past pulled him into a trauma state, I imagine, and I was a distant person of his creation that was safe but not necessarily real. Nicknames are controlling. He was placating me with a tone that said, You are a nervous little guy, you can do this, don’t be so scared of me like everyone else.

Ambivalent. I could never supply the energy it would take to compete with the negative force of his father’s destruction. I wanted to be optimistic. I mean, people have gotten over worse? Louis could maybe pull this off. I was very attracted to him, this damaged man-boy. I wanted him to take care of me in an old-fashioned way, in his suit, with a steady paycheck. In return, I would hold this damaged little kid, his somewhat flabby but still very attractive body, in an effort to soothe him. I could give him the care his family had denied him. Maybe. Tentative. Scary. Shit.

…

Months passed. The sex with Louis calmed down as he was getting off with other guys all over town. Two times, he came home late from a business meeting in a leather jacket, with a cat-who-ate-the-canary grin that signaled, clearly, that he had had sex with someone. He didn’t try to hide it, wanting me to accept him for who he was. I was furious. He apologized and cried but still was elated for having had the sex. I told him this was probably not going to work out, us. Louis begged me to stay, standing there in the cookie-cutter kitchen—in a tower in the East Nineties, in the early ’90s—of the apartment he was subletting from a friend of mine. I was not necessarily against extra-relationship sex. I was more concerned that he had so little control over it. It made me feel like I could vanish at any moment. Or, let’s face it, like he might give me the disease of the day that was killing everyone.

Janet Lombardi, Bankruptcy: A Love Story

At home, Josh was continually angry with me, and I found myself dodging him because he questioned my honesty. He claimed it wasn’t my relationship with her that was infuriating; it was my lack of telling the truth. Late Sunday evening arguments took place behind our closed bedroom door, where I sat on my side of the bed, leaning against the inlaid mother of pearl oak headboard as Josh paced in front of the windows where the moon peeked in.

“The secret self is the feelings, not the facts, my dear,” he snarled. “The facts are the truth of what is, not what we feel or wish it to be. If I were in your shoes,” he laughed, “I wouldn’t want to tell me either. And I know you’re getting angry now because you can’t win, right? No matter what you say, I don’t believe you, right? Nothing has happened, right? I know you fooled around and it’s probably gone too far once or twice. And I know you feel you deserve it because you have that lesbian component. That gives you permission, right?”

“It doesn’t give me permission,” I said, exhaling. “Please let’s pick this up tomorrow. I’m tired.”

“Nobody likes to come clean,” he shouted. “Everybody denies responsibility and wants to blame outside factors, or rationalize, minimize, maybe, or at least ignore unpleasant truths. We’re indignant. Aren’t we? Aren’t you?”

I stared at the dream catcher hung in the corner of the room, fixated on how the feathers got tanner as the eye followed their form and how intricately the netting was sewn. I didn’t even know what the questions were. What was he asking me?

“Lies become truth, you know,” he continued. “Silence can become the truth. The significant can become the insignificant. Truth can become a secret shared only by those who know the facts.” He was giving a summation before a jury and I was the defendant.

I nodded in agreement. My body recoiled towards the headboard. I just wanted this to stop.

“Sure. And tomorrow you’re back with her. And she can hammer you too. I know how aggressive she is. How she needs you to be like her. But you like being hammered by her. But not me. Sure we can talk about it tomorrow.”

As unpleasant and horrible these encounters made me feel, I absorbed them not only because I felt guilty and that I deserved it but because I had unwittingly agreed to be a receptacle for the frustration and despair molting off him since 9/11. His anger at my indiscretions pointed to some return to normalcy. At least he was animated, not the depressed, listless person who had lost all interest in living. He was beginning to stop his swaying and to bolt upright like the inflatable toy punching-bag clown at a standing position. I had gotten his attention.