The First Chapter

Sex addiction

She names it and I laugh. It sounds so clinical, as if she has transposed a disease onto my personality. I have climbed inside the novelty suit at the theatre. I am the joke act now, the sex-addict character in the play. I picture an ape, furiously masturbating in its enclosure. We see them at the zoo and we are certain that their behaviour has come from some place of damage.

“But I’m not a sex addict.”

She raises an eyebrow. I have known her since I was 18. She is the friend who has stuck by me longest. I look at her gorgeous luminous face, and I wonder why we have never slept together, not once in all these years. She sips at her coffee and watches me and I feel myself unpicked and when I am seamless there is nothing left of me but sex. I am my behaviour. I have been pathologised.

A sex addict.

I can feel the ugly monkey suit itching against my skin and for a brief moment I am repelled and also aroused by the image. I am used to this sudden rush of desire, the narcotic effect of the idea of sex, a prickly spread of it like heroin trickling through my body.

I am made of sex, I feed on the thought of it. I call myself Queer because there is no other word I know to describe this state of being indiscriminately sexual. Now she has made new words for me to worry over. Sex addict. An addiction.

I would like to tell her that I’m not addicted, that I could stop any time. It would be a joke and it would also be untrue. I can’t stop and I would not want to stop.

A young Asian man walks into the café and I glance at him and register his feminine beauty. Again the rush of pleasure. That comforting settling low in my belly. There was a time when I would have made some kind of contact with this man, smiled slipped over to his table, engaged in some light flirtation, heavier if he responded. There was a time when we might have ended up in bed together.

“If I am an addict then I have got it under control.”

“How many times a day do you think about sex?”

Almost constantly.

“How often do you masturbate?”

No more than twice a day, three times if I am bored, rarely more, unless I have to stay cooped up in the house all day.

I don’t need to answer her at all. She knows me almost as well as I know myself. She is perhaps my oldest friend.

“Heaps of people think about sex as much as I do. Men. I am just a man trapped inside a woman’s body.” A flippant throw away line and she laughs.

“Teenage boys, perhaps, but you are going to be 40 this year.”

I shrug.

“How many shrinks does it take to change a light bulb?”

“One,” she says, “but the light bulb has to want to change.”

I hold her delicately fingered hand and smile and I think about how deeply she could reach inside me with those elegant fingers. A wriggling fish of thought, fleeting, gone in a second, but there will be another and another, whole schools of thoughts flashing across my consciousness. The constant distractions of a sexual world wonderful and varied as the ocean, a world I could drown myself in and still die happily.

“I don’t think I’m a sex addict.”

I check my watch. Just enough time to catch a bus to work.

We stand and hug and there is her willowy body pressed against mine for just a moment. I rarely hug. Touching a stranger seems too intimate. Hugs are an open doorway to a flaring in my body and therefore I remove myself from these kinds of intimate gestures. No hugging, no kisses on the cheek, no holding hands unless I feel safe enough with the person I am touching. I feel that somehow they may feel the heat of my desire climbing up from my skin, that I may burn them with it.

My friend and I hug, my oldest friend. My safe and wonderful friend who has just now pinned me with her observation.

“You take care,” she tells me, and she means it. She always wishes well for me, my beautiful friend. I watch her walking away from me, graceful, slender, the tight line of her perfect breasts under a snug sweater and that liquid surge pumps through my brain. I am, of course, not a sex addict but as I watch her walk away from me I slip a lozenge of lust under my tongue as if it were a Lindt ball dissolving and vibrating in my veins.

I pause, then, and I wonder.