Enough of Guilt?

Christian rituals die hard. If they die at all. And guilt is by no means a Christian ritual. It makes me wonder if the akrasiacs also felt guilt. Or were they just perplexed? I like that description the best: "something did not occur as planned."

Yet these instances are guilt of the I-got-caught variety. Not my sort.

So let me explore the I-got-caught variety, for some contrast and consideration. I call this the "cleaning out the apartment story" (of MC (#6) and KHG (#11)).

My heart was rekindled with love for humanity after a summer of intrigue (2001). More exactly, a summer of "potency." I had been in Italy for a boot camp of sorts, involving Danes, other Americans, "body," "earth" and ... Robert Smithson ("art"). A philosophy event. I'd never heard of Robert Smithson before or earth art, for that matter. But the concept of this work thrills me. Particularly, the temporality of the earth. There I met Rasmus. And would that I were in love with Rasmus. About a week or so in we started asking each other "are you feeling potent today?" and the other would answer, "oh, I am feeling incredibly potent today." We needed a secret universe where we could escape the intuition of the winter ahead. And for that magical lapse in time, we'd found it.

After the boot camp was over, he asked me if I'd care to come to Tübingen with him, and then afterwards back to Copenhagen. Naturally. In Tübingen, we did a lot of couleur-besuchen and there I met Tina, who only kissed me for a few minutes in a room apart from the one where her Chilean soccer player boyfriend was. Then in Copenhagen he introduced me to Carolina (#10), who was his friend who he'd also slept with. She was a lovely loaded girl who was coasting through life in a beautiful apartment. When I got to Paris for the few days before my flight back to the states, I sat in that dreadful room in the southern part of Paris writing her letters.

KHG was one of the new members of my program. A beautiful girl from butterchurning country. Her skin is a glowing fairness. She had blondish hair. She had scars on the back of her upper arms from the farm. We fell in love the way people are supposed to fall in love. She had a boyfriend when she arrived. Quickly dispatched that sorry fellow. We kissed on a skateboard ramp, admiring its graffiti. That was around the beginning of October.

But I was leaving in January to spend several months in Paris. I remember just a few nights before I left, we were having sex and in the middle she burst into tears. It was the most romantic thing I think I've ever experienced.

I was cleaning out that apartment where I'd lived for nearly two and a half years. There, I'd been with LCB and LR and MC and X(J)M and ... the funny business with OA and whoever else. MC stops by. On her way back to central New York, where'd she'd been teaching at the time. These were infamous visits. Essentially booty calls. But nothing since October, because I'd been with KHG and my heart and cock were so incredibly single-minded. With KHG, the world has been eclipsed.

That day I was cleaning up from a party I'd had the night before. We all got so drunk and even Dylan, who'd be dead only five years later, was there (I wonder if he ever knew his end was so near?). I restrained myself to mainly words with MC. But somehow in the bedroom, which was even barren of a bed, she had laid down on the floor and taken off her clothes and was touching herself. And I was standing above her, had pulled it out and was stroking it gazing at her body.

This was a repetition of a thousand other times.

I think not too infrequently about the time that I had gotten her pregnant. Not that I had known when it was. But there was once that I recall very vividly. It is late at night and I'd probably spent most of the evening drinking at the bar with her and a couple of friends (our nickname for her was "set theory," as in, are you going to learn some set theory this weekend, when I was going to visit her). She had mounted me and my cock was so hard and fully penetrating her and it seemed like that tiny most sensitive point at the head of my cock was pressed almost into, as if it were possible, her cervix. And I think that I saw fireworks as I came inside of her. That was a year before that afternoon when MC laid down on the floor and rubbed herself.

I stood above her, and would not even let her lick the cum off my cock after I came. And it was an act inspired by post-drunkenness and my own inability to process my confused feelings. That I was leaving KHG, after I'd just met her and we'd fallen so desperately in love. And I needed some diversion from the sharp pain of that confusion.

Months later, MC had shared a room at the Pacific conference with AT. And MC told AT, KHG's friend, about having sex with me and how it had repeatedly happend and about how I had always come back to MC after all of the little interludes, including LCB, XJM, LR, etc. MC and I would meet at motels between here and central New York, just for a night of sex. We would have phone sex, sometimes multiple times during one week. In fact, even years later, after KHG and I'd broken up, I slept with MC yet again.

And AT told KHG. I was in Tübingen, ironically, that weekend in the spring of 2002, when AT told KHG and she was ... distressed. Upset.

I lied to her and told her nothing had happened and that MC was making up the entire episode. And I stuck to my story. Luckily, no Starr inquiry was following the evidence. There was no cumstained dress. And KHG, either believed me or decided that she would pretend that she believed me. I prefer the latter explanation, so as not to insult her intelligence.

I felt guilty, but perhaps more than that upset that I would lose this relationship which had meant so much to me, to this silly thirst for pussy that'd overtaken me as I struggled, like a child, with feelings that adults (whoever they are) are supposed to be able to process.

KHG and I lasted about a year after this.