“Robert was a hedonist. He was a hedonist not because he was a fag but because he was a hedonist. The best kind”
A crazy person said once that “everyone’s life is a form of psychosis in slow motion and that crazy people are just experiencing psychosis in real time so its more noticeable”. For most of us there’s just enough gaps between disastrous events to create the illusion of sanity.
Crazy people provide a perspective on your lifestyle achievements that you take for granted; house, car, family, dog. You won’t have realised for instance that a house is an ostentatious expression of your control tendencies. A car for instance is the penis you envied in the gym changing rooms. A family is the fear of being alone. A dog is a crutch for your social ineptitude.
Crazy people will churn out great works of beauty as acts of defiance. Stand-up comedy is a slow and public nervous breakdown. We shouldn’t be laughing we should be calling an ambulance.
Crazy people are unpredictable, vulnerable and authentic. The combination of these are an aphrodisiac and will conjure love. Crazy people will do anything to make themselves feel better. Their self-effacing twists and turns will make you laugh and invigorate your spirit but exhaust the crazy person. You’ll want them in your arms radiating manic energy but they will fall limp well before you’re ready to stop feeding off them. You’ll justify the chaos by declaring that opposites attract. The sex will be unparalleled because you’re having sex with a body in turmoil as personalities jostle for attention. It’s an orgy without the insecurity body image issues. Then inevitably a relationship forms, you may even marry and suddenly they want to have sex with you ONLY to mute panic. You will feel like a carer at best and a piñata full of antidepressants at worse.
A crazy person never sees themselves as crazy particularly when they’re in a relationship. They think the other person is crazy which of course is true making them even more convinced they are right about everything including their misguided view of themselves as sane. This is the very definition of crazy.
If two speeding cars collide, the impact is the combined speed each are travelling at the point of collision. This is a relationship when both people are crazy. The coming together of crazy people is always a glorious explosion.
Robert’s eyes are fixed on Cameron’s. Cameron’s feet are stuck to the floor. The beers keep arriving and when the crowd thins Robert moves in. Now Cameron can see the colour of his eyes. A distant blue under thick shattered ice. Too many late shifts. He places another beer in front of Cameron and asks the last few customers to leave so he can close up. They complain, over-using his name. Robert. Did he hear correctly? Eventually the customers do as they are told. He locks the door behind them. Robert sculls Cameron’s beer to wash down his fear and rests his elbows on the bar. A hand grabs his belt and swings him round. He pauses for a few seconds to study Cameron’s face and then begins undressing him. He lies Cameron on the bar. Wet beer squelches beneath his spine. He undresses too now, keeping his eyes fixed on Cameron. Once he’s naked he climbs on the bar and places one foot on either side of Cameron’s hips. He slowly lowers himself down.
Cameron goes back to the bar night after night. It’s the same ritual. Cameron wants to lay himself down on the bar from the moment he arrives but he has to wait all night till the bar closed. Robert barely speaks but he makes his intentions clear through eyes that glue on to his. Holding Cameron long in his stare he feels guilty for crimes not yet committed. Only Robert know this.
Cameron tells Robert they are in a relationship as he licks Cameron’s torso clean of beer. Cameron nods and lets his hands rest on the peak of Robert’s buttocks.
The bedroom feels stale. He needs more. Fresh beating heart. Seduced, just as Cameron once was. The smell of cigarette smoke and beer was hard to adjust to first thing in the morning but Cameron got used to it and looked forward to it after a while. Robert would pull the man to Cameron’s bedroom and undress him starting with a tug of the belt. Robert would stare into Cameron’s eyes as the man pushed into him. His eyes were an embrace.
“Are we open?” Cameron asked. He was not sure what this meant but if it meant living a life free of social and moral restrictions he wanted in.
“Polyamory”
“What?”
Cameron laughed and held on to him tightly. A man like this would ground him.
“So you’re okay with it then?”
“If you are?”
Robert kisses Cameron’s forehead.
“Monogamy is unnatural. I don’t own his body and he doesn’t own mine”
He waited till noon to hear his knock. He went to the bar. He hadn’t turned up for work the night before.
Cameron went home and waited.
Cameron is naked on his bed with the fire exit door open waiting for a breeze. It’s the darkest hour just before dawn and the air is still thick with humidity. The thin skin of his testicles sticks to the inside of his thigh. He peels the skin away and flicks them gently to keep them cool. He stares at the ceiling and tries some Jungian interpretation of the stains and cracked paint. Cameron sees only Robert’s face, arms, legs. Silence is typical of this time of day but the silence this morning has depth. It hangs heavy and sticks fast as if it is a sound in it’s own right overbearing all other sounds. Like white is a colour, silence can be a sound. He understands it’s depth. It was holding something, someone. He didn’t hear footsteps so when he appeared it was as if he was floating. Robert. Beside him, propped up on one elbow and staring into his eyes. Robert’s eyes are colourless he remembers they are blue but he can’t see the blue. It’s dark. He rests his lips, his breath falters. Cameron holds on until finally his tongue pushes into his mouth. He places his hand on the back of his head and pulls him in. The room cools. This is a good thing this humid morning but an ominous sign too. Cameron tries not to think about it as he kisses him, his first love. Robert where are you?
Cameron and Robert made clumsy love. Cameron kissed Robert with a welcomed objectivity, without the deep hunger he felt when he made love to him two years earlier. Robert sensed a detachment and stepped it up. His writhing body and honks of wonderment at Cameron’s thrusts stretched his cock to new lengths. Although this time he was only mildly intrigued by his dance. Cameron remembered why he lusted for Robert so irrationally once. He wasn’t a fool after all, Robert was just very good at what he did.
Cameron smiled at Robert slouching against his pillows chain smoking not because he loved him in any romantic sense anymore but because he remembered how desperate he was for him to be in his bed once. Cameron was filling in the gaps and honoring his younger less resilient self.
Robert was a fantastic lover. He gave all of himself in fits of vulnerable desperation and slutty exuberance. He made Cameron feel like he was the only one who could satisfy him and the only one who could save him from self destruction.
Cameron was led into a room by a thin man with round spectacles. He had a beard that struggled to flourish on his face and instead knotted and crisscrossed in patches of unremarkable growth. When his kind eyes set upon Cameron, he felt like he was stroking him gently. “My name is Angus”. He told Cameron he wasn’t judging him. Cameron described his relationship with Robert as intense and complicated. He shook his head back and forth and shrugged in a prolonged heaving forward.
“He creeps inside me and before I know it I’m lost in him” Cameron said. Angus nodded . He knew what he meant, it seemed. Angus was a good 20 years older than Cameron so he assumed he’d stacked up plenty of intense and complicated relationships, presumably so many that he now just referred to them as relationships, the intense and complicated bit was a given.
There was no way Cameron was going to start from the beginning. He knew how therapists worked. He remembered they had a habit of cutting you off at 45 minutes just when you start to make some sense.
“To be honest I feel like my brain has been bashed in”
“Is that how you feel about our session, someone trying to bash the answers out of your head? Angus bashed his own head.
Cameron dropped his shoulders to show he was exhausted.
“It’s totally voluntary but I was wondering if you could provide me a list of phone numbers
Cameron heaved a sigh and rolled his eyes.
“Robert could give us a few phone numbers and we could call them. Robert would remain anonymous. It’s helpful in terms of getting people tested”
Cameron flared his eyes and nostrils and dispensed a cluster of air trapped in his lungs.
“For fucks sake” his hands now running through his hair, “Yeah I get it, I get it, I guess”
This was easier than analysing the reason why he loved sadistic men. Public good was something he could rally behind.
“There really is no telling how many men he slept with while I was at work. No telling. He fucks everything – butcher, baker, candlestick maker”
Angus looked overwhelmed but he kept his professional demeanor by pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
“I will try and get a few numbers for you and bring them in tomorrow”
Angus thanked him and continued.
“Maybe Robert personalised the failure of monogamy but the truth is its failure has nothing to do with you”
Cameron smiled at Angus and looked at his feet, he needed to leave now.
He knew what Angus was talking about in laymen terms, that Robert will fuck anything”
Cameron gave Angus’s comment some thought as he walked home but he couldn’t give it the attention it needed since he was preoccupied with planning the phone conversation he needed to have with Robert. He walked through his front door and sat down beside his phone and rehearsed the conversation out loud. When he felt ready, he dialled the number. He was put through to Robert’s room. To hear his voice again was like sunlight sinking into cold skin. He sounded upbeat. Cameron wanted to say nothing, let Robert do the talking, but he couldn’t help myself. He told him everything. He was after all an old friend not just a guy who broke his heart.
“There are drugs now” Cameron said.
“I take pills three times a day. I get to live. We are lucky fags Cameron” Robert replied.
His declaration made Cameron’s cock grow. The boldness, the ownership of the word fag.
Robert was a hedonist. He was a hedonist not because he was a fag but because he was a hedonist. The best kind. Cameron started to understand Angus’s parting comment. The only way he could understand and accept Robert’s desires for other men was to think of Robert’s sexuality as something to do with him. The realisation that possibly Robert was a victim of Cameron’s narcissism rather than the other way round eased the arch in his shoulders.
A door slammed in the hallway outside his apartment. His neighbour was leaving for the day. A bit late, he thought. He was pleased he had the head space to think about the mundane again. Everything felt less crazy.