WHEN I ASKED

On retirement from ministry I had two freedoms.  One was the extra latitude given to religious leaders to go into dangerous and forbidden places as someone who could try to understand and risk being destroyed.  The second freedom is not having to be accountable to a group of lay people who had not studied what they called religion or theology or ethics.  (That IS also one of the main hedges against nutcase clergy.)

One must earn the freedoms, in my opinion, and the main way is by addressing difficult subjects that plague the larger society.  These recent mass shootings certainly qualify.  It is clear to me that guns and sex are mixed.  The third element is economic, but rarely considered.  These boys are economically downscale if employed at all, which means they are not marriage material, which means that their love life is crippled.  The normal progression of settling is destroyed.  They cannot start a family and home.

Ask China, where there is a huge problem because selective abortion made a certain generation into a male unisex throng, unsettled.  They just don't have enough money to marry because of inflated bride prices and there's no one to marry anyway.  With luck they can find a job, but why?

One of the ways Americans (and others) are controlled and kept blind is being forbidden to know or find out things.  I discovered in the Fifties and Sixties that I was never going to find out anything about sex by looking in a dictionary.  The problem of American boys whose families have thrown them out because of money or just fighting or because they offended the conscience by being gay is that they are told too much by all the wrong sources.  They know falsehoods, twisted facts, and flammable opinions.  And so they learn to keep a front, an illusion of knowing it all and not caring.  They attach where they can.

In retirement I had been met by a mainstream society that was emptying dumpsters of information about sex, etc.  Did I ask how many shades of gray there were?  No, I did not.  The problem was not being forbidden access but finding some kind of order, particularly since so much is just recently known -- either from technological research or by finally gaining the trust of other cultures.  It all challenges belief and understanding even in middle America.

In addressing these recent incidents of gun violence, I need to tell things I barely know about myself:  that boys are sex-workers, that babies can be raped, that much of what is considered sex is more truly torture, that grown men have a whole range of intense regard for boys from murder to self-sacrificing love, that there is no clear line between men and women anyway.  People don't stay on their own side.  Or any standard schedule.  People respond to circumstances in loving attachment or sex and violence.  Something similar happens in terms of age.  People are forty before they attend junior college.  Likewise, some are still childish when they reach menopause.

In short, I hardly knew anything and still have many questions, but I do see that bullets are a kind of "cum" and that denial, confinement, neglect, are gunpowder.  At first I wasn't asking about guns, just about porn.  I was bluntly told that at the first sign of judgement, patronizing, over-intellectualizing -- they were through.  They had to knock all the narcissism out of me, the tendency to imagine what this or that would be like for ME instead of them.  Because, they said, it wouldn't be the same for me.

Slowly I began to realize that porn or even the sex act was not some forbidden object, but rather a source of identity, a sort of password, with a high investment in secrecy among the initiated.  

It was a while before they began to disclose how many of their tricks were not paying for sex but rather buying the right to hurt them.  "I charge more for that," the boys said.  "More than doin' it bareback."  If they had control.  These tricks were not necessarily degenerate sleazy men, but men fighting rage about themselves, about their sons, about the people they wanted to be but couldn't.  Sometimes they paid a trick for the sex act right in a son's bed.  I never heard a story about a man who wanted to be beaten himself, but I wouldn't be surprised.  Maybe they just go to dominatrix women.

No reporter has ever talked about the sex lives of these lone mass shooters, whether they made money that way or whether they hurt sexworkers.  I think it's highly relevant.  Reporters check for "manifestos" to read as though they were still in the Cold War.  Aren't any illiterate?

When I began to read about these things and to read porn directly, it turned out that one of the most obscene and scary writers was the one who originated the stories on one of my fav BBC mysteries:  "Wire in the Blood," starring Robson Green, a civilized man.  In general, the lesbian porn I stumbled onto was horrendous.  No problem at all to imagine them shooting people, and yet they don't do mass murder with assault weapons.  The boys who talked had no guns.  If they did, they would sell them to buy food and meds.

At the other extreme was a complete gentleman who was friends with Gertrude Stein and her companion, Alice Toklas.  His idea of violence was poking someone with an umbrella.  I decided that porn is in the consumer, not the material.  The material has to conform to the mind and emotions of the consumer.  But mass shooting is in the larger culture. It suggests the act, provides the guns and the crowds, and the follow up of talktalktalk.

No one has talked about what books or magazines mass shooters read, or do they only read online? Or do they just watch vid?  About shooting?  (One sort or another?)  Something that will let them pretend they are all-powerful?

When the boys who were the real life model for the "chapter" from "Prairie Gladiator," try to explain to me, what they express is not so much sex (though the unmanageability of desire came up-- sorry for the pun) as feeling that they were not being considered worth relationship, not even friendship.  No one wanted to know anything about them.  But I did.  Some had close friends.  They were not shooters.

MORDECAI: Fiction

The boy was in the dumpster.  As though it were his coffin.  He looked like Eddie Redmayne except not.  Those saint’s pale blue eyes, that shock of red hair, that vulnerable mouth, except ear rings and cuffs, eyebrows -- full sleeve tattoos with Celtic figures, Maori tatts around his neck -- and the red hair was bleached white in streaks.  His open shirt showed two tit rings and two words tattooed on his chest, a little off center because they were supposed to be over his heart.  “Jesus wept.”  He had wanted, paid for and endured these embellishments.  Now the blood caked on him was not requested but it was contagious.  He had late stage AIDS, which meant he was fragile in the first place, vulnerable to many things but maybe hatred most of all.  The real infection was self-hate.

Let’s make him Irish.  That way we can import a whole stereotypical backstory and won’t have to write it out.  Let’s call him “Mordecai” but he’ll need a nickname.  The father, of course, was abusive and deserted them; the mother had had too many children too close together and might have been very pious but maybe only dependent on the parish for help.  All the children were pretty, when they were clean, but Mordy had a different quality, kind of other-worldly, floaty.  He was a good student, intellectual but mystical, and mixed the pagan stories in with the Christian stories, even though he was an altar boy.  (Of course he was  -- what did you expect?)

His priest was his hero.  He was a large bitter man, but fond of Mordy.  More than fond.  He’d run his hand through that red hair, take the boy by the chin to tip up his face so he could see into his eyes, but no one thought anything of it.  At first.  Until the day the priest kissed him on his soft mouth.  Mordy already worried a bit about being too girlish.  He was twelve.  He’d never thought about men who abused boys sexually because he didn’t know such a thing was possible.  His brothers and playmates were rough in their play and took for granted the hard-ons that were just there -- didn’t mean anything.  When the priest initiated him -- let’s be honest -- raped him, he told the boy it meant that he was chosen, special, that it was a beautiful thing that God approved of, that it meant love.  But Mordy didn’t quite believe it and suddenly the priest left the parish.  

Things were bad at home -- no money, not even enough food -- so Mordy took off.  As easy as a river eel he slid into sexwork.  But he didn’t stay out of libraries and one day he was picked up by an American professor, an older guy on a research sabbatical, looking for his youth.  The professor took him back to his American university, treated him well, and gave him books to read:  “Lolita” (Mordy thought she was a spoiled little snot.) and “The Persian Boy,” which he loved.  It was a liberal urban university and no one was very shocked by Mordy.  They loved his accent and hinted that they knew secret things about the IRA.  He didn’t hang with students, but the ones he met shared drugs.  He thought of himself as enrolled in a special course, rather elite.

Then one night the professor gave a dinner party, everyone got more drunk than usual, and the professor’s rival colleague took Mordy into the bedroom.  The next morning the professor bundled the boy into the car, stopped at an ATM for some twenties that he stuffed in Mordy’s pocket, stopped at a sports supply place to buy him a warm jacket and a backpack, and drove a long ways while Mordy slept off his hangover.  He woke when the professor pushed him out of the car along a highway like a cat no longer wanted, and drove off.  For a while the boy just sat there and wept.  He was fifteen. 

Life was never as good after that.  “Jesus wept” was his first tattoo.  You can find the rest of the story in many places: the do-gooders love them.  Misery eaters.  The short version is that the older he got, the tougher his clientele became and the more he defiantly embellished his identity.  

The next marker was the day he was diagnosed with HIV.  He wasn’t making enough money for the meds but he found clinics and programs, which was more complex and ambiguous than reading at the library about the search for the cure.  Finally he saw that the economic collapse meant that all poor and needy were going to be losers.  After that, powerless, he went for long spaces without prescribed meds, depending on street drugs to keep from committing suicide.  At least he thought he wasn’t committing suicide -- he remembered it was a sin.  But how would Hell be different?

Beatings were part of the job, some in order for the trick to get it up and some afterwards as regret or expiation or projection -- whatever.  He just looked away with his pale eyes and left his body.  His nickname became “Sky Eyes.”   

Eventually he ended up in that dumpster.  It was winter and all the street guys had the flu so they were dosing on Nyquil and meth to keep working.  They’d duck back into the alley to shit and puke behind that dumpster.  It was as close to a toilet as they could get and they did have a little modesty left, even then.  Sky Eyes, who was a natural caretaker, kept telling the tens and twelves to get liquids into themselves before they passed out from dehydration and were taken to a hospital where they would be surrendered to juvvie authorities.   When the real dangerous guys came, the kids scattered.

This isn’t real, you’ll remember.  It could be.  But mostly I’m just making all this up as I go along.  Now I’ll tell you about something real.  I was living in Portland, working for the city, and living in an apartment across the alley from a bigger apartment building where a couple of gay guys lived.  I was ironing a blouse to wear to work.  The ironing board was set up in front of the kitchen window, which faced onto the gay guys’ back porch.  A different man came out and sat down on the steps to put on cowboy boots.  He was tough-looking, shirtless until he shrugged into an old leather vest.  He checked a wad of bills from the pocket of his cut-offs and lit a cigarette, the smoke curling up.  Then he looked over and saw me across the sunken service alley where the dumpsters were.  Maybe forty feet across.  Window open.  Curtains back.  Me in my underwear, holding the iron, a little steam wandering around.

Nothing happened.  We just looked at each other.  No thoughts, no words.  Just two human beings early in the morning, starting the day, equals.  Empty and innocent as deer in a misty field.

So did Mordecai survive his ordeal in the dumpster?  I have no idea.  You finish the story and then ask yourself why you finished it the way you did.