Something got seriously warped in my relationship with the opposite sex very early in my life.
On the night of my first birthday, my mother got very sick. She was soon diagnosed with cancer and over the next three years, she wasted away.
On April 24, 1970, two days after her 40th birthday and a month before my fourth birthday, she squeezed my dad’s hand and said, “Thank you for a lovely life.” Then she drifted into a coma and died.
The normal way that kids learn to relate to their parents, particularly their opposite sex parent, I don’t think that happened for me and I’ve been pretty twisted ever since.
As a kid, I liked to poke girls with sticks and announce to the world the color of their knickers.
I’d lie on the ground beside the stairs and as the girls would walk up and down, I’d shout out the details of their undies.
If only I’d done this with adult women and gotten them to sign release forms, I could’ve pioneered the up-skirt phenomenon.
The first dirty joke I remember hearing (around age eight) and then retelling enthusiastically was: “What did the father say to his son? Take your little Tonka toy out of mommy so I can park my big truck.”
In fifth grade, the first girl seriously made a move on me. I responded by teasing her. I left tacks pointy side up on her seat. When she got too close to me, I kicked her.
“One day you will love someone who kicks you,” she said with tears in her eyes.
I moved to the Napa Valley with my parents halfway through fifth grade. I started sixth grade in September 1977. For a brief few weeks, my classmates didn’t realize I wasn’t cool and the most beautiful girl in the class dropped a note on my desk asking me to go with her.
I was so frightened at the prospect of getting what I wanted most that I teased her unmercifully for months until she hated me.
When I finally repented and asked her to be my girlfriend, she blew me off.
I didn’t get my first real girlfriend until February 1989. I was 22.
A couple of times over the next few years of my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, she visited me at my parent’s home in Newcastle, 95658.
Afterwards, my mother said to me, “You squeezed her like a lemon and threw her away.”
In 1993, I met Diana through a singles ad in the weekly San Francisco Jewish newspaper. She was 5’2″ and had natural E-cup breasts.
I told her how religious I was and that I didn’t believe in pre-marital sex. I thought it was better that we way to get to know each other before messing around.
The first weekend she visited, I proclaimed I was “shomer negiyah” aka the Hebrew phrase for not touching the opposite sex, but on the final day, I lay on the bed with her and she rested her chest on my hands. I justified that they were just passively on the bed and I wasn’t actively touching her. She was touching me, but on the drive to the bus stop, I couldn’t help myself and my hands started actively touching her.
The next visit, I picked her up at the bus station on Friday night and pushed her to tell me in excruciating detail about the various times she’d been raped. There was that time at age 12 when she watched her dad’s copy of Debbie Does Dallas with the boy next door and he forced her to give him oral. Then there was the time in high school when a classmate talked her into making out with him in his car in the school parking lot and then forced her to give him oral. And then there was the party where she’d gone to bed and then this guy she’d been making out with climbed into bed, pulled off her clothes and started having sex with her until her protests roused other partygoers and they dragged him off of her.
I was terribly excited by these tales of woes and started aggressively hitting on her while driving home. She fought back and turned out to be stronger than I was.
“Do you want me to turn around and go home,” she asked?
“No,” I said.
“If you come into my room tonight, I’ll scream,” she said.
So I waited until the morning. My parents were preparing for church. I snuck into her room carrying a paper towel and slid into bed with her. We cuddled for a while and then my hands started playing around with her and then she said, “I wish it was your ****,” and away we went.
I had to be careful not to slam into so hard that the head board banged against the wall and alerted my conservative Christian parents.
By the time we emerged, they were gone.
As I prepared breakfast, Diana said to me, looking away, “What color are my eyes?”
“Brown,” I said.
“No,” she said. “They’re green.”
I was house-sitting for the neighbors. I brought Diana over with me and I overcame her objections and we did it in their bed.
The next morning, Diana was tired of fighting, and when I snuck into her room, she was naked. The lack of resistance non-plussed me and I was unable to complete the deed.
Sex for me isn’t a particularly loving act. It’s usually a violent act. And yet without it, I don’t feel loved. I don’t feel alive. I don’t feel nurtured and accepted and desired.
After we’ve done the deed, then for me it is time to be tender and loving and to share feelings and to drop pretense. I feel far closer to someone after sleeping with her once than if I had dated her for three months without sex.
Sex nurtures my soul far more than food or words or gifts. Only once I’ve had it do I feel fully human. Without it I feel starved, like a beast raised by wolves.
So while I carried on a passionate daily telephone relationship with a woman 11 years my senior in Florida, Diana would pop up from San Jose to visit me about every third weekend.
One day she told me on the phone, “Every Sunday I leave you, I’m exhausted. You suck the life out of me. You can’t get enough attention. I don’t know why. Perhaps you didn’t get enough as a kid? You just want more and more. You just lap it up. You just take and take and take and you give nothing back.”
She gave me the book, The Givers and the Takers.
Soon after, the woman from Florida visited me for three weeks and at the end of her stay, I flew back to Orlando with her and moved in.
My new girlfriend was concerned about community property laws and when it quickly became apparent that I was not a keeper, she stayed overnight with an ex, knowing that I’d get so mad, I’d leave.
Women still do this to me. They tell me about hooking up with an ex just to get me out of their lives.
I’m terribly jealous. I know how much I want to sleep with every hot chick I can that I can’t help but fear that my partners are as faithless as I am (in my inclinations more than my behavior for I’ve never cheated).
You know how people will pop off and say things casually that you never forget?
For me it is comments like, “Why are you so needy for attention?”
Or, “Didn’t your parents love you?”
Or, “Why are you so insecure?”
Or, “Pity is the Trojan horse Luke uses to get inside women.”
Everybody has a favorite phrase. Mine is, “Let’s talk about me!”
I fear I’m condemned to live off women for the rest of my life. Sure, in good times, I hold down good jobs and make my own way in life, but then there are the inevitable collapses and dependencies and I always end up lying in bed wanting to suck on her breasts and have her rock me to sleep.
I’m a sucker. I suck women dry. I can’t get enough sex. I can’t get enough nurturing. I can’t get enough attention.
“I get this image of you,” said my therapist one day. “You’re sucking insatiably on a breast because every breast you’ve known has run dry.”
Another time, my therapist said, “At times I felt like bringing you home and taking care of you, but I knew I’d only grow to resent you.”
I spent most of my work time from 1995 to 2007 blogging about the **** industry. A normal person doesn’t do this. I think something got screwed up in the way I relate to women. I like having sex with the attractive ones but their endless neediness frightens me.
Women frighten me. They’re too intuitive. I resent that 99% of the chicks I’ve hit on have knocked me back. That’s why I loved ****. It’s revenge on all the women who rejected me. Now I can see them subverted.
I could go on and on about how I exploit women. For instance, Holly paid for every movie and meal we shared over several months. “It bothers most men when I pay,” she told an interviewer, “but somehow it never bothered Luke.” Other women let me move in with them for weeks and months (never longer than three months). One flew me to New York for three weeks and gave me spending money.
But presenting myself as an exploiter of women is just bravado. Overall, the women I’ve been with have gotten as much back from me (mainly in the form of entertainment) as they have given to me. When the ratio got too out of whack, they left me. Mainly, I’ve just been alone. That’s why I write so many stories about the ones who got away. Somebody with a life doesn’t take up as much residence in the past as I do.
A few years ago, a childhood friend sent me a copy of the one book my mom published. It’s called Fireside Stories (by Gwen M. Ford) and it is a collection of children’s stories. I read the book hungrily one Shabbat, looking to see if it contained any messages for my life. The only one that was clear to me was that I should be a good Christian.
Khunrum emails: “Luke you can explore the psychological aspects of such behavior but I believe that you are simply a run of the mill moocher. A lovable moocher perhaps but a freeloader nevertheless. Nothing wrong with that of course if the moochee consents to be mooched upon. Mooch away.”
