Thursday, August 25, 2005
WHY SEX PARTIES? (Part 1)
Well, why not? People go to sex parties for lots of reasons, probably, but I had to sit down and think about it myself for a minute or so. Reasons, excuses, whatever. My partner and I have reasons and excuses that go back a ways. I like to say it's all because of our respective holes. No, not THOSE holes, and not the holes in our heads, either, although we certainly could be described as having those too.
My partner started life with an undetected hole in his heart. His parents didn't recognize this until he got to be around 8 years old. He was tired all the time. Instead of playing outside he'd be lying on the sofa watching TV. After having heart surgery, he really felt he got a second chance at life, so to speak. D tells me that afterwards he became like a completely different kid, full of energy and vitality. Food became a big thing. Bigger than it normally is in a Jewish household in Brooklyn. He would visit his friends' houses and basically end up raiding their fridges. The mothers had to keep an eye on D, his appetite was enormous. The man can still sit down with an entire roasted duck, cooked by him, and polish it off in one sitting. My arteries slam shut just at the thought of it. Oddly, his cholesterol level is better than mine.
In a few more years, the other appetite came along - sex. I never realized how much action there was going on in D's particular yeshiva. Are they all like this? I wondered, as he told me stories of 13-year-old boys fucking each other in the stairwells, around corners. Not circle-jerking, or cocksucking, mind you. But outright anal sex. Great, I thought, so, where are the rabbis?
The hole that affected my story happened nearly a decade ago, when I survived a sudden rupture of an undetected abdominal aortic aneurysm. Not many people do. Usually you're dead by the time you hit the ground. An aneurysm forms in an artery, it's a bulging out of tissue, like a balloon, which can sometimes burst, leaving a hole in the artery from which blood runs out into the surrounding body cavities. Basically, you're bleeding to death internally. In this case the artery was my aorta, the largest blood vessel in the human body.
It was not pleasant, especially for close family members, who clustered around my bed in the ICU at UCLA Medical Center. Nor for D, who hated hospitals ever since his own heart surgery as a child. He had not been inside one since. I was not expected to pull through initially, so he went because he thought he would never see me again. My chances were not good, but years of being a highly trained cyclist saved my ass. I had a heart that just never gave out, and that got me through.
More years of unpleasant follow-up surgeries. I lost my appetite for food, then for sex. I looked like a concentration camp survivor. I lost muscle mass. It took a while to build my body back up. Just when I did, another complication developed, I went under the knife again. Back to square one. I felt like Sisyphus, forever doomed to rolling that damn rock up the mountain.
Naturally this got to be very depressing. I was very depressed, for a while I was on Paxil. Let me tell you how horrible those anti-depressants can be, they really fuck up your sex drive totally. I guess the doctors figure you're depressed anyway, so you probably won't care about sex, so why not take Paxil. When you take Paxil, you can still get aroused, but you can't focus well enough to have an orgasm generally. Your mind is all over the place. A very frustrating situation. I would never take that drug again. My advice is just suck it up, be as depressed as you have to, but stay away from those seratonin-uptake inhibitors. They are nasty.
But eventually I got better, I lost the Paxil, along with my appetite for food, and that has never really recovered, to this day. Five major surgeries in about six years can pretty much gut your appetite for good. But my sex drive did return, I'd rather have sex than food, wouldn't you? As long as you have enough of the latter in order to do the former.
So, basically I followed the path my partner D followed. We both came out of our caves of misery like bats out of hell. I had some living to do now, and time to make up for, and I went about it all in gung ho fashion. I could finally start to feel again what it feels like to have a healthy, strong and physically very fit body. I could look around and see things I wanted to be part of again. I started buying more bicycle equipment and backpacking gear, because I was going to pursue these activities again.
I was happy to be here. Here or anywhere. And yes, like D, our libidos kicked into overdrive. A celebration was in order. And we both wanted to celebrate with as many people as we possibly could.
- - - - - -
My partner started life with an undetected hole in his heart. His parents didn't recognize this until he got to be around 8 years old. He was tired all the time. Instead of playing outside he'd be lying on the sofa watching TV. After having heart surgery, he really felt he got a second chance at life, so to speak. D tells me that afterwards he became like a completely different kid, full of energy and vitality. Food became a big thing. Bigger than it normally is in a Jewish household in Brooklyn. He would visit his friends' houses and basically end up raiding their fridges. The mothers had to keep an eye on D, his appetite was enormous. The man can still sit down with an entire roasted duck, cooked by him, and polish it off in one sitting. My arteries slam shut just at the thought of it. Oddly, his cholesterol level is better than mine.
In a few more years, the other appetite came along - sex. I never realized how much action there was going on in D's particular yeshiva. Are they all like this? I wondered, as he told me stories of 13-year-old boys fucking each other in the stairwells, around corners. Not circle-jerking, or cocksucking, mind you. But outright anal sex. Great, I thought, so, where are the rabbis?
The hole that affected my story happened nearly a decade ago, when I survived a sudden rupture of an undetected abdominal aortic aneurysm. Not many people do. Usually you're dead by the time you hit the ground. An aneurysm forms in an artery, it's a bulging out of tissue, like a balloon, which can sometimes burst, leaving a hole in the artery from which blood runs out into the surrounding body cavities. Basically, you're bleeding to death internally. In this case the artery was my aorta, the largest blood vessel in the human body.
It was not pleasant, especially for close family members, who clustered around my bed in the ICU at UCLA Medical Center. Nor for D, who hated hospitals ever since his own heart surgery as a child. He had not been inside one since. I was not expected to pull through initially, so he went because he thought he would never see me again. My chances were not good, but years of being a highly trained cyclist saved my ass. I had a heart that just never gave out, and that got me through.
More years of unpleasant follow-up surgeries. I lost my appetite for food, then for sex. I looked like a concentration camp survivor. I lost muscle mass. It took a while to build my body back up. Just when I did, another complication developed, I went under the knife again. Back to square one. I felt like Sisyphus, forever doomed to rolling that damn rock up the mountain.
Naturally this got to be very depressing. I was very depressed, for a while I was on Paxil. Let me tell you how horrible those anti-depressants can be, they really fuck up your sex drive totally. I guess the doctors figure you're depressed anyway, so you probably won't care about sex, so why not take Paxil. When you take Paxil, you can still get aroused, but you can't focus well enough to have an orgasm generally. Your mind is all over the place. A very frustrating situation. I would never take that drug again. My advice is just suck it up, be as depressed as you have to, but stay away from those seratonin-uptake inhibitors. They are nasty.
But eventually I got better, I lost the Paxil, along with my appetite for food, and that has never really recovered, to this day. Five major surgeries in about six years can pretty much gut your appetite for good. But my sex drive did return, I'd rather have sex than food, wouldn't you? As long as you have enough of the latter in order to do the former.
So, basically I followed the path my partner D followed. We both came out of our caves of misery like bats out of hell. I had some living to do now, and time to make up for, and I went about it all in gung ho fashion. I could finally start to feel again what it feels like to have a healthy, strong and physically very fit body. I could look around and see things I wanted to be part of again. I started buying more bicycle equipment and backpacking gear, because I was going to pursue these activities again.
I was happy to be here. Here or anywhere. And yes, like D, our libidos kicked into overdrive. A celebration was in order. And we both wanted to celebrate with as many people as we possibly could.
- - - - - -
