Simply Addicted (or, in Sensual Submission to the Excessive)

From an Innocent Individualism to a Mysterious Mutuality Note: Addiction can desensitize a man to his actual desires, debilitating his ability to empathize with others. As I extended my “prurient pursuit” into my time in Nepal, I was keenly aware of the copious divisions – class, national, racial… – that, as the structures exist now, read more..

From an Innocent Individualism to a Mysterious Mutuality

Note: Addiction can desensitize a man to his actual desires, debilitating his ability to empathize with others. As I extended my “prurient pursuit” into my time in Nepal, I was keenly aware of the copious divisions – class, national, racial… – that, as the structures exist now, put me in a position of power. While I freely gave into an open-ended personal adventure, I persisted fully cognizant of others’ poverty and lack of privilege in comparison to the advantages I inherited.

No sexual act was engaged in for the exchange of currency. It enrages me when Westerners visit developing countries for one-sided erotic pleasure.

Please do not attempt to duplicate my experience abroad. If anything sensual happened it was due to a mutual attraction to an energetic receptiveness along with the reality that I was a good-looking and in-shape 31 year old opening an oft-closed door. Since the respect was reciprocal, sometimes there was synergy. I had the sagacity to feel each situation out considerately. There are countless methods of mystery-seeking that empower yourself and those involved – or at least are not at others’ expense.

I believe the culmination of excitement in anonymity is only purely achieved with the awareness that real human beings are on the other end of a fleeting fantasy. Having stated that –

Warmed Ayurveda oil seeped into my flushed flesh – its stimulating scent filling my nostrils – as “Bijay” kneaded my legs, brushing them briskly as his nimble fingers slid from my shins to my glutes. I needed to be touched, and the impression of his hands felt immensely pleasurable on my neglected frame. Face down, my downward-pointed cock throbbed between oily thighs and under balls distended from Nepalese heat.

Initially I had thought his thumb’s slipping past my cheek to anoint my hole with the herbed ointment was accidental, but after Bijay’s second slicking I surmised I had been thus mistaken and slightly lifted my ass for a moment to pronounce my pulsating prick.

As I flipped my fast-slimmed physique over, exhilaratingly exposed and achingly erect, Bijay elatedly pointed out, “You have much sex power!” I had no knowledge of his sexuality and only a sense of his story, but peering toward his clothed mid-section it was perfectly clear that his cocked craving matched my uncovered lust. “Yes, I’ve been staying in Kopan Monastery and I haven’t masturbated for roughly three weeks,” I replied, feeling flustered and frantic, assuming he discerned little of what I’d said. Day after day of monotonous monologues on attachment, I had attempted to detach myself from sexual desire and now an old addiction to the mysterious rose to the surface as I emerged past the sheet. “You want, I suck?,” he suggested, and I caved into the consummation of that warm, wet something I couldn’t have suspected as he swallowed me with an effusive smile in his upwards-cast eyes.

It was my first prohibited departure from Tibetan Buddhist detention, and in one failed continuation of my indecent conquest of elusiveness I had originally hiked to a sauna for the middle and upper classes that contained hot rooms and a heated pool simply to ascertain Asian modesty as mine was the lone wang wagging unreservedly amongst gents secured in briefs and bathing suits. From a quiet disappointment to a quite stupefied “Aha!” with Bijay as my initiator into a series of eureka occurrences that would culminate into one electrifying lightbulb moment, the handful of rubdowns I’d received prior to going to Kopan in once-hippy-trail-turned-tourist-trap Thamel had in all realness revealed the Kathmandu Valley’s underground of queerly strapped voraciousness. The anonymity of America’s banyas intensified in its transference to a Nepali ambiguity.

Already a lover of massage and masculine handling, I found myself surrendering to excess as I sought out one, three, five… two-hour sessions nearly every day for four weeks. I switched off my chronic reasoning and turned myself onto a contorted reality that found me changing on a dime to accommodate just one more… The craving only deepened by the cultural divisions, and I felt liberated in reducing myself to the frustration of not freely perceiving, and almost certainly not peaking. Regressing into unrealized adolescent desire, what once had been viewed solitarily as transgression would come full circle in transmogrifying into innocently expressed mutuality. In the seeming selfishness and so-called duplicitousness of posing as a man badly necessitating a body rub, I would come to encounter unparalleled kindness and – yes – purity.

Eating formerly forbidden meat and consuming locally-produced booze, I immersed myself in all that had been withheld. Prurient as I was present, though not impeccably mindful, I developed an appetite for a lostness that found me thirsting for that unspoken thing while being hungered for in heightened silence. The mindlessly wide-blue-eyed American with money to spend and time to expend intersecting with the wise-brown-eyed workers who emboldened him as much as they embraced what he embodied. And I them.

From the innocence in individually touring temples and visiting with newfound friends’ families to the elation of being a passenger in polluted motorbike traffic to the glory of volunteering as an observer of village life’s love-fueled, life-filled goodness, I punctuated the overt cultural excursions with covert personal experiments in novelty throughout the ancient kingdom. Yearning for loosened knots, and in the losing of inhibitions, it was not lost on me that a 20-year-old masseur’s hands might eagerly grope my nude buns or that a man in his 50s may unsuspectingly graze my lubricated nipples.

The newness of it all! Promptly prostrating myself before another man, passive to the undiscovered, he would wrap me from behind in a cloth that could be removed at his will and in his time. Bijay being the exception, I was never again to orgasm (though I would see him on the streets and we would beam knowingly at one another, both undercover. We would send each other love and go about our respective hunts – him handing out flyers for our shared trade and me, tables turned, reciprocating in an active receptiveness). Past men criminally muttering “hashish?!” (as though affected shadiness authenticated the weed) while “Om Ma Ni Päd Me Hum” intoxicatingly resounded from rough-and-ready tourist shops, I would make my way to the next expedition with Ayurveda oil sticking to my sweaty skin and staining my clothing. With no obligations, I permitted this rousing rush of obscurity with obvious patience.

In a spotless spa here, on a stained mattress there… mesmerized by the frustration in the unfamiliar… personal space went unnoticed and notions of social separations crumbled for the unnamed few who happened upon a foreigner who felt his undefined heat… those who perceptively lingered over my lightly sculpted chest and whose fingers pressed and massaged my abdomen, brushing their palms past pubic hair to reticently approach mounting meat. Oh! That telling look in the leave-taking, as both of us beheld the untold. Myriad men were unintentionally accommodating my mania for the mysterious, but these boys from my tribe were wordlessly relishing a connection that employed bodily contact in a way that accomplished a particular acknowledgement.

It was “Ganesh” who introduced me to the best deep tissue treatment I was to receive on this exploit, and we became close. Every time I called on him I regarded it less as one of the escapades into uncertainty that were quickly transforming from a mad passion to an impassioned tolerance, and more as a painful means to providing requested relief. However, every visit translated increasingly sensually. The sheet would fall to the floor and reveal my feverish famine as he suavely maneuvered his smooth limbs to lengthen, then widen, my legs – his calm façade a couple cancelled licks away from my activated manhood.

Having presented myself by impersonating inconspicuousness, I evolved as a companion to my peer and would discuss business techniques with him, as he was taken by my having performed similar work across Europe and in the States. I suffused myself in Ganesh’s world when I suggested that I pay for a lesson in massage methodology, using his 18-year-old brother, “Rajesh,” as our model. We worked slowly, and the undertaking was as spiritual as it was overwhelmingly sensuous. My preceding descent into dissipation dissolved in an instant as I longed to intensify the senses of this boyish body that sheltered such an unsullied spirit. The equal tug of the proclivity to consume the mystery in the toned form of Rajesh’s youthful inexperience and to consecrate it with movement and tempered yearning proved virtuously invigorating. Ganesh would grin at me as he attended to the right thigh while I applied pressure on his left, and in studying the virgin bulge in his briefs to the marvelous arch of his backside, I reached a state of ecstasy. I cared for as much as I craved, and it was in this tenderness that I touched, and gave – of myself and that sensory-concentration that was now communal. And the wisdom of tapping into the tenuous to persist in the restorative as I carefully caressed him, looming over the obvious objects of my carnal inclinations to focus on the fibers of his biceps and the flatness of his belly…

On my final night in a progressively cooling Kathmandu before proceeding to a polar-chilled Chicago, I came to Ganesh and Rajesh to submit as a corresponding other to my brothers as they provided me with the real Ayurveda: recuperative and life-prolonging. Vulnerable and bared before them, broiling blood coursing through my veins, they pushed and pulled in unison, lovingly lulling me for hours. My mind enlarged and my heart expanded… my body reflexively swelled as my awakened appreciativeness had me eschewing control and sharing a consciously innocent wisdom that they personified. With every natural stroke and every knowing stretch my soul was united with them, and I was welcomed. Welcomed home, wherever – and with whomever. And welcomed to myself. And to a union with like-bodied, minded, and spirited others, as we accessed universal potential in accepting ourselves.

I embraced Ganesh with tears streaming down my cheeks, and was led by Rajesh to the tiny sauna where we saturated in the steam, locking looks through the mist while he exfoliated me – a sort of shedding of this instant in his homeland before taking the insight to my own. And then he showered me, soothingly soaking – and lathering soap over – my stripped skin, then adoringly toweling me dry. It was in this act that I recognized how simple I had been to ever believe my sexuality had been indiscernible to the astute men I had met in the weeks prior – or that our stories weren’t the same.

Yes! In the neutrality of anonymity, men had unambiguously connected with me, and we had utilized mystery to humanize motive – together.

Still jerking off to recollections of slippery skin and interludes into uncharted territory as I held my breath and stiffened my grip – I was as gripped with what had been clandestine as I was with the compassion signified in my Kathmanduan interactions. I was now withdrawing into a stateside turning of a deeply personal page with hopes of prolonged global discovery on the damned other side of the same blessed thing.

In Chicago, Palm Springs, and New York City, I was profoundly in awe of an increased awareness that addiction’s constraint can uncover hidden needs as I desperately necessitated connection to the men I served to such a deep degree that room for nuance and obscurity beckoned a bright expanse of ubiquity.

As my façade continued to collapse in the cold of the vortex, it was in the most heated of moments that I could still make out that ecstatically perseverant perfection encapsulated in “Om…Ma…Ni…Päd…Me…Hum…” – and I fervently counted the days until I could relapse into mystery on a four-month, four-day multi-faceted, erotically-charged stretch in South Asia.