January 20 (Kevin Westling)
My thoughts stuttered over the notion of a favorite phone sex line. He regaled his friend with a litany of descriptions of disembodied voices, each with their own name and special abilities, with whom he had shared sexual intimacy. It was quite the life, Griff explained to his silent companion. He lived on Chinese food and pizza, often delivered along with the cocaine. If he needed groceries or alcohol he had them delivered as well. Within the walls of his domicile he was king of the Wild Things, and this made him exceedingly pleased. His happiness and contentment seemed impossibly complete and for months and months he slept, ate, drank, tooted and cavorted without discovering his fill.
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The Steam Room Diaries:
Sex with an Angel by Cam Miller
Tuesday mornings are normally quiet in the steam room. I can almost always count on having it to myself if I finish my workout by 8:30 and beat the little cretin I call Frodo who invades like clockwork at 9:00. Monday and Wednesday I share it with Wilson, which is okay because he brings a small beaker of Eucalyptus oil and pours it liberally between the slats of cedar covering the steam pipes, and no one but Wilson and me can tolerate the sinus-piercing intensity. Wilson is a rapper who says the oil compensates for cigars he smokes when he’s in Atlanta or NYC cutting music deals.
The small rectangular steam room is floor to ceiling alabaster white tile, scrubbed in the merciless light of a single whining florescent fixture. It could, if you were on the edge, scream at you. There is nothing, on the face of it, to imply sacredness. It is, in fact, old and tired and in need of repair. The only splotch of color in the small rectangular cell is from the worn sleeve of a five-foot length of ragged garden hose attached to a faucet. The timer is broken so you have to spray the thermostat sensor above the door. If you put your finger over the nozzle it produces enough pressure to sustain a spray that will reach the sensor. If you hold it there long enough, sometimes up to a full sixty seconds, the pipes, which are imprisoned in a casing of cedar slats, begin a slow deep gurgling sound. The gurgles grow into tapping, and the tapping becomes a shhh-shhh swishing, and finally thick clouds of steam escape from between the slates of cedar. In seconds the small white cell is filled with such a concentration of steam that your skin cries out. I have witnessed grown men cry uncle and leap for the door.
One Monday I sat in the corner enjoying the silence when two men I had never seen entered the steam room. Vapor was just beginning to pour out of the cedar box and the moist heat was scorching my neck and arms when I tuned into the man doing all the talking. He had neither slowed nor moderated his speech even though I was there in the corner leaning against the wall – so engrossed in his own story or indifferent to my presence, it didn’t seem to matter which one.
He spoke about his former cocaine habit and something in the way he talked made me suspect the other man was also a member of the ex-druggy conspiracy. He still had the cadence and manic-mannerisms of cocaine-induced hyperactivity, and the velocity of his words were captivating. I began to feel as if I had fallen into a modern-day Grimm’s Fairy Tale, with the steam an ephemeral and magical mist carrying me into a new dimension. I listened, and soon the storyteller had painted such graphic visual images that I hovered in the corner of the story’s location like a spying specter.
For the sake of the story I will call him Griff, and tell you that he had a graveling, raspy voice that fit the lifestyle he described. He was in his late twenties or early thirties, with a thick upper body that was tight and sculpted. I don’t remember a tattoo but it seems now, in retrospect, that he should have had several.
He was telling his silent companion about the genesis of his fall, or at least the precipice over which he dropped. The death of his parents came suddenly, both dead from an automobile accident leaving him an only child, orphaned in his early twenties and the sole recipient of their modest estate. He sold their house and belongings and liquefied whatever investments they had, and then stood triumphantly upon a pile of half a million dollars. He did not move into a bigger apartment but he did quit his job and adjourned to his bed.
For months and months he did not cross the threshold of the apartment. He ordered cocaine, a trusted companion pre-dating the demise of his parents, to be delivered by prostitute. In this way he engaged his mind and body in a concurrent influx and outflow of vigorous pleasure, fibrillating the centers of ecstasy at least twice a day. In between prostitutes he called his favorite phone sex line.
My thoughts stuttered over the notion of a favorite phone sex line. He regaled his friend with a litany of descriptions of disembodied voices, each with their own name and special abilities, with whom he had shared sexual intimacy. It was quite the life, Griff explained to his silent companion. He lived on Chinese food and pizza, often delivered along with the cocaine. If he needed groceries or alcohol he had them delivered as well. Within the walls of his domicile he was king of the Wild Things, and this made him exceedingly pleased. His happiness and contentment seemed impossibly complete and for months and months he slept, ate, drank, tooted and cavorted without discovering his fill.
Somewhere, the occasion or day was not marked in his memory, a nagging thought broke into his bliss. Though he was able to keep it on the other side of the apartment door for a very long time, eventually the thought became a home invasion. There would come a time when he would run out of money. Finally, sometime in the early part of December, he calculated that the money would run out right around Christmas. He would not allow the inevitability to diminish the pleasures of his current life but he began making preparations for that day. He made certain that he had all the supplies he would require, and he sifted through thoughts about who he would want to see and talk to when that day finally arrived.
The day came on December 24th. It was Christmas Eve and he had no memory of the weather outside. He did not care what the world outside was like, one way or another. Like a Zen Master he had become focused like a laser upon the very present moment, inside, where he was about to abdicate the throne he had inhabited for what suddenly seemed like too short a time.
The crescendo of his prodigal journey had arrived. From his perch on the top of his kingdom he could look out and see the prospect of coming down after being high for months and months. He could envision being alone without any money to pay for companionship. He could peer out and see the inevitable homelessness that would come arrive abruptly and painfully when there was no longer any money whatsoever. Surveying the landscape from his throne that was bleeding kingdom, power and glory by the minute, he resolved to kill himself.
Late on Christmas Eve, as the world around him hovered in hushed anticipation of quiet joy dawning with Christmas, Griff entered the solace of his favorite prostitute. When she was gone, only then did he enjoyed the Mongolian Beef and Crab Rangoon wrapped in the plastic smiley-face bag tied with a soiled red ribbon. Full for the last time, he climbed into his bed, slid between the covers on his back, ingested the last of his cocaine and, with one arm hugging a freshly loaded shotgun as if it were his Moll, he used his other hand to reach for the phone.
He dialed the phone sex line and asked for his favorite voice, he called her Angie. Griff, grim and maudlin in his nearing sobriety, told Angie good-bye. She asked him what was the matter. The conversation drilled deep into the night, Angie talking him down and encouraging him to get help. With amazing resourcefulness she found Griff the local crisis hotline and in the face of his steep resistance, finally got him to agree to a conference call: Griff, Angie and some anonymous hotline volunteer that went home that night with a story to tell. In the end, she saved his life. Angie, he said, was his Guardian Angel who God had sent him at the critical moment to preserve his life.
Sitting there in the steam room, the hot gaseous cloud now gone and the horrid white light glaring against the blaring white tile, my eyes closed so I didn’t have to see Griff and his companion or see them seeing me. I contemplated the paradox of a phone sex operator as an angel.
I had so many questions I wanted to ask but I was already a voyeur, a total stranger listening in on a miraculous story of recovery. He was, in fact, well on the road to recovery and making it. Who was I to tell him that God doesn’t rescue people like that? So with nothing I could say, the best I could do was marvele at the serendipity. Then it occurred to me that Griff’s moment of metamorphosis was as natural as it seemed miraculous. He had described his Christmas Eve epiphany as a spiraling down and a stripping away of all the things that kept him from recovery. One by one, that which kept him from stillness disappeared. One by one, that which kept him from himself disappeared. One by one, that which numbed him disappeared. Suddenly the voice of an old friend climbed the steep stairs of my memory and sang its verses in my ear:
“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
for hope would be hope of the wrong thing;
wait without love
for love would be love of the wrong thing;
there is yet faith
but the faith and the love and hope
are all in the waiting
wait without thought,
for you are not ready for thought;
so the darkness shall be the light,
and the stillness the dancing.”
I was lost in the pleasure of T. S. Eliot fondling me when Griff and his companion decided to leave. The glass door dripping in perpetual sweat was slowly closing behind them before the departure registered with me. I wanted to yell, “Wait!” as if I had some right to hear or know more than I already did about the life of a total stranger. Still, I had not broken in uninvited. Griff was the one that crossed my boundary, and he was the one who had taken my attention hostage with the force of his story. Still, I was the one left alone and wanting more.
I leaned down and grabbed the end of the worn green hose, aimed it toward the broken thermostat above the door, and turned the faucet handle. The spray hit its mark and within seconds the clanging of pipes issued a new cloud of steam that grew so thick the walls and door disappeared. That is how it was when Wilson opened the door, a broad silent smile parsing his lips, and the tiny brown bottle of eucalyptus oil utterly shrouded by his immense sausage fingers. I looked up at Wilson and their appeared the image of him in Gangsta clothes with a fat hog of a Dominican cigar sticking out his face like a sundial. Suddenly I felt awash with the gentle humor of a god that makes an appearance as an angel working a sex line. Wilson too, may be an angel I chuckled to myself, only one of many dancing in the steam room.
