“Just put your penis inside the ziplock bag and wrap the Velcro around it. And make it tight — we don’t want any slippage.”
Confessions of a Sex Addict
Deep in the bowels of the Southern American University Addiction Center (name changed to protect the wicked), white-coated Lab Man says it like he’s telling me to tie my shoes or tuck in my shirt. I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you to put your penis in a ziplock bag, but it’s one of those moments when you can’t help but think, How the hell did my life bring me here?
In my case the answer is that the good people at 48 Hours are doing a show on addictions, and now, suddenly, shazam, I’m the poster boy for sex addiction. Or “problematic hyper-sexuality,” as it’s called at the Southern American University Addiction Center.
And why, you might ask, would I be willing to expose not just my johnson but the depths of my raging demons to a nation hungry for titillation? Because I wrote a book called Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent, based on my time as a teenage gigolo servicing rich, bored, desperately lonely or desperately dysfunctional women in Beverly Hills.
And after my time as a gigolo, I became, yes, a sex addict.
Or problematic hyper-sexualist. And once you’ve come out to the world as a skanky ho, being a sex addict seems like a Saturday-night stroll through the red-light district.
You might think I had a great life. But during all my years of wicked, sinful carryings-on, I was a wretched lost soul, and sex was my drug of choice. Finally I was able to stare down my demons and conquer them. And I learned that, in America, if you can’t figure out a way to make money off your misery, you’re doing something wrong.
But back to my penis. The Velcro I’m wrapping tight around it is attached to a “phallograph.” Phallo for cock, putz, pud, wang, schlong, dong, dingle, dick, willie, peter, johnson. Graph for, well, graph. Yes, Southern American University, deep in the groin of the Bible Belt, is graphing me and my penis for a study they’re doing on sex addiction.
So, after my manly wang dang doodle is ziplocked and tightly phallographed, Lab Man has me slip on a pair of huge dark glasses one usually sees on a cataract-clouded shuffleboard-er, then straps my head into a contraption that will measure my brain waves. He locks my head into restraints, Clockwork Orange-style, and plugs my ears. He has me lie down on a slab that would look quite comfortable in a mortuary. They’re going to slide me into an MRI machine, show me dirty movies, then study how I (and my penis) respond.
America … what a country!
Apparently some people freak when they get slid into the machine. So Lab Man gives me a little bulb attached to a tube. If I freak, I’m supposed to squeeze the bulb. I hadn’t even thought about freaking, but now that I have my freak bulb, I’m thinking maybe I will freak after all.
As I slide in, the machine whirs and hums like a post-modern prehistoric monster swallowing me whole.
Suddenly this is not seeming like such a good idea, and I feel my ziplocked cock shrivel. I slip headfirst into the long black womb. Rather than feeling like a freak, I’m strangely comforted being in this metal uterus that cradles me like a sex-addict zygote.
A blank blue screen appears inside the goggles. The MRI machine emits a loud steady buzz interrupted by a thumping sound, like an old man with a steady snore hiccuping at regular intervals. I find myself drifting into sleep, but I don’t want to go there, afraid I’ll have sex dreams of Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft, sliding into the machine with me, de-ziplocking then lip-locking my cock.
I’m strapped into a contraption that will measure mv brain waves, and they’re going to slide me into an MRI machine and show me dirty movies. What a country!
“Stay awake, you sex fiend,” I tell myself; don’t want to skew the research. Finally a hot-air balloon appears on the screen. The balloon takes off and I sail up with it, peering down on the Serengeti Plains: gazelles bounding, elephants bathing, giraffes loping, and wildebeests wilde-ing; like The Lion King, only not cartoon, and no sound. That’s when it first hits me: There’s no sound. As I take this in, I feel a sense of deep disappointment. I was expecting some hot porn, cocks slurped and clits diddled. Hey, when you’re the poster boy for sex addicts in America, you have standards. Turns out this is the part of the study where they record my base brain waves while I’m watching boring nature footage.
Then they show a bunch of lame Americas Funniest Home Videos-type clips: a hen sitting on a vacuum cleaner and laying an egg, someone falling out of a boat, a kid dumping spaghetti on his head. Apparently this is the humor section of the study. The only problem with the humor is that it’s so not funny.
Next we’re off on a jaunt down Intoxication Way. First a long row of booze bottles. Booze, booze everywhere, and not a drop to drink. Now I’m no juicehead, but even I know that the appeal of hooch is not a long line of bottles. It’s being in a smoky bar with cool tunes playing, getting snockered with some babe who keeps getting hotter and hotter the more you drink, that beautiful floaty feeling of losing yourself in the sea of alcohol, cares and worries going, going, gone.
Next up, hands roll the lamest joint you ever saw. It was truly pathetic, like the roller had never even seen weed, never mind rolled any up into a tasty spliff. And again, if I wanted to appeal to a doobie lover, I’d show the skunky, hairy bud and the dreamy, narcotized R. Crumb rendering of a higher-than-a-kite stoner on his way to Mary Jane heaven.
Now hands chop up what looks like baking soda. But, again, doing it badly, leaving big rocky chunks that would end up as undigested coke boogers in some moron’s nostrils. None of the group-toot fun I associate with a wonderful coke spree, and I’m thinking, If I’d designed the clips, they’d show some hotsy-totsy chiquita snarfing up lines off a blood-engorged cock. But that’s just me.
We conclude our jaunt through Drug Land with footage of heroin being cooked and shot. Once again it’s clumsy and fake, and if I were a junkie, I’d guffaw, highly offended. Now that shit is funny, I’m thinking — you should put that in the comedy section. It certainly doesn’t look like, as Irvine Welsh so aptly put it, far better than any orgasm you ever had. Frankly, the whole thing is starting to smack of people who know nothing of smack, blow, grass, or hooch. Strictly Phonus balonus.
But now, finally, we’re on to the seXXXy part of the show. There’s a hole in a wall. We’re watching a woman getting out of the shower. Apparently we’re Tom, and we’re peeping. Except that you can tell the woman knows she’s being watched, and she’s trying to act like she doesn’t know, but doing a terrible job of it Looks like a no-budget soft-porn version of a Victoria’s Secret ad, with this tremendously not-hot babe drying her breasts, her bottom, her feet, her hair.
Puhh-leeeeease, this shit is weaker than weak! my sex-addict brain screams. Then I feel like a heel, thinking about the actress in the movie and how I’ve been conditioned to think like Joe Jerk, how my definition of hot got so small that I can’t see the beauty in this perfectly lovely woman.
Now it’s on to the porn. At last, something that I — poster boy for sex addiction in America — can sink my metaphoric cock into. Guess what? It’s limp stock footage showing a bored, dead-eyed woman getting humpty humped by a guy packing a small, not-quite-hard schlong. This is the stuff that gave porn a bad name 15 years ago. Mechanical, apathetic, asexual sex, rutting of the lowest order. Two words: puh thetic.
Do these people really believe they’re going to sniff out world-class perverts with this shit? As a sex addict, I find this desexed caricature of fucking frankly insulting. I don’t know what signals my brain is cranking out, but my peter never so much as wiggles in its ziplock cod-piece. So far, one word keeps zinging through my brain: bogus.
Then it’s over, and the MRI machine shits me out I de-phallograph my love muscle and remove it from the baggie. To my delight, it retained all its freshness — no wilting. Again, if you’ve ever had your penis wrapped in a ziplock and a phallograph, you know just how good it feels to air it out
The next step on the problematic hypersexual gauntlet is a battery of psychological tests. They’re now going to codify me like a sexually addicted guinea pig, measure what’s inside my head. Another Lab Man handles me now. I’m starting to notice a pattern. These Lab Men studying sex addiction are some of the stiffest, homeliest, most asexual-looking fellows I’ve ever seen. I have to stop myself from asking, “Have you ever been laid?” But maybe that’s just me being a condescending prick. It’s easy to be a condescending prick when you’re a sex addict
First, the basics: DOB, parents, siblings, childhood diseases, broken bones. At one point he asks me the day’s date. I’ve been traveling so much, and I don’t have a job where I have to go to an office, so one date’s the same as another to me, and I realize I have no idea what the date is. Panic sweeps through my Serengeti Plains. Oh shit — am I deranged, insane, out of my brain?
I try for a casual yet mentally competent tone when I say, “I’m not exactly sure, but I know I have to be in New York on Friday.”
Lab Man seems to accept this as a reasonable answer. Now it’s on to the intense questions.
“Do you ever have delusions of grandeur?” Yeah, all the time, I’m thinking. ’Cause I’m the funniest, smartest, sexiest motherfucker I know — and I know a lot of funny, smart, sexy motherfuckers.
“No,” I answer.
“Do you ever get the feeling that people are talking about you?” Yeah, I’m having that feeling right now. With you. You’re talking about me, aren’t you?
“No.”
“Ever have tarry stools?” Tarry stools?
That’s a sick question. That is just ill.
“No.”
“Do you ever feel like you have super-human powers?” Hey, they don’t call me the Man of Steel for nothin’.
“No.”
“Is there any mental illness in your family?” Well, there’s pedophilia, addiction, obesity, maniacal repression, but apart from that, no.
“No.”
“Have you ever used sex to escape your problems?” Who doesn’t? Isn’t that what sex is for? Wasn’t that God’s master plan for procreation, to make sex so interesting that you forget all your troubles and say, “Hallelujah, I’m happy”?
“Yeah, sure, haven’t you?” I flash him a killer smile, but it just bounces off his white lab coat Then it dawns on me:
This guy probably gets nothing but grief from sex.
“Have you ever had sex and felt like you just wanted more?”
As a gigolo, I had a hippie-chick client named Rainbow who turned me on to the ancient art of tantric sex, so nowadays I ejaculate only about once a month, no matter how much sex or how many orgasms I’m having. Lost weekends, endless hookers, homeless lesbian couples, six girlfriends at a clip — what do you think?
“Yes, I would definitely say yes to that”
“Has your sexual activity ever hurt you or your loved ones?” Apart from losing my house and my wife and alienating everyone near and dear to me, no.
“Yes,” I say.
“Can you describe an instance of sexual acting-out?”
“Well, I’d be done with my day, in my car, and I’d see a beautiful woman, or a billboard with some half-nude honey, and I’d hear this voice in my head that told me —”
Lab Man perks up big time. “You hear voices?”
I have a sudden vision of myself in some loony bin with the cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, babbling to the wicked man ranting in my head.
“No, no,” I say, “it’s not like that I don’t hear voices like some psycho killer —”
This answer apparently gives Lab Man a big woody. “Psycho killer? Interesting choice of words.”
“No, no,” I say, “I don’t mean psycho killer, that’s just a phrase you say, you know, like the Talking Heads song, ‘Psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est.’ I don’t hear voices, it’s just a variation on my own voice, you know, the voice that tells you to pick up your laundry or remember to tape the World Series game, only this voice tells me to go down to Skanky-Ho Ville and —”
“Skanky-Ho Ville?” Lab Man looks as confused as a lab monkey.
“You know, the nasty neighborhood where the sex workers hang out So I hear this voice, well, not a voice, but I feel the impulse to go have sex with a professional, and it’s like I’m talking myself into going to have sex, it’s like I get hypnotized or something, and next thing I know, I’m hagglin’ with some prostitute, then we’re goin’ to some fleabag no-tell motel, and then we’re shtuppin’ till the cows come home.”
Lab Man jots it all down. “What is your sexual orientation?”
I give my standard answer. “Seventy percent heterosexual, 20 percent lesbian, and 10 percent gay.” The 48 Hours crew would tell me later that it was all they could do to not crack up, but Lab Man never misses a beat, God love him.
Finally they take me to the big cheese himself. He insists the cameras not be present. And of course, Dr. Sex Expert looks like the most asexual of them all. It’s truly bizarre. The chief of the whole sex shmegegge looks like he’s never had a whiff of sex. Then again, maybe it’s just me.
I tell him that I’d been very excited about the study because I think this is an important subject that needs to be scrutinized academically. Imagine my disappointment, then, I go on to say, when right off the bat the comedy is so shockingly unfunny.
He says they had a problem with the comedy because they didn’t want anything violent, and it had to be silent.
What about Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Mr. Bean, the good shit, the time-honored classics? I ask him. He shrugs.
And what was up with the joint rolling? I inquire. That shit was a combination of pathetic and pitiful. You should have had some guy with a monster bong taking a big hairy toke, smoke billowing, eyes glassing. Same with the liquor: Shoulda had some sexy babe pouring shots of tequila down a guy’s throat.
But the porn, that was the biggest sin, there’s no way you’re gonna get a trigger response from a dyed-in-the-wool sex junky with that absurdly douche-baggy porn. I tell him he should show a series of short hot clips: supermodels getting cluster-fucked by big black studs, nasty chicks with toys, a gaggle of beauties gaggin’ on a studmuffin’s monster johnson.
There’s great sexy porn out there, I tell Dr. Sex Expert, who looks more like a eunuch every second. I could put together a list for ya if ya want, the inside dope, the righteous skinny He gets all huffy and defensive, starts asking me questions about being a whore and a pervert. His words, not mine.
At one point I say, “Well, when I was a sex worker …”
He cuts me off: “You were a prostitute.”
“Yeah, but just so ya know, most sex workers like to be called sex workers.”
“Yes, but you were a prostitute.” He puts a nasty little stinger in it.
“Yes, of course I was, but we don’t call black people niggers anymore.” He actually moves back in his chair on that one.
I feel bad. It’s not really a fair analogy, is it? Sex worker is a generic term that encompasses strippers, porn stars, anyone who makes a living through sex. Whereas a prostitute is a prostitute. I guess, in retrospect, it was more the way he said it, like it was a dirty thing. Then again, maybe it’s just me.
He starts asking me about my parents, and if I was ashamed. He’s really coming after me, and I feel a jolt of anger. Normally I would shout, lose my shit, and rip him up with my rapierlike wit. But for some reason I don’t. I just sit with it, and I feel myself go right past pissed-off and all the way to sad.
Then a weird thing happens. I start crying. Me. The big tough-guy gigolo sex addict. Instead of balling a babe, I’m bawling like a baby. Right there in Dr. Sex Expert’s office. I then make a conscious decision. I will not stop the tears. So I just sit there sobbing, staring right at him. And the whole vibe in the room changes. He softens. Sweetens. Cajoles. Empathizes. Suddenly he’s my best friend. Better than having him opening a can of academic whup-ass on me.
And then it’s on to the last stop. The problematic-hypersexuality therapist. He’s so nice. Just a really nice, nice guy. I like him a lot; we have a great chat.
He tells me that although I most certainly was at one time, I show no signs of currently being a problematic hyper-sexualist. Me, I can’t wait to go home and have sex with my wife. That kind of hypersexuality doesn’t seem problematic at all.
For many years after my time as a teenage gigolo, I suffered never-ending vampire-like hunger, continuously trying to fill that hole that could never be filled. Although it seemed like I had a great life, I was a miserable, lost soul, and sex was my drug of choice.
Reggie Jackson struck out 2,597 times. If you add all those whiffs together, it’s like he didn’t even play for five whole years of his career. That’s how I feel about being a sex addict. If you add up all the time I spent chasing and having bad sex, it’s like I threw away five years of my life. And then it took years and years of intense hypnotherapy to learn to control my impulses and lead a happy, harmonious life.
But in the end, I’m happy to be a poster boy for sex addiction. Because if just one knucklehead out there sees my story on 48 Hours and gets some help, then I will consider myself a smashing success.
People ask me if I learned anything from all my years of wicked carryings-on. “You’d certainly hope so, wouldn’t you?” I reply I guess I’d say that when I stopped running away from my misery and embraced it, I was finally able to stare down my demons and conquer them. When I told my story, spoke my truth, I was set free.
The other thing that being a poster boy for sex addiction has taught me is that, in America, if you can’t figure out a way to make money off your misery, you’re doing something wrong.
Despite — or perhaps because of — the humor in the article, being aa sex addict can be a debilitating condition. It also varies substantially from someone who simply enjoy frequent and varied sexual episodes. You can look for signs if you’d like, but essentially if your fantasies start controlling your actions in the real world to the point where things (and people) around you start falling apart, you might want to talk to a professional.
