The bookstores without booths were better. He especially liked the ones with big dark back rooms with one TV for everyone. Back there, you could get anything: oral, anal, group action. He once saw five guys tag-team a female pro. There was the transvestite who'd show up with his menagerie of dildos. Guys walking around naked, like in a health club locker room.
Sex with one person in a booth was good. Sex with one person in that back room, with others watching, was better, Andy recalls. But soon, that wasn't enough. He'd have to have sex with multiple partners, simultaneously. Then it was rough sex. Each time, Andy would have to increase the dose.
Jill Hadley Hooper
Carnes's book became a bible for sex addicts.
Patrick Carnes, Ph.D.
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Andy says addicts don't even have to be that great at hiding their second life anymore. The more pornography infiltrates the mainstream, the easier it is to hide. Strip clubs, cybersex, massage parlors -- they're everywhere, for everyone to use, addict and average alike.
"Straight guys go, 'Isn't that just being a guy?' Gay guys go, 'Isn't that just being gay?' " Andy says. "You can have it and be supported and be invisible -- unless you really start fucking up."
Andy never did that -- he just became a rapist in his mind. That scared him enough to want to check out. He just couldn't get all the ingredients for his lethal recipe.
"I was trying and failing to kill myself," he says, "so I went to a meeting."
First he smoked pot, his 5 p.m. ritual for 25 years. Then he circled the building a few times in his car. He was afraid the meeting of sex addicts would be frivolous -- a bunch of oversexed Bubbas laughing and slapping each other on the back. But when he finally pushed through the meeting room door, he saw otherwise. SAA allowed no BS.
Andy says it was enough to make a cynic like him soon give up marijuana. He wanted to be sober for these things. He got a sponsor within days and wound up going to 11 meetings a week. Even though he's toned it down to three or four a week, he still lauds the group. It helped him get over the rape obsession -- and kill the idea of killing himself.
"I may have turned into a Moonie," he laughs, "but I'm much happier now."
It's ten-thirty at night, and Ted is driving home from an AA meeting. The radio's off. When he's in the car, Ted prefers to think about God and fighting his addiction. Some recovering addicts like Christian tapes; Ted likes it quiet.
It's a sign of his recovery that he can remember his temptations so clearly, like that night two months ago.
He was on Memorial, approaching Beltway 8, when he noticed her: walking in the opposite direction, no purse, clearly not out for an evening jog.
The road was open. He thought about swinging a U-turn, pulling up beside her and ordering the usual.
Suddenly, he recalled hearing his own voice penetrating the silence: "I don't do this anymore."
A split second later, there was that archived footage playing in his memory: the promise he made to his wife about telling her if he slipped. What would that do to her?
But Ted's no longer trapped in the Bubble.
The desire passed, faster than the woman in his rearview mirror.
