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into.  When he lays on top of me, his weight pinning me to the bed, a trembling creeps over my whole body.  My wit and cynicism disappear, my tongue struck silent in my mouth.  I feel then like Sappho’s ode to man from 600 B.C.: “Greener than grass, at such times, I seem to be no more than a step away from death.”
    Richard is the boy upon which the fantasies of dark, lonely nights formulate themselves.  He is aesthetic perfection removed from the realm of art and thrust into the flesh.  His eyes, dark and deep-set, slay hearts from under his heavy brows. When he smiles, as he does when I’ve pleased him, he lifts the darkest of my despairs.  But when displeased, his face contorts into a scowl that condemns me infernally.
     Often friends come to me with reasons to leave him.  They coax me with their compassion and then, frustrated, badger me with rhetoric.
Can’t you see he’s just using you?  You’re just his security blanket when things don’t work out.  Don’t you care that he sleeps around town but he doesn’t want you?  That slut!
    They ask me exactly how he managed to conquer my most rational and independent spirit.  They want to know how an immature boy like Richard – too caught in up in a world of hip-hop clubs and random sex to even pursue an education or hold a substantial job – can bring a hardworking banker like myself to such degradation.
    Using wit where common sense would not dare thrive, I tell them perhaps it’s because we’re born in degradation that some of us still remember to have a penchant for it.  In the primordial filth of blood and piss and shit.  Then they roll their eyes because they know I’m full of shit, determine that I revel in torture, and resolve never to hear another word about Richard.
    Who can explain why I long for Richard?  For a man who pours his declaration of platonic love in my ears and his seed into the bowels of other men?  Who would believe the desperation, the madness, even the love that I feel for this boy who climbs into my bed at three in the morning but refuses to touch me in the way I want to be ravaged?  Only someone who has felt such fire. Someone who, instead of recoiling from the burn, is enchanted by the crackling of flames.
    The problem – and what I can’t explain to my dear friends – is that Richard has been unable to disenchant me.  Yes, I’ve been seduced by the lure of his random beckon.  But I’ve also been kindled by the cruelty of his rejection.  Richard can do without me.  Walk away without so much as a backward glance.  To him, I’m dispensable, and this I cannot accept.  I was unable to change this about my father.  Perhaps I can change that in him.
    Sometimes it all seems possible, and I become optimistic.  Drawing fresh inspiration from self-help books by Williamson and Chopra, I’m able to envision the very moment when the jousting will end and a mutually impassioned loving will begin.  I pilfer through these aids ravenously, underlining everything that puts me in command of my desires, with Richard at the very top of that list.  My faith is then restored and like a fool I believe we’re making strides toward some destined consummation.  But this was not one of those moments.
    That night, as I sat holding my tear-stained face in my hands, waiting for the phone to ring, for Richard to call, I was in complete acceptance of his power over me, his fascist role as both panacea for and provider of my pain.  That night, as I sat there, checking again and again to see if the phone was resting properly in its cradle – because it wouldn’t ring – that is just how I felt.  Condemned.
    Right then every New Age guru and their motivational psychobabble had perished, along with all my fantasies of a blissful tomorrow.  All this because an hour before I had been expecting him to show, Richard reneged on our plans to see a movie together.  Changed his mind.  Didn’t feel like it anymore.  Wasn’t up to