UNSAFE: CHAPTER FIVE OF UNDERCOVER

My sex was never safe. The very idea of safe sex renders it not worth the time of doing. In fact, the very idea is an oxymoron. For me, power is the ultimate turn on. The only thing that has changed with age is what I consider powerful. At 16, all that was necessary was to be a high school football player. There was nothing sweet about my first kiss.

The force of passion is in the act of abandon, and if sex were meant to be safe there would be no need for throwing caution to the wind. My relationships were mostly unhealthy, but the sex was powerful. Quality relationships probably don’t develop from really good sex most of the time, though I fully believe good sex can develop through positive relationships. Since I’ve never had one, I wouldn’t know.

That said, I sometimes wonder why we encourage kids to have safe sex expecting to be taken seriously. There is no way a teenager can have safe sex. Teens probably don’t have good sex that often either, but that is the aim. Safe sex, for a teenager, is no sex at all. My first sexual experience was neither safe sex nor good sex.

I was a child of the sixties, and the sixties brought the sexual revolution. At that time, it seemed that being a virgin was definitely not cool. Smoking pot and experimenting with harder drugs was cool, and easy enough, but how, I wondered, was I going to get rid of my virginity without letting anyone else know I was still a virgin? A friend of mine had shared with me how she had accomplished this through sexual relations with a male friend, but I didn’t have any male friends. I didn’t even know how to talk to guys.

So basically, this is how it came down. Once I had a plan in hand, I waited for the first guy who happened to make a pass at me, and told him I wanted to get rid of my virginity with as little pain as possible. I was high on marijuana at the time, and wasn’t particularly attracted to the guy. He was simply a means to an end. My goal was accomplished with no passion and no condom. It might as well have been safe sex, as far as I was concerned. It was actually pretty dull. I probably also took the thrill of the conquest out of it for him, too.

People didn’t talk about “safe sex” in the sixties, because we knew sex wasn’t supposed to be safe or clean. It was against the rules, and that was how it was supposed to be. That was before the politically correct bunch got rid of sin, and made sex a requirement. The concept of safe sex was difficult for some of us to grasp at first, since it wasn’t risky or naughty, how could it be any good?

The sex got better, but it didn’t get any safer. I don’t think I experienced romance even once, until I was over thirty years old. Even then, I confused love with emotional intensity that developed from the pursuit of the ultimate sexual experience through power worship, risk taking, and methamphetaminie. The experience always left me unsatisfied.

I finally decided sex was not necessary for life, and was causing me an undue amount of emotional pain. I replaced sexual intensity with safe friendships, and career ambition. In time, the bitterness dissolved, and it became possible to have male friendships, however, wasted time caused me to miss out on most of what others take for granted. I never married or had children. The perceived strangeness of this fact sometimes makes it difficult for me to fit in, and I have less in common with the average woman. Still, sex had long past ceased to be an issue in my life. That is, until the day before my birthday, in late September of the year 2008.

One of the strengths of being abnormal, is in the ability to work affectively with prostitutes, and drug addicted battered women. These groups are accustomed to being judged, and they can sniff out judgment from the best of actors and actresses. Once they suspect negative judgment, it’s all over. They clam up just as tight as a vault, and reveal absolutely nothing about themselves.

I do not use the typical counseling techniques nor skills taught in college; my strength is that I profess to have no skill. My strength is found in having no negative judgment, as well as in having a great deal of empathy for all whom I treat. My strength is found in knowing how easy it is to fall into the pit of the many addiction possibilities, and how few of us actually avoid them all. I know being a sex addict, or crack head, is not that different from the tendency to over indulge in Danish pastries. All seek relief from emotional discomfort through sensuality in its many forms. I also know the price paid for doing so.

I am sitting in a gray folding chair with my printed form before me. My arm is resting on a small wooden desk with a surface that has been scratched mercilessly. I always use black ink. Rebecca is sitting across from me.

We had to meet in the office of my referral source, because Rebecca has no permanent residence. My first attempts to phone her were forwarded to a voice mail service, and eventually I received a recorded message stating the number had been disconnected. My mailed letter was returned to my home by the post office. Finally, the caseworker intervened, and agreed to allow us to meet inside the Referral Source Office Building. The office is not much larger than a typical walk in closet.

Rebecca is a tiny wisp of a female, more girl than woman at 21-years old. She is an African American of light complexion, with hazel eyes that cause me to suspect she is a coffee and cream mix of black and Caucasian decent. Her willingness to share so freely with a stranger must be more closely related to a lack of healthy boundaries, on her part, than to any trust I have earned. A desperate attempt to escape her present life causes her to accept any savior available, even a blonde Caucasian one in a business suit.

“I feel shame,” she tells me. “Shame about turning tricks with a newborn baby; shame about hooking when I was nine months pregnant.”

With very little emotion, she shares that she has been a hooker since she was 13, when her older sister traded Rebecca’s virginity to some drug dealers, in exchange for crack cocaine to support her own habit. She describes being beaten, raped, her nipples bitten, and her body thrown into a ditch and left there. My client had then somehow managed to pick herself up, and drag herself home, in spite of the pain.

“After that experience, I started using drugs to deal with my grief and fear, and then got hooked on crack myself,” she tells me. “My sister is in recovery now; I’ve forgiven her for selling me to the dealers, because I now know what it is like to be on crack.”

Rebecca is requesting residential substance abuse treatment, as an opportunity to escape her present lifestyle, but I know it will not be easy, even as I assure her it can happen. There is more to addiction than simply taking drugs. One million and one associations will impose themselves on the unsuspecting mind of the addict, pointing back to the path that was left behind.

Associations, commonly referred to as relapse triggers by addiction professionals, are cues in the environment that remind us of other experiences, past and present. For instance, if a person has a history of snorting cocaine through a straw, any straw or white substance can become a relapse trigger through its visual association to the cocaine user’s drug of choice. In this way, spilled salt or sugar on the kitchen table, may bring about thoughts in the addict of cocaine use, and cause a craving response to develop. Rebecca will have to deal with associations related to both cocaine, and prostitution.

Four hours later, I am driving home. I’m grateful I have a home. I am grateful I don’t have an incurable social disease. Though my client was luckier than some, and did not have the AIDS virus, she shared during the assessment process that she does have genital herpes. Forming healthy relationships with males will be more difficult with the disease, and it wouldn’t have been easy without it. I know, because I have not been able to do it yet.

UNSAFE IS CHAPTER FIVE OF UNDERCOVER, A NOVEL ABOUT METHAMPHETAMINE ADDICTION IN ATLANTA. CLICK LINK BELOW TO READ PREVIOUS CHAPTERS:

http://hubpages.com/_2pvzhao591xs4/hub/UNDERCOVER-SYNOPSIS-OF-MY-FIRST-NOVAL

TO CONTINUE READING ON TO THE NEXT CHAPTER, CLICK LINK BELOW: 

http://hubpages.com/_2pvzhao591xs4/hub/THE-BOY-NEXT-DOOR-CHAPTER-SIX-OF-UNDERCOVER