by Jay Lygon
(03/02/05)

Something went awry with my rutting karma. Again.

In the endless cycle of birth and rebirth, I slid up and down the reincarnation scale like that childhood game, Chutes and Ladders. Sometimes I advanced towards the goal of total enlightenment, but then some inescapable pig gene in my soul tripped me up and sent me hurtling head-first down some slippery chute until I was back to Square One.

Reflecting on my progress towards nirvana, I expected that with so many lifetimes behind me I'd eventually get the decoder ring for the whole rebirth-recycle thing, but somehow it eluded me. When I fucked up my sex karma really bad I came back at a different level -- read "lower," although supposedly all life had equal value, right? -- with a challenge simple enough that even I couldn't screw it up. It was karma putting a football helmet on my head, making me grip the rope, and saying "there, there, even you should be able to master this," although I sensed a bit of eye-rolling behind my back.

So how bad did I fuck up the last go-around? How far was my ying out of alignment with my yang? I could always tell from my re-entry point of consciousness.

For example, there was that time that I kind of promised Jamal he was "the one" so that he'd give it over to me. The goofy jokes he told, the gap between his front teeth, and his Olympic-caliber track-star bubble butt drove me mad -- sex crazy -- but I didn't want a boyfriend. So I lied a little. Jamal needed love in exchange for his virginity; I wanted to fuck. Oink, oink.

In fairness, Jamal absolutely was "the one" for that brief, transcendent moment as I tipped over the edge into orgasm. His brown-pink, tight little hole grasped my cock hard, so I pushed harder and got the milking of my life. For that nanosecond I loved him to the depth, breadth and height my spunk could shoot. I worshiped and adored him -- right up until the moment I came. After that, not so much. While Jamal sat in the bathtub and got melancholy, I called Rajeeve to see if he was up for something later that night. I opened the door to the steamy lavender-scented bathroom, avoided looking at my reflection in the fogged mirror over the sink, and saw Jamal crying. He heard the call and knew I was about to make an excuse to leave him to go to another guy. For breaking Jamal's heart in a moment of duhkha -- suffering I caused because I was out of alignment with truth -- I came back as a snail.

A snail. On the bright side: self-lubricating. On the downside: cruising was so damn s-l-o-w. Even as a snail I thought all snails looked the same, so for a moment during a weekend-long debauch inside an azalea blossom I worried that I was rutting with the snail equivalent of a hunchbacked, bad-comb-over accountant with halitosis. Hot summer sunlight filtered through the flower, bathing our moist bodies in tawdry porn-pink light while we wrote the snail Kama Sutra. It was an Arabian Nights harem-tent fantasy without the requisite mustachioed leather daddy, but he/she/other rocked my world in such slow motion that I left a glistening come-trail of satisfaction behind.

That life I didn't screw up. How could I? It was the karmic equivalent of the short bus. So I rolled my dice, advanced a few squares, climbed a ladder, got right back in the game, and found out that hearts could be broken physically as well as emotionally.

I made one too many comments about Kevin's weight. I loved Kevin, really did, but as we ate a celebration breakfast near the beach on a foggy June morning, a surfer dude practiced jumps on his skateboard in the café parking lot. The surfer's shirt was wadded in the back pocket of his low-slung yellow board shorts, and as he whizzed by on hissing wheels I was mesmerized by the shoulder blades that stuck out like twin shark fins. He had sleepy stoner eyes that concentrated on the curb before him as he attempted again and again to do the same trick with varying results. The surfer was beautiful and tight and lithe and I wanted to taste his sun-kissed skin. I thought about snuffling inside those board shorts to root for his balls like truffles, ripe and funky and smelling strongly of earth. Oink. I frowned for the surfer when he stumbled and grinned at his triumphs as I tuned out Kevin's big news, Kevin's voice, Kevin.

I could have been more discreet. I never should have let Kevin catch me eyeing his thick belly and sighing. I actually encouraged an eating disorder that fucked up Kevin's heart; he dropped dead in the gym while trying to sculpt a body that was impossible with his DNA. Pig that I was, even I realized that I deserved to slide down a chute -- out of the major leagues, down to the farm team -- for that one.

Know what they call a bull that mounts another bull? Lunchmeat.

Know what they call a queer caught walking alone to his car at 1 AM after leaving his boyfriend's bed? Dead meat. If you're laughing, stop me. I heard enough testosterone-laced hysterical laughter as that high school football team used my body for a piñata.

The sad part was that I thought I finally got it right. My lover Kaseem was great, but I had that pig itch to go to a club and find someone new. Someone disposable. A fuck toy. What I did instead was go to Kaseem's place and spend the evening rediscovering his body. We kissed until the inside of his mouth tasted like mine. With my tongue, I left a saliva slick from his brown nipples to his tight-drawn mahogany balls. Teaching him snail-paced tantric sex, I wrapped my body around his and kept him hard until he muttered pleas for release. When his pure white spunk splattered on his mocha stomach, for once he invited me inside rather than making me ask.

He seemed happy in his dreams as I carefully got out of his bed to get dressed. It was another thing to love about him, that it was okay to go home to my own bed in the middle of the night. No pouting, no hurt feelings, no scenes. From the way he sprawled across his mattress when I gave his forehead a goodbye kiss, I decided he preferred to sleep alone too.

The streets were quiet that time of night, so I heard the prowling car long before I saw it. Dumb-ass me, I stood in the muggy night patiently waiting to cross the street to where my car was parked. When the van slowed, a boy in a scarlet jersey leaned out the passenger window. He didn't have murder in his eyes at first but then rage contorted his baby-fat face and there was a great bellow of homophobic fury from the back seat, and suddenly there were boys around me, boys with bats, boys armed with hate, boys with death masks on their young faces.

Kaseem mourned me as the great love of his life and never allowed himself to feel that way about another man again, which was a goddamn waste of a human heart. For leaving him wracked with terrible guilt over not begging me to stay the night, I got to move ahead three spaces and climb a ladder to a whole new level of enlightenment . . . as a girl.

A gay guy in a female body. Should have been a natural, right? I could date guys, hold hands with them, kiss them in public, marry one, screw as many as I could get my hands on -- a free ride all the way. It was hell. Gays didn't want anything to do with me and I found out I wasn't turned on by straight men.

Out of desperation I hung out at one of those fucked-up religious brainwashing centers for queers that hated themselves so much they wanted to go into denial and pretend to be straight. Oh yeah, that was healthy. It said something about the level of quackery involved when the patients came out of "treatment" more fucked up than they went in.

John-John (NOT Johnny) had deep brown eyes mired with self-loathing and the madness of the converted. Yet he also had a generous mouth that I burned to coax into unleashed kisses, a long, lean body, and a great ass. Under his white shirt I saw his big, dark nipples and wondered if I pinched them hard enough, would he bite those full lips to hold back a yelp?

We sat in the basement of a church center where the "therapist's" beady eyes monitored our behavior. I got the stink eye from the holy roller as I relaxed my thigh so that it rubbed against John-John's. Wasn't the idea that John-John was supposed to be gripped by religious fervor and jump my bones for Jesus? Or maybe the chaperone was there to make us confuse awkwardness for sexual tension. Anyway, I kind of blew my cover when I confided to my bitter, wound-tighter-than-an-over-bred-Pomeranian, bible-groping date that I'd be okay with using a strap-on to do him if he needed his sweet ass drilled. Got myself dropped faster than E on a Friday night. No forgiveness for this sinner.

I never did catch on to the girl thing. Once I was in the bathroom in the mall sneaking a smoke when some girl asked me where I bought my wicked cool motorcycle boots. I didn't know her, so I sort of freaked out that women talked to strangers in the bathroom, but I thought, "Women talk, men use glory holes, and on the cosmic scale of things, isn't sucking cock a hell of a lot more intimate than talking?" Then I decided I was thinking way too much like a chick. Hell no, cock sucking wasn't intimate, not with a stranger. Not if done right.

I had no business being in a woman's body. The secret handshake for feminine behavior was elusive and the physical wiring didn't match up with the true me trapped inside. I missed my dick.

There was probably a lesson to learn about myself that cycle, but what I found out instead was that the straight guys I let into my pants couldn't screw to save their lives. After awhile I was frustrated enough to go kick ass and take names, but unlike the uptight righteous sisters around me, I didn't choose evolution in high school science texts as my whipping boy. To be truthful, I had mixed feelings about that. On one hand, it seemed ludicrous that any parent would choose to keep their kid stupid and deny them the benefits of scientific thought. On the other hand, if the parents wanted to insure that Junior Bible-Thumper was only fit for a job gutting chickens at the local factory, more power to them. Leave the high-paying fields of medicine, science, and engineering to the children of the open-minded.

Sex education was what they needed in the schools, and I didn't mean that cruelly uninformative "don't even think of sex" bullshit. Really -- in what war was complete ignorance considered the strongest defense? I wanted to give people truly useful information, like "How to Achieve Orgasm 101" for chicks and for guys, "How to Service Your Woman Properly -- The Remedial Course, Because God Knows, Guys, She Needs It Bad. Seriously, Man, Look at Your Woman! She's Got That Scary Carry Nation Glint in Her Eye, She Has an Axe to Grind, and She's Coming after Your Favorite Secret Vice, Swinging! Better Get That Mamacita Well and Truly Fucked Before She Does a Bobbit on Your Package." That title probably wouldn't fit in the course catalog though.

Ironic how I ended my years in that life hanging out in women's bathrooms trying to strike up conversations with girls. No, nothing perverted, although I did get arrested a few times. I approached girls alone and in groups, and I gave them condoms and showed them how to use them properly. I told them, "I don't care if you're in love, you're both virgins, he worked on a nuclear submarine so he's sterile, you jump up and down afterwards, you're proving that you love him, whatever, if he's hard and wants it, you have the power in your hands at that moment, so for that moment, love yourself enough to slip a rubber on him."

I must have done something right that go-around, even though I was roundly vilified as the village slut, because the next lifetime my move across the game board put me at the base of a long ladder to climb. I wasn't wearing panties, so if you were on the rows below me you probably got a good peek under my skirt. Like it shaved, daddy?

Some would call my next incarnation a huge leap forward. Sex karma probably had high hopes for me. Lame duck President. Talk about a big, swinging dick! Talk softly and all that shit. I had the most powerful penis on the face of the earth and everyone wanted a taste of it.

A broad-shouldered man wearing a blue suit and sunglasses gave me Secret Servicing in the back of my limo while he listened distractedly to radio chatter on his earpiece. I stared out darkened windows as my motorcade glided through the removed world, turning back to the ray-banned sphinx sucking my cock just long enough to watch my spunk splatter on his square, chiseled chin. My First Beard and her assistant muttered disdain.

All the fucking power in the world, but I had no will to wield it. In my defense, I had power, but it had me. Problem was, I got caught up in making backroom deals that left me with a jones for more power, so I kept putting off my meaningful statement. I had four years, right? With nothing to lose and everything to gain, I made the classic mistake of grasping for more power while neglecting to work for the greater good.

I became a preta -- a hungry ghost with a small neck that made it impossible to swallow enough to fill my greedy belly. Nothing satisfied my unending gluttony.

Then I only had two years. I could feel that meaty power slipping from my grasp as my Vice President began his run for my job, so I eased up on clean air standards for my campaign contributors, but I couldn't be bothered to give a junkie a clean needle.

Then I only had a year left. My power steadily drained and I got desperate. I rounded up billionaires I thought were my buddies and talked them into building a Presidential Library to glorify my name. We blew a couple million on interactive displays about how government supposedly worked for the individual, but I wouldn't force schools to teach a kid how her body worked from the waist down. Banks of high speed internet lines were run to kiosks that scholars never used but I couldn't spare a telephone line for a crisis center that could comfort a suicidal teenager with a crush on the captain of his basketball team.

I truly intended to leave a legacy, but then it was already the swearing-in ceremony for the next big swinging dick, and I was out, out of power, out of friends, out of a chance to make a difference.

How bad did I fuck up? For betraying the hopes of millions, breaking trust in my "Personal Contract with America," and for squandering their future to get my power fix, I took the long slide of shame down to Square One.

I came back as a condom. Karma, I realized, threw up its hands over me.

Positive thought: "Cool, a condom. I'll be wrapped tight around a hard cock. Nice." In my wildest dreams as I waited in my foil pouch I was the whisper-thin, spit-slicked trios of a ménage a trios that included me, a cock and a hole. Hot. But no. I got slipped into the wallet of a teenage boy named Daniel. Over the years, my silhouette rubbed a perfect O into the leather. When my foil wrapper sprung a slow leak two years later, slathering his driver's license with impotent spermicide, he didn't notice. Then it was the night of the Senior Prom and there we were: Daniel's cock, me, and some girl, in the back seat of his Mom's minivan.

I winced at the conversation. It was too damn familiar.

"I've been saving myself." She wanted love in exchange for her virginity; he wanted to rut.

"Of course I love you," Daniel lied. (Was I ever that calloused just to get laid? Oh yeah.)

She screwed up her courage. "You better use a condom." At least someone got the message.

"I have one." Groping for his wallet, he fought back the rush of jizz that threatened to coat the inside of his boxers. He'd asked her out because he figured she'd be easy, and she was, because she was desperate for someone to treat her as if she were special. Daniel only noticed her because her tits were jiggly and her blouse popped open to show those soft swells and her chill-hardened nipples when she leaned over to scoop ice cream into a cone at her work. Oink.

The girl emitted that sharp girl-sweat smell, eau de chocolate syrup, and a little of her own scent as she reclined on the floorboards, squished between the first and second row seats, a blue crayon grinding into her buttock. She put her knees up and spread her thighs as she waited for magic, intimacy, and romance. Daniel fumbled as he ripped the foil away and pulled me out, forgetting the human attached to the pussy in his need to score.

I turned to dust in his hands, like a vampire in sunlight. My spirit floated upward, like climbing a ladder, and I hoped that the next time around I wouldn't blow my karmic wad too soon. Then I saw the light. Didn't know how I got it right finally, maybe a sum of the parts thing, but I achieved total enlightenment. Nirvana was mine; I was free from samsara -- the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

As for Daniel, that lying sack of shit, he told the girl that he had the condom on, kneeled between her pearly-white fleshy thighs, and fucked her anyway. Three strokes: one to change her body forever, another to teach her how lonely sex with another human could be, the last to break her heart.

Daniel, you slimy bastard. A word of advice: Watch out for salt.

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