Yes: a fascination from the start. An unconscious childhood yearning. I didn’t want to be a man in uniform: I wanted to do a man in uniform.

The Bodhisattva recollects.

Yes: the innumerable incalculable lives lived by the partially enlightened One in his present existence. Each and all of me. The fat kid in the schoolyard at recess, for instance: that’s me: staring at the boy I loved. I can’t help myself: I go up to him and try to kiss him. He sees it coming and runs away – horrified. I am bewildered. And some twenty years later the thin and kind of attractive young man in the law-school library: that’s me too: pretending to read but staring at the man I loved. After travelling an immense distance of personal transformation but without going anywhere. Bewildered still.

And now.

Practising law. Living that life: adorned with those ornament of earthy success.

But yet.

Unconnected. Disinterested. Detached. Languishing: with neither a compelling reason for going on nor a compelling reason for not going on it seems.

And lonely.

Yes: lonely in a kind of suspended animation of loneliness kind of way. Or as one of those South American writers might say: entangled in a web of solitude.

And scared.

Yes: I am afraid: afraid of living the life unlived. Afraid with moments of actual terror in fact.

What a life.

Yes: I’m kicking thirty and I cruise around the mall at night sometimes and fantasize about the young guys working in the shops. It’s pathetic. I know it is. But I do it anyway: drawn there by their light. The one at the record store. The one in the sports shop. And especially the one at the book store. Yet it’s not so much a sexual yearning for them as a kind of longing envy of them: they look so alive and I feel so dead. Still I would drop to my knees for any one of them. Like I’m ever going to get the chance. No: that parade has definitely passed me by I think. I’ll probably never do it now. Oh well. I can always console myself with Pynchon’s dictum that the real and only fucking is done on paper anyway.

But it’s not as if you tried.

No: I didn’t try. And I wanted it too. And not like I want it now: with a dull throbbing longing. No: I wanted it with an aching burning consuming desire. Yet I never tried. Never went hunting for it. Don’t know why. It was an aspect of the homosexual psyche perhaps: avoidance. As counterdistinct to the more notorious aspect of the homosexual psyche maybe: over-indulgence. Who knows? The long and the short of it is that I didn’t try.

But yet you had your chances.

Two chances. First, the guy in the music lounge at university: a platinum blond with long legs. A real specimen of the male persuasion. And attracted to me amazingly. I’d feel his eyes on me: all over me: making me feel warm all over. It was nice. But when he made his move I didn’t respond. He nodded to me when we passed each other in the hall and I didn’t nod back: I pretended not to notice. Like the chickenshit fool I was (and am). And I never went back to the music lounge either. Fuck.

And then the guy in the shiny black truck.

Yes: during the stint of unemployment. I was existing in a phantasmagorical isolation then: wandering around after dark: the magical clear dark of night: walking and thinking: obsessed with speculative problems and always semi-expecting to run into three midnight hags at any moment: and looking forward to it. But instead of the hags I ran into the guy in the shiny black truck: wearing sunglasses. A nice looking guy: who asked me if I was the one he had been chatting with on the Net. I did not clue in: I said No. If I had clued in I would have said Yes. I know I would have: because I went back to the same spot night after night at the same time: looking for that shiny black truck. Anonymous sex in a shiny black truck: I would have done it.