The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan suggested that there is a jouissance — an excessive pleasure — that compels us to continually seek to transgress the boundaries of our own enjoyment. A desire for sensations so intense they would push one to what Michel Foucault called “the point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or the extreme.” These childhood wallowings were the closest I’ve ever come to this. As I grew up I wondered: How far would I go? Would I journey to the point where I was at the border of my being? Was this what the pervert in me wanted? To destroy my self? Venture to the place where death infects life? I didn’t trust this creature, my blood, my DNA; I imagined God the Father, the sperm donor jerking off in a cubby into a little plastic cup with an orange lid, and myself as the son, played by Antonin Artaud, inveterate sinner, liar, thief, crucified on Golgotha “not as Christ but as Artaud… as complete atheist.” A body persecuted for erotic gluttony. “The obscene sexual erotic golosity of mankind, for which pain is a humus, the liquid from a fertile mucus, a serum worth sipping by one who has never on his own gained by being a man while knowing that he was becoming one.”

All of which to say is that somehow I wasn’t as surprised as I thought I might have been to find myself at a Super 8 motel near Highway 401, sucking off a guy in a grey suit playing a businessman while two HD camcorders filmed us. Nor was it a particularly novel or unexpected situation for an out-of-work, undereducated not-quite-actor. The Diderotian empty vessel. In fact, in some way it felt almost inevitable that I should find myself there, my knees on that beige nylon carpet, as if it were the unforeseen but predestined endgame of my childhood preoccupation with the body. I could have chalked up that blow job to my being broke. Or depressed. Or directionless. I imagine these excuses would’ve been more palatable for you. But they would have been excuses. The truth is I wanted to. I was alive, and I wanted to confirm it through feeling everything a living body could feel.

God only knows how you found out. To this day you’ve never leaked your source. Ana swore on her life it wasn’t her and I believe her, even though you and she had kept up a private correspondence over the years. My best guess was that I must’ve logged on to my email on your computer at some point and forgotten to log off; though that would have required a sinister amount of snooping on your part. But what you did next really goes down in the Monica Tannahill annals.