I’m going way back here. Back before the last good kiss, the last blissful fuck, back before the years and years of booze and beds, bars and ladies’ room toilet stalls, furtive foyer fucks and breakfast blowjobs, making the beast with two backs on beaches at dawn, in deserted churches in Sicily, and on a slow boat to China, those eternal loves that can’t even be remembered. Back before dry-humping and slow, timid tit-fondling. Way back to where it all began.

I vaguely remember the priest in that confessional. We were all anxious of what the proper expression for masturbation was when the time that “Bless me, father, for I have sinned” rolled around. “Self-abuse,” we were advised by those who had been through this malarkey before us.

“Bless me, father, for I have sinned.” My voice must have been trembling like a lamb on the altar. I’ve always loved the title of Herbert Huncke’s little book Guilty of Everything. That was me, that was all of us, or so we felt. “I’ve committed self-abuse.”