Commedia dell’Peccato

(Disclaimer: All names and identifying details in this narrative have been changed to protect privacy. Content Warning: This story contains crude language, references to abuse, drug usage, sexual scenarios, sexually explicit humor, and self-harm.)

So seemingly imbued with intent was Carlo’s fate that it made of him a born again Christian. I understand. It would provoke anyone into a search for meaning, likely to end at the divine. I myself succumb to the illusion that I contributed my part, that my character ought to have done something to avert that which was to come. Perhaps, in feeling this, I am too much like the girls he seduced: so compelled to hold and comfort Carlo the little boy that I granted and still grant too much to the man.

I could have intervened. Had I, my intervention should have taken the form of violence. I ought to have punched him. A rude awakening as perhaps the only means of helping someone I truly loved. Instead, I went, gently, silent. Unaware, his descent occurred without the comfort of my care.

Seventeen years after having met Carlo and perhaps ten since I stopped speaking to him, I learned that he had lost a testicle to cancer.

His genitals had a tendency of making demands upon my attention. I had seen them directly—a source of amusement more his than mine—when Carlo called out my name. “Hey! Hey!” I looked. His goofy, Pulcinella face was all-smiling while mine scrunched in puzzlement. He said nothing; just looked at me like that. My eyes panned down, searching, and there was his exposed scrotum.

“Why you lookin’ at my balls?” he asked me, laughing.

It wasn’t the only time. I remember him walking out of his bedroom completely naked, save for the condom upon his stiff member. I was brushing my teeth.

“Hi Carlo…” said I.

“So awkward,” said he and shook his head.

I agreed. It was awkward that he had chosen to walk out of his bedroom in the middle of sex to grab himself some water. Why would someone do that? Was he hoping to be seen in that moment of virile glory. By me?

Lascivious as he was, his lays were victims of charm and nothing more. He was actually somehow endearing despite his filth. Not to everyone, of course, but to a surprising number. Among them: the mother of his child.

Until she met Carlo, she had been a virgin. He slept with her at a party to prove he could. He told me of this on my first night in college while we wandered the campus and recounted the year that had separated us. Back then, I was still a vegetarian, and my response to his news was, “damn. The worst thing that happened to me all week was I think I accidentally ate some meat.”

He did witness the birth of his child, at least. He named me godfather, though in that informal way of contract between men who love one another. I never signed a document, though I’d still help the child today if he were in need. I still remember his name. I was present at the hospital that night too, keeping Carlo company as the mother of his son endured her contractions.

What Carlo did not tell me then was he had also impregnated another girl at the same time. The second girl, wisely, had an abortion. I learned of this later, after I had already cut ties. I thank the Author for giving the girl liberty and wisdom.

Unknowing these depths, I remained naive. I’d respond when called me into his room to smoke weed, whereupon he would look up and share porn of the most fringe nature. I saw a woman with two vaginas that way. I didn’t see the appeal, though so hyperbolic were his lusts that two a two-vagina woman might have been his great white whale. He was later curious to know my tastes. Who was my favorite pornstar? Drunk, I told him, whereupon he immediately looked her up to evaluate and, perhaps, enjoy.

Another exploit I recall was during the evening when an embarrassed girl left his bedroom. Carlo was sullen. I played video games with him into the night as he processed some sort of complex emotion. Eventually he told me that he had been “fudgesicled”. I didn’t know what this meant. He explained that the girl had accidentally shat on his penis during anal sex. I don’t know if the term was of his own invention or if it were general knowledge to which I was not privy.

Yes, he was a deviant, but don’t the children of pastors often carry the impulse to seek vengeance upon their fathers, both Earthly and Divine? His mother, too, did her part to embitter Carlo, sending him hand written letters elaborating the ways he had disappointed her. He kept them in a box in his closet. He sometimes read them to me.

The emotionally abusive parents gave rise to a fiend. Isn’t this just typical?

Could I fully enumerate the wounds of the boy, doing so would not warrant excusing the man. He had chosen to compensate for his profound hurt not merely by way of sexual gratification—I too have been guilty of this as had been the girls with whom he slept—but specifically by counting the sets of legs he had spread. Into his bed flowed women by the dozens. How he seduced so many, I know not. He was that charming. Yet though impressed, even then I recognized that his was really a strategy to spread pain.

I did not abandon Carlo out of a sense of Justice, though I imagine he might feel judged in the eyes of the public. Or before God. Or, most likely, in his own mind. I wonder if he believes it’s why he lost his testicle. An actual Lothario loses a testicle! Of course it’s a punishment. How well written. I myself get nervous when confronted with too apt of circumstance, as if indeed I am just a character in a play. Is such paranoia not unlike faith? But I don’t really believe Carlo has been visited by divine justice. I don’t believe Carlo deserved it—despite how such a narrative gives meaning to his misfortune. What’’s more, if I were convinced he pursued the sex simply for the genuine joy of it, like a joyful satyr, I would defend him.

No. Not Justice. I had a better reason.

The first words I ever heard Carlo say were: “I love you Árón Ó Maolagáin!” It was during an audition for a high school theater production. He was a senior then, and I, a junior, never before had anyone explicitly express appreciation of me. I was curious and thus made my way to ask the stranger how he knew of me. Apparently he had seen me perform improv earlier that semester and was impressed.

Carlo was an exceptionally beautiful boy with Italian features—dark hair and large, almond eyes. He had the lean hardness of a youthful athlete, being a football player in addition to a thespian—a bit of a classical ideal, though he wouldn’t know what I meant by that. He was more successful in the later pursuit and many were the classmates who saw him as one destined for greatness. I know I was among them. Watching him perform as Abbott in a rendition of “Who’s on First”, I felt that giddiness one gets in the presence of one blessed with a shiny oasis of a future.

He was going to be famous! An actor! What better thing could one be? It’s common to feel such things in towns wherefrom no successful people hail. Ours were not a passionate people, and we two were aliens among them. That’s why Carlo called out to me. He was good at finding his type.

After befriending Carlo, more of our classmates gathered around me. I also proved a good actor, and handsome too, though less athletic. People came to have that same feeling around me. I was receptive, and his specialness had rubbed off.

I remember eating at a Dennys the night after our stage rehearsal for The Crucible. I sat at the table among the leads though I was cast as Francis Nurse. All their characters projected, puffing out their chests, while I was frail, hunched and subdued. Still, I was welcomed. I remember laughing then, and a triumph over our adversaries so complete as to render all bitterness obviated. By then, I accepted Carlo as my older brother.

I did have a biological older brother, but our was a relationship devoid of brotherhood. He had visited base cruelty upon me since the day of my birth in a truly Freudian fashion, ever eager to hoard our mother’s attention. Some of the harm he inflicted could have had mortal consequences.

I recall when he trapped me under his weight in a plastic container while I suffocated, screaming that I could not breathe with my remaining air. Perhaps I was merely hyperventilating, panicking from the fear of suffocation. Shall I remember the experience differently, then?

There were other occasions like these, but mostly he’d rat tail me till I bled, punch me, spit in my mouth, and throw dog shit upon me. When our parents forced him to drive me to school, he would speed through our neighborhood at velocities that could kill while I would beg him to slow down.

My memories of my biological brother are almost all acts of violence either physical or psychological, though he taught me the thinness of their distinction. Our parents condoned this behavior as “normal”, as indeed it was in the sort of community in which we lived. What’s more, an ambient concern that I was a closeted homosexual tainted my complaints. There was no consensus of how to treat homosexuals in my household. They were seen as provocateurs—the authors of the impetus to visit harassment upon them.

Oh, the pleasures of being held within strong arms, shielded thus from the abuses mundane or extreme. Oh, the craving to rest within the garden of another’s care. I hesitate to admit it, but it’s true. Who does not wish to feel the safety of love?

Love.

“I love you Árón Ó Maolagáin!” What a lovely thing to say.

Carlo was undeniably gifted with the effortless charm and grace requisite of a successful actor, but unfortunately such are the requisite talents to attract diffident women. If I recall correctly, in the year he spent in college—when I was still trapped in our hometown—he had sex with over thirty women.

When I finally graduated and made my way to the same college, I stayed my first night sleeping on the couch of the house he and some friends were renting. That evening, one of his roommates hooked up with a drug addict who snuck the pills Carlo had been prescribed—painkillers, I think—and left. We were worried he had consumed enough to kill, and went searching the streets. Finding the man alive on the sidewalk, our concerns were allayed. Carlo then decided to make the journey worth while by visiting a girl who lived nearby. He took me with him, and I stayed in the living room petting her dog while the two of them fucked in her bedroom. Only a door and a year separated us.

Such were the days. I learned alcohol and drugs, but not yet sex, late bloomer that I was. My main hangup was that I refused to have sex with a woman I didn’t find absolutely enchanting. Unfortunately, most of the women around me were the types who would sleep with Carlo. I considered nothing less appealing.

Far, far too high, Carlo once had a panic attack and feared he needed to go to the hospital. “My heart…” he kept saying. “No guys… I think there’s something really wrong.” No one was sober enough to know what to do. I, however, sobered up. I made him lay down then and there on the couch. I got him water, made him a sandwich, and put a blanket over his shivering body. I told him he was okay, and asked if he’d like something to make him feel better. He said he wanted to watch ESPN, so I brought him his TV. I then stayed with him, holding his hand until he fell asleep.

“I know this might sound weird,” Carlo later told me while intoxicated on what I cannot remember, “but I wish I could find a girl like you. You know? Like you, but as a girl.”

I could tell he meant it, too. It’s among the most awkward but sweet things one man can say to another. Of course I harassed him about this. Unfortunately, I did not at all feel the same way, having grown increasingly disgusted by his vulgarity. He was lucky to have thus far avoided an STD. I told him that if I were a woman, I wouldn’t let him near me. But this was only half true. I don’t know anything, really, about how I’d be were I a woman.

We pushed ourselves as far as we could. I didn’t yet know consequences. I broke my mind. One evening, burdened with the mounting turmoil of youthful existentialism, I attempted to drink myself to death, or rather it’s more appropriate to say I decided to drink myself out into unconsciousness, without regard to whether I lived or died. I was taken to a hospital. I would later learn that, in my blacked-out state, I was violent. I regained consciousness just as the nurses put a catheter in, and I was confused as to why they seemed so cold. They told me I was lucky to be alive.

I regained consciousness again in the drunk tank, in the middle of speaking to some councilor. It just turned on, and it was as if I had been sitting there with her for some time. They wouldn’t let me leave for three days—it took me that long to show as completely sober on a breathalyzer. None of my friends had the time to pick me up from the middle-of-nowhere facility where I was detained. Carlo organized to have one of his regular girls retrieve me, and that’s how I got home.

I then decided I needed to make a change. I incurred Carlo’s disappointed by transferring schools, moving to a different city and leaving him behind. When he would visit, he had a new harshness about him. He, with his vastness of sexual experiences, found me naive and laughable. The big brother/little brother dynamic had worn thin. I no longer felt in awe. I felt disrespected. I stopped talking to him.

On recollection, I think that what caused us to drift apart was the dawning realization that I was not his audience. If I had been, the show was over like a loss of faith. We were aged to the point when if anything at all special could have happened, it already would have.

Did he perceive disappointment in my face?

Sometimes I feel guilt. I worry I missed a chance to change both his life and my own. I should have punched him. For me. For all the women he left feeling used. But even for him. Who knows how having the man he considered his little brother slap him good and hard across the cheek might have awakened him earlier. But I didn’t.

He couldn’t have fully grasped that I was immersed in my own story, that my origins anticipate a character who sees abandoning a relationship more practical than amending. I have my excuses, too.

Years went by without a word before I received a text message from Carlo. I had moved even further away by then, to the heart of NYC really-real-reality. I had seldom thought of him until I read the message. It was an apology for all he had done to lose my friendship. I told him I appreciated it, and I meant that, but I still did not wish to talk to him.

The following year, however, I had decided I was ready to reconnect. That’s when I learned that Carlo no longer saw his child. His son’s mother refused to allow him into their lives. His alcoholism had progressed before he reached out to me to the point where he was driving drunk. He had an accident. He spent some time in jail. Not long after, he found a lump on his testicle.

We joked about it, as we had in the past. I made some comment about him being like a pirate, though with a rubber testicle instead of a peg leg. He lamented that had he known how uncomfortable the rubber testicle would be, he would have elected to leave his scrotum less occupied.

He was working in our hometown as a councilor for at risk children. A kid with autism gave him a concussion from a hearty headbutt. Most likely never to see his son again. Not likely to father another. Rubber testicle rubbing painfully inside. Discussion of the stage seemed irrelevant in the extreme.

“Blessed” became a mainstay of his vocabulary as he turned to Christ and weight lifting. He sent me a picture of himself—a weary Hercules instead of the lean Mediterranean youth I knew. I told him “you look like the man Joe Rogan is trying to be” and he laughed.

I sometimes imagine, still, that Carlo will go to Hollywood and bamboozle us all. He remains my favorite actor. There never another whose presence upon the stage moved me so. I’m still moved when I envision his return to the place I feel belongs. I know it wont happen. His life has only the shine of a narrative, and, I fear, it has shined out.

No more punishment, I pray, if neither shall there be promise.