He didn’t lie about it to his mother — except about using her credit card which she discovered on her own anyhow when he finally maxed it out prompting her to read the whole statement for once instead of just checking the minimum monthly payment due. But she knew he was deep into porn — maybe not how deep — and although she shook her head and clucked her tongue whenever she caught him at it she didn’t seem to care. She treated his growing addiction to pornography like it was little worse than a waste of time better spent doing his homework or helping out with housework. So it wasn’t his mother he lied to or anyone else either since no one else knew or ever asked him about it. He lied to himself.
And it wasn’t watching porn that he lied about or even his constant jerking off. He lied about the way they made him feel, both the porn and jerking off. He told himself it was normal, everyone did it — especially guys. Well, maybe only guys. And it was no big deal anyhow. In fact it was boring, he told himself. Even the quintuple-X hard-core multiple black-on-white fisting double anals. Porn was boring; beating his meat was boring. The same-old same-old. He just did it because it felt better and less boring than not doing it, he told himself, like chewing gum or wearing sneakers instead of shoes. That’s what he told himself.
But he knew better. He did it because he couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t stop himself because watching pornography and masturbating were the only times he felt real. The rest of the time he felt as if he were his own ghost — not quite dead but not alive either. A dust bunny shaped like a person. So for years whenever he was alone with a computer he watched pornography and masturbated. Until the night he let himself get lured by brandi18 into a house in the suburbs and got busted by her and her father.
He doesn’t know why but everything changed that night. Suddenly for the first time in his life he was visible to himself. The police who took him down in Brandi’s yard when they interrogated him at the station later opened a laptop on the table in front of him and put in a disc and showed him a video of him and Brandi’s father in the kitchen that Brandi’s father had taped with a hidden camera and the second he saw himself on the screen he felt like all his atoms were instantly reconfigured. It was as if he had never seen himself in a mirror before. It was like being touched by an angel. He had an actual body and it was not just his body, something he merely possessed, it was him! And who was he? He was the digitalized body of an about-to-be convicted sexual offender, a grown young man with a six-pack of beer, a porn movie, condoms, and a tube of lubricant trying to hook up in the suburbs with a fourteen-year-old Internet girl — and because now it was on a computer screen for everyone in the world to see, it was reality.
From that moment on he no longer felt even the slightest desire to watch pornography or jerk off because now he was a convicted sex offender, which provided him with the same feelings he used to get from sitting in front of his computer screen with his hand wrapped around his cock watching one or two or more naked men with huge erect penises pushing their penises into the orifices of one or two or more naked young women. Three holes and two hands per woman. He no longer had to lie to himself. He no longer had to endure mind-numbing boredom in order to feel partially alive. He had been made human — as wholly human as he could then imagine anyhow. And those women — those three holes and two hands each — for the first time the women on the screen were almost human too and not just two-dimensional pictures. They were as real as he was!
There’s a difference between shame and guilt. And the Kid has begun to realize that he’s not ashamed of having spent most of his life so far watching pornography and using it to give himself orgasms: he’s not a bad person, he knows that much, and being a bad person is what makes you feel shame. No, he’s guilty instead because that’s what you are if you do a bad thing. And if the women being abused on camera by facial cum shots, gangbangs, and double anals and so forth as if they were just images designed to make his dick hard enough to whack off with were in fact as almost-real as he, then paying money to watch them being abused and degraded was a bad thing. It was like paying money to watch someone beat a dog.
Ever since the night he got arrested and then was convicted and sent to jail and the months he’s spent as a convicted sex offender he’s thought and acted like a man who was ashamed, a bad man who deserved to be cast out of the city. For reasons he will never fully understand — although he knows its origins go back to his childhood way before Iggy came into his life — he got sluiced into being a nearly full-time consumer of Internet pornography and because he didn’t realize it was a bad thing that he was doing and should therefore feel guilty for doing it which would have made him stop doing it, he felt ashamed instead: a bad person doing his typically bad things instead of a good person doing one bad thing. Or maybe two.
Remembering the night he was arrested for soliciting sex from a minor via the Internet and how as a result he went from feeling like a dust bunny to a flattened image of a man seen on a computer screen, the Kid wonders for the first time if there is a way for him to give that two-dimensional image on the screen a third dimension and become wholly alive.
Maybe if he just acts like he has a third dimension whether he’s seen by others or not — whether he’s seen by practically everyone in the world on YouTube and is monitored by his parole officer on a computer screen with beeps from the GPS on his ankle or instead is invisible to the world, living underground in darkness beneath the Causeway and well out of sight from passersby on the highway — if he acts like a three-dimensional man then maybe, just maybe he’ll turn into one. Isn’t that how everyone does it? By acting?
But he’s not sure how to behave as if he were already a man with three dimensions. It has to be done mentally from the inside out, he knows that much: it can’t be just an act put on for the cameras and the Internet as if life were a gigantic reality TV show that you can download onto your computer or your phone. That would only make things worse. No, it has to start way inside you down in the black hole of antimatter that sits at the exact center of who you are. Diddle that spot even a little and the rest will follow and out of nothingness will come heat, light, and a strong wind blowing across the universe, and they will combine and bring into existence fire, earth, and water, and out of fire, earth, and water will emerge flesh, bone, and blood wrapped in his skin.
So the Kid decides to believe the Professor’s story. All of it. That’s the first move. The rest will follow.
He decides to invest some of the Professor’s money in a new generator for the Greek and go into the battery-charging business with him. That’s the second move. If he’s stingy with it he can maybe make the Professor’s money last a year or possibly more, at least long enough for him to luck onto a job as a busboy again at one of the hotels out along the Barriers. The way he lives he could get by just on panhandling plus his cut of the Greek’s battery-charging fees but a real job will help establish him as a man in the world beyond the Causeway.