My story

A Saturday afternoon, a Village Voice, and a pay phone: the mechanics of my first paid sexual encounter.

My origin story, retold — how lap dances, fear of rejection, and an endless appetite for contact sent me down a path I’m still mapping.

How I got from there to here, in fewer than a thousand words.

Liza asked me about cheating. I wince at the word — it reduces something sprawling and tragic to a single dimension of betrayal, when what I did was something far worse: I led a secret, double life.

Liza asks the question this blog can never fully answer: how do you get from twelve years of secret cheating to a healthy open marriage with the same woman?

It’s not the fear of losing her. It’s the fear of being rendered worthless by whoever I lose her to.

The paradox of paying for what you most want: it delivers the act but destroys the meaning.

L tells me I’m not very sympathetic, and I want to understand why — even as I suspect the answer is staring back at me from every post on this blog.

I have known monsters. They’re good, decent, kind, loving people.

Not all of what I write is true. But all of it is real.