WTF! Godot, a Sex Addict?

The man in the gray trench coat showed up around a quarter to eight. He walked onto the courtyard from the church parking lot, neither smiling nor frowning, and he strode with flattened affect through the clouds of cigarette smoke. And he didn't look at anyone, or shake anyone's hand, or hug anyone.
    The Friday night meeting was held at the Methodist church on Route 7. Inside the meeting room most of the regulars were already seated, or standing and smiling and shaking hands left and right. The coffee was already made, and someone had brought a tray of sugar cookies, which was always nice.
    But when the man in the gray trench coat walked into the room, the mood changed. Sure, everyone turned to look at him, to welcome the stranger, but the bonhomie leveled out and the chuckles died down. They watched the man (who was neither tall nor short, fat nor thin, and whose hair was a plain mousy color, neither short nor long) find a seat near the back of the room.
    The smokers came in from the courtyard and found their seats. The chairperson announced that it was time to begin. All heads dipped, and the Serenity Prayer was intoned by the forty-odd men and women in the meeting.
    After the prayer the chairperson said, “Hi, still Magda, still a gratefully recovering sexual compulsive.”
    “Hi, Magda,” said the room. Someone coughed.
    “I'd like to welcome everyone to the Friday night meeting. Do we have any newcomers who'd like to introduce themselves?”
    Everyone waited, and on this night they waited several moments longer than they normally would because this group's membership was fairly regular. Though most were too polite to stare openly at the man in the gray trench coat, almost everyone's body language seemed to lean collectively in his direction, like a field of rustling wheat, as though the presence of the man in the gray trench coat had stirred a troubling wind.
    The man in the gray trench coat placed his white styrofoam coffee cup on the floor, and he stood.
    “Yes, hello, my name is Godot, and I'm a sex addict,” he said.
    “Hi, Godot!” said the room loudly and brightly, and everyone felt more comfortable.
    “Where are you visiting from?” asked a man from the front of the room.
    “Oh, nowhere special,” said the man in the gray trench coat.
    Murmurs in the small crowd. Creaks and squeaks of metal folding chairs.
    “Welcome,” said the chairperson from the front, and everyone turned to look at her. She was smiling, Magda was, which was unusual in itself because Magda almost never smiled. Then the group concern seemed to shift to Magda to see if she was about to start crying. But her smile just faded slowly and she addressed the group.
    “Since our new friend Godot is himself a sexual compulsive,” she said, “we may now begin the discussion portion of this, what is a closed meeting.” Magda was from somewhere in Eastern Europe. About 45 years old, tall and frighteningly beautiful, Magda had worked for many years in the adult film industry.
    “Tonight's topic,” she said, “is concerned with anticipation, and I will not further define the term but will allow the group to begin the discussion.” She looked around the room, peering over her granny glasses. “Melvin? I see you lurking in the rear. Please begin with some worthy comment, as you always do.”
    Melvin stood. He was a large and muscular black man with a clean-shaven head. Whenever Magda chaired the meeting she'd always call on Melvin to get the ball rolling, because everyone was afraid to digress from the topic, after Melvin had shared. Melvin had been in prison for several years for reasons he would not discuss.
    “Thanks Magda,” he said. “Hi, I'm Melvin, sex addict, and I used to be a danger to myself and others due to my uncontrollable nature.”
    “Hi, Melvin,” murmured the room in ominous tones.
    “Anticipation,” said Melvin. “Makes me think of the ketchup ad. Anybody here remember that shit? Kid bangin on the bottom of the ketchup bottle, waitin for the stuff to come out all red and delicious. Which was kind of how my life was, except it was me poundin on the damn ketchup bottle, and you can bet your sweet ass I was hittin it harder than on TV. To the detriment of myself and others. But now, thanks to the grace of God and the fellowship of this program, I don't have to wait. The waiting is done. Over. God is in my life now, and he don't make me wait. Cause he's there, like, for the duration. God is a lifer in my life now. I want to pass to that Mr. Godot, there, in the gray trench coat.”
    Melvin sat back down, glowering dangerously at the group as he did, and everyone in the room was practically forced to turn in their seats and stare at the newcomer.
    The man in the gray trench coat, though he seemed to hesitate, once again placed his coffee cup on the floor and stood.
    “Yes, hello, my name is Godot and I'm a sex addict.”
    “Hi, Godot,” said the room.
    “Hello, everybody. And thanks for this opportunity to share, because the topic—anticipation—well, that hits the nail right on the head. Now, I've been celibate for over three years in this program, so it hasn't been that long. I well remember anticipation, because I experienced it myself ... and I'm afraid my greater sin was that I inflicted it on others. Like all the time. Constantly. You see, I used to be what you might call an emotional gigolo, and I would keep people waiting all over town.”
    The group listened eagerly to what the newcomer had to say, and seemed to wait especially to hear what “emotional gigolo” might mean.
    “But it was my own sexual compulsion, I must hasten to add, which led to it. No matter what I did to others, or with others, or how long I made them wait. And it's the disease talking inside me still, after three long and difficult years, that makes me say: my clients got what they paid for. They got their money's worth.”
    The man in the gray trench coat appeared about to sit down and continue sipping his coffee, but as he smiled and looked around the room at the others, he saw from their frustrated questioning faces that he would not be able to sit down, just yet. He kept standing there.
    “Perhaps I can explain myself a little better,” he said. “You see, a big part of what I did was this: I would schedule an appointment or rendezvous, and then I would take a very long time to show up. If at all. If I ever showed up. My sponsor tells me it's a control issue, like so much else. I was getting off on the sexual aspect of it, the anticipation if you will, but mostly it was the satisfaction of making them wait. Anticipation ... one of the most powerful drugs of them all.”
    Again the newcomer stooped to sit, but about 15 people in the room cleared their throats in stern warning. Hand gestures—eye-scratchings, fingers slicing across jugulars—flitted threateningly about the room. Magda the chairperson watched the newcomer impassively.
    The man in the gray trench coat stood up straight.
    “Forgive me,” he said, with a sick smile on his lips which were neither thick nor thin. “I'm a stranger here, and you probably don't have any idea of what I'm talking about. All right, my sponsor says I have to share, so I'll share. As I said, I'd make certain appointments, meetings at such and such a time and so forth, and I would show up very late, and more and more I wouldn't show up at all. Which really isn't unusual, let alone a sexual compulsion. However, for me it became one, because I discovered that much pleasure, much sexual pleasure, was there for the taking, if you will.
    “In my family storage facility on the edge of town I discovered my mother's wedding dress, in a blue box. After clearing away the mothballs and tissue paper I found that it actually fit me.”
    Many of the members of the group began to mutter amongst themselves, and several people got up for coffee. Two women left the meeting altogether.
    “While my clients waited,” the newcomer continued, “I wore my mother's wedding dress and imagined that I was my mother, and instead of clients waiting, it was my fiancé waiting at the altar. The idea being, that if my mother had kept my father waiting, had jilted him, had stood him up, in other words, it would then negate my own existence. And the idea of my own nonexistence, while wearing my mother's wedding dress, with people all over town eagerly awaiting my services which, of course, they would never get ... well, surely I don't have to tell anyone in this room about fetishism and masturbation.”
    Now the room, collectively, was as silent as a morgue. Several members stood frozen in place at the coffee machine; one woman had half a sugar cookie jutting from between her lips.
    Luckily Magda had nerves of steel, or so everyone agreed, which was why they'd made her chairperson. She smiled and said: “No, I agree that such details will not be necessary. Thank you for sharing.”

The meeting continued, and soon people forgot all about what the newcomer had shared. Beating off while wearing your mother's wedding dress? Well, hell, if we weren't sick we wouldn't be here! was the feeling. And he looked like a fairly nice guy, not dangerous or anything. After all, the lady over there on the other side of the room had a nine-year affair with her Great Dane, and the only reason she was even in the program was because the dog died. She was nice, though kind of quiet. And the guy who wasn't here tonight, and his thing for musk melons. He'd talk about it all romantic, like the melons had feelings and everything, and you could tell he still dreamed of the good old days.
    So some of the regulars, the inner circle of the Live and Let Live group, invited the newcomer, this man in the gray trench coat who called himself Godot, out to a local restaurant for a bite to eat, some pie and coffee, some after-the-meeting fellowship. And the newcomer agreed, and said he would meet them there.

“This motherfucker ain't gonna show up,” said Melvin, sipping his coffee and glowering dangerously.
    “Oh, yes he will,” said Mary Margaret, a former nun and member of the group. “I have a special feeling he will.”
    “Who wants pie?” asked Glynnis, who always asked that.
    “I'm with Melvin,” said Granger, a short twitchy man with a buzzcut who claimed to have been a singles-bar stud, though nobody believed that story. “I doubt we'll ever see Goodhue or Play-Doe or whatever the guy's name is.”
    “Godot,” said Melvin. “I don't never forget a motherfucker's name.”
    “They have boysenberry!” cried Glynnis.
    “Would it be silly of me to say that I have faith that Mr. Godot will indeed show up?” said Mary Margaret. “Faith that is, perhaps, a gift from my Higher Power?”
    The waiter appeared and stood nervously by their table, which was in the back of the Egg Palace away from all the other customers. The waiter was a thin and squirrely young man from New Jersey with brown rotten teeth, and he was holding two coffee pots in his hands.
    “Here's the thing,” said the waiter. “I think I made a mistake and gave you folks decaf.”
    Melvin stared into his coffee cup, gripped his fists, and closed his eyes.
    “No you didn't,” he said. “No you didn't.”
    “Yeah, well, I'm sorry,” said the waiter. “The new Mexican woman we got working back there made decaf and put it in the wrong—”
    Melvin opened his eyes and stared at the young waiter, who stopped talking.
    “Cut out your lying bullshit,” he said. He raised a thick blunt finger and aimed it at the waiter's face. “If you ever give me decaf again, when I didn't order decaf and never will order decaf, then I'll cut your motherfucking head off. You got that?”
    The waiter nodded, showed his brown teeth, set down the coffee pots and scuttled away.
    “I mean,” said Mary Margaret, “it can only be a good thing to extend faith to an imperfect individual, right? Even though that individual can never be God, or anything close.”
    “Unless God wears his mother's wedding dress and spanks the monkey,” said Granger. “No offense, Sister.”
    “Please don't call me Sister, I've asked you not to do that, and if you don't give offense you don't have to ask forgiveness for offending.”
    “And peach crumble!” said Glynnis, making a warbling sound with her laminated menu. “Peach at this time of year? Now there's a miracle.”
    Melvin poured the tepid contents of his cup on the floor, and refilled his cup with high-test.
    “Besides,” said Melvin. “Motherfucker going around like that in his overcoat, all covert and shit. Man's got to be a cop.”
    “Or just a tourist,” said Granger. “You'll see them from time to time at meetings. And if they want to get into a closed meeting, like tonight, then they show up with some whack-job sex story, like wearing your mother's wedding dress and dreaming your parents never met, beating off to your own nonexistence.”
    “And it looks like they've changed the recipe for the blueberry pie!” said Glynnis.
    “A fed, more likely,” said Melvin. “Hell, why should I be paranoid about Godot? I ain't got no warrants, my parole's been over for near 20 years. Besides: cops ain't got the resources to be sending spies into meetings.” Melvin drank his coffee.
    “Nevertheless,” said Mary Margaret, “I say we should wait for him. After all, he's probably not from the area, he's probably driving around trying to find the intersection we told him, where you can't miss the Egg Palace.”
    “Maybe he went to change into Mommy's wedding dress,” said Granger.
    “Ooh, I know!” said Glynnis. “Coconut cream pie!”
    A moment later, their waiter skulked sheepishly to the table. Melvin just smirked and shook his head and stared off into the distance.
    “Excuse me,” said the waiter. “First of all, the coffee's on the house, the manager says. Sorry for the mix-up.”
    “Well you can just tell your manager we'd all like to line up and kiss his ass for the 37 cents worth of coffee,” said Melvin.
    “And there's something else,” said the waiter in a dark tone, and they all looked at him. “Some guy called, said he was supposed to meet you here, and he left a message for me to give to you.”
    Melvin, Mary Margaret, Glynnis and Granger all stared at him, waiting.
    “Guy said to tell you: I am not really Godot, but Godot's representative, and Godot apologizes for not being able to attend the meeting tonight,” said the waiter, eyes closed, rocking back on his heels like a school kid reciting the names of the Presidents.
    “Well how do you like that,” said Melvin. “Man was a damn imposter after all.” He looked at the waiter. “Is this pre-vert in the trench coat coming tonight?”
    The waiter seemed at a loss.
    “The man didn't say. In fact I couldn't tell, from what he said, if he was coming here or not, even though it sort of seemed like it, because he knew where to call and all.”
    “That's because we told him where to meet us,” said Mary Margaret.
    “Wait,” said Granger. “Did you tell him the Egg Palace or downtown, at Duck Soup? Cause I think I heard someone say Duck Soup.”
    “Waiter?” said Glynnis. “I would like one piece of coconut cream, and one piece of Boston cream. Wait. One coconut cream, and one peach crumble.” But the waiter wasn't listening. He was looking out the window at the rear parking lot, where a plain gray sedan had pulled in and was slowing as if to park, but it did not park, but continued past the available spaces. None of them could tell if the driver was looking at them through the restaurant window, watching them.
    “I guess all we can do is wait,” said Mary Margaret.
    “Which is the hardest part,” said Granger.


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