Wiretap - Lust (Pt.3 of Seven Deadly Sins)

Episode Date: July 27, 2020

We explore the deadly sin of Lust. A young girl finds her first love at a Weezer concert, an adolescent boy grapples with unexpected desires, and Dan Savage on the most famous teenage lovers, Romeo and Juliet.

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A flood tide of filth is engulfing our country and is threatening to pervert an entire generation. We know that once a person is perverted, it is practically impossible for that person to adjust to normal attitudes in regard to sex. We must seek to deliver our. ourselves from the horrors of perversion. Oh, God, deliver us from this twisting evil.

I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and you're listening to Wiretap on CBC Radio One. Today's special Valentine's episode is part three in our series exploring the seven deadly sins, lust, in which a 69-year-old picks up women in the park, a teenager battles exploding hormones, and Dan Savage rewrites Shakespeare. Hello. How's my favorite client? I'm your only client. I was the big man.

Fine. Just got off the phone with the network brass, and they couldn't be more pleased with Johnny G. and his six deadly sins. Well, that's nice news, but you mean seven deadly sins? No, six. No, there's seven deadly sins. The network wants to cut it down to six.

They're not comfortable with the lost one. What do you mean? they're not comfortable with it. Well, you know, for obvious reasons. I mean, it's a family network. Lust could go at a lot of dark places, and I think it's... That's the point of their deadly sins. They're looking at rebranding opportunities on the deadly thing as well,

but it's more that lust thing, I think, and you that was a little bit of a sticking point. You're not really the right vehicle to deliver the lust message was really what the guy said to me, and I agree with them. I'm supposed to think about you in a raincoat with your sweaty palms sitting in a movie theater. Gregor, I'm just going to be talking about it. It's going to be from a purely literary academic standpoint. Don't give me literary academic. how to hide behind your, I know exactly what you're up to with your literary reading dirty books.

And it's not the point. The point is, everyone here at the agency is really excited because the network likes the sixth deadly sins. Why do you have to focus on the seventh one that they don't like? I'm not focusing. There's just seven. I want to tackle all seven. No, you don't want to tackle all seven. What you want to do is make the network happy. You can't rewrite history. There are seven deadly sins. Rewrite history, the history of what? The history of you sneaking into porn off years? That's not what I'm not about whether you get to.

visit a brothel or a strip club on the CBC's dime. Okay, Gregor, listen, there's nothing pornographic about having a discussion. Who are you talking to? It's me here. I grew up on a farm. I know all about where babies come from. I know what lust is. Do not ruin this with your stupid, horny, porny impulses. Gregor, there's seven deadly. It's like, you know, look at the guy who created Snow White and the seven dwarves. You know, if he was told by the network that he can only have six dwarves, I mean, that, you know, there's a sanctity to certain things. sanctity are you out of your mind i would tag sleepy by his neck and choke him to death if they wanted to give me a special about the six dwarfs and they said no we're thinking five i would stomp to death the nearest dwarf and throw him up and by the way if i got a meeting with wal disney and they said snow white and seven dead dwarfs i don't care about whoever made the dwarf story up which by the way nobody knows his name you know why because who cares who made it up who cares if he invented a hundred fifteen dwarfs okay greger i'm doing all seven deadly sins i'm doing a show on lost there will not be any loss johnny you are not doing a show on

You can't stop me. The network doesn't want it, I don't want it, therefore it's not happening. It's career suicides for both of us, and I'm not going down with you like some kamikaze guy in the backseat just because you're an idiot kamikaze. I'm Dan Savage and I've been writing Savage Love, which is a syndicated sex and relationship advice column for 21 years. So lust is pretty much your stock and trade. Lust in its complications, lust in its aftermath. What possible complications can there be? be. Relationships, marriage, divorce, heartbreak, adultery, infidelity, sexually transmitted

infections, including the original sexually transmitted infection babies. So do all of these things justify lust being considered a deadly sin, do you think? I don't think lust itself is a sin or particularly deadly. It's how you channel that. You know, I think people can do wrong when they're inspired by lust, but people also behave very well inspired by lust. It's a delicious feeling, and it actually brings love and pleasure and orgasms and connection and intimacy and life, too. So you don't think love and lust are two fundamentally different things? No, you know, I think lust is the compost, and love is the vegetable garden. You know what I mean?

Love is the fruit that you grow in the crap. Now I realize I'm calling Lust Dung, but, you know, lust is, there's no love without there being some spark, some connection, and then that is lust. Well, what about first love? Do you think that teenagers really actually experience love, or it's just hormonal lust? Yeah, it's love. I mean, it depends on how you define love. But, yeah, I think teenagers inspired by lust can experience love. But I do know that in a really sex-negative culture that tells you that lust is a sin,

and that sex is evil, people who experience lust will want to immediately upgrade that to love to exonerate themselves from being, you know, wicked or sinful or just interested in sex, because that's not legitimate. It's not okay. You can't say, I'm just so attracted to you, and you're so hot, and here's this great big ball of lust, and let's call it that, because that's what it is. People want to see themselves as finer and nobler, and then we'll, you know, they often get into trouble by rounding up lust to love too quickly. Romeo and Juliet, it's a best example of a story of, you know, young people in Lost who just can't say, oh, this is Lust, who then want to round it up to love, who don't want to admit that they are just in the thrall of, you know, that sinful lust, that base emotion. And so it's love and they get married and they kill themselves and all because they just, you know, wanting to declare it love, wanting to declare it something deeper and more meaningful than just basic animal lust.

Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about a lot of Juliet's language that she uses to describe her feelings towards Romeo. Like at one point, she talks about, like, cutting them up into stars and throwing them into the sky. I mean, it's the kind of crazy talk of a young girl. Yeah, but what you'll find, though, I think, if people are honest, is, you know, I'm in my 40s. You still get that feeling. You know, when you are bowled over by lust, I am a 13-year-old girl all over again, as I assume you are all over again. When we get hit by that, you know, Thunderbolt or Cupid's arrow, whatever you want to call it, when we are struck down, I feel that way.

I want to chop somebody up and eat them and put them in the sky and keep them in a cage in my basement and all the rest of it. That's really beautiful. Isn't it? As nice as it is to be the object of someone's desire, perhaps the more intense experience is desiring someone else. The dizzying highs, the heart-wrenching lows. You come alive, often painfully so.

And it's never more painful than when you fall in love for the first time. You're so vulnerable and naive. You tear yourself up wondering what the other person thinks of you and if they'll ever love you back. Why am I so unlovable, you wonder? Why am I so weird and different than everybody else? but what if you really are different than everybody else? Since birth, Taylor Tower has had third nerve palsy,

a condition sometimes known as lazy eye. This means her left eye can't move up or down, and the eyelid droops. When you're a teenager, and all you want is to fit in, something like that can feel deadly. Here's Taylor with a story about being different, young, and in love for the first time. The sight of my left eye upset me as a kid. When I looked in the mirror, I would peer into it as if it didn't belong to me.

It had this lackadaisical gaze that set my skin crawling. In folklore around the world, a lazy eye is an evil eye, capable of casting terrible spells. Scientists refer to the right eye as the oculus Dexter, and the left as the oculus sinister. Sinister. I was guilty by association. And the kids at school reminded me of it every day. I got called cyclops and retard, and sometimes kids would just pull the skin of their own eyelid

and chase me around the school yard. I wanted to know how my eye had gotten that way and what I could do about it. My mom was no help, so when I was seven years old, I called my grandma on my dad's side. My dad didn't live with me, and I only saw him once a year,

so I thought my grandma would be able to tell me if any long-lost relatives on that side had a lazy eye. She told me my dad had one when he was a kid. I asked her how it had gotten that way, and she said it came from sitting too close to the TV and that it had gone away by the time he turned 15. I looked in the mirror when we hung up, imagining what it would be like when I was an adult,

seeing myself with two perfect eyes. my dad died when I was nine and at 14 I made a trip to visit his mom I stayed in the spare room a room plastered with pictures of my father from all the stages of his life I studied each photo carefully believing I would see the steady improvement of his eye the eyelid rising the eyeball realigning itself as if by magic. I stood in front of those walls of black and white for a long time. No lazy eye in sight. My dead father's eyes had been perfect. That was the same year I started high school. I wandered through the halls unnoticed as the popular kids had open makeout sessions

at their lockers. All of my friends were boys who considered me one of the dudes. I secretly loved them all. As each of them got his own perfect-eyed girl, I started telling everyone I was asexual. Then one day, at a Weezer concert,

I met Noah. A friend and I skipped school to wait in line in the rain. We got there at 10 in the morning to camp out for the show, which didn't start until 8th, that night. Noah was already there, curled up in a lawn chair under an overhang, playing Weezer on a little blue stereo. His arms were inside the chest of his shirt to keep himself

warm, so that his sleeves hung at his sides like deflated limbs. He looked different than the boys I went to school with. I loved how small he was, how manageable. We sat cross-legged on a blanket he'd brought from home, playing Uno and eating bologna and craft single sandwiches all afternoon. When the line started to grow, I helped him pack his things into the trunk of his hatchback. As he leaned into the trunk to get all his stuff to fit, I caught sight of the rim of his underwear poking out of his pants and felt an unfamiliar rush of warm excitement in my gut. We joined my friend back in line, and Noah stood in front of me, shivering as the rain continued to fall. In an act of bravery, I rubbed his back in a mock attempt to keep him warm.

He didn't move away or ask me to stop. We started dating two months later. He had blue eyes and buddy Holly glasses. His lips were full and red against his pale skin, and he jelled his blonde hair up in a little swoop at the front. He spoke softly and always sat on. on his knees, even when he was in a chair. I always made sure he sat on my right side, so he wouldn't lean in to kiss me and recoil at the sight of my stagnant left eye

staring at him blankly. Sometimes when we rode the bus, there'd only be two seats left, and he'd sit down before I got to choose the one that had him on my good side. Then I'd just stand there awkwardly, pretending I didn't want to sit. In movie theaters, at concerts,

wherever there were seats, it'd this desperate game of musical chairs that only I was playing. Or when Noah, who often carried around an old Polaroid camera, took pictures of me, I smiled broadly, squinting both eyes so they looked the same. Sometimes I'd catch him through my blurry left eye, staring at me. For our first date, he took me to his high school, where a friend of his was playing. playing in a battle of the bands. I sat with my good eye to him, and he tried to hold my hand. I hesitated because my palms were hot and sweaty,

but compromised by laying a few fingers over his. My heart pounded in my throat. Once his friend's band had finished, Noah got up and walked to the stage to say hello, while I stayed in my seat. Watching him turn and point at me, smiling, showing his friend, I shivered with the joy of it, fragile and weak from so little self-esteem and so much ridicule,

until I overheard his friend ask, that weird-eyed girl? We spent a lot of time alone together in his room listening to records. One day, I was going through his drawings as he worked on something in another room. His drawings were everywhere, in piles on the floor and spilling out of his bag and nightstand drawers. I pulled a drawing from the bottom of his drawer. The paper was thin and soft from age and criss-crossed with creases from so much folding.

At the top, he had written, Dream Girl. It had drawings of three girls, meticulously detailed, with lines sprouting from different parts of their bodies that led to little notes like an anatomy diagram. A line sprouting from one girl read, needs to be shorter or the same size as me and another short hair or long hair doesn't matter the third girl's face had one eye drawn as a delicate slit

almost like a wink a line leading from the wink red must have lazy eye it didn't seem possible Noah hunched over his death had quietly conjured his ideal woman in ink before I'd come along. Even though it was only a pencil drawing,

looking at it, I felt I was seeing my face as it really was for the first time. This face with such delicate features was the face that Noah saw when he looked at me. Noah came back into the room and sat beside me on the bed, on my left side, and put his arm around me. Through my left eye, I could see his blurry face staring and smiling. Then he took the drawing from my hands, stood up, and went to his closet.

He stood on tiptoe, pushing the clutter from the top shelf to each side, and pulled out his Polaroid camera. I didn't turn my head or squint my eyes. As his finger pushed down to release the shutter, I looked straight into the lens and smiled. So we finally found a podcast that speaks to you, pure bliss. It's so good that when you finish the final episode, it leaves a hole in your heart and your schedule. What now? Personally, is here for you.

It's a collection of true stories that explore what it means to be, well, human. The best part, there are six incredible seasons to dive into, with more on the way. Personally, get lost in someone else's life. Available now, wherever you personally get your podcasts. I'm a musician, and the woman has always been the inspiration of my career, you know, stimulation. This is Maximo. I met him last summer in Tompkins Square Park. And as I sat beside him on a park bench, he tried to pick up the women walking by. This is the place, the most beautiful woman in the world, coming to this park. In his dark shades and pork pie hat, Maximo looked like a cool cat out of a black and white document.

about Greenwich Village in the 60s, which is where and when Maximo came of age. The 60 was the greatest. It ain't going to be another 60s. And when I was very young, I was very handsome. I was so busy that I didn't have time to put my clothes on. I could just see a young Maximo walking around naked all day. When I was young, I might as well have had my pants crazy glued on.

And no matter how busy, I get, even now, with household chores, paperwork, and such. I always have time to put on pants and even belt them up, often tightly. Maximo said that even now, as a septuagenarian, he still gets busy. I have girls that I go out. We just go out. We eat sushi. We might go and see a concert.

And there goes my pants again. There goes your pants? goes my pants again. Do you have any advice, like techniques for meeting women? I don't know, bullshit a lot. Do you know, 90% of the relationship that you see in this world is built by bullshit. But brother, you have to be precise and you have to be careful

what you say if you want to see her again. Bullsh is, of course, an important part of seduction, but even Maximo would probably admit that sometimes, particularly when you're young and full of hormones, infatuation can go beyond language, can penetrate to a level of pure animal attraction. All through elementary school from kindergarten, I had crushes on women, girls, teachers,

the one after the other. But I would say at 12 to 13, I was at the height of awkward puberty. Yeah. You know, I was going to have a chubby kid. I was going to a boys' school. But I was getting starting to have very, very strong sexual urges. And I remember that that summer when I was 13, we were going on a trip to Greece for a couple of months. So I was really looking forward to it.

There was going to be a lot of young girls around, girls my age, running around the beach and in bathing suits. So I started getting really excited about this trip to Greece. When we got to Greece, the first three weeks, we went to my mom's village, or isolated mountain village. There was nobody in this village except for the old people. And here I am, you know, all excited about this trip to the Greece, and I'm sharing in bed with my snoring mother in my grandmother's house. Where was your dad? And my dad was going to join us a bit later. And I had no entertainment, like there were no kids,

there was nobody else in the village. We'd go out in the day, and we'd take the sheep and goats out to the hillside to feed them and come back home, and we'd eat and take a nap, and then, you know, eat some more. And there was nothing else to do but go along with this Greek village rural existence. And I'm just bored out of my mind. And I had these two paperbacks with me, the Godfather and Canaan Abel. and both of them are pulpy books with quite a bit of sex.

I remember one of the lines from The Godfather that I had never forgotten. One of those lines, she wrapped her legs around him in a virginal frenzy. Virginal frenzy really, really got me because that's how I felt. I felt like I could totally understand the idea of frenzy at that point. I was losing my mind. So I'm kind of marinating in these stories, and then one day, we met one of my grandma's neighbors, Andreas, and he was out with his sheep and his goats, and there was a little goat called Galagos, who was his youngest goat.

Was that convention to name the various goats? Yeah, absolutely. All the goats and sheep had names, and the thing I started looking forward to the most was was going to the hillside to meet Galasios just because he was cute and he danced around he was full of life so I thought of him as a kid like me

he kind of became my friend I know that sounds corny but there was nobody else for me to talk to and I kind of like to think that he looked forward to seeing me every day too and what were some of the things that you did as friends you'd feed him you'd what? I'd feed him

I'd chase him around occasionally get a cuddle before he took off, you know, bounced the way again. Just kind of get down on my knees and put my arm around his neck and try to, you know, talk to him and stroke his, you know, his fur. It was a really nice thing. I mean, I only really got to see him once a day for about half an hour. And I had the rest of the day to just kind of think about him. And I started thinking about him a lot, actually.

And I started to develop a crush. an actual crush on him. On Galatios. On Galatios. And, you know, I started craving more physical closeness. And at one point a thought came into my mind that we could have like a old summer fling. You wanted a summer fling with a goat. I was 13 years old.

Stuck in a village sleeping next to my mother with no kids and nobody around. What ended up happening is my father finally showed up because we were going to be heading down to his village for the rest of the summer and that was pretty much it and we got ready to go. My family threw a little goodbye dinner for us and that was it. So nothing, nothing ever...

Nothing ever happened. Nobody got any action. and I found out, as we left my mother's village, which is high up in the mountains, I found out that at the dinner, the goodbye dinner, we ate Galasios. We ate him. Are you kidding? No. I remember looking for him, say, you know, where is he?

Like, where did he go? It never occurred to me, and my parents broke it to me on the way out of the village. Did they know about your feelings for Galatios? Not to full extent, but they knew that I was attached to it. So how did you take it? I was really upset. I was hurt and infuriated and just in shock, I think. Of all the goats, why would they pick him?

Your first summer fling? My first summer almost fling. Have you eaten goats since? Very rarely. I'm not a big fan of goat. Because of the incident or just in general? Look, I don't have a thing for goats anymore. I'm a happily married man.

But I can tell you this. Once you've eaten your first love, no heartbreak can ever stay in that bad again. On Wiretap today, you heard Gregor Erlich, Maximo Pantoja, Tony Asimacoplas, and Dan Savage, who can be followed on Twitter at Fake Dan Savage. You also heard Taylor Tower reading her story, Oculus Sinister, a version of which first appeared on Nerve.com.

For more of Taylor's stories, visit t.gilestower.com. Wiretap is produced by Mira Bertwintonic, Crystal Duhame, and me, Jonathan Goldstein. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.ca.com slash podcasts.