The Bisexual Lubricant

(Inspired by an ACTUAL social media comment)

The man’s name was probably Kyle.

It’s always Kyle, or a Kyle-adjacent. A Kolton. A Kody with a K. Something his mother chose from a baby name book in 1994 while his father sat in the next room watching SportsCenter and contributing nothing to the process, which, in retrospect, was the first lesson the boy ever received in masculinity and the most honest one he’d ever get.

Kyle had been using the Eucerin for six years.

Not on his hands. Not on his elbows. Not for anything the manufacturer intended or the FDA approved or any reasonable person would discuss in public. Kyle had been using the Eucerin for the thing Kyle did three to four times a week in the shower, or in bed, or once, memorably, in the parking lot of a Planet Fitness after a particularly aggressive chest day when something hormonal happened that Kyle attributed to his supplement stack and not to the woman in the squat rack, because acknowledging the woman in the squat rack would’ve required Kyle to admit he had feelings, and feelings are for women, and Kyle is not a woman, Kyle is a man, a man who jackhammers his own dick with a fistful of Eucerin on a schedule so rigid it could be used to calibrate industrial equipment.

Kyle bought it in bulk. Kyle kept a bottle in the bathroom, a bottle in the nightstand, and a travel-size in his gym bag that he told his girlfriend Brittany was for his hands. Brittany believed him because Brittany was generous in ways Kyle never deserved and also because Kyle’s hands looked like he’d been bare-knuckling a stucco wall since childhood, so the cover story held.

Kyle never read the label.

Six years of purchasing this product. Six years of unscrewing the cap, or pumping the pump, and applying it to himself with the grim efficiency of a man lubricating a machine part. Not once did Kyle look at the bottle the way you’d look at something you were putting on the most sensitive region of your body several times a week. Kyle looked at the price. Kyle looked at the size. Kyle grabbed and went. The way a man grabs anything. Quickly. Without reading. Without considering that the object in his hand might contain information that would one day unravel his entire understanding of who he was.

Then one Tuesday in February, in a Walgreens, reaching for his usual bottle, Kyle saw the word.

Unisex.

Kyle held the bottle at arm’s length like it had just spoken to him.

Kyle did not know what unisex meant. Not precisely. Kyle had a general sense that it involved both, and both meant two, and two meant a thing Kyle had opinions about, loud ones, the kind he typed in all caps beneath articles he didn’t finish, and by the time the word traveled from Kyle’s eyes to whatever region of Kyle’s brain handled language, it had been mugged, stripped, and reassembled into: bisexual.

The lotion was bisexual.

Kyle had been masturbating with bisexual lotion.

For six years.

Kyle put the bottle down. Kyle left the Walgreens. Kyle sat in his truck in the parking lot for forty minutes with the engine running and his hands on the steering wheel and his eyes on nothing. The podcast was playing. A man in a black V-neck was talking about masculine frame and sexual polarity and the importance of never allowing feminine energy to penetrate your boundaries. Kyle turned it off. Kyle had just realized that feminine energy had been penetrating his boundaries three to four times a week with a pump bottle and his dominant hand.

Kyle went home. Kyle went to the bathroom. Kyle picked up the Eucerin from the nightstand. Unisex. It had always said unisex. Every time. Every single time Kyle had squeezed it into his palm and gone to work on himself like a man sanding a banister, the bottle had been quietly, patiently, in plain English, telling Kyle that it was for everyone. That it did not care that Kyle was a man. That it did not verify. That it simply showed up and performed without asking who Kyle was or what Kyle believed or how Kyle voted. And this, in Kyle’s mind, was the betrayal. Not that the lotion was unisex. That the lotion hadn’t asked.

Kyle threw the bottle in the trash. Then Kyle took it out of the trash, because what if someone saw it and asked why, and then Kyle would have to explain, and explaining would mean saying it out loud, and saying it out loud would make it real in a way Kyle was not equipped to handle emotionally, spiritually, or grammatically. Kyle put the Eucerin in a plastic bag. Kyle put the plastic bag in another plastic bag. Kyle drove to a dumpster behind an Arby’s four miles from his house and threw it away there, like a man disposing of a murder weapon, which, in Kyle’s mind, was not far off, because something had been killed in that Walgreens. Kyle just wasn’t sure what.

Kyle went home and checked every product in his bathroom. Every bottle. Every tube. Every bar. He was looking for the word. The word that meant both. The word that meant compromised. Kyle found it on his deodorant. Unisex. Gone. Kyle found it on his bodywash. Gone. Kyle found it on a tube of sunscreen he’d used maybe twice. Gone. Kyle found it on the hand soap by the kitchen sink and threw that away too, which meant Kyle now had no hand soap, which didn’t bother him because Kyle washed his hands the way Kyle did most things related to hygiene, which was briefly and with an air of resentment, as though the very concept of cleanliness was a plot against him.

Kyle stood in his bathroom surrounded by empty shelves and felt, for the first time in weeks, safe.

Kyle went to a sporting goods store. Not a drugstore. Not a grocery store. A place where men buy things for men. Kyle walked the aisles looking for products that said FOR MEN on them in letters large enough to read from a moving vehicle. Kyle bought a body wash called GRIT that came in a black bottle with a bear on it and smelled like someone had mixed pine tar with diesel fuel and a fistful of asphalt. Kyle bought a shampoo called TIMBER that smelled like a lumberyard on fire. Kyle bought a deodorant called IRONHIDE that listed “activated charcoal and the essence of cedar” among its ingredients, which is not a thing, cedar doesn’t have an essence, cedar is a tree, but Kyle didn’t care because the label said FOR MEN in a font that looked like it had been stamped there by a blacksmith and that was the whole test. Not ingredients. Not function. Not whether it would prevent his skin from peeling off his body like paint from a foreclosure. Just the font. Just the label. Just a bottle that would never, under any circumstances, make Kyle question what he’d done with his evening.

Kyle’s skin got worse. Dramatically, visibly, almost heroically worse. His knuckles looked like something unearthed at a dig site. His elbows could strike matches. His face was flaking so badly that a coworker asked if he’d been in a fire and Kyle said “I’m just detoxing” and the coworker moved to a different desk and did not come back.

Kyle could not sleep. Kyle lay in bed at night in the dark with nothing on his nightstand where the Eucerin used to be and he thought about it. Six years. Hundreds of times. The lotion on his skin. The lotion in his hand. The lotion on him, in the most private, most vulnerable, most biologically honest moments of his adult life. And the lotion had been, the whole time, for everyone. The lotion had been for women too. Which meant, in Kyle’s framework, in Kyle’s specific and deeply broken understanding of how sexuality and skincare interact, an understanding shared by no medical professional, no theologian, no philosopher, and no functional adult on the planet, Kyle had been having bisexual sex. With himself. For six years. In the shower. In bed. In a Planet Fitness parking lot in broad daylight.

Kyle needed to tell someone.

Kyle needed a stranger in a dark room who was professionally obligated to listen.

Kyle found a Catholic church.

Kyle is not Catholic. Kyle has never been Catholic. Kyle was raised in a denomination that met in a converted grocery store and had a youth pastor named Skyler who played acoustic guitar and referred to the Holy Spirit as the Big Guy’s vibe. But Kyle had seen confession in movies, and it seemed like the kind of arrangement where a man could say something terrible and someone on the other side of a wall just had to sit there and absorb it, which was Kyle’s ideal communication structure, and honestly, the structure of every relationship Kyle had ever had.

Kyle walked into the church. Kyle sat in a pew for twenty minutes waiting for someone to come get him, like a restaurant. Nobody came. Kyle eventually found the confessional by following an old woman who looked like she knew things. Kyle waited. Kyle entered. Kyle sat in the dark.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Kyle said, because he’d heard that in a movie once and it was the only Catholic sentence he knew.

“How long since your last confession?”

“I’ve never done this.”

“Are you Catholic?”

“No.”

A pause. The kind of pause a man takes when his entire afternoon schedule is derailed. The same pause you take staring at a flat tire on the side of an interstate at 7 a.m.

“Okay,” the priest said. “Go ahead.”

“I’ve been compromised, Father.”

“Compromised how?”

“Sexually.”

The priest shifted. Father Paul Demetriou, sixty-three, ordained 2002, parish of St. Anne’s for nineteen years. He had heard adultery. He had heard theft, cruelty, despair, addiction, violence, the full breadth of human failure whispered through a screen in a dark wooden box. Father Demetriou thought he had heard everything a person could carry into this room. Father Demetriou was thirty seconds from being wrong in a way the seminary had not prepared him for.

“I was involved with something,” Kyle said. “For six years. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know what I was dealing with.”

“A person?”

“No.”

“An affair?”

“No. It was... it was in my hand, Father.”

“Your phone?”

“No.”

“A substance? Are we talking about a drug?”

“A product. A... substance. I was using a substance. On myself. For... personal reasons. And I found out it was...” Kyle swallowed. “Bisexual.”

Silence.

Not the normal confessional silence, the weighted, holy kind where God is supposedly present and everyone’s just being respectful about it. This was the other kind. The kind where a man on one side of a screen is realizing that the man on the other side of the screen has just confessed to a sexual crisis involving a drugstore moisturizer, and there is no page in any manual, no passage in any text, no moment in any seminary course titled “Pastoral Counseling in Complex Situations” that covered this.

“The lotion,” Father Demetriou said.

“Yes, Father.”

“You’re talking about lotion.”

“I didn’t know, Father. It says unisex. On the bottle. That means—”

“That means it’s for all skin types.”

“That’s what they want you to think.”

Father Demetriou removed his glasses. Father Demetriou rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Father Demetriou had a nice bottle of bourbon in the rectory and a crossword he’d been looking forward to all morning, twelve across was “Baroque composer, six letters,” and he’d been reasonably sure it was Handel, and now he was sitting in a wooden box while a man who was not Catholic and had never been Catholic explained that he’d been having a six-year sexual relationship with a bottle of petroleum and had just discovered the Eucerin’s orientation.

“My son,” Father Demetriou said, and he meant it the way a tired man means anything, which is to say he was reaching for whatever word might end this. “The lotion is not bisexual. The lotion does not have a sexuality. The lotion is a petroleum-based emollient.”

“A what?”

“It’s moisturizer.”

“I know what it is, Father. I’ve been using it. Extensively. That’s the problem.”

“The problem is that you used moisturizer.”

“The problem is what I used it for, Father.”

“Masturbation,” Father Demetriou said, “is... well, the Church has positions on that, but I don’t think that’s really what’s happening here.”

“I need to know if I’m still a man, Father.”

Father Demetriou looked at the screen. Kyle’s silhouette. The shape of a large man in a small box. Shoulders like a filing cabinet. Head bowed. Hands in his lap, and the hands, Father Demetriou could see even through the screen, were cracked and bleeding, the skin split across every knuckle, because this man, this man who had come to a church he didn’t belong to and a God he’d never spoken to, had stopped using the one product that kept his body from falling apart because the label hadn’t verified his gender before letting him touch it.

“You’re still a man,” Father Demetriou said.

“How do you know?”

“Because, God knows, a woman would never be in here asking me this.”

Kyle left the confessional. Kyle left the church. Kyle got in his truck, the one he was twenty-six payments behind on, the one with the Punisher skull on the back window and the lift kit that had never touched unpaved earth, and he sat there for a while, hands cracking on the steering wheel, bleeding onto the leather, which Kyle interpreted as toughness and Father Demetriou, who was already pouring himself a whiskey in the rectory at 11:40 in the morning, would have interpreted as the most obvious metaphor he’d ever been asked to witness.

Kyle drove past the Walgreens. Kyle did not stop.

Kyle went home and opened his laptop and searched for men’s only lotion, a phrase that took Kyle to a corner of the internet he did not know existed and was not emotionally prepared for, a forum called The Dry Brotherhood, where men, actual adult men with presumably valid driver’s licenses and the right to vote, discussed the problem of unisex skincare with the intensity and specificity of men planning a military operation. They had a manifesto. They had a supply chain. They had a man in Idaho who manufactured something called Patriot Balm in a garage using beef tallow, beeswax, and essential oils blessed by a pastor (the real MALE kind) and they bought it, they all bought it, they bought it in bulk and rubbed it on themselves and their children and probably their trucks, and it didn’t work, it had never worked, it was essentially a candle you rubbed on your body, but it said FOR MEN and it was blessed and it was made by a man named Dale in Coeur d’Alene, but labeled MONTANA because French and geography are for pansies.

Kyle ordered the Patriot Balm.

Kyle ordered the twelve-ounce tub. Seventy-eight dollars. The website had a flag on it and a photo of Dale, who looked like a man who had been in a disagreement with every institution he’d ever encountered and had won none of them. The shipping confirmation email contained a Bible verse and a coupon code: DRYMAN15.

The Patriot Balm arrived four days later in packaging that smelled like a barn. Kyle opened it. It was yellow. It was the consistency of cold butter. It smelled like a livestock auction in July. Kyle applied it to his hands. Kyle’s hands did not improve. Kyle applied it to his elbows. Kyle’s elbows did not improve. Kyle applied it to his face, which was a mistake, because the Patriot Balm sealed his pores like grout and by morning Kyle had a rash that made him look like he’d been slapped by someone wearing a mitten made of bees.

Kyle went to the doctor. Kyle never goes to the doctor, because doctors ask questions and questions require answers and answers require feelings and feelings are gay, apparently, like the lotion. But the rash was spreading and Kyle’s coworkers had started leaving pamphlets about contagious skin diseases on his desk, anonymously, which was not anonymous at all because there were only six people in Kyle’s office and four of them had already asked Kyle directly what was wrong with his face.

The doctor looked at Kyle’s hands. The doctor looked at Kyle’s elbows. The doctor looked at Kyle’s face. The doctor, a woman named Dr. Pham who had been practicing dermatology for fifteen years and had never once encountered a patient whose skin looked like it was trying to leave his body as a matter of principle, asked Kyle what products he was using.

“Patriot Balm,” Kyle said.

“What is Patriot Balm?”

“It’s a men’s moisturizer. Made by Dale. In Idaho. It’s blessed.”

Dr. Pham typed something into her computer. Dr. Pham looked at the screen. Dr. Pham looked at Kyle. Dr. Pham looked at the screen again.

“This is beef tallow,” she said.

“It’s blessed beef tallow.”

“You’ve been rubbing beef tallow on your face.”

“It’s for men.”

Dr. Pham prescribed Kyle a moisturizer. A real one. She wrote it on a prescription pad and handed it to Kyle and Kyle looked at it the way a man looks at a letter from the IRS.

“Is it...” Kyle started.

“Is it what?”

“Is it for... is it just for...”

“It’s for skin,” Dr. Pham said. “It’s for anyone with skin.”

Kyle filled the prescription. Kyle used the moisturizer. Kyle’s skin started to heal. Kyle did not post about this. Kyle kept the moisturizer in the cabinet under the bathroom sink, behind the pipes, in the dark, where no one would see it, the way Kyle kept everything that actually helped him.

His hands healed. He told no one.

His face cleared up. He told no one.

The rash went away and his elbows stopped bleeding and his knuckles closed and his skin, for the first time in months, stopped looking like a satellite photo of a dying lake, and Kyle told absolutely no one, because healing was the one thing Kyle couldn’t do in public.

But Kyle hadn’t touched himself in six weeks.

Six weeks. The longest drought since Kyle discovered the activity at thirteen in a bathroom while his mother was at Bible study and his father was watching SportsCenter. Kyle couldn’t do it. Every time he reached for himself his brain showed him the word. Unisex. Every time he closed his eyes he saw the bottle. The pump. The label. The six years. Kyle’s body wanted what Kyle’s body had always wanted and Kyle’s brain had placed the entire operation under federal review and the review had no end date.

Kyle was falling apart in ways that went beyond skin. Kyle was short with his mother. Kyle was shorter with strangers. Kyle got into an argument at a gas station with a man who’d looked at him for what Kyle determined was too long, and the man had not been looking at Kyle at all, the man had been looking at the air freshener display behind Kyle’s head, but Kyle couldn’t tell the difference anymore between being perceived and being threatened because Kyle felt threatened by everything now, by the lotion and the label and the memory of his own hand and the knowledge that his body had been enjoying something for six years without checking its credentials first.

Kyle started sleeping badly. Kyle started driving badly, which was different from Kyle’s normal driving only in the slightest degree. Kyle rear-ended a Subaru at a Chick-fil-A drive-through and when the woman got out to exchange insurance information Kyle couldn’t make eye contact because the woman was using hand lotion, right there, in the open, rubbing it into her palms like it was nothing, like it meant nothing, and Kyle, with a deeply conflicted erection, sat in his truck and watched her hands and felt something so complicated and so deeply stupid that if it were ever studied by psychologists it would need its own funding.

Then came the camping trip.

Kyle went camping because a podcast told him that men need to return to the primitive and Kyle interpreted this as literally as Kyle interprets everything, which is completely and without nuance. Kyle packed the truck. Kyle packed the tent, the sleeping bag, the fire starter, the tactical flashlight, the protein bars, the supplements, and the Patriot Balm, because Kyle’s face was still a disaster and the Patriot Balm was the only product Kyle owned that hadn’t been ideologically compromised, and Kyle drove three hours north to a national forest and set up camp in a clearing and felt, for the first time in weeks, like a man, a real man, a man in the woods with a fire and a knife and no lotion of ambiguous sexuality within a thirty-mile radius.

Kyle applied the Patriot Balm before bed. Generously. Face, neck, hands, arms, elbows. Kyle practically shellacked himself. Kyle smelled like a rendering plant. Kyle smelled like a butcher shop in August. Kyle smelled like seventy-eight dollars’ worth of blessed beef fat and beeswax slow-warming against human skin in a sealed tent on a warm night in a national forest in a state that had an active and well-documented wolf population.

The first wolf arrived around midnight.

Kyle heard it outside the tent. Sniffing. Circling. Kyle lay very still. Kyle’s podcast survival training had not covered this. Kyle’s podcast survival training had covered cold exposure and breath work and the importance of eye contact as a dominance tool, none of which was useful when a wild animal was pressing its nose against the nylon three inches from Kyle’s beef-tallow-coated face.

The second wolf arrived four minutes later.

The third brought friends.

After a while. Kyle was in a tent surrounded by a pack of wolves who were not interested in Kyle as a man, or as an Alpha, or as a high-value male, or as a moderator of The Dry Brotherhood. The wolves were interested in Kyle as food. Kyle smelled like food. Kyle had rubbed himself in animal fat and climbed into a fabric bag in the middle of their territory and the wolves had picked up the scent from what rangers would later track on the wolves collars was about ten miles out, which meant Kyle’s commitment to gender-appropriate skincare had a broadcast radius of ten miles, which was further than Kyle’s podcast had ever reached.

The tent didn’t last long. The nylon was rated for wind and light rain, not for the jaws of an animal that had been eating things larger than Kyle since prehistory. The first tear came at the seam near Kyle’s feet. Kyle kicked. Kyle screamed. Kyle grabbed the tactical flashlight and swung it and hit something dense and warm and fast, and the something made a sound Kyle had never heard a living creature make, a sound that was ugly and completely uninterested in Kyle’s opinions about fairness or the sexual orientation of skincare products.

Kyle tried to call 911. Kyle’s phone was at three percent. Kyle had spent the battery posting to The Dry Brotherhood forum. His last post, timestamped 4:47 a.m., read: “Night two in the wild. This is what masculinity feels like. No lotion. No compromise. Just a man and the land. #PrimitiveProtocol #DryBrotherhood #BlessedNotMoist.” The post had gotten fourteen likes by the time the phone died. Fourteen men, somewhere in America, had double-tapped a photo of Kyle’s campfire while Kyle, in real time, was being dragged out of a tent by animals who had identified him, correctly, as a large piece of meat that had pre-seasoned itself.

Kyle fought. Kyle fought the way Kyle had always imagined he would fight, which is not well, because fighting in real life is not fighting on a podcast, and the wolves had not listened to the podcast, and the wolves did not care about Kyle’s supplement stack or his deadlift or the twelve-week course he’d completed at an airport Marriott in Orlando. The wolves cared that Kyle smelled like dinner. Kyle had spent four months rejecting every product that could have kept him alive and replacing it with a product that made him an appetizer, and the wolves, who were the only actual wolves Kyle had ever met or would ever meet, did not think about this, because wolves don’t think, wolves just eat, and Kyle, who had called himself a wolf in his Instagram bio for two years, was finding out what that actually meant.

Rangers found what was left of Kyle the next morning.

It wasn’t much. The tent was shredded. The sleeping bag was in a tree, which shouldn’t have been possible but was. The Patriot Balm tub was licked clean. Kyle’s tactical flashlight was forty yards from the campsite, still on, the beam pointing at nothing. Kyle’s phone was found in the dirt, dead, screen broken, still open to The Dry Brotherhood forum.

The ranger who found the site was named Gutierrez. Gutierrez had been a ranger for twelve years. He had seen bear attacks, exposure deaths, falls, drownings, a man who’d been struck by lightning while urinating on a summit, and once, a tourist who’d tried to pet a bison and been launched into a ravine like a bag of laundry. Gutierrez had never seen anything like this. Gutierrez radioed in and described the scene as “a wildlife predation event involving a male subject who appears to have applied a significant quantity of animal-derived product in what could only be explained as ritual suicide.” Gutierrez paused after he said it. Dispatch paused after they heard it. Everyone paused, the way people pause when they’ve just encountered something so stupid it needs a moment of silence not out of respect but out of disbelief.

The Dry Brotherhood posted a tribute. “Kyle was a warrior. Kyle was a king. Kyle died doing what he loved, which was being a man in the wild, uncompromised, unbowed, unlotion’d.” The tribute got three hundred likes. Someone in the comments asked what product Kyle had been using. Someone else posted a link to Dale’s website. Dale sold out of Patriot Balm in forty-eight hours. Dale did not issue a warning. Dale issued a coupon code: KYLE20.

Brittany heard about it from a coworker. Brittany sat at her desk for a long time and didn’t say anything. Brittany went home. Greg asked if she was okay. Brittany said “Kyle died.” Greg said “the lotion guy?” Brittany said yes. Greg said “how?” and Brittany said “wolves” and Greg said “wolves?” and Brittany said “he rubbed beef fat on himself and went camping” and Greg opened his mouth and closed it and opened it again and said nothing, because there was nothing to say, because the sentence “he rubbed beef fat on himself and went camping” is a sentence that answers every question and invites none, and Greg just put his hand on Brittany’s shoulder and they sat there, and Greg’s hands were soft, because Greg used moisturizer, whatever was on sale, he didn’t check the label, he never checked the label, because Greg had never once in his life confused lotion with a political position.

Father Demetriou read about it in the local paper. The article was three paragraphs. Man killed by wolves. National forest. Unusual circumstances. Father Demetriou put down the paper and looked at the crossword he’d been working on. Twelve across. Baroque composer. Six letters.

Handel.

Father Demetriou filled it in. Father Demetriou poured himself a bourbon. Father Demetriou sat in the rectory in the quiet and thought about the man in the confessional, the man who’d come to a church he didn’t belong to and a faith he didn’t practice to ask a stranger if a bottle of moisturizer had changed the fundamental nature of who he was, and Father Demetriou finished the bourbon and poured another and said, to no one, to the room, to God if God was listening and Father Demetriou had to believe He was, “Dumbass.”