No Backward Glances

Past the point
of no return -
no backward glances:
I remember so well the first time-twenty or thirty years ago now--when I first heard them singing those words in Phantom.  Actually I have a lot of funny memories of that musical since one of the ballerinas lived in our building, and for a time, one of the phantoms lived there as well;  they were always vocalizing in the afternoon just like all the other performers, making the building a kind of music box. She it was who arranged on the occasion of my husband's birthday, not only to get us splendid house seats for the performance, but arranged--it must have been her--to have the ballerinas come down to the apron at some point in the performance and mouth the words "Happy Birthday, Richard" while the show was going on.  When later on in the evening I in my wonderment asked her how that came about, she said quite casually that the audience were all Japanese tourists and they would not know what was happening.  In any case, when I first heard those lyrics I thrilled to them, lost in the exaggerated narcissistic wonder at my own splendor as being the natural and obvious subject of a major song in a major musical.  Breaking the rules in a small midwestern town when you are sixteen, becoming a pariah, simply by asking the boys of the high school if I could relieve their sexual tensions, even if you are only even a teen-weeny bit self conscious makes you know that you have crossed some boundary, made yourself in some way a non person or a person with whom no one could any longer identify.  I think I knew this from day one, the day I had an encounter with a tough so called "no good" "bad boy" of the town, knew that I had crossed the point of no return, moving into a land where the proper, upper middle class, white bread world in which I was raised did not figure.  Yes, point of no return.  Yes, no backward glance.  I became a notorious cocksucker, if I may use the parlance of the street, and no way back from that, back to the charming little boy who was his mother's jewel and treasure, no, past the point of no return, and she never forgave me for the disgrace I loaded onto the family.  But somehow I had already discarded the Judaeo-Christian notion of sin, that idea of the willing transgression of the laws of god, where I do not know.  But, yes, I did not feel that my taking a boy's penis into my mouth somehow offended the god, whoever he, she, or it was,  which they were only too happy to oblige, and usually with a minimum of derogation and hostile notoriety.  And later on when I for whatever reason married a woman and continued my excursions into the male erotic world, and she died, and I married again and fathered four children, yes, I had certainly passed the point of no return, but, no, I did not feel doomed or damned by this, as the narrative arc of the musical Phantom implies.  Now here I sit aged eighty four, and I have no backward glances, thinking back to the point of no return, and maybe finally I have to say that it seemed so natural that despite my religious upbringing, despite my mother's pieties, I never noticed that I was doing something out of the ordinary.  Could that be true?  My tingle when I hear the song says no.