by Howie Gordon
I retreated to the foyer.
It was a small party, maybe twenty people or so, and most of them were there in couples. The few unpartnered women on hand could have all played on the offensive line of the San Francisco 49ers. In all, I lasted about an hour at the party that night. Mostly, I tried hard to eat $20 worth of hors d’oeuvres, and then I went home early.
My idea of some SM activity was a little spanking. You spanked me or I’d spank you, and then we could get down to some serious sucking and fucking. It was like a patty cake of foreplay to the main event of orgasmic activity. I didn’t know what those people were doing. Somewhere along life’s line, their wires of arousal appeared to have been recircuited in such a way that heavy pain was reinterpreted as ecstatic pleasure.
Well, they might as well have been breathing salt water or speaking Urdu. It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t my night.
Wasn’t my night? My wife was in France! I had childcare! “I coulda been a contender!”
Have another cheese puff, Herman, I says to meself, and get yerself on home. Live to fight another day.
Saturday. Saturday came and who can remember if it was baseball or soccer practice, but I was driving my son to it. I let the obligations of family steer me out of the immobility of depression.
I had nothing planned for Saturday night lust-wise, and I rejected all acts of desperation as available options. The years have taught me that desperate fucks aren’t worth having. No one is breathing, shoulders can’t relax, and assholes are tightly clenched. A desperation orgasm is less satisfying than Kraft’s Macaroni and Cheese.
I needed to recover from Friday night. It had been a tough first-round knockout. The bar scene, perhaps my best remaining opportunity, was out of the question. All my giddy-up-and-go had gotten-up-and-went. I needed something safer. As it happens, I was invited to another party.
This one was a circle of old college friends. It was not likely to get me laid, but it would still be nice to get away from the kids and enjoy some adult company.
The party was at Susan’s house. Susan lived in a house on a cliff that overlooked the Pacific Ocean.
“Where’s your wife?” she said upon my arrival.
“My wife is in France.”
“Ohhh,” she said disappointedly, “I was really looking forward to getting to know her better. I think she’s terrific,” and on and on she went. The gist of which was that she really wanted to become closer friends with Carly. Well, that was nice, and I moved on to another old familiar face and then another. The sun was beautiful, the beach was spectacular, and it was shaping up to be a pleasant and peaceful day. Libations and intoxications made their rounds and lubricated the tales of old friends and college days long gone by.
As the dinner hour approached, Susan reappeared on my screen, all harried and bedeviled with hosting the meal preparations. I offered my help and fell into step at her side. We gabbed as we cut the vegetables. We laughed as we pulled down the plates. We danced to the music in the kitchen as we prepared the chicken. It was busy and it was constant, washing, cooking, cleaning, and preparing. When the meal was finally placed upon the table and the guests all dug in, we served the drinks and kept refilling the platters. When all had quieted down some, we took our own meal together, quietly, away from the throng.
Susan and I had never really looked at each other in college. Back then, she had a lover, I had a lover, and we were both just part of a larger circle of friends. This pattern had lasted for thirty years.
At this point, her mate had been gone a week camping and wasn’t due back for a few more days. And my wife, my wife was in France.
I think we were both surprised just to be looking at each other after all these years. And then it was time for the cleanup. What a mess! Susan and I spearheaded that campaign too. Others joined in. By the time the last dish was dried, Susan and I were joined at the hip.
The darkness came and the party moved down to the beach to make a bonfire. Susan and I were almost holding hands. The stars, the night, the beach, you know what’s coming. The fire blazed. After a while, we drifted down the beach, away from our friends, and into the darkness.
In one brief, magical moment, we gave vent to the magnets, which for hours had been straining at keeping propriety. We came together like the cover of a romance novel. As we melted in torrid embrace, fire and sand, surf and stars all swirled about us to the sound of crashing waves. I feasted on her neck while she pulled me to her body. Our hands moved as blurs with the hunger. Blessed connection. The days of her missing lover and mine were screaming to be done. Solitude was broken. Our longing was strong, mutual, and well met. We were there for each other. Right now was calling.
My hand reached down into the back of her jeans and clenched a naked buttock. I squeezed her hot wetness toward me. My maleness calcified into a bone of contention that mightily sought to rend the fabric of my clothing and hers, that demanded entrance to her body, that craved completion of the circle. The sand we stood upon threatened to become a molten glass from the heat.
And then —
“Ding!” came that tiny sound, like the gentle strike of a spoon upon crystal.
“Ding,” like an air bubble risen from the deep, still pond of conscience. Susan’s first words of the day came back to me, the words that had declared how much she said she wanted to be my wife’s friend.
I was compelled. I withdrew to arm’s length and said, “Susan, if we do this, my wife will never be your friend.” There was a beat.
Susan had taken in my words and then added,”Yeah, and I don’t think my lover could handle this either.” There was a timeless pause.
“I know,” I said to her, “Let’s pretend that we just fucked and that it was spectacular. Because we did, and it was. You know it and I know it, and then we can trade this one night of passion for a lifetime of friendship.”
It had been a moment. It was a moment like after the last burst of a fireworks display. The explosion had filled the sky with bright light and then fell downward, dimming and plummeting to a final dark quiet.
I was so caught up in the drama of my own conscience that I remember being struck odd that Susan would have had a say in the matter too, that her own commitments would rise up to douse the fire as well. In the stillness, our heartbeats normalized. The sand had become cold to the touch of our bare feet. It was over. I knew it was over. She knew it was over. Only broken sleazeballs that neither one of us wanted to be would have persevered.
Uh-huh, I was hoping that she’d talk me out of it.
But no, Susan was a strong woman, a woman of substance and character. I don’t think we had revealed ourselves to be any lost soul mates. More’s the point that we were both just lonely. We played stand-in for each other’s lover and we had played the parts quite well, but when the true moment of truth arrived, it just didn’t happen.
Amid warm smiles, it was quickly agreed. We sealed the bond with a hug that had already alchemized into something safely tucked far away from the fire of erotic passion. And when it was done, feeling all grown up with ourselves, feeling pleased with having done the right thing, we rejoined our friends round the bonfire.
Fuck!
And even on that sour note, if my story had ended there, I would still count myself among the luckiest of men. Little could I imagine what sport the gods were about to make of me.
When it came time to leave that night, Susan asked me for my phone number. I was standing by the back of my car. I’m not likely to ever forget it. I took out my wallet because I had some blank cards in it, upon which, to write my phone number. I withdrew one of the cards and put my wallet on the roof of the car. Don’t ever put your wallet on the roof of your car. I wrote the phone number on the card and gave the card to Susan. We shared a chaste kiss, the kind that Lancelot might have given Guinevere after she had entered the convent. And off I went into the night.
Down her driveway I drove, along the short stretch of road to Highway One, and then off toward th
e bridge for the long drive back across the bay.
When I got home, I gathered with my teenagers around the kitchen table. We talked about our day’s activities and I casually began emptying my keys and such on the table. That’s when I realized that my wallet was missing.
Panic. Shivers of fear ran up and down my spine. Everything was in my wallet — money, credit cards, access to all the bank accounts —
My wife was in France! You knew that. I called Susan’s house and got her answering machine. It was twelve-thirty at night. I grabbed a flashlight. I had to go back and find my wallet.
I flew from Berkeley to Marin County as fast as any automobile has ever made that journey. Susan had gotten my message while I was en route. She joined me with a flashlight for a while. My wallet did not turn up. By two in the morning, she looked exhausted and beaten up, she had to call it quits. Though I resisted that notion, it didn’t look like I was going to find anything in the darkness. She offered me an office floor to sleep on. The house was already full with overnight guests. What had transpired between us earlier was gone, long gone, ancient history, and not even a factor.
I declined the office floor, told her that I had to get back to the kids, and we said our goodnights. I went back to square one and started looking all over again with the flashlight. Still nothing. Damn. I got back to Berkeley around three-thirty in the morning.
I suppose you could call it sleep, what I did in my bed the rest of that night, but I’m not sure. At the first ray of dawn, I was back in the car and rushing off to Marin. I figured I had one chance to find the wallet that I had left on the roof of my car — and this was it. I had to get there before the day’s crowd started showing up on the beach.
It was still very early when I pulled into Susan’s driveway. I was the defective detective in search of the wallet that the Fates were hiding. On foot, I began retracing my car’s path of late last night, from Susan’s house toward the highway. I thoroughly investigated the bushes on both sides of the road. Nothing turned up. When I came across a Park Ranger unlocking the gate to the beach, I explained what had happened and gave him my home phone number. He said he would call if someone turned it in. Oh, yeah, I thought to myself, fat chance. I had little faith in my fellow man.
As I walked that dirt road to Highway One, I reasoned that I hadn’t actually been going fast enough for the wallet to fall off until I turned onto the highway. Yeah, that was it, I decided. I would find it on the highway.
By my calculation, I had walked about half-a-mile on that highway, when looking ahead, I saw that the road took a sharp, upward swing to the left. In my best Sherlock Holmesian deduction, that’s where I decided I should concentrate my efforts. If I were a wallet, that’s where I’d have flown off.
And sure enough, when I got there, right under the guardrail, against a roadside shrub, I spotted a bright, little orange envelope. I was jubilant. I had made that very envelope myself in order to house my winning Monopoly stickers from the last McDonald’s Contest. It obviously had spilled out when my wallet had hit the highway. I was so smart.
When I opened the orange envelope, there was my little sticker for a free cheeseburger and two more for free ice cream cones. Though not immediately visible, I knew that my wallet could not be far off. I began digging in the brush.
An hour later, my wallet still had not turned up. The brush was thick and dense. The wallet was brown and would be well camouflaged by its own earth tones. I had to dig deeper, really get down in there and pay closer attention. The search continued, still, no wallet. On my belly now, rooting like a pig for truffles, raising branches, carefully exploring in months, maybe years of composting foliage. Still, no wallet. I was in a sleeveless T-shirt and wearing thin cotton pants. My arms were getting scratched. My butt was getting poked. My wallet had to be there. I searched and searched. Cars whizzed by on the highway. The late morning sun rose in the sky.
I was on my ass, leaning backwards and holding up a branch under a pine-like shrub, when I spied a smallish rattlesnake winding its way away from me to disappear into deeper, denser brush. I looked around where I was sitting. There were several shed snakeskins within reach of my butt.
Sherlock! I said to myself, how important is this wallet to you? This was a whole new ballgame. I extracted myself from the brambles as rapidly and as carefully as I possibly could.
Defeated. Dirty and sweaty, I walked the roadway defeated. I held onto my little orange envelope and wondered how the gods could tease me so. As I approached the house, Susan was in a terrycloth bathrobe having just emerged from the hot tub. She could have been naked with a two-headed dildo stuck in her and it wouldn’t have made any difference. She had seen my car and wondered where I was. It was of no consequence. I mumbled pleasantries, she offered sympathies, and I got in my car and drove off.
As I approached the Richmond Bridge, I dialed home on the cell phone.
“Dad,” my eldest daughter said on the phone, “your wallet’s in San Francisco.”
“What?”
“This guy called. He’s a fireman that works in San Francisco. He lives in Bolinas. He was driving to work this morning and found your wallet sitting there on Highway One.” It was music to my ears. “He’s at the fire station near Candlestick Park. You want the phone number?”
“You bet I do!”
It was Fireman Jerry Dunn. Jerry, you did a great thing! Aren’t firemen just the best?! He didn’t even want to take any money. I had to force him to take half of what I had in there. Lord knows, he could’ve had it all. My spirits soared. What a goddamned rollercoaster ride! Sunday had all of a sudden become a very wonderful day!
The hours passed in a fog of relief. I was gently bumping into walls and sleepily doing all the things that I had to do. With my faith in my fellow man feeling newly secured, I went to bed early that night.
I was awakened out of a dead sleep in the middle of the night. Scratching and tearing at flesh, it felt like my balls, my arms, and my ass were on fire.
“Late at night when you’re sleepin’ poison ivy comes a-creepin’ around…”
Poison oak, in this case, and so bad, so intense — that calamine lotion couldn’t even begin to touch the fires. Into the bathtub of ice I went. I called my dermatologist the next day. I was beyond over-the-counter remedies. I knew it. I needed professional help. She was all booked up. There were no openings. “How about next week?”
“NO!” I pleaded my case. She agreed to see me after closing at eight o’clock that night.
“Alright,” she said, tired from her long day at the office, “let’s see what you got that couldn’t wait.” She examined my arms first. “Hmmm, let’s see the rest of it….”
I dropped my shorts and my underpants and she bent me over a table. She and her nurse looked at me and just started laughing. They both agreed that it was a pretty horrible case of poison oak.
As I was, with little to hide, I ended up telling my whole tale of weekend misadventure to both doctor and nurse. I’m very funny when I’m miserable and I actually took great pleasure in shocking and flirting with my bungled tale of male madness. When the merriment died down, I was given a shot in each cheek and a prescription for the latest and greatest in scientific ointment.
As I was leaving her office, the good doctor suggested that perhaps it would not be such a good idea for me to tell my wife about my recent escapades.
“Oh, no,” I explained. “My wife and I tell each other these things. It’s our way.” The good doctor confided that she couldn’t even begin to imagine playing out such scenarios in her marriage.
That very day, Carly ended her e-mail from France to me with, “I miss the feel of your skin.” I answered,
“The feel of my skin has itchy bumps all over it at the moment. Poison Oak! It’s a long story, but in a soulful way, it’s just God stepping in to save me from myself.” I signed it, “Itchy Lust.”
“Dear Itchy Lust,” she returned. “I am empathizing and giggling with you, o
l’ boy, whose God would do such a thing to you. I cannot in good faith take any actual delight in this. It would be too unkind. However, perhaps a tiny smile would not be out of line?”
P.S. Here’s further inescapable proof that Carly is actually a bruja with truly Castanadian powers:
My beloved departed again for yet another artists’ retreat. This one would be for six days up North somewhere along the picturesque California coast. It is our first separation since France and the poison oak episode, from which, as a man, I quite naturally learned absolutely nothing. For indeed, as her recent departure approached, I once again began entertaining fantasies of what willing females were out there and how I could go about getting me one of those safe, yet exotic “temps” to satisfy my middle-aged cravings for just one more lap around the fast lane.
On the morning she left, literally within minutes of her car pulling out of the driveway, I was conducting my bathroom ablutions when I discovered a hemorrhoid forming where hemorrhoids usually form. In almost fifty-two years of life on this planet, I had never before experienced the joys of such an event. Hemorrhoids, hmmm, you can just imagine my exaltation.
Within hours, it was bigger than Rhode Island and is now roughly the size of Delaware. Surveyors suggest that if this trend continues, it will soon be large enough to qualify for U.N. aid as a third world country.
Needless to say, all thoughts of dusting off my old, white, John Travolta Disco suit and going dancing tonight have vanished. What’s your bet that this hemorrhoid from Hell won’t be gone until long after Carly comes back home? The only saving grace to this whole story of my man-eating hemorrhoid is that its screenplay may soon become another chilling Johnny Depp movie that will premiere next summer in Cannes.