Rules of the Game

by Neil Strauss

  She sends me links to Taoist and Tantric Websites with information about sexual gurus like Mantak Chia, Stephen Chang, and Alice Bunker Stockham. From Stockham’s research, I learn a new phrase: “coitus reservatus”—sex without ejaculation. From Mantak Chia, I learn that it’s possible to have an orgasm without actually ejaculating. And from Stephen Chang, I learn the deer exercise, which is based on ancient Taoist monks’ observations of the potent, long-living deer, specifically the way it wiggles its tail to exercise its butt muscles. The ritual is supposed to spread semen from the prostate to other parts of the body. I need to do this immediately.

  I sit on the toilet with my laptop computer open at my feet and follow the directions, rubbing my hands together to generate heat, then cupping my balls. I place my other hand just below my navel and move it in slow circles. Then I switch positions and repeat. For some reason, I can’t imagine a deer doing this.

  For part two of the exercise, I tighten my butt muscles, imagining air being drawn up my rectum, and hold it. Then I relax and repeat. It is sort of like doing butt push-ups.

  The pain persists, but now it’s mingled with embarrassment. I’d rather get caught masturbating than doing butt push-ups.

  Before going to sleep, I call Kimberly and attempt Mantak Chia’s method of orgasm without ejaculation, hoping it will provide some relief.

  When she pulls a dildo out of her bedside table and narrates its next moves in graphic detail, I can’t take it anymore. I press on my perineum, tighten my PC muscle, and do a butt push-up. It just barely holds back the flood. However, I don’t have a dry orgasm, either.

  “Oh my God, I just came so hard, baby,” Kimberly gasps. “Did you come?”

  “I can’t yet.” All I’ve done is make the pain worse. Why do I keep doing this to myself?

  There is silence on the other end. It is not a comfortable silence.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I decide. “When I see you in New York in four days, I’ll really come. I think it would be amazing to end this experiment with you.”

  “But what about the thirty days?” she asks, more relieved than concerned.

  Fuck the thirty days. I am willing to fail this experiment for what may be love. In fact, any excuse to end it will suffice.

  THE EIGHTH DAY

  As I attempt another of Crystal’s ridiculous exercises—the straw meditation, which involves imagining the orgasmic energy being sucked up my spine and into my head—I remember the night I learned to masturbate.

  I was at overnight camp in Wisconsin, and for some reason I will never comprehend, the two cool kids in my cabin decided to show everyone how to beat off.

  I lay in my top bunk bed and watched as Alan snuck into the counselor’s area and returned with a red can of Gillette shaving foam. He stood in the center of the room in his blue camp shirt and dirty white briefs, as if performing theater in the round, and addressed the nine other pubescent boys of the Axeman 2 cabin.

  “Just squirt some into your palm. Then you gotta move your hand like this.” He stuffed his fist into his underpants and began the demonstration. His loyal follower, Matt, hopped off his bunk bed, squished out some shaving cream, and joined him.

  We were too young to know that masturbation was supposed to be a private act, its revelation to peers punishable by mockery and ostracism. In my pre-sexual brain, it was just another group activity, like archery or orienteering.

  Hank, sickly and effeminate, rolled out of bed and distributed dollops of shaving cream to everyone else in the cabin. We all got to work.

  The sight, in retrospect, was ridiculous. People often wish to be innocent again, but there is no such thing as innocence. Only ignorance. And the ignorant are not blissful; they are the butt of a joke they’re not even aware of.

  I didn’t come, or even feel much pleasure. I don’t remember if anyone else came, either, but, according to Alan, that was the goal. It was a race and, after camp ended, Hank won: He wrote me a letter, excited because he’d masturbated and “a few drops of come even came out.”

  Almost a year later, lying in bed at home, I began pulling at myself one night. I thought of a story a friend had told about going to the movies with a girl from school and getting a hand job. I extracted every detail from him: I’d never kissed a girl before, or even been within kissing range.

  As I touched myself that night, I imagined it was me getting that hand job in the movie theater. Soon, pressure begin to build and I seemed to be separating from reality. My breath caught in my throat, my body was seized by what felt like rigor mortis, and then it happened. A small pool dribbled out of the tip. I reached over my head and turned on the reading lamp next to my bed, careful not to mess it up. Then I conducted an examination. Because of the way Hank had described his come, I thought it would be clear, like raindrops. But instead it was a little viscous puddle with swirls of cloudy white and a few transparent patches.

  As I write this, I realize for the first time why my sexual fantasy is fooling around in public places like clubs, theaters, and parties, where no one can see what’s going on, since that’s the image to which I had my first orgasm.

  “You have to check this out,” I told my nine-year-old brother the next day. “Follow me.”

  He padded into the bathroom behind me. I stood on his toilet, dropped my shorts, and thrust my hips out so that when I came, it would dribble into the sink and not make a mess. Then I got to work.

  Outside of sweat and tears, I’d never known my body to make a product that wasn’t waste. I was proud. I was an adult now.

  THE NINTH DAY

  I wake up next to Gina. She’d stopped by after bartending the night before for a quickie. But it was 3:00 a.m., and in addition to being tired, I was desireless. She took it personally.

  “You’re over this, aren’t you?” she asks in the morning.

  “What do you mean?” I protest, though I know full well what she means. In addition to my new effort to limit my desire, ever since I’d started talking to Kimberly, I’d grown more distant. “Is this because I didn’t have sex with you? In twenty-one days, everything will be back to normal.”

  “It’s not that. I love you, but I have to love myself enough to realize that you don’t want this.”

  Above my bed, there’s a small painting she made for me in happier times. She takes it off the wall and lays it in her lap. I watch her, sitting upright in the bed, her hands shaking as she struggles to remove the backing on the frame. The latches holding it in are too small and stubborn for her trembling hand.

  She eventually clicks them open and pulls off the back of the frame. Instead of removing the painting, she takes the backing, pinches the black paper on the inside, and tears it off. Beneath, there is a hidden note she’d evidently written when she first gave me the present. I never even knew it was there.

  She throws the torn backing onto my chest, then walks out of the house. I pick it up and read:

  “You will be a great husband one day when you are ready and find the one. You will be an amazing father to cute intelligent baby Neils. You are going to hurt me. But I will always love you.”

  My face begins to swell, my eyes and nose feel warm and flushed, and suddenly tears begin leaking out.

  I’m going to miss her. And I will always respect her: the picture frame gambit was the work of a true breakup artist.

  THE TENTH DAY

  Tomorrow, I’m finally going to see Kimberly. As my other relationships have fallen apart, she has remained loyal. I feel like we’ve met before, slept together before, pushed each other around in grocery carts before. There are moments when I actually think I love her, but I know it’s just a combination of attraction, obsession, and curiosity. I’m sure she feels the same way about me.

  That is, until she calls to tell me she has to take a last-minute job as a production assistant in Miami and won’t be able to meet in New York.

  “I don’t have a choice,” she says. There is a hostile, self-defensive tone to her voi
ce that I’ve never heard before. “I really need the money. I have like thirteen dollars in the bank right now.”

  I’m crushed. I’ve been so fixated on meeting Kimberly in New York that I can’t imagine being there without her. I start to tell her that.

  “Don’t,” she snaps. “There’s nothing I can do.”

  “I’m not upset,” I say, upset. “This is just really unexpected. But it’s not the end of the world. Maybe I can visit you in Miami after New York.”

  “I may have to disappear for a few days,” she says, her anger melting into tears. “I just need to think about us.”

  The more we talk, the more emotional she gets. The more emotional she gets, the more she withdraws. “So you’re not going to meet me in New York and you can’t make a plan for Miami?” I feel like she’s put a cigarette out in my heart. “I need to know that I’m going to see you.”

  “You’re making me cry.” She’s yelling at me now. I’m dealing with emotions; my logic is useless, my anger counterproductive. All that’s left is frustration, paranoia, and a sickness in every cell in my body that was anticipating the end of the 30 Day Experiment tomorrow and the beginning of a fairy-tale romance.

  “If you have to disappear,” I press, “then first give me a time when I can see you, so I have something to look forward to. Otherwise, this has all just been a fantasy relationship.”

  “A fantasy relationship?” Evidently, I’ve said the wrong thing again. “I wanted to see you so badly and you know that. I wanted to be your girlfriend.” She stops sobbing, then hits me where I’m weakest. “Don’t blame this on me. You’re the one who’s impotent on the phone.”

  On a more positive note, after we hang up and I collapse onto the floor of my bedroom, I realize something: My balls haven’t ached all day. I seem to have made it through the pain period.

  THE ELEVENTH DAY

  The next afternoon, I’m in a cab to LAX to take a plane to New York. At the same time, Kimberly is in a cab to JFK to take a plane to Miami. Neither of us has slept. We spent the night arguing, showing each other our worst sides. And now we are texting each other the ugliest good-bye in the world: “Have a nice life.”

  On the plane, I’m a wreck. Sleepless, unshaven, blanched, I hold my head in my hands the whole ride and replay the conversation in my mind, regretting all the stupid things I said and wondering if Kimberly sabotaged the relationship on purpose. Perhaps she’s scared to meet, worried that either she’ll disappoint me or I’ll let her down. Perhaps she never planned to meet in the first place because she has a boyfriend in Miami or is a lunatic telephone stalker or has a fake MySpace profile and actually looks like a linebacker.

  None of these possibilities alleviates the heartbreak. I didn’t know I could feel this way about someone I’ve never met.

  The empty bed fills my hotel room like an accusation. I’d spent so many nights imagining lying here with Kimberly, seeing each other naked for the first time, acting out all our phone fantasies, taking a candlelit bath together, and then getting under the covers and talking until we fell asleep in each other’s arms. I feel like a fool for trusting her, falling for her, spending all those hours on the phone building a future with her that she knew would never exist. At the same time, I wonder how much my infatuation with her was a result of transference from the 30 Day Experiment: replacing one addiction with another.

  I decide to go to her favorite lounge in the city, Amalia, to search for someone just like her. Instead, I find Lucy, a young, thick Brazilian girl with a lisp, a too-tight black dress, and no interest in 60’s garage-rock or grocery carts.

  She follows me around Amalia, touching me at every opportunity. So I tell her, not really caring whether she accepts or rejects me, “We should take one of these girls home with us tonight.”

  It is presumptuous and I prepare for her to snap back, “Who says I’m going home with you?”

  But instead, she snaps back, “We should take, like, five of them home.”

  “Who’s your favorite?”

  She points to a tall, frail girl with pale skin, long auburn hair, and a big, toothy smile.

  Two hours later, my hotel bed is full. Lucy takes my computer and plays a Shakira video online. Then she rises and lisps along in perfect harmony while working her hips in slow circles. The tall girl, an off-Broadway actress named Mary, lies in bed on her stomach and watches. By the end of the dance, she’s on her back and we’re making out.

  She gets the chills every time I kiss and bite her neck, each shiver shaking off a little more inhibition, until she tells me, “I want to see your cock.”

  I’m taken aback by her sudden boldness. It seems less like she’s turned on and more like she’s decided to play a role.

  “Get naked,” she orders. “I want to see it.”

  I play along, and within seconds I’m completely nude. They’re both still wearing their dresses. Without clothes or even actual desire, I feel awkward. I miss Kimberly.

  “I want to watch you fuck Lucy’s tits.”

  Having something to do helps. Lucy joins us on the bed and removes her shirt. I kneel over her, put my dick between her breasts, squeeze them around me, and start sliding up and down. It is as unsexy as it sounds.

  “I like watching you fuck her tits. I want to see you come all over her.”

  On that command, I lose what little arousal I was able to muster.

  “There’s something I should tell you,” I begin.

  They both tense, assuming the worst.

  “No, it’s not that.”

  After I explain the 30 Day Experiment, we start fooling around again. But it’s not the same. Mary eventually gathers her clothes and leaves, and Lucy falls asleep while I’m going down on her.

  It is the worst threesome ever and I don’t care. I am beyond desire. But I am not beyond loneliness.

  When I reach over to the nightstand to check my phone, I notice a text message from Kimberly. My heart clenches. I feel excitement, anxiety, curiosity, fear, and, when I see the message—“Are you phonable?”—relief.

  Careful not to wake Lucy, who’s lying naked and spread-eagled over the sheets, I slip into jeans and a T-shirt and tiptoe into the hallway. There’s a window ledge next to the bank of elevators, and I perch there and call Kimberly.

  “Hey,” she says. I adore her voice. It is the sound of gravity sucking me into her world. I never thought I’d hear it again.

  “I’m glad you texted.” I want to tell her that I wish she were here, but I know it will upset her. “I’m sorry for overreacting. I just had my heart set on seeing you.”

  “I did, too. I really thought we would be together, like, really be together. But last night changed things. I saw another side of you.”

  “Yeah, I understand. I think the relationship went as far as it could go on the phone, until there was nowhere to go but down.”

  We spend the next hour trying to talk things back to the way they used to be. Eventually, we succeed. “I wish I could be with you right now,” she whispers.

  Minutes later, I’m squeezing myself through my jeans. “I’m imagining you fucking my face,” she is saying. “You’re just grabing my head and thrusting into my mouth, as hard as you can. And you’re reaching down my back and putting a finger inside.”

  I’m not sure if this is even physically possible, but it’s making me feel like I’m thirteen again and stealing my father’s copies of Penthouse to read the letters. I undo the button of my jeans and reach into my pants.

  I imagine the night as it should have happened. She is here, in my hotel room, pale body against the crumpled sheets, lips swollen and chin red from endless kisses, thighs wet from …

  I hear an elevator whirring, people laughing. I don’t stop. I’m half-exposed. The pressure is building, the body is separating. Wet from … This is the night I was supposed to end it all, the night of the toothpaste and the hammer. Thighs wet from . . .

  I lower myself into her. I could stop. I should stop.
I can’t stop. She’s coming. I’m coming.

  I watch it release. It doesn’t fly everywhere the way I expected and, on some level, hoped. It just flows out, into a giant pool, like the first time I ever came—except this time, instead of fantasizing about a public place, I’m actually in one.

  An immense wave of relief spreads through every nerve ending, my eyes fill with tears of joy, and white fireworks explode lightly in my head.

  “Did you come?” she asks.

  “Yes.” I already feel guilty: less for masturbating than for not even making it halfway through the 30 Day Experiment.

  “I can’t believe it took me so long to get you to do that.” She pauses and I hear her suck in air. She’s having an after-phone-sex cigarette. “You were giving me a complex. I thought: I’m no good. I’m not turning this man on, and he’s giving me all these orgasms.”

  I suppose she needed the closure. And so did I. We basically had an entire relationship over the phone: we met, fell for each other, dated, had sex, fought, and broke up without even meeting. Tonight was just makeup sex.

  It is clear that we will never meet. Like the idea that I could actually go thirty days without an orgasm, the relationship was just a pipe dream.

  Before I go to sleep, I call Crystal in Los Angeles. She’s handling the experiment just fine: no pain, no anxiety, no attraction to cartoon characters. But she’s of a different gender, the one more likely to hurt after the orgasm than before.

  I tell her about the benefits of the Experiment: I’ve been less tired during the day, possibly attracted more women, and definitely saved on Kleenex. Then I tell her about the downside: I failed. As she tries to console me, I realize that I actually set myself up to fail. I went on a diet, then hung out at Baskin-Robbins every day.

  The Buddhists are right. Desire is my pilot. Most of each day is spent giving in to it. When I’m not fucking, I’m chasing. When I’m not chasing, I’m fantasizing. I have had sex with tens of thousands of women in my mind. And now that the Experiment is over, they will be back. All of them. A parade of innocents. The college girl swinging her hips through the supermarket aisles. The secretary posing at the crosswalk as I drive past. The party girl making out in the hot tub on the reality show. The girls who have gone wild. Cartman’s mom. Kimberly. If I can’t have them in real life, I will have them in my imagination.