by Peter Gault
“Loneliness! Fuck!” I confessed. “It’s destroying my mind. I need an army of women to fill the gap Elizabeth left, and I can’t find one. The Spirit of Loneliness is chewing on my testicles. My balls feel like bubble gum.”
“What about Kim?”
“Kim couldn’t come close to comprehending the complicated workings of my brain,” I said magnificently. “And I hear she has a boyfriend out of town.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Barb with superior female wisdom. “She wants you. A fling might do you good.”
“To tell you the truth, I often lie in bed fantasizing aboug her interesting little ass. She brags about being a virgin. I like the way virgins yell and scream in pain when you make love to them, as if your penis is ten inches long.”
“Believe me,” said Barb. “That virginity trip is bullshit.”
“She’ll probably giggle through the whole thing, which will kill both my concentration and my confidence.”
“It’ll be a break from masturbating.”
“Masturbation keeps me in practice,” I explained. “As my father always says, use it or lose it.”
“You were well brought up,” said Barb.
Barb was a cure for misogyny. Loneliness reduced many a man to a woman-hater, but my friendship with Barb made it impossible to project internal feelings of cynicism on womankind. She had a cheerful confidence that mystified and fascinated me. Her support system was blighted by a bizarre history of bereavement, from a mother’s deathly pirouette into a dry swimming pool to a father who butchered himself with his own squash racket, yet there was nothing maudlin or self-pitying in her attitude towards life. Her heroic courage made me feel ashamed. I was forced to swallow my bitterness, not shoot it at extraneous targets or innocent bystanders.
“I’m tired of myself,” I said quietly. “For the first time in my life, I’m tired of myself. I’m sick of my silly little middle-class traumas, agonizing over the fact that I haven’t been laid for two months, suffering because I haven’t got a woman around to tell me I’m wonderful.” I shouted with theatrical exaggeration, “Do you hear that, World? Ken Harrison hasn’t been laid for two months! Shut down the factories! Board up the classrooms! Sound the alarm! Someone fuck Ken Harrison before his burning ego consumes the universe!”
I lowered my voice. “It boggles my mind to think that some people have it even worse than me, such as cripples and rape victims and mongoloids and amputees and drug freaks and starving Biafrans and eunuchs and hospital-ridden cancer patients and fat people with glandular problems. What right have I to complain? What is there for me to bitch about? I’m not in the Vietnam War dodging snipers in the jungle. I eat well, brush my teeth twice a day, lie in the sun and read, buy dirty magazines, and beat off. I have a healthy body and an alert mind. I have more choices in life than most people. Why don’t I feel good? We arts students glorify depression. I think depression is petty and bourgeois. It’s boring and pretentious, as if I’m suffering for the good of humanity. The truth of the matter is I’m sulking. I’m sulking because I can’t always have my own way. I’m a spoiled brat!”
“You’re being unfair to yourself,” said Barb. “You’re going through changes for the better.”
“Let’s not talk about me,” I said. “I’m tired of the subject. Let’s talk about you. How’s it going with your boyfriend? What’s his name again? It sounds like Anus.”
“Hannes.”
“What is he, Greek?”
“Estonian,” said Barb. “I think it’s a beautiful name. His sister is called Annaliisa.”
“Anal Ingus? I’d like to meet her. Must be an interesting country, Estonia.”
“It’s Annaliisa, not Anal Ingus.”
It was Phuc not Fuck, Sterm not Sperm. Annaliisa not Anal Ingus.
Barb told me that her friends were deserting her because she had a boyfriend. They rarely phoned and when they did phone it was a one-way conversation. They talked about what they saw and who they’d met without bothering to inquire into Barb’s life. It was as if a single person, by her very nature, was more alive than someone with a mate. It was as if couples were necessarily dull and uninteresting. It was as if the only things that occupied her mind were domestic chores and sexual fidelity.
“We single people are self-obsessed bastards,” I said.
“I hate being thought of as having settled down,” said Barb, “just because I’ve met a man who I like to be with. I still like to go to a bar, stay up late, get drunk, swear. I’m a bohemian at heart. I enjoy roaming around discussing art, being spontaneous, and doing something different every day.”
“I solemnly swear never to desert you because you have a boyfriend.”
“I blame it on suburbia,” said Barb. “It’s a suburban stereotype, this crap about being wild and having fun when you’re single, then getting a man and settling down to routine and monotony. I’m expected to cut off the world and focus my attention on my man and my career. No fuckin’ way!”
“Fuck suburbia!” I exclaimed excitedly. Barb and I had a common enemy: suburbia. This private war gave us a feeling of camaraderie. We had great fun saying filthy, obscene things about “suburban people.” We blamed everything on suburbia.
“Fuck ’em all,” she said. We both suffered ostracism in one sphere or another; yet we were united in our friendship.
“Sometimes you remind me of my mother,” I said. “It’s the way you pronounce ‘Fuck.’”
“I like our friendship. You make me feel good.”
“I love you Barb, in a friendly kind of way.”
Barb veered to the left and headed home alone. I accelerated my pace, sprinting the final stretch to the athletic center. There was a solitary tree on an island in the parking lot directly outside the front doors which I used for my ritualistic baldness treatment. I stood on my head, maintained my balance by placing my feet on the tree trunk, and let my pounding heart pump blood into the hair follicles. My head was swimming. I opened my dizzy eyes and the athletic center was upside down spinning around me. I got on my knees, raised my head about an inch off the ground, and massaged my scalp.
“Are you OK?” said a voice. I looked up and saw a woman staring at me with an expression of concern and bewilderment.
“Fine, thanks!” I said. “Just massaging. It helps prevent baldness.”
I carried my towel modestly in front of my crotch as I walked towards the showers. Suspended on the horizon of naked bodies was the most grotesque monstrosity I had ever seen. It was none other than Steve Lawson’s big, fleshy, uncircumcised penis, dangling halfway to his knees like the snout of a bloated anteater. Lawson was obviously proud of the awesome weapon between his legs because he danced around the change room flinging it rudely in people’s faces. Someone was drying his toes, innocently minding his own business. Lawson thumped the knob of his giant penis on the back of the guy’s head a couple of times and exploded with laughter. If he had done that to me, I’d have bitten his cock off.
“Is that thing ever ugly!” I said disgustedly to Lawson as I marched past him into the showers. He didn’t have a chance to get in the last word. It probably took him a couple of seconds to realize what “thing” I was referring to.
My penis has a distinctly Anglo-Saxon appearance with a circumcised crown and handsome contours. It is cleancut and respectable. Admittedly it’s not the biggest organ on the face of the earth, but it’s efficient and reliable. Elizabeth once referred to it as cute. I’m not sure I like that particular adjective—too harmless, not menacing enough. At least you could depend on my erection. I was shocked if I couldn’t get it up after the third time.
“Men tend to be highly critical of their own penises,” I whispered to myself perceptively.
The person at the shower-head across from me had a penis that stuck out in a crowd. He had a ghostly frame, knobby knees, anemic skin, toothpick arms, but swaying between his skinny legs was a limp edifice of gigantic proportions. It was a foot long, curving up at t
he end like a ski jump and swerving to the right. He could have used it to kick field goals. I recognized the owner. It belonged to Chris, which made me fearful for Henry. Henry couldn’t take a tree trunk like that up his ass. It would rupture his sphincter muscle. I placed the towel on my crotch and dried my balls distractedly all the way to my locker.
In my room I prepared to stage the seduction scene on Kim. A run and a shower made me fell sexy. I wore baggy sweat pants, no underwear, and no shirt. I held a bottle of wine in one hand and a corkscrew in the other as I listened at the door for the hall to be silent. My head popped out, then the rest of my body. I heard a noise and jumped back into the room. It was a false alarm, Chuck’s dog wagging his tail against a garbage bin in the next room. I tiptoed down the hall, heart pounding, flew up the stairs and stopped at the landing outside Kim’s door. I peeked under the door and noticed the light was on and a clock radio was playing. I heard the slow tapping of a typewriter.
A stampede was approaching. I ducked into the women’s room and listened to six or seven, perhaps more, female voices charging past, all talking at once. The coast was clear. I slipped out and wasted no time knocking on Kim’s door. It opened. Kim flashed a breast as she was doing up her housecoat.
“It’s your bisexual neighbor,” I said, checking to see that she was alone. “I though you could use a break.”
She giggled, noticed my bottle of wine, and giggled again. I let myself in and shut the door. There were posters of puppy dogs and pussy cats on the wall which was depressingly indicative of Kim’s preadolescent aesthetic maturity. It was almost enough to make me leave, but the crucifix accentuating the cleft between her breasts enraptured me in a spiritual trance. I pushed the face of the desk light against the wall, darkening the room, and poured a couple of glasses of wine.
“Thank the Lord for what you are about to receive,” I said, handing her a glass of wine and sitting beside her on the bed.
By an unfortunate coincidence, Kim was writing a philosophy essay on the existence of God. Page four bent backwards out of the typewriter. Kim swooned and glowed in a mood of passionate religious ecstasy. Suddenly, spitting with disgust, she launched into a graphic description of aborted babies in garbage cans, which she had seen in a propaganda film by something like the Christian Fellowship Society. She denounced premarital sex as responsible for the degeneration of traditional value systems and bragged that she had the only intact hymen on campus. With my luck, her hymen was probably four inches thick and as impenetrable as granite. I decided to monopolize the bottle of wine, get drunk, not even try to seduce her. She was becoming so excited about God that I started to get nervous. She was ranting about the throbbing power of his paternal love, feeling his omnipotent presence entering her, probing her, etc., etc. When I noticed her hand inside her robe caressing her crotch, I was thoroughly frightened. She lunged at me, knocked the glass out of my hand, pulled me on top of her, and began thrusting up and down with her pelvis.
After a momentary fit of disorientation, I regained my composure and assimilated the rhythm of her heaving groin. I opened her housecoat. She was naked and I was wearing thin cotton sweat pants which were soft against my erection. Her legs were spread as wide as they could go, one foot dangling over the side of the bed. I kissed and licked all the way to her clitoris. My face was between her legs. The lower I went, the more excited she became, until I was rocking back and forth from one hole to the next with my tongue, and she was tearing and scratching at the mattress with her deadly talons. She jumped away when I poked at her hymen with my finger, but gave various squawks of encouragement every time I poked her in the other hole.
“Sodomize me,” she said sweetly, slipping her arms out of the housecoat and rolling onto her stomach. I was amazed she knew what the word “sodomize” meant. She thought that since I was bisexual, I was expert at this form of sexual expression, when she was obviously the more experienced partner. I was a virgin at anal intercourse.
Kim was adamant about having me enter by the “back door” and responded angrily when I tried to surreptitiously penetrate her vagina because, as she explained, she was “saving herself for marriage”. The back door was very wet and, after a minimal amount of pushing, I was inside her. Her face was pressed into the pillow, muttering muffled obscenities: “Ass Hole!” “Harder!” “Fuck!” “God!” “Fuck me God!” My hand was under her, twiddling her clitoris, and I was moving in and out. I admit that I liked it, loved it. It felt terrific. The scene was incredibly erotic, naughty and irreverent; being associated with God was profoundly complimentary. Then the phone screamed as loudly as a fire alarm, interrupting our concentration. It was the loudest ring I had ever heard.
“Excuse me,” she said, edging away.
“You’re not going to answer it, are you?” I asked.
“I have to. It might be my mother. She’ll be mad if she thinks I’m out partying this late.”
“Does she mind you getting fucked up the ass?” I asked.
It wasn’t her mother. It was who I was afraid it was, her boyfriend, “Honeybum.” That was what they called each other, “Honeybum.” How appropriate! Kim whispered on the phone, giggling, and playing with my limp penis. Apparently, Homeybum was drunk and frisky, making the most outrageously lewd comments imaginable. Kim reproached him sternly, threatened to hang up, giggled, and groaned with lust. Homeybum was uncontrollable. I stared at the puppy dogs and pussy cats. I pretended that I wasn’t paying attention.
“Got to go, Honeybum. Classes tomorrow.”
Giggle giggle.
“I love you too.”
Giggle giggle.
Click!
Kim was dying to tell me everything about Honeybum. She discussed Honeybum with the same starry-eyed devotion that she discussed God. When Honeybum got an erection, Kim explained, he would hold it vertical under the blankets and transform the entire bed into an Egyptian pyramid. His penis was so huge that after making love she couldn’t sit down for a week. But it was worth it! “It hurt good,” she said. Honeybum had an indomitable sex drive, excellent technique, and uncanny staying power. He could make love three days straight without ejaculating.
Why do women love to talk about the outstanding sexual performance of their last boyfriend or, as in Kim’s case, their present boyfriend? As if his sexuality was interesting by way of contrast to mine. Needless to say, I felt intimidated, feeble, inferior. The conversation seemed improper. I wished we were debating the existence of God.
She rolled onto her stomach, spread her buttocks with her hands, and invited me in the back door. I went at her a second time, hurriedly, worried that another phone call would shatter my passion. I couldn’t figure out if it was impolite to come inside her. In fear of inducing an enema, I withdrew before orgasm, ejaculating all the way to her scalp. I collapsed on top of her, spent and drifting on the edge of sleep. She slipped out from under me. Bang! I looked up, startled. She was slamming things, drawers, the closet door, whacking the chair into the desk.
“Anything wrong?” I said, feeling guilty for almost falling asleep.
“Ten seconds,” she said, banging another drawer shut.
“Ten seconds?” I asked.
“Why did you pull out?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Ten more seconds and I could have come,” she said, kicking the tin garbage can into the corner, producing a loud clang. “Now I’m frustrated.”
“Sorry,” I said sheepishly. It interested me that she could get an orgasm from anal intercourse. “I was afraid the phone would ring. We can do it again if you want.”
“Don’t do me any favors,” she said, thumping a couple of library books on the desk and sitting down to write her philosophy essay on the existence of God.
“Do you want to sleep together?” I asked.
“I can’t sleep when I’m like this,” she said. “Besides, I don’t mind having sex with someone I don’t love, but I won’t sleep with him. I’m religious, you know. I fee
l you have to draw the line at a certain point.”
“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t understand the way she thought; I assumed it was because she was logical. I could never follow a logical mind, the mind of an “A” student. For me, it would take a lot more love to let someone give it to me up the bum than to sleep with me.
She reluctantly let me kiss her good night on the cheek. I put my ear to the door and waited for the coast to clear before ducking out and tiptoeing downstairs to my room, holding the corkscrew in my hand like a mangled penis.
Now that I had experienced anal intercourse, I felt like a man of higher knowledge, full of dark wisdom, spiritually uplifted. I was calmly exuberant, like a reborn Christian at a Jesus freaks’ meeting. I danced around the room happily, cleaning, dusting, hanging up clothing. I put a fresh snot-rag on my desk. I liked to pick my nose while I did homework and deposit it on a piece of toilet paper, which I called my snot-rag. I crawled into bed, stretched, and squirmed comfortably. I had the bed to myself and appreciated the luxury of farting under the covers without complaint from a female companion. Sleep came easily.
Sleep came, and with it a dream, an epic, a mythological kind of dream that leaped over great distances and great chunks of time. Phil and I were at my mother’s place preparing for a Herculean journey to Hades and back. I stopped in the doorway of the bathroom and watched my mother having a pee, an artist in action. I noticed she had a tiny penis.
“Mom,” I said. “You have a penis.”
“Women have a tiny penis and a hole,” my mother said, standing up and showing me that it was true.
I went out to the front porch and Phil directed my attention to a young boy shyly asking a little girl for a kiss. It was cute. We laughed. My cap was on the step, but someone had urinated on it which was irritating because it meant I couldn’t bring it with me. We walked to the bus stop. It was a dry, clear summer day. As I climbed onto the bus, I realized I wasn’t wearing any shoes.