by Peter Gault
“I didn’t have a single beer today, so I can get drunk tonight,” Henry joked. He was concerned about becoming a first degree alcoholic.
“I didn’t drink last Tuesday. It’s Friday, so it’s still all right for me to get drunk tonight too,” I said. “I’m a firm believer that you should stay sober one night a week.”
There was an awkward silence in which it was apparent that he wanted to ask me something. “Can I talk to you privately?” said Henry.
“She’s one of us,” I said. “She can keep a secret.” I turned to the redhead, “Henry loves secrets.”
Henry looked around shyly, nervous about being overheard.
“This girl and I are going to have wild sex. Do you have any of those things?”
“What things?” I asked.
“You know!”
“Condoms?”
“Right.”
“How many?” I had a supply of condoms in my knapsack.
“Two,” said Henry quickly. He knew exactly how many he needed.
“I may be needing some myself tonight,” I said, glancing furtively at the redhead.
The redhead bought the next round of beer which was a good sign. It meant I wasn’t boring her with my relentless and impassioned prattle. I had come out of a silent stage where I was breathing in and had moved into a talking stage where I was breathing out. I couldn’t shut up. I enjoyed hearing my own voice. I fascinated myself. She found me amusing too, an off-beat artsie, an adventurous, irreverent, lecherous drama student. Drama students were known to be erratic, promiscuous, and sexually unconventional. The average drama student was in love with five women and three men at once and sleeping with most of them.
She was marriage-oriented. Her ambitions were humble; find a reliable income and a reliable husband. She wanted to be surrounded by a family which she could love and support. She had no desire to lead revolutions, climb mountains, or take the art world by storm. I was far too egotistical to be a reliable husband with a reliable income. I needed a woman as strong and egotistical as myself, like the women I was brought up with. My mother and sisters weren’t exactly helpless cupcakes. I longed for a relationship with double power, two energy forces working together.
“The waitresses call you the Sex King,” she said.
“Come with me to the enchanted Sex Palace,” I answered.
We left Ring Stadium holding hands. Holding hands! What a luxury! I had forgotten how to hold hands. I knew how to have oral sex, anal sex, and sex missionary style. I even knew what to do with two women in my bed at once. But I hadn’t held a woman’s hand for a thousand years, and it was the most inspiring, sensual, emotionally rejuvenating thing I had ever experienced. It made me feel like barking, which I did. Chuck’s dog responded enthusiastically as we passed his door.
“I’m so good-looking without a beard that I intimidate women,” I explained to a curly-haired blonde sitting at an easel. I posed naked on a double bed. “A beard tones down my striking good looks and makes me more approachable.”
“An interesting theory,” said the curly-haired blonde. She was sketching me vigorously, ferociously, as if I was about to get up and run away before she finished. Male models were difficult to come by, especially ones that gave such a specialized service as myself. Her hands were covered with charcoal.
I got off the bed and walked behind her. She didn’t stop sketching or break her concentration until I had studied the drawing a few minutes. She was shading, giving me depth, playing with my expression. It wasn’t bad, but it lacked humanness. It looked like a caricature of a murderer or a rapist. She was more adept at drawing women. She drew women with a poetic compassion, probably because she was more familiar with the female body and had worked more with female models.
“You drew my penis too small.” I reached down her top and lightly caressed her breast. My penis swelled. “Look! That’s its real size.”
“It’s an imaginative interpretation of reality,” she said.
“Next time, imagine it bigger, not smaller. I’m going to have to eat more bananas. They cause your penis to enlarge.”
“Where do you get these theories?” she asked.
“I don’t know if I read them somewhere or if I make them up. I think my mother told me that one.”
“I prefer to draw a woman’s body,” she said. “Don’t be offended. You’ve got an excellent build for a man, muscular and trim, but I find a woman’s body flows easier. The lines are subtle and gentle. Artistically speaking, women have superior bodies.”
“You just haven’t got the feel of the male body yet,” I said. “The physique of a man is easily as beautiful as a woman’s. Think of Michelangelo’s ‘David,’ the ripples of muscle on the stomach, the fullness of the chest, arms, and legs, but nothing that’s crudely bulky. Your drawing has technical accuracy, but you don’t capture the spirit of me because there’s no imagination in it. I look stilted, oppressive, cruel. You have to learn to be me, a man, and love me, before you can project me onto a sketch pad or a canvas. It’ll make you a better artist and a better lover.”
“I’ll try,” she said suggestively, clutching my testicles with a charcoal-covered hand. She unbuttoned her top with her other hand.
“Leave your clothes on,” I said, doing up her buttons again. “Stay dressed and I’ll stay naked. Be conscious of my body only. Make your breasts disappear, grow a penis and testicles. Become me.”
“How?” she said.
“It’s an imaginative interpretation of reality,” I said. “Think penis. Meditate on the word. Repeat it in your mind, over and over again. Penis, Penis, Penis.”
Sitting at her easel, she was at the perfect height to take me into her mouth. Her head bobbed up and down with an unbroken, fluid rhythm. Her concentration was focused on the mantra. She was trying to become a towering, quivering erection. Usually she sucked with such force it felt like she was going to bite off my knob, chew it, and spit it out. This time I didn’t have to pull away in pain. Yet she wasn’t afraid to make her presence felt. She knew what I wanted, how I wanted it, where I wanted it, why I wanted it. It was an invasion of my senses, my consciousness, and I surrendered to it with relish. I was drunk with sensitivity. I was her mouth, erect nipples, a swelling wet crotch. We were conscious of each other’s body, of our own body, of a burning sensation inside, of everything burning and rising inside.
She swallowed my sperm, but there was that bit which spilled out the corner of her mouth and rolled down her chin. I pulled her up and kissed her. She was as supple as butter. I was still hard. Her clothes slid off and dropped to her ankles. We shuffled to the bed.
The second course of sex was consumed with the appetite of a connoisseur, not in the brutish rush of a starved glutton. I was on my back, on my side, on my front, on my knees. Afterwards, sleep hit me like a huge army of ants, picking me up, distributing my weight, and carrying me away. I awoke briefly to discover the naked, curly-haired blonde sketching at the easel. The movement of her hand was not agitated or convulsive, but smooth and graceful. She was an out-of-the-ordinary kind of person, with an out-of-the-ordinary kind of beauty. I was deeply in love with everything about her. The veil dropped, the haze returned, and I drifted back to sleep.
“It’s been a drag the last fifteen years, all this anger and hatred between men and women,” I said to my professor of Women in Literature who had wavy brown hair and stood at the front of the class. Despite her athletic figure and large shoulders, she had an attractive, feminine appearance. “You don’t have to tell me it was necessary. I know that. But it’s not necessary any more. It’s time men and women started loving each other again. I’m ready.”
I sat in a sea of women, blissfully contented, my heart pumping happily. I felt confident and generous and charming and witty. Women gave me energy, brought me to life. I glowed. There were five males in the class of thirty. They came and went in a small flock, like a clump of grapes, nervous and uncomfortable. I frolicked with the women like a pupp
y dog on a spring day.
(After class the girls and I liked to meet at The Artsie Fartsie to gossip and drink tea. There were usually about eight women, and I positioned myself as close to the center as possible, and we would have a merry gab. Gossip is a weakness of mine. I never tire of hearing about who is sleeping with whom, and who is breaking up with whom, and who is cheating on whom. I could discuss sex and relationships for hours. The conversation inevitably ascended to a higher, intellectual level and inevitably descended again to a superficial gossipy level. It was an ungodly mistake to interfere with the natural flow. It was best to enjoy the ride.)
“This whole Margaret Atwood thing is getting a bit boring,” I said authoritatively, unable to resist an audience or an opportunity to open my mouth. “She hates men, hates women, hates fuckin’ pig Americans. Hate! Hate! Hate! Let’s sit around and have a good hate. She’s supposed to be profound because she perceives that life is empty and meaningless, and if you want to be profound too, you have to perceive the same thing. Then we can sit around and hate some more and feel smug and superior and laugh at the rotten unintellectual slobs who can’t see that life is a waste of time. If you say that life’s meaningless in your first book, why write the second one? So you can say the same thing? Can anyone deny that a positive loving force exists in people? Life’s only meaningless if you’re incapable of love, and someone who’s incapable of love can’t grow as an artist. Love is the source of an artist. An artist must be able to project love onto the world. It was Dostoevski who said that hell is the suffering of being unable to love.”
“I like Margaret Atwood,” said my curly-haired professor. “She expresses a phase in the development of women. She says a lot of things that a lot of women have been dying to say for a long time. You do tend to get an empty feeling at the end of her books, but some of her stuff is more cynical than others. What books of hers have you read?”
“None, to tell you the truth,” I said. The class laughed. “I read the first thirty pages of one of her books, but I forget which one. I have my most refreshing insights in a state of complete ignorance. I have lots of passionate theories on things I know absolutely nothing about. Information and facts cloud my intuition.”
The class was familiar with my unfounded opinions and theories on literature. They didn’t take them too seriously because it was obvious that I didn’t mean them too seriously. I dropped opinions as fast as I picked them up and had no qualms about making glaring contradictions from one day to the next. I was an actor, not a politician or a fastidious academic. I had opinions for the sake of drama, to be amusing or to shock. The professor appreciated my presence. My wild, flamboyant generalizations were sure to provoke heated class discussion. I had been exposed as a literary charlatan once before. I was in the middle of a sophisticated tirade about Dostoevski, proclaiming him to be the greatest writer who ever existed. Eventually it came out that the only thing of his I had read was a novella, The Double, back in my freshman year.
“It’s a vicarious release for me,” said one tiny, soft-spoken girl. “I purge my frustrations through Margaret Atwood. I feel wonderful afterwards.”
“Margaret Atwood is old already,” I said. “And an artist isn’t allowed to get old. It’s not the seventies anymore. The seventies were a long time ago. I have a premonition that we’re coming into the greatest decade of the century. Men and women are going to start getting together in the nineties, start understanding each other for the first time. It’ll be more exciting and more mature than the sixties. John Lennon was really a nineties man, and he died on the cross for sanity between the sexes. The World According to Garp, a novel by John Irving, is another harbinger of the nineties. They represent a new, positive force which is getting stronger and about to burst into prominence. When that happens, Margaret Atwood will be an anachronism.”
Although there were many Atwood supporters, everyone was enthusiastic about my optimistic prediction of the future. The majority of the class knew me from The Artsie Fartsie and had talked to me privately. They were willing to enjoy my ideas without casting themselves in the role of enemy or friend. They weren’t threatened by the bombastic presentation of my opinions. The professor flung back her wavy brown hair and smiled at me. I smiled back.
“I’ve never had an orgasm,” said my professor as she lay down on the rug of her office floor. Behind her head was a vast bookshelf, overstocked to the ceiling with cumbersome leather and hardbound books, shoved in at every angle. The curtains were closed, and the office had the perfect mixture of light and darkness.
“It doesn’t matter,” I reassured her. “You don’t get a medal for having an orgasm.”
There were two irate young men waiting impatiently outside the locked door of the office. They wanted to complain about bad marks they had received in Women in Literature, convinced that the professor had a prejudice against them because they were men. From my perspective, it was an unfounded accusation.
There was something exciting about making love in an office on the fourth floor, in the middle of the English department, with students waiting in the hall. She kept warning me to be quiet until I had penetrated her, and then I was warning her to be quiet. She coaxed me to go faster and harder. Her dress was pushed over her breasts and her panties circled one ankle. The frantic movement caused her head to thump against the bookshelf. I was worried that she would hurt her head and tried to get her to move away, but she wouldn’t budge. She had a powerful grip. She squeezed her arms around me and insisted that I do it harder and faster.
The thumping of her head was causing the whole bookshelf to waver and books began to shower down like a monsoon rainstorm. They bounced off my bare ass, hit the back of my legs, slammed to the floor beside my head. I was locked in her iron clasp, an unyielding bearhug. Books sailed through the air like the debris of a tornado. She jerked suddenly with a mighty force. There was a crack. I screamed. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales lay broken and exposed beside me. The bookshelf crashed above us, stopped by the desk which prevented us from getting squashed.
“I came!” whispered my professor to me in the back seat of the car as the two guys who were in the hallway drove us to the hospital. I had waited until we were both fully clothed before crawling through the wreckage and under the bookshelf and unlocking the office door.
“You sure love sex,” I whispered.
“It’s the greatest,” she said. “Except maybe for food.”
“Ya,” I said, without taking offense. “Food’s pretty good too.”
She had a minor concussion.
I was treated for three cracked ribs.
“I’ve had a broken heart, a broken ego, and three cracked ribs, and I still think the world is a great place to hang out,” I said to Barb who sat across from me at The Artsie Fartsie. “I provide a stud service for lonely women as my contribution to the human race.”
“What about yourself? Don’t you get lonely?” asked Barb.
“I’m a little in love with loneliness. Loneliness can be a real bitch, but she has a definite sexual appeal. She has wonderful breasts and long shapely legs that wrap around you.”
“Where is she now?”
“She’s inside me. She’s the woman inside. She’s not my enemy anymore. We work as a team. She helps me with women, guides me.”
“What’s her name, this woman inside you?”
“I don’t know …”
“Bullshit!” said Barb. “You know her name. It’s Elizabeth Baldwin.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “You remind me more of my mother every day.” I leaned forward. “Can you deny that Elizabeth is guiding me, teaching me? My life has gone straight up since the day she died. Things couldn’t be better for me. It’s not luck. It’s Elizabeth helping me. Yes, she’s the woman inside me.”
“It’s not love you feel for these women you run around with,” said Barb. “At least it’s not all love. It’s love mixed with guilt. It’s the guilt you feel about Elizabeth. You’ve projected t
hat guilt on all women. You’re exorcising your personal feelings of guilt on womankind. Nothing was your fault. Things just happened. You don’t have to feel guilty.”
“We have a debt to pay,” I said. “Men, I mean. Do you want to know a horrible secret? I’m glad Elizabeth is dead. I’m glad because I know no one else can have her. I couldn’t stand the thought of someone else having her. In a way, she’s all mine. I never had her to myself when she was alive.”
I awoke with a swollen bladder. I could have pissed out my ears like a lawn sprinkler. I could have submerged the town of Stockton in a polluted sea of urine. Pressure! I could explode. 8:00 a.m., said the digital clock, which was unusually early for me. I moved with painful slowness to the bathroom. There was the sound of an electric toothbrush. The door was locked. When I returned to the bedroom, I noticed the smell of smoke. A hole was burnt through the towel over the lampshade. The light had been left on. I turned it off, kissed Heather on the temple, between the eyes, on the end of her nose, and left. I peed against a tree on the way home.
“If I can’t have eternal love,” I decided aloud as I relieved myself with immense pleasure, “I’ll settle for a few good years. If I can’t have a few good years, I’ll settle for a good night, a few good hours, a good ten minutes.”
13. Inside a Jar of Peanut Butter
I studied my bowl of Alphabits Cereal and spelt obscene words on my spoon like “shit” and “fuck.” “Cocksucker” was more challenging. It required three c’s and two k’s. I finally had to nibble a b into the second k. The Artsie Fartsie was where I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner and had numerous coffee breaks in between. It was my surrogate womb, a place where I was well-known and well-liked, where I could be myself and feel secure. The old ladies who worked there had taken a motherly shine to me, old ladies often take a motherly shine to a golden boy, and regularly quizzed me on my diet, bullying me into eating something more healthy. My popularity with the opposite sex was a great source of delight for the old ladies and when I came in with a new girl they whispered and giggled among themselves, greeting her with huge smiles. They perpetually warned me not to get a girl pregnant because she would manipulate me into marrying her. My mother had given me the same advice since I was nine years old. I showed them my knapsack full of condoms and they roared with laughter. They looked after me, and if I was short of money, they gave me meals on credit.