Beyond Group Sex: Doing Their Own Thing (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by John Warren Wells

  I don’t know if there’s any way to sum all this up. In a way I hope there’s not because I don’t feel I myself am summed up yet. I have a lot of living to do and a lot of growing, and I’m going through plenty of changes and enjoying where I am and looking forward to where I’m going.

  Which does sort of sum up everything in a sense, because if you compare the way I am now with the way I was a couple of years ago, it’s just such a different way of looking at the world and at myself. I’m not there yet. I still withdraw, I still spend most nights alone by choice and yet feel lonely in the course of them. I don’t think I’ll ever be perfect. Not that anyone ever is, but I do have problems, and you never get away from them, do you? You just, if you’re very damned lucky, find ways of living around them.

  I’m getting to the point where I’m pretty satisfied to be me. And that was something I could never have said before.

  Thirteen??? I Am Not Superstitious!

  I think about Linda quite often. More often—I was about to say more often than I’d like, but I don’t think that’s altogether true. Not any longer.

  It was true enough at the beginning. I gave her up a year and a half ago. “Gave her up”—the phrase is singularly apropos, you know. I could have kept her. There was never any question in that regard, that she would have gone on seeing me as long as I wanted her. Nor did I ever stop wanting her. I’m tempted to say I gave her up as one gives up drink or tobacco, because she was bad for me. And in a sense she was, or at least I had come to feel that she was. She was making me into a person I was gradually finding myself uncomfortable being.

  But I think it’s more honest to say that breaking things off with her was motivated far more by unselfish precepts than by selfish ones. Oh, every act is selfish at root; better to say that I gave her up for reasons of conscience.

  We were together almost seven years, you know. It began a few months after her eleventh birthday, ended a few weeks after her eighteenth. I like to tell people that the thrill wore off the day she reached the age of consent. Not that at all, of course. The charming little girl I fell in love with did not become any less lovable through transformation into a charming young woman.

  You see, I don’t consider myself a pervert. There’s an important distinction that must be understood. A person whose sexual enthusiasm can only be awakened by a child, a person whose libido has that narrow a scope, is a person I would be inclined to call a pervert. Perhaps he’s afraid of failing with a grown woman. That’s the standard explanation. And any man who would molest or force or hurt or frighten a child I would consider not only a pervert but one who ought to be tucked safely away. Or hanged, preferably. There are certain things to be said for capital punishment, you know, especially in a society which makes a habit of releasing the criminally insane out of hand and freeing men under life sentences after they’ve served seven years. Capital punishment indisputably precludes the possibility of a repetition of the offense. And there’s no denying that certain scoundrels and miscreants would be much improved by hanging. Do wonders for them.

  The astonishing thing is that the average person learning of my own tastes and my relationship with Linda would automatically identify me with the stereotyped old men who lure children into cars with candy. Or men with false trouser cuffs stitched to their raincoats, getting it off by revealing themselves to prepubescent girls. “Look what I’ve got, little one!” Or, at the least, with hapless neurotics who would run screaming from a mature woman.

  There is a difference between a perversion and a preference, however . . .

  Why did I have to break up with Linda? Well, in simplest terms, I felt she had the right to a future, and I couldn’t provide the sort of future to which she was entitled. This would have been true whether I married her or not. I could have married her, either immediately or in a few years’ time. The age discrepancy was becoming less and less significant. I’m what? Thirty-seven. When we separated I was thirty-six, just thirty-six, and she had just turned eighteen. An eighteen-year difference is not that disproportionate. When we met she was eleven and I was twenty-nine—an enormous, unreal gulf! In two decades’ time she’ll be forty, I’ll be fifty-eight. An unnoticeable, wholly unremarkable gap in our ages.

  As a matter of fact, I would be somewhat surprised if Linda does not ultimately marry a man approximately as many years older than herself as I am. She would probably be best advised to do just that. But not me, you see; it would have to be someone else, someone who did not begin with her at so early an age. She has to have a chance at independent growth. Our affair matured her in any number of ways, but it simultaneously compelled her to live in my shadow in other ways. She had to grow into the sort of person she thought I expected her to be. Now she needs a chance to find her own way and to become her own person. I hope she doesn’t rush into any sort of marriage, either with an older man or with someone her own age. If she does marry her contemporary I’m sure it won’t last. Not unless she goes through quite a few years of living first.

  I don’t think I’ve seen Linda since we separated. The reason for the uncertainty in that statement is that several times I’ve seen girls on the street and thought they were Linda. I gather this is a not uncommon phenomenon. I experienced it years ago after my father’s death. At least a dozen times I would see a man on a street or in a crowd and be struck by the extraordinary resemblance he bore to my late father. Each time a closer look revealed that there was really no resemblance whatsoever. The mind plays that sort of trick upon the eyes. Just as one has recurring dreams in a situation of that sort in which the dead person reveals himself as still being alive through some uncanny set of mysterious circumstances.

  Whether or not the occasional girls I’ve seen as Linda have actually resembled her or not I can’t say, because in each instance I’ve made it my business to turn away quickly and avoid observation, let alone encounter. So in that sense it’s possible that one of them was Linda, that I have seen her since the separation. But I doubt it, because I’ve avoided going to either the town where she lives or the town where she attends school.

  I don’t find it hard to live without her. Now, for a time I did, and I went through a very bad period emotionally. Nervous sweats, hands and feet always cold whatever the room temperature, enormous difficulty falling asleep, chaotic and disturbing dreams, an inability to make decisions, numbing inertia—all the usual symptoms of anxiety and deprivation. A siege of compulsive whoring around. Too much booze. Occasional dispassionate thoughts of suicide, but nothing ever very serious in that direction.

  Then, after all that passed—those things do pass, you know, given time—I would have periods of gentle despair. The feeling that the truly interesting and involving part of my life was over now, and that everything from here on in would be a matter of living on memories and getting through life on a duller plain. No more mountains and valleys, just the bearable but undramatic business of living.

  I still feel that way from time to time, but less frequently and less absolutely.

  One persistent source of uncertainty is the Maud Mullins bit. You know the poem. I think it’s by Lowell. James Russell Lowell, of course. Not young Robert.

  The saddest words of tongue and pen

  Dih-dah-dah these: It might have been.

  It’s fortunate that Lowell hit on an eternal truth there, because there’s nothing remarkable about the language he used to couch it. But it’s not that the words are sad so much as that they gnaw at your liver. It might have been, and then again it might not have been, and you never get to find out, because life doesn’t permit you to test your hypotheses. Perhaps I was wrong, perhaps we could have stayed together, perhaps instead of limiting ourselves we could have found in the years to come an even better thing than we had already enjoyed.

  And again, perhaps not.

  An unproductive line of thought. Since one can never be sure, and one can never do anything about it anyway, why bother thinking about it?

  Thus I try
to dwell on the question as little as possible.

  • • •

  Keith is an acquaintance of mine of about ten years’ standing. I have only rarely used friends of mine as subjects for interviews. There are several reasons for this. Most obviously, people in general are far more at ease discussing intimate details with a total stranger than with someone they know socially, not so much out of fear of exposure as out of natural reticence and the concern that their relationship will be adversely affected by what they reveal. In instances where this has not had an inhibiting effect, I have found, curiously, that I myself was inhibited in dealing with the material when I sat down at the typewriter, perhaps out of reluctance to attempt to sum up the complexity of a friend in a few pages. (On the other hand, I have several times become friendly to a greater or lesser extent with persons after having interviewed them. While in many cases the special intimacy of the interview renders social interaction difficult, in others it very much facilitates the development of an honest and unmasked friendship.)

  I met Keith at an antique show. At the time I had a now inexplicable passion for old guns, and he was then a collector and part-time dealer in antique firearms and edged weapons. Thereafter we would see each other several times a year at various shows and conventions. After my interest in the hobby died, I would still see Keith with about the same frequency when I happened to be in a town where he happened to be attending a show.

  I knew of his enthusiasm for nymphet types very early on in our acquaintance. He made no secret of it, indeed seemed to take delight in shocking more staid types by playing the role of dirty old man. On one occasion that will be forever fixed in my memory, a whole bevy of girls about ten years old passed our table at a restaurant. “Ah,” said Keith, licking his lips, eyes sparkling with venery. “Ah, smorgasbord!”

  His affair with Linda, begun when the girl was eleven, was two years old before I learned of it. An absolute secret at first, he had by then grown sufficiently comfortable about it to discuss it quite openly with his closer friends. Since these were friends he knew through the antique trade, and since there was no possibility of their knowing the girl, he felt secure enough to be quite at ease talking about the girl.

  The majority of his friends either tried to pretend he was joking with them or maintained an attitude of reserved disapproval. “Keith,” a friend once remonstrated, “this girl—she’s thirteen!”

  Keith, tall and stout and commanding, drew himself up to his full height. “I am not superstitious,” he announced.

  My own reactions, neither censorious nor ostrich-like, led Keith to speak to me about Linda in somewhat more detail. Several times he spoke of bringing the girl to New York so that I could meet her. He had never introduced her to any friends or acquaintances but wanted to make an exception in my case because he felt I understood and did not disapprove. (Which was quite true—I’m much more given generally to understanding than to disapproval.) The meeting never came about. In the course of preparing to write this chapter it occurred to me that it might be worthwhile to get in touch with Linda and hear the whole story once from her side, but I felt that such an intrusion on her privacy at that stage of her life was ill-advised.

  The remarks of Keith’s quoted at the beginning of this chapter were spoken not too long ago. We met for lunch at an East Side restaurant. Keith had just returned from overseas. He had lost an immense quantity of weight and looked remarkably fit. He had given up cigarettes (so had I, but it didn’t last) and taken up jogging (I hadn’t). He was bursting with plans—the restoration of an old house in his hometown, a new business venture, and a possible plan to cruise the Greek isles on a friend’s yacht, which was to be guarded by a Basenji. “They don’t bark, you see. But they aren’t silent. They make this uncanny whrooshing sound. It’s really quite appalling to listen to.”

  Some of what follows was also said over that lunch. Other material was confided over the years, while the affair with Linda was going on. Obviously I did not take notes over the years, so much of what follows is a reconstruction, but, I think, a highly accurate one.

  • • •

  I don’t know why it is that I find girls of a certain age particularly attractive. Actually, I find it less astonishing that I prefer young girls than that everyone doesn’t share my preference.

  How, really, can anybody explain sexual tastes? I’m familiar with the traditional Freudian explanations. That one identifies all mature women with one’s mother and thus fears to transgress the old oedipal boundaries. That one is uncertain of one’s virility or feels one’s penis is too small. Castration fears. I’m not quite ready to dismiss all of that as errant nonsense, but if it applies in my own case, I don’t see how. Nor have I ever seen the point in paying money, hard-earned or otherwise, to have some old Viennese chap help me work it all out.

  From my particular viewpoint, there is a certain type of girl who represents the ultimate in physical and emotional appeal. A girl at just about the point of puberty, somewhere between the ages of ten and thirteen. Slender but not scrawny. Possessed of shapely legs. The great majority of girls that age have rather unattractive legs. It’s unfortunate. But when you’ve found one with good legs and tight plump buttocks and the slightest hint of breast, one with eyes at once innocent and knowing, clear complexion, silky unstyled hair, slender arms and delicate hands and feet—when you have found that, my friend, you have found a diamond in a dust heap.

  Biologically, it’s perfectly consistent for men to regard girls of that age as sexually desirable. With every other animal, sexual activity begins at that point in development. As soon as any other female mammal goes into heat for the first time, every male mammal of the species within sniffing distance begins pawing the ground. That, after all, is how the world keeps on keeping on. That’s how big giraffes get little giraffes.

  It’s difficult to say when I first formed my particular image of female beauty. I certainly had an appreciation of young girls years before it even occurred to me to do anything about it.

  I remember an incident in, oh, my second year in college, as I recall. I went to school in the Midwest and kept getting letters from Mother suggesting that I look up an aunt and uncle whom I hadn’t seen since early childhood and didn’t really remember at all. They lived less than a hundred miles from where I was going to school. I kept putting this off—I’ve never been much at looking people up—and then one day I got around to calling them and made arrangements to drive down and have dinner with them the following Sunday.

  They had a ten-year-old daughter who instantly developed a mammoth crush on her older cousin. A stunning child, bright and polished beyond her years. I found out I liked her enormously. My aunt and uncle were at least as boring as I had anticipated, but the child was a delight. Our age difference didn’t matter at all. We talked absolutely as equals, with neither of us conscious of any discrepancy in ages. I was nine years older than the girl, but we related to each other as contemporaries.

  I remember thinking, on the drive back to school, that in eight years’ time she would be eighteen, and that I would certainly marry her then. The idea enchanted me. I told friends on campus that I had met my future wife, and that the only complications standing in our way were that she was only ten years old and my first cousin in the bargain. Of course I was joking, but at the same time I was perfectly serious. I even went so far as to do a little research into the legal and biological implications of marrying one’s first cousin. It varies quite a bit from state to state, as it happens.

  But even before I met my cousin, I had felt myself drawn to girls her age as sex objects. Indeed, from fifteen or sixteen years of age onward, I was frankly drawn to virtually anything female. For a period of a few years I would have fucked a cobra if someone would have held its head. My first chance at having it off came before my sixteenth birthday. A friend of my mother’s. Not a terribly close friend, but an occasional bridge partner. A widow. She seduced me, one might say, although it was not quite a mat
ter of playing Benjamin to her Mrs. Robinson. I’m sure no young man has ever been so willingly seduced. Unfortunately, she grew quite guilt-ridden about the enterprise. I was with her perhaps eight times over the course of a year. Each time we would fuck furiously and then she would cry and carry on and insist she would never permit herself to see me again.

  I also had relations with several girls in my high school, girls who were no harder to seduce than I had been. The accessible sort. And the anonymous girls one picks up at roller rinks and bowling alleys and tups hectically in the back seats of cars.

  I was never involved with any of these girls. It was standard practice to regard them with a degree of contempt, and I may have taken that stance in conversations with friends, but I felt no contempt for any of them. I felt a certain tenderness, a certain measure of gratitude. But I never imagined myself in love or wanted anything other than sex from any of them.

  I didn’t really date much, in high school or in college. Other than those dates which were preludes for pleasant impersonal fucking. I had girls with whom I was friendly and to whom I would become quite close, but those relationships were generally platonic, or if they did turn sexual, they never lasted long . . .

  In the course of all this, and before I ever set eyes on my young cousin, I had become aware of the special appeal of young girls. It’s possible that this was first suggested by something I read. I can’t be sure now. I know I was a big Lewis Carroll fan. The two Alice books . . . everything else of his rather bored me, but Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass have a magic that never wears off for me. I read quite a bit about Carroll. Interesting man. I often wonder just how aware he was of the sexual implications of his friendships with young girls. They were his closest friends, you know, and he couldn’t abide little boys. Positively loathed them.