I think it’s doubtful that he ever actually did anything with his little playmates. Beyond drawing and photographing them in the nude, which was one of his innocent pastimes. Obviously he wanted to gobble their pretty little snatches, but I’m almost certain he never went through with it, and I wonder if he knew consciously that he wanted to.
He did have a love life, as I understand it. An affair with a famous actress, I believe.
Before I met my cousin, I thus already recognized that nothing could delight me more than to have sexual relations with a girl about that age or a few years older. I would excite myself with thoughts along those lines. Never did anything about it, never considered doing anything about it.
I began visiting my aunt and uncle every few weeks, driving down for Sunday dinner and pretending to take great delight in their company. Of course, it was my cousin I went to see. We would tease each other that she was my girlfriend, and she would sit on my lap sometimes and play with my beard, which she thought was really something smashing. I had a beard then and was said to resemble Henry the Eighth, or perhaps to look like one thought Henry ought to have looked, whether he actually did or not.
Happy times. Very innocent, and yet not so innocent at all. Several times I developed very urgent erections while she was squirming merrily on my lap. I felt quite ambivalent at such times. Guilty over responding to her this way, but enormously excited nevertheless, and unable to avoid wishing she would just squirm around a little more, just bounce a trifle more enthusiastically in my lap, so that I could have a delicious private orgasm, which no one need ever find out about.
This never happened. But afterward, away from her presence, I found myself more and more unsettled about the whole situation. This was very much a matter of acting-out for me. I wasn’t about to seduce her. The whole idea remained unreal for me, and yet it was becoming a preoccupation, a constant fantasy.
While I don’t know that I knew it then, this was probably the chief reason why I transferred to another college at the conclusion of my sophomore year. I was afraid to be near her indefinitely. I invented other reasons, none of which seem truly pressing in retrospect, but that had to be the prime mover.
We exchanged letters for the next few years, with decreasing frequency. When she began dating she got less interested in writing letters to her fat old cousin, and seven or eight years ago she got married. She’s separated from her husband now and in the process of getting a divorce—this filtered down through the family grapevine. I wonder what would happen if we saw each other again, if there would be anything there for either of us. I also wonder how aware she was of what was happening then. At the time I never even suspected she might know what was going on. Since then I’ve learned that girls that age are infinitely more knowledgeable than one may suspect. She was relating to me in much the same way that I was relating to her, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she was aware every time my penis stiffened beneath her bouncing bottom, and if she enjoyed it all every bit as much as I did.
I wonder what would have happened if I had seduced her. I know it would have gone well, at least as well as it later went with Linda. We would have had no trouble keeping it a secret from her doltish parents.
I know it would have been exciting, and as exciting for her as for me. But I’m sure it would have ended badly, and for the same reason that it never began. I was still far too conventional in terms of sexual morality to be comfortable in such a relationship. I was considered quite the iconoclast at the time, a bit of an enfant terrible, a singularly unconventional young man who would speak his mind very openly even when there wasn’t much on it. But I was still by no means ready to believe that a sexual relationship between a grown man—and I was sufficiently ill-advised to regard myself as a grown man—and a child, that such a relationship could be other than improper. I could crave it, I could romanticize upon its possibilities, but I couldn’t really believe within my soul that it was permissible.
I’ve traveled many mental miles since then, obviously. Just as obviously, I haven’t completely banished that feeling. If I had, I would probably never have given up Linda. It does come down to that, doesn’t it?
• • •
Away from the temptation of his cousin, Keith felt free to let his sexual preference for pubescent girls define itself more fully. He openly admired girls he saw on the street, but made no attempt to do anything about it. In his mind, he gradually outlined the ideal young girl and planned the ideal relationship, always with the intention of keeping this as a personal fantasy and of doing nothing to bring about its fulfillment.
As an aid to this fantasy life, he purchased pornography of one sort or another on occasional visits to New York City. Censorship was considerably more rigid at the time, and he tells of extraordinary visits to bookstores where he would be told to visit a certain room in a certain midtown hotel where a peripatetic under-the-counter pornographer plied his trade. Each time he would go to a different room in a different hotel and purchase photographs and mimeographed pamphlets at exorbitant prices.
• • •
The procedure was the sort of thing one associates with the sale of atomic secrets. Occasionally there were passwords, recognition signals. This aspect enhanced the whole procedure for me. I liked the drama of it, even the sordidness of dealing with these foul little men. And there was something reassuringly masochistic in paying twenty-five dollars for a horribly written and crudely printed little pamphlet.
I tired of the printed pornography early in the game. It was so wholly unrealistic and so very poorly written that one couldn’t really take it seriously. Also, some of it was singularly off-putting. Sadistic swill. Often the girl would be horribly abused by some older couple, generally a man and a woman, and after being viciously tortured and heroically raped she would suddenly turn passionate and enjoy herself. This was typical plot structure, and not much in line with my own sexual proclivities at all. I used that tripe to select notions for my own fantasies, but soon found I was better at making up little scenes in my mind out of the whole cloth.
The pictures were more successful. Most of them were simply posed nude shots of female children, standing alone and displaying their charms. Others were fairly rough. Children in sexual acts, with one another, with older partners, with animals. It bothered me that the young things who modeled for these pictures were being so horribly exploited. Nevertheless, I did find the pictures exciting. I seemed to attach special significance to the fact that, in many of these pictures, the little girls seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely. Somehow it reassured me that children could have relations with their elders, and could give every appearance of enjoying the whole business.
• • •
In addition to the use of pornography, Keith studied the phenomenon of pedophilia in some detail, as much for information as for excitement. He increased his knowledge of pedophilia not only through a wide range of reading but through conversations with friends and acquaintances both during and after college.
• • •
As you know, I was making no secret of my passion for the little darlings. When I admired some passing nymphet I would voice my admiration to whomever I happened to be with at the time. This was all regarded as a splendid joke, not always in the best taste, perhaps, but something hardly to be taken seriously. Friends would assure me that I was indeed a dirty old man, and that I had become a old man at a surprisingly tender age. But they knew that I was as eager as any of them to fuck girls my own age, and they thought I was simply striking a harmless pose, and doing it more for its shock value than anything else. I’m sure I did get a kick out of being shocking. And I suspect some of them must have realized that I was not entirely kidding, but they didn’t think I’d ever do anything about it. In a sense, neither did I.
A surprising number of times, some remark of mine would turn the conversation to the general subject of pedophilia. Often a friend would have some contribution to make. He would be reminded of a notorious
old man in his hometown, a store proprietor who would give free candy if they let him feel them or if they jerked him off. I was a little shocked myself to realize that there were any number of men in my own hometown who had something of a reputation along these lines, and that they went on living this way with little or no trouble from the police. They may have had an arrest or three over the years, but by and large they were going on with their lives and gobbling up girl after girl without really getting into trouble.
One girl actually told me about her experiences with one of these men. While she was in high school she and several of her girlfriends visited this chap every once in a while. A friend had told her about him, that he would give you a dollar if you let him put his face between your legs and lick you, that it didn’t hurt and sort of tickled in a very nice way, and she went along one time and earned a dollar and got tickled in a very nice way indeed, and enjoyed it enough so that she kept on returning for months.
The girl who told me this was the wife of a friend. She had told her husband previously, at which time he had stated that he really ought to go down to the old boy’s store and beat him to a pulp. He repeated the threat when she told me the story, but it was a pretty transparent imitation of jealous rage. For the girl’s part, she seemed to think the whole incident was quite amusing and quite pleasant.
I couldn’t get the story out of my mind. I found it extremely significant. Indeed, I couldn’t think of my friend’s wife without picturing her as a child of fourteen with a man’s face—a face which became mine in fantasy—snuggled between her downy thighs and gobbling eagerly at her lightly tufted pubes. I’m sure it was this image which led me to have an affair with her not long after the revelation. I had never been especially drawn to her before, nor did I make it a practice to fuck my friends’ wives.
Though one really ought to do so, you know. After all, there’s no higher compliment one can pay a friend than to tumble his wife or mistress.
Not that I tumbled her often. Half a dozen times altogether, and my friend never knew about it. Nor was I by any means the first or last to put horns on his head. A sweet girl, actually, with a lovely passion for fellatio and a laudably accomplished mouth. She was pleasant, but the novelty wore off soon enough, and that was that. I was on the road to Linda, you see, and nothing else could hold my interest for any length of time.
I was twenty-six before anything actually happened, and I wonder how long before the occurrence I knew it would come about sooner or later. I wonder precisely when I began actively to seek it out.
Perhaps a year, perhaps two years. It’s hard to say for certain, because the first things I did which you might be tempted to call overtures were undertaken with very mixed feelings. I would go for a walk or sit on a bench near a schoolyard or in a park and watch the girls, and I would tell myself that sooner or later I would strike up a conversation with one of them and it would lead ultimately to bigger and better things.
But to what extent did I actually believe this? That’s virtually impossible for me to know. I was serious about it, but I was also playing a little game with myself. I was at a point where I actively wanted it to happen and where my fears and inhibitions were beginning to recede, but they were still very much in evidence. I at once wanted it and feared it.
I did become friendly with several whom I encountered almost regularly at the park. They were twelve or thirteen and quite comely; one in particular was truly adorable, and was damned well aware of it. A natural flirt.
I never touched them. I was enchanted with them and told them stories, and they were delighted to have a stout and sonorous-voiced adult whom they were invited to address by his first name and who seemed vitally interested in whatever nonsense they cared to tell him. They were darling, and I wanted desperately to pet them and eat them and fuck them, and I did nothing about it.
The one I especially liked would have been easy game, too. And if she had not always had one of her companions along, I think something would have come of it. I was that close to being ready; it just wanted the ideal set of circumstances, but she was never alone with me, and that kept us from getting anything started. I used to hope she would turn up alone, though I never suggested it to her or made any moves in that direction.
Then not long after that, when I was twenty-six, I had my first real experience with a young girl. It was not long after you and I first met, Jack. I was running a vest-pocket dealership in guns, making a surprisingly gratifying amount of money with very little work, and doing fairly extensive traveling for the first time in my life. Travel does facilitate adventure, you know; one will do things in terra incognita that one would shun in one’s own backyard.
On this occasion I was five hundred miles from home in a city where I knew absolutely no one and to which I had never been in the past. Oddly, I was the only weapons dealer at the show; a few all-purpose antique dealers had the usual lot of firearms, but I was the only specialist. It was an excellent show for me on both sides—I grossed over a thousand dollars and made several superb purchases, a couple of good pieces I knew I could turn over for three times what I had to give for them. I’d expected a dreadful show and had done magnificently, which did wonders for my mood.
On Sunday afternoon I closed my table an hour and a half before the show was due to wrap up. I packed everything in the trunk of my car and locked it securely and walked across town to the one restaurant in twenty-five miles where one might escape ptomaine poisoning. I stopped at a drugstore to look for something to read. Dining alone is a bore for me, and I’d rather help the time pass with a book.
I was browsing the paperback stand and had picked up some work of marginal pornography and was sampling a sex scene when a little voice demanded to know what I was doing. I looked down and saw a girl about thirteen years old with an impertinently saucy grin and huge eyes—she looked like one of those waifs Keane paints. Skinny arms and legs to match, cuddly little breasts poking at her blouse front, and that indescribable combination of innocence and sexual assurance.
“Why, I’m reading a book,” I said. She asked why I was doing that. “Because it’s the only thing they’re good for,” I said, “short of propping up table legs.”
“Is it sexy?”
We recognized each other, she and I. I hesitated only a moment, then passed the book to her, holding it open to the part I had been reading.
“See for yourself,” I suggested.
She read for a few moments, licking her lips suggestively with her tongue, shifting her weight from one little foot to the other, looking up at me with curious eyes, then returning to the book.
“It’s sexy,” she said finally. “I figured it would be sexy.”
Our eyes met again. I asked her name and told her mine. When I asked how old she was, she said she was “going on fourteen.” She asked if I had a car. I said I did, and invited her to go for a ride with me. We left the drugstore, but when I told her where my car was parked she said she would wait at the drugstore for me and have a Coke while I picked up the car.
Afterward I saw this as good sense on her part, no doubt born of prior experience. For the two of us to walk any distance in public would have been moronic.
I hurried back to my car, cursing myself for not having brought it along in the first place, certain I would return to the drugstore and find her long gone, positive I would never set eyes on her again.
I couldn’t manage to get the key into the ignition, fumbled around helplessly with it. The old joke came to mind, the bit about the advisability of putting a little hair around the key hole to make it easier to locate it. I immediately mused on how much hair might presently surround her own little keyhole, and whether my current inability was an intimation of failures to come.
How enervated I was! Because I knew very well that this was no innocent, that she had done this sort of thing before. She had picked me up with no little skill, had gotten her message across with a glance, and I’m sure she knew not only what she was doing but tha
t she had picked the right sort, a man particularly drawn to girls like herself.
She was waiting for me in the drugstore doorway. I had no sooner pulled to the curb than she scurried across the sidewalk and hopped into the seat beside me. I drove aimlessly at first, my excitement still high-pitched but my ease in conversation with her remarkable for the circumstances. I remember nothing of our conversation except that it was utterly trivial.
I drove some twenty miles out of town and stopped at a shabby motel. I did this without consulting with her, and she did not seem at all surprised or dismayed when I turned into the motel lot. She stayed in the car without being told, while I went to the desk and registered. I signed the register as “Humbert Nabokov.”
In retrospect, I find myself surprised how little I feared the possible consequences of all of this. Statutory rape was a crime I had committed before—it’s committed every time an eighteen-year-old boy tumbles a seventeen-year-old girl, you know—but this was a case of a man of twenty-six who looked older than his years and a girl of thirteen who could have passed for his daughter. In short, if the shit and the fan came into the necessary proximity of one another, I could easily find myself facing a twenty-year prison sentence.
And I was well aware of this, but somehow it didn’t bother me in the least. I was quite certain that everything would work out well. The fact that she was obviously an old hand at the game no doubt helped set my mind at rest.
We went into our little room. I bolted the door, picked her up, sat down on the bed, and put her on my lap. She kissed eagerly, her mouth warm and sweet to the taste. I undressed her completely and stretched her out on the bed, petted her, and kissed her for a long time. Ultimately I knelt fully clothed over her and paid the appropriate oral homage.
Beyond Group Sex: Doing Their Own Thing (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 7