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

by John Warren Wells

  It was a transporting experience. I was utterly enraptured. For the longest time she seemed quite detached, quite unstimulated, until gradually she became very excited and ultimately had an orgasm. Her climax thrilled me beyond belief.

  My own excitement was focused entirely upon hers. I didn’t even have an erection, had one briefly during the initial kissing but lost it in my absorption with her body. When she climaxed, I was so completely involved with her that I shared her climax emotionally, if you can follow that.

  Afterward she lay there for some moments with her eyes closed while I snapped a thousand mental photographs of her. I wanted to register every moment in my memory so that I would not lose a single nuance of it.

  When she opened her eyes, she asked me if I didn’t want to fuck her. I said I wouldn’t want to hurt her, and asked her if she had done much fucking. She never said much about her earlier experiences, was vague when I asked her what sort of men she had been with and when she had first started, but she made it clear that she had had extensive coital experience. I told her I didn’t have a condom and wouldn’t want to get her pregnant.

  “You can just put it in me for a little while and take it out before you shoot,” she said.

  If this was her accustomed method of birth control, it was a wonder she had remained unpregnant this long. I almost said as much, but the desire to be inside her, even if only for a moment, was not to be denied. She watched me intently as I took off my clothes. I was quite fat at the time, and she commented favorably on my corpulence. A surprising number of women are drawn to fat men, and I’ve found this to be especially true of girls who are attracted to men considerably older than themselves. Perhaps they had fat fathers.

  I lay down with her again and began to caress her, and she took an active role and stroked me with her little hands. I became very urgently erect and entered her.

  It was heavenly, but after a few strokes the fear of impregnating her had an inhibiting effect, and I withdrew. Without being told, she used her hands to bring me to a climax. The pleasure was intense, yet it was not as wholly thrilling as the joy I had taken in her climax.

  I would have liked to keep her there all night, but she said she had to get home for dinner. She wouldn’t tell me where she lived, asked me to drop her at the drugstore where we had found each other. I asked her if I could see her again. She was uninterested in making plans but told me she was usually hanging around the drugstore afternoons after school and that maybe we would see each other there.

  I dropped her off and drove immediately out of town and out of the state and back to my home, although I had originally planned to get a good night’s sleep and drive back Monday morning. An aftershock of fear was beginning to set in, and I had visions of the little darling arriving home late for dinner, breaking down under parental cross-examination, and setting the cops scouring the state for me.

  Also, I was oddly troubled about the experience. There is an ancient curse, presumably Oriental in origin: “May you get what you have always wanted.” I had just obtained what I had been craving for several years, and I sensed already that my life was changed, changed utterly. The terrible beauty Yeats spoke of was born, with full emphasis on both “terrible” and “beauty,” and while I was uncertain of a great deal, I know full well that my life would never be quite the same again. It was one thing to have the desires, the obsessions even, of a old man. It was something else entirely to have played the active role of a dirty old man, and I wanted some time to myself to put it all in some semblance of perspective.

  • • •

  Keith never saw the girl again. It was several years before business brought him to that particular city again, and by that time his affair with Linda had commenced and he made no attempt to locate the first girl. Two months after the initial encounter, however, he made a trip to her city for the sole purpose of seeing her. He parked his car in the vicinity of the drugstore and kept an eye open for her, but she did not turn up. He returned home after a few hours, feeling a mixture of disappointment and relief.

  This first fulfillment of his sexual desires was not without effect upon his pattern of living. His sexual relations with women approximately his own age, which had been gradually diminishing in frequency since his college years, now ceased almost entirely. Occasionally he made use of a professional or semi-professional prostitute, but did so more to determine whether or not he could still perform adequately with a mature partner. His performance was as it had always been, and such occasions resulted in orgasmic satisfaction, but he could not dismiss the fact that sexual relations seemed curiously flat and unaffecting in comparison to the joy he had tasted in the motel room.

  Nor did pornography, whether verbal or visual, have any value for him any longer. At one point he attempted to render the motel-room incident immortal by describing it in the greatest possible detail, ultimately producing a manuscript of almost a hundred single-spaced, closely typed pages dealing with the two hours he had spent in the little girl’s company. This must have been an extraordinary document, no doubt worthy of publication in book form, but Keith destroyed it completely. He worried that it might be discovered, took to keeping it in a safe-deposit box, and ultimately decided that he did not want it existing even there, lest he die abruptly and the manuscript be found after his death. He said, too, that a rereading of the script had been disturbingly painful and embarrassing.

  The interval between the incident described and the inception of his affair with Linda was a period of roughly three years. They were quite turbulent ones for Keith, marked by periods of sexual obsession alternating with periods of severe sexual repression. His moods, his views, and his patterns of behavior swung from one extreme to another as he tried to find a way to come to grips with what he described as a preference, but often privately regarded, like it or not, as a perversion.

  • • •

  You knew me during this time, Jack, but of course you didn’t know what I was going through. No one did, and that was the worst of it, that there was no one in whom I felt capable of confiding. I don’t believe in psychiatry—perhaps that’s foolishness—but I almost went to a psychiatrist just to have an ear into which I could funnel all of the agony I was experiencing. What stopped me was that I felt sure I would delude myself into expecting answers, and if answers existed, I didn’t believe a psychiatrist could provide them. I would have to find them myself.

  Also, I didn’t see the point in spending twenty-five dollars an hour looking for original causes. When the floodwaters rise, you don’t study the geography of the region—you head for high ground.

  I made any number of attempts to find a regimen that would let me live at peace with myself. I thought it might do me good to marry. I looked at my married friends and found all their relationships lacking to a greater or lesser extent. The ones who weren’t cheating on their wives were wishing they had the guts to. But it seemed to me that marriage, even a less than ideal marriage, might have some stabilizing effect on one’s life, might put points on one’s compass, and might be worthwhile for that alone. I dated with that thought in mind, had these platonic dates with girls who didn’t much interest me and rarely appealed to me, and I actually considered marrying one or another of them out of desperation.

  At one point I seriously considered having myself castrated. But geldings grow fat, you know, and I felt I was fat enough to begin with.

  Furthermore, I’ve learned that eunuchs don’t lose the desire unless the operation is performed before sexual maturity. They may lose the capacity to do anything about it, though even that isn’t inevitable. The penis will grow erect if blood flows into it, and blood will flow where the brain tells it to flow, and the brain can make such a judgment with or without the cooperation of the testicles.

  At another stage I made it an absolute rule to masturbate twice a day whether I wanted to or not, upon arising in the morning and upon retiring at night. I did this in an attempt to minimize desire at other times. It ought to wo
rk, but curiously it doesn’t. And therapeutic masturbation is even more emotionally unpleasant than therapeutic copulation. A joyless orgasm is far worse than no orgasm at all.

  Then there were times when I went in the other direction, trying to master the sexual impulse and obliterate it completely. No masturbation, no reading erotica, no sexual contacts, and the suppression of impulses by cold showers and yogic meditation. I’m not constituted to be a monk, am far too devoted to the pleasures of the table and bedchamber. Very frustrating, all of it.

  You must understand that I did not spend all my time in these pursuits. At times repression came easy because sex simply didn’t bother me—I involved myself in business and friendships. And other times, instead of trying to find a way to eliminate my desires or accommodate them, I attempted simply to indulge them.

  There were three occasions of whole or partial success before I met Linda. They were all similar in certain respects to that first incident. They took place on business trips, always far from home, and they were with girls who knew the game and who played it with zest and verve.

  I have a feeling that most of these girls were seduced considerably in advance of puberty by an older relative or father figure. I’ve come to understand that this is far more common than statistics would indicate, and that there’s a psychological pattern formed which leads the girl to seek approval and a sense of personal worth through sexual contacts with older men. This is supposed to be a prototypical incident in the childhoods of girls who ultimately become prostitutes.

  None of the three girls fell into my lap the way the one in the drugstore did. Instead, I sought them out, much as I had been tentatively seeking out such girls earlier, though formerly with no success. Now I went to zoos and parks and school neighborhoods, waiting for my particular type of dream girl to appear. I was very careful not to approach any girl unless I was quite certain she was the right sort. Then I would initiate a conversation along some innocuous lines, so that, had I guessed wrong, I would be taken for no more than a friendly if eccentric stranger. When this happened, the little angel went her way and I went mine. When my signals were received and accepted, we would go for a ride in my car, twice winding up in motels, once parking in a shaded lane.

  I did not have coitus with any of these girls. I plied my trade as cunning linguist, which was my main objective. Two of them were virgins, or said they were; I’m rather inclined to believe them, since, if anything, they seemed ashamed at the admission. The other was willing to fuck but offered me the alternative of fellatio, which she charmingly called “frenching.” One of the others also “played the flute,” while the third used her hands, and with so little skill that I ungallantly lost interest.

  I never saw any of these girls again, nor did I make any attempt to do so. My feelings after the glow had worn off were mixed. I was pleased at having had such a pleasurable experience and having provided pleasure for my partners—while they did not all have orgasm and while none became anywhere near as excited as the girl I had met at the drugstore, they all enjoyed my lovemaking. And their enjoyment was a sine qua non for my own: I was aware that girls of that age are available in the larger cities as prostitutes, if one knows where to look, but the idea of purchasing a child’s favors was utterly distasteful to me.

  If I was disturbed by anything, it was that my association with these girls was purely sexual. I enjoyed their company, and they seemed to enjoy mine, but on both sides the pleasure of conversation was very much a part of mutual anticipation of sexual intimacy. And our intimacy was exclusively sexual. I did not know them and they did not know me. With the first girl, I had given my right name; with the other three I did not. I don’t know whether or not they told me their names correctly.

  What I wanted, of course, was a complete relationship with a girl of this sort. A protracted affair. Ideally, a total mutual involvement which would lead to marriage and a long exciting life together. But I was afraid to take the slightest step in this direction because of the dangers inherent in the attempt. Thus I wanted to have one of these girls forever at my side, and yet I carefully avoided seeing any of them a second time.

  Then, too, there was something about the girls themselves which militated against the type of relationship I wished to achieve. How to say it? They were old hands at the game, as predatory in their own way as I myself was. They had a certain freshness, but they also lacked a certain freshness. It was not so much that they had prior experience and I was intent upon a virgin as that they took sex too casually. This casual attitude made them available, but it also made them slightly less than perfect in my eyes.

  And then there was Linda.

  She was a complete departure, Jack. A girl I had heretofore met only in the privacy of my mind. Or in my uncle’s house; whether or not she actually resembled my cousin I cannot say, but I was instantly aware of a strong resemblance in both appearance and personality.

  I met her not as a stranger but as a friend of her mother’s. Linda’s mother was a divorcée in her early thirties. She lived in a city miles down the road from my home. I had known her husband professionally, became acquainted with her while they were married, and ran into her one day some three years after the divorce. I dated her two or three times. She just wanted someone to talk to and seemed relieved that I didn’t try to put our friendship on a physical plane. I liked her well enough but had no desire to take her to bed, so it was pleasantly and conveniently platonic for both of us. I even considered marrying her, thought it might do us both some good. No point attaching much significance to this. I had similar thoughts with most of my female friends but let the thoughts pass unattended.

  Then after two or three casual dates she invited me to have dinner at her house before we went to a movie, and at dinner I met Linda for the first time. I had known of Linda’s existence before, but only that Linda was her only child, an eleven-year-old. The simple fact of a female child’s existence does not send me into spasms, and I expected some properly charmless and ungainly little pouter.

  I fell in love at that dinner table. Joyously, hopelessly, irretrievably in love.

  And thus began to spend more and more time with Linda’s mother, keeping our relationship wholly platonic all the while. I was a frequent dinner guest. If Linda was not present, I concealed my disappointment. If she was with us, I did what I could to conceal my delight. Over the next several months we became friends. I saw her only in her mother’s company, and made no overtures to her whatsoever, but a definite feeling developed between us, and began to grow apace.

  On several occasions I went with Linda to her room after dinner to help her with her homework. She was a poor speller and a worse mathematician, though quite bright otherwise. I could prattle on and on about how hard it was to keep my hands off her, but actually it was relatively easy. Although I wanted her desperately, I found her mere company sufficiently delightful to minimize frustration.

  And then one evening I had as usual gone upstairs to help Linda with her math. Her mother had hied herself off to a concert. I had originally planned to attend it with her, but pleaded exhaustion, and had done so quite honestly; it was a Monday, and I was still recovering from a four-day show in Manhattan. Our relationship was sufficiently relaxed that there was nothing out of the ordinary in her going to the concert alone and my helping Linda for an hour or so, then going on home myself.

  She was sitting on the edge of the bed reading things from a textbook. I stretched out on the bed with my eyes closed and corrected her mistakes, and after a few minutes of this my exhaustion triumphed and I slipped off into a light sleep.

  I came awake a half-hour later. Linda had turned off the overhead light and was curled up beside me, sleeping on her side and facing away from me.

  I was still half-asleep myself, not entirely certain whether I might be dreaming. I reached out a hand and touched her bare arm. I began to stroke her arm very lightly, and as I did so I felt a tight feeling rise in my chest.

  She was wearin
g a short skirt. I lifted it to her waist and played first my eyes and then my hands over her legs. She did not stir. I rolled her over onto her back, and still she did not move.

  I touched the insides of her thighs, felt her mound gently through her white cotton panties. She remained completely inert and unresponsive. At one point I knew suddenly that she was awake, although she had been asleep when I first began to caress her. As soon as I realized this, I told myself I ought to stop, but stopping was quite out of the question.

  I kissed the tops of her thighs, tasting the perfect texture of her skin. When I raised my head, I saw that her eyes were open. Her expression was impossible to read. She seemed neither alarmed nor apprehensive, nor did she give any sign of knowing what was happening.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “You don’t have to be afraid of anything.”

  She said she wasn’t afraid.

  “I won’t hurt you, Linda. You’re so beautiful. I just want to make you feel very wonderful.”

  She nodded, and I took her panties off. She did not resist me in the slightest degree. Utterly enchanted, I ate her for forty-five delirious minutes, until her excitement gradually reached a peak and subsided. She did not have an actual orgasm that time, but reached a zenith of sorts.

  Afterward I undressed her and brought her her nightgown. She put it on, and I tucked her under the covers and kissed her cheek. I told her she was beautiful and that I loved her. I didn’t warn her about keeping what we had done a secret, knowing intuitively that she would not tell anyone. I asked her if she had enjoyed it, and she told me solemnly that I had made her feel very happy inside her body.

  I can still hear her speaking those words.

  I told her again that I loved her, went downstairs, let myself out, and drove home.

  Within the week I visited her again. As an excuse I brought her mother a book she had been wanting to read, dropped it off after dinner, and while I was there, went upstairs to give Linda a hand with her homework. As soon as I entered the room she smiled and kissed me, then closed the door and took off all her clothes. She lay down on the bed, and I knelt at once before her and did as I had done before. Within fifteen minutes she reached a partial climax and sighed. After a few moments she got up and dressed herself, and we went to work on her studies.