One time she handcuffed me. I didn’t know what the deal was. It was new for me so I just went with it. She said, “How does that feel?”. I said, “Fine. I guess. Now what?”. I think she had a couple ideas but she didn’t think I was ready for them and she was probably right, so she just took the cuffs off. Every now and then during sex she would turn over onto her stomach and squeeze her legs tight so it was difficult to get into her from behind. Looking back, she probably wanted me to put it in her ass, but, like I said, I wasn’t exactly a sexual expert so I’ll chalk that up to woulda shoulda coulda.
At the end of the summer she came over to the house I lived in with my mom and step-dad. They were out at work so we had the place to ourselves. She told me that this guy, Victor, that she was in love with and that she would do anything for was coming back from the west coast and she was gonna have to break things off with me. It was probably the only time a girl has ever been straightforward with me about something like that. I said something like, “Okay. There’s nothing I can do about it, so, whatever. Will we still be friends?” She smiled and kissed me and threw me a goodbye fuck. It was the only time it was kind of sad and romantic with her for me. She got dressed and left and I never saw her again. So much for friendship.
In college I didn’t have any problems with women.
It could have been the college. It had a popular nursing and educational program so there were a lot of girls there.
Go ahead write that down.
I majored in psychology and often I was the only guy in the class.
Write that down too.
“Majored in psychology.”
I developed this system of staring as flirting.
If I saw a girl I liked I’d just watch her until she looked in my direction and we made eye contact. Then I’d smile and give her the “chin-up” nod and pretend to be reading or whatever.
After I did that a few times I’d sidle up to her in line at the dining hall and say something like, “Hey. I’ve seen you around. What’s your deal?”
Either they’d shut me down or they’d let me talk at them.
Either they had a boyfriend or we made plans to hang out.
Either they were having it or they weren’t having it.
I knew that if they weren’t having it, they just weren’t having it, so I’d laugh it off and move on.
I just played the averages.
I figured if I flirted with enough girls, one or two was bound to bite.
It worked. I don’t know how, but it did.
I pretended I was unafraid and I guess to a certain extent I was.
I figured if I talked them up and they gave me the cold shoulder then I’d never have to bother with them again, but if I never talked to them I’d always have this unrelieved frustration.
I remember that first year, running five girls at once. It was a scheduling nightmare.
I’d kick out the girl that slept over the night before and go to class. Maybe I’d get a call to my beeper and I’d return the call and I’d spread a little afternoon delight. I’d have plans for dinner in the dining hall with some girl and then we’d go back to my dorm room and we’d fool around, and if she didn’t want to come across, I’d make up some excuse and tell her we should hang out sometime soon and I’d walk her to the door, and when the latch clicked I’d call up another girl and have her over for a few hours. And maybe she’d stay the night and maybe she wouldn’t. And maybe a different girl would come tapping on my window at two in the morning, drunk, coming home from the bars, and want to come in, and I’d have to work around her in stage whispers, trying not to wake up the girl that was all naked and curled up in a ball under the blanket in my bed. Maybe that happened once or twice. I wasn’t an asshole, I was just trying to have the best time with the most girls I could without hurting anyone’s feelings. Maybe I was making up for all of that long-term relationship without sex bullshit from high school, but it didn’t feel like I was making up for anything at the time. Actually it felt pretty fucking awesome and if I could’ve I probably would’ve spent the rest of my life that way.
But in a community as small as a college, word gets around, and none of the girls was really interested in being part of a harem. So I ended up with one or two that I would see steady. But none of them lasted through the summer breaks, going home to hook up with their hometown sweethearts.
But then again, each year there were incoming freshmen and graduating seniors so it all balanced out in a comfortable equilibrium.
My first year steady had a boyfriend who was at a military academy in New Hampshire.
She wanted to be the only one and I told her I was okay with that, but she had to break things off with her boyfriend. She said she would when she went up to be his date at a formal dance at the military academy. She didn’t break up with him. She didn’t have the heart. She fucked him and came back, thinking she could just carry on with me. I kind of respect that. At least she didn’t lie about it. She was trying to do the right thing in her own way. I told her that we could still hang out, but I’d still see other people.
I started dating a different girl and I fell in love. At least what I thought was love at the time. She was beautiful. Naturally corn-silk blonde with dirty-blonde roots. Ice blue eyes. Long legs and round firm D-cup breasts. I bet you’re thinking I’m making this up but I’m not. Okay. She had some crooked teeth. And she smoked camels, so her breath always smelled like cheap cigarettes. And she was anorexic. And she had this voice that was like a breathy Betty Boop which could be really annoying sometimes. So she wasn’t perfect. But she wore a leather motorcycle jacket and black jeans. I wanted her and I acquired her and I told the first girl that I was going to go steady with the second.
The first girl attempted suicide. She took a whole bottle of her medication and locked herself in a shower stall with nothing but a razor and she wouldn’t come out. Her room-mates called me.
What was I supposed to do? I went over.
Let me give you some back story.
Some more back story. Just in case I haven’t lost you yet,
She had some strange medical condition. She had abnormally low blood pressure. She’d be standing there and then her eyes would roll up under her eyelashes, which would flutter like a person having a seizure. Then… poof! She’d collapse in a heap on the floor.
It only happened once a month or so, and usually she was around people who knew what the deal was so they’d keep an eye on her and keep people from running over and practicing their CPR on her.
Once my room-mate and I were walking to the dining hall first thing in the morning and we saw a lump that looked like a garbage bag on the sidewalk in the distance. When we came up on it, sure enough, it was my girlfriend, passed out cold on the sidewalk in her winter coat and backpack. We couldn’t just leave her there, so I grabbed her under the armpits, and my room-mate grabbed her ankles and we carried her back to the lobby of the dorm. We must have been quite a sight and someone must have seen it, because someone called security and a uniformed campus security guy showed up. The guard really wanted to call the paramedics, but we kept insisting that she does this about once a month. That if you give her a few minutes she’d come around. You just had to give her some breathing room. Plus she told me she got really pissed when someone called an ambulance, because they’d show up and she’d never go with them and sometimes the ambulance tried to charge her a fine since they thought they rushed over there for nothing.
So the medications raised her blood pressure and kept the blood in her brain and kept her from falling over all the time. But when she tried to overdose on them, all they did was make her retain a huge amount of water, so she bloated up like a year’s worth of premenstrual water weight at once. So she was dumped and depressed and bloated like a hippopotamus. And there was nothing I could do about it. If she wanted to kill herself, in my opinion, that was her decision to make. I wasn’t going to kick in the shower stall door and get soaked and maybe accidentally dice
d up by a razor trying to keep her from deciding her own destiny.
It was all for naught anyway. I dated the blonde till the summer then she dropped me after the first night at my first apartment on my own. My car died and I couldn’t get a job and I was a month behind on rent all summer long. Women just weren’t an option. So I decided to do without.
My summer room-mates were supposed to stick with the apartment through the next school year, but my room-mate’s girlfriend flaked and dropped out. And my room-mate had a free room at the college because of a scholarship, so he took it. I understand, but it left me in a tough spot. I got a one-room apartment in the heart of the city. There was no heat. No hot water. Not bad in the fall, but in the winter it got really damp and cold and I got really sick. Cold water showers and no heat. It was usually colder inside than it was outside. I would sleep with the blanket over my head in the hope that the heat from my breath would stay under the covers and keep me warm.
All I ate for a semester was a large coffee and a bagel each day, because it was all I could afford.
I got so sick I had to drop all my classes. I probably should have been hospitalized.
I got crash financial aid and managed to get a dorm room for the spring semester.
It was close. I thought I had hit bottom.
I had no idea what the bottom was.
Since the summer was unkind, I decided not to bother with women.
Not that I got into guys.
That whole collegiate experimentation with homosexuality?
Yeah, I skipped that whole thing.
That whole not bothering with women thing? That didn’t last long.
I was hanging out with some friends from the theater department.
You want to talk about ambiguous sexuality, let’s talk college theater.
Everyone at the table except me was gay or bisexual or omnivorous or whatever.
Later on I had a buddy that worked tech crew for the shows and he got me a couple gigs.
That shit was great.
You got paid to hang out with the prettiest, craziest, sexiest girls on campus and all of the male actors were gay. Being a techie was like being rough trade up in there.
I fucked around my fair share.
Anyway, all of the gender-bending theater kids were insisting that everyone was a little bit bisexual.
They had this stupid fucking game where they insisted that you had to pick a celebrity of the same sex to have sex with.
They wouldn’t fucking let it go, so I finally relented and said, “Sean Connery. But just cuddling.”
Of course, being the over-dramatic nutbags they were they took that and ran with it.
I finally had enough and broke it down for them.
“Look. The idea of having someone’s cock in my mouth doesn’t make my mouth water. I don’t get turned on by imagining the business end of my dick in any guy’s mouth. I’m not really big on anal sex and that goes double for guys. And I know I don’t want any guy fucking me in the ass, so I guess that pretty much wraps that up. Doesn’t it?”
That served to shut them up and I’ve stuck with that line ever since.
So I knew I wasn’t gay, but women just seemed like more trouble than they were worth.
A little bit of happiness and when you least expected it… BANG!
They’d drop you like a lump of hot dogshit.
Then you’d find out that they’d been fucking your friends or some other dude.
Why bother?
I jerked off five times a day and I knew what I liked.
I could get myself off in five minutes flat.
I never had to buy anyone dinner and I never had to say, “I love you.”.
That was good enough for me.
I was friends with the room-mate of my ex-girlfriend who tried to kill herself.
We’d hang out. I didn’t think anything of it.
I was bitter.
I guess jerking off five times a day while swimming in a sea of girls that want nothing to do with you will do that to you.
I was going through that whole philosophical freefall that trips up some college students.
Bumper sticker nihilism.
Taking art classes and film classes and Eastern philosophy classes.
Searching for meaning.
Defining themselves.
Questioning authority.
Rejecting everything.
The last thing I needed in my life was a woman.
I didn’t have any room in my life.
I was so full of myself.
As I said, I didn’t think anything of it.
We’d spend a lot of time buddying around.
Going to poetry readings at cafés, but at that time it was called “spoken word”.
Don’t judge. I know.
Lame shallow pretension masquerading as depth and sophistication.
Bullshit armor a foot thick.
Clove cigarettes and black clothes.
“Whatever.”
She had a boyfriend. Then another. Because I wasn’t thinking about her as a woman we became close friends. And since we were close friends and boy and girl we fell in love with each other. At least that’s what I thought at the time.
One of the most intense memories of my life. We’re listening to classical music, Beethoven, and kissing. The overture for the ninth symphony comes up, and scoring romantic scenes with the overture for the ninth is such a cliché that we both open our eyes and when our eyes meet we both break out laughing and without saying anything we both agreed to quit making out until the overture is over.
She wasn’t the prettiest girl I ever dated. She didn’t have the nicest body. Her breasts pancaked against her chest when they weren’t being held together in a bra and her vaginal lips had a weird bluish tint. But I realized that the best of all possible worlds was being in love with your best friend.
She dropped me.
Like I said, she had a boyfriend. I was better looking but he was a nice guy.
She wasn’t going to break up with him and I was still sleeping with any girl that was willing.
I figured that if she had her boyfriend then I should have my girlfriends.
Petty resentment-laden bullshit.
Things just kind of unwound.
I took it pretty hard.
How hard?
Everything I did reminded me of her.
We were so in tune without making any effort to get in tune that we liked all of the same things.
So in a surprisingly brief period of time, everything I enjoyed in life had turned bitter and rotten.
Stale and unprofitable.
I’d send her letters and gifts in the mail.
Eventually she told me to cut the shit.
I wasn’t crazy enough to keep it up so that she’d have to take out a restraining order on me.
But I was close.
I figured if she wasn’t having it, she wasn’t having it, but maybe some day she’d change her mind and realize how perfect we were for each other.
I couldn’t sleep so I’d drive by her house at night.
I wouldn’t stop, but I’d see her car in the driveway and I’d be overwhelmed with emotion and I’d have to pull over into the parking lot of the restaurant at the end of the street and push the heels of my hands into my eyes, making black stars bloom until the desperate longing subsided enough for me to drive away like I had committed some crime and was driving the getaway car.
I thought about her every day for five years and every other day for the next five years after that.
I spent a year asexually.
Girls were just humans with higher voices and nicer hair and curvier bodies and a wider variety of clothing options.
It’s not that girls didn’t flirt with me, but I just shut them down cold.
I wanted no part of their coy bullshit.
I went all astronaut / 1950s television detective.
It was all, “Yes miss.” and “Yes ma’am.”.
And every night of that year I was in such emotional turmoil that I would try to cry myself to sleep, but I couldn’t cry, so I just laid in the darkness, looking into the darkness, keening like a wounded animal, not sleeping until exhaustion overwhelmed me.
I lost weight.
I didn’t eat because I was never hungry.
There was only one thing in the whole world that I wanted and since I couldn’t have it I didn’t want anything.
I smoked cigarettes like it was my job.
Smoking causes cancer? Good.
How long does it take? How many cigarettes do I have to smoke?
I was looking for a reason to kill myself.
Just to end the endless suffering.
Being diagnosed with cancer seemed as good a reason as any.
This went on for years.
I was a terrible person to be in a relationship with.
Maybe just a terrible person in general.
I was one hundred percent confrontational one hundred percent of the time.
I was not afraid of death, so I was not afraid of anything.
A man without fear is a fool, but he is also invulnerable.
Everyone is immortal until they die.
That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Except, of course, the thing which kills you, which just fucking kills you.
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