Hard Evidence- The Collected Bawdy Writings

by Kevin Keck

  The Collected Bawdy Writings

  by Kevin Keck

  Any dialogue or events ascribed to the characters in this book—those who are real and as well as those who are imagined—are entirely fictitious. I mean, who would really believe any of this stuff happened, right? This is a work purely of the author’s own imagination. (With the exception of that bit about Pert Shampoo. That actually happened, and I still get mail about it from other unsuspecting onanists. Take a lesson kids: don’t put Pert on your private parts.)

  Copyright © 2013 by Kevin Keck

  First Edition

  ISBN: 0-9707802-7-3

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form of by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Oedipus Wrecked was originally published by Cleis Press in 2005.

  Are You There God? It's Me. Kevin. was originally published by Bloomsbury USA in 2008.

  “The Death of the Handjob”; “Sleeping with Students”; and “Interlude with the Vampire” (Nerve Mix) all originally appeared on Nerve.com in slightly different versions.

  For my godfather,

  John Everson (1941 - 1991)

  “I am not furnish'd like a beggar; therefore to beg will not become me. My way is to conjure you, and I'll begin with the women.” – Rosalind, As You Like It

  “Lifting her skirt, she revealed her treasure. The mother lode. Pretty, I thought, but is it art?” – Edward Abbey,

  A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

  Table of Contents

  The Collected Bawdy Writings

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  from Oedipus Wrecked*

  Ass Backwards

  Hard Evidence

  I was a Teenage Homosexual

  Wet, Hot Presbyterian Summer

  Delicates

  Stranger that Friction

  Cherry Picker

  Touched

  Oedipus Wrecked

  from Are You There God? It’s Me. Kevin. (2008)*

  Interlude with the Vampire - (AYTG?IM.K. Version)*

  Interlude with the Vampire (Nerve Mix)*

  Swing Town

  Uncollected Essays*

  The Death of the Hand Job

  Sleeping with Students

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Preface

  I believe the earliest of these stories—”Hard Evidence”—was written in 1998, at the behest of Troy Fuss, who was editor of an influential indy magazine called Popsmear. I’d been turned onto Popsmear because it was stocked at the coffee shop on Marshall Street where I spent most of my time when I was a student at Syracuse. “Hard Evidence” was not the first thing I’d sent Popsmear—I can’t quite recall the subject matter of that first piece, truthfully—but I was in the habit of writing long, rambling, confessional letters to editors in those days. I apparently unburdened my soul to Troy concerning some rather outrageous phone bills I’d racked up while assuaging my loneliness and innermost desires via phone sex, and he seized upon my personal misdeeds as a superior story to whatever nonsense I’d initially pitched him.

  Shortly after that I wrote the first half of “Ass backwards,” and while it didn’t see publication until some three years later when Albert Lee of Nerve.com read it and suggested I lengthen it, in the meantime it made the rounds (via the good old-fashioned United States Postal Service) to the Features Editor for Details Magazine, David Keeps, and then to Details West Coast editor, and I was given a much needed ego boost with some freelance work of a less-risque nature.

  However, after Nerve.com published “Ass Backwards,” I found myself flooded with emails from people eager to read more of my work. (Surprisingly, many readers at that time considered that what I wrote was “erotica” and I was the beneficiary of some curious photographs and articles of clothing. I suppose if you, kind reader, find these writings…stimulating…then I am glad to oblige you. But in case you were wondering, I have never tried to write an arousing story at any point in my career.)

  And then Nerve paid me a staggering $300. I find money to be a solid motivator for the muses, and so I began to write a series of essays in a similar vein to “Ass Backwards,” thinking of them as comic monologues and essays blended in the traditions of James Boswell, Montaigne, Charles Bukowski, Philip Roth, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Henry Rollins, Gore Vidal, Joan Didion, and Bill Hicks. Believe it or not, I had maintained a curious obliviousness to the prevalent popularity of the memoir and the personal essay. I’d attended Syracuse University to study poetry; Mary Karr and Tobias Wolff were both on faculty when I arrived. What two more important memoirists could I have been in close proximity to in the 1990s? I should say none at all, and yet I consider the two of them to be literary writers. After all, they held academic positions, and their memoirs elicited a more elevated respect from critics. I knew memoirs had a readership—I just didn’t know how vast it was.

  My ignorance is, in some ways, because I have always preferred to read the classics. I don’t totally ignore contemporary writers, but I’ve always felt that a writer ought to have a deep sense of the tradition in which he or she is working. I also hold the belief that a writer should not simply confine himself to one genre, but should hone his total craft by working in every genre. A writer should write plays, as well as poems, and novels, and essays, and journalism when the occasion calls (we must be careful to afford true journalists a separate category from that of writers in general, because the journalist makes a sacred compact with the reader that the novelist or poet does not).

  I mention the initial date of composition because I am often placed in the vast repository of other writers who also took up the form of the personal essay around the same time as I, such as David Sedaris, Sara Vowell, David Rakoff, Steve Almond, and Mike Birbiglia. I can’t begin to guess why they were compelled to choose the first person narrative essay, but there is no denying a certain zeitgeist of confessional writing occurred at the turn of the 21st century. It had been building through that decade of the 1990s, with memoirs and nonfiction books edging themselves onto the bestseller lists in the United States in ever increasing numbers, but in the early 2000s “truth” becomes the commodity for story telling in American Culture. It is during this same time that television is awash in so-called reality programming, and cable news outlets question the integrity and honesty of their competitors, offering to serve viewers any version of the one true reality they might desire.

  In drawing attention to this period in cultural history, where the vast audience of the world seems to be craving narrative which posits to be the final authority on The Facts As They Actually Happened, I wish to assert that I never considered myself a memoirist in any literal sense. I have always considered myself a storyteller, and while the stories I tell may take the form of an essay, and while the events described are true in that they actually happened to me, I have never claimed a journalist’s compact with the reader. True events are rearranged to conform to a more pleasing experience, while other details are borrowed from the lives of friends and presented as my own—not to deceive you; I would never deceive you, loyal reader, or make a fool of you. But I use deception as an actor might, to wear a mask that allows us both to more easily gaze at something universally true, which, if looked at in the mirror, might unsettle us to rancorous depths.

  When these stories were first printed, they were viewed as somewhat scandalous. Now, in the current climate of such well-wrought entertainment as It’s Always Sun
ny in Philadelphia, Louie, The League and Workaholics, not to mention a seemingly endless stream of bawdy and badly written imitators, the pose (and prose) of personal confession in print seems relegated to the quaintness of the vinyl record.

  That being said, it strikes me that throughout time, the earliest forms of subversion have arrived in print, whether delivered digitally or on paper. Thus, if these stories wind their way into you hands, by whatever means, and they give you some moment of release, either through laughter or—God help you—self abuse, and if you are comforted in knowing you are not alone—that it was, in fact, the Pert Shampoo that did that horrible thing to your penis—then my efforts are justly rewarded.

  Kevin Keck

  August 10, 2013

  Denver, North Carolina

  from Oedipus Wrecked*

  * These stories—or essays; call them whatever pleases your categorical fancy—are not exactly in the forms as they appeared in Oedipus Wrecked. The selections before you are, in fact, better. In some instances, I have streamlined the prose, while in other instances restoring passages which were originally excised.

  Ass Backwards

  When I was sixteen my mom confessed to me that she had a vibrator, which a friend had given to her, but which she never used. She just liked to keep it around "for laughs."

  Within a day I found the vibrator and immediately plunged it into my own ass while in a fit of vigorous masturbation. I could spend the rest of my life in analysis and never get to the bottom of that one. In fact, I don't even know why I felt the need to stimulate my prostate-- I wasn't even aware I had one-- unless on some level my ass knew that such an act of appropriating your mother's sex toy is the modern equivalent of killing your father.

  My best guess, though, is that I had read something in Hustler ("How was I to know that when I went to the doctor's for a routine exam, his nurse would give me a physical I would never forget!"), or I just wanted to see what was up with all those "fags."

  Eventually, though, the vibrator vanished. I don't know if my mom pressed her ear to the bathroom door one night only to hear a familiar whir, or if my constant treatments of bleach (I was sanitary, if nothing else) to the vibe's surface irritated her in some fashion that she couldn't fathom and she tossed it. Either way, such a loss lead me to desperate measures, involving cucumbers, a broom handle, a fire poker (just the handle) and, in an incident I refer to simply as "The Chiquita Affair," a banana that broke off inside me. I nearly killed myself straining to get that out as quickly as possible, and let me tell you: there's nothing more fucked up than shitting a banana.

  However, this was just my ass. I couldn't get over the fact that I was potentially a freak, and possibly violating some serious biblical code. I mean, Jews can't eat pork — surely anal delights are way higher up on the list of taboos. When I walked by people in my small town, I tried to imagine them pillaging their rectums with a variety of implements (usually garden tools), and I just couldn't do it. And somehow, when they looked back at me, I felt they knew an ice cream scooper had once protruded from my posterior. (Oh, and sickness of sicknesses, that same ice cream scooper is still nestled in one of the drawers in my parents' kitchen! I know it's been many years and numerous rinse cycles, but on those hot August afternoons when my dad suggests a chocolate sundae, I politely decline.)

  This pleasure center I discovered in myself only fueled my obsession in wondering about the way other people's asses operated. I mean, for years I never came across a woman who admitted to liking (let alone having) anal sex. I read interviews with porn stars who said they reserved anal sex for their off-camera sex life, leading me to believe that fucking a girl in the ass was the Rosetta Stone of sex, performed only by women who had conditioned their sphincters in a Kegeling exercise that allowed them to siphon the jizz out of man in such a tantric fashion that would regress the lucky fellow to a womb-like state.

  Because the frequency with which I got laid between sixteen and twenty-five could be measured by the appearance of comets, and because those women I did manage to bed with any regularity just seemed so loaded with vitamin D and other wholesome goodness, I never found myself in a situation where I felt comfortable saying to a girl, "So, would you mind if I fucked you in the ass tonight?"

  And that lasted until I met Debra.

  We were lying in bed in post-coital bliss, when I mustered the courage to ask her if she wanted to try anal sex.

  "Sure."

  The speed with which I was able to achieve another erection was dizzying. I grabbed a bottle of lotion from beside her bed and started lubing her up. I was generous with the lotion; I wanted things to go as smoothly as possible.

  She moaned softly as I slid my finger in her ass, then two, and I thought that things had been loosened up enough. She slid a pillow under her belly and spread her legs as I got in between them, rubbing the head of my cock up and down the crack of her ass and then sliding it in. I felt more pure joy than when I graduated high school.

  Then the head of my dick hit something. In my experiments with driving a dildo up my own orifice, this didn't seem right. I mean, maybe my ass was special, but I could sink my mother's vibrator pretty far in there. I pulled out a little, then pushed in again. Debra was moaning like a real champion. Things couldn't have been going better.

  Except that my dick hit something again. The gravity of the situation dawned on me: the tip of my dick was in direct contact with — something. (I have since come to know this unfortunate circumstance as "running over a turtle.")

  I immediately withdrew and leapt off the bed.

  "I have to go to the bathroom," I said, and blazed a trail to the shower, haunted by thoughts of hepatitis, bacterial infections, gangrene. I didn't even wait for the water to warm up: I jumped in the shower and held my dick (which had shrunk considerably) under one of the streams of water, and then held the peehole open so it could be thoroughly rinsed.

  I jumped back out of the shower, found some Q-Tips, got back in and lathered one of the Q-Tips with soap and jammed it into my dick. For three days I couldn't pee without tears welling in my eyes.

  Mid–urethra swab, Debra pulled back the shower curtain.

  "What kind of a fucking freak are you?"

  Had it not been for the fact that a Q-Tip was dangling from the end of my dick, I might have had an answer for that. Instead, I said, "What are you doing in here?"

  "I've got to take a crap."

  I closed the shower curtain and put my head under the water, trying desperately hard not to listen as she shamelessly used the facilities a mere three feet away.

  While I stood there, praying that my fecal encounter wouldn't lead to a hospital visit, I could swear I heard something like a grunt. I had lived my whole life in denial of the fact that women even had the capability of farting; reality as I understood it was crumbling.

  It occurred to me that Debra and I probably weren't going to work out.

  After that night I didn't give much thought to any sort of anal adventures. I spent the next year or two cautioning other men against such transgressions, telling them in excruciating detail my saga of coming head-to-head with the dreaded turtle.

  I probably wouldn't have returned to the pleasures of the prostate had it not been for a phone sex conversation gone awry. At one point during our step-mother/step-son role-play, the "delectable milf" I had dialed said, "Oh, my sweet boy, I want you to let me fuck you in the ass with my big plastic dildo."

  I came immediately, which was unfortunate since I had paid for twenty minutes.

  After this, I became obsessed with finding a woman who would fuck me in the ass with a dildo. I would spend weeks and months testing the waters with various women, coaxing them to finger my ass while they gave me head. Those that made it that far (and they were an exclusive few) usually found one reason or another to conclude our relations for good when I asked them to entertain the thought of cornholing me.

  Eventually, in a coffeehouse I frequented, I met Alice. She was an
English major, and she had that dark, bohemian look that seemed to indicate that she was the type of girl who would fuck a guy in the ass, if only because it deconstructed traditional male/female relationships. I was not so idealistic that I wanted to hold out for a woman who was genuinely interested in buggering me, and if a few years of college had built up enough postmodern angst in a girl from the suburbs, I was entirely open to exploiting that.

  I did not, however, anticipate falling in love with Alice. This complicated things because past experiences had taught me that not even a one-carat engagement ring could bind a woman so closely to me that she was willing to do that "dirty deed." Alice was also not interested in "toys." Whenever I suggested buying her a vibrator she dismissed the thought. When she introduced me to her parents several months into our relationship, I began to suspect that we were on a path of normality that barred the boinking of your boyfriend's butt. Things were getting out of hand. On the drive home from her parents' house, I finally said, "Look, do you love me?"

  She affirmed that this was the case. "Well, here's how it is..." And I related the tale of my mother's vibrator, of the ice cream scooper, even of the banana.

  When I was done, Alice said nothing for a while. I was prepared to take her back to my place, let her collect her things and then bid her farewell so she could retreat to her friends and family with stories of what an absolute lunatic I was. Instead she said, "I think I have what you're looking for." The strap-on was black and made of rubber and was worn on a black leather harness. I marveled over it while Alice told me of her brief adventures on the Island of Lesbos.