by Kevin Keck
I dealt with the discomfort of my surroundings, and got a room at the newest motel in town, the Super 8. Eerily enough, as soon I was in my room the phone started ringing. It was Marceil, my delicious phonesex princess.
“How did you know I was here?” I asked.
“There’s no place else you could be in this town,” she said. Marceil did not drip with a lazy, southern accent as most of her townspeople did. (Even I had trouble understanding the drawled enunciation of the desk clerk while negotiating my room.) Marceil was a transplant from Pittsburgh—her mother had married a Methodist minister after leaving her husband for him, and thus when she told me that my choices of whereabouts were few and far between within the city limits, it was with a disdain that I could understand: the town I grew up in is also small, though we do not even share the luxury of a hotel.
I drove to pick up Marceil at the veterinary clinic where she worked as an assistant. I took this to mean she fed the animals and cleaned their cages, and this fact was confirmed when she entered my car. However, she was much prettier than her photos had indicated, and so I did not allow the odor of caged animals to put a damper on our rendezvous.
Back at the motel we each sat on a different bed and asked awkward questions of one another. The questions were awkward because they had no point; they were merely an attempt to mask the surreal aspect of meeting someone in person who has previously only been an abstract voice. It was true that Marceil had once implored me to come and visit, take her to an adult theater, and fuck her in the ass while dozens of anonymous men took turns sodomizing her mouth. But sitting on the bed opposite her, I found it impossible to reconcile the rather proper and innocent girl before me with the absolute whore that spoke to me on the phone.
After about an hour she mentioned that she would have to be getting home soon, and for some reason I chose that moment to begin my seduction of her. As are usually the case with these things, it was not the long, slow, ritualistic dance into the bliss of the bed, but rather brief, confusing, and clumsy.
As soon as my hands were down her pants and playing with her pussy, she suggested that we wait until tomorrow night, when we had more time. I agreed with her, but I had a raging erection, and I had driven for a considerable distance (which, sadly, was not the longest distance I have ever driven for sex.) After mutually deciding that we should put off our passions for just a few more hours, we were back on top of one another. We dove straight into intercourse with such speed that neither one of us had our pants completely off. I was so aroused that the condom didn’t give me a lick of trouble, and no sooner was it on than it was off again as I came on Marceil’s face and shirt. I would spend most of the drive to her place apologizing about the shirt.
When I went to pick her up the next day, my car wouldn’t start. The rest of my weekend became an ordeal in finding a mechanic in Opelika who would fix my car without raising the price to an absurd amount because of my out-of-state plates. None of Marceil’s friends would give her a lift to the motel, because they thought meeting a guy from the internet was the most insane thing a person could do. I freely admit that choosing a partner from the internet probably increases the likelihood of selecting certain undesirable traits (for example, the ability to sit inside in the dark and stare at a computer screen hypnotically for hours), but the ratio of psychos to “normal people” is no greater in the virtual world than it is elsewhere. And besides, the odds still say you’re more likely to be killed in an auto accident. Or by a relative.
Without a car, and without willing friends to ferry her to me, Marceil and I were out of luck. I did not see her again for the remainder of my agonizing stay in her fair city, and when I returned to the darkness of my parents’ laundry room, kneeled beside my bed with cock in hand and phone to head, Marceil dropped a bomb on me:
“I was a virgin, you know. I should have told you.”
Because it seemed an impossibility to me that a virgin could have articulated such intense sexual desire, I thought that she said she was a Virginian, that she wasn’t from Pittsburgh at all, but a southerner like me. And then I realized how stupid that was.
“Oh,” I said. I thought about what my response should be. Why was she telling me this now? Was I supposed to feel special? Guilty? I actually did feel kind of lousy. I didn’t feel as though I had given her an encounter to remember, and that if anything I may have just made her feel cheap and used. “So, like, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t care,” she said. “It wasn’t a big deal. Besides, I'm only--” And at hearing her actual age, I came from sheer fright. “I have a lot of years ahead of me to really make it matter.” I heard the words, but my head was swimming from the crushing weight of incontrovertible truths, of the sort usually reserved for bodice-rippers and television mini-series.
Where did her attitude come from? Crossing that initial and thrilling sexual threshold has always seemed of monumental consequence, regardless of your age or culture or class. So much of the world that we experience is a reaction to the mystery of sexuality, a mystery that we can only begin to unravel with the aid of an accomplice. It was beyond my scope of reason to grasp how Marceil was undaunted by the union of bodies and constriction of muscles that weigh upon the minds of most people.
Even though I had felt her body against mine, she became more abstract to me in the light of her confession. Her yielding of her virginity without pomp and circumstance set her apart from my construction of what a woman was in my mind. I was threatened by it—she seemed to have a fearlessness that made her stronger than me. I was a fool the night I lost my virginity, and I was a fool many times after that: when I was with a woman I pretended to be someone I was not; I wore the mantle of manliness that I believed was proper, instead of allowing myself to open up to someone and free the well of desire that I had dammed inside of myself out of shame.
But it would be a while yet before I could find the ease with which to free myself, and so my phone calls to Marceil became more infrequent until she became an abstraction entirely: a memory, like everything else eventually becomes.
Touched
I found the ad in the back of Rolling Stone. It was a classified ad with small print promising that after one call you would be “cumming back for more.” I called the number, which was international, and waited as the foreign tone rang a few times. When my call went through, a seductive, automated woman’s voice welcomed me and tossed around sexual innuendo for a few minutes, then scolded minors who might have called and urged them to hang up. (I imagine that few adolescents were ever deterred.) I was then dumped immediately onto a party line, where what sounded like dozens of people, both men and women, were moaning with ecstasy. It would have been impossible to try and carry on a conversation over that din of desire, and so it seemed everyone had spontaneously erupted in a chorus of coming. The sound of other people’s pleasure was still a rarity for me then; I was a junior in college, but the promises of frequent sorority servicing in college did not pan out for me as they did most of my friends—in retrospect, I see that the girls could sense I dripped with desperation, the same way a soldier still green from bootcamp sweats with eagerness and anxiety to finally fire his weapon at a live target. Needless to say, I was avoided exactly like someone who was fast on the trigger. Thus, when I heard those cries of release on the phone, I came brutally and quickly myself. I felt terribly guilty for some reason afterward, but the guilt was not substantial enough to prevent me from calling back an hour later.
When the phone bill arrived a few weeks after my initial call, I had managed to tally a modest one hundred and fifty dollars in phone calls. Had I been the sole resident of my domain, the bill would have presented little problem, but I lived in my parents’ house during my junior and senior years of college. I was also unemployed. At the time, it really didn’t register with me that I was an unemployed guy studying poetry while masturbating chronically in my parents’ basement. The whole lack-of-getting-laid thing makes perfect sense now.
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Naturally, my parents flipped out when they saw the chunk of change that my jerking off had cost them. I explained the matter as a misunderstanding on my part: I had recently learned how to connect via modem to other computers, and I had errantly dialed up a number to an academic site without realizing it was in another country. I apologized profusely and my dad assigned me extra yard work (which was actually worse than it might sound: we lived on several acres that required constant tending). I knew I only had one shot with that excuse, and so I would have to be resilient and avoid the temptation to dial-for-delight.
I went out that night, purchased a copy of Hustler, and nearly wrecked my car as I drove home at a speed that would have garnered felony charges, all the while scanning the picture-plentiful phone sex ads. It was such a thrill for me to listen to other people come that whenever I looked at a phone my dick began to swell. The next eight months, as the phone bills continued to escalate and I was forced to get a job, I concocted one sci-fi excuse after another: the higher the phone bill, the more inane my explanation for why I was calling small Caribbean islands. My dad had been a college professor, and even though he had spent the previous ten years working in the private sector, surely not even he could have believed that housed in the tropics was a wealth of mainframe computers that contained volumes of new critical work on the Metaphysical poets.
If my phone sex obsession had resulted in any actual human interaction, it might make more sense as to why I had to have it so badly. However, I never spoke a single word during any of the calls I made. I would whack myself to the point of drawing blood as I listened to horny, lonely voices talking or cooing to one another, and thus I became a voyeur of loneliness, which is probably the most lonely thing you can be.
A recurrent pattern in many of these calls was the indifferent operator. It was the job (in theory) of whatever girl was acting as operator to help cultivate sexual discussion on the line. On most occasions, her boredom with the constant barrage of men calling for a quick jerk session was heavily evident, and you could sometimes hear her flipping magazine pages, or the sound of her changing television channels.
My parents finally kicked me out of the house when one of the bills topped five hundred dollars. I moved in with my friend David, promptly started running up his phone bill, and then somehow persuaded him to cash in his trust fund and loan me the money to pay the bill. David’s nest egg that had been accruing interest since his birth was depleted rapidly, and when the well was dry I departed for Central New York to attend graduate school. I left David with a four hundred dollar phone bill, which was a more unkind cut after learning a week prior to my departure that he and his girlfriend had become pregnant. Serious cocaine addicts have behaved in more a honorable fashion to the family members that they fuck over in order to support their habits, and my failings as a human being were simply a direct result of my inability to jerk off without some sort of pornographic stimuli.
I thought that when I arrived in New York I would finally get the monkey off my back, but my phone was shut off after only a week of service. I had racked up a long distance bill of such magnitude in such a short period of time that it alarmed the telephone company. My first three years in New York were spent with spotty phone service because I was always frightfully behind on my bill. It was, after all, higher than my rent by a long shot, and I was at least rational enough to realize I needed a place to live more than phone sex.
I emphasize again, however, that I was only listening during these calls as I held my breath and pounded myself vigorously in silence. Once I began to actually speak, things got worse, and my maxim of rent-before-phone-sex was left behind like the furniture I had to abandon in the numerous apartments I fled in order to avoid eviction.
I learned to speak my desire in the same place I had learned to listen: in my parents’ basement, in the room directly under their bedroom. It was about six on Christmas morning, and I had met an older woman in a chat room on AOL who wanted to get off on the phone. I had butterflies in my stomach as I dialed her number, and I came shortly after we began to talk, even though we weren’t doing much more at that point than just describing ourselves. For the remainder of my visit at my parents’ over the holidays I was attendant to only one thing: the computer. I would hang out in a chat room on AOL (usually the “All Men Do It” room), and when a woman materialized in the room, I would join the swarm of other lurking masturbators who flooded her with instant messages that pleaded to be the one she chose to play with. When I returned to school, I promptly filled out the paperwork for a student loan so I could buy my own computer, and have a little extra cash to cover my phone bills.
The knowledge that there was a woman who was listening to me as I pleasured myself, and who was very likely doing the same thing, was the most delightful notion—sometimes even more wonderful than sex. Sound is the most pleasurable of the senses for me, and the orgasmic orchestra that I helped conduct over the phone was a constant source of arousing and heavenly music. The sound of any random woman coming is the sound of a beautiful woman—your ears are never as biased as your eyes. When I closed mine and listened to a woman evoke such primal sounds from the instrument of her body, I felt the strings of pleasure within my own body begin to vibrate, and my hand would keep tempo along my cock until the crescendo.
In my initial conversations with women I was very coy. We would talk for a while about non-sexual topics, then build through a slow foreplay until we were both moaning and diddling ourselves towards mania. However, like many addicts, the casual nature of my addiction spiraled all too quickly to a single point: to get my fix. Even when I had a girlfriend, all I wanted to do was get on the computer, find someone to talk to, and fall to my knees and jerk off while on the telephone. I had several people that I talked to on a regular basis, and when I knew they would be online I had to be in front of the computer to greet them and invite them to join me for a session of self-gratification. I left parties to go home and jerk off on the phone; I cut actual dates short. Even when I knew that my girlfriend was on her way over and that I would definitely be getting laid, I would have phone sex and completely ruin my appetite for real, live intimacy.
With the fat government loan checks rolling in every semester, my appetite for whacking via the assistance of Bell Atlantic was insatiable. I eventually phoned beyond my means and lost phone service completely. I was able to dial out using prepaid calling cards, and I spent all my rent money for the next two months doing that. During that time I somehow became engaged to another graduate student in the English Department: during an argument that stemmed from her inability to reach me via the telephone I said, “Well, if we’re going to care this much about each other, we might as well get married.”
“Okay,” she said, and a few days later she and I went to get a marriage license. I moved in with her shortly after that, but not because I wanted to join my life with hers in any sort of permanent sense: I had to vacate the apartment I was in because my landlords were threatening to evict me. I stole away under cover of night during the course of three days as I stealthily transported my meager belongings one carload at a time to my fiancee’s, all the while realizing that I would have to contain my urges for telephone titillation once I shared the same space as my bride to be.
While I was able to restrain my need to reach out and touch someone (anyone, really), I still was jerking off like a man possessed. I would sneak out of the bed and go into the living room, which was carpeted, and kneel in front of the television and masturbate to the female meteorologists on The Weather Channel. One night my fiancee caught me taking the happy pup for a walk, and from that day forward made it her habit to walk barefoot across the entirety of the carpet to discover the evidence of my onanism. (For the laymen, allow me to point out that when semen is expelled onto carpet, it often leaves a crusty spot that one can feel if it isn’t cleaned up immediately after landing.) She became suspicious of me when I would vacuum, as though I were constantly trying to cover up my trac
ks—pecker tracks as my mother used to call them.
Ultimately, I broke down and commenced with the phone play again, only to be caught fairly quickly by my dear would-be-life-long love. We didn’t have call waiting, and after trying to call one day and finding the phone line busy, she called the phone company to check on the bill. Her assumption was that I was on the line having phone sex, and much to her credit, she was right. That night she packed my things and moved them into the corridor of our apartment building. I was at a Ratdog concert while this was happening, and when I arrived at home to find my things waiting for me silently in the hallway, I figured my dreams of holy matrimony weren’t going to pan out.
I landed on the spare futon of my friend Hooper, and his roommate, T.J. I confess to being a slow learner, which is why once I realized I had a virgin phone line at my disposal I began my obsessive behavior all over again. Because I was broke, I couldn’t go out and do anything, and because I was stuck at home, I had nothing to turn to but my own ambrosia, the telephone.
By the end of the summer the phone bill had escalated to approximately $4500. I eventually paid it, with the majority of my student loan for that semester, and T.J. took me to the bank (literally) to have a letter notarized stating that I was the sole culprit responsible for the slow payment on the long distance charges for adult entertainment lines. I felt that T.J. was out to humiliate me because I had often knelt outside his bedroom and masturbated as I listened to him fuck his girlfriend. Sometimes I was even on the phone as I did this.
Ultimately I did unhinge myself from the shackles of aural delights. I mean, there’s only so much phone sex a person can take. But when I consider what attracted me to it, I suspect it was because I lacked the savvy and skill to be the lover in life that I was on the phone, and whatever desires I kept from my partner at the time seemed completely easy to reveal to the abstract voices that urged me to orgasm. The same was true for the women I spoke with as well: there was the woman from New York city, a nurse, who told me how she loved to suck her brother’s cock, and on one occasion someone that she claimed was her brother did walk in on her having phone sex with me, and I shot a massive load as I listened to her gagging on his dick. There was an eighteen year-old in D.C. who was supposedly from an upper class family who begged me to call her a worthless whore while her dog licked her pussy. I heard couples having sex, vibrators in cunts, voices whispering urgently for me to fuck them as their husbands or parents or boyfriends or roommates were asleep in the next room. I’ve had innumerable women on the phone ask me to tell them that I love them as they hysterically work themselves into a lather. I have been a party to more confessions of shame and sin and desperation that I can even begin to speculate about. I must have heard thousands of orgasms (or the illusion of orgasms). Whether or not any of it was true is irrelevant: I was a witness to those dark, misshapen desires that had been nesting inside all those people, and I heard them temporarily become weightless as those passions went aloft into the ether of wires and satellite signals, and this is happening all around us, at all times: those frequencies we cannot detect with our senses are passing through our bodies, carrying not only the currents of pop culture to our televisions and radios, but also the shriek of orgasm from one attuned ear to another.