Hard Evidence- The Collected Bawdy Writings

by Kevin Keck

  When I came, I pulled out and sent great streams of semen all across her. Whatever virility I experienced during the event notwithstanding, as soon I shook the last quiver of release from me, I flipped out. I couldn’t comprehend what I had just done. I had standards, didn’t I? And wasn’t this a flagrant violation of them? I was overcome with a strangeness similar to the first time I experienced an orgasm in front of a woman. I was awash with guilt and anxiety—and one can only begin to imagine what unspeakable horror in my infancy involving (more than likely) a rectal thermometer might have lead to this reaction. As a drop of semen made a slow, clinging descent from the tip of my penis and down towards Cindy’s navel, I said:

  “This was a bad idea.”

  Her face clouded over quickly, and she began to scream:

  “OH MY GOD! YOU’RE NOT GOING TO ASK ME TO LEAVE AFTER YOU JUST FUCKED ME ARE YOU? I FEEL LIKE SUCH A FUCKING WHORE! FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCK!”

  I felt my penis go cold and limp in my hand, and I thought about the come that was drying on Cindy’s chest and neck.

  “Would you like me to make you some toast?”

  She stared at me blankly. I tried again, this time with something less nurturing:

  “It’s not you; it’s me.”

  She seemed to understand this, and so I began to explain the terrible misfortune that we had experienced together, how it would be bad for both of us if this became public, how it never should have happened, and that while I appreciated her interest in me, it would be best if this encounter were forgotten. When I was done she looked at me and sighed:

  “You’re nothing like I thought you would be. I’m really disappointed.”

  I refrained from telling her that she was not the first woman to come to this conclusion. We both dressed in silence, and when she was ready I walked her sheepishly to the door.

  I tried to leave things on an up note. I reminded her that she had a paper due tomorrow, but under the circumstances I would consider giving her an extension if she needed it. She smiled. I thought about kissing her goodnight, then decided against it. I watched her walk across the street to her car, then I turned to go back inside. From behind me I heard:

  “I MEAN REALLY DISAPPOINTED, KECK! YOU SUCK LIKE I’VE NEVER SEEN!”

  I didn’t turn around. Cindy never showed back up in class, and when I did see her on campus she pivoted as if on pointe, and promptly walked in the opposite direction. I gave her an “A” at the end of the semester, felt lucky to have escaped being caught, and decided that if I had at least learned something from the experience then it wasn’t a total waste.

  I now conclude that the experience was a total waste. Should I have expected anything less? In the simple world of pop-psychologists, I was only behaving exactly as I was supposed to. I was chasing the archetype of romance, the model by which I was to set all standards. My entire upbringing is filled with fairy tales of romance between my mother and father, a romance which began when she was a student in 1968 in his history class at a small, religiously affiliated college nestled in the mountains of North Carolina.

  It would have been a great help had I recognized this obvious comparison prior to taking a job as an adjunct professor at a small, religiously affiliated college that was also sunk into the backwoods of the Old North State. Even had the fact crossed my mind at the time, however, I would have dismissed it: I was dedicated to becoming a full-time faculty member, and I was going about my business, by the book.

  My return to the South was nothing short of a culture shock. Upon acceptance of my position at the college, I was asked to sign a form stating that I was a practicing Christian. I had no reservations about this: if you're paying me, I'll sign a form saying I was the sole mastermind behind the Holocaust. But for the record, it had been so long since I'd set foot in a church that I avoided the prospect at all costs for fear of being immediately incinerated once I crossed the threshold.

  Besides making sure (by God) that their instructors were of the sort of strong Christian influence that they wanted around their students, it was campus policy that men and women were not allowed to engage in displays of public affection. Private affection was also off limits, but understandably harder to enforce. Thus, males and females were housed in different buildings, and visitation was limited more or less to those hours of the day when the sun illuminates all dark corners where sin could be hiding out. Also, if a man and a woman were in a room alone, it was mandated that the door to that room should be open. This went for teachers, staff, and students. (Later I would learn that this extended so far as to include visiting family members, which shouldn’t have surprised me in a state where I had once been encouraged to ask my first cousin on a date.)

  Despite the overall atmosphere that at any moment one could be visited by the Inquisition, I welcomed a chance at discipline and purity. I really wanted to have a bland, middle-class life, to immerse myself in a world that existed only in books. I was grateful to be on a campus where students openly discussed their total dedication to a life spent in service of the Lord. The girls were maddeningly delicious, but they were single-minded about their commitment to a sin-free, Christian life.

  The second week of classes a rather bookish girl (and a very outspoken Star Wars aficionado), Elizabeth, appeared in my office. After some idle chit-chat about class there was a long, uncomfortable lull in the conversation. I sensed Elizabeth had something on her mind, so I sat behind my desk with my eye-brows raised.

  "Do you ever watch Sex and the City?" she finally asked.

  I had to confess that I didn't watch it on any regular basis, but that I had seen a few episodes.

  "Did you see the one about the politician who wants to pee on Sarah Jessica Parker?"

  "Yes." I wasn’t quite sure where this was leading, but I assumed that as a student at a Christian institution she was about to launch into a litany regarding the morality of such an act as based on her readings of the scriptures.

  "What did you think about that?"

  Honestly, I had thought nothing of it. It neither appealed to me, nor disgusted me, which is why when later that night Elizabeth showed up at my apartment dressed conservatively, and after a few sips of white zinfandel shed her clothing to lay down in my shower waiting for my warm stream of urine to flow over her, I attempted to comply. Whatever hang-ups she had about patriarchal figures and her self-worth had been decided long before I came along, and so I didn’t feel especially heinous as I tickled the tip of my penis in an attempt to coax a good, long piss from it. I had been drinking water for the previous several hours, and I could feel the ache for release in my kidneys and bladder.

  Nothing was happening though. Elizabeth kept alternating her anxious gaze from my flaccid member to my face. She would occasionally utter the encouraging phrase (“Come on, piss on me, I’m you’re little whore,” etc.), but for the most part remained silent. I admit I was nervous. I also admit that I have had problems my entire life when it comes to urinating under pressure. I can’t begin to recount the number of times I have been at some concert, waiting in a line for the bathroom that flowed at the pace of Silly Putty, worrying that I might wet myself, only to discover as I finally stood in front of the urinal that the pressure to pee quickly and move on was just too much. I would freeze-up. I would try to pretend I was alone, in my own bathroom, with the nurturing hum of the exhaust fan overhead and a soothing, diffused light. But it was always to no avail, and so I would fake the shake-off, flush the toilet, and walk away completely disgusted with myself.

  Eventually I turned the shower on, hoping that the warm water might relax me. To Elizabeth’s credit she kept up a good face, never criticizing, but always provoking me to let her have it, because she had been bad and deserved to be treated like a filthy slut. In my mind, though, I kept thinking how silly this all was, how it held no allure for me, and how I just felt rather sorry for an attractive, young girl who sought out some sort of connection with another human being via this avenue. Finally, Eliza
beth, in a cause and effect miscalculation, began to masturbate. I suddenly sprouted an erection, and peeing was out of the question. Before I could offer to help her finish, the water went cold.

  When we were out of the shower I suggested that next time we try something more traditional. She said:

  "Oh, I don't have sex. That's a sin. At least until I’m married."

  And then she dressed and left to meet her fiancé at church. Eventually that same fiancé would break into my apartment one night, lying in wait for my return so he could kick the shit out of me. Fortunately, I am a heavy pot smoker, and I often fall asleep in strange places and never make it to my own bed. Such was the case the night that the frustrated fiancé intruded upon my domicile, but he eventually was able to have me fired for being a pornographer because of the subject nature of most of my writing. For the longest time I sympathized with his anger: I doubt I would want a strange man making an attempt, however feeble and willingly received, to urinate on my fiancé. Months after my dismissal, I discovered he had no knowledge of the aborted golden shower; he was incensed over the white zinfandel his fiancé and I had shared. Southern Baptists are funny that way.

  I was able to pick up adjunct work fairly quickly at the local community college. It speaks volumes about my knowledge of my subject area, or the sad state of American education, that I was hired on the spot while completely stoned. I had ripped about twenty bong hits prior to the interview—perhaps the best interview I’ve ever had—and chatted away merrily about my love of teaching disinterested youths the merits of the five paragraph essay.

  After having been fired for being a pornographer, and enduring the humiliation of being “pee shy,” I felt that I had more or less hit rock bottom. To make matters worse, I wasn’t even able to afford the quality of cannabis that I had grown accustomed to. It comes as no surprise then that I did not take my position as an adjunct instructor at a community college very seriously, which is why when one of my students called me up after the first class meeting to ask if she could come to my apartment for some tutoring I was more than willing to work overtime for free.

  Fiona was a petite, dirty blond who dressed like a hippy, and I have always had a weakness for hippy girls: nothing about them seems overly processed or fortified with preservatives. And despite everything that had happened to me up until that point, I in no way saw myself as a man with whom women were eager to have sex. I spent the hours before her arrival drinking Coors and smoking one joint after another, until I was seriously on the brink of being more aware of the earth spinning than I ever care to be. When Fiona arrived at my apartment she seemed embarrassed; I was doing my best to seem as cool as possible, but it’s hard to seem very cool when remaining upright is problematic.

  I made matters entirely worse by not getting right down to it. A professor more experienced than I (and perhaps tenured as well) might have thrown the young, nubile body of Fiona against the wall immediately and plunged into her. I wanted to at least collect enough of the community college’s meager paychecks in order to pay rent for a few months, so I made sure that things were as Kosher as possible first. I offered her a drink, asked her about her family, and what she was studying. She sat on the floor in front of me, shifting positions every now and again, and seemingly making a point of not disguising the fact that she had no underwear on under her skirt. The tension of the situation kept my stomach in knots.

  Finally I said, "I see you're not wearing any underwear." Fiona looked up at me, surprised, then opened her legs and hiked her skirt up. She spread her labia and said: "I have a pretty pussy, don't I?”

  The night overwhelmed me at that moment, and I puked all over her pretty pussy. I do not have a high tolerance for alcohol, or sexual tension, and the combination of the two usually unmasks me as the neurotic mess I truly am. Fiona showered and left that night in some sweatpants and a t-shirt of mine, and I cuddled up in bed with a bottle of Pepto. But she didn't lose interest. That should have been a warning signal of some sort.

  Fiona made a nest of my apartment, which would have been fine if her love-child dress code accurately reflected her musical tastes. Instead, she blasted songs consisting of irritatingly out of tune guitars while walking around the house as though her womb were swelling, telling me that she couldn't wait to "become a mother." Her assertion that she was on the pill became a point of skepticism for me.

  After a few weeks she took me to meet her father, a brutal stump of a man who couldn't have been much more than 5'1". Standing modestly over six feet, I towered above him and tried to be very aware of that fact so as not to come off as superior in any way. Immediately he said:

  "Is my daughter getting an A in your class?"

  Out of habit I fell into professional mode:

  "Well, she's doing fine in the class so far, but she has a few issues with her writing which need to be worked out. I think if she puts her mind to it, she'll do fine on the final, and there's no reason why she couldn't make an A."

  "She's been sleeping at your apartment. I imagine she'll get an A."

  I decided right then that trouble was brewing.

  I started staying at my office more, to avoid going back to my apartment and being cornered by Fiona. She started lingering after class and coming to see me during my office hours. After a few close calls where she announced a bit too loudly that she would see me back at home, I went to the only place I could: the men's room. I closed myself in a stall and graded papers, caught up on my reading, and even fell asleep on occasion—though I tried not to. I harbored a secret fear that the graffiti on the stall wall advertising homosexual encounters in the visitors' locker room of the field house would somehow imprint on my forehead and not wash off. Finally, during a night of love-making when Fiona cooed for me to fill her with my “thick baby batter,” I hopped up from the bed and announced, “Fiona, I want to pee on you.”

  I helped her pack her things, dropped her off at her father’s house, and watched as she walked to the door where he was waiting for her. He glared at me, then took her into his arms and held her in a way that made me frightfully uncomfortable and once again glad to be out of such a sticky mess.

  The following semester when I began teaching at The Art School I reasserted my personal conviction that despite my parents’ thirty-year odyssey together, it was altogether impossible in this day and age for anything good to come from relations with the student body. Besides, if I had learned nothing else from my previous encounters, at the very least I should have grasped the fact that young women do find me attractive, and that statistically most of those young women did not attend the school at which I taught. My reasoning, however sound it may seem, would only have been slightly less accurate had I based it on the wisdom gleaned from petrified goose turds.

  From the very beginning of my tenure at The Art School I was made to feel like a piece of raw meat dangled before starving jackals. Whereas my prior liaisons with studious nymphs had stunned me by their actual occurrence, I was constantly aware in my new position that whenever I said the word there were several eager young ladies willing to deliver. Nothing could have been more mind-boggling, save for growing a cactus on my forehead as I slept.

  I do not mean to sound insincere in my claims of bewilderment at my students’ lust. The simple fact of the matter is that anyone who knows me will substantiate the claim that, in the non-academic universe, I am a total butterfingers where courtship is concerned. Before becoming a bonafide college instructor, I dated intermittently, had relationships that never fully satisfied me (or my partners), and spent the majority of my time alone and depressed. Since then I have had the best sex of my life, with the most beautiful women I have ever dated, and they’ve all been my students. I am at once repulsed and fascinated by this realization.

  Why is this? When I was a student I had a swashbuckler’s main of thick, luscious hair, and now I endure my friends’ unrelenting repertoire of premature baldness humor. While I’ve always been lean, years of getting stoned and
entranced by the Discovery Channel have turned me into the worst of all creatures: the out-of-shape thin guy. As I’ve gotten older, my problems with depression have made me a rather difficult individual to be around. I owe more money than I’m comfortable thinking about. My penis, once a great source of aesthetic pride, has lost its looks a bit from too many allergic reactions to scented lotions. This being the case, it makes perfect sense why I am a bachelor in the world of bankers and bartenders.

  But I am none of these things when I teach. When I am in front of a classroom, I am in charge. I am confident, I am charming, I know what I’m talking about. I make people laugh. I help people. I tell them they are doing a good job, that they are going to be okay, and if they aren’t going to be okay, I let them know that I’ll do what I can to help them fix it. And if they are attractive and of the female persuasion, then I am all the more likely to help them as much as I can.

  During my year of teaching at The Art School I have managed to keep things under control—for the most part. The circumstances I currently find myself in—an early morning interrogation by my current and former sexual partner—lead me to believe that perhaps the amount of control I thought I wielded has diminished considerably. I watch as my girlfriend boxes up her possessions in the early hours of the morning, assisted by my ex-girlfriend. When I get up from the bed they stop what they are doing and observe me like an alligator whose eggs they are stealing. I walk past them and to the kitchen where I begin to make coffee.

  My first semester at The Art School I walked around a corner only to hear Belinda, my ex-girlfriend, saying that whenever she heard me read in class she wanted to immediately fall to her knees and suck my cock. She made this statement the day after I had read a portion of Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes to the class (and it was my sincere wish that Exley had gotten more than a few blow jobs out of that story in his day). I ignored this comment and went about my business. During a meeting with her towards the end of the semester, which was supposed to focus on her final research paper, Belinda detailed her dissatisfaction with the size of her current boyfriend’s penis, using her cell phone to illustrate the length and girth that her beau lacked. I remained as professional as one could under the circumstances, and pointed out to her that she would certainly find someone who would fulfill her in more than just a physical way. As I said those words, though, I was taking mental notes as to the model of cell phone she had so that I could see (at a more convenient time) whether or not I measured up.