by Storm Large
Bill.
Saying his name now, I can still recall the ache and how I would sigh. My first blowjob recipient, he also taught me about handjob etiquette, put hickies on my boobs, smelled really good, and was a fantastic kisser. But we never ever had sex.
I couldn’t figure out how to get the two together, the liking and the fucking. If I had feelings for someone, for me it was a sad guarantee that they would never like me back, no matter what I did. It was instant agony. If my heart leapt at the sight of them or the sound of their name, I knew it was hopeless. I was that chick who would call the guy maniacally until he (or better yet, his parents) would pick up and yell “Stop calling!” I was the girl who’d show up uninvited to parties and stare miserably at whomever it was I was obsessed with. I couldn’t see it then, but when I felt anything like love for another person, I would really be just like my mom, who confounded and terrified the people she loved the most until we all scattered away from her as if she were a bad smell. I spent most of my tweens feeling like a turd in a punch bowl, but having feelings for someone turned me into an insta-leper. That, coupled with the fact that I actually wanted someone to love me, filled me with hot-faced shame.
I had no shame about sex though, nor anything around it; it all seemed normal and natural. My biggest problem was that I made too big a deal about it, secretly wanted it to mean more. A desperate flutter in my chest, hoping that what’s-his-name or whoever was bending me over in a bathroom stall, would see something in me and think I was special. That they would see I was more than that, and try to fuck some sense into me. Then one day the flutter gave a cool thud, my heart balled into a fist and gave the world the finger.
The guy was, I think, thirtyish. He was some muckity-muck business professional with a law degree, and we were both guests at a wedding. It was a sweltering day in a deep green part of New England, and we were all partying around a pool. Everyone had bathing suits on under their formalwear, and as soon as the word came down from the mother of the bride that the classy part of the wedding was over, people peeled off their clothes quickly. Through the wavy blur of humidity, the huge lawn was littered with discarded poufy dresses. The grass looked like it had sprung a bunch of prehistoric flowers, all pinks, blues, and multicolored, wilting in the oppressive temperature.
I was sixteen years old and in a bit of a Goth phase, short spiky blonde hair, black cat eyeliner and black everything. I wanted to be too cool for the pool, but it was superhot and the party was quickly turning into a drunken free-for-all, and getting fun, so I peeled out of my witchy-poo dress, tossed it behind me with a flourish, and walked off the diving board.
I could feel the guy staring, and once I confirmed that he was, swam under water and hid among groups of people to see if he would look for me. Once that was confirmed, I commenced fucking with him. Swimming around his legs, kicking water in his face, then taking off to the opposite end to glare at him. He asked a bridesmaid about me; I could tell what the topic of conversation was, because he was grinning, she was not. She shook her head at him and I could read her lips. “No. No . . . she is not eighteen. No.” He mouthed okay at her but kept glancing over to me to see me smile and give him the finger before I submerged among a pile of partygoers.
“Sure I am,” I lied to him a bit later, a bit drunker, and still sixteen. “I’m actually nineteen. How ’bout you come back here when everyone’s asleep . . . midnight.”
As the party wound down, I chatted up one of the hired bartenders as he was packing up the booze and getting ready to split. He had a homemade-looking tattoo that I could see the tip of, sticking through his shirt sleeve. He asked me if I might want a drink before it all got put away. I told him I could find forty bucks for something else.
Later, I helped him carry a box of glasses to his catering truck where he sold me a decent amount of blow, neatly packed in a rectangular fold, a torn piece of a page out of a porno magazine.
At the height of summer, it seems to take forever for the dark to take hold and steep the world in one of its rare and fine velvety nights. It was near nine when the sun finally gave up the day and that plummy, hot black soaked in. Most of the people had left, or gone off to bed and the big old house grew quiet and settled as it ticked towards midnight.
I did a fat line in the bathroom, then walked around the wide dewy yard in the dark, away from the house lights, waiting. My bathing suit was still damp but the summer night was a warm breath, silk around my skin. The grass and earth were cool and wet under my feet and the dark jangled with cricket songs. Delicious nerves were ringing throughout my young wires, waiting, nearly invisible in the inky black.
I felt like a kid on an adventure. The frosty numbness in my nose and lips and the tickling excitement of the night and the blow, my belly feeling suspended by a strumming rubber thread. In the dark I pretended I was a dancer, swaying my hips around and grinding in wide exaggerated circles. I was an animal, a creature. I could hide in the bushes and scare the shit out of this guy as he walked up the lawn, or I could run away and howl at the moon, pouncing through the cool grass, naked and hidden in the deep backyard. I could blow this clown off and skip the whole to-do. Then I saw someone ambling up the street, and held my breath for a split second.
Here he comes.
This was the first time I had experienced somebody exerting any effort to get to me. He had to sneak out of his house and walk about a mile in the pitch dark up a country road, all based on the hope I would be where I said I’d be, and that he would get some when he got there.
The distance from the street to the pool was about seventy-five yards, so I had a minute or so to set the scene. I wanted to have it arranged so, when he saw me, it was like the movies. I trotted through the dark and slipped into the pool, dunked under and dragged the backs of my fingers under my eyes to right my eyeliner that had started to run. I stretched my arms out along the edge and gently kicked my legs in a slow, rhythmic, cancan. Hair wet and slicked back, I smiled at him as he walked out of the dark, towards the eerie blue glow of the pool.
Been waiting for you, sailor.
He smiled back, stopping at the edge. He undressed and walked into the blood-warm water and swam towards me.
No talking. Nice. I dove deep through the water under him to a ladder at the deep end and spun around to face him as he followed. We made out at the ladder a little, kissing deeply, groping, wet and clumsy, still a little drunk. His mouth was pool water and scotch. I slid down into the water to take him in my mouth a few times as I held my breath, blowing bubbles around his cock and between his legs. After more splashing around we found an empty room where we could go at it for hours.
It was one of those stinging, sweat-soaked marathons where parts of your body ache and cramp where other bits lose all sensation from the desperate pounding. I don’t know if it was the coke or the booze, but the guy stayed marble hard and could not come.
I refused to stop or even wince, for fear of betraying the hurting parts. I was all pornographic moaning and a squealing good time.
My stubbornness in keeping the good times rolling wasn’t so much for Mr. Marathon Esquire; he was good looking enough and not too bad a guy from what I could tell. No, my hell-bent determination to fuck through the pain was to bruise this into his memory banks. All of his future encounters would be compared to this one, to me.
This was my power. This was my only grip on being something, anything. I would replay in his head while he throbbed in his hand or some other sucking mouth.
Raw and sore himself, he finally called a temporary ceasefire. I tucked him into my mouth cooling off his dick by swirling ice cubes around it with my tongue. He was holding my head up by my hair. Suddenly, looking down at my face, with my makeup having been all fucked off, he must’ve seen the kid I actually was.
“How old are you?” he asked, a bit out of breath.
“Mmmummph?” I hummed around him and the ice.
“How. Old. Are. You. Really?”
The word really trailed off with the unmistakable ring of already knowing the answer and that the answer was all kinds of bad. I never really considered the legal ramifications of these scenarios. Pretty much every man I screwed around with was older than me except one guy in high school who was my age. Mr. Marathon actually sounded scared. Jesus, friends and some family were all over this house sleeping off the hot day and the buckets of free wedding liquor.
He could be seriously fucked if anyone even saw him here. Poor guy.
He pulled my head up quick by my hair and looked at me harder through the dim light.
His cock popped out of my mouth so I tapped it lightly on my chin, smiled and cooed sweetly and reassuringly up his sweaty torso. “Okay, okay, I’m thirteen.” I went back to licking him. “Why?” I asked, tapping him against my lips, smiling.
Gotcha.
To this day I don’t know why I lied to the guy, but the look on his face was priceless. The surge of panic, wrestling with desire, wrestling with eons of law school, reputation, more panic, and more lust stoked by the very, very, wrong thing going on, so dirty, so bad.
“Hurry up and finish,” was all he could manage.
Power.
Right around that time, my dad showed me how to break a guy’s thumb by pinning it back against his wrist, a trick he picked up in the Marine Corps. It’s a move so painful, he explained, I could drop a guy much bigger than myself. I assumed that he taught me that trick because he thought I was strong enough to be on my own, and didn’t mind that I was always gone. I asked him recently why he didn’t freak out or punish me: make me stay home, send me to military school, break my legs, and so on. He said he was terrified that if he tried to control me, it would push me even farther, that I would have run away for good, gotten arrested, or worse.
I had plenty of run-ins with cops, but thankfully didn’t get arrested until I was eighteen (for possession of a class B substance, cocaine, and contributing to the delinquency of minors; the second charge was ironic because the sixteen-year-old, whose delinquency I was supposedly contributing to, was my dealer). Being eighteen, though, meant my dad wasn’t called. I spent one chilly night in a cell by myself, was fined four hundred dollars, and was told, if I paid on time, since it was my first offense, the charges would be taken off my record.
We’ll see, if I ever run for office or try to marry a prince or something.
Besides that tiny footnote from my late teens, there were, of course, stupid injuries, car accidents, wicked fights, and oodles of drugs. I was part of a small crew of kids that the dealers loved. They would say things like, “Hey, Storm, I think these are Quaaludes, will you take one and tell me how you feel in twenty minutes? Oh, and don’t drink.”
My punk-rock beggar friends and I all hung out at the Harvard Square T stop. There is a brick, circular, patio-type structure there where we could sit around and complain about society, talk about how punk was dead and harass passers-by for spare change. The boys would do skateboard tricks, and the girls would smoke and put on black, black eyeliner, using little circular mirrors on their superpale pressed powder compacts. It was where we heard about parties, fights, who was fucking who; the T stop was a great hangout.
On one particular day, to our collected rage and disgust, the city of Cambridge had festooned our hangout with blue plastic port-o-potties. Five of them, in a row, along a low wall, which happened to be my favorite sit and bitch place.
It was Harvard’s 350th anniversary and the whole area around the campus had become a fucking glut of blue-blooded, overly entitled douche bags snobbing around in their maroon blazers talking like Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island, and they were all peeing out their gin and tonics in our hangout.
We were appalled.
The cops kept trying to roust us from the area, but like bees to a barbecue, we all buzzed back and continued our very important loitering. Since the public crappers were stationed where we normally all sat, a couple of us climbed to the top of the T stop itself. One of the guys was my buddy Starchild.
Imagine a featherless and emaciated turkey with a crooked, baby curl Mohawk and put a motorcycle jacket on it. Now, set its head on a swivel, so the head constantly swims on its neck as if trying to break free of it, and you might get a picture of poor Starchild.
He had done more drugs than Hunter S. Thompson. He was so completely brain-damaged; it sometimes seemed like he had been trepanned (when a hole gets drilled into your skull so you’re high forever). Mental stability aside, he was a complete and total sweetheart.
The day of the reunion, he was very quiet. He sat up straight, eerily staring at everyone below our little rooftop perch.
My friend Keith and I were snickering at the preppy bastards tiptoeing around, trespassing on our land. We started to play a little game we’ll call “Audacity Tag.”
As in, if you have the audacity to come into our house, then tag! You’re it.
As soon as some poor sucker would get all situated in a port-o-potty, we would jump off the roof and knock on the thing, shake it and yell into the vents, literally scaring the piss out of them. Then, we’d clamber back onto the roof and duck down, so the sad sack wouldn’t know from where the attack had come. When a corpulent man in a craptastic red-and-white Hawaiian shirt stepped into one, we launched our attack, trying to outdo the fear factor of the last. We pounded, yelled, and pushed, and suddenly it rocked at such a treacherous angle, Keith and I backed away nervously.
“Whoa,” Keith giggled, as we heard a muffled expletive from inside the thing.
Just as it was wobbling back to right itself, with Hawaiian Punch still cussing inside, we heard a scream. We looked up just in time to see a low-flying, peeled swivel turkey sailing quite beautifully through the air.
Starchild had suddenly launched himself from the station roof onto the roof of the Johnnie on the spot, screeching, “Kaaa-yeee-haaa!” sending himself, Hawaiian Punch, and the port-o-potty crashing over onto the bricks, the latter landing on its door, trapping its ill-fated occupant.
Starchild sprinted down Dunster Street cackling. Keith’s and my mouths hung open and time froze for a second. We were about to start laughing when the bottom of the Johnnie splooshed out its entire day’s contents onto the bricks.
There was a hideous, muffled screaming and pounding coming from inside the shit sarcophagus. Hawaiian Punch’s wife came running towards the fallen thing with her hand on her face, but stopped short when the stink choked her away. The cops held their breath, righted the thing, and H.P. came stumbling out, looking for someone to kill. Starchild was long gone. Half the people in the immediate area were laughing, the rest too horrified by the scene to move to or fro. I was in full paroxysm and looked guilty as hell, so Keith and I bolted to the Cambridge Common.
In the middle of the Common, a park across from Harvard campus, stands a monument with Abe Lincoln standing inside. All around this monument, several thousand well-heeled WASPs milled about with their pet names and trust funds as the sun went down. Keith and I laughed hysterically over the horrendous spectacle we had just been privy to, as we clambered up into the monument. I don’t know how no one saw us do it; the park was packed with alumni-ratti, but we crawled under the old president’s bronzed legs, and fucked like kids without a future.
By the time I turned sixteen, my brothers and I hardly went to see Mom in the hospital anymore. We wouldn’t even go to bring her home. She would get rides back to our house from friends or just take a cab.
We barely spoke to her parents anymore, either. There was no official conversation between them and my father about Mom’s staggering health-care costs, but after the separation was official and divorce was imminent, they were finally helping with her bills. Which was nice, since my father, a teacher, was struggling and mom’s parents were multimillionaires.
My brothers and I always felt that our maternal grandparents—we’ll call them the Banks—blamed us for Mom’s troubles. God knows what
Mom told them about us when she was with them. She probably sang her favorite, my children hate me song, but what she told us of her life with them, she made it sound like she was raised in an evil yacht club full of stiff-jawed, overprivileged rapists who made her young life a silk-upholstered hell.
Mom was adopted a little before her fourth birthday, from an orphanage near Yale University. Mr. and Mrs. Banks were a wealthy couple from Snob-Ascot, Connecticut, and had one natural son, Dicky. It might have been because of Mrs. Banks’ delicate health they adopted a little girl instead of having another baby. Mom was about seven or eight when Mrs. Banks number one died of brain cancer.
Enter Mrs. Banks part deux. The second Mrs. Banks was a gourmand and a highly paid interior decorator. She did a room in the White House and bought tchotchkes for the Shah of Iran. She was a friend of the family, and recently widowed, so she and her natural son, Claude, moved in. Daddy Banks has his son, Mommy Banks, hers, and then there’s little Suzi. The girl the dead lady wanted.
Now, everything Mom told us about her life, growing up a Banks, was clearly mommified. It’s not so much that it was all total delusional bullshit, but so much of what came out her mouth about anything was baloney, that one had to take it with a grain of salt. Or maybe, a ton of salt, like, as much sodium as one might find in baloney. So I can’t really say much about her childhood other than the obvious: She was raised with loads of money, was a debutante, sent away to schools, given horses and French tutors, and then sent to Paris to study dance, where she met my dad. I can’t really speak to the alleged abuse, rapes, neglect, and satanic nannies who drugged her, or any of the other colorfully horrific things that supposedly happened to her at the Banks house. However, I can tell you about my personal experiences with the Banks.
Mr. Banks was a hoity-toity CEO or some such thing for a fancy hospital in New York City. I have no idea if my uncle Dicky ever actually had a job, but I’m certain he suffered a rope burn or two while docking his yacht in various ports of call. The other uncle, Claude, seemed nice enough, but we barely ever got to know him.