by Martin Mundt
She stopped stretching for the cigarettes.
“What?” she said.
“I can’t get off you,” I said. “I’m… stuck.”
“Stuck?” she said, shifting underneath me, testing our connection. “What do you mean, stuck?”
“I mean stuck stuck,” I said, trying a little reverse herky-jerky, like hiking a football, to pop myself free. It didn’t work. “I mean stuck as in, I can’t get off of you, because I can’t get out of you.”
“Quit bleeping around,” she said, and she swiveled, and she sideslipped, and she shimmied, and she couldn’t unstick herself either.
“I’m not,” I said. “I can’t. I’m sorry. I’m trying.”
And I did try. I tried rotating myself free, and I tried leveraging myself loose, and I tried scrunching up on my knees and clenching butt and cantilevering us apart, but nothing worked.
“Ow,” she said, “this – ow – isn’t – ow – funny – ow – cut it out – ow – already – ow!”
I stopped. I settled on top of her.
“Jesus H. Bleeping Christ,” she said. She flexed, trying to extrude me. She stretched, trying to eject me. And then she relaxed.
“Well?” I said.
That’s when she tried to ignore me, which she couldn’t do, obviously, any more than two kids with locked braces can ignore each other, only more so. She just lay there, underneath me. She seemed… unhappy.
“Are you OK?” I asked the top of her head. I’d never really looked closely at a woman’s scalp before. The sight of all those little roots was strangely erotic.
She didn’t say anything. I waited a second.
“You want to be on top for awhile?” I said.
Nothing.
“Maybe we should go to the emergency room?” I suggested.
“You’re bleeping right that you’re going to the bleeping emergency room,” she yelled, “as soon as I tear your bleeping bleeper off at the bleeping root with my bare bleeping hands.”
And then she reached in, and she grabbed, and she pulled, and she tried to tear my bleeping bleeper off at the same time she sidled and snakehipped and snapwhipped and centrifuged and slinkied her spine and squeezed and shoved and screwed me clockwise and then re-screwed me counterclockwise like she was trying to pop a stubborn cork from a bottle, all the while screaming and swearing and finally, finally, failing and stopping.
I found the whole experience to be strangely erotic.
“You know,” I said after about a minute of nothing but unhappy breathing and quiet laying there. “As long as we’re stuck, you wanna do it again?”
Sure, I didn’t expect her to say yes, but I figured, what the heck? Why not give it a shot?
“Get bleeped,” she said.
I thought about saying, I’m trying, but the inflection in her voice told me that that probably wasn’t a good idea.
I waited. I felt her breath flutter through my chest hairs. I found the sensation to be strangely erotic, but I didn’t say anything about it. I waited some more.
“I know this is awkward,” I said finally, “but…”
“Awkward?” she said, and there was that inflection again, unhappiness and anger and smoky voice all braided together. I fantasized about what that rumbly, humming, whiskey-rough voice would feel like if I had been getting a blowjob when she got stuck. The fantasy was strangely erotic. “You think this is awkward?” she said, every syllable reverberating through my ribs. “Of all the tens of thousands of words in the English language, the one you pick out to describe this, this… farcical, European, cinematic tribute to Kafkaesque irony is awkward? Of all of life’s little miscues or odd mistakes or gentle, loopy, giggly, Keystone mishaps that could rightly be considered awkward, like – oh, I don’t know – two former lovers getting stuck going in the opposite directions in a revolving door, or maybe getting the giggles at a wedding, or maybe even accidentally dropping an M&M in between a woman’s breasts – among all these potentially awkward situations, you want to include this? This isn’t awkward,” she said. “You want to know what this is? How about a millennial motherbleeping crisis? How about the worst, most demeaning, most heartshrieking nightmare I could ever bleeping conceive of in the worst, most demeaning, most heartshrieking of all possible bleeping nightmare worlds? Huh? How about that? How about the worst bleeping decision I’ve ever bleeping made? Oh, bleep, how did I manage to find the one guy in the bleeping universe who finds a bleeping way to get himself bleeping stuck? You want bleeping awkward?” She yelled this like a syringe of adrenaline directly into my heart. “I’ll give you bleeping awkward. I… have… to go..to the BATHROOM!”
I braced myself against the bathroom wall with both hands and swayed my back so that Lola could ease herself down into a sitting position. I stared at the tiles over the toilet.
“More,” she said. “Further down. More. Come on. More.”
I let my back sag more. My spine cracked. She landed. I hooked my toes into the grout between floor-tiles, locking myself into place.
“You know,” I said. “I’ve never been to the john with a woman before. I find it… strangely erotic.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “I can feel. Try and find it a little less erotic for awhile, OK? You’re plugging up the bleeping plumbing, if you know what I mean.”
“Quit talking dirty, then,” I said, and I glanced down. She had a really cute butt when she was sitting down. “You’re sexy when you talk dirty.”
“Does everything get you excited?” she said.
I thought about that for a moment. “Pretty much,” I finally said.
“Well, stop it already, OK?”
I tried. I closed my eyes. I concentrated. I performed complex mathematical equations in my head to try to coax the blood back into my brain. Well, I tried. The mathematics turned into equations describing the elegant parabolas of her buttocks as they spread across the toilet seat. I had never realized it before, but mathematics was strangely erotic.
But I must have succeeded at least a little bit, because right then Lola let go. I wouldn’t call the experience a golden shower exactly. More like a gentle golden spongebath for Little Petey, but from a very naughty nurse. The feeling was strangely erotic.
“Quit getting bleeping excited,” she said.
I tried.
“Could be worse,” I said.
“How?” she said. “How could this be bleeping worse?”
“We could have been doing it doggy-style,” I said.
“This isn’t bleeping funny,” she said, quietly, as if she might start crying.
“Or sixty-nine,” I added.
She opened her mouth. I heard her inhale in preparation for some really sexy dirty-talk, and then she started giggling. She laughed. I laughed. She started to shake, she was laughing so hard. My muscles started to shiver, catching the harmonic of her struck funnybone. She started crying, she was laughing so hard. My legs wobbled.
“Ow, ow, cramp, ow, leg cramps,” I gasped as pain twisted my calf muscles, squeezing the strength out of them like tourniquets. My knees buckled. My toes lost their grip and squeaked across the floor, and I slipped my grip on the wall and collapsed, both of us skittering off the toilet.
“No, no, not yet, wait, wait, not finished,” she gasped between giggles as I pulled her off the seat, and we thumped onto the floor, laughing, crying, settling in a warm, slippery, mis-aimed puddle of our own making.
“Oops,” I said finally, the first coherent thing I could make my voice do. “We’re going to have to clean that up later.”
Then we started laughing again.
The emergency room was wall-to-wall embarrassment, because, as it turned out, Lola and I were not the only ones stuck together. The place looked like a living Kama Sutra, a pop-up manual of love.
There were bunches of missionaries like Lola and me, along with partially attached sixty-nine’s, and blowjobs, and rear-entries, and two-guys-with-one-girl sandwiches, and gay guys – anal gays and
oral gays and hands-on gays – and a boy and his dog, and a guy wearing a rubber kilt and standing there all forlorn and bowlegged trailing about six feet of garden hose behind him along the floor, and various other plug-and-socket activities for which, quite honestly, I couldn’t see the point. There was a guy sitting off by himself, except for two cops flanking him. The guy sat with his pants around his ankles, his lap covered with a jacket, and his right hand in his lap, also covered by the jacket. But hey, different pokes for different folks, right?
The whole scene could have been really embarrassing, except for this one guy, big as a wrestler, who had three dwarves, also guys, stuck to him, front, rear, and head-height. He looked like he had a fetish for scaffolding.
I thought the sight was, however, strangely erotic, but they did make everybody else feel a whole lot more mainstream.
“Hey,” I said, turning around and panning the room for Lola. “Check it out. No lesbians.”
“Of course there’s no lesbians,” said a voice behind me. I turned around. The voice belonged to a doctor, a doctor holding a clipboard. “There’s no lesbians,” he continued, “because lesbians have no need for condoms.”
“Condoms?” I said.
“Condoms?” said Lola.
I shuffled around ninety degrees so she could see the doctor as well.
“Yes,” said the doctor. “Condoms. I’m Doctor Sanchez, and you’re…” He glanced down at his clipboard, at the paperwork we’d filled out when we came in, “… Lola Soleil and Peter Barry Manilow?”
“Peter Barry Manilow?” said Lola. “Oh, god.” She covered her face with her hands and buried her head in my chest.
“Yep. That’s me,” I said. I smiled. “Legally changed.”
“I swear to God,” Lola said, looking up at the doctor. “I swear to God I didn’t know he’d changed his name to Peter Barry Manilow. It was a one-night stand. I was drunk. I swear to God.”
“Drunk as a skunk,” I said. “Absolutely, without a doubt a one-hundred proof date.”
Lola closed her eyes and took a couple of even breaths. I felt her exhale through my chest hairs like a feathery comb. It was strangely erotic. She opened her eyes and looked up at the doctor again.
“You said something about condoms?” she said.
“Yes. Condoms,” said the doctor. “The reason you’re stuck together, the reason everybody here is stuck together, is condoms. Specifically, the Mister Manly’s Brand SuperSpecial Valentine’s Day Redhot Erotic ManWrapper.”
“Are they defective?” I asked.
Lola stared at me with her mouth open. “You actually bought a sex product called a Mister Manly’s Brand SuperSpecial Valentine’s Day Redhot Erotic ManWrapper?” she said.
I shrugged. “You should see the package,” I said. “There’s this really hot picture of two people engaged in an act of really hot, sexy, sweaty, kinky, disgustingly perverse…”
“Product tampering, actually,” said the doctor. “The chemical structure of the latex in the condoms…”
“The Redhot Erotic ManWrappers,” sighed Lola.
“Yes, those,” said the doctor. “The structure was altered so that they broke down into an epoxy-like substance which permanently bonds flesh to flesh when activated by friction and pressure and expansion and repetitive motion. What starts out as two surfaces of flesh becomes one indissoluble whole.”
“So what you’re saying is,” I said, “is that we’re stuck.”
“Like glue,” said Doctor Sanchez.
“Bleep,” said Lola.
“So,” I said. “What do we do?”
“Complex, dangerous, and ruinously expensive surgery,” said Sanchez.
“What?” yelled Lola.
Sanchez chuckled. “Sorry,” he said. “Medical humor. The surgery really isn’t complex or dangerous.”
“I’d like to bleeping tamper with the bleeping bleeped bleeper who bleeping bleeped the bleeping bleeped condoms.” She took a breath. “The bleep bleeped bleeper bleeping bleepwad bleeper.”
“Well, there he is,” said Sanchez, pointing at the guy with the jacket covering his lap. “Right over there. He calls himself the Mad Gluer.” The doctor reached over and picked a flier off the nurse’s station. He handed the piece of paper to me. “He was carrying these when the cops brought him in.”
I read it out loud.
“’The Striking Evidence of the Lord Jesus Christ’s Visible Bonds of Shame!!!’ – with three exclamation points – ’or, How the Unwary Become Trapped in the Bondage of Wanton Fornication.’”
The title was followed by a nine-page heroic poem describing the life of Christ in rhyming couplets.
“It’s really… something, isn’t it?” said Sanchez.
“Shame, my bleep,” said Lola. She flailed her legs, trying to reach the floor, trying to walk with legs that were both too short and too awkwardly positioned to manage the feat. She twisted back and forth on me as if she were fiddling with the dial of a safe whose combination she didn’t know.
The twisting hurt, but it also felt strangely erotic. I felt an awakening begin underneath the bedsheet wrapped around our waists, my genitals speculating on the possibility of making themselves ungovernable.
Lola stopped struggling to free herself after awhile, and she finally climbed back up on me, locking her legs around my waist. “Walk me over there,” she said. “I’ll shove so many bleeping iambics up his skinny white pentameter, his bleep’ll rhyme with ‘ducked’.”
I thought it was best not to walk her over to the guy, so I turned to Sanchez instead. “What’s he got his hand under the jacket for?” I asked. “He hasn’t moved it since we came in. It’s like it’s stuck there.”
Lola rolled her eyes. “He was…” she started.
“… testing the condoms,” finished Sanchez. “To see if they worked, so he said. They do. Extremely well, as you can tell. He’s stuck, too.”
“Oooooooh,” I said, nodding as understanding dawned. The knowledge was strangely erotic.
Lola was still staring at the Mad Gluer. He stared back at her and smiled.
“Hey, glue-boy, what’s so funny?” she yelled across the emergency room.
“Tee-hee.” He giggled like a prepubescent girl. “Live now within the unbreakable bonds of shame, slaves as you all are to your evil carnal desires,” he shouted. “Fornication is only allowed within the bonds of wedlock; therefore fornication is the same as marriage in the eyes of God. Tee-hee. And let no man put asunder what God hath joined.”
One of the gay guys, a top, twitched his hips, bouncing his partner off his heels. “Hey,” he said. “It itches.”
“What itches?” said the woman in the menage-a-trois sandwich. She suddenly got squeezed from both ends, like a vice, by her two whitebread partners. She gasped. I thought I heard her ears pop.
“It,” said the gay guy. “You know. It.”
“Tee-hee,” said the Mad Gluer. “Of course it itches. That’s what they’re designed to do: adhere and itch. When you are in the thrall of fornication, you have no free will. Tee-hee. It controls you, and the only way to get rid of an itch is to…”
“… scratch it,” I said, feeling my own itch begin to uncoil beneath my sheet. I humped once, twice, uncontrollably, trying to get some leverage, trying to rub some relief into my…
“Bleep,” said Lola, and she started to jerk right along with me.
“Tee-hee,” said the Mad Gluer, and then his arm jittered underneath his jacket.
I felt a twinge, a tickle, a… pricking sensation, as if I were holding back a bladder full of feather boas. I twitched, and Lola bounced on my hips. I twitched again, and jerked, and Lola shimmied and jiggled. I twitched and jerked and pumped, and Lola swirled herself around in faster and faster circles, around and around, like she was in a sexy holding pattern at the International Airport of Love.
“Tee-hee,” said the Gluer, and his arm tweaked again, and again.
Two different gay guys convulsed and q
uickly fell into a house-music rhythm, dance parties for two. Then the sandwich set up a seesaw rhythm, up-down, up-down. Then a missionary couple coupled. The guy as big as a wrestler had his dwarves shivering and shaking and clutching at his head, his body, like he was being attacked by a dwarf immune system. Then more gay guys twittered, and another missionary, more gay guys, me, Lola, the Gluer, the dog and his boy, gay guys, missionaries, missionaries, sandwich, doggy-styles, actual dog, missionaries, gays, me, missionaries, gays, me, Gluer, Lola, like we were all individual neurons in a love-brain, and a sex surge was overloading all the moral inhibition fuses, until the whole emergency room twitched, tickled, squeaked, jerked, humped, bounced, clenched, rutted, fisted, fiddled, diddled, hopped, gasped, moaned, stroked and poked like a pornographic carousel at the annual convention of the Society for Creative Depravity.
“It…” said Lola, bouncing, bouncing, like a guy dribbling two squishy basketballs in an unstoppable drive to the post. “… it… itches.”
The girl wearing the Chippendale sandwich-board moaned.
“Oh…” said Lola, breathing short, throaty breaths. “It really itches.”
The women moaned. The men moaned. The dog moaned.
“Itches so good,” whispered Lola, her phone-sex voice putting the dirt in dirty. I felt good, like I was paying for it with somebody else’s credit card.
I cantered in place, and Lola squeezed me tight with her saucy thighs, like I was a fleshy saddle with an especially naughty pommel. We introduced our itches to each other. We synchronized our joys of sex as we pivoted on our single point of contact.
I fishtailed, and she swerved, and we both squealed and squirmed around hairpin corners, careening down Love Mountain with our brakelines cut and our steering gone and at least two wheels dangling over the precipice at all times, and we didn’t care. The itch just itched more.
The best feeling I’d ever experienced in my life nosed its way open inside me like a flower. Well, OK, it wasn’t really anything at all like a flower. It was sex. Just sex, slipping out from the throat of my gonads like a growl. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr. I was full-service, filling Lola with liquid love.