Big-hearted, appetite-driven, over-intellectualized and paranoid, my friend X is a great character and one of the few authentic geniuses I've known -- though undoubtedly twisted by his over-wired circuit board of a mind (almost all of them are at those IQ levels). He is also a subtle poet, witty raconteur, generous friend, virulent enemy and avid taker of mood and energy enhancing drugs. But most importantly for the purposes of our tale today, X is afflicted by the chronic itch-scratch syndrome of runaway satyriasis: an exuberant and unrepentant obsession with all things sexual.
And not shy about sharing the details.
This gives some people the heeby-jeebies -- as if a beetle-browed Uncle Ganoush had suddenly started toe-tickling their pubic bone under the cafeteria table. Looking up, startled ("What the ...?!"), they would behold with horror and disgust the waggling leer of Uncle's gleeful invitation. Others -- in fact a surprisingly large proportion of the population -- react more positively. ("Let's just see where this goes.") After all, one can always disavow the association later. I have my suspicions, dear reader, as to which group you belong.
Though not handsome by most human standards, X's flamboyant Priapism has led to an astonishingly active and adventurous sex life with a profuse variety of attractive, intelligent and captivating women. In the lush, fertile, non-judgmental humus of his carnal fascination, a woman could -- often for the first time in her life -- blossom into the sexual being that had lain dormant, ignored, repressed, even non-orgasmic for decades...to ...become the rose!
Though over the long run, they were not always grateful for the awakening. Or perhaps other factors pertained to their ultimate shrewishness or peevishness with X. Relationships are difficult and coupling may be the least of their complications, but this piece is mostly about the coupling bits.
"Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thought refin'd"
John Keats
X was the sort of avid lecher who, driving down the street, would incline his head sideways when passing a bus stop in hope of catching a glimpse of white panties under the uniform skirts of Catholic schoolgirls. On first dates, he famously inquired, smiling slyly in anticipation, eyebrows pumping with goatish encouragement, "So, what's the most perverted thing you've ever done?" And the surprising intensity and embrace of his voracious, lip-licking expectancy elicited many a confused and excited confession from his flushed quarry. You had to give it to him: the man really wanted to know.
However, the absence of a straightforward and viscerally detailed response to his question ("Oh, you funny man!"), even after extended flirtatious cajolery, would ultimately summon a look of pursed-lip distaste -- as if to say "Who's kidding whom here?" Waiter! Check! Happily, in such cases, it wasn't unusual for X to answer the phone the next day to hear the trembling voice of his recalcitrant date racing to spill her most lubricious secrets, and X, like a Borgia Pope, would graciously bestow his absolution. The important thing being that she had come to her senses. Now the hard work could begin.
I used the most-perverted-thing line at parties to great hilarity for years. (Hilarity, that is, as long as the audience was inebriated; otherwise a most humiliating silent disdain ensued. Timing! The humorist's petard.) Joke notwithstanding, squeamish dilettante that I am, I rarely wanted to hear the tawdry and imaginatively poverty-stricken stories dredged up from the gutter bottom of my listeners' prurient past -- especially if they concerned animals, garden tools, pain, excrement, leather masks, appliances, really fat or really old people. My boyish tastes are generally quite conventional: young, randy schoolteachers in horn-rim glasses, inadvertent changing-room encounters, anonymous nightclub coupling with panty-less women in black cocktail dresses, attractive female acquaintances in short, loose bathrobes stretching for something in the pantry or leaning over the table with my cup of coffee; one thing leading to another. You get the idea: good, clean, healthy, half-clothed stuff.
"Keep it to yourself, sweetheart. It was a rhetorical question, a conversational gambit. I'm not a psychiatrist; I'm just here for a good time." And I'm sensitive to having images placed inside my head that I might not be able to forget. I'd move quickly, clapping my hands, to nip the confessional urge in the bud: "Hey everybody! Who wants to take the banana test?" Oh Lordy me, yes, the banana test is a sure-fire, dull-party reinvigorator -- though women can get surprisingly competitive, and catfights are not uncommon.
* Footnote: in the Test, a large, but not overripe banana is peeled down and held firmly by the lower tip. The contestant gingerly inserts the fruit into his or her open mouth until obstructed, or until the gag reflex kicks in beyond the competitor's ability to ignore, and then bites lightly down, leaving their distinctive tooth marks in the white starchy flesh. Whoever bites furthest down the phallus, I mean the banana, wins the test! Tonguing the banana coyly--any egregious vamping around in general--is officially discouraged, though terribly popular with the peanut gallery.**
** Footnote to the footnote: in ancient Hawaii it was a capital offense for a woman even to touch a banana, much less peel, eat, fellate or leave tooth marks in one. I'd just like to take this opportunity to congratulate the ladies:
You've come a long way, baby!
"Why should a man, whose blood is warm within,
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster?"
William Shakespeare
X, like most men, entertained lush, comprehensive fantasies of having sex with more than one person at a time, at least one of those being female. I could sketch out a sample fantasy scenario, but a true aficionado's would run on for many single-spaced pages, a huge cast hopping about like toads, and much of it hard to keep straight even with the best of wills.
However, unlike most of us yellow-bellied milksops, X realized his group-sex fancies on a multiplicity of occasions. (His secret? Well, in sales, it's called "Asking for the business.") And with a mixture of generosity and naked self-interest (he dearly loved to watch), X regularly invited my own diffident participation with the one, two or three eminently desirable women he enlisted in the enterprise. Here's the icing on the cake: this being 30 years ago, when AIDs was unknown and sexual ambivalence was de rigueur in the more sophisticated Bay Area circles, and even heterosexual feminists strongly supported the fundamental political-moral rightness of lesbianism (an additional blessing of the newly formed women's studies departments everywhere), the female participants were almost always succulently bi-sexual. Ooh la la! Something X and I supported fully. (We liked to consider ourselves feminists. Indeed, if the chromosomal cards had fallen that way, we'd undoubtedly have been enthusiastic lesbians ourselves.)
Nevertheless, and this may surprise you, unless one is a serious voyeur (as X is), group encounters can be a rather challenging experience in a wide and unexpected variety of ways. It's vital not to get bogged down in the details:
Whose hand is that? Whose mouth? Whose tongue? Very raspy tongue! (Jesus! Bowser got out of the kitchen!)
Are those moans of ecstasy emerging from my partner? And...am I the primary cause of them?
Whoever's thumb is up my butt, I appreciate the thought, but get it the fuck out!
Eeeeeee! My scrotum is ticklish!
Too many distractions! I'm losing my hardon!
And, of course, the inevitable:
Wait! Stop! Please! Oh Christ, not yet ...!
The party's over for you, good fellow. Pour yourself a drink and get comfortable; you're the CD-changer and wet-towel man for the rest of the evening.
I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but, personally, I find it much easier to concentrate on one mysterious, enchanting goddess at a time. No spectators to note the zits or wild hairs on my pale, heaving ass, or counting my strokes as if at a hardboiled-egg eating competition (101! 102! 103!). No one playing the sportscaster ("He's charging for the net!"), or the volcanologist ("He's gonna blow!"). I guess I'm just an old-fashioned mug like Ward, the Beave's dad. I can't see him with anyone but June, or maybe Lumpy, but not both at the same time (unless methamphetamines are involved, in which case all bets are off).
Don't get me wrong: that doesn't mean I refused any of X's invitations. He was my best friend, and I tried my best to be there for him.
These experiences also allow me to indulge in no small amount of bitter envy from lesser mortals, such as E, for whom such a situation (multiple bisexual women!), at least in his perfervid imagination, would be golden Xanadu itself. When I casually drop another story -- "Have I ever told you about panty-show night?" -- he looks like a boiling rice pot about to explode. (Remember that "I Love Lucy" episode where Lucy's best intentions for homecooked Cuban black beans and rice went horribly awry?) And in a life filled with self-esteem issues, that's gratifying on a number of levels.
"Debauchee, n. One who has so earnestly pursued pleasure
that he has had the misfortune to overtake it."
Ambrose Bierce
X's supreme desire was to participate in a general orgy: dozens, even hundreds of lusty, uninhibited natives doing everything to everybody, in every combination and every conceivable position. And he finally arranged to attend such an event -- "Ken n' Sally's Dessert Club" -- with one of his more toothsome and nubile girlfriends, Y. (Don't worry, Y, no distinguishing characteristics disclosed: I know you're a PTA and Girl Scouts mom now.) X and Y arrived at a large, private house in the Berkeley hills, paid their $20, checked most of their clothing, and wandered, nervous and avid through the saturnalia to consider the hors d'oeuvres.
X and Y spent some delightful time indulging their voyeuristic proclivities, though it was sometimes hard to focus in the blurry hubbub: so much pink, pulsating flesh, so many dangly parts, all that pubic hair (this being before the heinous anti-pubic hair crusade, curse of our effete and degenerate times). The hot tub looked a little soupy to their freshmen sensibilities and they studiously avoided the raised-eyebrow and gum-smacking inquiries of a number of unappealing fellow travelers (one of whom they dubbed "Turtle Man"). It was all a bit overwhelming, and with a gulp of white wine, they swallowed another couple tablets of Benzedrine. Hopefully, that would settle them down, help them concentrate, give them courage (and stamina).
In due course they fell in with an attractive, healthy-looking couple in matching leopard loincloths, had a nice conversation about books and movies, and then decided to plant their corn on a nice patch of dry carpet in the baby's room, under the Old MacDonald's Farm mobile. And thus, with few preliminaries, went at it: Y doggy-styling with Tarzan; X muff-diving with sweet Jane. Y is soon yodeling with pleasure, galloping across the pampas to the cliffs and that bright, perfect Void beyond. X's connoisseur's tongue is playing mademoiselle like a Rachmaninoff piano concerto -- gentle, sighing adagio; quickening, panting allegro; urgent, racing prestissimo; transcendent finale! Then she shouts, "Come up here and fuck me!" And yet...X does not clamber up, but continues to lap away like a thirsty coyote at a rare waterhole. "I want your big, hard cock, right now!" X feigns deafness, as if lost in a tidal wave of crazed oral ardor. Finally, his exhausted tongue flails spastically, a dying hound dog licking its master's hand for the last time.
"Well building hath three Conditions:
Commodity, Firmness, and Delight."
Sir Henry Wotton
Because, tragically, but not unexpectedly to the cognoscenti among us, amidst this long-sought realization of his most cherished dream, our friend's libido had been struck by a debilitating blight, a freak frost in the vegetable patch. His theoretically "big, hard cock" (in point of fact, medium-sized by the most charitable of standards) had shrunk and shriveled from crisp, sturdy banana to listless banana slug.
"Well, fuuuuuck me!" groaned X. This was worse than the previous 4th of July when, in the throes of lovemaking on LSD (always a fragile endeavor, due to the mind's proclivity on hallucinogens to hop-scotch down any of the infinite rabbit-holes of the subconscious), another girlfriend's face had morphed into Jimmy Carter's -- albeit flushed and twisted in sexual abandon. This had precipitated what Malcolm Gladwell calls a "tipping point" in tumescence. (Sadly, the relationship never recovered from that hallucination, which X could never quite shake -- even when loving the former president from behind so as not to see the sincere, toothy face.)
X clenched his eyes, summoned his prodigious will and flagging concupiscence, and conjured up the sexiest fantasies he'd ever had -- the most delectable bottoms above lacy, pulled-down panties, the sweetest jiggling breasts below pulled-up t-shirts, good girls turned insatiable sluts. Come on boy, don't fail me now! Please, please, PLEASE! I'm begging you!
To no avail. And when this wormwood-bitter reality could no longer be ignored, X staggered to his knees, pushed his prostrate and distended tongue back between chapped lips, massaged a near-dislocated jaw, and shrugged, what can you do? The jig was up. The lady looked not only stupefied, but incipiently petulant. Impossible to explain: it's nothing to do with you, darlin'.
X glanced at Y, now filling the mansion with theological affirmations. She'll be fine, God bless her. X felt a surge of fondness. She was a good lass: feisty, inventive, game for anything, multi-orgasmic, extraordinary tits. You go girl!
As he slumped off, feeling old, spent and weary, one of the spectators -- looked like a Rolling Stone, the ravaged, cadaverous one, yeah, Keith Richards -- patted him on the shoulder, as if to say, "I've been there, mate." Then Mr. Richards put down his Corona and moved toward the abandoned and unfulfilled young filly with what appeared to be a foot-long salami pointing at his chin. Her eyes lit up with an impossible and childlike hope; she smiled demurely, made a mewling sound, then scrambled quickly up on all fours, and as anthropologists describe it, "presented rearward." A happy ending after all.
Epilogue
X shuffled off for a beverage, something to wet his whistle, thinking ruefully of the old racist joke: "The Doctor said I was im-pótent! So I'm going to start acting im-pótent!" Heh, heh, well, as long as you can laugh ... Frankly, he blamed the speed, that teasing and capricious Salomé of sexual stimulants -- it could always go either way: unflagging fascination and the 12-hour erection (think Herod), or distraction, aggravation and ultimately no erection at all (think John the Baptist). However, now that he thought of it, a doobie couldn't hurt, and ... might well help. Who knew? Life was funny that way.
And echoing from millions of bedrooms, backseats, movie theaters, and, yes, sex clubs, over every mountain and vale, spiraling up into heartless space, X heard and appreciated the Big Bopper's terrible cry of hope, need, optimism and despair:
Oh baby, you know what I like!
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