I didn’t mean to step on anybody’s toes. It had never been my intention to discomfit X or stoke his latent insecurities when, over the course of six weeks, I slept with his girlfriend, his best friend (a woman) and his girlfriend’s best friend (with whom, I later discovered, X was conducting a surreptitious affair). It wasn't like that. In the shuttered cuckoo clock of my secret heart, I fairly bubbled with good intentions. It was just that, enveloped by mysterious female bodies, mainlined into their complex hearts, hitched to the meteors of their passion, I, Henry Panky, dwindled to a small, infinitely bright dot of unsullied consciousness, and then disappeared: pop!
And at the time—1979—that existential "pop!" was what I desired above all things: freedom, escape from self, extinction, mystic union with the great Beloved--whatever you want to call it--once tasted, I just couldn't get enough.
Springsteen pointed out that everybody has a hungry heart, but it was X who introduced me, albeit unwillingly at first, to the all-you-can-eat buffet.
Naturally, I assumed each of these young, smart, beautiful women would arrive breathlessly at my door with a hastily packed suitcase of silky panties, and we would make obliterating love until the stars fell from the sky—but, in the event, none of them seriously considered leaving their existing boyfriends (X, a Berkeley astrologer and an insurance agent trainee). My book-length poem, “This Ripe Cantaloupe, My Heart” dates from this era. Profoundly influenced by “Interview with a Vampire” and Yoko Ono's "Grapefruit," it speaks movingly of “gulping heartbeats like buttermilk,” “suicide, a hair’s-breadth out of reach” and "playing turkey in the straw with Linda Ronstadt."
A Thoughtful Reply to a Difficult Situation
If X considered my romantic adventures to be inappropriate, then that might explain his behavior the night he dropped by as I was tripping on multiple LSD hits. He found me on my hands and knees, trying to choose the next album—a challenging proposition while hallucinating: Yes, Traffic! But, no, let’s look a little longer. Wow, Grace Slick sure looks sexy. Yum, yum! Where was I? Oh yeah, new music. Here’s Carly Simon’s nipple album. Huh! Blind Faith is always good! Cream? Ravi Shankar? Fuck! I don’t know! What the hell am I doing on my knees? Oh right, looking for music. Should I drop another hit? How many hits have I taken?... And as my mind fluttered like a seagull in the brightly lit aisles of an expanding universe, X said something, just making chitchat, about how his enemies never see him coming: they only felt his shiv ripping into their kidneys from behind. Apparently, this was his signature style and he gained a lot of satisfaction from it. X certainly looked enthusiastic.
I didn’t look up, but I nodded. I saw what he meant quite clearly. “That’s cool, man. I can dig that." Then, referring to the unlit joint in his hand, "You want to tweak that hooter again?”
“Blood on the Tracks”! That’s it! "Hunted like a crocodile ravaged in the corn; come in, she said, I'll give ya shelter from the storm." Jeez, that sounds nice. Man, I love Dylan.… Uh, lemme see, now what were X and I talking about? Oh yeah, he was saying I had pushed him too far, I was a self-indulgent asshole, our friendship was kaput, and should we meet on the battlefield like former blood brothers Buffalo Bill and Crazy Turtle at the Little Big Toe, one of us would end up face down and spread-eagled in the gentle, crimson current...with a shiv in the kidney.
New Friends
When X and I first met at a strategic-war-game tournament, I was a bookstore manager, a smug, vegetarian, teetotaling guru-wannabe, ever willing to extol the spiritual benefits of brahmacharya celibacy (pretensions that surrendered to Penthouse magazine and furtive, guilty onanism several times a week). X, on the other hand, was a brilliant med school intern, a caustic, intoxication-loving sybarite, an uber-empiricist, always eager to stick in the scalpel, the electrode or the penis to see what might happen. Despite initial inclinations to despise one another, it caught X’s eye that I wore a Napoleonic hat and a machete to the tournament and turned out to have a certain ruthless talent for secret negotiations and betrayal. Inviting me over to meet his girlfriend Janice, the three of us got inebriated, sniffed and circled like dingoes, flirted on a variety of levels, and fell in love. I know, it seems like it should be more complicated, but these things happen a lot more often in one’s twenties.
Mix drugs, alcohol, loneliness, a desperate hunger for transcendence, the proximity of a radiantly lustful woman and 24 years of suppressed emotion and appetite: events began to move quickly. X flew back east on a family visit, and before anyone really consciously considered the ramifications, a hot plateful of Janice’s famous chicken enchiladas was slid onto the table in front of me—and Henry Panky, aspiring ascetic and dedicated vegetarian, self-destructed without a second's hesitation. Trading the austere intellectualisms of Unbounded Mind for the voluptuous, fertile mysteries of the Great Mother, I tucked in my napkin, shook on the tabasco and fucked Janice all night long. Oh yes, indeedy. Yum yum. Many are the crooked pathways and slippery chutes to grace and damnation, and sometimes it's damned hard (and inconvenient) to tell one from the other.
In my defense, the evening with Janice began innocently enough: a bottle or two of Mountain Chablis, a couple of X’s doobies, my special-mix "Love Has No Pride"/"Sexual Healing" cassette, a back massage (“Let’s get this shirt off. Whoa! Nice tits!”), a slow dance, pulling up her skirt to nuzzle a soft, bare bottom. (Much to my disappointment--because I do love them so very much--Janice didn't wear panties.) I’m not sure I can even put my finger on the exact moment events took a certain turn. Hurting X was the last thing I wanted. Honestly, I don’t think he ever crossed my mind.
The Courage to Re-Commit
After our "crisis," X & I decided to continue our friendship after all. I had never had a best friend, nor met so many attractive and surprisingly willing women. For his part, X was a paranoid who expected betrayal, and really preferred to just get it out of the way. He set the trap; I dove for the cheese: Expectations fulfilled! That I came back, with improved manners, passed some sort of test for him. Without further ado, we got stoned and went to see a triple feature of Toshiro Mifune samurai films: manly stuff, lots of beard scratching, grunting and blinding swordplay. I think we both realized that we too were masterless ronin in a lawless and corrupt land and had better stick together.
From then on, I only fucked his girlfriends when he was present (at least as much as practical). This was a triumphant win-win for everybody because X loved to watch, and I usually didn't care … as long as he kept quiet and stayed out of my peripheral vision.
The Dark End of the Street
A couple years later (after Janice had moved on to a bass-playing biker), X and I embarked on a ménage a trois with the intoxicatingly uninhibited Dolores. Dolores, a massage therapist, had arrived in the Bay Area from Texas and quickly rubbed and oiled her way into the upper reaches of wealthy, hot-tubbing, New Age society. By the time she met X, Dolores was married to a mellow, guitar-strumming, trust-funded, Mill Valley crystal dealer (the magical quartz, not the stimulating inhalant). Tooling around Marin County in her convertible Alfa, she seemed content with a carefree life of shopping, socializing and EST seminars. But, alas, Dolores was bored, an affliction for which she had a particularly low tolerance. And that’s where X and I came in.
Clandestine romance, poetry, sophisticated repartee, passion, lots o' drugs--and love, that greasy meat hook. (Or as Burt Lancaster put it in "Elmer Gantry": "And what is love? Love is the morning and the evening star.") X and I put on quite a show in our heyday. Admittedly, it’s hard to discern today the appeal we had then, but most of us are in that sinking boat, eh compadre?
Dolores' intense allure deliciously combined the grinning cowgirl-next-door in tight jeans with the rich debutante in short, black dress, laughing in the pages of Vogue. Her body conveyed a slender, small-breasted and full-bottomed voluptuousness (think young Kathleen Turner in Body Heat), but infinitely more to the point, Dolores exuded a bright, gleeful sexual charisma of such let’s-have-fun-baby invitation, that even the toothless geezers drinking Manischevitz behind the Safeway turned their heads and whistled. The male animal danced herky-jerky in the sweet, warm wake of her narcotic pheromones and those of us who found our way into her bed were not disappointed.
I ended up as the “third party correspondent” in Dolores’ divorce.
Since neither X nor Dolores was a natural monogamist—to put it mildly—our ménage soon featured a large revolving cast of extras, and, indeed, as a political party, we could have swung certain municipal elections. Nurses, patients, students, professors, taxi drivers, hitchhikers, and people met at parties, weddings and video stores; there was even a polite, well-heeled Chinese gentleman, Mr. Wong from Hong Kong, who pulled up in a limousine every six months or so.
Generally, I got the Tuesday and Friday night slots and sometimes Sunday brunch, unless, of course, Dolores had recently met a fresh-faced college student of either sex—in which case, reasonably enough, I had to be flexible.
Inevitably: Complications
I had been strongly encouraged by both Dolores and X to expand and diversify my efforts in the field of sexual endeavor, but instead was becoming increasingly besotted with Dolores.
A fiery Latin girl, Consuela, almost killed X, precipitating an excited visit from the local SWAT team, and interrupting a badly needed session of meditation (I was attempting to re-integrate spiritual practices into my downward spiral of work, sexual obsession and drug abuse). In the event, I did hear what could have been a gunshot, but in the absence of shrieks or heavy thumps (as from a body hitting the carpet), went back to my immersion in Godhead. The 45 pointed at my head through the window (“Freeze!”) convinced me to put on some clothes, make a cup of tea and—as soon as “my” policeman decided to join the party on the second floor—prematurely flush my stash down the toilet. Upstairs, I heard pounding footsteps, screams, shouts of delight, laughter and bellows of rage. X and Consuela had been found vigorously alive in one of the more popular kneeling positions, their only covering, the socks X rarely took off. Fortuitously not found: the shell casing under the couch, the bullet hole in the stucco and the eight-ball of methamphetamine in the desk. The happy, chuckling, back-slapping SWAT team (this was considered a "good day" in the world of law enforcement) concluded the reported gunshot must have been a back-firing car. The lovebirds made up and X hid his Beretta more carefully from then on.
Another fetching coed, Tania, scratched four bloody fingernail marks down X’s face, which gave him a certain ominous ambiance until the scabs fell off. The thing was, after the initial excitement wore off, the younger girls—all bright, attractive, strong-willed lassies—had a hard time playing second fiddle to a virtuoso like Dolores. They often turned unstable and dangerous, threw tantrums, broke things, made threats. I empathized deeply and was always polite and respectful when meeting them half dressed in the kitchen. X started to snort more speed, becoming ever more twitchy and paranoid.
On X’s birthday, everybody came together, snurfled a variety of drugs from his lazy susan, and the living room floor became a holiday huggle muggle of arms, legs, mouths, bellies, bottoms and breasts—though the young women often seemed more interested in eyeballing each other than X or me. (This being the eager Rubyfruit Jungle adolescence of radical feminism, lesbianism was very popular—X and I naturally tried to be as supportive as possible). On one occasion, staring someone’s rosy hindquarters in the face, trying to maintain the tired pistons of my earnest thrusting, and wondering, with some melancholy, where Dolores might be in the heap, I found myself musing over a line from the Talking Heads’ album playing in the background: “And you may ask yourself—how did I get here?”
Happy Endings
Do you know that line of Nietzsche's, so popular in prison movies: “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”? (I believe KFC Taco Bell has made it into a jingle for their current campaign.) I don’t generally find that to be true, do you? It makes me think of that scene in "Monty Python's Holy Grail" where the knight who's had his arms and legs hacked off is still shouting about how he's going to fix the other guy's hash but good. Right. But in this particular instance, I emerged from the resultant psychotic breakdown and suicide attempt forged into tempered steel: a hard, cynical, tight-lipped pessimist of limited expectations. Happily, this provided a significant boost to my business career, and women seemed to like and trust me more.
As her thirties began, Dolores quite abruptly began to lose her head-turning looks and, subsequently, the attentions of both the newly ripe undergraduates and the overripe geezers behind the grocery store. Too many years tanning in the hot western sun, too healthy a country girl's appetite, and dwindling motivation for her daily regime of leg lifts and stomach crunches. Though X and I were not troubled by a few new wrinkles or a few extra pounds, Dolores panicked badly, and over lovey-dovey, post-sexfest breakfasts in bed, gave uncomfortably fervent pitches on the delights of husband-and-fatherhood to her entire flabbergasted roster—except the lesbians, of course, who were quickly cut loose as a passing girlish fancy. I got pitched third, maybe fourth, and it was nice to be asked. After half a dozen polite demurrals, she ultimately ended up marrying a new guy, a serious, hardworking fellow who wanted children and, after a few drinks, played a mean, polka-like "Horse With No Name" on his accordion.
Though not invited to the wedding, X and I still sent the newlyweds a very nice microwave oven, then a cutting-edge appliance. Because of a special promotion, this came with a complete set of plastic mixing bowls, which as the salesman pointed out, constituted a fine gift in their own right.
Epilogue
On either side of the burning bridge of time, Dolores and I have lost touch, and I sometimes wonder what became of her. Are the flirtatious eyes, seductive mouth, long, slender legs and firm, succulent ass just rose petals blown away on the hot, merciless winds of time—too fine to last in this increasingly grim, collapsing and corpulent world? I don’t know: I remember her as she was, and wish her well.
X developed a substantial substance-abuse issue. (He vehemently disagrees, but then why did he speak so quickly and incomprehensibly, and why did blood spurt from his nose all the time?) Still, he ultimately cleaned up his act, and in the nineties made a shitload of money selling his line of all-natural, erogenous-zone enhancement products. That’s a high margin, recession-proof business, and his beefalo ranch is right next to Ted Turner’s. I’m proud as heck of him.
As for me, I retain my lean, boyish figure, though my chest hair is going gray and the body is now topped by the sad, shrunken head of a life-beaten octogenarian. Despite X’s generous offer of substantial product discounts, I decided to stick with my homemade penis weights: supplements and salves make me nervous, and it’s second nature by now to simply slip on the twine and dumbbell while watching HBO. Sometimes, sitting alone in the blue, flickering light of the TV, I think they’re all that keep me from blowing away.
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