Saturday, October 12, 2013 2:58:26 AM
More Sex, Anyone?
By DICK CAVETT
October 11, 2013, 9:00 pm
You made me laugh. You, the reader who wrote that, on the subject of sex before marriage, your mother asked your father the farthest he had gone with his before-marriage girlfriend. “Poughkeepsie,” he replied.
My last column [ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/as-comics-say-these-kids-today-i-tell-ya/ ] inspired a remarkable number of thoughtful replies. I wish I had space and time to deal with all of them.
The college I wrote about that posted information and advice on sex at school is, I learn, hardly unique. And many readers wonder what took so long. If only we had had that as a theme.
Only a handful could be considered shocked or disapproving of the practice. Many worried about the possibly lost distinction between sex and true affection.
I am always shocked that there are still a handful of defenders of the dubious practice of abstinence, surely the worst idea since chocolate-covered ants.
Undoubtedly this practice urged on the young combined with forbidding them contraception has accounted for a hefty portion of the income of the baby-shower industry.
Abstinence. What sex-drive-free human specimens dreamed this one up? Were, or are, they utter strangers to the turmoil of the storming erotic drives of the young? And, as several fortunate readers attest, some lucky members of the old?
If there is an Abstinence League, my image of its leader comes from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell”: “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.”
Remember when the “one true church” was heavily promoting the “rhythm method” of pseudo-contraception? Of course the jokes came thick and fast about inability to keep a beat, etc. I wonder what wit first labeled the fiasco “Vatican roulette.” A daredevil version, it proved to be, of roulette with about four chambers loaded.
I liked the reader who admitted quite frankly that, yes, she did think additional sex experience would have been a good thing in her case, probably producing a more successful marriage.
Several people referred, or at least alluded, to the danger of a wrecked school life and education from an unwanted pregnancy.
No small concern. More so in my day, when detailed knowledge of the traps and pitfalls of the loins was often sparse.
I received zero sex knowledge at home. Had my mother lived, I might well have, but my dad merely worried that I was going to impregnate someone in high school. But no advice.
Considering the thinness of my sexual activity at the time, the odds against the calamity that haunted A. B. Cavett were somewhere below zero. I wouldn’t be surprised, such was the extent of my dad’s concern, to learn that he might have had some such related experience himself.
In college, where the odds favoring inadvertent calamity at least climbed to just above the freezing point, I can still recall a stabbing and chilling moment of angst, fear and trembling.
The previous night had included a rare episode of pneumatic bliss, properly conducted, safety-factor-wise.
The next day, as chance would have it, Fate, or one of my roommates, placed in my hands one of those pamphlets for boys. It at least felt as if my hair stood up at reading the icy words: “Be careful not to touch the end of your penis to the wrong side of the condom, then turn it over and…”
It went on to make it clear that the not inconsiderable frequency of this inadvertent “transfer” mishap could account, accidentally, for an addition to the population.
At that, the black and white tile floor of the dorm bathroom where I was standing seemed to zoom up at me as in an early film-noir special effect.
Had I done that? Had I wrecked my life? Cold sweat.
Was there a preacher in my immediate future? Would I be on a train back to Nebraska? Would I be home, saying, “Hi, folks. Meet Janie”?
For a good time thereafter, sleep was fitful and sometimes impossible without a mild sleeping potion and a page-or-two dose of Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene.”
Why tell this? As an argument for sex education? Surely no one with a measurable I.Q. is still against that, although, in fact, you can still hear folks with but 10 watts upstairs say, “Why put ideas in kids’ heads?”
My wondering about whether more sex in school, in my part of The Old Days, would have made me a better person seemed to divide the audience.
I was assured it would have and that it emphatically would not. I suppose all we can say here is, how will we ever know?
Some readers made the distinction of how different things always are for boys and girls. A female reader, disputing assumptions about the time, wrote of the incredible pressure “in the 60s even” for girls to “keep your knickers on” or be looked down on by female classmates. But that now, she says, the pressure is to “lighten up, get with it.” To shuck ’em down.
She feels the school’s enlightened document I quoted is spot on.
Some urged that doleful term “waiting,” maintaining that “character” is built by biting the bullet and waiting.
Poppycock.
The great Marlene Dietrich told me that in her German childhood upbringing, she was commanded to go without a drink of water when thirsty “to build character.” Did it? I asked. “Not one brick’s worth of character was built. It probably injured my kidneys.”
One reader, Joe of Brooklyn, touchingly wonders if, as a schoolkid, that certain gorgeous dream of a teacher ever fancied him, envying those 15-year-old students these days taken “twixt the sheets by a comely and passionate high school teacher.” (Who subsequently does time.)
Poor Joe has never gotten over it. He thinks in today’s atmosphere, the “it” he longed for just might have happened. She was 33 then — she would be 92 now — and “she is still more enticing than any woman I have ever encountered.”
Joe says every man he tells this to has a similar school days story and longing. I know I do. Would we have been better off? Anyway, Joe, you have at least a sitcom episode here, if not the core of a feature.
Glad that so many writers liked the column and applauded the school’s efforts, warnings and advice about that old devil, sex. Many wish they’d had it. Such a document I mean, of course.
(A few practical souls pointed out that it is also greatly in the school’s legal interests to able to say to thundering parents, “We told them.”)
Predictably, I guess, I was taken to task (what in hell does that really mean?) by some readers for committing humor within such a topic. This always puzzles. The old, “There is no place for humor here.”
You have it almost right. There is no place for no humor. At what boundary must humor halt? I commend you to my friend, Mark Twain on the power of humor: “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”
As further assertion of the place of humor being everywhere, let us close with the wise, wise advice about life given by the great George S. Kaufman to his young daughter Ann.
“Sample everything in life. Except incest and folk-dancing.”
*
Related Posts from Opinionator
Sex, Doubt and the Pope
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/sex-doubt-and-the-pope/
As Comics Say, ‘These Kids Today! I Tell Ya!’
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/as-comics-say-these-kids-today-i-tell-ya/
My Life, Post Exposure
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/my-life-post-exposure/
Prelude to a Kiss
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/prelude-to-a-kiss/ [next below]
Sex and the Secularists
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/sex-and-the-secularists/
*
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/more-sex-anyone/ [with comments]
--
Prelude to a Kiss
Kris Mukai
By ALISSA NUTTING
April 23, 2012, 7:05 am
The house I grew up in was ordinary in most ways — a small stucco two-story in suburban Florida at the end of a block lined with more of the same. One thing did set it apart, though: it was outfitted with an advanced security system of 57 crucifixes. The crosses were strategically hung throughout the house: the moment you left the gaze-range of one Christ, you walked straight into the radar of another. There were no blind spots, not even in the bathroom. I understood and even admired their ubiquity. There was no place in the house where I could hide from scrutiny. It was checkmate.
At times I felt a sympathy for the keepers of this vigil. I often looked at the carved, pained expression of one of the living room Christs when my father stalled the television remote on something particularly dull — episodes of that PBS do-it-yourself remodeling program come to mind — and thought, Haven’t you been through enough?
In the presence of the bathroom Christs, though, I avoided eye contact. Still, it happened from time to time. I’d give a pained smile as I sat down, cringing as the porcelain echo broke the silence, then quickly flush and wash my hands. “Thanks for listening,” I’d say apologetically — by which I meant, I’m sure you have better things to do than preside over the excretion of my liquid waste.
It was through this pre-Keanu matrix I had to pass in order to arrive at my first date.
*
I was 15 years old and knew very well the sexual developmental markers my peers were hitting and rapidly passing. If I didn’t kiss a boy soon, I’d be abandoned, exiled to roam the dry wastelands outside the dome-city of Adolescent Pheromones where the unforgiving sky rained S.A.T. vocabulary flash cards and lunches were eaten alone in the girls’ bathroom handicapped stall.
Since the Catholic devotion of my parents fell somewhere between that of Mary Tudor and John Paul II, unsupervised dating prior to marriage was discouraged. I had therefore asked my father to drop me off at a friend’s house; just before leaving home I would call my date with instructions to rendezvous at the departure point in 20 minutes. I would walk around the house and enter her backyard, wait until my father drove away, then wait for my date to arrive.
And how did I adorn myself for this personal scavenger hunt for French kissing? I wore a turtleneck, of course, because nothing says “open for business” like concealing both your wrists and upper chin. This was not kin to the tight-fitting turtlenecks of ski lodge playmates but rather a sacklike bag that could’ve successfully hidden any number of surprises, ranging from an additional limb to a third-trimester pregnancy to a Remington Long Rifle. I suppose I hoped it would, in some odd Victorian sense, heighten my date’s interest. Perhaps he’d be so curious as to what was hidden beneath the muumuu cut of its hemline that he’d feel me up for his own peace of mind. His intentions didn’t matter, after all. Only the physical outcomes did.
My attire had another benefit. When my father finally dropped me off at my friend’s house neither he nor the omnipotent belly-buttons of the Christ-cams had seen anything that might indicate foul play. And so I waited behind the fence, vigilantly peeking between its boards with a nervous eye. At one point I nearly fainted as heavy footsteps approached — I was sure her parents had come home early. Then a pair of blue Postal Service shorts and black knee-high compression stockings came into view. Only the mailman.
Soon my date’s well-used car pulled up. I realized I’d been so nervous about getting to the date that I hadn’t yet worried about the date itself. He spoke first: Did I want to go to a movie? I nodded too quickly and he began to drive.
He was a friend of a friend, as all outliers are. And he was “older” — the fact that he’d offered no particular age likely placed him upward of legal drinking age. I didn’t know much about him, but the few stats I had were not rosy. He was in town to stay with relatives for a while (hiding from the law?) His graduation status was dubious. In his one month stay he had already been fired from a job at McDonald’s for allegedly taking $20 from the register (he maintained his innocence but did not attempt to get the job back). Then there was the most damning fact of all: he was willing to take me out on a date.
My stomach turned as I took in the details around me.
“Is my driving scaring you?” he asked. I looked into the side mirror. My bulging eyes appeared to be floating several centimeters ahead of the rest of my face and my mouth had opened to a degree normally reserved for the facilitation of wisdom tooth surgery.
“Everything’s fine,” I said. It was an attempt at self-hypnosis. I repeated this statement a few times as we pulled into the theater.
I have absolutely no recall of what movie we went to see. I was too busy trying not to vomit and fantasizing about all that could go wrong. Would we crash on the way home? Had my parents already somehow found out where I was? Would all the Christs descend down from their crucifixes in the middle of the night, form a Lilliputian army, and tie me to my bed to await punishment when the sun rose?
At one point during the movie, my date’s hand moved from my shoulder to my side. I’d never had a boy’s hand on the side of my body. Millions of confused neurotransmitters started to riot, breaking furniture and punching walls. I began to shake, not demurely, but rather seizing up like an antiquated washing machine connected to a diesel engine and filled with several yards of industrial-grade carpet.
I kept telling myself that perhaps he wouldn’t notice my convulsions.
“Are you cold?” he asked. I shook my head no.
“But you’re shaking.”
“Oh?” I stuttered casually.
I like to think that I ceased rattling before the credits rolled, but I can’t be sure.
“Did you like it?” he asked me on the way out.
“Everything’s fine,” I responded.
We went to Wendy’s, and even at 15, the parallel meaning of the assembly-line consumerism of the place was not lost on me. I was there in that moment because I wanted to have had my tongue inside the mouth of someone else, because all my friends had already done this long ago, because we all needed to be the same and we needed it right now. The guy didn’t matter, the circumstances didn’t matter; I didn’t (or rather, couldn’t) demand anything to be special. My peers were lifting off all around me, passengers on shining aircraft of sexual discovery. I’d been granted no such ticket. But I could make out with this guy tonight in his used car.
I had him drop me off several blocks from my parents’ house. He stopped the car and turned to me. Suddenly it was all in reach, his mouth the flag I needed to capture. I didn’t know when or if I’d get a second chance, so I didn’t want to risk anything to subtlety. I had to be sure that it counted. I stuck my tongue inside his mouth and violently moved it around as fast as I could: two angry, epileptic eels in a collision to the death. I kept my eyes wide open the whole time.
As soon as it was over, I fled the vehicle. Dusk had fallen.
*
When I entered the door at home, I felt the heat of the crucifixes’ stares. It was dark but I could sense the location of each one—they hung on the wall like strung lanterns, each connected to the next through a telepathic wire of all-knowing. I turned the light switch on and tried to act normal, but I knew what they knew. My tongue felt infected and swollen, too-hot to the touch. I went to the bathroom and brushed it with the rough disdain of a zookeeper scrubbing a cage. “I had to do it,” I said to the crucifixes; “I didn’t like it any more than you did.” And to myself, I said, “but for different reasons.” Then I dimmed the lights, watched the shadows lengthen across their painted eyes like closing lids, and put the Christs to sleep.
A few nights later he called me at home, when my parents were already asleep; luckily I caught it on the first ring.
This time he showed his age; he wanted to come pick me up. It was 11 p.m. on a school night. “I can’t go out this late,” I explained. “Sneak out,” he pressed. But I was firm. “I only sneak out in broad daylight amidst a nest of supporting details and a cover story,” I reported.
It was the last time we spoke.
© 2012 The New York Times Company (emphasis in original)
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/prelude-to-a-kiss/ [with comments]
--
(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=91425190 and preceding and following
By DICK CAVETT
October 11, 2013, 9:00 pm
You made me laugh. You, the reader who wrote that, on the subject of sex before marriage, your mother asked your father the farthest he had gone with his before-marriage girlfriend. “Poughkeepsie,” he replied.
My last column [ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/as-comics-say-these-kids-today-i-tell-ya/ ] inspired a remarkable number of thoughtful replies. I wish I had space and time to deal with all of them.
The college I wrote about that posted information and advice on sex at school is, I learn, hardly unique. And many readers wonder what took so long. If only we had had that as a theme.
Only a handful could be considered shocked or disapproving of the practice. Many worried about the possibly lost distinction between sex and true affection.
I am always shocked that there are still a handful of defenders of the dubious practice of abstinence, surely the worst idea since chocolate-covered ants.
Undoubtedly this practice urged on the young combined with forbidding them contraception has accounted for a hefty portion of the income of the baby-shower industry.
Abstinence. What sex-drive-free human specimens dreamed this one up? Were, or are, they utter strangers to the turmoil of the storming erotic drives of the young? And, as several fortunate readers attest, some lucky members of the old?
If there is an Abstinence League, my image of its leader comes from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell”: “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.”
Remember when the “one true church” was heavily promoting the “rhythm method” of pseudo-contraception? Of course the jokes came thick and fast about inability to keep a beat, etc. I wonder what wit first labeled the fiasco “Vatican roulette.” A daredevil version, it proved to be, of roulette with about four chambers loaded.
I liked the reader who admitted quite frankly that, yes, she did think additional sex experience would have been a good thing in her case, probably producing a more successful marriage.
Several people referred, or at least alluded, to the danger of a wrecked school life and education from an unwanted pregnancy.
No small concern. More so in my day, when detailed knowledge of the traps and pitfalls of the loins was often sparse.
I received zero sex knowledge at home. Had my mother lived, I might well have, but my dad merely worried that I was going to impregnate someone in high school. But no advice.
Considering the thinness of my sexual activity at the time, the odds against the calamity that haunted A. B. Cavett were somewhere below zero. I wouldn’t be surprised, such was the extent of my dad’s concern, to learn that he might have had some such related experience himself.
In college, where the odds favoring inadvertent calamity at least climbed to just above the freezing point, I can still recall a stabbing and chilling moment of angst, fear and trembling.
The previous night had included a rare episode of pneumatic bliss, properly conducted, safety-factor-wise.
The next day, as chance would have it, Fate, or one of my roommates, placed in my hands one of those pamphlets for boys. It at least felt as if my hair stood up at reading the icy words: “Be careful not to touch the end of your penis to the wrong side of the condom, then turn it over and…”
It went on to make it clear that the not inconsiderable frequency of this inadvertent “transfer” mishap could account, accidentally, for an addition to the population.
At that, the black and white tile floor of the dorm bathroom where I was standing seemed to zoom up at me as in an early film-noir special effect.
Had I done that? Had I wrecked my life? Cold sweat.
Was there a preacher in my immediate future? Would I be on a train back to Nebraska? Would I be home, saying, “Hi, folks. Meet Janie”?
For a good time thereafter, sleep was fitful and sometimes impossible without a mild sleeping potion and a page-or-two dose of Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene.”
Why tell this? As an argument for sex education? Surely no one with a measurable I.Q. is still against that, although, in fact, you can still hear folks with but 10 watts upstairs say, “Why put ideas in kids’ heads?”
My wondering about whether more sex in school, in my part of The Old Days, would have made me a better person seemed to divide the audience.
I was assured it would have and that it emphatically would not. I suppose all we can say here is, how will we ever know?
Some readers made the distinction of how different things always are for boys and girls. A female reader, disputing assumptions about the time, wrote of the incredible pressure “in the 60s even” for girls to “keep your knickers on” or be looked down on by female classmates. But that now, she says, the pressure is to “lighten up, get with it.” To shuck ’em down.
She feels the school’s enlightened document I quoted is spot on.
Some urged that doleful term “waiting,” maintaining that “character” is built by biting the bullet and waiting.
Poppycock.
The great Marlene Dietrich told me that in her German childhood upbringing, she was commanded to go without a drink of water when thirsty “to build character.” Did it? I asked. “Not one brick’s worth of character was built. It probably injured my kidneys.”
One reader, Joe of Brooklyn, touchingly wonders if, as a schoolkid, that certain gorgeous dream of a teacher ever fancied him, envying those 15-year-old students these days taken “twixt the sheets by a comely and passionate high school teacher.” (Who subsequently does time.)
Poor Joe has never gotten over it. He thinks in today’s atmosphere, the “it” he longed for just might have happened. She was 33 then — she would be 92 now — and “she is still more enticing than any woman I have ever encountered.”
Joe says every man he tells this to has a similar school days story and longing. I know I do. Would we have been better off? Anyway, Joe, you have at least a sitcom episode here, if not the core of a feature.
Glad that so many writers liked the column and applauded the school’s efforts, warnings and advice about that old devil, sex. Many wish they’d had it. Such a document I mean, of course.
(A few practical souls pointed out that it is also greatly in the school’s legal interests to able to say to thundering parents, “We told them.”)
Predictably, I guess, I was taken to task (what in hell does that really mean?) by some readers for committing humor within such a topic. This always puzzles. The old, “There is no place for humor here.”
You have it almost right. There is no place for no humor. At what boundary must humor halt? I commend you to my friend, Mark Twain on the power of humor: “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”
As further assertion of the place of humor being everywhere, let us close with the wise, wise advice about life given by the great George S. Kaufman to his young daughter Ann.
“Sample everything in life. Except incest and folk-dancing.”
*
Related Posts from Opinionator
Sex, Doubt and the Pope
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/sex-doubt-and-the-pope/
As Comics Say, ‘These Kids Today! I Tell Ya!’
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/as-comics-say-these-kids-today-i-tell-ya/
My Life, Post Exposure
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/my-life-post-exposure/
Prelude to a Kiss
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/prelude-to-a-kiss/ [next below]
Sex and the Secularists
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/sex-and-the-secularists/
*
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/more-sex-anyone/ [with comments]
--
Prelude to a Kiss
Kris Mukai
By ALISSA NUTTING
April 23, 2012, 7:05 am
The house I grew up in was ordinary in most ways — a small stucco two-story in suburban Florida at the end of a block lined with more of the same. One thing did set it apart, though: it was outfitted with an advanced security system of 57 crucifixes. The crosses were strategically hung throughout the house: the moment you left the gaze-range of one Christ, you walked straight into the radar of another. There were no blind spots, not even in the bathroom. I understood and even admired their ubiquity. There was no place in the house where I could hide from scrutiny. It was checkmate.
At times I felt a sympathy for the keepers of this vigil. I often looked at the carved, pained expression of one of the living room Christs when my father stalled the television remote on something particularly dull — episodes of that PBS do-it-yourself remodeling program come to mind — and thought, Haven’t you been through enough?
In the presence of the bathroom Christs, though, I avoided eye contact. Still, it happened from time to time. I’d give a pained smile as I sat down, cringing as the porcelain echo broke the silence, then quickly flush and wash my hands. “Thanks for listening,” I’d say apologetically — by which I meant, I’m sure you have better things to do than preside over the excretion of my liquid waste.
It was through this pre-Keanu matrix I had to pass in order to arrive at my first date.
*
I was 15 years old and knew very well the sexual developmental markers my peers were hitting and rapidly passing. If I didn’t kiss a boy soon, I’d be abandoned, exiled to roam the dry wastelands outside the dome-city of Adolescent Pheromones where the unforgiving sky rained S.A.T. vocabulary flash cards and lunches were eaten alone in the girls’ bathroom handicapped stall.
Since the Catholic devotion of my parents fell somewhere between that of Mary Tudor and John Paul II, unsupervised dating prior to marriage was discouraged. I had therefore asked my father to drop me off at a friend’s house; just before leaving home I would call my date with instructions to rendezvous at the departure point in 20 minutes. I would walk around the house and enter her backyard, wait until my father drove away, then wait for my date to arrive.
And how did I adorn myself for this personal scavenger hunt for French kissing? I wore a turtleneck, of course, because nothing says “open for business” like concealing both your wrists and upper chin. This was not kin to the tight-fitting turtlenecks of ski lodge playmates but rather a sacklike bag that could’ve successfully hidden any number of surprises, ranging from an additional limb to a third-trimester pregnancy to a Remington Long Rifle. I suppose I hoped it would, in some odd Victorian sense, heighten my date’s interest. Perhaps he’d be so curious as to what was hidden beneath the muumuu cut of its hemline that he’d feel me up for his own peace of mind. His intentions didn’t matter, after all. Only the physical outcomes did.
My attire had another benefit. When my father finally dropped me off at my friend’s house neither he nor the omnipotent belly-buttons of the Christ-cams had seen anything that might indicate foul play. And so I waited behind the fence, vigilantly peeking between its boards with a nervous eye. At one point I nearly fainted as heavy footsteps approached — I was sure her parents had come home early. Then a pair of blue Postal Service shorts and black knee-high compression stockings came into view. Only the mailman.
Soon my date’s well-used car pulled up. I realized I’d been so nervous about getting to the date that I hadn’t yet worried about the date itself. He spoke first: Did I want to go to a movie? I nodded too quickly and he began to drive.
He was a friend of a friend, as all outliers are. And he was “older” — the fact that he’d offered no particular age likely placed him upward of legal drinking age. I didn’t know much about him, but the few stats I had were not rosy. He was in town to stay with relatives for a while (hiding from the law?) His graduation status was dubious. In his one month stay he had already been fired from a job at McDonald’s for allegedly taking $20 from the register (he maintained his innocence but did not attempt to get the job back). Then there was the most damning fact of all: he was willing to take me out on a date.
My stomach turned as I took in the details around me.
“Is my driving scaring you?” he asked. I looked into the side mirror. My bulging eyes appeared to be floating several centimeters ahead of the rest of my face and my mouth had opened to a degree normally reserved for the facilitation of wisdom tooth surgery.
“Everything’s fine,” I said. It was an attempt at self-hypnosis. I repeated this statement a few times as we pulled into the theater.
I have absolutely no recall of what movie we went to see. I was too busy trying not to vomit and fantasizing about all that could go wrong. Would we crash on the way home? Had my parents already somehow found out where I was? Would all the Christs descend down from their crucifixes in the middle of the night, form a Lilliputian army, and tie me to my bed to await punishment when the sun rose?
At one point during the movie, my date’s hand moved from my shoulder to my side. I’d never had a boy’s hand on the side of my body. Millions of confused neurotransmitters started to riot, breaking furniture and punching walls. I began to shake, not demurely, but rather seizing up like an antiquated washing machine connected to a diesel engine and filled with several yards of industrial-grade carpet.
I kept telling myself that perhaps he wouldn’t notice my convulsions.
“Are you cold?” he asked. I shook my head no.
“But you’re shaking.”
“Oh?” I stuttered casually.
I like to think that I ceased rattling before the credits rolled, but I can’t be sure.
“Did you like it?” he asked me on the way out.
“Everything’s fine,” I responded.
We went to Wendy’s, and even at 15, the parallel meaning of the assembly-line consumerism of the place was not lost on me. I was there in that moment because I wanted to have had my tongue inside the mouth of someone else, because all my friends had already done this long ago, because we all needed to be the same and we needed it right now. The guy didn’t matter, the circumstances didn’t matter; I didn’t (or rather, couldn’t) demand anything to be special. My peers were lifting off all around me, passengers on shining aircraft of sexual discovery. I’d been granted no such ticket. But I could make out with this guy tonight in his used car.
I had him drop me off several blocks from my parents’ house. He stopped the car and turned to me. Suddenly it was all in reach, his mouth the flag I needed to capture. I didn’t know when or if I’d get a second chance, so I didn’t want to risk anything to subtlety. I had to be sure that it counted. I stuck my tongue inside his mouth and violently moved it around as fast as I could: two angry, epileptic eels in a collision to the death. I kept my eyes wide open the whole time.
As soon as it was over, I fled the vehicle. Dusk had fallen.
*
When I entered the door at home, I felt the heat of the crucifixes’ stares. It was dark but I could sense the location of each one—they hung on the wall like strung lanterns, each connected to the next through a telepathic wire of all-knowing. I turned the light switch on and tried to act normal, but I knew what they knew. My tongue felt infected and swollen, too-hot to the touch. I went to the bathroom and brushed it with the rough disdain of a zookeeper scrubbing a cage. “I had to do it,” I said to the crucifixes; “I didn’t like it any more than you did.” And to myself, I said, “but for different reasons.” Then I dimmed the lights, watched the shadows lengthen across their painted eyes like closing lids, and put the Christs to sleep.
A few nights later he called me at home, when my parents were already asleep; luckily I caught it on the first ring.
This time he showed his age; he wanted to come pick me up. It was 11 p.m. on a school night. “I can’t go out this late,” I explained. “Sneak out,” he pressed. But I was firm. “I only sneak out in broad daylight amidst a nest of supporting details and a cover story,” I reported.
It was the last time we spoke.
© 2012 The New York Times Company (emphasis in original)
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/prelude-to-a-kiss/ [with comments]
--
(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=91425190 and preceding and following
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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