VonMunchausen's Xanga

To the Woman who maced me

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 01:55:52 GMT

I saw you jogging around the lake and followed you to Dunn brothers. I was trying to work up my courage to get out of my van and go into Dunn brothers but you were only inside for 30 minutes. As you left the coffee shop I followed you slowly as you walked up the block. I think you got nervous when I hit the garbage cans that some jerk left on the boulevard! I guess I did hop the curb, but still, they were pretty close to the street. Anyways, I watched you start to run and I wanted to explain what happened, you started screaming for help as I tackled you, whats with the screaming anyways? And why do women always scream when I try to talk at them? Anyways, thats when I got a face full of mace...that was three days ago, and I was just released from the jail. I was hoping you could meet me and possibly drop the charges.

New Beginnings uhm Take 2?

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 04:23:52 GMT

Sorry about my last blog- got some hatemail from a few of you. I will try not to mix alcohol and writing in the future- or at least keep it in moderation.

So what is a blog- "on ongoing narrative - a series of events that follows another series of events...." SO basically what I had been doing was shit. I now have reason to write- I need the mental exercise. lets just say these lines are warm up swings.... Many of you have enjoyed some or my short stories on here but truth be told I am very out of practice. I need some stimulation to return to my prolific ways.

So what to do- for those of you that have the great displeasure of knowing me personally you know that my daily existence is a train wreck, hazmat spill, and a 70's raunchy porno with a LOT of bush!

seee. Shit .. I just got kicked out of my bed because obviously my typing is too damn noisy!!! Soooo let me save here run over to the office and start penning away again.... be back kids.......

Ok so now I am back for a bit. I probably gave you a little bit of time to start doubting the fact that I live such a crazy life. Well I don't know how crazy crazy is but it has been entertaining to say the least. I think My life has been on par with most it is just most people forget the funny stuff and dwell on the shitty stuff. Let me think if I can share a lil anecdote with you guys to set the stage---

A few months back I decided to be a little daring and bump into one of you pervs in person. I mean all the teasing and double entendres got me all worked up so I figured what the heck. She was cute enough and quirky in her ways, she was always quick to post about my blogs and excitedly took to chatting me up on messenger. It was a thrill sharing my work with someone in near real time.
We teased each other about chatting over drinks- she said she wasn't a big drinker <uh huh> so I suggested coffee or whatever... Well we went round and round for a while on this. I suspected that she thought I was some pervy old guy and being that she was a coed well hey you can't be too safe these days.
One evening was the turning point. She sent me some pictures of her breasts! Very nice I might add. She wanted to show off her handy work- some surgical steel that was now one with her tender, swollen areolas. I was very excited for her. It all fell into place shortly after.... so we fast forward to that afternoon. We basically met without any preconceptions- lets just hang . Had a little lunch then I thought we could go to a local park and see a secluded area to chat. As we drove around for what seemed am eternity making small talk and looking for each other's openings came the question "So what line of work do you do when you are not taking nude pictures of women or writing debaucherous tales?"
This is actually a pretty common question for me and I easily quipped "I am a boss at a national firm" <not exactly what I said but I am still using a wee bit of discretion!> She answered that she had thought I had said that and asked which one. Ecitedly <like a fucking idiot> I chatted up my firm and its history. I basically did my elevator sales pitch. I looked at her and I kept seeing her recede further and further into her seat. She then began to laugh and asked if I knew a specific person who will remain nameless.......
Yep sure did know her, she worked with a department I was very close to..."I know her well, probably saw her daily! Why you know her?"
"Oh my God yes I do-- she is MY MOM!"
To say that my life flashed in front of me is an understatement- the horror!!! I felt so vulnerable and exposed and this poor girl had bared her body to me on numerous occasions over the preceding weeks over cam, and in pictures she wanted me to edit for her. I knew her gorgeous nips like the back of my hand! But wait! i knew her mom almost as well!!!
I don't think I have ever had a "date" go sour so fast! In the end we both promised to forget all about it..lol.. her mom had no idea of her daughter's newly found sexual identity and she made it clear mom did not need to know. We both made our promises and laughed as we said her goodbyes. I watched her as I dropped her off disappear in the waves of other college students and can only imagine her thoughts as she walked off. Thinking about the pathetic old man that she had just spent an afternoon with and how the world has a funny way of throwing curve balls!

So has that slowed me down? Ehh well lets just say that I am now a "Bus Driver" when I meet anyone new! No business cards get passed out going forward!

btw if she reads this which I am sure she will-- thanks for a funny time and it was really nice getting to know you better!

SO He Lives

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 04:00:15 GMT

Hello all ye faithful.... I know probably not many of you guys out there.... it has been a we bit rocky for the last few since I last logged on. Had to make some mental and social adjustments --- kinda get a bearing and take stock on where I am.

So why all this and why should you care-- well you care because .. I AM SPECIAL! At least that what I tell myself since I am still a narcisist. Another reason goes to the age old thing called curiousity~ We all get curious... I mean this is the damn web world where only a few of you know me more than just a "Max Headroom" figure out in cyberland that sometimes writes funny anecdotes. So I can just imagine, and can empathize with you that when someone that is a regular in our little niche of cyberspace goes AWOL we wonder what horrible maladies could have overtaken them. It is perfectly within our natue to wonder... was he busted on one of those "to Catch A Predator" stings? Was his fat old Marine ass recalled to duty and he is now on a guardpost in Sadr City? Did he finally break down and due to lack of $$ decide to hook up with his buddy Buster and be a Coyote runner in South Texas bringing over Illegals in a VW Jetta? OR Maybe just Maybe he was discovered to be sleeping with his best friends wife... said hubby coming home early at mid day to catch me providing her with a most pleasurable cunnillingual massage. Ohh one can only imagine!

Al those great thought and it was none- I simply, and honestly succumbed to an infarction of the heart. Yes-- it is true that at thr ripe old age of 35 my heart succumbed. I assure thee that the story will be most well recieved but it will go without saying that now, havingbeen so close to the end of the line, feel that I have so much more to tell- more to share.... There are so many untarnished minds out there that I need to spoil rotten. I look at this extra time to be as they say in my fave hockey parlance... We are in extra periods~

So I must make the most of it.....

kisses and hello all, I have missed you!

Lover's Dance

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 04:18:40 GMT

Lover's Dance

Glistening bodies entwined
in an ageless erotic dance,
seeking pleasures from each other,
seeking wonder and romance.

She touches his face with tenderness.
He draws her body near.
Aching, needing hunger
will make their destiny clear.

Their lips meet in soft kisses,
their tongues begin passion's war.
Forgotten now, the outside world.
All is here, behind this door.

He strokes her body tenderly,
she arches up for his caress.
He finds her silken portal
and her womanly wetness.

She moans in fiery desire
and pulls his hand away,
wishing to end this exquisite torture
and get on with passion's play.

She straddles his waiting body,
eases him into her feminine hollow.
She leads him on a rhythmic dance,
his thrusting hips must follow.

She rides him faster, even then,
to hear his wondrous sighs.
She shows him all the delights
she has between her womanly thighs.

They stare into each other's eyes
and gasp as ecstasy unreels,
and tangles them in a lover's knot
that every answer reveals.

Sated, they lie side by side,
spent but hungering still.
She touches him where their passion came
and tastes their lovers spill.

Their mouths meet in passionate need,
hungry animals once more.
This time he rises above her,
her body to explore.

Their ballet begins again,
as he thrusts his manhood in,
vowing not to end the dance
unless her cries he'll win.

Like beasts of old they become,
riding with desire,
only resting their throbbing bodies
when sated by their fire.

Swallow- by me PM

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 01:11:28 GMT

Swallow

(another me adventure)

Tiff was into hardware. The fact became clear the moment I saw her bedroom. There was what appeared to be the chopper handlebars from a girl’s Schwinn, from the mid-Seventies, complete with bubblegum-pink handgrips and plastic streamers, mounted with industrial lag bolts to the wall, just above the headboard. Maybe that should have tipped me off. But the barbell through the clit, making its appearance about an hour after the handlebars, was a little more that I’d bargained for.

Then again Tiff was a little more than I had bargained for. She was tough and wild and perhaps crazier than anyone I’d been with before—but fun and up for anything. Certainly more fun than Neva, the obsessive-compulsive 34-year-old I’d been floundering with the past three years. Stacked up against, for example, one of Josef Mengele’s Nazi nurses, Neva would still tip out on the less-fun side. But perhaps that is not fair. Neva had her good points, though self-inflicted pain was not one of them. This was a woman who often took a Tylenol before brushing her hair. The idea of jamming a metal bar through her clitoris would have seemed, to Neva, like science fiction.

But this new girl, Tiff—she was different. That fact was written all over her. I wasn’t exactly used to self perforation and, it was a little disarming. The tattoos I was prepared for—a chain of daisies ringing her pullet-like biceps; a kissing cousin to Bettie Page, winking coyly, probably cribbed from the Altoids ad; gothic calligraphy, small of her back, that said Kyle (and, I suspected, I watch too much 6ft Under). I saw them when I asked her out, along with the initial piercing—The tongue was obvious in conversation and the belly button dangle, a pendulous A-bomb, finned, tumescent with payload, even through the scrim of her blouse.

The last piercing, though, was not as publicly advertised. Word first reached me just as I was nuzzling the peach-fuzz glory trail just below the belly button, gnawing at her hipbones and tugging at the Tootsie Pop-print panties and inhaling the mix of cotton and musk.

“I’ve got something on my clit,” she announced suddenly, and though her tone was more statement than warning or apology—a mere point of trivia rather than alarm—I took her to mean she had some sort of STD. And I thought, perhaps a little crushed, Of course she does. How stupid would I be to expect otherwise? This is a person who walks up to strangers at work and bandies about the word pussy. And those Schwinn handlebars aren’t mounted there just because she thought it would dress up the room.

Eventually, I understood she meant something other than a sore or lesion when she hooked her thumbs on either side of her panties and yanked them down, free and clear. She was shaved clean—I thought of spring roasters and Cornish game hens. Her fingers pushed ahead of me, spreading the hood to show me. It was a tiny silver barbell, straight through her clitoris, with two round ends no bigger than those little metallic cupcake decorations I loved as a kid though never understood why they were edible.

But cupcake wasn’t my initial thought. I swear to God, the first thing that came to mind was an image—from TV medical shows, I guess—of foreign objects found inside the human body—pens and bobby pins, coins, condoms of muled cocaine and of course, bullets—and that moment when the frowning ER doctor throws the X ray up on the screen and there it is. It must have shown on my face, or in my stunned reaction, my sluggishness in leaping to interact with this souped-up hot rod of a vagina. I must have backed away, bit my lip, registered the horror of a bug-eyed extra in an old haunted-house movie. Because she made a comment: “OK then! Not something you’re used to, I take it,” and started to squirm back into her panties like she was closing up shop. “Maybe we should just—maybe it’s too much for you,” she said. Like I’m some Shriner, in danger of having my ticker poop out.

“No,” I said, though of course it was absolutely too much for me. The shaving and tattoos and the other piercings would have been enough to throw me, but I wasn’t going to say, No, you’re too much for me; no, you’re too wild. I wasn’t about to say no.

“No,” I said. “Really, Tiff. I want to go down on you—obviously but—“ The truth was, the thing gave me the heebie-jeebies. I admit it. Not really my thing. But let’s say I could pull myself together enough to do my part—wouldn’t it hurt her, having me flick away at it? Weren’t there special instructions for handling? “I’m just wondering if there’s any special way I need to-----“ But I didn’t wait for directions. I made a tentative lunge, like some slob in a Halloween costume bobbing for apples. Any suavity in getting my head down there was now out the window. This was not going to be an elegant, circuitous arrival, a rolling-in-the-surf or candle wax-dripping Barry White moment, a ballet of serpentine nuzzling. This now fell into the category of scientific experimentation: I moved in with the awkward caution of a wary lab technician, gave it an exploratory flick of the tongue.

The taste of cold metal reminded me of the time I made a move to nibble Neva’s earlobe, only she was wearing her grandmother’s pearl earrings with very long posts and I guess one of them jabbed into her neck or something because she elbowed me hard and shoved me off her and I ended up using an old copy of Mirabella to quietly squeeze one off in the bathroom.

I’m normally pretty good at it, I think. But my tentativeness must have been showing. “It takes some getting used to,” Tiff said before squirming out from under me and rolling me over on my back. She went straight for the nipples then continued on. Having no hardware obstructions myself, she inhaled me straightaway. She was good. It was no real surprise, I guess, but she was good to the degree of showing off, making a point, dusting off her resume, and I knew that Kyle, whoever he was, had never once gotten squeamish.

“My turn,” I said, cutting her off, pulling her away from my joint. “Let me try again-----“ She was a tiny thing and I wanted to show her I could be bold; I could be manly and in charge. I gripped her around that scrawny waist and pulled her on top of me, so she was straddling me. I scooted down flat, cupping her ass and drawing her closer, bringing that scary little pussy right up to my mouth. She let out a squeal that turned into a sigh as she began to ride my face. This time there was no escape from the weird taste of metal, but I was set on proving I was just as wild.

I opened my eyes, looking straight up. Since she was shaved, there was a clear line of sight: the underside of alert tits, her clenched jaw, pinched lids, half-slung mouth, the cockeyed wig and her hands as she pressed the wall, sliding upward with a shivery suspiration, her fingers wrapped around the grips of the handlebars.

Now she began to really grind. It was almost hurting my jaw, the torque she exerted. In an attempt to get more oxygen to my nose and to straighten my neck, crimped against the pillow, I began to thrash a little, finally managing to push the pillow aside and stretch my neck, get my head flat on the mattress. But thrashing only egged her on and she shifted into a full-tilt buckaroo cowgirl routine. And then I choked.

It wasn’t a hair, it wasn’t a bad swallow, a weird spasm. I couldn’t breathe.

I thrashed more and so did she. I tried to scream, but it came out as an encouraging moan, a deep vibration, and her thighs clenched, trapping me. So I shoved. Hard. It must have been right at a moment that she no longer had a good grip on the handlebars. Or maybe in my panic I’d mustered super-human strength. She seemed to take flight, losing her balance and tumbling off the bed, one foot hitting the floor with a hard clump.

I lurched upright, wheezing, slapping at my chest. There was a sharp pain there that I couldn’t account for, thought I suppose it could have been because I was pounding on it. I was vaguely aware of what was going on in that moment—including the foggy impression that Tiff was pissed off, cursing me and punching me in the leg.

I made what I felt at the time was the international sign for I think I swallowed you clit jewelry. It might have been more hand waggling and pointing at her general midsection, but I was getting through to her because the first nonviolent thing she said was, “You swallowed it? You’re fucking kidding!”

She was standing up now and she checked herself, swinging around the pink fake-fur gooseneck lamp on her bedside table, bending it to her crotch. Hunching forward, with bowed legs, she spread her hood again, towards the light. I looked, too. I had the better view. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “It’s gone!”

Stamping over to the wall switch, she threw on the lights and pawed around on the bedspread till she found the other end. “Wait! OK, here it is!” She had the barbell pinched between her fingers and she set it into her open palm and held it under the lamp. Then she turned back to the bedspread. “Where’s the cap?” The little ball that screws on the end?”

I showed her where, thumping my chest.

“How did you do that?” She asked. “What were you trying to do?”

I thought it was obvious what I had been trying to do, but apparently she was looking for an answer more complicated than Trying to give you an orgasm. What did she think I was trying to do? Defuse a bomb? She was spared the sarcastic comments, as I was still too busy banging my chest and gasping for air.

“I’ve never heard of this happening. OK? This is, like, not normal.” I could see where this was going now. It was an interesting tack to take: Clearly it was all my fault. I was the old square boring guy who didn’t know how to work a simple clitoris. At least not the late-model ones.

I could have pointed out that when you put a piece of metal jewelry through your genitalia, there can’t rally be anything remotely resembling normal. But I didn’t. It was all I could do to rasp out, “Water,-----“

She understood, but hesitated, not immediately signing off on the plan. “Reallly? You want to swallow it farther? Maybe you ought to try puking it up.” She got behind me on the bed and jammed her fist under my ribs, trying to Heimlich me. I was surprised how strong she was. The pain was sharp; much worse than before. Now I had two separate pains and the ball wasn’t budging. I could’ve told her—if I could have told her—that the Heimlich wouldn’t work. The obstruction was deeper than that. It wasn’t caught in my throat, but farther down.

She went and got the water. “So you’re planning on passing it, is that it?”

I didn’t answer, as I was busy gulping from a plastic Snoopy drinking cup.

“You mind crapping into a colander or something? I kind of want it back.”

The water didn’t help. It hurt. I felt like there were small mechanical parts in my chest that had broken off. It put me in mind of that doomed rattle you get when you try to repair a VCR yourself.

She offered to get me some bread. This was so absurd, I tried ignoring it, concentrating instead on trying to swallow and breathe. Unsolicited, she launched into a long story about how her grandmother always gave her a slice of white bread when she was choking. I couldn’t imagine a dumber proposal—even if I were actually choking and trying to push it down into my stomach, which I wasn’t. “Lung-----“ I rasped, pointing to one side of my chest. “Stuck…” I then pointed to the center of my chest. “Na’ here…”

She wasn’t buying it. Rolling her eyes and sighing, she announced fine, she would go make a pot of coffee. “That ought to help get things moving.” I snatched a copy of Bust and a lipstick from the floor, knocked off the dust bunnies and scribbled, over an Absolut ad on the back cover: I can’t pass it. It’s stuck in my lung or something!

She told me that I was being dramatic, made a sour face and marched into the kitchen, still nude, to brew the coffee. “I think I have some bran cereal,” she said. “You should eat a couple handfuls of that. Get things moving.

So I drank the coffee. I ate the bran cereal. And I lay flat on the bed, waiting for things to stir. But only after getting dressed. Because I knew this wouldn’t work and we’d eventually have to go to the hospital.

I didn’t know Tiff very well. We’d only met earlier that week, while I was looking to rent a costume for my editor’s “Come as Your Favorite Failed Dot-Com” party. Shooting for obscurity, I had settled on vetshrink.com, a little known blip on the radar screen that attempted to provide online advice for animals. I was contemplating the dog suit, actually, which happened to be right next to a cat costume. I didn’t even hear her slip up behind me.

“I see you’re thinking about pussy, aren’t you?”

She was so obviously the kind of girl I’d begun to doubt existed when I was with Neva.

Neva. God. This was a woman who refused to have any sort of sex outdoors—even when we were alone in a remote rental in Michigan for an entire week in early September, post-tourists, surrounded by nothing but pine trees, water, and stars. Not even our on the deck—she’d made it clear the beach or anywhere on the ground was out of the running. There were Adirondack chairs, which she said would be too hard, so I drove into town and bought a cushioned chaise at Kmart. No good. Still too close to the ground: Nonspecific bugs would crawl up the chaise and enter her “hoo-haw.” Believe me, I wanted to tell her, it’s not that easy to enter your “hoo-haw.” Then I suggested—foolish me—maybe standing against the railing, looking our at the twinkling lights on the distant peninsula. Or, if she required even more bug-height from the ground, with her sitting on the rail and me standing. But no, we’d have to put on repellent for the two or three geriatric mosquitoes still kicking beyond Labor Day and wouldn’t we taste the repellent from kissing each other’s neck?

She went back to reading Bridget Jones’ Diary; I went skinny-dipping.

Neva tried. She tried to be bold and unencumbered. But she had her issues. With everything, but particularly sex.

Particularly oral sex. Neva seemed to think the goal was the actual swallowing. The ingestion. Which is probably why she felt completely incapable of getting to that level. To someone for whom the idea of anything happening, ejaculation-wise, was freaky and upsetting, the idea of then proceeding to gulp it all down probably seemed to her like a paraplegic hoping to not only walk one day but to walk on the moon. I was torn: On one hand I could tell her it wasn’t the swallowing so much as just the riding it out—not switching gears and leaving me hanging out to dry, twisting in the wind. Lower the bar. Spit it into a potted plant.

Except I did sort of care. Because spitting makes you feel crummy and toxic, like you’ve just had a rattlesnake bite sucked clean by your “pardner,” who, except for the danger of your dying of rattler venom, would not be doing this. I never spelled it out for Neva because I wanted more. I wanted down-the-hatch.

And I didn’t want it to feel like bartering, like we were hammering out a labor negotiation. I wanted more than a muted sex life, one in which everything had become sanctioned and expected, rehearsed and preordained. Bottom line? I wanted dirty, I wanted wild, I wanted fun. So the one time, very near the end of our relationship, when Neva pointed out, pathetically, “Look. I got some,” and indicated, without touching it, a drop of jizz glistening along her jawline, far from the target, I did not point out that it was only three because she had panicked, once again yanked me out of her mouth prematurely, that she was, at the time of my throbbing, midair orgasm, cowering against the pillow, twisted away from it as if from a botched chemistry experiment and muttering “Sorry! Sorry!” eyes squeezed closed, hands up and shielding her face. Because I wanted more. I wanted the continued contact, true, but I also just wanted her to swallow.

So I was encouraging instead. I told her, “Good, honey,” like we had accomplished something together, like we were starting to make progress. It was pathetic. On both sides.

And now here I was, lying next to exactly the type of wild young woman I’d wondered about, and she was naked and ready and now I was mainly just wondering if I was going to die. It was two hours after she’d removed the dress. She was clearly beginning to regret wasting something “dry clean only” on me.

“This sucks,” she said. “I was so close to coming.”

I chose to be gallant and said I was really sorry. I think she understood me.

“Seriously. I was. You should take that as a compliment. You weren’t down there all that long.”

I decided to lie there and not respond. She said she still wanted to, that if she were alone, she would probably finish herself off.

“’Da lemme st’ ya…,” I mumbled. “Kna’ y’seff ow….”

“You’re here,” she said. “I’d have to go do it in the bathroom or something.”

The bathroom wasn’t on option. I’d made two trips already and was about to make my third. And it wasn’t pretty.

I elbowed her, lying there next to me. “G’head….”

But she wouldn’t do it. “I’m shy,” she said.

It was such a ridiculous claim that I wasn’t about to expend any more breath trying to respond.

I made my fourth run to the bathroom somewhere around 1:15. The pain in my chest was growing worse and it was starting to scare me. I remember being on the toilet, thinking how this would be such a stupid way to die.

That’s the last thing I remember.

I cam to with an oxygen mask over my mouth. In the hospital. There was a guy in a white coat who looked like an actor, standing over me, scribbling on a clipboard; a curtain nearby keeping me from some scenario involving a wet sucking sound and a female voice that kept repeating, “Oh baby, oh baby, oh baby.” Only not in a good way. And Tiff was there, not looking real thrilled, her mouth pursed in a little balloon knot. She was seated in the corner, out of the way, and she gave me a halfhearted wave when she saw I was conscious. She was back in the cocktail dress. She hadn’t thrown on the nearest sweats or jeans but put it all back on. Including redoing the makeup and Jackie wig. I guess I found that odd.

The oxygen was helping. Or maybe it was calming to know I was finally getting some help. Either way, I found that if I pulled the mask away, I could speak more clearly, between gulps of air. “I swallowed this…little metal ball. I think it’s in my lung. Is that possible?”

“It’s not in your lung,” Tiff said, rolling her eyes. I have to say I was getting a little sick of that eye-rolling business.

The doctor asked how big. “Tiny,” I said. “Like a BB. Smaller, probably.”

“You swallowed a BB? Please don’t tell me you put a BB gun in your mouth.”

“It’s not a BB.” Tiff sounded really annoyed now. “It’s the cap on my clit ring, OK? The little ball that screws onto the end.”

The doctor swiveled on his stool now, all ears. She unfolded a wadded napkin and showed him the remaining part that we’d found in the bedspread. “Like this end, OK? Only it screws off?”

“I see,” he said. “I think. Still-----“

“It was an accident,” I said.

He looked at me like I was a moron. “Of course. But are we certain you actually swallowed it? Perhaps the end piece came loose somewhere, and the pain you’re feeling could just be anxiety.”

I held up my hand, trying to put an end to this. “I swallowed it.”

He looked to Tiff for confirmation. She nodded. “I’m pretty sure he swallowed it. I don’t think it is in his lung.”

“Couldn’t you feel it was loose in your mouth before you swallowed it?”

Tiff jumped in to explain. “It fell, like, straight down? He’s on his back and I’m on top and he’s, you know, eating me.”

“OK,” the doctor said, getting the picture, then demonstrating with his hands, “so his head’s tipped back, his mouth’s open, and the epiglottis is relaxed and probably flopped open…”

Tiff shrugged. “I don’t know if he was fiddling with my epigloppis or what. He was just eating me. It was normal, regular, plain old eating my pussy.”

“I meant his epiglottis, not yours.” He took a moment to consider, as if finally picturing it our so evenly, with such control, I almost felt jealous. “Yeah, OK. Then I think we better get some shots of this. I guess it very well could be in your lung.”

Hadn’t I been saying that for the past four hours?

While we were waiting for me to get X-rayed, Tiff announced she was bored our of her skull. (Understandable, since nothing was lodged in her lung.) “I’m serious,” she said. “If we’re still here in five minutes, I may have to kill myself.

I muttered a suggestion that she go find a rest room and “finish herself off.” You have to understand, I was scared and she wasn’t really helping. But rather than taking offense, she seemed to be considering it. “ I could do that again, I guess. But I already took care of it. Before.”

I realized then we were talking about two entirely different ways of finishing oneself off. I asked her when she’d managed to do this.

“After you passed out. Before the ambulance arrived.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“What?” she said. “I called first, OK? I didn’t start diddling myself till after I called 911. So don’t get all outraged.

Two hours later, Tiff had still not killed herself. We were looking at my X rays.

The doctor actually said, “There it is.” This I felt was unnecessary. There were no other little round balls in my lung.

“Great.” Tiff sounded extremely bored. “Now can you do something to make him cough it up? Or do you have to cut him open, or -----“

I told her to shut up. I didn’t mind the coughing-it-up idea, but not if it came paired with the other suggestion.

“No,” he said. “That’s a sterile area, the lungs. Or it’s supposed to be. You et anything in there, we’re looking at pneumonia. Now, normally, at your age, with modern medicine, that’s not going to kill you. When it’s dust, fluid, stuff like that. But what you’ve done here, that’s not normal. There’s no amount of penicillin that can destroy a metal ball.” He took another long look at the X ray and said, “Man-----“

I hated the way he said it. “So I’m dead. That’s what you’re saying.”

“You’re not dead,” he told me, “we just have to do a little procedure. A bronchoscopy. Not a big deal.”

He explained how it would work, how it wasn’t, strictly speaking, surgery. They had a thing he called the FOB—the flexible fiber-optic bronchoscope –that he could insert down my throat with a tiny camera and alligator forceps and retrieve the ball without cutting me open. He went on to explain about the anesthesia, but I was still stuck on the idea that it wasn’t a big deal. Maybe this is a guy thing, but anytime someone says he’s going to stuff something down your throat, that is, by definition, a big deal.

When I came to, the nurse told me they’d successfully removed the foreign object but wanted to keep an eye on me.

Hours passed as I fell in and out of sleep, the waking moments finding me alone in the room. I wondered if she had gone off somewhere to masturbate. It had been about 12 hours since the time when she was waiting for the ambulance—she was probably due for a refresher. Finally, the nurse came in with my clothes and told me they were going to release me as soon as they found my friend. I got dressed and waited in the wheelchair, as instructed, feeling ditched. After a while, the nurse announced that they’d called my emergency contact. I’ve had the same insurance policy for years and had no memory who that even was. When the nurse came in again, she was followed by Neva. Brow knitted, just the way I remembered her.

Before, I could get my drowsy brain around an alternate plan, she got behind the wheelchair and pushed me out to her car. She tsked as she negotiated the maze of parking lots and exit signs out to the main road. “I imagine this if from wolfing down steak. You never did chew your food properly. Didn’t I always tell you—30 times for each piece?” I wasn’t about to start reeling off the details, so I allowed her theory to stand undisputed: I’d choked on food.

She said she was taking me home and I nodded off and woke to see she meant her home. I’d never seen Neva’s place, new since we split up. She’d never seen my apartment, either. This was probably the first long-term relationship I’d ever had that didn’t end with a slow weaning of sex, a wind-down period. With Neva, it just ended, cold, any booty-call action out of the question.

Her bedroom looked a lot like our old bedroom would have looked if I hadn’t been there to veto some of it. I tried to imagine walking in and seeing Schwinn handlebars mounted over the bed.

She told me she would stay home they rest of the day. She owns a little boutique called Scrappy’s where she sells scrapbooks and photo albums, though most of her income comes not in retail sales but from the consulting side. She helps clients design and organize their photo albums. For a while, she tried to get her friends to call her Scrappy, but that never really took. She’s not exactly “scrappy,” if that means, as I think it does, someone who’s tough and feisty and resilient. Don’t get me wrong—I still really love her in a lot of ways, but she’s not some sort of pioneer woman fighting off the Sioux.

She doled out sedatives from a little manila envelope as I drifted through the rest of the afternoon, a misty parade of scornful TV judges in faux courtrooms. I vaguely recall her returning in the twilight blue, with two more pills and a glass of milk and her rubbing my back in a simple circle and her fingers stroking my hair, momlike.

Next morning, less drug-fuzzy, my tongue capable of Ps and Ts and having had enough time to get my story straight, I confirmed Neva’s accusation of the day before: I’d choked eating steak. It had partly obstructed my windpipe. They had to get in there and yank it out. Part of me, the bravado part, felt the story was pretty chickenshit—the lousy windpipe?—but I kept my mouth shut and then she asked if it was a date. I told her it was.

“First date?”

I nodded.

She winced. “Ooh. Not a great first date, I imagine. And this happened at dinner? So probably no kiss, huh?”

Even though Neva wasn’t my girlfriend anymore, I didn’t like the idea of lying to her. So I didn’t say anything either way.

“I’m sorry, sweetie. Was she all right about it?”

“No, not really,” I murmured. “She definitely could have been much more—understanding.”

“Maybe you two can start over,” she said. “Just act like the next date is your first date.”

I told her I didn’t think there’d be a next date.

The third day, with the pain and sluggishness waning, I found forming complex sentences more manageable. When Neva came in with juice and to rewrap the Tiff cracked, I thanked her for rescuing me and told her how embarrassed I was that I’d made things worse by struggling during the procedure. I said, “I guess I was being a real baby about it.”

She dismissed that, saying it was nonsense. “Please. Who wouldn’t be upset when they’re jabbing some long poly thing down your throat?” She told me to relax, take all the time I needed. But I decided it was time to go home.

Of the dozen calls on my answering machine, only one was from Tiff. It was this: “Hey, it’s me. Call or whatever.” I didn’t call anyone back. I took the painkillers. When she called again later, I expected some concern, some apologies, some explanation of her ditching me. But there wasn’t any. All giggles and fun, she moved on to another topic: Was I up for company? I had to marvel at her ability to ask this without actually asking how I was doing.

I thought about how tender Neva had been with me, how she’d insisted that I take it easy. I told Tiff I thought I’d better pass on company.

“I’m not talking about the kind of company in the hospital, dum-dum—reading magazines and watching you lie there drugged out.”

But I knew what kind of company she meant. It just no longer sounded like such a swell idea.

She said, “We’ve got some unfinished business, remember?”

I laughed rather weakly. It still hurt my throat. I told her, again, not tonight. I told her thanks, but I really had to pass. I was sure she’ heard me. She was at my door 20 minutes later.

It’s amazing how easy it is for a woman to barge in when she’s kissing your neck and gripping a shopping bag that she claims contains a “special outfit.” She just kept coming, shepherding me back into the living room, murmuring some pouty-lipped baby talk about how she’d been looking for me at the hospital and couldn’t find me and then they said I had checked out and she just was so worried. It made no sense, of course, but there was this thing she was doing to my neck, grazing her lips down the length of it, and she did have my fly unbuttoned. Then she stopped as if she’d heard a noise and said, “Oh!” like she’d just remembered something and reached into the bag for what looked like a fax. “I probably aught to get this out of the way.”

A “friend” (how she put it, though I smelled ex or sometime boyfriend), who was a law student, had drawn up a “silly little” disclaimer for me to sign, which stated the Tiff was not in any way liable for the “accident.” She said she knew it was lame but this guy would really yell at her if she didn’t cover her bases. I wasn’t sure about all this. Not because I was contemplating suing her, but just where the hell has she been the past couple of days when I needed some comfort?

“Hurry up and sign it,” she said, “so we can get that out of the way and I can put this on-----“ She flashed open the bag for an instant and I caught a glimpse of white cotton and that familiar Red Cross on the peak of a cap: a nurse’s uniform. There was a downshift in her voice to husky vamp, “and we can play with your bronchoscope. I think I need you to perform a bronchoscopy on me with you big…long…bronchoscope. I think you better explore my throat, Doctor.” The way she dragged it out, lingering over each word, made me squirm. I admit it. But not completely in a good way. A little more wince than squirm. It was dumb and embarrassingly cliché and transparently manipulative: Sign this and I will dress up like a nurse and blow you. I mean, how obvious can you get?

Still, I signed. She went to the bathroom with her shopping bag and came out looking like a cartoon nurse straight out of a vintage pin-up calendar: clipboard, Red- Cross cap, big thick shoes, her hemline far from AMA-approved. “I suppose you’ll need to hear what my symptoms are first, wont you, Doctor?” I just sat there on the couch and watched. Not enough participation I guess, she stood over me, eyebrows raised, and handed me the clipboard. “Come on. Ask me what my symptoms are.” So I asked. She said, “My nipples are very hard and my pussy’s very wet.”

I really thought I would be enjoying this, but the little speech was starting to feel like a telemarketing pitch, someone trying to convince me I’d won a free trip to the Florida Keys.

“It is,” she insisted. “Check.” She bent at the waist slightly, arching her back, the hemline rising enough to prove that she wasn’t wearing panties. As instructed, I slid my hand up her thigh and found she was right. It made me grin. Despite all the clowning around, it wasn’t all an act: I did something to her. It was corny, but I could get into this, play my part.

I said, “Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Nurse. I’ll get right on it.” She giggled. I moved up to her clit and yanked my hand away: metal.

“I can’t believe this,” I said. “You just go right out and get another one? You don’t even care that---“

“You’re not even sensitive to the fact that---“

She frowned. “It’s not another one. It’s the old one.” She leaned closer, into the pool of the lamplight, lifted the white hem. I tipped the lampshade, caught the glint. She spread her hood and I peered closer. It was the old one. The original. I was very familiar with the original, believe me, and this was it.

“It’s clean and all,” she said. “Totally. It’s fine.” I just stared at it, not believing this was happening. Then she added, “Danny gave it to me.”

It was personal history I had not heard the other night, but I didn’t really care. Danny, Kyle--- the emotional value of the thing didn’t enter into it. Not for me at least. “Oh, so because it’s some keepsake from an old boyfriend, I am supposed to---“

“Some old boyfriend? What are you talking about? Your doctor Danny?”

She told me how, while I was still out cold, the doctor took her down to the cafeteria for lunch and they talked about local bands and nightclubs, and then slipped it to her in a paper napkin. He told he rthey should go ballroom dancing sometime.

“I am not going to do this,” I told her.

“There are certain things I’m just not doing, and this is one of them.” I handed her the clipboard.

“This is so lame,” she said. “You try to make it special for a guy….”

I tried to remember when I’d ever encountered a clitoris that made me think, Nope! Not special enough! It needs something. Her bag was over by the bathroom door. I got up off the couch to get it and hand it to her. She took the waiver and gave it a once-over, as if making certain I’d signed.

“Why do you have to be such a baby?” She had disdain in her voice again. I was old fogy, stodgy, an amateur. She rolled her eyes once more, but I didn’t really care. I am sure, to some, my life could be seen as boring and tame, but, hey, at least I’m breathing.

Besides, the phone was ringing, the answering machine was about to pick up, and I new before hearing her small voice that it was Neva, just checking up on me.

The Equation

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 03:18:34 GMT

The Equation - By Me

I have waited for you on the unclean floors of strange bathrooms with my legs lifted, thrown back in the air. I have kept my legs raised for twenty minutes while semen traveled — passing through blocks and canals, the waving strands of cilia — in their upward search. On the other side of a shut door, a man, perhaps this one is the architect selected for the intelligent set of his brown eyes, dozes satisfied on a bed.
     I have left the rooms of a Tom and a Peter, a Hans and a Flavio, men with names I could not even pronounce and men whose names I never learned. Architect, painter, roofer, botanist. They were my ready, sharpened tools. Careful to choose only men whose genetic flowering showed something splendid, I still had rather sufficient choice and each embodied a perfection — a gymnast's muscular back, a pianist's great reaching hands, a logician's classifying mind, a tongue that rolled through the dark hills of Catalonia.
     Walking through streets, museums, restaurants, libraries, I was like the great jewelers of the Byzantine sorting through full sacks of stones, saying, "No, not this one, too dull, without texture. I need to choose from more," and culling only a small collection of the extraordinary, the luminous, the ultimate.
     That was how it was for me selecting the fathers.
     I was the shrewd jeweler with the sharp eye and I was the rattlesnake who stores seven years of her mating to produce offspring. My body with its honed cycle of preparation and expulsion of the ovum. The ovum, the largest cell in the body, its hazardous journey toward the waiting nest of blood.
     At first it surprised me that once the selection was made, the pickup was always swift. I had no clever technique. It was that simple. There was no need to primp or stain my lips to draw men to me. I stunned them. I was made stunning by my desire for you.
     However, I have jumped ahead. Initially, I contacted a company, a donor bank. They sent lists, pages of pure information. The clean facts. Height and eye color. Medical history. Fair Danish skin. Blue-eyed Israeli, black-eyed Portuguese. It seemed clean. So purely mine. I could stay in my own room. I sifted through the facts. Selected donor 126. A check was sent to the donor bank and then I waited, wondering how they would deliver the frozen seed.
     But when it arrived, I grew uneasy. What arrived was a large corrugated box from which I pulled a heavy metal canister filled with dry ice. From a center shaft hung the five vials of number 126's donated semen. I felt squeamish. What exactly was I getting? How could I be certain? What if they had mixed things up, so that the small vials that I pulled from dry ice were not the donor sperm I had selected?
     Alone in my room, I went through with the five inseminations. There was no disappointment, given my dubious purchase, when conception did not occur. Rather, it was a relief.
     The next month I sent away for nothing.
     What I wanted was only you, the ropey muscles from this runner, the precise hands of the violinist, the builder's vision, the historian's crooked smile, all the men that I brought into me to make this child that I would cherish.
     I was determined to be swift, discriminating and reckless.
     I am not being entirely coy or contemptuous but it was easy to secure the contributions. Decidedly none for these men would have been a man with whom I might have carried on a sustained union.
     What is natural is only the bond between a mother and a child. I was not a brooder, sitting on a nest needing a helpful husband to bring anything home.
     I never wanted a house and I never wanted a husband.

He said, "I'll see you again, right? What about Saturday? There's a performance of Mozart's Requiem." He spoke through the shut bathroom door. I was on his tile floor, my legs lifted and crossed in the air, the floor tiles sticky against my back, and I closed my eyes so that I could avoid the cluttered shelves, the mold-spotted ceiling. Clearly he had not been chosen for his cleanliness or his organization. I spotted him during intermission at the symphony. He was a dancer the way he glided through the crowd.
     I check my watch. Ten more minutes.
     With a tentative knock on the door, the dancer said, "Are you still in there or what?"
     "Sure," I said hoping it might pass for an answer to anything asked. Eight minutes. My hands slid deeper under my elevated buttocks, propping up the tilted pelvis.
     This was his chance to join in as a father. I was not the first woman to do this, I reminded myself. The traditional South American lowland societies functioned with partible paternity. Aside from the tribe's belief that more than one possible biological father might ensure a child's survival — a tribal philosophy of I-better-feed-this-kid-it-might-be-mine — there was also the belief that multiple ejaculations from different sources produced a sturdier child. My child would be made not of one man, but of the best of each of the men. I imagined on my child the long, sure legs of this man, the strange way he moved on land as if he belonged in water. I fancied that I could almost feel the working glide of his sperm, lean-legged swimmers racing through thick waters.
     "I will be right out," I said pulling myself onto my knees, though it was sooner than I wanted to get up. But standing up off of his dirty bathroom floor felt good, and it felt good, too, the water on my eyes, and in my mouth, and the splash of water on my neck and water on my breasts. I would have wanted to keep going, cleaning myself, rinsing myself free of him or of what of him I could not use. But I needed to walk out there, into his room, say whatever I needed to say, in order to vanish.

My not knowing No charting basal temperature. No attempt to calculate ovulation. No checking under the microscope to see if the vaginal mucus was ferning. That was my decision after I gave up the donor bank. Just men. Selecting men without regard to possible danger. I wanted at least enough men so that there could be no calculating backwards to recall a single face wrenched in the lost pleasure of his ejaculation. There would be no one face made loveliest to me as I proclaimed him father. Always more than one, two or better still, a blur of chosen male faces in the months I made a child.
     And, just as I suppose that a hunter crouched at dawn, waiting to see the pricked-up antlers, the flicked white tail, must come to love the beast, I loved every one. The slant of a forehead, the bone structure of a face, a train of thought, the line of a man's calf. I was in the woods just outside the grazing herd. I was out there with hunger like a thrill through my body.
     Nights, back in my empty rooms, I read about spiders and snakes, the mating practices of animals that were seldom tender. Even the lovely butterfly had less courtship than attack. I imagined the bright monarch in its pinned night-long copulation. And then there were nights, a man's hand pressed against the small of my back, I was not the orange-vested hunter, but the beast, who too had killed, like every predator, with appetite and need.
     The slope of shoulders. The open laugh and tilt of a chin. I saw the men for the boys they had been. I saw them for the way their faces might shift, becoming the face of a girl.

The roofer told me as he entered me that he wanted a wife. He had kept one wife a little while. "Now," he whispered, his mouth damp against ear, "I want a wife forever."
     We were on a makeshift bed in his rambley, unfinished house. He had a face so beautiful I had made my selection seeing him walk up the aisle of the hardware store. He moved slowly trying to establish a rhythm with me.
     I moved quickly.
     "Slow down or you'll lose me," he whispered. "I want this to last. Let me give you more." His body was steady, easy, domestic.
     He touched my hair, saying, "I'll take care of you," and "Yes, that's my baby." His hands slipped under to hold my ass. He pulled close so that I was forced to move with him. Slower, until we were not moving at all. "Yes," he said, "yes."
     I said, "No. Let me show you something." Anything to get above him. First he held me below him, his hands snugging me up tightly against him. Then he let me turn him so that I sat on him. I posted up and down. The danger buzzer rang: fast, fast, get it and get away from this man fast.
     "Slow it down, baby. You're going to lose me," he said.
     "I need you in me," I whispered. "Please, let yourself be in me." I watched his eyes flicker shut, just little slits of white at the bottom. I watched his face as I lifted then lowered myself. His features each so exact they seemed to have a precise drawn outline.
     He had been a wonderful choice.
     After, he drifted, surfacing to whisper into my neck, "Baby, you took everything."
     Fast. Fast. Get away fast.

The Good Hurt

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:54:10 GMT

A piece of nylon securely strained those wrists.
And for his advantage he would tie them in a twist.
At each end, the cordage finished in a complicated knot.
Wrapped around both bed's posts, ending in no particular spot.

Grasping a cloth tightly in his hand,
He'd then gag her as according to plan.
She would choke for a moment in the dark and the silence.
But she knew that was nothing compared to his volience.

His body would press upon her voluptuous physique.
She was now vulnerable and once again weak.
With a teasing smile, he outstretched his hand.
And began to play with those ebon strands.

The pleasent warmth of their bodies entwined.
And once two variant souls were combined.
Lustful, red lips teased as he gave her a soft peck.
And fingers moved down to caress her ivory neck.

As he removed her seductive black top,
He lowered his head near her ear in a drop.
Departed rich lips began at a whisper
But his voice would end much keen and much crisper.

"I love you my dear." He said as he pulled out a whip.
Then ran the smooth leather over her breasts and her hip.
"But they say that love really hurts..."
As he lifted his whip in the midst of the air.
"And if love causes pain, im sure this works."

Pelo Negro- Black Hair

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 01:47:34 GMT

Last night my kisses were banked in black hair
And in my bed, my lover, her hair was midnight black
And all her mystery dwelled within her black hair
And her black hair framed a happy heart-shaped face

And heavy-hooded eyes inside her black hair
Shined at me from the depths of her hair of deepest black
While my fingers pushed into her straight black hair
Pulling her black hair back from her happy heart-shaped face

To kiss her milk-white throat, a dark curtain of black hair
Smothered me, my lover with her beautiful black hair
The smell of it is heavy. It is charged with life
On my fingers the smell of her deep black hair

Full of all my whispered words, her black hair
And wet with tears and good-byes, her hair of deepest black
All my tears cried against her milk-white throat
Hidden behind the curtain of her beautiful black hair

As deep as ink and black, black as the deepest sea
The smell of her black hair upon my pillow
Where her head and all its black hair did rest
Today she took a train to the West
Today she took a train to the West
Today she took a train to the West

Uncertainties

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:51:05 GMT

Uncertainties by PM

Sunday evening: He's back at his job in the kiosk on the mall, showing a long braided whip to a woman about his age. In fact, he thinks that maybe he has seen her on campus. She's heavy. Yesterday he would have thought fat.
     She doesn't buy the whip, but she smiles at him and says, "Merry Christmas."
     "Merry Christmas," he says and adds, so she'll know he means it, "a very merry Christmas." After she's gone, he wonders if the smile meant that she was the one. It's impossible to know. A smile can mean anything.
     In physics, the uncertainty principle limits what anyone can know about particles. In the kiosk, another sort of uncertainty principle limits what he can know about the customers, about what happened to him last night, and with whom.

The facts: The name of the business is Santa's Little Helper Whips and Leather Goods. He's making double the minimum wage -- better than he'd hoped for from a temporary job between semesters. His boss is Lenore, who makes the whips, crops, cuffs and straps that he sells. On the job, he wears a long-waisted green shirt trimmed with white fake fur, a green hat, green tights and green slippers. He looks silly.
     But that's not a fact. That's an opinion. It's purely subjective. A fact is that the air around those green Christmas lights in front of the shoe store is not misty. It only looks misty because of the laws of optics, because light at green and blue and violet wavelengths won't focus right on the retina.
     He likes knowing things like this. He told Lenore that a whip cracks when kinetic energy in the heavier thong is concentrated in the light tip, accelerating it past the speed of sound. She laughed. He also told her that the whoosh of a crop is an aeolian tone made by vortices of air. She laughed at that, too, and said, "You don't know the half of it."
     Then she said, "Want to play a game? I'm free Saturday." Lenore: She's old enough to be his mother. She's short. Her eyes are brown.
     When he took the job, she had to explain the merchandise to him, particularly the restraints -- what goes where. Some customers would already know, but he'd need to explain it to others. When Lenore bound his hands behind his back with the belt cuffs, his face got hot. She pulled the front of his shirt until he bent forward, face to face with her. Her eyes were wide. She said, "Yum. Right where I want you." She laughed. He managed a weak smile.
     "It's a game," she told him. "If you can't hold a playful thought in your head, then you won't be any good selling for me."

More facts: The velocity of sound in dry, sea-level air is 331.4 meters per second. A man with the bluest eyes bought a crop for $20. The human ear perceives sounds from 20 to 20,000 cycles per second. The man said thank you and gazed into his eyes a heartbeat longer than seemed normal. The speed of sound depends on the elasticity of the medium through which it travels. When a riding crop smacks flesh, a tiny shockwave travels through the body. He he hasn't figured out whether that shockwave moves faster or slower through the body than the speed of sound through the air. Faster through the body, he thinks. And the man who was just here buying the crop, he might be the one. It might not be a woman at all, and he's not sure how this makes him feel. A little scared, he thinks.
     A little excited, too. All of it leaves him feeling a little excited. All the possibilities.

Lenore's rules: She would hurt him, but she wouldn't injure him. He could say "No" and "Stop" as much as he wanted, and she would ignore him. But as soon as he said, "Game Over," that would be it; he could put on his clothes and go home.
     He felt his heart beating, heard his voice quaver, when he said that, yes, he wanted to play.
     "One more thing," she told him. "I won't touch you. It won't be like that."

Lenore's basement: Silver chains hung from her ceiling. Silver manacles were bolted to her floor. An orderly display of crops and whips and flails, belts and straps and rings decorated one wall.
     He wore a blindfold. He hung from the chains, cold metal sharp against his wrists, while the leather cracker of Lenore's crop danced on his nipples. It hurt. Fire blossomed in his skin. One nipple, then the other.
     She didn't talk to him. She hadn't changed into any sort of costume. She wore the same shirt and jeans as always. Whatever the game was, exactly, was up to him to imagine, and it kept changing. He was being punished or teased or tenderized. The crop smacked his butt, the backs of his legs. Wherever it had been, his skin burned.
     Like the ache of muscles after hard exercise, the heat beneath his skin felt good, like something he had earned.
     Very gently, she flicked the shaft of the crop against his erect penis.

Sunday evening: He's had a dozen customers. Christmas is getting closer, and customers who've been browsing for weeks are finally buying. Most of them are women Lenore's age, women old enough to know what they want. Some of them joke with him. Some don't meet his eyes. He likes them all. He notices them all.

New rules: As he hung from the chains in her basement that Saturday night, Lenore finally said to him, "You have an admirer," and she told him some new rules. He wouldn't ever know who the admirer was. The admirer would touch him, but only in certain ways.
     That's how she always said it: "the admirer." Never she or he. So he couldn't know.
     He felt another presence in the room. He tensed a little, both at the thought of new eyes gazing at his nakedness and in anticipation of the slap, the pinch, the tickle . . . something surprising from the admirer.
     What he felt was the heat, the feather-light sensation of breath on his penis. He gasped as a mouth received him, as hands caressed and squeezed his buttocks and thighs.
     Whenever he neared the brink, Lenore said, "Not yet!" and he'd feel the sting of the crop against his chest or his legs. The admirer would stop. He'd never felt so hard, had never ached to come like this. "Please," he begged. But the crop slapped his flesh again and again. His wet penis cooled, softened a little.
     When the mouth took him in again, he gasped at how hot it felt. Instantly, he was hard again.
     It went on like this for a long time before finally, his whole body burning, he rocked his hips, trembled and came with a cry like a woman's.

Uncertainty: Physically, he knows what he feels. His skin still tingles. He feels the clothes on his body, the ridiculous Santa's helper outfit, with a sensitivity he's never had before. He likes the feel of the tights clinging to his legs.
     But in terms of what he feels . . . he is afraid. He's gone to a place he didn't know existed. He's overjoyed, too. He doesn't know which he feels more of, the fear or the joy.
     Every customer who comes in, who smiles or who doesn't, who meets his gaze or who doesn't, could be the one. Those hands might have caressed him. That mouth might have taken him in.

What she meant: He locks up for the night, thinking about what she said. He knows, and he doesn't know, what Lenore meant.
     After it was all over, after the admirer had gone, Lenore had let him hang in the chains. He ached. He was blissfully happy. He was embarrassed. He was afraid. He felt wonderful. He felt a little cold, and shivered.
     Most of all he felt uncertain. A lot like he feels now. Uncertain and awake and excited.
     Before she unlocked him, she spoke softly in his ear.
     "Merry Christmas," she said.
     She said, "For Christmas, I'm giving the whole world to you."
     She said, "For Christmas, I'm giving you to the whole world."

Take Your Clothes Off

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 05:15:46 GMT

I am always fascinated by the physical transformation of two complete strangers into the intimacy of lovers, lying naked beside each other silently afterwards, each with the privacy of their own thoughts, and how random and accidental this journey together is, almost like flipping a coin.
     . . . Heads
     . . . Tails
     . . . And so we were lovers for the spring, sorting through the typical pleasures, misunderstandings, joys and arguments or just sitting around for hours in the morning drinking coffee and talking about the many things there are to talk about.
     She was very intelligent and so our minds could roam far and wide. Also, I find intelligence in women to be an aphrodisiac. I think I read this someplace else, but anyway, a woman's intelligence sexually excites me.
     She was one of those women who have a very good tight body but choose just to make life simpler by camouflaging it with loose-fitting clothes that lead one away from it. She didn't want to be hassled by men. She just wanted to go where she wanted to go without being an active part of a man's fantasy.
     So it was very exciting to have a long conversation with her and then watch her take her clothes off. Looking back on it now, it's sort of interesting that she almost always took her own clothes off.
     I think that's because she was very small, five-two, weighing between 97 and 103 pounds, and maybe I like to take the clothes off women who are taller, but like to watch smaller women take their own clothes off.
     I've never really thought much about this before and it probably would not hold up to the searchlight glare of logic because I have not been to bed recently, say in years, with a tall woman five-seven to six feet, so it's hard for me to recall accurately.
     I'm six-four and that perhaps has something to do with it, if anything does. I may be all wrong, but it seems to me that it's easier to take the clothes off a tall woman, the somewhat equal closeness of her eyes watching my eyes, but with a short woman it's so far down to her eyes and looking up she has to strain her head or maybe it causes an awkwardness to occur in me taking her clothes off.
     Maybe the bending over does it.
     I don't know. I'll have to bed with a tall woman one of these days to see if this hypothesis has any verity, but this book I'm afraid will be over before anything is proved one way or another.
     I did have a chance to go to bed with a tall woman last week.
     We talked for a couple of hours and, running out of things to say, at one point I asked her how tall she was.
     "Five-ten" was the reply.
     I wonder if I would have taken her clothes off, if things had ever gotten that far. She did have interesting-looking breasts and a small waist. The blouse she was wearing would have come off quite easily and I would have been looking into her eyes and it would have not been any effort for her to have looked into my eyes.
     I wonder . . .
     There's also something else that I just remembered that plays a part in my love life. Often I like to take my clothes off and get into bed first and lie there and watch the woman take her clothes off, and how she does it.
     Sometimes they do it very quickly and as fast as they take off a garment they just drop it on the floor and then almost jump into bed when they are finished.
     Other women take their clothes off very slowly and carefully, then fold them neatly on a chair or whatever is about before gliding like a swan into bed.
     I might add that whatever way a woman chooses to take her clothes off does not have anything to do with the quality of her lovemaking.
     . . . And there is of course something else.
     Perhaps this resembles an erotic spice and a spying glass into my mind and its sensuality. Sometimes I like to spend an entire night staying up talking with a woman in the front room, drinking whiskey and talking until dawn or almost, and sometimes during those nights I'll suddenly ask, interrupting whatever is being talked about, either a movie or the precarious fate of the American novel or perhaps a story about a boring mutual friend who's so boring that we have to talk about him or her for at least an hour, and then I'll suddenly ask the woman to take her clothes off.
     I usually word it this way: "Please take your clothes off," and usually the woman does it without saying a word about it and we continue talking about the boring friend while she takes her clothes off.
     After she has them off, we continue talking as if she still had her clothes on, and I make no romantic overtures toward her. I just want to see her with her clothes off because I enjoy the sight of her body. It adds to the whiskey and the conversation. The women never seem to mind and act perfectly natural. They curl up on a couch and the night moves on. If I see they are getting cold, I find a blanket for them and turn up the heat.
     Sometimes after they are warm and cozy under the blanket and the room is hot enough, I interrupt whatever we are talking about. We have of course finished with the boring friend and are on to something else. Maybe we are talking about the morality of suicide.
     I interrupt by saying, "Let me see your breasts," and the woman exposes her breasts without a break in the conversation, acting as if it is the most natural thing in the world for me to want to see her breasts while we are talking about suicide.
     There has probably been a question that you have wanted to ask almost from the beginning of this little revelation of mine.
     I have trouble with the word "kinky" because frankly I have difficulty understanding that word. There once was an English woman who lived in the nineteenth century who said the best thing I've ever heard about one's sexual preference or activity.
     She said something like "I don't care what anyone does, just as long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses."
     I know that is not the exact quote but it is close enough for my purpose. Maybe in this time we could substitute motorcycles for horses.
     Yes, back to the real question that you have wanted to ask me.
     "Do you take your clothes off?"
     "No."
     "Why not?"
     "Because it's not the effect that I want to produce. I enjoy the sight of a woman's body at play in the fields of intelligence."
     "What if things were reversed and the woman asked you to take your clothes off while she left hers on, would you do it?"
     "Of course."