Something Happened

sexy, and smart, and guaranteed I would be able to get all the girls I wanted when I grew up.

She was wrong. I haven't gotten all I wanted. And have gotten a number I didn't.

'Take it in your hand, Mrs. Murphy,' I sang back at her, gushing with joy, basking innocently in her sweet compliments and the affectionate warmth of her friendship.

Virginia was wide open for me then and I didn't know it. Virginia was wide open for me then and I did know it. That's probably the reason I always shrank back from her in such solemn ineptitude whenever she seemed to be sweeping me past a point I felt able to go. (As soon as I realized I could do whatever I wanted with Virginia, I lost my power to do anything at all. I could not say what was necessary. It came down to a matter of words, and I could not speak the right ones.) I would lose my power of speech (as I lost it with Mrs. Yerger — I never once believed I could ever say anything that would make Mrs. Yerger smile — and as my children, I think, and my wife, lose it with me). I don't know why it hit me that way. Kids today are doing it all over town with older girls and women (if you can believe the kids, or believe the older women). Truthful girls boast about seducing pretty or grimy young boys on summer weekends in places like Martha's Vineyard or Fire Island (it's Arabs, Greeks, and Slavs on vacations in Europe), or picking them up on city streets afternoons when they have nothing to do. They are sexually liberated (they say). They have no compunctions (they claim). They are slaves to no social or psychological restrictions. Anything goes. Then why are they anxious, hysterical, tense, and dejected? They are lonely. They have nothing to do.

'I have nothing to do,' my boy says.

'I wish I had something to do,' my daughter says.

'Can't you think of something to do?' my wife says. 'Isn't there anyone we can go see?'

Sundays are deadly. Spare time is ruinous.

Women my wife's age with broken marriages take up robustly with fellows much younger than themselves, sometimes boys, and their husbands don't like that part of it at all. (It's a means they have of really sticking it to us. The husbands can do without the money and kids. But they can't abide their wives' humping a younger dick and letting everyone know.) Our dicks are so pathetic. (I felt that way early and was close to a truth. I felt need, not power. I felt yearning. I never thought of it as an instrument of domination.) They can always find a hardier one for special occasions. (A girl can always find a man to lay her at least once.) I think they feel safer with teen-agers and young college kids or carpenter's helpers in vacation spots they visit and leave, grabbing the initiative with their tense, sharpened fingertips (if they haven't been chewing their fingernails down blunt, as more and more of us seem to be doing) and keeping control. Everybody wants to keep control. (I want to keep control. Penny makes me lose control, and often my wife does too. Penny diminishes me into a gargling, blabbering imbecile every time, and I love it.) I've got one girl who goes way out of control every time she has an orgasm and hates me and everybody else in the whole world bitterly and ferociously for five or ten minutes afterward (until she regains control of herself), until her scrambled senses start to reorganize. (Then she sucks her thumb.) She is humbled, vanquished, resentful, subdued. She is ashamed. She curls herself up away from me like a catatonic child and will not let me pet her, unless my touch and whispers are consoling. She'd rather not experience it (unless she's by herself, with her vibrator or her finger); she resists response; she'd rather just give them; she sees herself as the laughingstock of whoever watches her. I watch her. I'd just as soon not have to give them. (She and I are compatible that way. But I do taste what power over another human being is when I succeed in doing that to her. I do feel potent. We take leave of our character and are transformed into something else.) Were it not for the element of status, I really would rather not give orgasms to any of them but my wife, and there's even an element of sadistic cruelty (not consideration, not understanding) in that. Some of them change so grotesquely. They ought to be ashamed. There really is something disillusioning and degenerate, something alarming and obscene, in the gaudy, uncovered, involuntary way they contort. It's difficult not to think lots less of them for a while afterward, sometimes twenty years. At least we go in horny and bestial from the start; we want it, like lusting apes, and we let them know. Many of them start out that way too now, and I'm not all that comfortable with those (even though I know it's a sure thing. Maybe getting laid should never be so sure a thing. It isn't with this girl I know, or even with my wife. She gets aches, upset stomachs, and fatigue. It is with Penny. I don't see Penny as often as I used to). I don't like women who are that decisive and commanding.

'Okay, let's have it,' they seem to be ordering. 'You've been using it your way long enough.'

Those assertive bitches. Generally speaking, I prefer to make them do all the doing and giving; that way, I feel I have done something to them: I've gotten away with something. Many of them prefer that too. They blow their young boys. That must seem easier to them. They don't have to undress and show themselves. They don't have to be able to come or pretend to. They don't have to be 'good.' They don't have to go through motions. (Everybody wants to feel safe, not just me. Older, rancorous, divorced ones, though, do want to get laid, insist on it, demand it. I prefer my women with milder insecurities. I feed on submissive feminine loneliness like a vulpine predator. I'm drawn by the scent. My ravenous snout is insatiably passionate, for an evening or two. Bellicose women whose husbands have been philanderers will hatchet you for it: they are affronted if you do not wish to fuck them.) Then they throw them out.

'What the fuck would I have to talk to him about?' one of them told me about an eighteen-year-old she picked up in a record shop, brought home, and threw out before morning.

No wonder so many of our virile young men have trouble getting it up nowadays. (It serves them right.) I would too. I did. Virginia was certainly safe with me because I couldn't feel at all safe with her. (I certainly couldn't seize control. I had not the confidence or the know-how.) And Virginia, in her turn, could not ever feel safe again with the adjuster who threatened to throw her out of his car (or with Ben Zack either, for that matter, who tried to rape her in his car, despite his crutches, canes, wheelchair, and all) on the deserted street near the cemetery in Queens alongside which they were parked if she didn't put out for him.

'That's just the way he said it too,' she complained to me in a tone of petulant protest that was not typical of her. Her poise was shaken each time she spoke of it. 'He just took it right out without even asking. I thought he was crazy. I just looked down and it was there. I was sure insulted, I'll tell you. I wonder what Ben Zack told him about me.'

I didn't have the confidence and know-how to go too far with her even in my sex reveries without losing heart unexpectedly (and much more). Just like that, my little, rigid, dime-sized prick would dissipate into thinnest air. She scared me (the thought of her all naked scared me. I could never conjure up pictures of her that way). Pretty as she was, she could turn as grisly to me all at once as that separated head of Medusa, that evil, hairy, peristaltic nest of countless crawling adders and vipers arching out to fang me for no good reason.

'Let's do it all the way today,' she'd say.

And convert me into lead, wood, or stone every time she appeared to be trying to skate me closer than I wanted to go (into what used to be called sexual intercourse. Today it's called fucking). I'd feel dehumanized and castrated; things would feel gone. There'd be a thumping blow in my chest, and my heart would stop. I would feel ill. With tendons and muscles fluttering weakly, I would long to sneak out of sight for a while, in order to creep back later and begin all over again with her from a distant and more secure footing, inching back cautiously. (I think I enjoyed just flirting with her more than anything else: flirting was an end in itself and still often is. I'm still not always sure I really want to get laid.) I would lose my urge, go numb; I would have a lump in my throat instead of my pants. I lost my cock and balls; they'd go away. They lost their sensitivity. I would have to squeeze or hold or look to be positive those limp and wrinkled sausage casings were still sticking there, still mine. I felt absence; no density or weight. I feel no density or weight there now. What an odd and derogatory thing to have to say about our masculine genitalia.

It is our weakest reed.

I can feel my feet in my shoes when I pause to concentrate on them, and I can feel my thigh bone connected to my ass bone on this wooden chair. I can feel this hand and forearm of mine lying on my brown desk blotter. I can feel my other hand resting overturned on my thigh against the worsted fabric of my trousers and can feel my back turned and angled uncomfortably, the lower part (sacrum) aching steadily but tolerably, but I cannot, for the very life and dignity of me, feel anything inside my undershorts where my exterior sexual organs are supposed to be (and probably are). All I can feel, without touching, is something like sandpaper in one spot where my undershorts are pulled too tight. I try to force a stir and can't. I know I had something there a little while ago. I know they belonged to me. I think I'm entitled to them. I know I will have to open my pants and look if I wish to