September, 1983: "Save a Prayer" part one
Do you remember the first time you ever listened through a pair of feather-weight earphones? Walkman phones? I do. It was two years earlier, for sure, but I had only just gotten my own pair for my birthday two months previous and that fresh sensation of having Simon LeBon actually in the center of my head, singing – it gave reality a sense of heightened importance. The music, so rich and over-produced back then, it seemed to reach from horizon to horizon.
It didn't hurt to be standing on a pier in Maine, overlooking a large body of dark, peaceful water on a bright warm day in September, either.
My hair hung heavily over my eyes and ears. I wore a light, long sleeved dress shirt, yellow, lapels a bit too wide for the fashion, but I was ingnorant of this. If it was good enough for my brother Max when he was fifteen, then it was okay by me.
The fact that Max was fifteen in 1976 didn't make any difference, I didn't know any better.
Corduroy slacks (burgundy) a wide striped tie and a pair of Keds All-Stars and a pair of sunglasses completed the ensemble. The whole Goodman clan was gathered here at this odd time of year to see one of my cousins get married.
I and my family had been here, in Promise, Maine, earlier in the summer, almost two months before. Late July. Boy, had a lot of things happened since then. I was feeling strangly taller, and as though I were viewing the same familiar sights of my youth through a completely new set of eyes.
Compulsive masturbation. Late July, muggy and damp, two parents, one brother and a few of his friends, and a pair of foreign exchange students, all crammed into one rented bungalow. Any time they all jumped into the Volvo to go somewhere I would hide or just tell them I wasn't interested. I was being such a little prick the whole vacation they didn't put up much of an argument.
Once I was sure they were gone, I would slip upstairs to my room and strip down to my underwear, bought for a thirteen year old and worn holey. I'd lie on my front and twiddle with my penis, gripping it firmly with my fingers and briskly padding the tender underside with my thumb. I'd think of my girlfriend, Glenda, waiting for me at home – she'd let me play with her breasts before I'd left, and even suck on them. They were so soft and not very small at all – not as large as Becky's, my very first girlfriend's breasts, but her's were an exception in any young man's book. Becky's boobs were so big, and her skin was so fair, her nipples were so wide and light pink you couldn't really make out where they stopped and the rest of her gigundous breasts began.
But Glenda had long dark hair and dark, camel-like eyes. All my friends thought she was annoying as hell, but wow, did she know how to kiss.
We had both taken Jesus into our hearts as our personal savior last winter and were both kinda scared at the things we let ourselves do with each other – I pushed too hard sometimes, she was never very comfortable letting me touch her pussy, but neither was I.
Jesus. Any thought of the Messiah during masturbation made me cold with guilt and fear, but I was too far along to stop and certain desires override fear anyway.
Mom had constructed a make-shift sun shower out behind the cabin. It consisted of a long hose coiled up on the tar roof of the fishing shed with a shower nozzle at one end. The other end went into the shed to a sink, and if you stoppered up the nozzle and let the whole hose fill with water and let it just stay in the hose for an hour or so, there would be about three minutes of a steady trickle of hot water, forced out by cold water from the tap behind it. It was either that or a sponge bath out of the sink, and I was getting pretty concerned about some blackheads and tiny pimples developing on my chest and shoulders. Getting everything you wanted scrubbed in that three minutes could be quite an adventure, and particularly difficult when you were trying to wash your privates with your bathing suit on.
That afternoon though, I looked around, each and every way, and felt a strange thrill run through my entire being. I was behind the house, everyone was in town, and I could hear anyone in the near distance. The way to other cabins was blocked by trees and a ramshackle garage. Before I could question it, I dropped my bathing suit to the grass and stood completely naked in the mid-summer sun. I grappled awkwardly with the hose and let it run all over me, splashing the sun heated water onto my smooth, hairless, adolescent chest and wet my longish greasy hair. Soap gathered in the nest of my pubic hair until I pushed it down over my soft, spongy, shriveled up penis. I kept glancing around nervously, the warm air, the sun on my behind and testicles and my exposed hips, it was so alien and I feared so much of getting caught.
My penis began to stiffen a little at the thought.
Then the cold water came and I made an all too brisk job of finishing.
§
Still masturbating, I thought over my daring afternoon scrub. Barbara. Damn, I had loved her so much and she never felt that way about me. She had long dark hair and beautiful dark eyes. I had had a crush on her for three years, but we still just remained friends, although I wanted so much to be dating her.
In my mind I stood outside, exposed and scared. Barbara walks around the corner, wearing that one piece bathing suit she always wears to the pool. She's seen me! She calls out in surprise and ridicule, I blush all over and reach down to hide myself. She just smiles and begins to pull down the straps of her suit (I begin to instinctively bounce my pelvis into the squeaky mattress) and my idea of what she looks like naked materializes in my head — dark, bud-like nipples (I've seen them through her gym shirt) her tiny waist and broad, mature hips, a wispy puff of black pubic hair (it still frightened me) she walks over to hug me and kiss me under the trickling hose—
—when someone else shows up! All of the other kids who stay here at the cove during the summer! They heard us and have stepped around the corner of the house! Everyone can see my penis, stiff in front of me, exposed and standing like some comical toy soldier – oh, to be caught so aroused, it was mortifying—
—and my hand jerks back and forth against my red and swollen cock, the other hand spontaneously massaging my thigh, as I feel the great tingle flash from deep within my balls, and great gooey spurts of cum shoot through its tender tube and splat against the inside of my underpants. My mouth is stuffed firmly into a pillow and I huff and chuff silently, withholding all external signs of pleasure from my face and head, just rocking up and back and panting, whimpering softly. My cheeks are flush, my left arm hand throbs. pulses in time with my heart. I roll over and stare up into the log-beamed ceiling.
If no one comes back in ten minutes, I do it again.
"Kael's Diary" is copyright 1994 Millennium Productions / Kael Goodman (at745@cleveland.freenet.edu). Use of this work in any commercial venue (electronic or otherwise) is forbidden without permission. "Kael's Diary" is a work of fiction and the people and situations described herein are from the imagination of the author.
September, 1983 "Save a Prayer" part two
September. Two weeks after labor day, the end of my MTV summer. We got our MTV back in May and I spent every waking moment with my eyes glued to the set. Coming here made for major withdrawl.
Scuffling along the gravel road that winds through that sleepy seaside resort, which should at this point in the year have already been asleep if it weren't for this wedding and the special arrangements made by my uncle. It was nice and warm, but the slightest edge on the wind made it impossible to deny that summer was fading.
What a long summer. Actually, it seemed to go by so fast, but it had been packed with activity – strange for my life. Summer usually dragged on, there was nothing to do in my pathetic, suburban hometown and while a trip to Promise broke up the monotony, it too was a place where the main excitement was in watching the sailboats out in the cove or perhaps dropping a handline over the edge of the pier to see if you could catch a small fish.
But this particular summer, when "Thriller" was the number one album for GEEZ it seemed like forever and I'll be damned if Ronald Reagan wasn't making me proud to be an American, not a small feat considering my first Presidential memory had to do with Nixon resigning. I got my first job this summer, washing dishes at this greasy spoon back home, and there were some other firsts as well.
I had flown back from Maine, during the first few days of August. Everyone else drove, but there was no room for me in the car. Well, there could have been, but all the other kids (late teens, early twenties, Max was the oldest at twenty-one) wanted to sightsee New England on their way back and knew I would be a major asshole. So I flew home and spent a few days in the house, just me and Dad.
Except of course that Dad worked for a living. Glenda and I spent two solid days, six hour sessions, lying on my bed, kissing and licking each other – only one of us would be naked at one time, she had fears. We both knew it was wrong, her more than me, my worst fear was of getting caught but eternal damnation also lurked behind every thought.
She had a great neck. A nice long, pale white neck and great shoulders, they had great form, not doughy or anything, she had a nice, trim, hard little fourteen year-old bod. I had just turned fifteen. Back in Promise. My parent's never understood why I would want to celebrate a birthday back at home with my friends. Glenda would be fifteen in September.
That first morning I was back in town she came over just before noon and she was wearing shorts and this terry cloth shirt that just rode on top of her boobs and was held up with this thick, soft string that ran around her neck. I don't know when she first got it, but it was stunning to me, how she could wear it – she had been so shy when we first started going together back in February, and letting me play with her breasts was a major hurdle. And now she was taking a certain noticeable pride in wearing, well, this terry cloth top for example, because she knew how I loved to see her shoulders, but it also gave everyone this breathtaking view of her adolescent, emerging cleavage. I didn't really care why, but it took a little getting used to.
Small talk was minimal. We scurried up to my room and just started grappling at each other, I loved kissing her, she had such tabby, pouty lips, a little soft, blonde mustache forming there and we would mash our faces together and play silly tug of war games with our tongues, lots of chewing and panting and gnawing on earlobes and ramming of tongues into ears and we'd stop to stare at each other in the midst of our wild, animal passion, huge adoring brown eyes framed by her cascading, luxurious (shame on me) dark brown hair, looking past the shock of long blonde hair that fell into my face, into mine, a stupid little grin on my spotty little face.
I tugged at that powder blue, terry cloth shirt. She got this strange, slightly questioning, kinda acuusatory look on her face, but she let me do it. Just kinda squinting at me, letting me do all the work, I pulled the shirt up, working it slowly, deliberately so, when she put her arms across her chest, stopping me.
"You're sure you want to do this now?" she asked.
"If not now, when?" I asked. It was good enough for the President.
"You're sure?" She was just baiting me.
"I must see your breasts," I said. "And besides, I love you."
"Humph," she said, and grabbed the bottom of her shirt herself, and pulled it off, up and over her head, like they do in the movies. She set it carefully aside. She sat looking defiant and a little bored, her naked chest no longer a concern for her. "Okay?" she said. "So what?"
I grabbed her and pulled her to me and she let out a surprised laugh.
"You're really sexy, you know that?" I said.
"Yeah?" she said.
"Yeah," I said.
"Yeah?" she said.
"Yeah," I said.
And I took my shirt off so I could feel her skin against mine.
"Ew," she said, "what's that?"
"Huh?" I said, looking down at my scrawny little self. "Oh, zits, I guess, small ones, that's kind of embarrassing, yeah, I don't know, I've been washing a lot, though." I peered up from under my hair. "Still love me?"
"Oh, of course."
§
Glenda drew a hand slowly across my naked, hairless belly. My head, propped on a pillow, staring up into her chocolate drop eyes. A finger traced an imaginary line down my left thigh and then another up my right. My penis, glowing red, stiff and neglected sat out exposed just below my belly button, gooey stuff dripping from its tip.
"Please," I said.
She kneeled to my right, facing me, her shorts still on, her pert n' perky breasts on display for this little horn-dog to enjoy, pale and perfect, and she raised her finger up to her lips and slowly sucked on it, like she learned on cable or something, one slim digit probing her own mouth, her puffy teenage lips, drawing on it to its end before she laid it gently on my burning prick, rubbing it around, inflaming me even more, that stunning tickle in my dick becoming more and more harsh and delicious.
Her pants would stay on until I put mine on. She wouldn't suck on me or kiss my penis not matter how much I begged her. And we rubbed and teased each other all day until just before my father came home.
The next day we did it again.
"Kael's Diary" is copyright 1994 Millennium Productions / Kael Goodman (at745@cleveland.freenet.edu). Use of this work in any commercial venue (electronic or otherwise) is forbidden without permission. "Kael's Diary" is a work of fiction and the people and situations described herein are from the imagination of the author.
June, 1984: "Let's Hear It For The Boy"
I was fifteen, going on sixteen. Reagan was gearing up to win reelection, MTV was still considered a novelty and the second installment of the Indiana Jones movies had only just come out the previous weekend.
I was only just beginning to develop any form of self-esteem – I had recently changed my hair style from that long, stringy mop that used to conveniently hang in front of my eyes to that popular, short and neatly parted style all us young republicans were into those days. I had even risked all forms of abuse by tinting it a shocking blonde, the very first of my forays into alternative hair color. It's normal shade is a dirty kind of blonde, so one might think it wasn't such a radical alteration, but in that closed suburban community, in that high school, well, you would fare well never changing the kind of shoes you normally wore. God, were they cruel.
Sophomore year was at an end. The deathly Cleveland winter was long past and summer was on its way. Soon we would all be hanging out at the lake or the swimming pool, enjoying the poppy sounds of Cyndi Lauper, Huey Lewis and the News, and of course, the hottest single out was the theme to "Ghostbusters". I started getting used to standing straight up, all six feet, taking a little pride in myself – I was a teenager of the eighties, I was young, I was healthy, I was even going to Spain that summer for some of that "studying abroad" people talk about.
And, of course, I was in love.
Did she know it? Sure she did. At least, I thought she did. I did walk over to her house on her birthday to give her a long stemmed rose. I did (and I still don't believe this one) slip an anonymous (but not too anonymous) note into her locker telling her how cool I thought she was. And she must have loved the attention. But I wasn't for her. Just a little too geeky.
Today we were part of a car wash for Youth League, this ridiculous high school Christian association we both loved going to every single Tuesday night to share our love for Jesus Christ. Well, that's why she was there.
Michelle. A freshman, just about to turn fifteen, strong Nordic features, she had a round face, silky white (with a bright, rugged blush in the cheeks when horsing around or embarrassed) with longish, bright blonde (real) hair, and full, red, bubble gum lips. And though I had always considered myself above ogling anyone, it was difficult not to notice (as I did for the first time that day) how abnormally large her boobs were. Water gets all over during a good old fashioned car wash and her T-shirt was adhering itself to her in the most appealing way.
I don't know what was up this particular day, I must have been acting far too nonchalant for it not to have been ridiculously obvious that I was in so much fear of saying something stupid that I chose to rather say nothing at all.
"Hey, Kael!" she said as I rode up on my ten speed. God, she said Hey! like I was a friend or something. "I didn't know you wanted to waste your Saturday doing this thing." She walked towards me with her hands behind her back.
"Oh yeah," I said, dismounting (the bike – this isn't your father's porn), "I've always really liked...washing...cars."
"Ah," she said, and swiftly whipped a juicy, soapy sponge at my face. I ducked rather awkwardly, and fell backwards in an attempt to retrieve her soggy missile. Already I had gotten very excited at the idea of some kind of playful water fight with her, to, you know, show her I was cool and all, but by the time I turned back she had already become reengaged in what was already a massive garden hose, mop bucket, wet rag bonanza which I had apparently just ridden into the outskirts of.
Michelle didn't care about me. I was just another target.
§
That night I found myself in the same old position. Sitting in a movie theater. We were watching "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" and it wasn't as good as the original. I attended with my good old freshman buddy Don, and two completely unattractive girls named Margo and Fran. Okay, that wasn't fair, only Margo was unattractive, and luckily she was hitting on Don. Margo was just a bit too pudgy, her hair was frizzy and she had moles in the most unappetizing of places. Fran, while no prize winner, was at least quite intelligent and I had a great time talking with her.
There was still absolutely NO excuse for bringing them all back to my house.
True, my folks were out of town for a week. I had always been such a model son, never drinking (or getting caught), never taking drugs (or getting caught), never staying out late without permission (this is true), they felt I could be trusted. And so pudgy Don and his pudgy date Margo, and Fran and I ended up on the scratchy shag carpeting of the family room, frantically kissing, rolling around, wrestling, and basically letting all of our hormones do the talking.
But if Don was going to start prizing Margo out of her parachute pants, I didn't want to be there. I scrabbled across the family room to the kitchen, skidded across the linoleum and collapsed in the living room on the other side of the house.
Fran was close behind.
Fran's hair was that kind I still hate, unless the woman (or man) knows how to wear it well. One word – bangs. I hate them. Hair cut straight across just above the eyebrows, it's just so Frankenstein. And then it just fell straight down either side of her flat face. Her face though, now that was nice. High cheeks, a small but well defined chin, lots of exciting angles to her face and little exciting freckles and lots of them. No real lips to speak of, but I was dealing.
"Hello, Kael," she said. She brought her face up to mine and began to nuzzle at my neck. Her thin lips pursed and kissed just under my chin. She let her fingers play about my chest and she drew a small line down to my navel.
"Hiya, Fran," I said, and with trembling fingers I began undoing the buttons on her short sleeved, plaid patterned, cotton shirt. She kept kissing me as I freed all of the little buttons. Underneath she was wearing an adorable, soft cotton bra. I was amused at why someone with no chest to speak of wore one, but why be insulting?
My lips (I am now very proud of my lips – they are quite sensual, women love them, they are neither too thin nor are they too large and slobbery. I can pout – if I want to) found one of the shallow ravines of her neck and I began drawing up toward her ear with my tongue, while also deftly undoing the latch waiting in the front of her bra. The one hand I wasn't using to support myself touched her chest just above where her rib cage started. I was surprised. Her flesh wasn't like any I had ever touched. It was so soft, it was like tightlypulled cloth.
"Oh, I have waited a long time for this," she whispered.
"Yeah?" I asked. My hand slid up and I carefully drew my thumb across her left nipple.
"Yeah," she said. "I always knew the two of us would get together like this." She laid a hand across my thigh and began massaging my leg.
"Oh yeah?" I said. I was honestly, overboardedly infatuated with another girl. Fran didn't need to know this.
"Yeah," she said, and flipped around suddenly, turning to face me, crouched as though ready to pounce.
Amazing. If you asked anyone about Fran, the first words might be nerd, brain, geek. She wrote for the school paper, she was an intellectual, she had no fashion sense or she didn't care.
Here she sat, her hands on the floor, her knees just behind, the street lights of that hot June evening came through the windows throwing sexy shadows and light onto her body, that awful shirt just dangling from either naked shoulder, her pointed face glaring at me with excitement and hunger, her neck taught, her chest heaving, two small pale nipples erect and waiting.
"Let's go upstairs," she said.
I turned and ran, and Fran followed close behind.
§
Whump, she tossed me, flat on my back, onto my parents queen size bed. I squirmed slightly, wriggling back over the polyester bed cover towards the headboard to sit up a little. Fran stood at the foot of the bed. It was real dark, no light in the room, only the stray beams of a suburban streetlight catching her skinny shoulders and arms as she removed the dangling, nasty shirt and flung her bitsy bra wherever. She dropped her face, peering at me in the gloom from under those bangs and began crawling up on top of me.
She reached for my T-shirt and began to peel it off. I put out a hand to stop her.
"What?" Fran asked.
"Oh, uh," I said, "I just, uh, leave my shirt on, okay?"
"Hmn," she said, looking down at herself, kneeling over me. I put out my hands, playing with the soft, soft, almost cotton-like flesh of her arms and leaned up a bit to touch my tongue to one of her nipples, the left one. It was soft and salty and she pressed her hands to either side of my head. I suckled for a few moments before she tried lifting my face up to hers to give me another one of those...this is way difficult.
Her kisses were so wrong. She didn't know how to press her lips together or anything, she just didn't have the knack. And I was too immature to take control of the situation. She knew what she wanted, she wanted me, on my back, naked and hers and very, very badly. I wanted to fool around, sure, but it was all getting so confused. I'd never fucked anyone, let alone engaged in advanced sexual maneuvers with anyone I hadn't been dating for a few weeks first.
I ducked and kissed her neck instead. She loved that and let me know it. Her fingers touched the drawstring of my shorts and began fiddling with the knot. Seconds was all it took, she had successfully loosened them and was pulling the shorts and my comically precummed underwear, down around my hips and right on off my legs. My terribly swollen (and also confused) penis snapped back as the undersized underwear it had been constrained in and stuck to pulled free leaving it to bob and pulse, its gummy tip resting against the bottom of my T-shirt.
Fran carelessly tossed my pants aside, gave me a smirk and leaned over my groin.
"What have we here?" she said.
What have we here? Well, that was a cheesy thing to say.
I peered awkwardly down at the top of her head. She was gently kissing (or at least pressing her lips against) my penis and using the tip of her tongue to lick all remnants of precum away. She took long strokes at it, licking and kissing, and I began to ache horribly. A pain that began deep within my balls and spread out to the tip of my dick and it just made me want to curl up and just be left alone for a while, except for that fact that every time she hammered her tongue against my fleshy underside it all went away, and the fraction of a second she detached, it slammed back with even more venomous force.
I wanted to come, very badly, all over her face, only I didn't even know it. I had never orgasmed in anyone's presence before, I was horrified to try it.
She threw her head back and looked up at me.
"Please take your shirt off, Kael," Fran said.
Please understand I had a scary case of acne that only affected my chest and back and virtually (but not completely) avoided my face. I was understandably sensitive about this, but it was dark, and maybe she wouldn't notice. I lifted my shirt up over my head and off and flicked it into a far corner. I was now naked on my parents' bed on hot summers' evening.
"Should I take my pants off?" Fran asked. What she meant was, 'would you take my pants off?' and I knew it, so I sat up, reach forward, and undid her jeans. They came down and off rather simply and there we lay, side by side, naked and alone, the bedroom window open, letting a light, sticky breeze flow over our light, sticky bodies.
She placed a hand to the side of my face, and leaned in to kiss me.
"Please, Fran," I said, "Don't."
"What?"
"Look, just don't, uh, don't kiss me. I know it sounds horrible, but, uh, I'm not like really dating you and," her face began falling fast, "I mean, I really like you and I like being here," OH, was that a lie, "but I just find it difficult kissing someone I'm not in love with."
What? What was wrong with me? I just opened my mouth and a turd came out. I blame it on guilt-ridden Christian upbringing, fear of ridicule, just being a dork, I dunno. I could have shown her how to kiss, maybe we could have made love right there, my first time with a girl who truly adored me...maybe I should just face facts and realize I didn't really like her that much, our situation was a matter of circumstance and if I weren't so pathetically horny and fucked up over Michelle I would never have taken advantage of this parents out of town thing to get someone, ANYONE to pay attention to me.
"You're kidding," she said.
"I feel very awkward."
"You're being an asshole."
"I'm sorry," I said, "Here, just lie back, let me pay attention to you for a while."
"Hmn," she said, and laid back against the slippery bedcover. Her head rested against the pillows, her hands fell to either side of her slim hips and she slowly slid her legs apart. I hadn't noticed before how strong a scent was beginning to come from her – I was laughing ignorant of how aroused women can become, I was at that stage of development where it never dawned on me that girls could actually be more horny than boys could. They don't have penises, so they can't get erections, so there's no obvious physical evidence of arousal...unless you happen you have a vagina sitting right in front of you on your parents' bed, wide open and waiting.
I stared for a moment, and then laid a tentative hand over the tuft of hair above her sex, and drew my finger down and through the hot, moist folds of skin. She shuddered slightly and let out a moan that was a little more than what that unskilled action should have provoked. My middle finger, back and forth now, I never, shit was Fran, there was just so MUCH liquid there. She was dripping with the stuff.
"Inside me, Kael, yes, inside me," she breathed.
I shoved my finger up and into her.
"Yes!" she cried, "Yes, Kael!"
I looked up at her face. Her eyes were closed and her head rocked backwards, arching her chest in the most appealing way, if only –
"Go exploring, Kael," she hummed, "explore, Kael, Just like Indiana Jones!"
Oh, this was just wrong. I don't think I'd ever, nor would I ever, hear anyone say anything so lame during intimate relations in my life.
"Explore," she uttered, humping my hand, "Explore, like Indiana Jones!"
"Please," I thought, "don't speak." But I'd already told her not to kiss me, now I was going to demand she not speak? What was I doing there. What was she doing there?
I finger fucked her for a few minutes. I'd had enough. I'd made a terrible mistake and needed to get out. My left hand was wet and smelly, I withdrew my finger and lay down next to her.
"I'm sleepy," I said.
"Wanna take a shower?" she asked. "Play some water sports?"
"Really, Frannie," I said, "I'm not feeling very well now." This was true. I had a case of blue balls so criminal I just wanted to curl up and die.
"No, Kael," she almost cried, "you can't. Don't do this."
"I'm serious, Fran, I hurt." I pathetically crawled off the bed and started collecting my clothes. She sat up in bed and stared at me as I crept around, her whole, pale, shimmering body staring at me with greater intensity than her eyes could alone. Her young, teenage, lithe and naked body, a physical incrimination of what I was walking away from, sitting there, not saying anything.
I put my T-shirt on first.
"Fine," she said, finally, defiantly, not letting me know she was terribly hurt. "Where shall we sleep?"
"Oh, I, uhh," terrible cramp, "I was gonna go downstairs and see how Don and Margo are getting on."
"Better than we are, I'm sure," she said.
I slithered out of the room and downstairs. Don and Margo were nowhere to be found, but the den door was closed. I drew my own conclusions (which were right) and flopped onto the couch. The discomfort in my crotch had grown to governmental proportions and I stayed there in a ball for an hour without getting to sleep. Don and Margo never emerged from the den, and Fran never came downstairs.
What I thought as I tried to lose consciousness, apart from OH GOD WILL THIS PAIN AND/OR EMBARRASSMENT EVER STOP was, why couldn't it have been Michelle? I could have asked her out at the car wash, right? And then she would have come back here, oh sure, that would have happened, my life sucks.
My erection had subsided and a I put one hand into my shorts and twitted around with my little, sticky penis. Blue balls. If only I jacked off or something this pain would go away, but I didn't know that yet. If I had only jacked off...or let her satisfy me. And then satisfied her. What was I, saving myself? Afraid of Hell? Afraid the other kids would find out I'd been messing around with dorky Fran? That was probably closest to the truth. I promised myself I would never, ever, ever get into a situation like this ever, ever again.
At least, not without coming first.
"Kael's Diary" is copyright 1994 Millennium Productions / Kael Goodman (at745@cleveland.freenet.edu). Use of this work in any commercial venue (electronic or otherwise) is forbidden without permission. "Kael's Diary" is a work of fiction and the people and situations described herein are from the imagination of the author.
February, 1987 "She's Crafty"
I was in a bad way, and it wasn't just how I was dressed.
As evenings went for me during the first, bleak months of 1987 (those that followed that last, bleak month of 1986) this one was pretty good. Everyone in the freshman acting class, or everyone who mattered, was sitting around MacShaney's Pub, which was the sole domain of the University of Ohio School of Theatre, or at least it seemed so to us. There was a very good possibility that if I walked in MacShaney's I would find someone I knew, and with any luck someone I was on speaking terms with.
The seriously cool people never went near the place of course, the juniors and seniors and those uppity grad students, but we weren't seriously cool, we were freshmen. The most important part of MacShaney's, apart from the dim lighting and the guy who came in on Fridays who actually played the piano, besides the rough-cut, worn smooth wooden beams and the interesting, strange and sometimes downright frightening photographs of Clemson that dated back to the turn of the century (two men standing with a cow, a bunch of nurses gathered around an old man in a wheelchair in front of the insane asylum, that bridge under which they say someone was found strangled last Halloween, you know, the year before we arrived) the real reason was because they served minors.
I was there, with my hair cut short on top but running in twisting, greasy curls down my neck in that unpleasant white trash style, a U of O bandanna tied on my head (a do-rag, a Frisbee helmet) a T-shirt with a flannel shirt over it, and a pair of jeans I had just the day before splashed bleach on to give them that splotchy look that was so necessary at the time.
We'd pushed several tables together and it was like a big Viking meeting hall with all of us drinking and yelling and laughing along this long brown, heavy wooden table. Wilson was there. We were becoming really good friends. And Satch, with his long gray trench coat and those crystal ice-blue eyes, he still weirded me out a little, but boy could he make me laugh. He was so strange and beautiful. His hair was darkest brown except for this little swoosh of blond he'd put in at the part. GOD he was cool. Alexis sat across from me and she, at long last, I was finding quite interesting.
Alex was a striking girl with this vibrantly red, blood red hair, it stood on her head, curly and stunning, it fell about her face and shoulders and framed her orange face. She had beautiful eyes with the longest, blackest (mascara) eyelashes, a broad Polish nose and a shy little smile. When she let loose and laughed or really started showing off she reminded me a lot of Lucille Ball, and it wasn't just the hair, she could make the funniest faces or play real stupid as a gag.
There was only thing that pissed me off about her. When people talked about sex, she would say, with a certain amount of pride that she was a virgin and that she wasn't ashamed of it. It just kind of made me mad, I had lost mine a few months earlier and it was a wonderful and perfect – I resented the idea that I should be ashamed of that or something.
And Martin was there and Sarah and just everybody, except, of course, for Barbara. Barbara, the love of my life. Barbara, the cigarette fiend, the soccer player, the woman I fell in love with at age twelve and who had recently taught me how to fuck. The only woman I had ever fucked. And still, now, almost three months after we broke up, after we had started school here together and I had spent the most wretched and painful time of my life – adjusting to college life, taking way too many courses, missing all of my friends and working so desperately to save the most important relationship in my life – still, she was the only woman I thought of or desired. Yes, I was looking around, I was on the rebound and struggling to not seem to pathetic, but if Barbara had said the word, just given me a call, and I would have forgiven everything.
"Isn't our improv class exciting?" Alex said, smiling with huge teeth, "have you heard what the final exam is like?"
"Yes, and who cares?" Satch said, slowly and mysteriously, the way he liked to, "has anyone given a thought to putting on an hour of club improv?"
"Oh you mean funny stuff," I said, setting down my drink. A Sloe Gin Fizz. I'd just discovered it. It was really sweet and sticky. "I used to do some of that in high school. I started my own troupe."
"Really, Kael?" Alex asked, visibly impressed.
"We were awful," I said, "Comically unfunny."
"That's great," Satch said, meaning it wasn't, "Teacher says if we want to we can get around all the usual bureaucratic nonsense of getting a space and signing up for time by staging an improv show as though it were an additional project, like an extra credit project for class."
"Brilliant!" I said.
Alex touched my hand and spoke lowly to me to draw my attention away from the conversation Satch continued with Martin, Wilson and Sarah.
"You know, Kael," she said, "I wish I were as active in theater as you were in high school. I was just in the regular shows – you seem to know so much already about doing outside projects. And there's so much we could do here at college, I just don't know if I can handle it all!"
"Oh," I said, raising my eyebrows. Where did that come from? What do I say? "Well, uh, thanks, I guess. You know Alex...can I tell you something?"
"Of course."
"I really think you're the most talented girl in our class." It might not have been saying much, but at least it was true.
"Well, thank you Kael."
"I'm serious – hey, you know what one of my other projects is?"
"No, what?"
"I'm a dee jay."
"No way!"
"Yes," I said, "I do a little show on the campus radio station, Saturdays from twelve till two. Me and a friend host it."
Alex cocked her head slightly and gave me a curious smile. "You're pretty smart, Kael."
"Oh," I said, "how's that?"
"Well, everyone in our class is up in arms about how we're not allowed to do any shows until we're sophomores, and you went out and found a way to perform every week, on the radio!"
"I never thought of it like that," I said. "Hey, you wanna do me a big favor?"
"Anything."
"Well, my co-host went home for the weekend, I was wondering if you wouldn't want to sit in for her."
Alex sat back and gave me a big, open mouthed, you are incredible smile. "Oh, Kael! Really?"
"Hey, it's no big deal, it'll be fun."
"I'll be so nervous!"
"Well, I don't want to cheapen it but nobody listens to the campus station, do you?"
"Well, no," she said.
"So it's really no big deal – look, I'll meet you at the cafeteria tomorrow morning at ten, and we can walk from there."
"It's a date," she said.
"Hi, Kael," came a familiar stuffed up voice from over my shoulder. I turned in my heavy wooden chair to see Barbara? No, just her hair – a short, black, boyish haircut on anyone's face made me see Barbara first. It was Carolyn. Her hair was dyed that color, she liked to wear army boots and funky cats-eye glasses, she was progressive as they say, she listened to all of those moody sounding Euro-groups I just couldn't get into.
"What a coincidence," I said, "Alex, this is Carolyn, she's the programming director for WUOR."
"A pleasure to meet you," Alex said sweetly.
"Hi," Carolyn said, "is this seat taken?" and she gestured to the empty one to my right.
"No," I said, "please, sit down."
Carolyn looked odd tonight. Oh, it was because she was wearing a nice shirt, a button down shirt and a skinny tie. Her face was a bit mottled, like stucco – she had a lot of acne scarring, but she was so mysterious it was attractive. A tomboy, and I had learned a long time ago that girls who dress like boys love to mess around more than girls who don't.
"Carolyn's a senior," I informed Alex.
"What are you majoring in?" Alex asked her.
"Well, it was Inco but I switched over to the Communications department so I should be here for a fifth or maybe a sixth year." She pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her big ugly bag.
"Same old story, I guess," I said. I don't know anyone who graduated in four years.
"Hmn," Alex said, "what do you call someone who is taking a fifth year?"
"A fifth year student," Carolyn said a little brusquely. "Kael; have you given any thought to those promotional tapes you said you were interested in making for the station?"
"Oh," I said, "uhm, yes, a little bit."
"I'd like to assist you," Carolyn said, lighting up her cigarette, "seeing as it's your first time."
"Well, sure," I said, "thanks."
"Not at all," she said, "besides, I think you're cute."
"Kael," Alex said, derailing the train of thought Carolyn's unexpected observation put me on, "ten o'clock is real early and it's very late now, would you mind walking me home?"
"Oh," I said and looked at my watch. It was a cheap digital number my grandfather had given me for my eighteenth birthday. It read 1:15 AM "Yikes, it is late, sure I'd –"
"Hey you live on the South Quad, right?" Carolyn asked, blowing out a long stream of smoke.
"Uhm, yeah," I said.
"Then you can walk me home, too."
§
The three of us trudged across campus through snow and ice and bitter cold. South Quad was located the furthest from town of all the dormitory clusters and took about twenty minutes to get to. I huddled my army jacket close to my body. I was used to dressing warmly at home, but not for extended periods outdoors and I was always forgetting how cold it got at night. Alex had a long, beautiful black coat, she always dressed so snazzy before she went out, even for just a drink. Carolyn wore a long tweed trench coat, probably bought at a second hand store. We approached the first row of residence halls, the freshman row. Alex lived in the one next to mine.
"Well," Alex said, "this is where I get off."
"Heh," chuckled Carolyn.
"See you tomorrow," I said, "for breakfast."
"I can't wait," she said, walking over and giving me a big hug, "this is so exciting!" and then she kissed me on the mouth. It was the first time she'd ever done that. As we parted I gave her a big smile.
"Yeah," I said, "it is exciting. I'll see you tomorrow." And with that she walked off to her dorm.
Carolyn's place was further back, near the river. I stopped as we approached.
"Here you are," I said.
"Oh," she said, turning to face me, "would you like to come up?"
"Uh," I said. I hadn't thought of it, and it struck me as kind of a strange thing to offer. I knew what it probably meant, but just couldn't believe it, that had never happened to me, and it didn't make sense to be happening now, I mean we barely knew each other. "Sure."
She smiled at me from the corner of her mouth, a slight squint in her eyes. Strange mouth, her lips were rather fat and protruded a bit from her face. She swung open the great metal doors to the first floor of this college building and we rode the elevator to her place on the fourth floor.
§
A single. A small room, cramped and small. A bed, a desk, built in drawers that overflowed with clothes, the space in front of the huge mirror the university provided was positively cluttered with make-up, appliances, personal items – it was built just like mine, it was on the same quad after all, but this was a single. It was half the size of the room I and my stoner roommate, Rod shared, maybe even smaller. It was the most disorganized and messy room I'd ever seen a woman maintain. And she was a senior, I guess she was twenty-one then, and living on campus. I hoped I wasn't still living on campus when I was her age.
The English progressive band "The Smiths" stood on one wall, leering at me, chastising me that meat was murder. Another huge poster, this one of their lead singer was pasted to the opposite wall, by the door, he was posing severely, his shirt off, he had a hand to his head and was pursing his lips at me. There were other posters, too, lots of them, mostly pertaining to music or social functions which featured music.
The only chair in the room, the one at her desk, was heaped with dirty clothes and so the two of us were squatting on her bed, talking about things, smoking cigarettes (which still made me woozy) and it was getting very late.
"I knew your brother, Max," Carolyn told me. She lit up her fourth cigarette. I hastily stubbed out my second into the University of Ohio ashtray sitting on the bed between us.
"Oh yeah?" I asked.
"Yeah," she said, "I used to do schlep work over at the tee vee station and I hung out with him a couple times. He's real cute."
"He is?" I asked. I wasn't being disrespectful or anything, I'd grown increasingly close to my brother since he graduated from U of O almost two years earlier, but my image of him was pretty much like my image of me, just another guy, skinny and geeky, not the type women notice and bother to say 'he's cute' about.
"You don't have to act so surprised, Kael," she said, "you're pretty cute, too."
I couldn't believe this. I had only been working with Carolyn at the station for a little over a quarter now and we had never done much talking together, a little perhaps, but where was all of this coming from? It was all so sudden, it seemed obvious where it was going but I had never even kissed a girl I hadn't known already for a few months. And now this, and I couldn't help but feel a little more than insecure and a little less than aroused. The smoke, the speed, the heat – it was the dead of winter and the university made sure all of its charges weren't being left in the cold. The air temperature was hovering around seventy degrees and I was still a little drunk. My armpits were damp and my forehead was slick and greasy.
"You think so?" was all I could say.
"Yeah," she said, and smiled warmly. "I've thought you were pretty cute for a while now."
"Hmn," I said, "I've been thinking the same thing about you." Well, this was true. I had. She was short with a boyish black haircut, like Barbara. But her hair wasn't really black, that was dye, and her natural pale skin didn't compliment it, and under the fluorescent light provided by the school, her flesh was even worse – it wasn't smooth and velvety like Barbara's, it was scarred and pockmarked and her lips were puffy and red and looking not a little chapped, standing out brightly against her sallow face. Her eyes were narrow and dull, not round and bright like Barbara's. She wasn't what I wanted. No one was, but Barbara.
"Really?" she asked.
"Yeah."
Hello, uncomfortable silence.
"It's late," I observed.
"Would you like to spend the night?" she asked.
Help.
"Would that be okay?" I asked. I knew she had a boyfriend, or at least I thought she did.
"You don't mind, do you Kael?" she asked.
Someone tell me what to do.
"Uh, do you have anything I could sleep in?"
She got up and found a pair of cut-off sweats for me, and excused herself to the communal bathroom to put on her nightgown. I took off my pants, my shoes, my watch, and slipped into the shorts she had provided, which were a little too snug and revealing, and so I just slid into her bed before she came back.
In she came, wearing this incongruous floor length baby girl nightgown. It had a bow. At first I was shocked by the way it looked on this hard-core art-type I had come to be acquainted with, but the way she almost blushed as she saw me look her over, the way it fell about her shoulders and down her sides, the way I could see now how large and pendulous her boobs were...
I got an erection. Bam.
This is what I was here for. This is why I was here. This is why she invited me, and I had to face it, I had not had sex since November. Since long before Barbara and I had broken up. And I had never had sex with anyone else.
Carolyn hit the light and got into bed next to me. The lights from the catwalks outside shone through the one window in her room and cast a golden glow on the two of us, faint though, no single light cast its beam directly into her window. I was propped up on a collection of pillows at the head of her bed. She snuggled into me and looked up into my face, her eyes round and wet now, reflecting up at me.
"Could I kiss you?" I asked. I was miserable. She nodded slightly and I touched my mouth to hers. Her kiss was dry and lifeless and I struck my tongue into her, licking at hers, and she shoved her tongue into me and we mashed awkwardly, two people trying too soon to adapt to each other's rhythms. I held her to me and she grunted appreciatively, sniffling a little bit, I guess she had a cold and couldn't breathe properly. We kissed little kisses then, each one ending with an embarrassing "smack" from her, my lips are thin and full, hers were wide and fat, they didn't fit, they were just so wrong – Barbara and I kissed perfectly.
I fumbled at the fabric of her nightgown, fiddled with her large, misshapen breasts. This had to stop, I wasn't enjoying this, I didn't love this woman, I didn't even know her well enough to know if I liked her, foreplay and fondling had no joy in it, I just needed to fuck. I wanted to feel my penis inside of someone, to feel it sliding inside of something warm and smooth and comfortable, to take away the pain, if only for just a little while. To forget.
"Can we do it?" I heard myself whisper into her ear.
"You want to?" she asked. I couldn't tell if it was because she knew what was going on in my head or if she was just making coy bed talk. I helped myself away and looked her in her face, her not-Barbara face.
"Yeah," I said with a little smile, "I want to."
"Okay," she said, smiling, and pulled her nightgown out from under me. I pulled off my shirt, displaying my chest, covered with large acne boils and sticky bandages holding together the ones which were open festering sores. My acne was at its worst – the pressure of school had caused a eruption and my fallout with Barbara busted me wide open. I leaned on one hand and worked off her sweatpants and exposed my swollen and bobbing penis.
She lay back against the mattress, I could see her naked body below me, all white and glowing in the dim lamplight. She was skinny but her hips were broad and her pussy was an unshaven raggedy bush of dark and twisted hair. Not neatly trimmed like Barbara's. Her breasts were huge, so much so that they were flat against her, spilling out across her chest and over the sides. I put my mouth to the left one and kissed her wide, almost invisible nipple. It too was dry and chapped. Sucking on it seemed like a joke.
I looked up at her. "Would you put me in?" I asked. She reached down between us and took hold of my dick, pressing it against the opening of her vagina as I slid forward. I held myself up on my arms as I pressed on in, her snatch was hot and wet and huge, I passed through easily, and in a moment fell against her and hugged her close, I was longing for comfort and this was it, I pumped myself into her hard and fast, my chest, my Band-Aids mashed into her breasts, my butt bucking up and back into her groin, my face was stuffed into the pillows and I groaned and whimpered, the stinging sensations in my dick rising swift and increasing relentlessly and she squeezed my ass and I felt the surge burning, swelling up in my balls, in the base of my penis and I cried and I whimpered and I came, shooting a pathetic dribble of white stuff into Carolyn.
A minute and a half, tops.
I frumbled myself up and off of her, breathing unevenly. Her face hid not a drop of disappointment.
"Hmn," she said, sitting up, "impressive."
I lowered my head in shame as she got back into her nightgown and excused herself back to the bathroom, presumably to wipe off my little present. I skulked about and located my sleeping outfit and had them on by the time she returned.
"Do you still want to sleep over?" she asked. It's amazing the two different connotations 'spend the night' and 'sleep over' have.
"Yes," I said, because I assumed things were bad enough without my running away like an animal with his limp dick between his legs. She got back in bed, we said good night, and she fell asleep.
§
I looked at her bedside LED clock. 4:15. I had been lying awake in Carolyn's bed for over an hour and a half. The heat wouldn't let me sleep. My emotional distress wouldn't let me sleep. And the one time I had drifted into a light semi-conscious state, she began smacking her big fat lips, a kissing noise, accompanied by the word 'muh'. She did it often, she did it loud. She smooched the air. I gazed exhaustedly at the poster of Morrisey. I began to feel he was making kissy faces at me alone, and now I could hear him.
"Muh, muh."
My first one night stand, and it was wretched. This was much worse than anything, even worse than the time I had led Fran on, leaving her panting and unsatisfied on my parents' bed. At least then I had stopped before I had fucked her. At least then I wished I was with a girl I had a crush on but had never actually been with – a longing for something I didn't know of or understand, not like this. Not humiliated by a woman three years older than me, wishing stupidly for a little satisfaction like that I had known in the arms and between the legs of a woman I loved, who loved me.
"Muh, muh, muh."
4:16
§
"Carolyn."
"Mm?"
"Carolyn, I'm going to go, okay?"
"Mm-hm."
"I'll see you at the next station meeting."
Pause.
"Muh, muh."
I crawled over her snoozing and noisy body and pulled my clothes back on, my pants and different layers of jackets and squinted to make out the legend on the clock. 5:23. Out of that building and not looking back, pulling my coat to me to keep out the bitter wind as I crossed the quad to Freshman Row.
In my room I found my roommate in his bed, his mighty, dope-induced snoring not nearly as disturbing as Carolyn's disgusting sleepy time smacks which had tormented me for the past what seemed like million years. I shed my clothes, peeled my underwear from my still moist and sticky penis, the guilty reminder of night spent in the tenth circle of hell, the one meant for premature ejaculators.
I flew like a wraith in the early unfamiliar, unknown and unusual morning silence of a boys dormitory into the showers to wash myself clean, to expurgate the stink of disappointed pussy from my crotch, to wipe the sweat from my brow, to open the puckering sores on my chest, clean and disinfect the accumulated puss and blood that flowed like tears from the open wounds before dressing them again, dry and shivering with a patchwork of fresh bandages in the safety of my own room.
And then I slept.
§
"Good morning, you're listening to WUOR, Clemson's only alternative. That was Crowded House with "Don't Dream It's Over". Before that we heard "I Wish I Had a Date" by Fishbone and started the whole set off with the Beastie Boys and "She's Crafty". You're listening to 'Saturday Afternoon with Kael and Cheryl' but it's not today, is it?"
"No, not today."
"That's right, because this morning I have my good friend Alex sitting in with me."
"Hello Clemson."
"And you know, forgive me for saying this, but I don't miss Cheryl at all right now."
"Oh that's sweet," she said, and knowing her she meant it.
Alex and I were seated side by side in front of the operations board in the small studio that was WUOR. We had our headsets on, a mic in front of each of us, and had been bantering like this, spinning records and gadding happily over the air for about an hour, half the length of the show. My nerves were shattered over breakfast and I tried desperately not to let her know it. Alex was too excited about being on the radio to notice, just my luck, and now I was beginning to settle in, calm down – I was whipped, a little hung over and only three hours of sleep to recuperate, but Alex was such a doll and we were having such a good time, I felt the horrid memories of the night before beginning to subside.
"Hey Alex."
"Yeah Kael?"
"I'm taking a big risk by asking this over the air."
"Oh."
"Yeah, but it's something I gotta do."
"I understand."
"Alex?"
"Yeah, Kael?"
"You know next Saturday is St. Valentine's Day."
"Oh?"
"Yeah, and I wanted to ask you, in front of all of Clemson, if you'd be my valentine."
"Oh Kael, I'd love to be."
"We'll be right back."
And with that I started a PSA about how to escape from your dorm room in case of fire. I swiveled my chair towards the stacks and rummaged about for another album to play.
"Kael?"
"Yeah, Alex?"
"Did you mean what you said just then?"
I turned around in my seat to look at her. Such an innocent face, all bright green eyes and freckled. She was so kind and endearing.
"Yeah," I said, smiling shyly, "did you?"
"Sure," she said, "I'm flattered."
With that the door opened and in walked Carolyn in her hulking overcoat and with a thick wool scarf wrapped around her neck, obscuring her chin.
"Hiya Kael," she said, setting down an armful of station mail and new releases. "How are you this morning?" Her tone was empty, cold and businesslike.
"Morning, Carolyn," I said, trying hard to stare at the albums in my hand, "I'm fine, how are you."
"Fine," she said, brushing past me and placing certain pieces of mail into certain cubbyholes. "Hey, can you meet with me a half hour before the station meeting tomorrow to go over those promotional ideas?"
"Sure," I said, "that would be fine." I set a new record on turntable one.
"Cool," Carolyn said, and turned to head out the door. She stopped right next to me, and set something frighteningly familiar on the console.
"And here," she said, "last night you forgot your watch."
"Kael's Diary" is copyright 1994 Millennium Productions / Kael Goodman (at745@cleveland.freenet.edu). Use of this work in any commercial venue (electronic or otherwise) is forbidden without permission. "Kael's Diary" is a work of fiction and the people and situations described herein are from the imagination of the author.
June, 1989 "One of the Millions" part one
It was the strangest apartment.
It was located on High Street in downtown Clemson, Ohio, home of the University of Ohio, and had been converted out of an old warehouse. Each apartment in the place was designed differently. This one opened into a cramped kitchen/lobby area whose walls did not come together at right angles, but the ceiling went up about twenty feet. There was a skeletal staircase which went up to the three separate, tiny bedrooms, none of which had doors. My two roommates and I had survived an entire school year together in that tiny place, and none of us would be friends ever again.
My bedroom was at the far end of the tiny, balcony-like corridor which overlooked the kitchen below. By the time you walked around to it, oddly placed steps up and the intermittently arranged pipework just below the ceiling made a six foot tall guy like me need to hunch over. I couldn't stand up straight in my own bedroom.
The room was tiny, tiny, tiny. A desk (which came with the place and I never sat at) at the far wall seemed to reach half-way to the ceiling. It's real job was to block out the horrendous amount of sunlight which would blaze through the industrial size window which began one inch below the ceiling and ended at the floor. This same window continued at the top of the ceiling of the "dining room" (ha ha) right below my room. Having already spent the previous summer in this place, the summer of 1988, a summer of extreme heat and drought in the midwest, and with another one approaching, you would think I would have, somewhere along the line, put up a sheet or something to keep out the light and give myself a little privacy. But the window overlooked a parking lot, I wasn't particularly modest and, hell, you know, the desk did a pretty good job.
This night, though, the only light coming through that window was a stream of broken beams cast by the industrial lights of the parking lot. The light cast unusuals on me, on my naked chest, and on Vera.
Vera. Vera was thin. Her face was thin. Her nose was very thin. Her arms were thin. We lay facing each other in bed. It was possibly three or four in the morning. I kept slipping in and out of sleep, as I always do when I'm in bed with someone new. But every time I opened my eyes, hers were already open. Her forearms were together, her ha, Vera her freshman. The way we got together is an interesting story in itself. On an ordinary weekend night (possibly Thursday – the weekends start earlier at school) I was in the basement at MacShaney's, where all the theater students hang out, and Kristie invited me to sit down and join her.
Kristie was a groovy young woman, also a freshman, she wore blocky glasses and had a huge toothy smile. Her hair was bobbed mushroom style, as was the fashion and had a thing for mustard colored sweaters. I was just getting over my "studious" phase where I wore nothing but ties, vests, slacks and penny loafers. Summer was pressing on and I returned to my old standard of T-shirts and shorts.
"Kael," Kristie said, "this is Vera."
"Hello, Vera," I said, shaking hands with her. She was dressed very sharply, like she had a meeting to get to or something. White turtleneck, plaid jacket, BIG shoulder pads, a skirt, sensible shoes. Her black, black hair was shaved in back and what was on top swept up and down over her forehead in a big wave.
"Hello, Kael," she said. "You look very familiar."
"Oh, well, have you seen and shows at the school of theater, I'm in most of them."
"Ah," she said, visibly unimpressed, "no. Maybe we've just met before."
"Uh-huh," I said, turning my attention to Kristie, "and how have you been?"
The conversation turned from bad to worse as I started in on a few members of the faculty and my fellow students, grousing about one thing and another – basically it was the end of a bad day and I was unloading on my new friend Kristie. Vera, however, got the distinct impression that I was a complete boner and not very interesting or amusing.
"...and Thad was being a major weenie at strike yesterday, he just kept pissing and moaning about one damn thing after another," I was saying.
"Hmn," Vera said, "don't get much of that around here."
"What?" I asked. "Oh, ha. Yeah, nice, well excuse me, I've had a rotten week."
"So glad you could share."
I looked to Kristie, who just smiled and shrugged.
"I like your friend," I said.
"Wish I could say the same," Vera said, raising her glass of beer to her lips.
"You don't know my friend," I snapped, and turned back to Kristie. "I'm sorry, Kristie. I should go."
"I understand," Kristie said, "Catch you later."
"It was a pleasure," Vera said, smiling sharply and offering her hand. I shook it, smiling just as bright.
"Maybe someday we can start over," I said. "You know, for the children."
"Uh-huh."
The very next night I was again in MacShaney's. Bones and Rudy were playing out, and just my luck Rudy was at the bar, taking a break from his usual singing cum screaming bullshit and it was just Bones, who was a very decent guitar player and a modest singer. I was alone at my table, close to where Bones sat on a stool, playing an impassioned rendition of "All Along the Watchtower", which I had especially requested.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Vera.
"Hi," she said brightly, shaking hands with me, "have we met? My name is Vera, and you are..?"
"Uh, Kael?"
"Yes, I think we're both friends with Kristie," she took a seat, "anyway, it's very nice meeting you like this."
"You, too," I said, smiling in spite of myself, "you seem like a very nice person."
"I am," she said, proudly, "and I think you are, too. What's that you're drinking?"
And so it went. For some strange reason Vera gave me a second chance. Maybe I really had amused her or something, maybe she thought I was cute, I dunno. Kristie, who was also there, joined us and we three had a pleasant little chat over the barroom din.
"Well," Vera said after a half hour or so, "it's late, I wanted to turn in."
"Yeah," Kristie said, "I want to go, too." And with that Kristie stood up to leave. Vera just sat there and looked at me intently.
"Well," I said, "It was very nice meeting you for the first time like this, we must do it again."
"Yes," she said, "I think we will." She continued to sit there and stare at me as Kristie watched us both with interest.
"And you live..?" I asked.
"Thompson Hall."
"Can I walk you both home?"
Vera abruptly stood up and said, "Why yes, that would be nice."
And I walked them both back through the balmy late-spring streets of Clemson, past puking frat boys, burrito stands and lots and lots of bricks. We came at last to their dorm.
"So," I said, "here you are."
"Yes," Vera said, turning her back to the large building and, again, looking unwavering at me.
"Ookay," Kristie said, "good night, Kael." And with that she left Vera and I alone.
"May I ask a presumptuous question?" I asked.
"Of course."
"Did you come looking for me tonight?"
"Come looking for you?" she said, innocently, "I only just met you."
"You know what I mean."
"Yes, I did, and no, I was on a date."
"You were what?" I asked.
"Thad, you know, Thad who you were bad mouthing last night?"
"Yeah?"
"We just saw a movie and he brought me to MacShaney's afterwards."
"What!" I gasped. "I saw him there – you ditched Thad at MacShaney's?"
"We ditched Thad at MacShaney's, yes."
"Oh, but that's not right!" I almost laughed. "He's going to think I did it on purpose!"
"Probably," she said.
"Well," I said, "I should be going, you look tired."
"I am," she said. "Thanks for walking me home."
"No biggie."
She stood there, not moving.
"We should get together," I said. "Again."
"Yes," she said, "we should."
She stood there, not moving.
"Can I take you to dinner?" I asked. "Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow, sure," she said. "Six?"
"Great," I said.
"Great," she said, "see you in the lobby, here, tomorrow, at six. Goodnight." And with that she suddenly spun around, and walked into her dorm.
Stunned, I turned slowly to walk away, looking back only once. "Shit," I said under my breath. "I've been pegged."
But she didn't trust me. Good for her, I guess. It was very difficult convincing her to spend the night. I laid on top of her on my bed, in my apartment, kissing little, sharp kisses. Lips touched, and touched again, small tongue flicker, but mostly lips, hers on top, mine on top. She had the darkest eyes, and they were so close to mine, her long, skinny pale arms wrapped around my neck. Her jacket was on top of the "sun desk" and her thin cotton turtleneck had no sleeves.
I began pulling at the base of her shirt.
"Oh, Kael," she said, putting a hand on mine, "I don't know."
I looked at her with a little grin and kissed her again.
"I'm very shy," she said.
"Ha!" I said. "Oh please, you are not."
"I don't know."
"It will be," I kissed her pointy nose, "nice."
"Okay," she said, sitting up a little. I sat back. "But I'll warn you."
"Huh."
"I'm scarred."
"You mean, like, emotionally..?"
"My body."
I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything, I just sat and smiled. I leaned forward and we kissed again.
"I think you're very beautiful," I said. "You're a very attractive woman."
She pulled her shirt from out of the waistband of her shorts. "This might change your mind."
"Impossible."
She pulled up her shirt and drew it over her head. The light was very dim, the lights from the parking lot making her milky white skin glow in the dark brighter than her white turtleneck had. Her waist was narrow, her rib cage, too, she had no breasts to speak of, her nipples small and round, dark little circles in a background of snow white.
I couldn't see any scarring to speak of. I leaned forward, looking alternately at her face and at her chest. I kissed her face and kissed her neck, and kissed her shoulder. She rolled her head back and let me kiss right under her chin, and then I began to see.
A v-shaped portion of her body, beginning an inch or so below her left nipple, and forming a triangle to the middle of her neck and over the her left shoulder and down, was a tortured span of flesh. It wasn't so horrible as she thought it was. Just a different texture, just not smooth. It wasn't even a different shade.
"Is that a burn?" I asked. She nodded quickly.
I looked up to her face. "You're still beautiful." I reached down and pulled my T-shirt up and off. "See?" I said. My chest was a mass of rubbery bumps and lumps, the scarring from adolescent acne gone horribly awry. "I'm in Braille."
She peered at my chest and touched my scars gently.
"That's nothing," she said.
I drew my hand across her chest. "That's nothing. It depends on whose opinion you're asking. Now lie down."
She slid back and I moved over her, and rested my lips gently on her left nipple, licking and sucking. She sighed appreciably, letting me lick and kiss every little bit of her frontside.
I nuzzled her navel and drew my tongue in a straight line up her belly to where the skin began to turn from pale and clear to pale and damaged, and beyond. I was aroused at the texture on my tongue, and on my face, kissing, tasting, enjoying her rumpled epidermis.
We did not have sex that night, she said she wasn't ready and I secretly wondered if Vera and I would ever be. I didn't think so.
"Kael's Diary" is copyright 1994 Millennium Productions / Kael Goodman (at745@cleveland.freenet.edu). Use of this work in any commercial venue (electronic or otherwise) is forbidden without permission. "Kael's Diary" is a work of fiction and the people and situations described herein are from the imagination of the author.
June, 1989 "One of the Millions" part two
"Kael?"
The sun was already blazing through the window, the temperature already starting to rise, very, very fast.
"Kael, are you awake."
My skin was sticky from sleep sweat and the heat coming from outside. I barely opened my eyes, wasn't even close to surfacing consciousness. I could just understand it was Vera next to me, dressed.
"Kael, I have to go."
"Whutimizzit?"
"It's almost nine," she said, "I have a final in three hours I still need to study for."
"Okay." I rolled over.
"Kael," she said, "would you like to have breakfast? At that Mexican place or something?"
I had already fallen asleep again.
"Call me when you wake up?"
"Mm-hm."
"Kael?"
§
I was twenty, going on twenty-one. We were just beginning to enjoy the effects of having a spineless twerp like Bush in the White House and the gargantuan and ridiculous pre-promotion for the first Batman movie had swept the nation.
I was, at this last week of my junior year only just beginning to settle into my fresh outlook on life. The previous fall I suffered a near nervous breakdown and finally decided suicide wasn't just an option, but the only sensible option. My whole life I had allowed forces beyond my control to steer me into whatever situation seemed like the one I was supposed to follow. Having completely lost my faith in God, my friends, or the government, and sensing that life on Earth without Kael Goodman would in the long and the short of it be more or less like life with him, I realized I needed to start making reasons for myself to keep plodding away at existence.
I quit smoking, dropped about twenty-five pounds, grew my hair VERY long, and started becoming "Kael, the boy every girl loves", or "the boy who loves every girl", that was more like it.
One woman I had loved, and then almost punched in the face at the depth of my fall 1988 doldrums, was Alex. We had dated all through sophomore year (I was the first man she had ever had sex with) but I was far too immature to sustain the relationship, opting rather to flit about and kiss any girl who said "yes" if I asked them to. I'd like to think I broke Alex's heart. We didn't talk all winter, and we only just started settling into what I presumed to be the nature of our relationship for the rest of eternity, the ex-boyfriend/girlfriend who become just good friends thing. That would be okay. The idea of making enemies with someone so unconcerned and endearing as Alex would have definitely said something about me.
§
I woke up a few hours later. The temperature inside had risen to about seventy-five degrees and I felt deathly and gross. My body was slick with sweat and my hair was pasted onto my head.
Summer in Clemson, Ohio. I would be spending it here again, working on the summer theater program, listening to De La Soul's first album, the latest release by XTC ("Oranges and Lemons") and Peter Gabriel's soundtrack from "The Last Temptation of Christ" which had just come out.
I slid out of bed and harrumphed into the shower. My two roommates were all through with finals and long gone, thank god, and so I could traipse around the place more or less at ease. Mine, all mine, for a few more days. I had already signed a lease on a single apartment around to corner, a cramped basement pad, just perfect for one single guy, and where I planned to spend the rest of my college education, alone, at peace, and with the occasional (well, no doubt more than occasional) nocturnal visitor.
Where to go, what to do? I had already taken my last final, closed the last show, the next week was just playtime until the summer session began. I stepped out onto High Street, combed and cleaned, around noon, it was a bright shine, shiny bright day. Where to go, what to do.
I walked up the street, saying "hi" to the people I knew, who were plentiful. Taking a left up Mentor Street I came to a huge early-twentieth century house, huge for student-rental shack-type houses, anyway. It was two-stories, symmetrical, and even had a front porch that wrapped around the front and went half the distance to the rear of the house. That porch, and the rest of the building was divided in two, however, and two separate sets of tenants lived on either side. I knew all of them. One side for the boys, one side for the girls. All eight of them were theater students.
Some of them had been dating when the lease was signed, but now none of them were. We (the entire rest of the theater department) has christened it "Theatre Hell" way back in September. I wasn't the only one who had had a rough year.
"Hallo?" I said, calling through the open wooden door. The front room of the right half, the girls' half of the building, formerly a memorial to the likes of James Dean, Jimmy Stewart and Charles Chaplin, was strewn with boxes and paper and trash. Two had already moved out.
"Just a minute," a voice called from around an odd angled corner. A moment later Betts stepped out from the bathroom in a white, terry-cloth robe and toweling what was now her very, very short blonde hair. "Oh, hi Kael."
"Hey Betts," I said, stepping further into the front room. "My god, your hair. It's gone!"
"Yeah," she said, wincing a little and pulling down a strand and having it end before she expected it to. "It's a new thing."
"I love it," I said. "I can't tell you, it just brings out your face."
"Thanks," she said. She walked back towards the kitchen. A swing like my back porch. "Want some tea?"
"Hmn? Oh, love some. You'll be here all summer?"
"All summer, I'm moving into Sally's old place." She banged about with a kettle in the sink and I heard water running.
"Hey, that's across the street from my new place."
"Yeah, I guess we're going to be seeing a lot of each other."
I paused for what I felt was the proper amount of time to insinuate something and said, "Yeah." And with that Alex bounded down the stairs.
"I thought that was you, Kael, hi honey."
She could have knocked me over with a breath. Her hair, which had been long and curly even since I met her three years before, and now it was a short cut reaching just below her chin, and straight and encircled her round, freckled face like a shocking red oval picture frame. She bounced over and gave me a big hug. I breathed in deeply. With Alex I could never tell whether I was going to receive the freshest intake of bathroom oils and powders or a good whiff of natural body odor, and either one was always a turn on. When we parted she leaned in and gave me a little kiss which lasted just a moment longer than either of us had expected.
"Uh-huh," she said, her face just inches from mine, her long, wide nose moving in to touch mine.
"Your tea's ready," Betts said, walking in from the kitchen.
"Oh, thanks," I said, disengaging myself from Alex and receiving the steaming mug Betts was offering me. I turned back to face my old girlfriend. "So what, did you two go out together on this short hair thing or what?"
"Oh," she said, grabbing a large handful of her fluorescent red hair, "no, well, maybe she inspired me. Whaddaya think?"
"It's incredible," I sputtered, "it just takes some getting used to."
I put a hand out and ran my fingers through her hair. Alex's hair was so red, red, red, red, redder than any redhead I've ever known, and I've known a lot of redheads. And thick. Thick red hair. And now short and straight. Way twenties.
"Wanna come into my room and watch me pack?" Alex asked.
"Yes," I said, "that's what I wanted to do today."
§
I lay on Alex's bed on my back. My head was propped slightly by a pillow. She crouched next to me, kneeling on the floor, her prominent chin resting on her folded, freckled forearms.
"Wanna know a secret?" Alex asked, poking me in the belly with one free finger.
"Yes."
"Betts told me she was looking forward to seeing a lot of you this summer."
"What!" I couldn't believe it. That was just great! Now I knew it was going to be a good summer. "Oh, you're kidding."
"It's true."
"Well, I'm going to have to ask her over for dinner at my new swinging bachelor's pad."
"Yeah?"
"Yes," I said, "in fact, I'll ask her before I leave this building."
"Yeah," she said, "probably the last time you see in the inside of Theater Hell."
"You knew we called it that?"
"Oh come on, Kael, everybody knew."
"Hmn."
"I'll miss it," she said.
"I'll miss you," I said, taking her hand in mine. Alex's skin.
Definite, distinctive texture, like soft leather. It was like that all over her body. Rough? No, soft but very textured. Soft leather. And firm.
"Aw," she said, smiling brightly. Big thick eyelashes, normally sporting mascara, now light orange, almost colorless, big, thin smile, soft lips. She loved it when people said stuff like that.
"Really?"
"It's been a shitty year, Alex," I said.
"Huh," she chuffed, "don't I know it."
"Well," I said, "this is nice. I feel we've overcome some tremendous obstacle. And that we're, stronger now, because of it."
"Hmn." She peered down along my outstretched body.
"Kael!" she said, looking up at me sharply. "Do you have an erection?"
"Alex, sweetheart, I have had a woodie since late last night that I have not been able to get rid of."
"Oh my," she said, rather mock taken aback.
"Alex."
"Kael."
"Are you my friend?"
"I like to think that I am."
"Would you do anything for me?"
She paused. Rather matter of factly she asked, "Kael, do you want me to give you a blow job."
"Alex, I want you to give me THE blow job," I said, "like no blow job I have ever received."
"You're serious."
"Toot me."
"Well," she said, sitting up on the floor, "you're just going to have to take your pants off first."
I undid the drawstring to my shorts, lifted up my hips, and drew my shorts and underpants right off. My penis, quite swollen and stiff wobbled against my belly.
"Oh, Kael," she said, "that's big."
"Eh," I said, non-committally.
Alex crawled up onto the bed, and straddled my legs, facing me. With a knowing smile she laid her delicate fingers on my dick, pointed it up towards her face, and lowered her mouth onto it. My entire penis disappeared under her nose.
"Holy fuck," I gasped, as Alex's tongue hammered against the spongy underside of my cock. The muscles in the back of her mouth and throat clenched against the dome of my dick and pushed it out and away as her lips closed tightly around every slippery inch of my loose penis-flesh. In and out she took me like some tasty dicksicle.
"Wait, wait, wait," I poofed. She let my spit-soaked penis relax for a moment. I took a breath and said, "well, I can see you've learned a few things in the last year."
"I had a great teacher," she said, and moved up onto top of me.
"Ouch," I said, "you mean I wasn't?"
"Oh, you taught me the basics."
"I taught you how to love."
"Ha!" she said, rolling off and next to me. "You did not teach me that." I scooted onto my side so we faced each other, her back against the wall next to the bed. We kissed. We kissed again.
"Wanna do it?" I asked.
"Kael!" she smiled. "Is that what you came over here for?"
"That's why I go anywhere."
"Hmn."
"You're going today, right?"
"Tonight."
"It's been a long year," I said, "for us, I mean. It might be a nice way of saying 'see you next fall.'"
She sat up and moved to get off the bed. "Wait here," she said.
"What?"
"And take your shirt off."
Alex walked out of the room. Hmn. I took my T-shirt off and plopped it next to the bed. I rolled onto my back. Christ, it was so hot outside, and it was only June. The window on the far wall was wide open and a warm breeze blew through the room and over my naked body.
One moment, then Alex stepped in, slowly, looking out from the side of her recently cut hair, peering at me. She smiled with a little anticipation, my gaze dropping down to her wildly freckled shoulders, great spots of orange on a light, light pink background. A dazzling pattern of speckled skin, the orange dots becoming smaller and smaller, giving way to just that imperceptible shade of pink as her chest began to swell into those two large breasts, all pink, no freckles, her shoulders back her breasts stood straight out, two deep pink nipples hard and excited. Down, a well-defined tummy, neither skinny nor chubby, her waist came in and her hips went out, her belly-button beginning a trail of wispy red hair which traveled down her belly to a stunning shock of red. That tuft of red hair, standing straight up like some fright wig. I could smell her from here, no perfume today, moving day, she smelled bad and it just made me harder.
She giggled a little, standing there by the doorway.
"Oh, Alex," I said, "sometimes I forget how beautiful you are." Alex smiled broadly and bit her lip. She strode over and flopped on top of me.
"Oof," I said.
"Oof you," she said, pressing her lips hard against mine, ramming her tongue innocently between my teeth. I'll never know how anyone could innocently ram anything, but she could. I slid my hands over her hips, worked one over a thigh, bucked and rolled swiftly, bringing her up on top of me, both broad, orange spangled legs straddling mine, her bright red vagina resting just where my balls become my penis.
"Whoop!" she said. It looked really funny, like my dick was actually hers, only upside down. "We never did it with me on top."
"We tried, remember? You couldn't get the hang of it."
"I couldn't?"
"Trust me."
She slipped her right hand down between her legs, lifted her hips slightly, and tucked my penis neatly into her. Her cunt, warm, wet, smelly as hell, she lowered herself slowly, very, very, way, fucking slowly onto me. I let out an equally slow breath. Alex fixed me with those huge eyes, those long translucent lashes, and grinned wickedly. Her knees, bent under her, each hand placed firmly on the bed on either side of my head, she rocked her pelvis up and back, up and back, slowly, red vagina lips, sliding up and down me, catching at the odd moment, gripping suddenly and releasing. The muscles of my back tightened, my feet digging into the mattress, I lifted my butt, rolling my hips, I couldn't help it, my penis had never been THIS hard – I always got a little softer whenever I went in, my cock got even harder, the feelings intensified, my penis HURT with sensation, my hands gripped her hips just below her sloping waist and I began forcing her to pick up speed, my penis was soaked, thrusting up and in, and out almost to the point of exiting and then slamming back in, thudding against the back of her snatch, we were rocking now, oh yeah, and I couldn't stop if the house caught fire.
"Oh, Kael," she breathed, "I want you on top."
"You sure?" I choked. "This isn't good?"
"Oh, this is great," she laughed and sobbed. "But please."
She leaned over and kissed me. I pulled out, ducked under her as she rolled onto her back, freckled legs lying wide open, her bright red vagina, moist and pungent, her own fluids already out and coating that crimson mound of hair. I kneeled between her legs and brought my mouth down over one of her breasts, biting and sucking while firmly kneading the other.
"Oh," she sighed, "forget that Kael, just fuck me."
Whoomp, my cock like some great, comic horn, I slished my penis in her fragrant gates. Wham, I began pronging her like I had never done for anyone ever before. Anyone. Ever. I was truly astonished at my own dick. It was stiff and painful and glorious, and it did't feel as though I would ever be soft again, or that I would even come for that matter. Who cared? Who'd want this to end? I was so in love at that moment. Propped up over Alex's beautiful face. I bent in and awkwardly kissed her, chewed on her little ears, she panted and gasped as I swung myself into to her, again, again.
"Huhnn," I said, "hey, huh, Alex?"
Her eyes rolled up into her head, her head rolled back into the pillow. Her mouth fell open. "Mmm, yeah, Kael?"
"I love you, Alex."
"Mmm, I love you, too, Kael."
"No," I said, laughing, "you don't get it. Hm, hmn, hm. I am so in love with you right now."
I lowered my body a bit and grabbed onto her shoulders. I kissed her cheek and buried my head in her neck. Wham, wham, wham.
She groaned even louder. "I know what you mean," she guffed, "and I mean it, too. Now shut, huh, up, I'm just about to come all over you."
I laughed out loud, leaned back up on my arms and kept fucking. I could see every tooth in her mouth, her head was so far back and her chin almost touched her chest – and she exploded. She yelled and shuddered and bucked for a solid minute or more, and I didn't let up.
"Stop, stop!" she yelled. "You must stop!"
So I did. I stopped. I withdrew. I lay beside her and kissed her face and pulled her body to me.
"Oh my god, Kael, that was wonderful."
"Yeah," I said, kissing her eyelids.
"I'm sorry, you didn't get to finish."
"Funny," I said, "that's okay."
"Really?"
"Yeah, I don't need to. I just wanted to make you happy."
Wow, but doesn't that sound like bullshit. But it was true, and she could tell, and she smiled and rubbed herself against me.
Odd. I had spent the last few days hanging out with Vera, a woman I kind of liked but who wouldn't have sex with me. I was dying to spurt into something other than Kleenex, but I just couldn't. All I wanted to do was watch Alex go ballistic with ecstasy, and, of course, to love me. I think that was it. I just needed every god damn woman in the world to fucking adore me that spring. And I was well on my way.
I put on my clothes, and Alex put on hers. She told me about the big end-of-the-year party that was going on in the other side, the "boys" side of the house that night and that I had better show up. I promised I would. Letting myself out I passed Betts in the front room.
"Be seeing you, Kael," she said.
"Yeah, hey Betts," I said, "all summer, right?"
"Uh-huh," she said, "I'm designing costumes for the show."
"You said. I'm designing props, You wanna get together for dinner sometime?"
"Yeah," she said, showing me those huge teeth, "we should sometime."
"Monday too soon?"
"Ha, no, Monday's great."
"Great," I said. "See you tonight. At the party."
"See ya then," she said.
And with that I stepped out into the blinding afternoon. A party. Tonight. And nothing to do until then. Where to go, what to do, who to see next?
"Kael's Diary" is copyright 1994 Millennium Productions / Kael Goodman (at745@cleveland.freenet.edu). Use of this work in any commercial venue (electronic or otherwise) is forbidden without permission. "Kael's Diary" is a work of fiction and the people and situations described herein are from the imagination of the author.
June, 1989 "One of the Millions" part three
Successfully, I emerged on the other end of a long, oppressively hot Clemson day. Since that point in the afternoon when I had left Alex, sticky and satisfied, I spent most of my time darting in and out of ridiculously air-conditioned establishments. Later in the summer of 1989 the median temperature was around sixty, but this day in June suggested it was going to be as unbearable a season as the summer of 1988 had been, that summer of record temps and horrible drought.
I recalled that past summer, before Quintel had moved in and it was just me and Nancy in that strange, strange, Escher painting of an apartment. Both Nancy and I had signed up for the same film criticism class (summer session is not a time for physics courses, thank you) and we would drag ourselves out of our beds at eight, the thermometer already pushing eighty, the friendly sun already painting my room and most of the rest of the place, and venture bravely into the early morning heat haze. And every day we would breathe a sigh of relief to dip into the cool surroundings of the film arts building. Into our chairs we would slide, all ready to enjoy "La Strada" or whatever classic in cozy, chilly surroundings. And every day, about twenty minutes into the flick, our skin, only a half hour previously slick and gross now goose pimply and shivering. We never learned. We earned, deserved pneumonia.
But this day, the sun had gone down, and it was nice, nice, seventy degrees nice, and I was headed for Theatre Hell; Boys Side, for there was a party going on, and I would be, oh, a fool to miss it.
If Theatre Hell; Girls Side was a testament to the stereotypical whims of college females; cleanliness, potpourri and shrines to dead or nearly dead film stars in their prime, then Boys Side was just as predicable, and even moreso.
It was dank. It was moodily lit. It was woody. You stepped in the front door, and even in broad daylight, you could only see a few feet in front of you, in the front hall, the banister ran up to nowhere, walls ran up into total darkness, it felt cramped and claustrophobic, except the corners and where the floor met the wall seemed to go on forever.
And once you reached the end of the hall and stumbled upon the sitting room – pretension met utter slovenliness. Large, overstuffed chairs and couches, stuffed to the point of splitting, and some already had, a pipe in an ashtray, decanters of brandy and cognac (some actually half full) sitting up or falling over, half read, dog eared books and magazines, posters for George Romero films, and absolutely everything, everywhere one looked, was a uniform shade of brown.
I passed safely through all of this, I knew my way around, I was a regular.
"Hello! Hi! Tomorrow? I guess I'll see you next fall. Congratulations! Tell her I said hi. Damn you look good. Yeah, it is dark in here. What the hell is he doing? Great. Excuse me, I need to get to the fridge."
I shook hands with everyone I knew, who was everyone, and the place was stuffed. Semi-tasteful classical music played and I shuffled my way to the kitchen and over to the refrigerator. In went a six of cheap beer, out came a sparkling wine cooler, that seemed like a fair trade.
Half past ten, the horizon had cleared the sun almost forty-five minutes earlier. No lights came through the cracked window panes, not even from the neighboring houses. The crowd was thick in that tiny little place; practically everyone who was left before finals were over had been invited, and they weren't many, but they were all there. They were all friends and close acquaintances, and those I didn't like weren't important enough to leave the room over.
I took a seat in one nasty Naugahyde chair (brown).
"What's up, Kael?" someone asked.
"Oh, nothing," I said. "When are you taking off?"
"Tomorrow."
"Me too," someone else said.
"Hey, where's Vera?" someone else asked. I looked over and saw Thad coming into view. Oh, oh, Thaddeus. One year older than me, and a year behind in studies, he'd transferred in from somewhere. The first time I met him I loathed him. The first time I saw him was on stage, he was in one of the first one acts of the fall season and I had to admit he was funny. It was him and Laura in this piece, I can't remember what it was, some wedding slash comedy slash horror thing. We were in a make-up class (I mean, a class in the instruction of how to apply make-up for theatrical purposes, not, as you may have thought, a make-up class for something missed or failed) and we learned early on that we were each ridiculously fond of ourselves and prone to wit and insults. He proved an easier target of course, standing a few inches shorter than me (and a lot of people, for that matter) had a premature bald spot on top of his head, and, of course, just wasn't as clever as I was. Am.
"Oh, God, Thad," I said, rising to meet him. "Give me a hug you great, black bastard." He strode over, laughing, and threw the arm not bearing a bag of presumable alcoholables around my neck.
"Kael, you beautiful prick," he chuckled.
"I had no idea," I said, as we parted. "She came up to me, if I had known..."
"Oh, forget it," he said. "We weren't getting on very well, anyway. Have her."
"I don't think she's one for being had, Thaddeus." I waggled my bottle at him. "Shame on you and your little sexist mouth."
"Bless you and your little sexy mouth," he said, and backed towards the kitchen. I smooched his way, and he smooched back. I sat back down.
Sitting on the floor, holding a beer, in front of the couch next to my naugathrone, was Marge. She was one of Kristie and Vera's quiet friends. She had also been the costume designer for a play I had written and directed that quarter. Her head was a mop of dirty orange hair and she had a round face with tiny little eyes and liked to wear huge round glasses. Would comparing her to Thelma from Scooby Doo be an insult? I don't mean it to be. Her posture was always a little droopy, and she had a thing for army fatigues.
Tonight however, there she sat. Someone I had never even really talked to before. Tonight, she was wearing a black halter top, black stretchy-kind of sweat pants, and some leather slip-on shoes.
"Hello, Marge," I said.
"Hiya, Kael," she said. I was given the impression the beer in her hand wasn't the first on that had been there that evening.
"How have you been?"
"Great, Kael," she said, smiling up at me.
"Making all gone with your finals?"
"All gone."
"Then you," I said, "deserve a horribly indulgent back rub."
"Oh, yes I do," she said, and scooted over between my feet on the floor.
My long, thin, lithe, white fingers came to life on Marge's neck and shoulders, working loose any last tensions of her freshman year at the University of Ohio. A small knot of flesh, a bundle of nerves, I would use the very tips of my fingers, working several of them in rhythm like I was writing on the world's smallest typewriter, and that knot, that bundle would gradually disappear, and Marge's little gasps or grumbles of pain would drift into sighs and coos of relief. And then I'd do it again somewhere else.
Marge. Her eyes closed, her jaw slack. What went on inside that head? So quiet, such a cipher. We didn't speak much, as I rubbed and kneaded I was talking mostly to other people, the musical tastes of the tenants of the house (albums by Tangerine Dream) gave way to the auditory desires of the rest of us (Bob Mould's new solo album "Workbook") and we all drank and reminisced and my hands were getting kind of tired, I had already taken care of most of Marge's back and was ready to take a break – – when the lights went out.
"Awwwwww," came the collective sigh of mock pity from practically every corner of the house. There shortly followed a series of whoops and giggles.
"Ah, SHIT!" I heard Jack call from the kitchen. Jack was one of the fellahs who lived there, so it was his right to yell that. He and some others began scurrying in and out of the sitting room, looking for, finding, and then lighting and placing various candles.
I, discovering some strange, newfound enthusiasm for my task, continued to massage Marge's back. I had decided to concentrate on the lower part, the "small" as they say of her back. My hands, next to each other, facing out, down between my calves, plunging those mighty fingertips into the flesh just above her behind, where the muscles get seriously tense. I pulled up her shirt a little and laid my naked fingers against her bare back, down there. As I continued to work my hands, the motion became less and less of a sincere attempt to loosen aching muscles and relieve tension, and more and more of a soothing rub meant to make the receiver feel...well, it's only to feel good, isn't it?
The room was virtually light free. A few candles burned in various places, casting an odd, active glow on anything close to them, but not too much light on anything further away. All attempts to locate the problem or rectify the situation seemed to reach a standstill. The lights were out, who cared?
Sparse conversation, people moving in and out of darkened doorways, no music just the soft, late-night sounds of a deserted college town street wafting through the opened, shattered window.
I can't recall what anyone said. I don't really remember anyone speaking to me. I certainly can't think of anything I said to Marge, or she to me, all I know is we sat there in that crowded, balmy, cave-like room, and I put my hands all over her back, she leaned forwards for me, sat back as I worked up her neck, balancing her head, scritching through her scalp, her head came to rest, bent backward, into my lap, and I smoothed out her face, pulling back her hair, working out the greasy flesh of her (for the first time, to me) revealed forehead, and drew my thumbs across her eyebrows and across her cheeks, and then down her lips, carefully touching and stretching every square inch of her face, the line of her little chin, and then, bringing her slowly, so slowly, over minutes of time, she was sitting again, she was getting quite used to my touch, and trusting me more and more, (people were seated on a couch close by, but neither of us had said anything to them in almost fifteen minutes, and Alex had already been through and gone, I must have said hello, and Thad, like we give a shit, right kids?) and her head lolled forward again and my fingers dwelt on her shoulders pressing in and relaxing her even further (did I stop to drink some more? I must have) and down my hands went working free the unexplored muscles of her chest and both hands pressed onward, sliding both palms over her breasts and squeezed them lightly and cupped my hands around them and let my fingers lift them up, and index finger and thumb now gently discovering each small nipple beneath the black cotton cloth and there I played for a moment, just casually feeling up Marge in that room full of friends, in the dark.
An hour gone past, the lights were still out, and word had come through that it was in fact a fuse in the house and not the whole street that was out. No one, however, could be bothered to fix it.
My hands came to rest on Marge's shoulders. I leaned my face close to her ear, and could see her eyes were closed.
"Marge?" I whispered.
"Mm-hm," she said, in that marginally conscious manner.
"I didn't lose you did I?"
"Nope," she said, "Thank you, I am just very, very, very relaxed."
"That was all right, then?"
"Yes," she smiled, "thank you very much."
"Marge," I said, "it's kinda late, you wanna go?"
"Yes," she said, craning to look up at me with those little eyes.
"You'll walk me to my dorm?"
"I was going to ask if you didn't want to watch Christmas specials back at my place."
"Oh, yes," she said, "I'd like that."
Twelve-thirty in the A.M. Deep within the demented apartment, the architect's house of pain, was this "room". It had four walls, oh sure, but they didn't come together at right angles. One of them was so short it was practically triangular. And small. The 19 inch television sat on a wee table against one wall and Marge and I sat on a horrid green couch against the opposite wall. My feet rested on the tee vee table. Marge sat to my side, my arm around her, she leaned against me.
We were glowing blue. "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas" played out on the set before us. While "wanna come back to my place to watch Christmas specials" may be one of the more ridiculous pick-up lines of all time, I am nothing if not honest.
"...it was Cindy-Lou Who who was no more than two..." I slipped my hand into her sweat pants. I was surprised. I lifted up the waistband slightly. I could see a tuft of dirty orange hair.
"You don't wear underwear?" I asked.
"No," she said matter-of-factly. It was kind of a stupid question, my hand in her pants and all. I turned my face to hers.
"Are you going to want to spend the night?" I asked her.
She looked up at me rather sleepily and gave me a big, thin smile. "I'd like that," she said.
"Good," I said. I leaned in and brushed my lips against hers. She gave me a little kiss and I kissed her back.
"You kind of like me, don't you?" I asked.
Yes, it was as stupid as the question about her underwear.
Darker still now. No candles, no blue tee vee glow, just the scattered beams cast from parking lot lights, broken up or blocked out completely by a conveniently placed desk.
The accumulated heat of the day clung to every inch of that tiny little room. Condensation, warping the Robert Smith poster, dripping from the plaster bust of Elvis, the walls were slick and the mattress never completely dried from the night before. The whole nook smelled like Kael.
Gray white skin in that darkness, head resting comfortably on a thin cotton pillow, shoulders back against the bed, soft curve of breasts, their orange nipples wide and soft and flaccid (oh yes, they always have to be "erect", don't they) one single stripe of sweat slowly sliding down her slender belly, curving in and down, her arms at her sides, her hands reaching up, and her fingers coming to rest on either side of my head, my tongue out and pointed, tasting the doughy skin between her legs, salty and moist, I used my fingers to open her a bit more, and using my thumb to rub against that swollen knot (a simile; unlike with the muscles of the back, massaging this knot relaxes no one) and she moaned and gasped and her legs, propped up on either side of me swayed back and forth.
"Hmmmmmm..."
My head bobbed up and down in an amusing fashion, I, propped up on my knees, my butt sticking way up in the air, one free hand gripped my erect penis which bobbled freely between my legs, and using my thumb and index finger I briskly pinched at its underside.
She breathed softly, sudden, occasional gasps, it was slow love folks, no one was going anywhere, except perhaps to sleep. We were each very drunk. At least I know I was pretty drunk, and I thought that she was. She never said. She had never said much anyway.
Little girl, only eighteen, moody and sullen, so many secrets, and how had she gotten here? What was she doing in my bed? How did I arrive at this place, here, jaws open, tongue out, slapping it and flicking it against her most private part. Always hiding under a mop of hair, always dressed in baggy, concealing clothes. Had I ever considered she had breasts, let alone those displayed there on my bed? Did I ever give a second glance at the shape of her hips? And there they were, rising suddenly and then resting, her small behind settling into the dunes on that floppy mattress.
Why was she here? Simple. Because I had asked her to be.
I rose up, standing on my knees (my head only a foot or so from the ceiling) and pushed my hair back out of my face. My face, glistening with sweat, my penis, turgid before me, its head so purple and shiny, precum slooshying from its tiny mouth and beginning to run down its length. Marge lowered and closed her legs slightly and I slithered beside her.
"You're wildly attractive, Marge," I said.
Her eyes, barely slits now, widened considerably. "You think so?" she said.
"Yes," I said, smiling, all teeth and glowing gray eyes, "I will admit you make it hard to notice."
"I do?"
"Well, I would be the last person to encourage a woman to show off her body," I said, "and that's the last thing you ever do. 'Nuff said."
"True." She smiled at me.
"But I can see all of you now. And you are very beautiful. And I am overwhelmed."
She beamed.
"And I'm not just saying that to get you in bed with me."
She laughed. I kissed her little pug nose and kissed her mouth. We kissed a while.
"I think we should do it," I whispered. "Do you think we should do it?"
She nodded. I leaned over the edge of the mattress and ran my hand through the narrow space in the skeletal spring set between the mattress and the floor in order to locate a box of rubbers.
I used to be really, really good at putting on condoms. I took my position, kneeling again between her legs, peeled open the package, pulled out the party favor, and rolled it into place. Marge spread herself wide (but not too wide, I noted – for a moment I feared virgin) and I placed my hands along her thighs, sliding down and placing my thumbs at the base of her vagina, sliding them up its length to test how wet she was (she was) and leaned over her. My hips adjusted, using my fingers I nudged my penishead against her and began to slide it in. I held myself up with one arm, my face hovered against hers, and she looked at me with awe and surprise. We kissed again, as I continued into her, coming to rest, my butt between her thighs, deep brown, curly hair nestling among dirty orange, the hairs becoming entangled and entwined, until I backed up and out, and then down and in again.
Slow.
I leaned on my elbows, I grabbed Marge's head in my hands and we kissed kindly and timidly. My behind arched up and down, her hips shifted slightly, sweat began to cascade down my back towards my shoulders.
I worked her and kissed her. An entire day's worth of courted and suppressed orgasm began to build within me, I rocked a little harder and Marge's closed her eyes.
My rhythm began to build and she just lay there, moaning so quietly, gasping for occasional surprise breaths. I began pounding my hips into hers, my bloated and splitting dick, its blood pulsing in my head, I gripped her shoulders tightly and held on as long as I could, the pain was horrific, and still she lay there, not giving any indication of pleasure, arrival, her world was far from mine.
I shuddered. I slammed. Those eeny, clenched muscles inside my penis, tormented and tender finally gave way and sploot after sploot of molten me hammered into a wall of sheer latex. Marge rocked her head back and made no sound. I grunted and hunh-hunhed and squeezed my hands into her shoulders, a tight vise-like grip. My legs went see-saw and my feet were fists.
And then it was over. I gasped for breath and lifted myself off of Marge, reaching for a Kleenex to remove our protection, throw it in the wicker waste basket. I lay back next to her, and put my arms around her.
"Hmn," I said, already drifting away.
"Hmn," she said.
"Was that okay," I asked.
"Mm-hm," she said. "That was okay."
"Wanna go to sleep now?" I asked.
"Yes," she said.
So we did.
"Kael?"
Another morning in Clemson, Ohio. Another day. The sun was all over my room, stuck to every wall.
"Kael, wake up."
I was in an early morning stupor, the previous day's activities, not yet enough sack time, the heat...I could go on. Vera? Marge kneeled next to me. She was dressed.
"Kael, I have to go."
"Whutimizzit?"
"It's almost eight-thirty," she said, "I have to pack. I'm leaving tomorrow. Will you call me when you get up?"
"Okay." I rolled over.
"Kael," she said, "would you like to have breakfast? At my dorm or something?"
I had already fallen asleep again.
"Call me when you wake up, okay?"
"Mm-hm."
"Kael?"
I did not call. I meant to call, I did not call. That day I ran into Vera who chastised me for not having called the day before or telling her about the party. I wasn't in the mood.
"You, Kael Goodman, are the single most conceited person I have ever met," she said.
I stared at her blankly. "So?" I said.
She threw up her hands in disgust and walked out of my life.
When I finally remembered that Marge had told me she was leaving the next day, I called, but there was no answer. I called again the day she was supposed to leave, and there was again no answer. I called the next day, and when there was still no answer I went round to her dorm room and saw the check-out slip on her door.
I felt sorry I had missed her, ever though I had done it so effectively.
The following fall I learned she hadn't liked the University of Ohio very much, and transferred to a school on the coast. I also learned from mutual acquaintances that before she even came to school she had once attempted suicide.
Casual badgering of her friends on campus for some reason never led to my actually procuring a phone number or an address where I could reach her. I kept asking and they kept saying they would give it to me, but it just never happened.
I've heard she's doing well, but I've never seen or spoken to her since.
"Kael's Diary" is copyright 1994 Millennium Productions / Kael Goodman (at745@cleveland.freenet.edu). Use of this work in any commercial venue (electronic or otherwise) is forbidden without permission. "Kael's Diary" is a work of fiction and the people and situations described herein are from the imagination of the author.
December, 1989: "Sowing the Seeds of Love"
Lurking at the top of the stairs was me. I was slouching in the darkness, my black fedora pulled to just above my eyebrows, dark pea coat humphered around my shoulders and tucked under my butt as I crouched there, on those carpeted stairs, my black hush puppies not making a sound.
I had only just taken my gloves off, up there, I'd already knocked on her door but she was out. Couldn't find a light switch but I knew the place, an old house in an old city in rural Ohio, possibly a two bedroomer to start but addition led to addition and it's a good thing I had known the place, there were half a dozen locations where the floors didn't come together in just the right way and the architect wasn't proud. Just another tiny apartment building, just another place to stuff the students.
There was a key at the front door, down there, and that's why I had ducked down and squatted where I was. Christ, what if it's not her? Best way to find out – wait.
The door flew open and she with it, ushering a blast of cold late December air. Her hood was open and over her head, but it was her and not someone else, I knew that. I knew the coat. Green down thing, nasty. She turned to the steps and I said "hi" and she gasped in fright and disbelief and then in joy and wonder and charged up the stairs at me and landed in my outstretched arms.
"Woof, careful," I said, holding her and bringing her into my lap, sitting now at the top of the stairs, "remember I was puking sick this morning."
"Oh, God," she said, kissing me lightly on the mouth, "how are you?"
"I'm fine," I said, taking my hat off and holding it with one free arm, "just a bad gyro or something, ehw, I can still taste the tin foil."
"I didn't think you were coming today," she said.
"Well, until about ten neither did I, but, you know, I'm in love."
"Mm-hm," she said. "How long were you waiting here."
"Coincidence," I said, "I just got here. I tried your door."
Bright blue eyes set into a pyramid of darkest brown, wavy, frizzy hair. She placed her bowy lips against mine and pressed her tongue into my mouth slightly. I pulled my mouth against hers and breathed a little faster.
"I'd like to try your door again," I said.
§
December in this last year of the boom-boom eighties. The beginning of the end for the millennium and the start of the closing chapter in my college career. My grandfather was dead and he had told me the meaning of life, and for that I was grateful. It was just this past spring and he was dying and I visited him in Florida and he told me you have to set goals. Life is setting goals and achieving them. You have a larger goal, and you succeed at it by establishing smaller ones in order to attain that final, larger goal.
Yes, pretty simple, but it's not "plastics" and you don't have to be in Wall Street or some other form of business to use it, you can be an actor, like me. It's so simple anyone can see it and yet no one my age was doing it. I was twenty-one, in the middle of my fourth year of college, and aware that I would be starting a fifth in order to get done. My grandfather's words of wisdom clued me in to the fact that my present course was just another of the ones I'd been riding since my inception, one of those fated paths of least resistance.
Sure, choosing a major in theater might have been considered a little radical to those I'd grown up with in that stifling, fifties era-style suburb I still called home. But it was still college. I was still doing what was expected of me, and once that simple choice was made, I now had a new set of adults to tell me exactly what to do next so I didn't have to think about it at all. My advisor had a whole pre-figured out course of study he sent all of us through in order to keep our minds on performance and not worry about other aspects of theater or business or the world or anything else that might distract us from (or, who knows, improve) the "work".
Screw that, I altered the major a little, changed counselors, and made myself learn things, important things, things I might need to know later on, if I intended to carve a life for myself rather than just following a well worn path set before me.
And I met Maria. And that was a surprise. After three years of dodging every single possible relationship that sprang up in front of me – and god knows they were plentiful. I'm an adorable guy. Women love me. I'm cute and talented and I kiss good. But I was terrified of being hurt again. The single important relationship I'd ever had in my life, one that spanned the decade, from first yearnings at the age of twelve to losing my virginity five years after to the final break, the moment I let go, see ya, I'm on my own now and don't expect any more phone calls, it was finally dead and buried, and only since March.
I was complete. I lived alone in a basement apartment with one bedroom, one bed, ceilings that towered three inches above my six foot head and I liked them that way. Sure I had my nocturnal visitors, the whole summer of 1989 I was getting laid all the time, but in the morning they went away and I could just lie there or walk calmly and proudly, naked, all the way from the bedroom, through the kitchen to the shower and use up all the hot water.
And nights when I was on my own, a balmy summer's eve let's say, with Joe Jackson on the stereo, all the lights out and just past dusk, napping in my underwear, the alley light shining through the blinds, casting sexy shadows on the tee vee, the couch, the wide bay doors which divided the bedroom and the living room (but were never closed) and on me. Half-awake now, I would hear the murmur of voices from the back patio of the bar across the alley, wafting through the open window with the fragrant night air, part sweet summer mist, part dumpster.
Cool jazz. Hot night. I stood and walked to the window.
"It's late," J.J. sang, "I'm winding down. Am I the only one..?"
And for the first time in my young adult life I actively noticed I was happy to be me. Just me. I had been happy to be me and someone else before and that was nice, too. But to be alone and know it's okay. I knew also that if I needed company, I could step out onto the street, walk for a block or so and run into someone I knew, or check out a few bars within reach or there was always the set or a movie – but to know I could just sit in peace, alone with my thoughts, and that that could be enough...well, it was new, it was different, it was so alien and wonderful.
But as I was saying, I met Maria. And I don't think I could have without this transformation. Years and years of hiding and ducking, yes love is wonderful but responsibility sucks and I was always too fucking immature. But I changed, I was riding higher and taller and I had opened a new door and the first person to step in was Maria, nineteen and bright, a stunning young woman, taking time off from that expensive private school she'd spent her freshman year at to make some money and ride tuition free at this huge state university that employed her father. A professor's kid. That same professor who'd written a rather rude (but completely deserved) letter to the editor of the paper I wrote for criticizing my work as "politically incorrect", whatever that means.
I had met Maria a few months before, or even perhaps a few years before – I was always coming into contact with a variety of high school students who either got involved in projects that crossed over to the university, or through other college students, students who grew up in town and had introduced me. She may have even been at a party or two in the last apartment I'd lived in, I knew her old boyfriend anyway. But I knew her by name only just recently.
Thad, a good friend, also a theater student, and I went to visit our friends in Danielsboro, Ketucky, who were involved in an outdoor production called "Daniel Boone was a Man" or some such nonsense, one of those dramas involving lots of horses and square dancing and pretty white views of American history. Lots of our friends were playing the part of "Injuns" and had to shave all of their body hair off, paint themselves dirt color and got to grunt a lot.
On our way home, an eight hour journey in Thad's lovely air-conditionless rusty old tub of a car, we had a lot of time to just talk and more often than not the conversation was little blue.
"So," Thad said, "have you looked over 'Balm in Gilead'?"
"That's the undergrad show?" I asked.
"Yeah."
"No."
"I'm auditioning for the part of Dopey," he said, "he's a heroin addict."
We were cruising along state road 555 in Suthuhn Ohiyah, windows open full blast, hot air on our faces, sitting in the same T-shirts we'd slept in. Thad was at the wheel and I had just finished fiddling with my banged up wee tape deck, god it was good for how literally dented the exterior was. The plastic was cracked and every little piece of metal was scratched and bent but it was nice and loud and tinny. Thad's old wreck didn't even have FM but I had mix tapes of all sizes and colors.
"Sounds great," I said, "Can I tell you something funny?"
"No," he said, "no, not funny."
"Fuck you, it's, I feel a little odd, you know, it's personal."
"No, not personal," Thad said. "Come on, you can tell me anything."
"Did I apologize for picking up Vera?" I asked.
"Oh forget about that," he said, "and give me another cigarette."
I looked at him wide and strange. "You're out already?"
"Already?"
"You bought two packs at that gas station yesterday."
"Yes," Thad said, "and I spent the night with a bunch of broke and sad actors."
"I see."
"I'm a charitable guy."
"Yes you are," I said, and fished out two sticks from the already ratty pack I had planted in the cracked door-side armrest.
"And besides, how many have you had today?" Thad asked.
I reached into my pocket and found a pack of matches.
"Mom, I'm telling a story."
"I'm sorry."
"It has pussy in it."
"Tell your story."
I stretched out, reaching behind me with interlocked hands, touching the roof a few feet behind me. My face was slick with sweat and my hair a bobbed blond mop, ratty from filth. No shower this morning and I hate that.
"Beth," I began, "you knew I was fucking Beth?"
Big sigh from Thad. "Yes, I knew you were fucking Beth, Jesus Christ you know how to hurt a guy."
I looked surprised. "You like Beth." I cupped my hands and leaned into my own lap in a desperate attempt to light my ciggie in the gale force highway winds. It was a triumph.
"Oh you are mean, tell your fucking story."
"Don't raise your voice at me."
"Tell your fucking story."
"Do you know your lighter doesn't work?"
"Tell your fucking story."
"So," I said, turning my body slightly so I could look at him better, one knee up on the wide, single, old-style front seat, "she was going on about how shy she is."
"Shy?"
"You know, the first time we kissed she needed the lights out."
"She's got bad acne," Thad observed.
"You think she's cute," I said rather defensively.
"I'm just saying."
"She has got bad acne. Anyway, so she's over the other night, and it's hot, and we're watching Cure videos and the blue light from the tee vee is just painting the walls –"
"You are killing me."
"– uh-huh, and we're kissing and I ask if she wants to fuck and she's like, she doesn't know and I'm like, well, do you fuck and she says, yes she had but she doesn't know if she can trust me and I say, I'm not asking her to trust me I'm asking her to fuck me –"
"You didn't say that."
"– maybe I didn't, I'm saying it now, though, but we crawl from the couch to the bed –"
"Why did you bother?"
"– why did? Because the couch is right in front of a window, you don't really want to hear this do you?"
"Keep going," Thad said, "I am piqued."
"That's what she said."
"Ha."
"So anyway, I've got her all nude and everything on my bed -"
"How are her tits?" Thad asked.
"– how are? They're nice, so everything –"
"Nice? They're nice? She has this killer cleavage."
"– yes, killer, I'm not talking about tits here, I am, I am trying to talk about fucking. You are talking about tits."
"You know who I really like?"
"You aren't interested in this story at all, are you."
"I am."
"I would like to know who you really like, though."
"I will tell you later."
"You won't change your mind about whoever she is?"
"I will not change my mind," Thad reassured me.
"So it's not going well. Her cunt, I dunno, it was too small or something –"
"Oh you'd like people to believe that."
"– and anyway, it was just not going well at all, it was uncomfortable and she said she wasn't sure if she could really do this, she said she wasn't really any good and anyway, she's shy, and I'm trying to calm her down and my dick is just straining against the latex here –"
"Ah safe sex, I was gonna ask."
"Why do you care?"
"Because I love you."
"Oh," I said, "that's sweet. Well, you know, these are the eighties and all, it's a matter of life and death."
"Thank you, George Michael."
"Don't you bad mouth George."
"Please go on."
"Well, this is the thing, so she lifts her legs above her fucking head! She just traps them behind her arms, outta nowhere, whoom, her feet are behind the fucking headboard, her navel is almost touching her own breasts and her cunt has become this wide open enormous gash, it's like five feet wide now and she looks up at me, and I'm gawking over the thing, and she says, will this help?"
Thad stopped in mid-drag to stare at me with incredulity for a long, dangerous, eyes off the road moment, and then began guffawing in the most athsmatic manner. I just grinned.
"I thought you'd like that," I said.
"Shy?" he asked.
"Very shy."
"Oh my god! So then what did you do?"
"I got fucking laid, Thad, I humped her 'til I bled, what do you think I did."
"Jesus. That's great."
"That's just sex, Thad."
"You know who I like?"
"She does this groovy thing with her tongue."
"Who?"
"Beth."
"You know who I like?"
"Who?"
"Do you know Maria B.?"
"No."
It was the first time I'd heard her name.
§
"Oh, Maria B.," I whispered softly into her ear. Late December, and I was pushing myself slowly into her.
She bared her teeth and hissed slightly, drawing in a sharp breath.
"Huh?" I asked, "Is, are you okay?" I leaned up a little, up on my hands, I looked into her concerned face.
"S'nothing, ah," she said, and the tension in her brow softened and relaxed. I began pumping a little faster, but it didn't seem to be going well.
"Huhn," she said, "I love you."
"Mmnf," I said, "yes, I love you, too, I'm so glad to see you." I was rocking my pelvis into hers, curving my spine my rest my mouth on one of her large nipples.
"Could I be on top?" she asked.
"Ha," I chuffed, "I love it when a woman asks me that."
We fumbled around each other on that bed, not too wide, a single person's bed for a single young woman. The curtains were closed, it was dark in her room and I didn't know where the edge of the bed was. I lay back, pinching skin, and she hopped up on top of me, mighty thighs straddling my wide hips, I put my hands onto her tiny waist and slid them up to her happy little tits.
"God I love that," she said, "yes, squeeze them."
She put me inside of her and made that face again.
"Okay?" I asked.
"Mmn, yes," she said, "it's better now."
And we began rocking in time. Her time. It was better. I was never very good at coming on the bottom, but now I was.
§
An hour later Maria was packing large amounts of her things into a bag and I was put my loafers back on, getting ready to walk the half mile back to my apartment to get my car. It was the first moving day and we would be starting slow.
"Have you told your folks yet?" I asked, putting on my huge coat.
"No," she said, futzing with some shoes, "not yet."
"But you will, right?" I asked. "I mean, soon?"
"Yes, soon."
"Today would be nice."
"There's a rush?"
"Yes," I said, sitting close to her on the bed. "Because I have already told my parents you're moving in, and you know, news travels fast."
"The length of the state?"
"It's a small state."
"It's not that small," she said. "What did they say about it?"
"Well, only Mom was home at first, and she said she knew this would happen and did we need anything to fix up the place with."
Maria stopped what she was doing to look at me with a confusing smile. "She didn't."
"You don't know my mother. Dad called when he got home to give his congratulations."
Maria shoved a handful of undies into the side-pocket of a suitcase. "You'd think we were getting married."
"Oh, no," I said, "too soon. We've only been together two months. I told them that would be at least another two."
Maria just laughed.
§
December 31, 1989. New Year's Eve. 11:59 PM, the last minute of the decade. Maria and I were walking very very fast through the biting cold in order to reach a big house on Mentor Street. There was a party there, a New Year's Eve party – apparently it was one of the longest running New Year's Eve parties in Clemson's history. Lots of brothers and sisters, Clemson natives who also went on to attend the university, renewed the same lease over and again and their end of the year bashes had become such legend that it became THE place to be for every Clemson High graduate or anyone else who happened to return to school before classes started the following week.
"So," I said, "am I going to know anyone here?"
"Probably," Maria told me, "at least the odds are very good. I'll probably know a lot of people. There's so many people I want to introduce you to."
"I know," I said, "I'm excited about it."
A brash gush of wind thrust down the street and I pulled my coat closer to me and yanked down my hat to keep it from blowing back the way we had come. The house, our destination, set up on a little hill rising from the street, was still a thousand yards away.
"Have I told you about Jo?" she asked.
"I think so," I said, "which one is she?"
"The one in New York. The artist."
"Oh, the one with the green hair?"
"It was green the last time I saw her," she said.
A rousing cheer of human voices rang out from the house. Everywhere there was the sound of people yelling, fireworks being set off, and further in the distance we heard the discharge of shotguns.
"Hey," she said, "happy new year!"
"Come here," I said, and stopped her in the middle of the street. I grappled for her puffy coat and we both smiled and pressed our faces into the other. Small, playful kisses and one big tongue wrestle, her hot spit warming the inside of my chilledhead.
"Welcome to the nineties," I said.
"Strange, huh?" she said.
"I have a feeling they're going to be better than the eighties," I said, "with you in them."
"Hmn," she said, grinning wildly. And we headed up the hill to the house.
Parties. Such unpredictable chemical events. If I know everyone at a party, and I'm feeling good, it can be like Hollywood. Lots of kissing and talking and drinking and it's a time to be magnanimous.
"Hey what's up? How's the project? You look FABulous, baby."
Then there was the party I met Maria at, last July. It was a cast party for a how I wasn't in. I was only running props and no one there, except the host, who had invited me personally, knew me.
I put a six-pack of cheap beer in the fridge and took an import sitting next to it for myself. I looked around the room. It was too bright in that apartment, I could see everyone too clearly. No one said hi. Everyone was sitting about, talking quietly. The music was on low. I saw a familiar face (one that had been pointed out to me, not one I knew personally) sitting on the couch, and an empty chair next to it. I took the chair.
"Uh, hi," I said.
"Hello," she said.
"You must be Maria."
"Yes," she said, for indeed it was.
"I'm a friend of Thad's."
"Oh," she said, "yes, I know you, you're, Kael is it?"
"Yes," I said, "Kael Goodman."
"That's a strange name."
"I'm a strange guy," I said. "Kael Goodman, the Irish Jew."
She just stared at me.
"Ha ha ha ha ha," I said.
Awkward pause.
"You make a very good bird," I said, "in the show."
"Thank you," she said. "You go to school here?"
"Yeah, I'm in theater."
"How do you like it, I think I might have to spend some time here." She said it like it was an impending prison term, but hey, she grew up here, her take on the place was probably different from mine.
"Oh, it's great," I started, "I like to think I've learned a lot. I mean, I hope I have after three years but sometimes I think I'm doing all the learning myself. That sounded stupid – what I mean is, it's like you can just skate through most of these courses, almost all of the profs are, like, complete dummies and they'll give you at least a passing grade no matter what shit you sling at them, excuse me, I meant excrement, but, I mean, do you see what I'm saying? I'd like to think I'm a pretty intelligent guy, you know. I mean, I read for God's sake, how many people can you say that about? I guess the point is, I'd like to think this is all going somewhere, oh, I'm sorry, did I get any of that on you, I'm sorry, and who knows, maybe when it's all said and done, I'll have made something...of...all...this."
Death.
"That's very fascinating," she said, and turned to speak to someone else.
Oh, and did I mention all of the assholes I've met here?
This party, however, was something else. It looked like the kind of shindig where someone could have swung from the chandelier, though no one did, and had there been a chandelier, which there wasn't. (Oh, great, and now I'm Douglas Adams.) The place was packed with teenagers and twenty-somethings, all drinking and smoking and shouting and laughing and eating and drinking. It was bright, sure, not dingy enough for my tastes, but the music was loud, the floor was filthy and the company was young and degenerate.
"Hey!" Maria was saying. "God how are you? You look great! Yes – not since – you were there, too? Oh my GOD!"
I just followed on behind, and it wasn't such a bad place to be.
"Have you met my boyfriend? This is my new boyfriend. Kael, I've got someone for you to meet, Frank, Bob, Jim, this (dramatic pause) is my new boyfriend, Kael."
Boyfriend. I hadn't been called that, excuse me, I hadn't let myself be called that in a few years. It felt nice. It had a pleasant ring. Kael, Maria's new boyfriend. My coat was still on as she took me by the hand and led me through the streaming crowd of immediate post-midnight revelers. She introduced me to a skinny guy, about her age, with a wild mop of frenetically curly blonde hair.
"Kael, this is Lewis."
We shook hands. I smiled.
"Hey!" he said. "Heeey, I know you – you were in, whatsis, 'Balm in Gilead' last semester, weren't you?"
"Yeah," I said, "that was me."
"Oh Maria," Lewis said, "oh hey, he was fantastic, you played that, what, he was a dope addict –"
"Well," I said, in my studied 'demure', "they were all dope addicts."
"Dopey," Maria said.
"Yeah!" Lewis said, "you were fuckin'-A fantastic, man, let me shake your hand!"
"Oh, we just did," I said, "I don't want to peak too soon."
"Ha ha HA!" Lewis laughed. "Oh Maria, I love him, he's hysterical!
Lewis was a fun drunk. I would like to have had him around at all my parties, if only to laugh at everything I said.
"Hey you," came an unfamiliar voice behind me, and Maria cried out in surprise and rushed past me to hug the new arrival. I turned to see a small woman dressed in a black, second hand coat, but that was what I noticed first. It was her electric pink hair that stood out like a neon beacon crying "NOTICE ME."
She was almost a whole foot shorter than me, and once she and Maria disengaged I could see her face. She was thin and small. Small nose, small mouth, and HUGE glasses that were perched on the very tip of her nose, dying to fall off.
"Kael," Maria said, "this is Jo."
"Oh THIS is Jo," I said, "I would never have guessed. It's a pleasure to meet you."
"And you as well," Jo said, "Maria's told me a lot about you."
"I've heard a lot about you, too," I said, "I thought your hair was green."
"Well," Jo said, not blinking, not looking away for a moment, "you know, Maria hasn't seen me for a while, what has it been, a year?"
"'Bout that," Maria said.
"And after all," Jo said, "it is the nineties."
"Hell," I said, "I would have guessed 1983."
"Not in Athens," she said.
"But you live in New York City," I said, giving particular weight to those last three words and letting my eyes bulge.
"Big sigh," she said, "why must people always fear the unusual."
"I apologize," I said, "my own flavor was black, black hair, black eyemake-up, and that was only a few years ago."
"You don't strike me as the type."
"You just met me," I said, "what would you know about my type?"
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a pack of English cigarettes. "Mind if I smoke?"
"It's not my party," I said, and I leaned in to whisper in her ear, "and I'm dying to join you, but I told Maria I quit."
"Did you?" she said, sticking a smoke in her face, making her already quite stuffed up voice even more so.
"Uh, yes," I said, "it's been almost a month. I don't want to be a slave to anything in the world I live in."
"Except Maria," she said, and struck a match.
I blushed and smiled tightly.
"Except Maria," I said.
§
"What did you think of my friends?" Maria asked. It was an hour or so later (maybe three, we were looped) and we were stumbling our way through the brick paved Clemson streets back to my, uh, our apartment.
"Wonderful," I said, "all of them, just charming."
"You were getting pretty bold back there," she said.
"I was?"
"Sure, when Jo and Lewis and us, when we were all standing around there, weren't you feeling me up?"
"Ha!" I said, "no."
"Oh come on." She looked at me to see I wasn't lying. "You were squeezing my ass."
"I'd know if I was squeezing your ass."
"Shit!" she said, "it must have been Lewis!"
"Probably," I said, "it wasn't me. I don't think it was Jo, either."
"You two hit it off?" she asked.
"She's just the type of lithe, androgynous pretentious art-fag I would have loved to try and nail when I was a sophomore," I said. "I think she's great."
"I knew you'd like her."
§
Maria and I slouched about our tiny love-nest of an apartment. I had a viscious attack of the late-post-New Year's Eve-drunken munchies and had just toasted and buttered a bagel. I put it on one of those turquoise plastic plates I had discovered in the closet when I had first moved in, and stepped into our living room.
The tee vee was on, perched atop a milk crate. The tee vee had a nineteen inch screen. The milk crate was sixteen inches across. The milk crate would have looked a lot more comfortable and secure on top of the tee vee. Maria looked very comfortable propped up on the couch, her big eyelids slowly dripping down her blue eyes. She was watching hippies fooling around with the special effects generator on Clemson cable access. I sat down next to her and set my plate in my lap. The space heater behind the couch blew a pleasant gust of hot, dry air up my neck, which was only now beginning to thaw from the five blocks we had briskly strode back from the party. I peered at the tee vee.
"Are those hippies?" I asked.
"I went to high school with most of those guys," she said.
"Right," I said, "and the ones you didn't go to high school with, I did." A scruffy looking kid was stuffing mustard into his mouth while the others interviewed each other. There was lots of tie-dye everywhere. "Do they think they're being creative?"
"Is that a bagel?" she asked, leaning her shoulder into my thigh. She tossed her thick frizzy hair around her face and smiled up at me. Straight teeth.
"Yeah," I said, smiling down at her suspiciously, "Why, did you want it?"
"I'll take half."
I handed her the plate. "Take the whole thing," I said, getting up, "I'm feeling big."
"You're looking big," she said, getting a prime view of my backside as I rose. "You need new pants."
"I need to lose ten pounds," I said, heading into the kitchen.
"You need to stop taking me out to dinner," she said, munching her bagel.
"I always went out to dinner," I called out, "only now I have some lovely company." I stuck my head into the fridge the relocate the bagels, which had mysterious hidden themselves behind the butter.
"I love you, Kael Goodman," she said, sober, for a moment. I popped my head up over the top of the refrigerator door and looked at her, squinting, my glasses left by the answering machine.
Lying almost sideways on the couch, our couch in our apartment, was the most beautiful woman in my life. Where the hell had I gotten off – young, sexy round face, she had dimples! The woman had dimples – her heritage was Greek, Irish, Native American even, mostly Greek though, her skin was pale and her eyes were huge and her nose was long and straight. Oh yes, she had a little mustache, most women do you know, but when she smiled at me her face was bright and shiny and even now, plastered and stinky from party smoke, I could tell she adored me and I was so happy she was there.
It hadn't been easy, I admit. One night, not long before, I'll never forget this, we were at her old apartment, maybe last November. We'd been together a month. We were lying on her bed, facing each other, my shirt was off and she was running her fingers along all the twisted scars and bumps on my chest. They were remnants of severe acne scarring, these 'war wounds' were still quite red and visible. I had a few stray hairs sprouting along my chest, connecting my nipples. Her plaid shirt was all unbuttoned, no bra, her little breasts peeking out, her big nips still hard from minutes before when I'd had her flat on her back, licking and sucking at them, making her coo. I drew a line from her navel up between her breasts and up to her chin. She was smiling.
"You know, Kael," she said, "I really like you."
"I like you, too, Maria," I said.
"I can't believe you made me dinner."
"I'm a sensitive eighties kinda guy," I said, "you have to know how to do those sorts of things these days. If you want to get laid, anyway."
"Not tonight," she said.
"I understand."
"I'm going back to my old school this weekend," she said.
"I see," I said, and moved my face in and bit her lightly on the chin. She growled approvingly. As I sucked at her neckline I said slurped out, "going to visit what's his name?"
"He's my boyfriend, Kael."
I backed away a few inches. "And what am I?" I asked.
"Oh, I don't know," she said, "I love spending time with you, but I plan to go back there after a semester or two and I really do love him, you have to understand that."
I laughed in a disaffected manner. "I know, I know, and I am happy to entertain you while you wait."
"Yeah," she said, "that's it, you're my little entertainer."
My mouth twitched slightly. It almost gave me away.
"Ha," I burst out suddenly, "well, yes, I do know what my place is. Kael Goodman, pleaser of women."
"You're very good at it."
"Honey," I said, "I'm the best."
A half hour later I was in my car driving back to my apartment. My face was tense, my brow furrowed, my knuckles blanched, gripping at the wheel. I began to slam my palm against the dashboard as hot angry tears spewed out of my eyes and streamed down my face.
"Dammit!" I howled, "no, no, NO! I do not want to do this again!" My voice was loud and unbridled, phlegm collected in my throat which had completely closed into itself, and I had difficulty breathing. I blubbered and bawled little a child, trying desperately to keep my car on my side of the road as I sobbed without care.
"I don't want this," I groaned. "Never, never, never, don't let me do this." I tried to sort through all the horrible, pathetic and sad things I was feeling.
"I do not want to fall in love," I sighed.
But I did. I already had. Unbelievable – there I was at one thirty on a school night, banging down Alex's door (she lived right across the street) still sniffling and teary-eyed. Alex had been asleep but she knew something was wrong when she opened the door. I asked if I could spend the night and she said sure and I curled up next to her, it was very strange, I hadn't been in the same bed with her since we'd last had sex, for the last time, the previous June, and this wasn't exactly the same circumstance. She dropped right off and I stared out the window trying to think of anything except Maria.
And here we were two months later and she was mine, sitting on the couch, watching stupid homemade tee vee and she said she loved me.
I was toasting myself a bagel when there was a knock at our door. It was Humphrey, Maria's childhood playmate, former Eagle Scout, present day Communist.
"Hey, come on in," I said.
"Kael, right?" he said, shaking my hand as he stepped in. Humphrey was a hulking thing, a big long mass of blonde hair and a straggly thick beard, but you could still see the little kid in his eyes. He had an uncomfortable self-effacing laugh whenever he spoke.
"Yeah," I said, ushering him in and closing the door against the cold. "Warm yourself up. Happy New Year."
"Happy New Year," he said. "Boy, it sure is low in here, isn't it?"
"Is that Humphrey?" Maria called from the living room.
"Yeah, honey," I said, "and yes, well, it used to be a basement, you know. Maria's in there, watch your head as you go in."
"Thanks, ooh, is that a bagel in there?" he asked, pointing at the toaster with one hand, removing his enormous army jacket with the other.
"Uh, yes," I said, "I was making it for you." Humphrey went into the living room and I buttered the bagel for him. As I was putting another into the toaster, there was another knock at the door, a very loud one.
It was Claire.
"Well," I said, letting her in, "I didn't expect to see you tonight."
"Who's that?" Maria yelled from the living room.
"It's me," Claire said.
"Who?" Maria bellowed.
"It's Claire," I said, shutting the door again.
"Claire?" Maria laughed.
"Never mind her," I said, "she's drunk. So am I."
"That makes three of us," Claire said, and sat down at the kitchen table. I just stood there and looked at her.
"Why are you here?" I asked.
"Happy New Year," she said, smiling up at me benignly.
Claire was a freshman here at the University of Ohio. During the summer of 1988 I had a very, very brief thing with her. We were both doing summer theater together and she'd come on to me very heavily at a cast party I had thrown. I felt very awkward and self-conscious making out with a high school student, but, you know, I did anyway. But it didn't last very long and it didn't get very far, but that didn't keep her from making my life hell whenever we ran into each other.
"Happy New Year," I said, "why are you here?"
"Apparently I missed you at the big party."
"I missed you, too, Claire," I said, "would you like a beer or something?"
"Yes," she said, and I went to get her one out of the fridge. I could see Maria and Humphrey talking, she on the couch, he sitting cross-legged on the floor next to her. They were eating bagels. Maria saw the look of helplessness on my face and just smiled and rolled her eyes.
"This is a nice place," Claire said, accepting the beer, and then taking a huge, long suck off of it.
"It's nice," I said, not sitting down, just leaning against the sink, against the cracked brown contact paper that disguised whatever damage had been done to it by previous tenants. The toaster went "ca-chuunk" and went to put it on another plastic plate, this one peach colored. None of the plates were the exact same size.
"Suplised to see me?" she asked.
"Yes," I said, scraping and buttering my bagel at the sink, "I haven't seen you since, well since the last time I saw Thad I suppose. Some time last semester."
"We aren't dating anymore," she said, squinting her beady little brown eyes at me.
"I know you two aren't dating anymore, Claire."
"Why were you such a DICK to me, Kael?" she asked. The weight she put on the word 'dick' made me wince and I cast another side-long glance into the other room. They were laughing about something. I was hoping it wasn't me.
"I'd like to think I was being honest with you," I said.
"You dumped me really fast," she said, "you didn't need to do that." I turned around and set my plate on the table before going to get myself a beer.
"We weren't even 'dating', Claire," I said, rummaging in the fridge.
"Sure we were," she said.
"Ha!" I said. "We only did it once." I turned back and saw she had slid the plate with my bagel on it to her side of the round table. "Don't touch that," I said, menacingly.
She began to pick up the bagel. I lunged across the room at her and she swiftly lifted the pate up and stepped back out of her chair and against the far wall by the fire extinguisher.
"Don't you fucking DARE eat that," I said.
"Ha ha ha," she snickered. I countered around the table towards her. She slid around the other side, stepping over boxes and huge undiscarded piles of the U of O Examiner.
"I'm warning you," I said.
"You're warning me what?" she said as she slipped further around the table, foot crossing over unsteady foot.
"It's been a long night, and you can stay here and abuse me, if you wish."
"Oh, I do."
"But all I want is THAT FUCKING BAGEL!"
She stopped where she stood, in front of the fridge, and looked into the next room.
"Hey Maria," she said.
"Hello, Claire."
"Hiya Humphrey."
"Nice to see you Claire."
"So," Claire said, leveling her gaze at me, "is SHE here now? She's your main thing?"
"Give me that bagel, woman."
"She your new GIRLFRIEND?" she asked.
Conversation in the next room had stopped. I was pressed, this was the challenge of my collegiate sexual career.
"Yes," I said, "yes Claire, Maria is my girlfriend. She lives here. She belongs here and you do not." I stood up straight, almost hitting my head on the ceiling. "Now," I said, taking a deep breath, "just...please...give me the bagel. Give me the bagel and no one gets hurt."
Her face dropped and a slight quiver came to her thin bottom lip. She slammed the plate onto the table.
"Here," she said, "take your stupid bagel."
"Thank you," I said, even though the impact of her action had caused one half of it to fall onto the floor. Claire then turned, picked up her beer and slammed out my front door.
Humphrey quickly walked through the kitchen, his coat half on, a partially chewed bagel sticking out of his mouth.
"Fee you, Kael," he said, heading for the door.
"Oh, no, Humphrey," I said, "you don't have to go."
"Oh don't worry," he said, I understand." And with that he closed the door behind him. I watched him go, and looked back at Maria, smiling wryly at me, still just sitting on the couch. I picked up my plate. I retrieved the bagel from the floor (it landed buttered side up, thank you) and dusted it off. I looked at it. I looked at Maria. I took a big, comical, tiger-sized bite out of it, complete with "Aaarumph!" sound effect and Maria giggled.
Fwump, I sat on the couch next to her, and she put an arm around me.
I whimpered slightly.
"Aw," she said, "my poor little Casanova."
"I didn't mean to drive your friend away," I said, chewing mournfully.
"You didn't," she said, "he told me he couldn't stay long."
"I told her," I said, in my best child-like voice, "that, that you were my GIRLfriend."
"Yes," she said, "I heard. The neighbors heard."
"Wanna have sex?" I asked.
"Do you?"
"No," I said, "not really, not now."
"Then let's just watch tee vee."
"What's on?" I asked.
"You are."
And I looked at the screen. And there I was. It was a little project I had done for access the summer before.
"Jesus Christ," I said. I was in my underpants, delivering a monologue I made up on the spot about insects or something. "They'll let anyone on that channel."
"That's this apartment, isn't it?"
"Sure is."
"How much did that cost?"
"Nothing," I said, "They just let you borrow the equipment and you do the rest. Hey, and that reminds me."
"Yaas," she drawled.
"Mind if I videotape us fucking?" I asked.
"Hmn," she said, "well sure, why not."
We watched me talk for a little while longer in silence.
"Hey," she said, "I just thought of something."
"Yaas?"
"Who gets the tape if we break up?"
I looked at her and smiled. I looked down at her lap. I looked back up.
"You worried about that?" I asked.
"No," she said, "not right now."
"Kael's Diary" is copyright 1994 Millennium Productions / Kael Goodman (at745@cleveland.freenet.edu). Use of this work in any commercial venue (electronic or otherwise) is forbidden without permission. "Kael's Diary" is a work of fiction and the people and situations described herein are from the imagination of the author.
June, 1994: "Closer" part one
Who knew I could ever be an adult? Oh sure, they always tell you you're supposed to grow up, there are all of these so- called adult people walking around as proof of the kind of person you should grow up to be. But fuck all that, all right? I'm supposed to be getting serious now, right? Well, in my own way I am. I sure can look the part. A little flabby here and there, and my golden hair is getting quite thin indeed on top. I'll be bald before I'm thirty, I'm sure, if I live so long. But for now I am twenty-five, going on twenty-six, headed for the Millennium, and I'm gonna go down screaming.
There I stood, wearing a cut-off pair of Dockers, an old army belt, an over-sized T-shirt and a huge, structureless cotton jacket that hung down past the ragged cuffs of those pants. Combat boots, large wire glasses and long hair that defied the pre- described onset of male pattern baldness. I stood, for a moment, outside that old building, in that bad section of Cleveland – I was there because I worked there, me and everyone else sitting around outside it on that balmy June evening, waiting for the audience to arrive. It was a local theater house, one of the small and less reputable ones, and we happy band of twenty-nothing aged men and women had made it our base of operations. The younger generation has no clear goals, no clear objectives? They just couldn't see them. But then, any goal that doesn't include ruling the world and enforcing your will on others always seems to confuse Baby Boomers.
Take President Bill, for example. Oh, I supported him, and I still do. But you have to admit that's what he's up to. That's what all those who aspire to power attempt to do, but Clinton and his whole generation aren't content to just rule, they want to mold the world in their self-righteous image. My g-g-generation? We're slackers, losers, we can't get our shit together. Uh-huh. Just watch us. Oh sure, we'll prove you "right", who can actually change the world? But cut us a break and don't turn a blind eye to all the hard work we do.
I say I stood there, outside the theater, for a moment. That's because the next moment I had to dodge yet another of a series of excruciatingly embarrassing blows inflicted by Jackie, with whom I was having an amateur boxing match.
Jackie had been with our renegade theater troupe since the previous summer and you couldn't call her beautiful. A pixie, a sprite, a wood nymph, are these descriptions insulting? A remnant sale fashion sense and a strong body odor. She stood five foot two, her normally brownish-reddish hair now dyed to a fluorescent blondish-orangish with deep brownish-reddish roots.
Her hair was like that of a six year-old boy, unkempt and dirty, even if she owned a comb it would have been hopeless. Oh, and a voice like a demonic child –Linda Hunt meets that dwarf from "Poltergeist", on a pack-a-day habit. Odd freckles and moles, one clear bump on her upturned nose, and teeth that looked like they had never seen the fuzzy end of a toothbrush.
Jackie was a mess. And she gave every boy a hard-on.
Right then, she, holding two tight little fists, one clutching a lit cigarette, receiving a playful head slap to the forehead from me, tried kicking my shins. I lashed down and grabbed her by the ankle. A normal person would have flipped out, panicked, lost balance and cried out in surprise. Jackie put her weight on her good foot, leaned into to my torso, and began pummeling my ribcage. I let go of her foot.
This continued for a few minutes. Sid, Ryan, also hanging around outside, waiting, begging for someone to finally show up to see our performance, began to get worried that if someone did show up, all they would see was that there was a fight going on outside the theater, figure there's a good reason why they had never seen this part of Cleveland, and move on.
"Hey guys," Sid said, "take it inside."
"You hear that?" I said, deflecting yet another hit aimed for my solar plexus. "We're not being professional."
"You started this," Jackie said, pushing me with one free hand, "you smacked my head."
I reached out and grabbed her hand that wasn't holding a cigarette. "That's because you were being a PRICK."
She writhed in my hands and began kicking again. I let go and stepped back.
"Stop?" I asked, smiling.
"Whatever," she said, and said down on the curb, with her back to the nasty, city-maintained "beautification" (see: "dying shrub"). I sat down next to her.
"You guys cool?" Sid asked, sitting a few feet away.
"Shut up," Jackie said, "sometimes Kael needs his butt whupped."
"I was kicking your ass," I said.
"I had a cigarette in my hand," she said, taking another draw off of it. "Do you want one?"
"Nope," I said, "thanks." I hadn't smoked in two months. It was looking like I might quit for good this time.
A deep, dark, maroon van pulled up to the curb, and we all sat back. The driver's door sprung open and Gail popped out.
"Like it?" she asked.
"Wow," Jackie said, "that's great!"
"Kel and I picked it up this afternoon from the airport, it's so huge inside," Gail said.
Jackie flicked her cigarette to the sidewalk, and calmly stood up. She stepped in front of me, and pushed me backwards into the bushes.
I yelped out in surprise as her wee fists began pummeling the living shit out of me.
"You crazy little bitch!" I cried.
"How do you like that, huh?" she barked in that great, hoarse, pinched voice, landing on me, battering me with a variety of punches and slaps. I flew my hands up in a weak defense. A swarm of bees rose from the nettles and flew about us.
"Get her the fuck off me!" I yelled, grabbing onto her wrists and pulling her down close to me, but she just kept on smacking me about. I managed to fling her to one side and get to standing, but she was already there. Sid leaped up and stood between us.
"Oh get away," she cried at him.
"Cut it out, you two," he said.
"Oh, MAN," I whined, petulantly, "we were having fun."
§
The plan was simple. We'd perform our Saturday night, eleven o'clock show, hop in this rented van sometime around one in the morning and drive to Chicago. Our show, consisting of originally choreographed and constantly updated dance slash comedy routines, had been running every week for seven months. We all needed a little vacation, and the cheapest one available was a short jaunt to Chicago. Those of us who had work managed to take a few days off, driving non-stop, the five of use who were going would drive and hour apiece and sleep (yeah, right) the rest of the way. We'd arrive Sunday morning and leave on Tuesday, flopping on the floor at friend's apartment, shopping and seeing as much alternative, inspirational Big City theater as we could.
Our show that evening was another disappointment. The media had a thing against our little theater, and we found it impossible to get any kind of free exposure. The usual trickle of ten people came in, saw our show (we jumped and sang, danced and pontificated, moved our tiny audience to tears and got huge belly laughs) told us it was the most original and innovative thing they had every seen in their lives and why were there so many empty seats?
Oh well.
They left, we turned out the lights, packed the van, and took off for the second city.
§
I love driving, late at night, my favorite music playing on the stereo, a-c turned off, the window cracked open after midnight. I've had a lot of experience taking long trips, driving to or from Clemson as often as I did for six years, that one time I went all the way to Florida, stoppin once for a ten minute nap. Nineteen hours was all it took, left at nine in the evening, I was in Bahama City by dinner the next day. Never doing that again, I'm sure.
This time it would be for just an hour. I went first – the van was signed in my name. Jackie drove shotgun, Ryan sat in the second, expansive seat, Satch and Gail tried to catch a few zees in the larger, more secluded back seat. Sid couldn't afford the trip or the time. Ryan, our seventeen year-old technical prodigy, by far the youngest member of our modest theater company, had purchased a copy of Madonna's contribution to the "Dick Tracy" hype back in 1990, "I'm Breathless". It was one dollar in a bargain bin, and we all listened to it. Funny. Ryan the high school student, Jackie, the lower class punk and me, an affluent middle class snob, and we all knew every word to that obscure collection of great Steven Sondheim melodies and cheesy Madonna pop tunes.
"Would you knock it off, please? ZIP! Thank you."
"Hey," Jackie said, picking up her purple, rattan, oh so very bohemian knapsack. "What does anyone else want to hear?"
"That's not done yet," I informed her.
"Yeah," Ryan chimed in.
"I don't care," she said, "I'm sick of this."
"Put in the 'Twin Peaks' soundtrack," I said, "as long as we're on this whole 1990 motif."
"You and your thing about chronology," Jackie said, "it's a little tired."
"Hey, I'm a little tired," I said, "it fits. Anyone see a sign for a rest stop?"
"In about two miles," Ryan said.
"Coolee-cool."
Since Ryan was attending a public school for the arts, he was able to tell his teachers that this was a special field trip he was taking with the theater he worked for, which was, when I thought about it, true. He was a hefty boy, almost taller than me, and a much greater distance around. A red smear tore down each cheek, just like the kind I had when I was younger, a tell-tale flush that at the slightest moment of insecurity would flare up into twin admissions of shame or embarrassment. Mine had died down a little as I got older, and whether this was self-confidence manifesting itself or just part of the aging process, I was glad to be without them. Poor kid. They have the emotional scarring capability of a hard-on in tight jeans, only you can't put your books in front of them.
We stopped the car at the next rest stop, still miles from the Ohio-Indiana border, and everyone switched places. Jackie took the driver's seat, and once I came back from the pop machine I found Ryan already waiting to sit shotgun. Satch and Gail continued to snooze in the back. Ryan had no license yet, and so the two of them would be taking us the rest of the way into Chicago. I sat in the middle seat, and the three of us continued our late-night pow-wow.
"Who put this piece of shit music on?" Jackie asked.
"It's Julee Cruise, it's 'Twin Peaks', man," I said.
"It's fucked is what it is."
"You're ugly," I said, "you know that, Jackie? You're so ugly, it goes down to your soul."
"Whatever."
"If it means anything," Ryan kicked in, "I don't think you're ugly."
"Yeah, well," I said, "we all know what you think."
Twin cheek flare-ups. Poor, poor kid.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Jackie asked, hitting the cigarette lighter.
"Yeah, what's that supposed to mean," Ryan asked, not a little defensively.
"I just thought, you know Ryan, we've been through this," I said.
"No, what?" Ryan said, turning in his seat to look at me.
"It's about your thing, you know, with boys." I said flatly.
"Oh, fuck you," he said, turning back around.
"No," I said, "I'm sorry, I keep bringing it up –"
"You've got to leave him alone," Jackie laughed.
"– it's just," I continued, "Jackie has got this whole Dennis the Menace thing going with her hair and all, it just made sense –"
"Thanks," Jackie said, mock offended.
"I'm sorry," I said, sitting back and throwing up my hands in a mocking sort of acquiescence, "I'm sorry, I just thought it needed to be said."
"The only one here with a thing for boys is you," Ryan said, trying to rise to the occasion.
"Well," I said, a little sombered, "there's no need to be hateful."
"Whatever."
"I mean, when I make assumptions on your sexuality," I just couldn't stop this, "I don't mean them as insults."
Ryan just sat there and stewed.
"You're so full of shit," Jackie said.
"I'm just trying to be helpful, I said.
"You can help me," Ryan said.
"Anything," I said, "how?"
He turned back to face me, his cheeks turned a deep purple.
"Shut the fuck up," he said.
I thought for a moment.
I nodded to him in closed mouth, wide-eyed, excited agreement.
§
An hour and a half later, getting on four in the morning, Jackie pulled our maroon rental into the next available rest stop and we all took a little stretcher. It was Gail's turn, more or less awake and refreshed, and it was me in the very back seat when everyone got back from the bathroom.
"Hey, Jackie," I said, "come spoon with me."
"Oh-kay," she said, quacking like a ten yea-old.
"Oh, man, "Ryan said, "that means I'm in the middle again."
"Did you want to spoon with me?" I asked.
"What do you think?"
"I wouldn't dare to presume."
Jackie stumbled into the back with me. I was lying with my head to the port side of the van (uh, that's left to everyone else), my back to the seat, on my side, and Jackie flopped comfortably into my arms. My knees were a little cramped, I had one foot here, another a few feet below and in front, I wrapped my arms around her, my left under her head, that greasy, glowing, golden hair under my nose. She smelled of patchouli, strawberry air freshner and a lap around the block. I held her close, this man-child, this freak of nature. A scratch on my calf, inflicted during the bee-bush episode, rested uncomfortably on the back of the upholstered seat. I fell asleep for a half an hour.
§
"Aaaagh," I said.
"Mm, what," she mummbered.
"My leg is way asleep."
"Wanna move?"
"Mm-hmn."
We shifted about. I tried putting my long legs anywhere they would fit, but it was pointless. We switched positions, her in the back, holding me, with my legs dangling out over the edge of the seat. That wouldn't work. I ended up lying on my back, a little of me hanging on the edge of the seat, I looked up into the ceiling of the van, my left hand reaching over onto my stomach, she lay next to me, on her side, back against the seat, her mouth an inch from my ear.
One of her legs was tucked under mine. The other lay on top. She held me in her arms. Her right hand gripped me around my ribs, like she was helping me stay on the seat. She nestled me close.
Her hand gripped my chest. Her breathing was a continual repetition of tiny sighs in my ear, never losing tempo, only increasing in volume.
Her knees squeezed together. That involuntary, right? I couldn't help changing my breathing only slightly. I had been asleep only a minute or two earlier. I was delirious. My chest rose with uncertainty.
I turned my head to hers. I looked into her face. Her jaw, slack, that small mouth, those chubby little lips, bucky little front teeth, nicotine stained and nasty and adorable. Her eyes were closed, her breathing heightened but regular. I opened my mouth (what? what? what am I doing this for?) and drew my lower lip against hers, and squeezing both of my lips against her lower one, she pulled her lips together – our faces were apart, our lips cleared the distance, making a teeny little handshake.
We did it again, she still kept her eyes shut, were we both asleep? No, I know I wasn't, her arms pulled me closer and I swiveled my body to face her, and our lips pulled and pushed, kissing again and again, tongues darting slowly, I put my arm around her and caressed her little body and her hand came up to touch my face. Her legs scissored around mine and the breathing started to seriously pick up in speed.
And now it was a grope fest, albeit a slow one. I wrestled my hand into her buttoned up, pea green shirt in a lame attempt to fondle her tiny little breasts. She continued to kiss me every odd moment, taking my lips in hers like a hungry bird, awkwardly accepting a small morsel of food.
The truth is, this was not the first time we had kissed. The first was on New Year's Day Night. That had been a Saturday night and she and I and Satch and Gail had sat around after the show, drinking what was left of the champagne and talking until two. After those two had gone to bed, Jackie and I sat up longer, talking it up until I had the balls to ask her to kiss me. At that point all I really knew was that I was horny, Jackie looked real sweet in the candlelight, and Maria had really pissed me off on New Year's Eve.
But those were just simple kisses. I wanted to pursue the matter, I tried getting my hands all over her, but Jackie talked me down and I figured our relationship would be an on and off series of months where we punched and insulted each other, and isolated moments where we would just kiss. And being one of the world's great kissers, a man who truly enjoyed just necking for hours on end, I couldn't complain. Because she was good. Her teeth were rotten, she smoked like a chimney, smelled like a man and looked like a boy, but she kissed like a goddess.
I was not getting her normal kisses here, however. The breathing was all wrong, less than assured, desiring more. I forgot about her tits, they were nothing – it seemed like they were nothing to her. She kept tugging my lips with hers, urging me on –
– I glanced upwards. The boy in the middle seat must surely be asleep, right? –
– we hadn't said anything. She gripped my behind and pressed my groin firmly against hers –
– and the music was playing, and the windows open, Satch and Gail must be oblivious, they're miles away –
– I tucked my pelvis back and rested a hand between her legs. Hot, very hot, she must be steaming inside these tattered old jeans. The soft, worn cotton was already damp with sweat, and what else..? I slid my hand between her and she opened her legs, one resting on the seat, the other against its back, and rubbed where I could only assume the trouble was...
...and there was a hole.
No. No, you're kidding. I brushed a finger against it. Pubic hair. No underwear? A hole?! She has GOT to be kidding. I was beside myself with disbelief, awe, complete befuddlement and just a little bit of restrained laughter.
Is this the trick hole? This woman has a trap chute in her jeans?
She continued to pulse with almost imperceptible earnest. I withheld my anxiety and pressed my middle finger into the hole.
Wet. Stewy wet. Swampy wet. If she didn't want me prying into her jeans, violating her through a secret hole that just barely (not even barely, let's face it) allowed my bony middle finger, it was the last thing she was telegraphing. My face was less than an inch to hers, my mouth less close, no more kissing, just sharing of breath, my eyes only slits as I drove as much of my left middle finger as I could into her. It was easy, in comparison with the tight sheath of thin cotton I had just passed my finger through, her secret part was warm and soft and slippery, I pressed into her like so much microwaved Cool Whip. I pronged her as carefully as I could, my finger up and into her jeans as far as I could put it. My lips brushed against hers and they trembled slightly.
But I knew this wasn't enough. I withdrew the offending finger, bent it as much as I could, the tight denim catching around my flesh just below the second joint, that bulky ring on the adjacent finger getting in the way, and I rubbed the tip, fingernail and all, in a valiant attempt to find THE CLITORIS.
The free fingers of her hand were kneading my shoulder and back. Her eyelids opened imperceptibly, those dark brown orbs now completely black between slightly parted lids. She panted straight into my mouth, closed her eyes again and pressed her face into mine, firmly mashing my lips with hers.
Pulsing, pulsing, the blood was not making an easy way into my crooked middle digit, and I found my mark – at least, I could only assume that's what it was. Our noses touched, we shuffed sharply down each other's throats, our chests slammed forcefully together, our legs a tangled mess somewhere down there where I couldn't see. The flesh right below my fingernail, thrubbing, over and over against this tiny knot, no, not tiny, it was actually quite large, it stood out proudly amidst the squishy skin and matted, moist hair. If I had ever before satisfied a g-spot, now was the time to remember exactly how it was done.
Not too hard, not too soft, maybe she liked it hard? Maria had always been very picky about how I satisfied her. Maria was really the only person I did things like this to for the past four or five years. Funny I should think of Maria now. I thought of Maria sucking off her manager at work in a van not very different from this one and pressed on.
I kept up the pressure, the pain in my finger increasing exponentially as it seemed to take on a life of its own, separate from my hand except for the pain it supplied. My hand was baking between her legs, she rocked in her seat and I tried to suspend the finger in mid-air, just above her tender, tender fleshy bit, gently but firmly and continually rolling it back and forth, slipping and sliding, and her head bent back, her breathing never changing, and I looked up at the seat back, had Ryan looked back here, and Jesus GOD I am going to have to quit soon Jesus FUCK this hurts, and still I went on, rolling and rubbing that thing, it was as big as a house, it couldn't fit in the van, and my hand was screaming –
– and she leaned her head forward, huffing silently, laid a hand aside my face (hers glowing with perspiration) and pressed her forehead to mine. I slowed my pace, withdrew from my Chinese finger trap and laid my crippled hand delicately on her thigh.
"Heh-mmm," I cleared my throat slightly, and kissed her again.
She parted her eyelids. The eyes were brown. She smiled.
"Heh," I said.
"Hmmmm," she said, an open mouthed smile, displaying the dirty dental work.
"Ah," I said, "did you, uh...you know."
"Mm-hm," she said, nodding slightly.
"Lucky you," I said.
"Mm-HM," she said.
"I wasn't sure I found it," I said.
"Do you think anyone heard?" she asked.
"Do you care?"
"No," she said. "Do you?"
"No," I said, without a moment's hesitaion.
"Hm," she said.
"I think," I said, "I can finally go to sleep."
"Yeah," she said, like a happy eight year-old.
The sun was rising behind us as we cuddled close together. In a few hours we would be in Chicago, on a Sunday morning, with everywhere to go and nothing to do.
"Hey," I said, reaching between my legs.
"What?" she whispered.
"I think I came."
She smiled her devilish smile and pulled me tight.
"Then we're both lucky."
"Kael's Diary" is copyright 1994 Millennium Productions / Kael Goodman (at745@cleveland.freenet.edu). Use of this work in any commercial venue (electronic or otherwise) is forbidden without permission. "Kael's Diary" is a work of fiction and the people and situations described herein are from the imagination of the author.
June, 1994 "Closer" part two
Deep spring 1994, pushing into summer, I was in the prime of my life and always looking back.
Just the month before Maria and I had gone to see Nine Inch Nails at the Agora. It was a sold out show, teeming with youngsters, the temperature rose swiftly as the two opening acts inspired a few people to begin shoving each other down in the pit, a couple of combat-booted boys were hurled into the air, set adrift on the hands of a few dozen hard-core moshers. Those kinds of people will dance to anything.
But when Trent and the Nails hit the stage, the place went ballistic. It was dark, dank and noisy, the sounds and smells of rusting machinery flared in my senses. Maria's not too tall, and crowds seem to frighten her. I saw the pit writhe and sway, huge young men, scrawny guys, a few pit chicks, the entire mass of bodies would lurch and stop, jump and melt – sometimes it was more interesting than what was going on on stage.
I had to get in it. I apologized to Maria and made my way through. It wasn't hard. All of a sudden I was amongst them and Trent, great haystack of black hair in girlie tight leather shorts, he was right in front of me, spitting out lyrics and recklessly abusing his keyboard. I was shoved and I shoved, and I leapt and helped people up on top of the crowd.
The moshers hold a great secret in their heads and hearts. The rest of the world, certainly the older generation (those fifty, sixty, or, in Cleveland, seventy year-olds who write rock criticism definitely) can't understand what the hell we think we're doing. It looks like a big brawl – what kind of maniac would risk having their neck broken in that way? It looks dangerous as shit. But if you haven't been in it, you just don't understand what it's all about.
It's sex.
Moshing is like sex, only on a grander scale and you have to keep your dick in your pants. It's hot and sweaty, you push and pull and it reeks of bodily fluids, and hands come at you from every direction and touch you and touch you and touch you. BUT it is perfectly safe. If you stumble and fall, there are twenty hands reaching for you to pick you back up. No one is throwing punches, no one gets the distance to get a good running shove at you, break your back, no one is kicking or biting, you are just swaying back and forth in a delirious, loud, cacophonic herd of confused and stampeding young skin.
"(Help me) Tear down my reason (Help me) It's your sex I can smell (Help me) You make me perfect Help me become somebody else"
For a shining moment I was transformed into what I had once been, or what I had always wanted. Kael, the anorexic young angel, thrashing and pulsing in an apoplectic fit, everyone around me, all those people on all sides, all my comrades, friends and lovers. I saw a woman to my right and behind call "oh fuck" as she dropped her pack of Virginia Slims. I threw out an arm to force one guy lurching backwards out of the way. Noticing this gesture she briskly crept down and scooped up her prize. Adoringly she put a hand on my shoulder and screamed softly into my ear:
"I love you for that."
§
Chicago. Kind of like Cleveland, only much, much bigger and infinitely more interesting. I love my hometown, but I sometimes dream of the day I just pack up and sell everything to move to Chicago. New York is too big, and L.A. too foreign, but Chicago still has the midwestern soul I was born and bred with but, my god, just open the yellow pages and look under "theater".
Every single weekend the place is alive with art, big houses, small houses, you can shell out thirty bucks and see the latest offering at the Steppenwolf, directed by John Malkovich no less, or maybe just seven or ten to sit in a shithole and have people my own age, just like me, ripping their own clothes off and spewing pointless obscenities. It's all there, this great gumbo of ideas, opinions and experiences.
In Cleveland it's the one: Big Play House, two: the Established Alternative Theater and three: us, a pathetic little comedy troupe in a seedy part of town. And you never get to hear about number three.
Our caravan sped into Chicago through the dawn's early light, and shortly after six-thirty (central time) we were entering the apartment of two friends Satch and I knew from the U of O.
"Martin, you great stud muffin," I said, dropping my duffel to give him a hug.
"Hey," Martin said, "bark for the ladies."
"Wurf!"
Introductions were made all around and we dumped our stuff just anywhere, five guests in an apartment made for two. I loved these guys, Martin and Wilson, and it amused me how they managed to live in squalid splendor as though it were still 1989 or something, off campus, homemade bookshelves crammed with mix tapes and theater books, Rolling Stones and Spins laying about anywhere, a few haphazardly framed rock posters, Crowded House, Elvis Costello...
...God, I must stop sub-referencing to pop stars, who am I anyway, Brett Easton Fucking Ellis? "The Eagles 'Hotel California' was on the stereo (you, the reader, supply whatever this means to you and save me the trouble of bothering to describe what mood I'm trying to set.)" Jesus, buy the man a god damn thesaurus...
§
The morning and early afternoon was spent wandering around lazily in the giant familiar neighborhood that is Chicago. We didn't use our van much, just parked it and walked everywhere we needed to go. Both Martin and Wilson (who had been a roommate of mine at school) worked during the day and so we five travelers had a lot of time to kill until the evening. We could have just stayed at their apartment and caught a few well deserved hours of sack time, but everyone agreed that could be taken care of once we got back to Cleveland.
As the morning hours ticked by we would pick a place that had just opened and stay there until somewhere else did. It was Sunday after all, the cafe was open all night, the bookstore opened at nine, the health food store next to it at ten, the mall around the corner at eleven, and so on.
That place has got some of the coolest second hand stores in the world. There's this huge Army-Navy place which sells a variety of hand me downs, new clothes, Doc Martens, and, of course, Army clothes. I found a black vest, which was like this black Army issue jacket with its sleeves cut off. I modeled it for Satch and he gave me an approving shrug. And I found this groovy rainbow brocade thing which was meant as a belt.
I put them on. A black vest. Like the one I had at school, only better. It fit better. The old one was this suede thing, it was from the seventies and was made for a woman, so it flared out at the hips. I suited me well during my androgynous phase back in 1987, but I couldn't pull that off anymore. I looked too old, it would have been foolish. Maria looks great in it. But this new thing – I looked bad. I mean Iggy Pop bad, straight up and down, black over a white T-shirt. I discarded the beat up army belt and knotted the rainbow strip over my slim hips and bubble butt.
Looking at myself in the mirror. Putrid, stringy, unwashed, sun bleached hair, visibly vanishing on top. Huge dark sunglasses resting on my proud, long schnozz. That weak chin showing the first day of fine bristles. New vest, black. Cut off pants, hippy dippy belt, hairy calves, beat-up Chuck Taylors, black, "1988" written in ball point on the side, sneaks that made it up and down the Santa Monica mountains every single morning for the two months I was in L.A., they had been tossed in a box and left there for almost three years.
I felt like the old man in "Death in Venice". This was a put on – valiantly trying to look the part of some macho grunge monster for my Tadzu, the little boy who had caught my fancy. She and Ryan were off somewhere buying groceries so Martin could make us pasta, and here I was, having my face painted, rubbing rouge in my cheeks, a pretense of youth.
Would I die of a broken heart, too? We had spent every moment since the van ride just being our usual selves – the insults were noticeably absent, which was a sign of something, it seemed. Was that our moment? I had to believe it was.
I'm a grown man. I am Kael Goodman. I don't need this shit.
But I bought the clothes anyway.
§
Back at the apartment now, early evening. Jackie sat out on the porch, smoking, and Gail rested in Wilson's room. Satch sat on the couch, close his eyes and stopped moving. Martin, Ryan and I sat around in their weeny living slash tee vee room and talked.
"So what do you know?" Martin asked me. "Any news?"
"News?" I said. "Come on, Martin, everyone we know lives here."
"That's true," Martin said. "Thad doesn't."
"Oh, Thad," I said, intentionally looking thin-lipped. "No he's not living anywhere anymore."
"No?"
"No," I said. "Sad. Caught a disease no one even heard of."
"What?" Martin said, rocking forward on his hands, and giving me a big laugh. It doesn't take much to make Martin laugh, I give him my cheap stuff.
"Either that or he's in jail."
"Ha ha," he said. "Heard from Alex?"
"All I know about Alex is that she's happily married and lives in Alaska, I talked to her, I dunno, a year ago?"
"But she was doing okay."
"Oh sure," I said, "I'm very happy for her, it's the life she wanted." And to Ryan I added, "Alex and me used to be a thing."
"They were a big thing," Martin added.
"Big big thing," I said, "way back in 1988."
"Wow," Ryan said, "and I was in fifth grade."
"Of course you were," I said, and to Martin I added, "he's the child one in our little theater group."
"Oh yeah?" Martin said, "And how is that going?"
"Don't ask," I said, hanging my head. "I am just so glad to be here. Away from Cleveland, away from the theater, away from home..."
"Yeah," Ryan cackled, "you sure were consoling yourself in Jackie's bosom last night, you didn't seem to miss your wife at all."
I raised my head slowly to look at him, my face steely placid, eyebrows raised. A countenance more in anger than in sorrow.
Twin smears of bloody red ran through both my cheeks. I looked to Martin. He just raised his eyebrows in return and looked back at me.
"Heh heh heh," Ryan said.
"I don't know what to say," I said carefully.
"Well, you could say –" Ryan started, with a childish smile on his face.
"No," I stopped him thoughtfully, and with a raising of my hand, "right now I'd rather not say anything."
"Did I say something wrong?" Ryan asked, chuckling.
"How would you know," I said, sternly and evenly, "you don't even know what you said." I turned back to Martin. "Now what were we talking about?"
Martin and I carried on our conversation.
§
There is a certain kind of person that doesn't take to being insulted very well. Maybe no one should. Most people deliver insults out of a need to feel superior to whomever they are insulting, or perhaps who they are making fun of isn't really a concern, it's just a need to look clever for the enjoyment of everyone, and the self-confidence and self-esteem of the joker. This could certainly be my case. I love being witty. People love me being witty. I am the life of any party.
I never intended to seriously hurt Ryan's feelings, but somewhere I did. Whether or not he took my rejoinders about his confusing sexual preference or his age to heart, or whether he wanted to come off as charming and eloquent to everyone (to Jackie?) as I did, doesn't matter.
When people choose to play these games, however, and they begin losing, sometimes it is necessary to really dig in the dirt to find anything that will stick.
I could make fun of Ryan's toilet habits, and he would be very hurt. You can't make fun of the size of my penis and expect me to be affected at all. And so you have to dig a little deeper.
Let's think about this as we go through the day. Do we want Ryan telling everyone about what happened in the back of the van. No, that might be hard to explain. Does anyone have the right to know? Do I feel I need to explain my actions? No. I just needed to find the right time to pull that little shit aside and tell him a thing or two about tact.
§
Jackie slipped on this eentsy, shocking blue, pinstriped, polyester blazer she had found at one of the dozens of second hand shops we'd been to that day. It fit her perfectly.
"Zounds, that looks sharp on you," I said.
"Thanks."
Our bizarre love triangle was sitting out on the porch, squatting on dirty, broken, overstuffed chairs (my NaugaThrone? Martin did live on the Boys' Side, this is too weird) or straddling the railing, overlooking apartment tops and a rather non-descript alley – except for the fact that it was a Chicago alley.
I was decked out in KleinWear. Ryan, who worked at one took advantage of his position.
"That vest doesn't go with that shirt at all," he said.
"Ha ha."
"What did you do," he said, "buy the whole display?"
"Yes," I said, leaning back in the cracked and filthy Naugahyde Seat of Judgment, "I have more money than you could dream or imagine. I can do things like that."
"I could have gotten that for half price."
"The point is I don't have to."
"What size is that vest," he asked, disapprovingly.
"Extra Large."
"It's too big."
"It suits me, Jackie say something I'm getting tired of this."
"You two didn't seem that tired last night," Ryan said.
"Huh," Jackie said, smirking and smoking a little more.
"Now, I'm glad you brought that up," I said, leaning forward in the Chair of Fifty Dead Naugas. "I don't really appreciate you saying things about my personal life in front of my friends."
"Oh?" he said, his face starting to turn and sitting up rigidly.
"No," I said, with a level form of intensity, my voice never raising, "you just met Martin, he's a friend of mine, and he's a friend of Maria's, and what happens between me and Jackie is between me and Jackie, and when I get home it will be between me and Maria. You don't enter into it."
"Oh?" he asked again, maintaining an impressive level of dignity.
"Yes," I pressed on, "I apologize if I or anyone else have been making you the butt of our pathetic little jokes all day, but there are some things you just don't say. You embarrassed me, and I don't think you considered Jackie's feelings, either."
Ryan's gaze shot nervously over to Jackie, who just sat there and shrugged.
"We're spending a few more days together," I said, nearing the home stretch, "I want them to be pleasant. I will cut back if you will."
"Okay," he said.
"Okay," I said, and let out a huge breath. "Now, who knows what we're going to see tonight?"
§
We saw "Lepers" at the Strawdog Theatre. I was completely stunned. Our last excursion to Chicago included a viewing of "Cannibal Cheerleaders on Crack" which is one of those ridiculously (some might say deliciously) horrible plays held in claustrophobic and poorly lit spaces featuring a variety of vulgar and horrifying situations and I believe the most bodily fluids ever to come together in one show. The only thing they didn't spray at the crowd was menstrual blood. Thank heaven for small favors.
The blurb for "Lepers" warned of nudity and adult situations, and I feared the same kind of attempted assault on the senses – cutting edge these days requires a parade of oddly shaped people screaming at each other, on-stage, naked. No point, no talent, just pubic hair and breasts, flopping about and calling itself art. But the write-ups were good, and the price was even better, and the Strawdog has a very good reputation (Wilson had done a show there).
It was brilliant. An intimate, well-maintained house (eighty seats perhaps?) a six member cast (three of each) and the first brief segments of the show featured, scene by scene, each initial pairing of couples in bed, and highlighting for all of us in witness their sexual hang-ups in detail. The performances were honest and the writing was realistic but carefully stylized – repetition of catch phrases ("Is it me?" a man's line, meant to get some kind of personal validation just after "failing to perform" as they say, and one uniquely pathetic expression of impotent hopefulness; "I can do it now! I'm hard, well...firm.") and one particularly hysterical scene involving the most narcissistic man in the world, under a sheet, by himself, talking, bragging, urging himself through what must have been the single most protracted and enjoyable masturbation in recorded time.
They were all completely nude (as opposed to "nude", which means the same thing) lying beneath and slipping out from under one sheet, but they were not self-conscious at all, the way most nude performances can be ("Hey, I'm nude now! This is the nude bit you read about in 'The Reader'!") and we all became very familiar very soon with every small mole, interesting tattoo, width of nipples, those who were circumcised and who weren't, and soon enough we didn't care. They were supposed to be in bed, fucking, or at least trying to, wouldn't it seem silly if one guy hopped out of the sack and was in his boxers?
And, a few scenes in, when they all sat around for a dinner party, fully clothed, acting like normal, nervous people at a dinner party, that's when the show really started to take shape.
We've seen you naked! We've seen your stretch marks and we know exactly how big your dick is! We know your hang ups, whether or not you're getting any, your sub-text is dead, we know who are you are and what you think!
It was genius. It was painful and it was beautiful. It was angry and fast and funny and said more about the modern state of human relationships and sexuality than any show I'd seen since "Cloud 9", and that was a long, long, jaded time ago. It was the kind of show where Maria, had she been there, would have leaned over, dug her fingers into my knee, and said, "I must fuck you, very soon". Jackie was sitting next to me, her legs crossed, leaning a little towards me. I wanted very much to reach over and touch her hand. I think I dug my fingers into her knee at one point, I don't know.
§
Going to sleep time. We had all looked forward to it for so long. Some of us managed to doze for a few precious minutes during the day, but we were all pretty sacked.
"Well," Satch said, "this couch folds out and then there's that other couch..."
We were all taking our turns going into the bathroom, scrubbing our teeth and cleaning our faces, getting into our sweats or whatever it was we slept in.
Wilson was spending yet another night over at his girlfriend's. We'd seen him for a total of thirty minutes that day. I stood in his room, just off the tee vee room with the folding couches, changing into my sleep clothes.
"I'm in here," I said, "I asked Wilson, and he said it was okay."
Satch gave me the glassy stare of premature death. Wilson had this really sweet futon, big enough for two. I couldn't tell if he was jealous that I had dibbed it, or because he knew what I was up to.
"It's big enough for two," I said, suggesting that I'd sleep with anyone else there. I looked at Ryan and smiled.
"I guess I'll sleep with you, Kael," Jackie said, arriving from the bathroom neatly scoured, her hair sticking straight up in tufts. She sported a tattered brown sweat suit and a look of sheer exhaustion. She announced her intent to lie down with me as though she had only just thought of it, and like she was doing everyone a big favor.
"Cool-ee cool," I said.
We all lay down to sleep, the door between Wilson's room and the tee vee room remained wide open, and all the lights were put out.
Jokes were made, but not very many, we were all too spent to have one of those slumber party kind of pillow talk sessions. I rolled over, next to Jackie, and gave her a light kiss on the cheek. She nuzzled her face to mine, and lay onto her back.
One by one the few comments there were dropped away, and the buzz of adult snoring started to kick in. I drifted in and out of consciousness for a few moments, trying to be relaxed after a day of consuming a way dangerous amount of caffeine. I rolled over to Jackie, half asleep now, and lay a hand upon her face. I turned it to mine to give her a little kiss. It was instinctive, I would have done it for anyone in my bed. I wanted a hug before sleeping.
She threw an arm around me and began sucking violently at my mouth. One slender leg was cast about my waist and she hoisted herself up on top of me. I was thrust flat on my back, we were kissing frantically, my hands went up and down her back, inside her shirt, pulling down at her flesh, pulling up on her small behind, massaging and tugging as she rested all of her weight on her knees, digging into the mattress on either side of my thighs and she roughly stroked her crotch against my rapidly elongating penis.
Our kisses were becoming more violent, and she continued to massage my dick, up and back her pants against mine, dry-humping like some teenager, I pulled my fingers into her spine and dragged my nails up her back, pressing them firmly into her neck as I ran my tongue about the edge of her chin, suckling on and licking her filthy little ears.
She continued to slam away at my dick through those thin cotton pants, and I was rocking, too, although every additional wave made my penis more sore and tenderized, the fabric of my underwear biting at its pained, aroused underside.
"Hah-hah-hah," I panted into her ear, "don't you think we better close the door?" She leaned over and scrumbled off the bed and swung the aforementioned door closed. She scrabbled right back on top of me, sliding into position, ground her exponentially sticky and blazing groin into mine and squeezed my head in her hands. We continued to pull and tug at each other's lips.
She reached down with one hand and in less than a moment her sweat pants had gone. Her naked and twisting vagina dragged fiercely at my swollen and tormented penis. Hands reached for the elastic in my sleepypants.
"Wha-wait, ha!" I whispered, "we can't."
"Hmn?" she asked, smiling this demonic smile. "No?"
"Hah, mmn, I wasn't prepared for this."
I gathered her behind in my hands and ran my nails along the tops of her thighs.
Grind, grind, grind, FUCK, I must be bleeding.
She breathed sharply into my mouth. "We could go someplace and get them."
"Jackie!" I laughed. "It's two in the morning. We're in CHICAGO."
"There's a Seven-Eleven across the street."
"Ha!" She was right. There was. "Oh my god, you're serious aren't you?"
She shrugged slightly and continued to shift her hips up and back. I kissed her slowly in an attempt to calm her down. She bit her sex even deeper into mine.
"Okay!" I grunted. She smiled and hopped off of me to get her pants on. "You're fucking nuts, you know that?"
"Whatever."
§
We skulked out of the apartment. Walking through the tee vee room I could only imagine what all of our friends were thinking. Were they asleep? Had we been keeping them awake, and they only pretended to be asleep because they couldn't imagine asking us to shut up?
One bottle of orange juice (mine), one half pint of Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Chunk Fest (hers) and a three-pack of Trojans (ours).
We settled back onto Wilson's futon and calmly and maturely began to strip each other's clothes off.
§
"Mnnnnnnnnnnn," I breathed, smiling. Flat on my back on that strange black futon, the light a half dozen alley lamps cast a pale, cold glow over the room. I stared dopily up at the ceiling, at the slowly rotating fan. A light cool breeze came through a crack in the window. My moderately hairy chest (hair, the great concealer, masking years of adolescent acne scarring, bumps and craters once glowing red now colorless and hidden) heaving warmly, a small pale goblin crouched over my penis, kneeling, small breasts dangling only inches above her own knees, playful and knowledgeable fingers delicately and firmly pressing into and massaging my testicles and that bubble gum smile, those horrid teeth carefully pulling at my cock, her tongue a tunted dolphin rolling about me, all of my pain and soreness a memory.
Dirty blonde hair, a ball of incandescence, right over it, then ducking down as her thumb rose up to pad purposefully into just the right spot, below the hole, her mouth, like some prehistoric sea creature, licking and sliding around my balls.
It was bliss. It was so good and such a relief after months of professional embarrassment, marital ennui and, most of all, a nagging desire to be right here, with her. She lifted her head up and smiled, reaching for the paper bag.
"Uh-oh," I said.
"What?"
"Nothing."
She unwrapped one and approached my dick. Just as latex hit skin I began to, oh how can we say, lose that lovin' feeling?
"Ppppth," I sputtered, "put that away and come up here."
She looked down at my thingee and looked up at me, with a certain degree of awareness and amusement. She put the rubber over on the bag on the windowsill, next to the unopened juice and ice cream. Her body stretched out along mine, resting folded hands on my chest and her head on her hands. So cute, her eyes, marbles of pure cobalt shining brightly through two narrow openings, grinning with happy front teeth.
"Ahem," I began, "I have what you might call opening night jitters."
"Mm-hm," she said.
"I try not to let it bother me," I said, "I hope it doesn't bother you."
"Mm-mm," she said.
"And I won't bother asking 'is it me' because it is me, I don't have a problem with that."
"Mm-hm," she said.
"I mean, I do have a problem with that, but what can I do."
She shrugged.
"Did you want some ice cream?" she asked, sitting up a little.
"Not yet," I said, and considerately flipped her onto her back. I slid down her body, kissing her navel along the way. Sprig of filthy blonde hair, not as dark as her natural color (huh, funny) and she spread her legs wide, very wide, gymnast wide, eat me wide, open. She rested her head and closed her eyes.
Planted on my elbows I drew both thumbs up the length of her vagina. So wet, so soft, so pungent. I drew them down again, and back up, one dawdled on the apex, finding the spot I had managed to discover with no small degree of difficulty the night before (the morning before?) and here it was in front of me where I could see it.
It was as large as I had imagined. She was harder than I was. A tiny finger sticking straight up. I flicked it lightly and repeatedly with my outstretched tongue and she moaned appreciatively. Thumbs kept massaging the length of her lips as I batted that little appendage with my tongue and, every odd moment I would place my whole mouth over it. It was like a blow job, it so big and available – all women should have them like this, we'd never miss it.
§
"Want some of this?"
"Jackie, I'm drinking orange juice."
I leaned against the wall and she sat on one of the pillows.
"That was okay, right," I asked.
"Oh yeah," she said.
"I mean, who else on this trip can say they been brought to orgasm at least once every night."
"I'm a lucky, lucky, lucky girl."
Another swallow of o.j. "I'm sorry about earlier. That scene with Ryan."
"Yeah," she said, "that really upset him."
"Well, I don't care, I don't need him spreading shit about me or you or Maria in front of my friends."
"You sure you don't want any of this?" She offered me a big plastic spoonful. "It's good."
Big sigh. "Okay." Big bite. "Ew."
"I think it's delicious," she lisped, like a child with a missing tooth.
"Kael's Diary" is copyright 1994 Millennium Productions / Kael Goodman (at745@cleveland.freenet.edu). Use of this work in any commercial venue (electronic or otherwise) is forbidden without permission. "Kael's Diary" is a work of fiction and the people and situations described herein are from the imagination of the author.
June, 1994 "Closer" part three
"Hi, come on in."
I was freshly shaved and showered, a clean pair of jeans, nice casual print T-shirt and a nifty vest with little Snoopys all over it. Her Boss and His Wife had just entered the Goodman homestead. It was a few Saturdays earlier and we were having them for dinner.
Why not? The day before Maria had Him for lunch.
I had been dreading this evening ever since Maria suggested it. Sure, why not, supper with the dork twins, it'll be fun. Of course, I was hardly being fair, and I kept it all to myself anyway. I had only just met them at that housewarming party we'd had, showing off our lovely new home to my friends and her co-workers. My time with my good good good friends who I barely saw any more was precious, so after a perfunctory little chat I went downstairs to play cards with people I really care about.
He, actually taller than I am, and with about seven years on me, a thick head of hair (the bastard) parted neatly like some fucking six year-old in line for some snapshots at K Mart. Or a Young Republican. A weak chin, prominent front teeth and a goofy smile.
Guys like this always have long, hard dicks. Great muscular penises. I think it's from lack of use (yeah, of course I'd think that) and they comically inflate at the worst times.
We shook hands. It was like groping gazpacho.
She, gawky and short, skinny and freckled and wild eyed like she was on the verge of a complete nervous collapse. I knew the minute she stepped in the door she would not be able to stop talking. But I was primed and ready. Shame it was a show night or I would have gotten half-tanked, but oh well.
"It's good to see you again," He said.
"Yes," I said, "welcome, Maria will be down in a moment."
"I'm so excited about seeing your show tonight," She said, "I was really looking forward to seeing it last week but I know you had to cancel it."
"Lack of ticket sales."
"Yes, I heard," She continued, "but we've just been talking about it all week and I've just heard so much it really sounds interesting and I think we're going to have a wonderful time."
"Can I take your jacket?"
"Of course. Dear, hold this for me, oh MY this place looks so much nicer when it's not full of people, that's a very nice picture, was that there before? I didn't notice it during the party."
"Yes."
"It's very nice."
"It is," I said, "it is very nice, thank you."
I think our spouses are fucking each other.
"Can I get you both something to drink?" I asked, and led them into our kitchen.
"Oh, the kitchen," She said, "I love their kitchen."
"It's nice," I said, opening the fridge.
Later we sat around a table eating an excellent vegetarian meal which Maria and I spent all day preparing. Actually, she prepared it, I cleaned the house. I clean better than Maria does, and she cooks better than me. That's why we got married.
"That's a nice van you have parked out there," I said.
"Yes," He said, "it runs like a dream."
Of course it does.
"I used to have a van, you know," I said.
"It was stolen," Maria said.
"Oh that's terrible," She said.
"Broke my heart," I said, "I have a new car now, one that I don't care about."
"Yes," He said, "I saw it outside, the Honda."
"I never want to care so much about an inorganic thing again in my life." I said, adding, "except Maria."
"That's sweet," She said.
You don't have a clue, do you?
"I had to have the clutch replaced a few days ago," I said.
"Ah right," He said, nodding his head with understanding, "you shift too soon."
I stared at him with wide-eyed amusement. I looked to Maria.
"Been telling tales out of school, darling?" I said. Everyone at the table laughed. "Any more of my little quirks you been sharing with the boys?"
"Oh, Kael," Maria said.
I looked at Him. "I feel so violated. You ever have that feeling?"
"No," He said, looking down at his place and humorously shaking his head.
"Well," I said, removing the napkin from my lap and setting it on the table, "that was delicious."
"Yes," She said, "you did a very nice job with this. I can't take the time to cook as well as this, not with the children running around and all, I'm always having to make something quick and dirty –"
"– Speaking of which," I said, cutting her off, "I apologize, but I need to grab a quick and dirty nap before tonight's show, I hope you don't think I'm awful."
Even if I know you all are.
"No," came the general response, and I slumphed upstairs to rest my eyes for fifteen minutes, in some kind of attempt to calm my fractured nerves.
§
"Where are you goin'?"
Mid-afternoon, Monday, Chicago. The second day malaise of most two-day road trips had settled in like an unwanted house guest (or, hell, let's say two unwanted house guests) and it was time to make sure I did everything I had promised.
"Well, Jackie, if you must know, I am going with Satch and Gail to that mall that was closed yesterday and I'm gonna find a little present for Maria."
"Bring me back something," she said, and hopped out onto the porch to have another cigarette.
§
There's this mall, I can't remember the name, but the layout inside is like the Guggenheim Museum in New York – the walkway spirals up and up, so saying that it has seven floors isn't quite accurate because as long as you keep walking straight ahead, you eventually pass through all seven of them.
A store called simply "Metals". I found some cute, handmade earrings, pure silver, flattened hoop with three tiny bars of onyx hanging from it, with other bits of silver and crystal, bent and curvy, delicate craftsmanship. A very attractive and sensible piece of jewelry. Maria can wear them to work with practically anything, and they also wouldn't look out of place dancing topless around a pagan fire. She will just love them.
...and an ankh. A couple of them, dangling from a display. You can't walk down Main Street, USA without seeing them for sale, but they still struck me.
A symbol for our generation. Eternity, but also an acceptance of death (the "Death" character in DC's Sandman comics always sports an ankh) permission to live recklessly and to not squander any moment. Not the "X" Generation, the "Ankh" Generation.
Malekha, with whom I had a very brief, intimate moment back in 1991 always wore an ankh, recently she had one tattooed on her back. The kind of woman who would wear an ankh. Ankh. Ankh, ankh, ankh. My keyboard just likes it when I type the word 'ankh' (oh, and now I suppose I am Tom Robbins). One in particular, it was a few inches long and it was flattened silver. A little gaudy? Yes.
A pair of earrings, then, and one gaudy ankh. I kept my promises.
§
Second night in Chicago. The last night. We had seen a production called "I'm Sweating Under My Breasts" at Cafe Voltaire. Eight original monologues about being a woman in this modern world. The performance space reminded me of those old films of The Beatles playing at "The Cavern". It was just a long, low ceilinged, subterranean tunnel with a Persian Carpet to mark off the small playing area and rows and rows of second hand chairs and sofas. Jackie and I sat in front on some cushions.
"Liking the show?" I asked at intermission.
"Some of it," Jackie said. "I'm real sleepy, though."
We had all dressed up again. I was wearing a different, cute, striped shirt and my new black vest I'd gotten at the Army-Navy store. She was wearing the same ensemble as the night before, groovy patterned shirt, bright blue blazer, and a new addition hanging around her neck.
"I like your necklace," I said. "It's nice and tacky."
She gave me a big dimpled smile. "Thanks. It was a present."
"Sleep with me tonight?"
She gave me an bemused look. "Mm, okay."
§
Jackie and I tried in vain to find to find a disco open in Chicago, in our neighborhood, on a Monday night, but it was a lost cause. Every place we stepped into didn't have a dance floor, and every place those places recommended we look appeared to have been raided the previous week.
We went back to Martin and Wilson's place to find everyone watching "Duckman", but even that lost its appeal after twenty minutes and everyone hunkered off to bed.
It was cold that night. It had been cold outside, and the warm early June breeze that came through Wilson's bedroom window the night before had turned unseasonably bitter. Jackie and I lay side by side and kissed a few times.
"Want to fool around?" I whispered.
"Uh-huh," she said, looking up at me.
"Okay," I said, "we'll wait until everyone falls asleep."
"Okay."
Everyone fell asleep.
§
I woke to dawn's early light.
Fuck.
I looked at the clock. It was shortly after four in the morning. Well, heck, we'd only been snoozing for two hours at this point, no one was planning on getting up until seven anyway. We could still fit it in, and this time I was ready.
I leaned over and peered at Jackie. Completely sacked. Her cheeks were bunched up like baby dough on one side, her lip smacker lips parted, front teeth puckered out and snoring. So cute. So adorable, I could cry.
Could I be so hard up? Despite my own clever comments proving to her what a big man I was and how I wouldn't let something as trivial as a limp dick hurt my pride...well, it's all a big act, isn't it? I had something to prove. Something base and infantile.
Truth? I was in love. This woman had really done something to me – or was it her? Maybe it was just the time or the locale, or perhaps the distance. Sure I'd kissed her before, but after I always went home. What do you do when you make love to someone and when you wake up, they're still there? You can't get away. You have to continue loving them until, all of a sudden, it's too late, bang, you've been duped, you thought you were acting again, but some part of the charade became real.
Big snore.
Go back to sleep, little man. You're in way over your head here, your holiday is over, and tomorrow you gotta go back home.
§
Parting was awkward. The trip home, unlike the one there, was made in broad daylight and most of us spent the time concentrating on different responsibilities we would have for that night's rehearsal at eight o'clock.
We arrived back at the theater (where all of our cars were parked) at around three in the afternoon, and I still had the van to return. I said "see you in a few hours" to Jackie as she got into her shitty little cherry red Ford Festiva but it was more like "good-bye".
We kissed once more before she sped off and somehow I knew it would be the last kiss for a very long time. I felt cold and alone, like there was some organ I was missing, some gaping hole that, for a short time, this little monster had managed to fill.
I look over the pages of this diary, my workbook containing my most secret and horrifying thoughts, Christ, if my friends ever got hold of this book, well I would certainly be fucked, wouldn't I? These pages covered in loose, sloppy handwriting, chronicling the parade of half- finished relationships which make up my life, over a decade of dismal failures and shallow victories. Becky, Fran, Michelle, Barbara, Sarah, Alex, Betts, Maria, Malekha, Aggie, Ariel, now Jackie, to name a handful. I keep trying to find a pattern, if I could just step back and see the picture from all sides, maybe I can figure what went wrong. All I can see from here is a man who spent his entire life struggling to be loved and desired. It's just a little pathetic, you know?
Put down the book. Set it aside, hide it up in the attic and come back to it in a few years, get some distance, man.
And besides, maybe a book is the wrong place to start trying to figure it all out.
§
"Hey, honey."
"Baby, is that you?"
"Yeah," I stepped into my house, dropped my duffel, and Maria came downstairs to give me a big hug. She felt so different from Jackie, her back much broader, her long dark hair so thick in my hands. My poor baby's face still bore the damage of an only recently survived bout with acne (oh, I sympathized, boy did I sympathize) but that was vanishing fast, and her smile was wide and bright and her eyes even more so.
We kissed full adult kisses, reserved and adoring, less saliva, more technique, what do you expect after five years? Her arms wrapped around my neck and I reached in front to massage her happy little breasts, and then down to fondle her huge behind. She smelled so fresh and beautiful.
"How was your trip," she asked.
Big sigh. "S'was great. I'm really spanked."
I picked up my bag and marched upstairs. She followed close behind as I began tossing things in the laundry bin in our yet to be redecorated since we bought the house bedroom.
"Tell me everything," she said, sitting on the bed.
"First things first," I said, casually sorting smelly clothes, "what, exactly, is going on between you and your boss?"
"I was wondering when you were gonna ask," she said, tensing herself up, but smiling.
"I thought we didn't have to ask," I said calmly, recalling our pledge of total disclosure.
"Wee-ll," she said, "we are fooling around."
"Fuck him yet?" I asked.
"No," she said, "just a lot of groping in stairwells and stuff like that."
"Uh-huh," I said, sitting next to her on the bed, "well, I had a girlfriend this weekend."
"I knew you two had a thing going."
"Oh, no, we didn't, this was a surprise."
"Was it."
"Well, whether it was or not, I think it was just this weekend," I said. "I want to tell you I'm very depressed."
"Oh, baby," she said, and I lowered my head into her lap. She drew her fingers through my hair.
"It's just," I started, staring up into the ceiling fan, slowly turning around and around, "it's like, from my point of view, my life experience is populated with all of these ghosts who fade in and out, but even when they're gone, this trace stays behind, this spiritual residue, do you get me or am I just talking shit?"
"Oh no," she said, purring softly.
"I need to start killing them," I said, "my every movement and solitary thought contains the leftover fragrance of some past lover or friend and I've forgotten myself in all of them."
"That's life, dear," she said, hunching down to kiss my forehead. I began to weep softly.
"I'm so tired," I said. "I just don't think I can do this any more. I..." Big sob. "I'm tired of losing myself in other people, I'm so lost, I just don't know where I am."
She drew a hand along my cheek and smooshed the hot tears over my face.
"I just...want to be..."
"Tsh, tsh, tsh, tsh, tsh," she whispered, "what do you want to be?"
I thought for a long moment.
"Me," I said.
That seemed to be right. She sat tall and looked straight ahead while I gathered my composure. Huh. I cry about once every four years, I just don't allow myself the satisfaction. See you in 1998.
"So, uhm," she said.
"What?" I asked, sitting up, snuffling.
"Well, it's gonna seem kind of selfish." she said, playing with the zits on the back of my neck for a moment before I took her hand into my lap.
"Ha!" I said. "Selfish, well hell, that's you and me all over, isn't it. What do you want?"
"Should I stop messing around with him?"
I chuckled softly to myself, and then laughed a little bit louder. I let out a great congested guffaw and threw up my hands in resignation.
"Whatever."
"Kael's Diary" is copyright 1994 Millennium Productions / Kael Goodman (at745@cleveland.freenet.edu). Use of this work in any commercial venue (electronic or otherwise) is forbidden without permission. "Kael's Diary" is a work of fiction and the people and situations described herein are from the imagination of the author.
July, 1994: "Possession"
The rain smacked angrily against the windows of my sweet little office. Ten minutes ago it had been eighty-five degrees outside, and with the storm it had dropped to seventy-five. In another ten minutes the torrent would no doubt vanish as swiftly as it had come and the temperatures would be right back up there, ninety degrees at eight in the evening, a herald, a mild example of a world without ozone.
Me. Talking self-righteously about ozone. The neighbor's house could be on fire for all I could tell, 'cause we had ay-see, and it was seventy-five all the time.
Abby sat comfortably in a sturdy stuffed chair, the one in the office, which had a purple sheet draped over it. Sitting upright, looking at me, not slouching, but with one crossed leg slung over the arm, real casual. Her long, dark hair pushed backwards over her head and hanging down in wisps past her shoulders. Dark eyes, the brownest eyes that I had...no, have I ever loved a woman who didn't have brown eyes? Well, other than Maria, I mean? Funny. I can get so lost in brown eyes, they're so mysterious. Maria's eyes I never get lost in. In Maria's eyes I know right where I am.
I leaned back a bit, set in my favorite office chair, the one my brother found in the trash when he was at school (in Clemson) and my mother had recovered and I had claimed as my own. I had a pad of sketch paper in my lap, a pencil in my mouth and a gum eraser in my hands, dabbing down a mark laid down just a bit too heavily, around the nose. Difficult nose. She had such a beautiful face, round, and well-defined cheeks, those eyes and a nose that starts out straight and ends with that familiar tell-tale Jewish ball. Small, but the tip is so round, it was so hard for me to get it right without making it look like she had a mushroom on her face. Forget the nose, get back to the mouth.
I looked with concern at my pad of paper.
"Could you smile just a little bit, please?" I said, looking up slowly.
She had gotten so relaxed her mouth was making all sorts of odd shapes, as if she were looking past me into things that weren't there, or playing out scenes in her head that were becoming too real. At my request she looked right at me, then away, and smiled. A big smile, big straight, big teeth. White. An actor's teeth, which is what they were. Abby and me had met when she auditioned for our theater troupe last fall. She got a better offer the day before we were about to offer ours, which was a shame because I felt she would have brought a lot to the company in the way of writing and performing, and, let's be honest, because I thought she was a knock-out. She met Maria, too, at one of our openings and they had become very good friends.
"Not so broad."
"Closed mouth?"
"Yeah."
I had been with the two of them on a dinner date or two, always weeks apart. The big even was when they went off to Indiana to participate in yet another "Earthfest" event. That's this big pagan festival where everyone runs around naked and sacrifices small animals to Satan.
Okay, it isn't. But it's kind of personal and I don't want to get into that right now.
Anyway, it was obvious to me when they returned that they were both becoming increasingly friendly and I'm not talking Betty and Wilma.
"Um," I said, "just relax your mouth." And I went back to the pad.
Her top, a loose khaki colored number which displayed her long thin arms and a pleasant amount of her chest, it hung about in casual folds, I wasn't very used to drawing clothing. Maria always posed for me naked and I just don't ever feel the urge to draw animals or things, just people. Abby had offered to disrobe for me, she wasn't self-conscious at all in that regard, but, I told her, I wanted her to be comfortable. Honestly, I wanted me to be comfortable. Take your clothes off? Sure, here, let me do it for you, I am only ridiculously attracted to you physically and the more time we spend together not fooling around the more I know I'm gonna fall –
"Penny for your thoughts?" she asked.
I stopped scratching my pencil against the paper for a moment and, still looking at the pad, smiled a tight-lipped little smile.
Sigh.
I began drawing again.
"You don't want to know what I'm thinking," I said.
"Kael's Diary" is copyright 1994 Millennium Productions / Kael Goodman (at745@cleveland.freenet.edu). Use of this work in any commercial venue (electronic or otherwise) is forbidden without permission. "Kael's Diary" is a work of fiction and the people and situations described herein are from the imagination of the author.
August, 1994: "Get Me", Part One
Checking my face at ten thousand feet.
I was standing in a big old jet plane, Delta flight 4844 heading into JFK. I was nervous, my stomach was in a bunch, the captain had informed us our arrival would be delayed TEN WHOLE MINUTES due to holding patterns or somesuch nonsense and I was feeling like a six year old – ten minutes? What's that, it sounds like a really really long time! I rationalized, like the twenty-six year-old man I was. I've waited four weeks, I can wait ten minutes, that's nothing. Lessee, ten minutes, remember when it was ten days? One minute for every day you waited, think of that, that's so nothing.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK.
I looked into the mirror (the mirror looked also, ha). Every long long blond hair in place, except for all those checking in absent up on top of course, a little tiny red spot, barely noticeable, now, just under the dimple on my nose. Would that turn into something unpleasant to look at in the three days I will be in New York? What am I, fifteen? Jesus Christ.
Clean white T-shirt, spiffy black vest, the one I got in Chicago last June, the one I was wearing when Jo and I had our, uhm, thing in Indiana. A month ago. Clean, pressed. Cut off shorts, not so clean. I had polished my boots, polished them shiny, I had told her I would.
She had told me she wouldn't be wearing any underwear.
Gray eyes. Lookin' kinda sleepy. They love that, though, they all do. I could never figure that, I always thought my eyes were kind of bleh but women dig my eyes. Maybe it's the color, soft gray, almost blue, but they change. Flecks of color in them, reds and yellows, when my pupils are small there's a greenish ring around them. I practice looking with them in the mirror, lowering my eyebrows, my dark brown eyebrows, they are perfect, perfect arcs over my eyes, I can do anything with them, they can be comic one moment and so angry the next, and when I am aroused, well, then they are really something special. It's not my eyes, it's my eyebrows, that's it.
"As you can see the Captain has turned the fasten safety belts light on over your seat. If you haven't already done so, please return to your seat and fasten your safety belt for our landing at JFK International Airport."
I did.
§
We had to take a shuttle bus from the plane to the terminal. In one door, through another, led like cattle, up some stairs – who would see who first – around a corner, tromping up more stairs, my blue backpack slung over one shoulder, my other hand gripping a large pad of sketch paper, glasses slipping down my nose –
– we saw each other first. I clearing the floor going up the stairs, she walking towards the gate. A pretty, deep blue dress with tiny white polka dots, the kind of dress grandmother would wear – when she was twenty-four and beautiful, that is, back then. Striding toward the gate, an hour on the subway a little more than apparent, but happy, such a strange smile, must have been a little like mine. A smile that says, "I don't know what the hell I'm doing here, but shit I'm glad."
All us passengers had to clear by helpful Delta attendants giving people on there way somewhere else an idea of how to get there. Jo was feet away, we were just staring at each other. Clear eyes, God she had clear eyes, and they were, yes they were brown, you people are fans, I know. And heavy eyebrows, smiling too, brown, dirty brown, unlike me, the hair in her eyebrows was identical to that on her head, which was waist length and tied up in braids and around her head, again, like grandmother would on her way to the USO or something, I wouldn't know, I didn't live then.
I was trapped behind a guy wearing a black T-shirt which read "All I want is the cure and all my friends back."
"Excuse me," I said, and slipped by him, straight into her arms. She's short, her arms reached up around me and placed her delicate, caring hands to my head, I could feel each finger slide through my hair and she whispered "hi" and I didn't say anything as I touched my mouth to hers and her tongue, wide and wet and lovely slid into my mouth and pulled up hungrily against my top lip.
My hands slid around her waist, feeling every inch of that awful polyester and indulging in the flesh beneath it. The backpack fell from my shoulder. We were kissing obscenely and in public and god did I used to hate that and now I just didn't care. I sucked on her fat lower lip as people pushed by us to catch taxis and other planes. I pressed my cheek to hers, and caught my round glasses on her oval ones (see: grandma). We pulled away slightly to look at each other.
"Hi."
"Hi."
No more. We put our hands together and she turned me away from there to head to the taxi stand.
"It's so good to see you," I said. She turned her head to me and smiled, peering out over her glasses. She does that a lot, her glasses always slide down her thin little nose, but see had never looked at me like that before. Well, not until Indiana.
"How long were you on the train?" I asked.
"An hour," she said, "that's how long the cab should take."
"I can't believe it's you," I said.
"Yeah," she said.
The doors slid open and we were outside. She talked to a few cab drivers and we got into one, a real New York taxi cab, headed to Manhattan. It was very private back there, one of those old giants with a huge, low backseat, and a pane of glass between it and the driver.
Perfect.
She leaned up to it and gave the cabby instructions, up to the George Washington Bridge and she'd take him from there.
Back to me, slouched against my own backpack, against the driver side back door, smiling in the bright August daylight that struck through the rear window. She sat back in her dress and looked at me, the corners of her small mouth turned up in a smile, exposing her two front teeth. We each leaned in and started kissing, our mouths wide open, her big fat tongue sweeping the roof of my mouth, I drew mine against her gums, savoring each tooth, my hands sliding around her body, the flesh of her back through that nasty fabric, in front to cup a hand on one of her wonderful tits, not too big, but that's what it was, tit, it wasn't small like Maria's –
– hmn, let's keep comparisons to Maria out of this –
– seeing her flesh up close, the flesh of her face, god it had been such a long month and my imagination had been all over. Our letters certainly left nothing to it, great long pulse thumping memoirs, and those phone calls! We'd started out slow but by the time the date was approaching we'd sit for two hours, either very very early in the morning, six-thirty perhaps, as the sun was rising, or late into the night – once even for two hours, and sometimes we wouldn't say anything, just listen to each other breathe. Pathetic, huh? Christ was I in – well, maybe I wasn't. I knew one thing, I was here, and she had promised to keep me in her room for three days. Not her apartment, her room. And though I had gotten to know to touch of her skin ridiculously well in the four hours we spent rolling around in the open air and in the dirt, I hadn't fucked her and I hadn't cared.
Would we fuck here? In this cab? She had suggested we might. We had each suggested a lot of things. Three days. Certainly we'd get to try them all.
The cab driver didn't say anything and by now he knew we were interested in how the Mets were doing or whether that bum Pataki was going to get elected. I don't think he knew much English anyhow.
I slid my clean shaven face against the soft, smooth surface of her face, cottony smooth, and licked at her earlobe and she moaned softly into me. My hands fell down to her lap and her legs parted for me and I put my hands up her solid thighs, trying to keep her dress covering her, for the sake of my modesty more than hers because I knew she didn't care. Hot and slippery, I think she was wet before she had even seen me, her pubic hair, never trimmed, spilling out onto the inside of her legs, slick with herself, I lightly grazed her vagina with my fingers and she moaned even louder, putting it right in my ear and kissed me hard on the mouth. One finger, in and out slowly, getting my finger, my hand, wet and smelly, and slowly massaging her clitoris, rolling circles of flesh with my fingertips.
She spread her legs wider and I glanced down to see how much of her was showing. Enough. She obviously didn't care and I shouldn't have either.
We were caught in rush hour traffic heading into Manhattan – school buses were passing on either side and children of all ages were getting a little adult education. Jo pressed her face to mine and I pressed my hand into her and she was moaning and humming into me and that ball of tension, that nervousness I had carried with me from Cleveland began opening up, that uncomfortable lump of self-consciousness was breaking apart and dissipating, I stopped looking around, ignored the driver, who were we? Just some consenting adults having wild foreplay in his cab, couldn't have been the first time.
How do you describe this? How do you write this? She came, she shuddered and came and tried not to be too loud, a nice and tidy orgasm. How do I express this? I've had so much sex in my life, so much meaningless sex, nothing felt special anymore. I had resigned myself to the reality of the Sticky Tape Theory they had taught us in Youth League.
Take a piece of sticky tape, any brand will do, and put it on someone. Sticks pretty good, doesn't it? Now remove it and put it on someone else. Still sticks, but not as well. Keeping doing this until it doesn't stick at all. That's promiscuity. That's what happens when you have sex with a lot of people, it loses its meaning, it stops being something special, something that should only be shared with one person, with your life mate, with a spouse. That's what they taught me in Youth League and I never forgot it, and worse, I believed it. That's why they told us those things.
I removed my hand, it was suddering too, I was quivering all over and she continued the breathe hard as I drew away, her head bent back, eyes squeezed shut and her mouth forming that small O I remembered from Indiana.
I was here, in New York, with her, I was here, not on the phone, this was Jo, one of Maria's best friends and I was here.
I threw my arms around her arched back and held her desperately to me and kissed her neck and kissed her face and she drew her fingers down my back and we put our mouths together, not a tightly sealed, neat kiss, a big open mouthed slobbering thing, I ran my tongue along the inside of her cheek and she began spasming again and groaning loudly at my intrusion as I explored the deepest part of her mouth, getting my lips inside hers, licking her up and around and I grabbed her ass and pulled her to me and our faces parted to look at each other. Her eyes, small and round and close together, deep brown pupils and the whites of her eyes were the whitest I had ever seen, so clear I could cry. I smiled a big evil smile.
"I'm glad I'm here," I said.
She smiled.
"So this is New York?" I asked.
"Yeah," she said, "a mid-afternoon traffic jam in the Big Apple."
I hopped up, kneeling onto the seat, facing back out through the rear window, hunkered down with my fingers gripping the leather-like upholstery. No big city skyline for me, just more and more cars and lots of run-down apartment projects on both sides. Perhaps this would be the most of NYC I'd see. I sincerely hoped so.
I slipped back down into my seat and we wrestled with each other more and she opened herself to me again and I made her come again, she buried her face in my neck and tried to make no sound (yes, a little modesty, just a little) and she was panting hard and I was breathing sharply through my nose and licking the tops of her ears and we did that all the way to her apartment. I couldn't believe when she excused herself from my attentions to start giving the driver more specific instructions, and which side of the street we'd want to get off on.
"We're almost there?" I asked, surprised.
"Yes," she said.
"That was an hour?"
"Yeah," she said, "it was."
"Wow."
We hopped out into the gray heat haze amid the bustle of midday Manhattan.
"Twenty-eight dollars," the cab driver informed us, and Jo paid him as I pulled my bag, her purse and my sketch pad from the car.
"Thank you," I said to the driver.
"It's nice, eh?" he said, turning his head, smiling back at us, "making love?"
We laughed self-consciously as we picked up our bags.
"Shyeah," I laughed, blushing, "it sure is."
End