It doesn’t matter where you stick or who you stick it into,
or who sticks it in you, as long as you get to stick it in someone, rolling
with it, making someone feel good, or they, you
It doesn’t matter how many get involved, bringing it to the
front door or back or the vacancy up top, choking on it, or having it stuffed
up inside, boy or girl or some other thing, as long as it feels right.
It doesn’t matter how often you do it, as long as you do it a
lot, maybe with a lot of artners, or one after another after another until you’re
worn.
It doesn’t matter if you stick it to a stranger or someone
you know, someone dark and mysterious found in a dark corner of a bar, whose gaze
is on you from the moment you enter and clings to you when you leave, someone
who is so intense you won’t let them leave without, even if you don’t have a
name, even if there is someone already waiting for you at home. You never get
enough of it, even when you think you do, and you search if out everywhere you
go, friend or stranger, or someone in-between. You just need someone to stick
it to.
I stuff my face food know are not for me, part of a
nightmare I always wake from to get up to pee.
I keep trying to remember what the nightmare was, if she was
part of it, and scold myself for not laying back down to get there again.
In it, I stop at a stand that sells tacos (hers) and Spam
(mine,) confused about who I really am, here on the outskirts of the Promised
Land – which the Boss constantly sings about but I can never reach, love lost
is not what I seek, though as I roam through here I find myself eating a peach,
my life counted out in coffee mugs, not dainty tea spoons, another poet sings
about. I cling to the tunes on the radio and ache to get back to what I know,
we living our lives on the edge of this abyss, the bad land we can’t miss,
working hard for a living to make other men rich – some of the men she once tried
to trickle up with only to get betrayed, when all I want, and often dream of,
is lying on a beach in the sun, out of reach, liquid lunch taking me where my
dreams won’t go, and yes, also wishing, she was lying beside me.
It is difficult to describe it, the feeling you get when you
watch another man fuck the woman you love, the intense multiple feelings, rage,
humiliation, lust and even love, more complex than the best of wine.
I never got to watch her fucking another man, though I’ve
imagined it, which is maybe worse, knowing it is transpiring without even the
satisfaction of seeing it happen, or watching her flaunt the fact – tearing her
victim’s guts out as another man enjoys her.
And yet, it is not completely without its attraction, this
stirring up of emotions, this hormonal outrage, this sense of helplessness – no
one chaining you to the chair, nobody forcing you (in most cases) to watch,
nobody keeping you from walking out the door. You just sit, and watch, and wait
(not for your turn, you never get a turn) for them to finish, or for other men
to join them, adding a cherry to the stop of that ice cream sundae.
Some men love this feeling, getting addicted to it, and somehow
encourage their loved one to love someone else. Some crave the feeling like a
drug.
Winter expired long before I got the chance to steam up my
windshield with her, my back seat too cramped (being a compact car) to accommodate
all I might want to do, and hers, larger, but unavailable, this wish to grope n
the dark the way I always did as a kid, a search for all her softer spots, the
gaps in her anatomy I ache to fill, especially in the dead of winter, when
seated in my small car waiting for it to warm up so I can drive, thinking of
what it might be like, what scents we might stir up together, rubbing our
sticks together, no boy scout ritual, but a ritual of passion and flame, I still
ache to perform, to heat it all up, to steam up the windshield, to keep going
until we can draw hearts on the glass, and in each other.
When younger, I could never hold it back, when the urge came I indulged, if not with a partner then alone,
unable to satisfy it no matter how many times I tried, never able to fully appreciate its flavor as if fine wine, to let the feeling spread through me as it does now, better to feel it than to feel nothing, to have my world shaken, to keep this for a moment when it could be shared, and if unable to be with someone then to save it, let it spread through me, fogging me up, impossible to ignore, fighting the urge to suppress, refusing to stroke it out of my mind or body, this overwhelming potency I keep inside
When Craig told me he was going to get married, I spat out
my coffee, the stared across the packing table at him.
This giant of a man has spent as much time in college up
girls’ skirts as he did on the grid iron, and I couldn’t see him settling down
with any one girl, at least, not until he got into his mid-30s.
But at 23, he said it was time to settle down.
“With who?” I asked.
“A girl I’ve been dating,” he said, refusing to look
directly at me.
“Where did you meet her?” I asked, envisioning all those
club encounters from which he got his usual assortment of women.
“My mother introduced us,” Craid said. “She’s the daughter
of my mother’s best friend.
All of this came out of the blue, marriage and settling
down. Until a few months ago, he had still be talking about how to get pussy.
The proposed marriage, I soon learned, had almost nothing to
do with his future wife, but his mother and his future mother in law, who felt
it was time for Craig to settle down, no more nights out with the boys, but
more importantly, his future mother in law felt that the two mothers and daughter
should find a way to tame Craig wild streak before they took the long walk down
the aisle.
“What the fuck does that mean?” I asked him.
“They want me to prove I’m worthy of her,” Craig said.
“How?”
“They want me to show how responsible I can be,” he said.
This meant, I soon learned, that Craig had to demonstrate how
well he could perform as a house husband.
“Why the fuck would they want that?” I asked.
“My future wife is a Wall Street executive,” Craig said. “She
earns four or time times when I might make here or in my father’s insurance
firm.”
“So, they expect you to stay home and do laundry?”
“Among other things,” Craig said.
“That’s nuts!” I said. “I would suggest you get another
girlfriend.”
“I would, but I actually love her.”
“Love her enough to give up your manhood?”
Craig blushed so deeply, I realized there was something else
he was not telling me.
“What else?” I asked.
“Her mother heard about all the things I did with girls at
college, and wanted to take an extra precaution that I don’t repeat it now that
I’m engaged to her daughter.”
“What kind of precaution?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Craig. You and I are friends, work mates and if you can’t
trust me, who can you trust.”
“They put my cock in a cage,” he mumbled. “They put
something up my butt, too, some kind of remote control vibrator. If I do
something or say something wrong, the mother in law pushes a button. It gets me
excited. My cock tries to grow, and can’t, and that causes pain.”
“And you put up with this? What does you mother say? Or your
future bride.”
“They all think it’s a good idea.”
“You mean having your cock locked up so you can’t have sex
is something your future wife likes?”
“Her mother and my mother said it’s make me want my bride
all the more, and they’ve promised to give her the keys once we take the vows.”
It was impossible for me to get my head around all this.
“So, you’re going to be a full time maid?”
“Yes, at both my mother’s house and my mother in laws.”
“Do they pay you?”
“Not in a way you think,” Craig said. “I get room and board,
and don’t have to pay for my uniforms”
“What kind of uniform?” I asked. Picturing him with the
typical blue shirt and pants of a maintenance worker.
“French maid,” Cliff said.
“What?” I said, trying to picture all six foot six of him in
a French maid outfit. “How they hell did they find anything big enough to fit you.”
“We went to tailor,” Cliff said.
“In public? Wasn’t thank humiliating?”
“Not as bad as I thought, except the part about the makeup.”
“Makeup?”
“They said I wouldn’t look right in the maid’s office
without makeup, lipstick and all that.”
I was sick to my stomach.
“You really, really got to get out of this,” I said.
“It’ll be fine,” he said. “It’ll all change once we’re
married and have a place of our own.”
“That could be more than a year from now,” I said. “God knows
what other things they can do to you in that time.”
“I try not to think about it,” Craig admitted. “The hormone
treatments scare me – not just the morning shakes, but the shots the doctors
give me.”
“Hormones? It sounds like they’re trying to turn you into a
girl.”
“Funny, you should mention that. My mother in law always
says she wishes my wife had a sister.”
Craig left the job two weeks later. I never saw him in
person again, although he did send me a Christmas card sometime after his
marriage. His mother, his mother in law, his bride and him, and he did look a lot
like his bride’s sister.
I got to Asbury first, then to Ocean Grove, searching the
shore line for whales I would otherwise see later during my trip to Cape May,
this stroll through memory lane, from that time way back when I came here
looking for girls, the Stone Pony still fresh with the echoes of the Boss’
music, later coming back lost, after part other Casino fell, no Latin lovers,
just the hum of a sea I could not see in the dark of night, but felt, and still
feel, each time I come, the pleasure palace, humping those silly machines,
roller bladers passing under the crumbling arch, sand dunes rising nearby with people
sweeping it for hidden treasure, and even in the dead of winter, I search for
rumors of whales, like angels who might come to save me, as I stumble along the
boardwalk, passed the shops selling seaside junk, aching now as I ached as a
kid, searching for something I lost or never had, this place full of ghosts, full
of things that stick inside me.
