(Also, very little of his reported dialog with me actually happened.)
-- W.A. Webster
The sunovabitch called at 9am, far too early for any reasonable person to be conscious. The chipper little chirp of the cordless slipped into my dreams and left my preconscious self standing in a dark swamp somewhere, Uzi at empty, wondering which enemy sounded like an electric cricket.
By the time my eyes were open, the fourth ring had passed and someone was talking to my voicemail. I closed my eyes in relief and sought the swamp ...
Chirp chirp chirp. Now I knew it was someone who knew better than to imagine I was already out of the trailer this early.
"Harlan S. Fervor."
"Harley? Bill Webster."
"Don't call me that, Billy."
"Bill. Harlan. OK. I need you to write me a piece."
"That's fine, Bill. Can I go back to sleep now?"
"I need it by tonight. Midnight."
"Tight deadline. Extra pay, you know."
"Well usually, yes, Harlan, but this assignment doesn't pay."
"Too early to joke with me, Bill."
"It's just a small piece. It's for a small, non-profit magazine on the Internet."
"The Internet! Bill, call me back after noon and let's start fresh, ok?"
"I'll call you back at noon to make sure you've gotten started. It's not a computer nerd magazine -- I need a piece on vice."
"The Narcs?"
"No, vice, as in moral defect, ethical imperfection ... The virtues columnist let us down this week."
"That's because there aren't enough human virtues to fill a column, Bill."
"I knew you'd say that, Fervor. So will you write me about some vices?"
"I've been trying to give up most of my vices."
"Write from memory."
Let's start with sex, shall we?
The parents of this country hide their daughters from the likes of me and mine, filling them with sick images of virtue or purity based on a view of women as things, perpetual children, animated bodies -- madonna or whore, clean or dirty -- not to mention the insisted (though rarely mentioned) rule that the people these girls and women are hidden from are boys and men and never other women, the horrors of homosexuality so deeply ingrained as never to be mentioned by any but the most fervent parents of the most butch girls.
Actually, I knew a young woman once, a nominal Christian from industrial Pennsylvania, whose parents confronted her about her closest female friend saying "Hannah, are you and Kim lesbians? Do you know you'll go to hell?" And Hannah was horrified and speechless and told all her friends and acquaintances and passers-by at parties what paranoid parentals she had ("Can you believe they actually said that!?") and of course she fell in and out of bed with boys to prove to her upright family that her vices were at least normal vices, and not full-blown perversions.
This stopped working when she left home and I found her collapsed on the carpet at a friend's house.
"We were on our way to Screw Your Roommate when Hannah showed up. Do you think she'll be ok? We're really kinda late." So I told them to go on to their party, that I'd take care of the large collapsed woman with the buggy eyes.
I helped her throw up and carried her (which wasn't easy) to her bed, where she told me she couldn't remember the name of the boy who'd gotten her drunk and had his way with her, that she really needed to know where Kim was because there was something she had to tell Kim ...
And so of course Hannah is gay and Kim is straight and that whole thing turned into a brand of sexual ugliness that I will not address here and now.
What was I talking about?
Bad sex comes in all shapes and sizes. Bad sex is the first sex and maybe the only sex that most people know -- except for masturbation, which works for some people. Woody Allen said that masturbation was sex with someone he loves. That may be true for Woody, but very few people actually love themselves enough for healthy autosexuality.
Guys prowl and grope unabashedly -- sometimes they rape -- and unlike many defensive males in this dying age I am willing to concede the point that most bad sex starts with the penis-bearing. Boys are taught to conquer their worlds, to climb and explore things in their environs. Girls are just more things to be climbed and explored.
Stephanie developed early, had tits and an ass you wouldn't believe on a 12-year-old. She had barely a brain and the emotions of someone half her age -- and it turned out she never brushed her teeth -- but the effects of early-blossomed T&A sent my 13-year-old hormones surging -- and when the promising early encounters gave way to her shyness and fear, I felt cock-teased, cheated, felt it was my right to get off on her, so I walked her to the bus each day after school, sometimes holding her ass the whole way, and I would extort a kiss or a squeeze or a feel before I'd let her take her bus. She didn't protest at first and when she started to it didn't make a difference.
She eventually got a mousy little baby-faced girlfriend of hers to walk with her every day so she could never be caught alone.
The young adolescent boy I was didn't know remorse for the terror he'd inspired. I didn't think once about the future boys and men who would suffer her suspicions and bitterness over my behavior. All I knew was frustrated sexual aggression and a resentment that I had been denied the release.
For straight boys, sex is the first goal that can't be won by persistence and effort, the first perceived need that can be frustrated by someone else. (I won't get into mother's milk here; I barely have room for my own tangents, let alone the psychosexual developmental theory of Sigmund's disciples.)
We teach our manchildren to expect gratification and pursue, aggressively, their due. And they do. And we all suffer.
There are so many ways to separate sex from the psychic rat's nest of romance, so many pursuits of the safest sex -- sex without complication or commitment -- and it makes sense that we pursue them: the broken heart is the most commonly cited source of "the worst pain I've felt in my life". Every guy I know has sought hassle-free sex, and many of the women I've known have sought the same freedom, though they don't always admit it.
But emotionally-safe sex is empty sex, and rarely caring sex. I've never given a one-night-stand an orgasm, have never much cared about her pleasure in the context of a quick fuck.
Memories of true lovers haunt me: entering Donna on tiptoe at the point in the pool where shallow plunges to deep, summer moonlight on her face and shoulders,the tops of her breasts; making love to Rose against the leaning birch tree of the abandoned motel, white foxes drawn by the sound of human or the smell of sex, yelping from the edge of the clearing; flash sensations -- images of Ellis dancing naked in the truck bed brake lights, the dark burn of candle wax, the play of chain and oil ...
Good sex memories stop my thoughts, slide me from the frenetic frenzy of the mind to the place I can't report on, a place of extra-linguistic reflection.
Bad sex memories bring a constant cringe, regrets and questions and wonderings ... what if I hadn't slept with the Passion sisters -- how did a scene from a het-porn flick turn into tears and recriminations? Why was I so selfish with the condom lady? Why did I drink that last gin & tonic with Rollins -- when she was so close, so close to taking me? (When the cat licked my fingers, I thought it was her ... I came to on a living room floor in a masking-tape take-off of a homicide scene, the outline of my shitfaced self marked on the floor where I'd fallen.)
One last thought: people don't always suffer from bad sex. Maybe the rapist does enjoy himself sexually, despite the feminist rhetoric. Maybe emptiness is a turn-on for some. I've known women who could not come in the bedroom, who needed the sense of illicit play. Perhaps some people find that sense of danger in anonymity, in promiscuity, in emptiness.
"Is sex dirty? It is when you do it right."
-- Woody Allen.
Poor Woody. As if he doesn't have enough problems without me taking all his jokes seriously.
The most enthusiastic compliments I've gotten as a lover have been from women I didn't care about, women whose orgasms I did concentrate on, because I was too burned or bitter to think of my own. I never told them how mechanical and loveless my manipulations were.
Who am I to tell them they've just had bad sex?