X

We were always trying to get next to an x.

Halloween reminds me of what a child I am, or want to be. I play “The Monster Mash” for my son, and I time trip back into one of those school parties, plastic capes and rubber masks, cotton spiderwebs and cutout skeletons with brads for joints, and candy everywhere. They play the tape of the beating heart, the screaming woman, the hissing cat.

It’s needing more from the world that causes you to grow. Lack of innocence is expansion of want. And one day, you’ll recognize all the black holes into which everything falls.

That’s me, fifteen or sixteen, out in the cold, with a balloon and my memory from grade school of how to make piñatas with glue and newspaper strips. I want to be the Mordred, in his gold, the wicked son of Arthur and his tricky sister, the creepy-cool knight-killer boy from the movie.

I don’t know if it will work and my fingers are going numb, slathering strips of wet newspaper on the balloon. Shaping a mask. Strips ribboned up for curls. Gold spray paint.

The Halloween party is in the city, and what we hope for, the five of us jammed into a car, is that there will be plenty of girls there. What we think we want to do is fuck but none of us could arrange that even if a girl was willing. We’re just driven to get close; we just move recklessly in the direction of any x we can.

And none of us think about why. We’re kids. We think about how. And we don’t even think about that well. We’re bundles of wish, of prayer, of hope. The accident that will get us laid may be coming.

I’ve read Tropic of Cancer and Portnoy’s Complaint but I don’t get any of it. I don’t understand that our desire to try to fuck is something to contemplate.

The girl, she’s dressed like a genie, complete with that flap of fabric that covers her mouth and the tip of her nose. Like that and in the dark and the music, I think she’s pretty. My mask is the opposite of hers: only my mouth is visible. I’ve heard about the Ancient theory that people fall to earth as hermaphrodites and break apart and then go forever seeking out the other half, but it doesn’t cross my mind as I notice that our masks complete each other.

Outside, pressed against her in the light of the street lamp, I see her skin is bad.

And yet there is her midriff, a belly button with a jewel in it. Her genie pants are pink and billowed and gossamer. We kiss and I touch and her skin is slightly wet and she doesn’t taste very good but everything I need or want to need is before me. I could pretend I remember it now, and I could write out that false memory, but it’s lost for me as it most likely has for you: the feeling of the possibility of communing with something that you think will really fulfill you.

If you read this blog, if you’ve lived this life, you probably know there is no such thing. Peace is a different endeavor.

This is the second vagina, and all I expect is to get my fingers in. Anything beyond would overwhelm me.

I slide my hand down and she lets it go.

( I think now of the birth of my son and the death of a love and the few other very deep moments when we realize we are really right up against it, the pure stuff of life, and I’m sure those first few times, those first few touches of that which it was hard to believe we’d ever be allowed to touch, can count amongst them).

The mound, bristly. The skin soft.

My finger inside. And aside from the fact that it is warm, there is no real tactile pleasure in this. This isn’t why we touch vaginas. It’s not even why we fuck them. Our own hands are better from a purely physical standpoint.

It’s that she’ll let you. Her x is something into which many boys want to put their fingers, but on this Halloween, you’ve somehow risen from the pack of them.

(Since then, it’s never enough. You always want more, whatever you get, whatever she gives. She’s nude for you, she’s open for you, she is yours, and then what? But I’m fifteen or sixteen, and I stand there in the cold autumn air with my finger in that warm wet place, and I don’t want anything more.)

Inside again, the dim lights, the loud music, all these costumes. She has on that thing that covers her face. I leave off my mask. My friends, they’re waiting for me, but I feel separated, and I don’t tell them about any of it right away.