Xx and Xx

There were two and this was a bachelor party and I didn’t think these kind of things happened in real life. We were all of us young and there was the excitement of boys going into a world they didn’t know but had heard about, the way it must be for some youths as they head toward war. Sex, like violence, was a broad subject, one we could not understand in complexities.

There was the redhead, taller and older, with a sharp smile, a woman whose persona was strong. There was the petite blond, uncertain and unable to pretend certainty. There were seven or eight of us, with bottles of beers held in our laps.

The dancers, they would take some of us upstairs one by one, and in that room we could kiss them and they would kiss our x’s and the blond would lie down and you could watch and even join when the redhead bent to place her mouth against the x of the blond. There was the price of the overall dance and we’d paid that but each of us that went upstairs went up there with fifty dollars.

Four of us went.

The blond and the redhead put four x’s in their mouths. The blond lie still and the redhead went down on her four times. The saw four boys come into their own hands. Four boys knocked, and four boys left. Then they dressed and went downstairs and out to the car where their driver waited.

The redhead hugged us all goodbye and kissed each of us on the mouth quickly. The little blond wanted to be away and she didn’t embrace but turned her shoulder and averted her face.

Sometimes, she had tried to smile.

I thought: I wish she were my girl. I wish there were a way. I thought that if I could get inside of her for real I would never want to be inside of anybody else. She was small and serious and she felt not exactly fragile, but there was something in her you wanted to protect—and not because you are a hero, but because you believed that if you protected her she would be yours.

They were walking down the little hill, grass a strange green in the street lamp, the redhead turning to wave, her smile sincere, the blond fixated on the car. Of course, the driver—somebody at some point had taken him out a beer—had to be paid out of the money the girls had collected.

The two of them dancing had cost one hundred dollars. This was in the living room with the group of us. Some sat on the couch and one on the recliner and we’d carried chairs from the kitchen for the others. Nobody wanted to be close to anybody else at a time like this, though everybody felt close.

The blond stood back and moved in her own space to music from a boom box. The redhead traveled from boy to boy and we sat there more ashamed to turn away than to watch as she worked against our friends.

You put your hands on her hips. She leans into you. She presses her nipple against your lip and you open your mouth and somebody you’ve known for a decade, since before puberty, leans forward to see if that is reallyreally happening.

One hundred dollars. And four boys went up the steps with fifty dollars each. There is a man in the car that must be paid and two women split what is left.

We sell all kinds of things and I’ve been married to a dancer and I know that for some people it costs more to sell particular things than others. I think about my own career and yours and the idea that in the end there won’t be much left of most of us.

The blond shouldn’t have been doing it. She wore white mesh gloves and a white garter belt. Sometimes at my second ex wife’s club there would be a girl like that, and you always wanted to tell her—now that you understood how some of it works and doesn’t—that she should stop now.

The blond, her x was small and open and it makes me wonder still that if wetness can sometimes be a function of pure mechanics and no psychology. The redhead tried to lead her and tried to make her feel all right but the blond did not want comfort from anybody there.

She was on the bed and her thighs were open and though I was touching her, I never really got to touch her and maybe that is why I felt as she walked down the hill that I’d hardchange my life to bring her into it.

You yearn like that everyday, and you get used to it. The girl who cuts you hair. The woman behind the register at the grocery store. All around you are women you tell yourself could improve your world, not just with their beauty but with whatever it is you think you see beneath it.

Maybe that’s almost always why we touch. You connect to see what will come of that connection, and rainbows, so that you can never prove there isn’t gold at their ends, move away, but some women don’t.

The blond, she didn’t walk quickly, but firmly, in her heels down the hill. I imagine fresh blisters on the flesh there. I try to think of her now, a long time later, me in the same city, sitting within a mile of where all of that happened. I’d like to guess her happily married, and to somebody better than I was or am, and I suppose it is not unlikely. This is what we always want for those about whom we accidentally care.

M and F

We’d read the other well, each the other's best audience, and sometimes one would mean this figuratively, but here this is literal. As a result of this, and of the pictures (her mouth pouted, her eyes very blue, the pose in which she leans forward with her palms on her thighs, that very wide smile, her ass further divided by the line of the panty) because of the complement of fact that she sent these pictures, and because of whatever she saw in mine, we decide to meet.

This is about a different blog, a blog in which the writer was more public, in which you could see my name and my face. And I hers. And we had this audience, reading us both, watching us to see if two people can be caused to seem to come together.

In fact, we could, though they didn’t cause but only predicted and probably were never really able to fully believe it. She drove the six hours, from her state into mine.

I was very sick, only I didn’t know it.

I knew I was coughing a lot. On that blog I wrote about my day to day life, dating and my profession and whatever it was I thought of love and death and sex and television, the same things everybody else writes about. The same things minus the tv I still write about.

There was a woman, F, who lived in a town where I used to live with a wife. It wasn’t far from where I was living when M came to see me, that town where a woman I’d married and I had lived in a house together like a family. Finally I was going back, driving the ten miles up the freeway into that different and old and somewhat lost world, going up there where I thought I’d never go again, going to see this woman F, though any real potential between was shot. The first night she came late to my house and I’d only kissed her before that, her pretty Latina face, this rare woman older than me, a music industry girl who could drop names but never did; you had to pry them out. F, always smiling, her energy good, a sharply dressed woman, and it was the way she looked at you that turned you on. That night we barely knew each other but she came to my apartment from the bars (I’d stayed in with my cough) and though she didn’t act it at first, she came there with something wrong and she was there to solve it but I wasn’t the solution but she couldn’t realize it and before I did we were fucking and tears were streaming down her face.

I was always afraid to even touch her after that.

But still, she’d gotten a little ways into my head. I’d go up to that town that was sort of painful sometimes to see F and I’d drink with her because it felt good to be around her. It wasn’t that we were creating strong enough memories to blot old ones but the pain of memory I’d create was quickly swirled up and deflated in our meetings and it seemed a smart solution.

It felt sort of good to finger the scar and then slip into a bar and into a vodka. F and I would drink and talk and kiss.

Christmas lights in the naked little square trees. I remember all of this. (There is much about much that I don’t want to forget, the little storehouse of thingsthathavepast. There were the three bars, and I could tell you the smell of each, and, one night, a band, and I could tell you most of the songs, but it was only just this last Christmas season, so I suppose this is no feat, but I mean to do it with everything, so afraid of aging or something more sinister and less defined am I.)

We’d talk, and she was a good talker and a good listener, a smart woman I admired. We would drink and she did that well as well. And we’d kiss, and I always liked the way she kissed. After I'd leave, I'd remember her crying after our first fuck, I'd decide I'd probably not see her again, because I assumed our relationship would always be limited by those tears, though we’d talked and drank over them until they seemed solved.

Better just to move on, I'd think. But then, as soon as I was beside her again: intoxication.

Those nights with the Christmas lights in the little square between the bars, the sky clear and cold, this town where I’d lived with a girl I’d loved and married and not so long ago but in a different life entirely and now it was now and I’d sing that to myself: now now now.

Walking between bars or to one or the other of our vehicles, I’d cough myself to my knees in the cold air.

I was sick, but I didn’t know how sick. I was old, but I didn’t know how old.

And of course, F and I would fade out, as everything is, and maybe even at the proper pace.

Amidst all of this, up comes M, this six hour drive, and we meet in flesh, taking a drink at a bar close to my apartment, and she is quite different from her blog, which is sassy and overtly sexy and hyper and clever—this woman that men want to fuck and women want to be more like—and here, across from me, she is quiet, and she studies me, with her eyes which are not even blue, but green, (but prettier green than that sharp and false blue), she watches me and listens to me talk, and listens to me cough, and finally she wonders out loud if I am attracted to her for real.

Yes. She’s wearing black slacks, a black shirt. Her hair is very blond. You would turn to look at her face. But more than that, you know by her quite she is not all bluster; the sincerity, the depth you read into her writing, it was not that you invented it: it was there to find.

And me, well, I’m better looking when I’m sick. Somehow, I’m more vital. My skin, my eyes, I sort of shine. This is fever, and fever, even in my head, as long as you minus the nausea, fever is my friend. It separates me from the world so that I can’t feel self conscious, and my thoughts, it’s like liquor: they are more lucid. I’m on my third week of coughing and my second day of the third or fourth bout of fever, this one higher than it was the day before, and as we sit and drink and cough and M studies me it, that fever, grows.

Maybe she shouldn’t kiss a man so sick. But she does. And it is her idea, I think—I rarely try to give the idea to a woman, and never with a woman I haven’t know sexually for some time—to take my x in her mouth. This is in the living room, all dark save a candle, all shadow.

This is where the writer materializes. Her black slacks open by a button. Her black shirt off. Those heavy breasts. Like a person I might have dreamed up off of her words, off of her photographs, and me standing there in a sort of stuffy shock, thinking about the way this moment was born from the first time I read her first entry and saw her face beneath a straw cowboy hat.

The way you say: I must have this woman.
And for many of them about whom you say that, the having doesn't materialize.

And we fuck all night, not long bouts—I can’t breathe very well, and often, I get light headed—but we fuck, over and over again, my temperature rising, she can feel it. But we’re into this and nobody is asking if we shouldn’t be. If anything, the fever accentuates the fuck, or vice versa. My lungs are growing bacteria. When finally I find myself with a doctor, she tells me everything I've done wrong. This night or any like it, according to her, one of those things.

Sometimes as we fuck or just before we begin or just after we seem to have finished, I slip into a near dream and the dream becomes half nightmare and this blond woman is like a succubus and I have to fuck her until she wants to go away because if I give in she will inhabit me.

We sleep with my hand burning on her belly. I wake and turn and where am I? I wake and turn and who are you? I wake and turn and without knowing the answer to either of these questions, like a man overly trained, or, as she wrote about it, like a robot, I begin fucking again.

In the morning, she goes, but not unhappily. I’m glad for the cold air beside her car. Happy for my open shirt in the wind. She’s holding my face. Her hands cold, my face hot. We’re wondering if we’ll see each other again, or if all that fucking was to making it not necessitate. She’s driving away, and my hot turns cold, my sweat to shiver, almost in an instant, and I wave and I sit down on the curb and hold my arms over my chest. After a little while, I go in.

Later, I’ll know how sick I am, and how old. But for now I just return to the place where she has been, a woman who for most people is really more figment than reality, this woman who I had fucked and fucked, over and over, but really, she was fucking me, or we were fucking each other, and as sweet as I want to make it, often she was a demon lover seeming to feed off of my fever and thus could easily by read as a product of it rather than an accessory to it, but the proof of it her earrings on my nightstand.

She blogs it.

I don’t, not until now.

M

Her husband was a cop and that made all of this not smart.

How much easier it is to focus on external danger

There comes a time when what I am drawn to is housewives. It starts early, at maybe 19, 20. Some afternoon in some park when I notice that I am noticing mothers standing in the sun. And I realize that it’s not just that suddenly they seem viable as sexual objects, it is that suddenly I feel viable as a potential sexual partner.

I’m sort of grown up. I have an x. They could, these housewives in their conservative shorts, in their tied-around-the-waste-sweaters, with their sunglasses pushed up into their hair, these women could take me seriously. They could take me seriously as one of those, as a lover.

Seven or eight years later, in the midst of my own marriage, it comes to me harder. This is in a Recreation Center, and I’m lifting weights, and across from me, through big glass walls, are all these not quite middle aged women, doing crunches on exercise balls while music plays.

And I see them going up and down, their imperfect bodies, the little slack on the arm, the little tears starting in the flesh of the face, that extra weight on the thigh, and I wonder what they want with all of this.

They are mothers and wives and as much as children can give a woman—or a man, for that matter—there are just things these women are not getting from their children. Or their husbands. What they are is five or ten years into a marriage and there is something in most of these women that nobody who says “I love you” you to them—or doesn’t say it anymore—gets. These women are going up and down on their exercise balls and what they feel is not necessarily empty. What they feel is something crushed up inside of them, some still but seemingly barely extant part of some person they are or might have been and have not abandoned but have never been allowed to expose.

These women wishing for more perfect witnesses.

And that’s what you want to be.

Look at their lipsticked lips. Their manicured nails. Those old rings. That well done hair. Look at her exercise clothes and her mini-van or SUV and understand that her life is almost good enough but she almost believes in a bridge and you may almost be able to be it.

So as it happens, years after I realize that this particular kind of woman interests me, and some years after I give heavy consideration to that consideration in a Recreation Center, I begin in earnest, and some of the 81 are from this set.

This one, M, her husband is a cop and that makes it a mistake. She is petite, with blond hair and pretty face, a voice I like. Her children get together with my child. I like the word “playdate”.

There is a Christmas party; she comes and she stays longer than anybody. It’s cold out and pretty and I walk her to her SUV and she moves almost as if to hug me and I move almost as if I don’t want to be hugged, a sort of uncertainty, but somehow we both know then a door is open.

Within month, I’m finger fucking in a vehicle outside a bar. Her skin is very soft. She’s open mouthed and leaned back and she’s at a stage where there is no need for any pretense.

I myself am cheating. This is the beginning of the relationship with my second wife, r, and here I am out with a woman who came to our Christmas party, whose husband is a cop.

Two days later, M, she’s reading a book I’ve suggested to her. Her husband, the cop, he comes up to her and he wants to know: What is this?

I suppose there were other clues. The way her hair was in my car. The way I had to confess myself to r. He calls M out on the book and I guess she chooses not to lie because this is what she wants.

I’m her catalyst.

She says that we kissed and held each other; not the whole truth, not so much as to send him over the edge. She’s tired enough of a marriage that it is hard to define as truly bad to risk what she says might be an experience with a glock.

He says he’s going to hurt you, she tells me.

I’ve earned this. For a long time, when a police car pulls up behind me, I’m ready for my beating. But no beating comes. They move toward divorce. I move toward marriage.

It is some time later, she’s moved to a neighboring state, and my own new wife is becoming my exwife, and I recognize that I’ve seen her for the last time. That kind of pain, nobody describes it properly; the only way to know it is to be in it.

It is now that M returns.
She reminds me of Reese Witherspoon. Or Beverly D’Angelo.

We drink vodka and eat candy worms. She gets close to me. I let her get close. We are listening to her music while we sit on the couch. She pushes her shoulder into me. I turn my chin. We kiss. It is not long before we undress.

How little she is with her clothes off. I watch her work against me. I watched parts of me work against her. This is nice, but I’m a bit raw. It feels good, but it kind of hurts.

She’s going to stay the night.

I feel both relieved and frightened. Relieved because I will not have to be alone with myself. Afraid because the presence of another accentuates the absence of the girl who has gone.

The next day, I do what I do. M’s car is gone when I return from my work. I am relieved, and afraid. Afraid to be alone with myself and relieved to not be with a girl who is not the girl who has gone.

M’s car is not in the parking space, but her knee high boots are standing by my door. Her bags are on the floor. And she’s left me a note: she’s gone for groceries. It is pasta. I can’t outwardly resist the idea of her cooking for me and eating with me and staying another night. But inside, I resist. I feel myself shutting down. I feel myself going distant.

I mean that night not to touch her but she does not mean not to be touched. And I am glad when I turn toward her touch. When she pushes through my walls. When she insists on my intimacy. And I am glad when her mouth presses against mine. When I penetrate her.

The next day, she has to return to her new state, her new life. I can hardly look at her. I pick up one of her bags to carry it out. I start to cry. I put on a baseball cap and pull it over my eyes. I can’t quit crying. I can’t talk. I walk with her to her car. I put the bag inside. She stands against me and I hold her and I cry. After I let her go, I run up the stairs, into the apartment I once shared with a girl, and there I fall to the floor, and now I sob, the way I haven’t done for years.

Ashamed, over the phone, I tell M that it was one goodbye too many.

I suppose, in a way, that it is true. I’m crying for almost everybody I touch and will not touch again. Some of the girls who are gone. Who are reallyreally gone. Not just the newest ex wife, but the old one, and every other woman I’ve loved.

A Night in the Life

I go alone, almost always.

This is not a post about x’s. We’re running out of them. I go alone to the bar and I come home that way too.

I’m not saying that I’m in here to meet a girl, but I will admit that I notice that every girl in here is a deviation of some girl I’ve been with before. This is not an epiphany. I’ve been noticing it for a long time, with every bar, with every collection of women it holds.

My past is littered with ruined relationships and no woman in this bar or any other is superior to a great many of the women from whom I’ve moved on. And yet, if we’re being honest here: did I not sometimes ruin those relationships just so I could be in a bar like this amongst women like these?

This is not an irony. This is a reminder: most moves are lateral and men don’t move on and on and on because in so doing they are finding something better, it’s that the something is NEW that keeps them moving toward it.

Anyway, the bar. A mixed crowd in terms of age, ethnicity. The atmosphere is calmer than that of the dance club next door. The club and the bar, side by side, and people circulate between the two.

I’m beside two blondes. I mean to have vodka tonics and I’m not sure what I mean to have beyond that. It’s just supposed to be the night at the end of the week when you sit in a particular kind of notquiet. Most anything can happen. What does is that the blondes and I strike up a conversation.

The blondes, half drunk, are evaluating nearly everybody in the bar. It is fair to assume that if I’d not been taken into their circle, they’d be talking about me. I am, though, in their confidences, momentarily immune. We buy each other drinks. The shorter one is engaged, her third marriage, and the taller one is married for now. They’re as old as I am, but they don’t seem it. I like the way they’ve aged. The tall one I’ll later see knows how to move, but it’s the shorter one I sort of vibe with. When she goes to the restroom, the tall one, the good dancer, she tells me that her friend is half deaf.

She reads your lips, she tells me. Don’t tell her I told you.

It proves to be an exaggeration. The tall girl has told me that about her shorter friend in the way girls have of cutting the legs out from under other girls; she’s trying to make her friend less attractive.

Her friend is, in fact, attractive, with a face similar to what has proven to be one of my longest enduring female friends, A, a girl I’ve kissed but never touched deeply, a woman working on her third marriage and first child, one of the smartest women I know, and most dangerous in he way she handles men. I’m very fond of her and this fondness translates to the little blond because of the similarity in their faces.

Two women pass. One of them looks at me and I don’t look away. She touches my back and murmurs something and then passes on, a pretty girl with what I at first believe is a Mediterranean look, a well dressed girl with hips and ass too large for my conscious taste, but she’s got the gate and confidence of a stripper, and on some level it’s all very attractive.

Across the bar, there is a man with a pink tie, stiff shirt, a man taking himself seriously, with a very pretty girl, dark hair, dark eyes. He seems young but she seems even younger, and sometimes it looks like she glances over, but I’m not sure. Maybe she thinks the girls are talking about her. In fact, they are. Maybe she thinks I’m looking at her. In fact, I am.

A very drunk girl with a very nice figure in a very nice black dress, a girl whose face is probably not what I’d call pretty even when she is sober, passer, her face twisted up drunk indignation. She is all frown, glare, bluster.

All cleavage and leg.

She passes, and one of the blondes say something and the black dress girl stops and wonders what the blond said and so to get off the hook the blond says: My friend thinks you’re cute.

The black dress girl focuses on me, looking angry. She wants to know if I really said that about her. And I’m a little afraid of her. Somebody has already made her mad tonight. Or maybe she is always mad. Anyway, I say, Yes, I think you’re extraordinarily pretty.

And her face softens. It does not become soft. Just softer. And she comes forward and puts her hands on either side of my face and she kisses my mouth, which I do not open. And then she backs up and then she goes on her way.

The blondes laugh. I drink.

The girls want to go, next door, the club. As we prepare to leave, the man with the pretty girlfriend, the stiff shirted pink tied man, he comes over, sort of aggressively, this man outclassed by his date, this man at who my companions have laughed a little. He says he and his girlfriend play a little game when they go out, just for kicks, they want to know: if I were alone, if she were alone, would I give her my number?

She’s sitting there across the way, smiling but no longer comfortably.

I decide: this couple, they’re too young to be swingers, at least not the kind that would approach a man in a bar.

I decide it is about the way a woman wants to know that she is beautiful. The way a man wants to wield the power of her beauty, especially when he has little beyond it. He heard laughter, he decided to push against it, to make a point.

I say that I would not give her my phone number; I’m honestly not sure why I give this answer except that somehow my pride was involved. His grin fades. The blondes like my answer. As we walk out, I hope the man lies to the girl about what I said.

In the club, I sit and the girls dance in front of me, with each other, with me, one of them good, the other not. It’s sexy enough. A Black man with a Fu-Man-Chu, an older man, he tips his imagined hat at me, as if I’m really in this, as if these are my girls.

But they are not my girls.

He tips his imagined hat and then he asks one to dance and then the other. Neither will.

He tells me that something is wrong here, nobody will dance with him. There’s a transvestite, I almost make a joke, he should dance with her. But I swallow the joke, and fifteen minutes later for real he is dancing with the transvestite, close and hard.

The girls are putting on a show for me, or maybe I’m part of the show, I don’t know.

I’m not sure if there is any legitimate want here. On a surface level, I could want to fuck either of them. It is imaginable that I could even feel intimate with the short blond. In some vague way, they want something off of me. Most certainly, they both want me to want them. And with the shorter one, the little blond, her face is perfect, and maybe she is half deaf, but what does it matter, and she lifts her shirt and her belly is perfect, too, and then for a little while I want her and I want her and I want her.

And seduction is possible. Seduction is always possible. Into every house is an open window.

But I’m almost beyond it. There’s a girl somewhere with whom I’m trying to hammer something out.

So, why the bar at all?

I’m half caught up in this very old habit. Older than I am. The monkey me in the cave, but refined. Fuck her and fuck her and fuck her.

Outside for a breather, I lean against the light pole and call the girl I’m supposed to be hammering something out with. From the first bar come the two girls, the Mediterranean looking one, sure of herself and sexy. She knows me, and I know her. Not really, but well enough, by type and by momentary connection. They stop in front of me and get me off the phone. They are going downtown, some bar I know, and they think I should go.

I say maybe I will. I say, I’ll probably see you there.

The tall girl, I don’t know where she’s from, but her accent is strong, and as she and her friend start walking away, she turns and looks at me hard, and she says something in Spanish, and then she says it again, and again, getting further away from me but staring back and repeating this phrase. And there is a look in her eyes. She’s a girl walking away from a fuck but still talking about it, the way a boy walks away from a fight but keeps talking to the boy he might have fought.

And god help me, for a moment, I still believe. There is a mystery to be solved here; there are pants to take down, an x to explore, and all that flesh and soul around it, and only now, on the morning after, do I stop to think that if I fucked her, it would really be me fucking the accent, the Spanish phrase she kept repeating, whatever it was, I’d be fucking that and the confidence in her stride and the unhidden hunger in her eyes, the complement of their focus on me.

Inside are the blondes. I keep my body and tongue mostly still, the blond girl, the little one, she’s looking at me and waiting. She knows how this works. I know how this works. It’s time for a step. Her hand his on my thigh, close to my knee, very casual. I’m supposed to put my hand on her hip. Maybe touch her face. I’m supposed to do something.

I’m keeping still just because I think I should.

I think I should.

I think I should.

You know what this post is about. You know what this blog is about. It is about longing. The kind that drove the Romans west. And everybody has been going west pretty much every since. That thing over the horizon that we mean to get to, just so we can decide to move on from it.

I come home alone. Not Spanish speaking girl, no blond, no dark haired dark eyed girl whose boyfriend likes to play games.

Home alone, and this is not a victory. There is something here to beat, but it’s not so easy as that. You can’t even see with certainty where the battle lines are and what specifically they are about and if you imagine and end to it, you can’t imagine a life beyond, the restructuring.

The project, whatever it is, it is vast.

K and S

False starts. Everything is just a bit forced. What is wrong here?

I want to make this entry but I can’t find my way into it. Any entry, but non of them are working.

Like K, the girl whose sister I fucked once, whose sister I suppose I was dating, like the way it was between K and me when we finally got together.

(S, she was easy to get into. I was young and I knew K was in the next room and I knew I’d rather be with K but the fact was that for a brief time S was beside me and now she was beneath me and I hardly understood how to seduce a woman, so making some kind of complicated switch over was pretty much unthinkable. S and me, I don’t think that we really liked each other that much and I wonder if in a way that didn’t make the fucking seem so effortless.

She came onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelvethirteenfourteen times justlikethat.

I know not because I counted but because she told me. And of course, years later, I’d learn to wonder if she came at all. Years later, I’ve never met a woman that multi-orgasmic, and those that have been even a fraction of that took a hell of a lot more work then I was capable of putting in with S that night.

Regardless: there she was screaming and rocking beneath me and I felt I’d been sucked into something bigger than I was and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted mostly for her to shut up and I even said Shhhhh, but if she heard, she did not listen. I figured to ride it out, the way they tell you to do if you’re caught in avalanche. Eventually she stopped.

Then we were done.)

K and I, we’d ride around in my car with the top down; it was summertime and we were full of youth. We never talked about the idea that we were a clear match and S and I were not. Then S and I faded out. K and I stayed friends.

Finally in autumn we gave it its go.

I know her still, the way you know someone you talk on the phone with once a month and see for an evening every other year.

Her marriage went like this: they were happyhappy. Then he got a bit sad. He stopped working. They moved to a bigger city. He developed strange habits, like not leaving the house for days and days and says. He stopped fucking her. She started fucking around, one night stands, dangerous sex. Then there was a legitimate boyfriend, a legitimate affair. Her work required her to travel. The lover, he was wealthy. They’d meet in FL, in LA, Pittsburgh. She and her husband argued; she was unhappy, this wasn’t working, what should they do? Divorce, maybe. She wanted to talk about it. He had an idea: he put the phone on speaker and dialed a number. It was her lover’s voice mail. The husband said, Shall we ask him what to do? There had been a private detective. There were details. There were photos.

He didn’t treat her right, not since the second year of the marriage. Hardly anybody can do that, not over time. When he didn’t fuck her, he told her it was her fault, in that way men have of externalizing what in actually is an internal problem. The way it is easier to blame others than examine ourselves.

So in way, he made this happen to himself. Still, I try to imagine what he felt, knowing what he knew, looking at her over glasses of dinner wine, greeting her when she returned from the office, from her business trips. The pictures he had, the details, the way they must have torn at his guts.

I know that I’m glad I wasn’t that lover.

And K, maybe you can blame her, but I can’t.

I think about that night we tried to fuck, skipping all the preliminaries, not trying first to establishing a romantic relationship. We hatched the plan over a Chinese dinner. Maybe we should fuck. We honestly liked each other, and in a way that can support a relationship. There was an attraction but we’d never indulged it.

The thing was, we’d never even flirted.

So we went about trying to fuck, mercenary style. Since then, we’ve both become adept at it. Not that that is necessarily something toward which you should aspire.

She went home and I went home and then she came over. She had on a red teddy, the kind that snaps between the thighs, and unsnaps there too.

And you keep thinking as you unsnap those buttons: this is going too quickly. We should kiss more first. We should hold hands for awhile.

We felt intimate, but there was no intimacy between us that night. It was like a boxing match with a friend. You step inside the ring and how strange you suddenly feel, how tentative.

I went inside of her x, the look, the feel of which I cannot remember. She wanted to be on top. I slipped out. Half hearted and half masted.

She said, This isn’t right.

Her face is now much as it was then. The good and sharp smile, the pretty dark brown eyes. Her voice on the phone, the way she laughs, it hasn’t changed. I don’t think it has.

We couldn’t really fuck. I put on jeans and went outside and sat on the steps. The air was cool, my torso bare, I folded my arms for warmth. She came out to smoke a cigarette and I looked at her and she looked at me and I know that we both liked how the other looked. I knew that we were like minded and maybe even like spirited.

I knew that we should be boyfriend and girlfriend.

We’d just fucked it up. We just didn’t find our way. It’s just that sometimes everything is there, you just can’t get it down.

l

Sometimes, it’s about this:

Caught in the ennui of dip after dip, like the ennui of days, and you think of days as you dip, the absurdity of one after the other, your shadow on the slick gym wall rising and falling and rising and falling, and it strikes you that you will have had done more dips than you will have lived days.

A muscle looks better in use.

Think of those dancers who aren’t trying to share an experience with a partner but just want somebody to look good with. The way sometimes people become for us pedestals, stages, soap boxes.

Do we look good together?
(Do I look good against you?)

In this room, you need mirrors, the kind you put on the wall and the kind she has in her eyes.

Let’s talk about her, a girl at that time not unlike I am at that time, a girl who wants to know who she is by how she imagines we look when fucking. If she masturbates about it afterward, who do you think she imagines mostly?

She touching your shoulder, murmuring against your arms, and this is why you lift, in this post-warrior culture where that kind of exercise is only useful to an athlete, these kind of arms almost obsolete; you do it not so much because you think she’ll want to fuck you more if you have arms, or abs, or glutes, but because simply you want to admire yourself when you fuck.

It’s a showcase and you are your own best audience, and all is vanity.

This is l, and she’s almost capital, but the problem with her is that beyond that vanity there is nothing. This is the girl you call vapid, though she is smart. The kind of girl who has no cause save breast cancer, and that because she might someday have it.

And the first night she sits on the steps, her shirt still on, her panties off, her tampon in, and I’m kneeling there with my back muscles in the moonlight, licking her upper-x, and what she does is apropos: she strikes a pose, elbows bent, tight arms flexed, head thrown back, her little neck a pulse of muscle and tissue.

The second night we fuck on the couch, old fashioned, me on top, and we pretend we’re looking at each other. In fact, sometimes I am. Sometimes I marvel at her body, this aerobic addict, this woman whose only real virtue is that kind of discipline. The stomach sunken and lined. The ribcage raised and the lungs behind it, they could breathe for almost ever. The mound of one breast. The other breast. Neither dripping off the side. Neither sunken in on itself, old grave like. Just there, standing, above her beating heart. She’ll turn over, a haunch for an ass, those leanly muscled legs, the hamstrings with the cord you can grip.

This is the woman you alone on an island and starving would want to eat.

Or for two or thee nights, not in a row, you want to fuck, this near masturbation, you’re getting off on yourself. You’re in love with her hands on your bi’s, how big they feel in her grip, your fingernails on your chest, isn’t it vast?

Everything she says ruins it a little. Everything you answer ruins it a little. So encourage silence. Fuck like bodies fucking. Pretend it is art, listen for the click of the camera in your mind’s eyes, her skin a better color than your skin, but in this light, it’s all right, everything is, you get to be beautiful.

You’re all line an indent.

There is no danger of love. There is no danger of misunderstanding.

Later, you’ll know better, you’re flaws, and probably somewhere else in the world a real mirror is giving her back hers. You think of Charles Bukowski, there are no beautiful women, no strong men.

L

There is that first what you thought was love, that high school girl with whom, in that Shakespearean teenager way you have of thinking then, you willed yourself to fall dramatically into something you called love. Who is she now, in that small town, in that dusty part of the world to which you haven’t returned in more than a dozen years?

It is a fact. She is there. In fact, as far as you know, as impossible as it seems, everyone woman you have touched like that lives and breathes and thinks athisveryrightnowmoment, just as as you do. Her life just as real. The story of the world still telling itself to her, only in it, she is the protaganist, and you're a minor character.

She is there, in that same town, married to someone you know. Not that you know him anymore. Not that you know her. Not that they know you.

She is like you, in her early thirties. You are both as close to your future grandkids as you are to the first kiss you shared.

How to talk about that? How to eroticize a girl you knew when she was just a girl, her lips the first you reallyreally sunk into? Large by comparison, but comparison to what other mouth? Just large. And the flavor of her, for there was a flavor, you can remember trying to describe it in something you wrote once for a different audience.

This is a little dance that you do together. She comes close, you come closer, she pulls away. There are the notes and poems you put in her locker. The stationary with the cutout silhouette of a unicorn beside a castle that you buy in the city and use for love letters.

This is high school and as badly as you want to fuck, you are scared to death of it. There are the older guys in the locker room, telling you: It might be big, but if you don’t know how to use it…

And of course, you don’t. You know what will happen. You will crash and burn, flying a plane you never earned and shouldn’t have gotten your hands on. This misplaced equipment that for a time is more a curse than a blessing.

It’s not much of a romance, and it doesn’t even get close to sex. That is her ass in track team shorts but even though you’re holding her hand you know you’ll never touch it. She’s smiling in the sun, and those are her nipples showing through her shirt, but they aren’t reallyreally nipples. If you took her shirt off…

Never mind. You’ll never take her shirt off.

Little towns like that, a few of you move on, most of you stay.

Years later, when you’re off at college and she is not, she calls you.

This is the girl you drove for once, that first summer after graduation, after your little high school romance or whatever it was ended, at a time when she was visiting a sister seven hours away, and she called you late and you drove all night and you arrived at dawn and she realized immediately it was a mistake. It had always been a mistake. This desire to be close but not veryvery close. Fifteen minutes, twenty later, the return drive in burning disappointment. The highway, part of it along a river, the road twisting and turning, your eyes unfocused, bleary. You were home by dusk.

Two years later she finds you. Not that you are hard to find. Not that you are that far from her. The college city not far from the little town. Thirty minutes though it seems often longer.

Then there is a trip to the county to visit her. Then there is her trip to the city to see you. A one dollar double feature at the Roxy, movies already out on video, and it is summer time and she’s wearing pink shorts. And you know you’ll they’ll come off.

You believe in her x and you know you’ll make it real.

Undressing as iconoclasm. Touching as demystifying. Her x, her nipples, all of it real after all.

And yet, somewhere along the way, some of the certainty fails. Even as it is bare before you, it takes on those more elusive, more transcendent qualities. Despite the fact that you’ve been around a few x’s now; despite the fact that you’ve proven yourself; despite the fact that she is buying into this neo-you seduction, you feel an increasing sense of pressure. And fear.

And before it, you are reduced. She grows and you shrink.

You’re twenty but you are still a teenage boy near-begging for what a girl has been taught to keep at arms length from you.

These are your fingers inside the first x you ever really really wanted and got.

But you’re hardly really touching her—you hardly know how—and anyway, this is like the man who keeps running but must fall: any step now, it will end.

And it does, where it always had: with her uncertain. She is bare, pulling the comforter up, and you are collapsing onto the bed. You haven’t fucked. It doesn’t matter. Behind every door there is another door and they further you get, the harder they are to open.

Fucking, like writing, is an act of regression, an act of reduction; in fucking and writing, we first turn things into less than they are, and then, sometimes, we try for the opposite: we try through our fucking and writing to blow things up into grander meanings. The picture is lost but what you mean for it to represent is created.

We lie there nude and not having fucked and I have no idea what she felt. As for me, what I felt was eluded, and an understanding that it will always be that way to a degree, that no matter what you take or meant to, or what you don’t, there will always be something ungotten.

We chase after whatever it is the way children chase after the strings of balloons that have gotten too high, leaping and running and sometimes maybe even gripping, and feeling the tug of it, but it will not come down--and it will not lift you up--it cannot be held, you cannot really know it.

Here is my Year Book, 1989, in good condition, as if not so many years have passed. I look at it, the pictures there, L and me and others, and I know I’m getting old. And it’s funny, and it’s scary, that I can read what she’s written: Picture this: Fall ’88, a guy comes into a girl’s life in. In the beginning, he drops little hints here and there. One day, this guy finally lets go and tells the girl “It’s not secret how I feel for you.” From then on, it an uphill (shall we call it) battle. The girl denys him and pushes him away. He backs off and the girl finds herself missing him. Now talk of stars falling and moons coming down arise. The two are united. The relationship could’ve went on for longer. But…as once said, somethings are better left unsaid. The end. Thank you for sharing all you ever did. You will always be a special person to me. Remember the good times because despite the bad ones there were good. This is the best I can do. I never was any good at signing annuals. Never will be. For some reason I can’t stop writing in this thing. I guess I just to fill up these pages so that what you write and what I write is the only thing on them. So maybe years from now, you’ll dig this out and remember. L.

All memories are exercises in the pain of loss, and yet who are we without them? The way I know myself through this blog. This act of reduction, expansion, reduction, expansion...

H and h

We would hang out at this bar and play “rock, scissors, paper” and the one who was put out would have to go talk to a stranger of the opposite gender. It’s much easier to take a risk when you have an excuse and so the game is one where you can no more lose on purpose than you can win by anything more than chance.

They had the same name but spelled it differently and were the same age almost to the day but H was tall and blond and blue eyed, while h was petite and dark haired with eyes like rootbeer barrel candies.

h thought she was in love with me and H was one of those rare and intriguing people who didn’t always make what she thought known. The three of us fucked around the first time the night after I met H in a bar and told her that I had a friend who wanted to fuck another woman and wondered if she would.

She kneeled on the carpet in a room in a place where h was house-sitting and worked my x with her hand and mouth, while h kneeled behind her and did what she did. They kissed and went down on each other and I fucked neither. There was a parrot loose in the room, a social bird who ate when its owners ate, and I wondered what he thought of it all, these naked people rising off of each other, sinking down on each other, saying nothing, ever.

I suppose men want to be with two women because the idea of seeing a woman’s face against another woman’s x is fascinating, and most certainly there is sort of aesthetic value to it. Perhaps there is too the idea that the pleasure two women can bring a man is greater than the pleasure one can, but the truth is most men aren’t prepared for even the full on pleasure of which one woman is capable. What it comes down to in the end is that if these experiences are going to mean much to you, is that you have to be doing it to deepen your sense of connection, you want the intimacy to run in yet another direction.

You could never say I was dating either and often in fact I was dating somebody else all together. Sometimes, the three of us fucked, and sometimes H or h and I would get together individually. The last time with h was in a hotel room at a conference we’d attended from different cities and she sucked me until I came in her mouth, a rarity with her or any woman, this tiny girl with her Juliette Binoche face, a girl that had been spoiled so badly she sometimes thought she had nothing even though the world had been made easy for her, and by the time she crawled beneath the blankets of my hotel room bed, Don Quixote playing on the television and me semi-transfixed on it, my resentment for that part of her had set in and there was something cold and even kind of awful in that finish; and the final touch with H, it was the last time I’d see her, we were parked in a car outside an apartment where it was dangerous to be parked, at a time when neither of us should have been doing what we were, her hand moving my x, my fingers in her x, this feeling of unfinished business, a kind of near desperation for on thing more or another, this sense that we’d close the book on it all because eventually that is what you do.

As a threesome went to Vegas together and sometimes we’d meet in one of our offices after hours for what felt especially risky and heightened sex, those nights with the city lights coming in through the windows and the three of us making shadows to collide with other shadows in a place that hours later would be run through with fully dressed people who even if they were able to look into the face of any of the three of us could not have imagined the capacity of that person to act in such a way in a place like that or probably any other—there were all these times, all these trips, but what I remember between us the most was one of the last.

The three of came half drunk one night to the apartment they were then sharing. I fucked one and then the other and whatever girl I fucked worked her mouth against the x of the other and sometimes I’d kiss that girls mouth or just hold her face to my shoulder; and for awhile H and I just fucked, slowly, while h sat on the edge of the bed and watched, and for awhile, I sat back and watched them as they worked on each other, and then H watched h and I fuck, this one hard and quick. Everybody seemed to know his or her place and time and turn so well that everything, every movement, every transition, was seamless.

Then it was the three of together again, limbs so intertwined you never knew what belonged to whom and you didn’t care, this tangle of flesh you’d not want to untie, the mystery you’re only satisfied not solving.

There is this way we want to see two girls and a guy. Either as dubiously unrealistic, some event that if it can be planned and the plan actually enacted will certainly lead to a series of surprise problems, jealousies and uncertainties and just a doubling of the overall mess any two people create together; or the opposite, the idea of three as some kind of pinnacle, that impossible pleasure that if you actually touch will turn your life magic. But what it was, what it became, was neither, just a further baring, a final kind of intimacy.

That night almost everything that can happen did, and I liked them both better than I ever had or would again except in memory, and I’ll not try to figure out exactly why.

This was a big bed and after we had finished, we lie there nude in that cool room and I felt that we were truly and permanently alone, the three of us together on a little boat in the sea, tired and satisfied and affectionate, floating through some night toward it doesn’t matter where, me and h and H on one of those rare occasions when there was no more to do and no more desire to do it, when I was full and certain of my fullness.

When whatever had been had been enough.

In Memorial

This isn’t about an x, or even a person with one, though to connect him to an x, or a number of them, is possible. With words, most anything is.

Along with a girl who had once been my lover, M watched me and a new lover fuck, only he watched not us in the flesh but the shadows on the wall. Aside from my father, he may be the smartest man I’ve known. Not only was he intelligent, but learned, a man who read everything, from Camus to Chanlder, from Bukowski to Kant, a man who knew how to talk philosophy and how to prowl the streets, a man with the heart of a thief and a poet, and he could have talked about the fucking in terms of Plato’s cave, shadow moving against shadow. This was all in a foreign country and not so long ago and none of us where kids anymore.

His had a kind of genius wisdom that some might call useless because there was no tangible benefit. It never required him to advise, only to understand, which is the thing we want maybe most from any other living thing, perhaps more in the end even than blind love. He saw me trade for x what I’d bought with years, but he never tried to stop me. He knew the truth about me and that particular x and all the x’s of all the girls on this blog because really it is only about them in that it is about me, and what he knew of me he knew from knowing himself, the way if any of us had enough insight, we’d understand the universe.

There were nights you could smell the whiskey through is pores and at bars there was always trouble. Some girl, some boy, some bouncer. He burned everything, or almost everything, his bridges, but this is not to say that he burned the people he held close; the loyalty of the half fiend may be the better kind of loyalty. The thief’s code is at least a code, and in truth the average person has none, or little.

On his birthday, he used heroin. On the other days, he thought about it. Though it might be fairly said that the moment you meet any person, you know he or she is going to die, in fact, you don’t really know it, but with him it was different, you saw his death in his smile and his eyes and from the first time we shook hands I wondered if he’d die in front of me. You would have wondered it too.

Lowry writes that those that are most eloquent in their doom are the hardest to save and M could talk to you about his despair and yours in a way that was nothing short of beautiful. There are some people to whom you can only bear witness and he was one of those.

If you met him, you’d want him to live. But you know what happens to people who are closer to characters than they are to people and they go to Mexico: like Geoffrey Firmin, they are going to finish it. Or let it finish them.

He is barefoot in my apartment in a country farther away than that; hung over and broken footed, his blood on the balcony from a cut he won’t remember having made, another night when he has aggressively twisted the knob on the stopwatch of his life. There is a girl x in my bed and it is morning and he is calm and when she rises, he’ll treat her graciously. She’ll cling to me harder in his presence, so brightly dark his aura, the kind of person you hardly ever meet and hardly know what to do when you meet him. He’s crossed lines you’ll never cross and wouldn’t acknowledge if you didn’t know somebody who lived on their other side.

I told him once that I felt inspired to write his eulogy, and he said that that was good, but that he didn’t want to see it. He said that when the eulogy was of use, it would be none of his business, as if the connection between the dead and this world is really no connection at all.

I didn’t write it then. You don’t want something like that to collect even a day’s worth of dust.

I write it now because it is time.