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The Remote Island by Bryan Christian NBC discovers Facebook, what happened on Gossip Girl and Terminator and our obsession with Mario Lopez continues apace.
I happened into my first real girlfriend, an exchange student from Switzerland, when I was a senior in high school. Like me, she believed that economics was a phony science created by the ruling class to keep the workers in line. Unlike me, she'd experienced a season as a semi-professional skier, frequent sex with older lovers, and two suicide attempts. She had long legs and blond hair, smelled delicious, and she wore a black-and-white vinyl dress to prom. She was my dream girl.
promotion
I’d known her host parents for years, so several nights a week I’d go over to their house for dinner. Afterwards, I’d take my girlfriend to Swensen’s, where we’d eat ice-cream sundaes and discuss existential philosophy. I was also partial to the works of Fritjof Capra, but she considered him a sophist. Then we’d drive to the top of a mountain (this was suburban Phoenix) and fellate each other silly in the bucket seat of my 1978 AMC Concord.
My Swiss girlfriend wasn’t particularly interested in intercourse at the time. She suffered from psychic visions that told her she’d get pregnant if she ever slept with an American. This was unfortunate, as my parents had procured for me a king-sized waterbed from a down-on-his-luck ASU graduate student, and my room that year would have been a bumpin’ screw pad. Finally, on New Year’s Eve, 1988, my girlfriend relented. Through a dream she’d deduced that we’d only be safe if we used a condom, a diaphragm, and a vaginal sponge. The loss of my virginity was a clinical, passionless experience.
My freshman-year sex life was comprised of a few dry kisses and an Everclear-induced blowjob.
On a foreign-exchange-student field trip to the Grand Canyon, my girlfriend hooked up with Julio, the Olympic-soccer-playing son of some Argentine lord of the pampas. Upon her return, we split up, but were back together within a week. Soon after, on a trip to New York with her host mother, my girlfriend met and dinked a real-life muhajedeen named Hamid. He was fighting for independence from the Soviet Union. I wanted to wait in line overnight for tickets to the U2 movie Rattle And Hum. She was definitely trading up.
"Go ahead and fuck your Afghan freedom fighter!" I said.
We were done. By June, she’d left the country.
For graduation, my jet-setting computer consultant uncle gave me a round-trip first-class ticket to Europe. I was going to use it that summer, but a family financial crisis kept me home. Instead, I spent four plodding months working at a novelty shop in Scottsdale, fielding calls from creditors for a genial hippie who was dying of cancer. Then I went to college.
My freshman-year sex life, which was probably more typical than most people would like to admit, was comprised of a few dry kisses and an Everclear-induced blowjob from a nice girl in my dorm who fled in shamed terror when she saw me at lunch the next day. Meanwhile, my ex-girlfriend and I had been exchanging spirited, intelligent, almost flirty letters. I still had that round-trip ticket. Spring Break approached. It was time to go to Europe.
***
My ex-girlfriend lived in Basel, an essentially charmless mid-sized city in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Her apartment was half an attic plus a toilet and shower. It had a nice view of a medieval water wheel that had lost its utility centuries before but continued to churn nonetheless. The first night of my visit, we looked out that window.
"When I returned home from Arizona," she said, "I fell in love with a clarinet player. He was from China."
I was wandering through the streets, looking in the windows of hoochie joints.
I gently rubbed her back.
"That’s nice," I said.
"Last month, he leapt from this window to his death."
"Oh," I said.
"At night, I hear his ghost calling to me."
"Wow," I said.
Later, we lay together in bed, not touching. I said that I still longed for her.
"Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have sex again?"
"No," she said. "It really wouldn’t."
She turned over and went to sleep. I stared at the ceiling and listened to the water wheel.
The next morning, she had to go to school. I went to the train station and bought a ticket to Paris. By late afternoon, I was wandering through the streets of Montmartre, looking in the windows of hoochie joints. I was exhausted, hungry, sad, and quite horny. Before me appeared a row of public toilets. I paid my franc and went inside. While the great city roared around me, I masturbated to completion.
It was the best sex I had that year.n°
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Neal Pollack is the author of The Neal Pollack Anthology Of American Literature, Beneath The Axis Of Evil, and Never Mind the Pollacks: A Rock and Roll Novel. For a daily dose of his satirical brilliance, visit his website, www.nealpollack.com. He lives in Austin, Texas.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
