61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Hooksexup's videogame blog: Golden Axe dresses down to its skivvies. Plus: Spore takes on evolution, reaches a stalemate, and takes evolution out for a beer.
Dating Confessions by You "There is nothing hotter than a nice, shy guy. Because it's so damn hot to see what he's like underneath it all."
PERSONAL ESSAYS
posted 10/31/2002
The lady named May writhes sideways on the St. Regis sheets, her sixty-five-year-old thighs abrading my face like weathered parchment, and asks me to call her princess.
"Princess," she sings, "like my Daddy used to do . . . "
May's vagina looms millimeters from my eyes. It smells faintly of vinegar and Johnson's Wax and smiles maliciously. I feel mocked. Diminished. And when her labia, a-glisten with lust and Vaseline, begins to move, to form words slowly at first, then with mounting articulation I'm less surprised than resigned to whatever message her septuagenarian sex feels compelled to impart. You little prick, hisses her old-lady pussy, why won't you kiss your Mommy!
By now even the walls are whispering. The sheets thunder like shifting tectonic plates. I can hear the whoosh of blood through her veins, blue as feathered neon beneath papery flesh that, even now, chafes the fuzz from my cheeks. At seventeen, I still only shave twice a week. But the LSD I've dropped this afternoon renders my senses razor sharp. I watch with some sort of detached wonder, but no surprise, as her ancient love-lips spew their angry commands. Put your tongue in . . . Lick it, little boy. Lick it! You want your money, you'll put your tongue in Mommy!
May's vagina, in my throbbing brain, has a voice not unlike Jean Stapleton, on All in the Family, though May, herself, is genteel as the Queen of England. I met her in the St. Regis lobby, when I floated in with Waldo, my roommate from Columbia. Waldo told me old ladies liked to pick up boys there. He said you could make good money if you dressed preppy and cleaned under your nails.
Waldo is as broke as I am, but once I meet May, he seems to disappear. Before I know whether I'm hallucinating or actually moving through space, I find myself in a metal box the elevator under the gaze of this tall and elegant white-haired lady, who introduces herself as May. She wears a black suit and silver stole with one of those fox faces that still have the eyes in it, so that it looks like the creature might leap from her frail shoulders and bite.
The entire ride, I can't tear my eyes from that vulpine glare. I decide, in the way that acid renders you capable of cosmically deciding, that in another life I was a fox, and I'm probably gazing at my own dead brother. Somehow I killed him, or let him die, and he's arranged to find me now this afternoon to torture me in ways I can only dimly imagine in that watery elevator light, face-to-face with a high-tone matron who looks like she should be heading to tea with Mamie Eisenhower, not soliciting sex with a seventeen year old in a suite at the St. Regis. It's all too much.
A thousand years later, we're in the hotel room, and I'm gripped by the thought, We all live in little boxes. The room's a hushed cube dominated by a double bed with flowered bedspread and a nightstand on which fresh roses, in a vase, wink at me as if they know a secret they have no intention of sharing.
"What's your name?" she asks when we step in from the seemingly endless hall. I thought I'd told her in the lobby, when she told me hers. Apparently not. It's hard to keep track of what's happening. The carpet leaks eyeballs. My hair hurts. My penis feels pipsqueak-tiny, then huge as a pillar. Plus, the St. Regis has butlers, smart young men in uniforms like the Philip Morris cigarette boy, not much older than me. I think I see one smirk as he pushes past with a cart of gleaming dishes. Maybe he knows. Maybe everybody does. Maybe, as I'm beginning to suspect, there's an entire, parallel universe of sex and money and old ladies who lick their scarlet lips when they catch your eye to let you know they're interested. All of it, until this day, was only a suspicion.
"I'm, uh . . . Nicholas," I say, blurting the phony name without planning to. Driven by a sense that something non-Jewy, something vaguely old money sounding, is what's required. I want to come off like a blueblood. Like a boy with a trust fund. The insanity of that eludes me. I am, by any accounting, virtually penniless: a Columbia freshman working weekends at a copy shop on Amsterdam Ave., selling pot to pick up food and book money. Not to mention the niggling fact that, were I, as "Nicholas," actually part of a prosperous bloodline, I wouldn't be selling my scrawny, faux-prep body to the first old lady who wanted to buy it. I've heard of fetishes. But I don't believe that any seventeen-year-old kid would voluntarily get into bed with a woman old enough to have spanked his father when he was ten.
Up in the room, suddenly dizzy, I decompress on the flowered bedspread and watch the lady named May unbutton her tailored black jacket. This done, she goes to work on the starched white blouse beneath it. Then she pulls the pins from her hair, so that it falls, in girlish waves, halfway down her back. When she sits in a chair, and bends to remove her shoes, I think, Just like the Land O' Lakes butter girl. As a child, I gazed for hours at the pretty squaw on the label. I loved her from earliest memory. The Butter Maiden formed the basis of my first, faltering, masturbatory fantasies. Now here she is, grown ancient, but magically available. Slowly, with that wife-of-a-senator smile, May eases the zipper down the snug right hip of her skirt. I see her garter belt, the top of one black stocking. I want to spray my brain with Raid.
After that, I lapse into a kind of hallucinogenic fever. I let her undress me. May is my height, six feet even, despite her stoop. And her breath, in the first, frantic moment when she leans in to grant me a smooch, smells fresher than I might have imagined. Not natural fresh, like a meadow, but chemical fresh, like the piss-cakes they put in men's room urinals. She must, I think in my Owsley-fueled cerebellum, have gargled with something manufactured by the same company.
But all that is nasal stuff. And right now, I'm careening into more tactile reality. I can feel her fingers, like talons, grasping the shaft of my cock. And to my surprise, my horror, I find myself getting hard. I don't know what I expected. On acid you don't perceive events so much as swim through them, charged and quivering on alternating currents of paranoia and bliss. I know you, you little prick!
It's her vagina again, the maw of those pink grapefruit lips making itself known. You thought you could make some easy money, didn't you? But you're wrong. You're going to have to work. You're going to have to work hard, or you're going to crawl out of here with your dick in a plastic bag and blood coming out of your pants . . .
"WHAT?" I screech, rearing back from her feral bush. (Disturbingly, she's dyed her pubes inky black, but left her head the color of gun-metal.) The old woman rearranges herself on the bed, so that her face aligns with mine.
"I said, 'I want you to take my honey . . . I want to make it long.'"
Up close, if I squint, the Land O' Lakes fantasy fades and, instead, miraculously, I'm in bed with Faye Dunaway. May has closed the floor-to-ceiling curtains. The only light leaks from the bathroom. And in the shadows, I'm suddenly Clyde and I'm kissing Bonnie. Which is fine. Which is fantastic. If I could just steer the hallucinations, I'd be in heaven. But my mind keeps veering off the rails. May has managed to roll me over on top of her, her legs splayed beneath mine, and it feels like the two of us are suspended, like sliced bananas, in some kind of toxic Jello. She slips her hand once more around my cock, guiding me between those brush-burn thighs and into what proves to be a surprisingly wet tunnel.
The whole time, May keeps up that nasty-sad patter. "Call me Princess . . . Make me your little girl . . . "
I wish, at this moment, that I hadn't rifled her wallet when she went to the bathroom. Wish I hadn't glanced the trio of puffy-jowled, madras-clad bald men who raised their glasses in a faded Polaroid. Her sons. (A banner over the table read "Happy Birthday Mom!") They are all older than me and, on top of everything else, I am seized by a vision of the three of them bursting into the hotel room, tearing off their matching madras and attacking me with forks. I don't know where I got the fork thing probably from the photo, which shows the boys in a fancy restaurant. Worse, as May slips my vaguely erect organ inside her, I can't help but turn away. I glance toward the door. Big mistake. The leering visage from the other picture I'd glimpsed her husband, a porcine Gerald Ford lookalike glowers at me with eyes the color of melting naugahyde.
May doesn't seem to mind my passivity. With something like tenderness, she arranges my hands on her breasts. They feel, in my desolation, like matching banlon socks filled with sand. Until suddenly, when I close my eyes, and she kisses me, the miracle begins to unfold. As though gagged, her vagina pipes down when I penetrate her. A second earlier, it had been calling me skink and chicken-chest. But now, though I can sense its muffled insults, the slurs are smothered by my throbbing hard-on. May begins to claw at my chest, pumping with a vigor that thrills and repels me at the same time.
Maybe it was the acid, but three minutes in, I find myself gazing into this seniorette's eyes, thinking, They could belong to a sixteen year old. The rest of her sagging chin, wrinkled mouth, liver-spots begins to fade away. All that remains is her gaze, her essence, and in the floaty union of our eyeballs, that disembodied tangle, I felt as if I had passed out of my flesh altogether, and that we'd connected on some plane of LSD-fueled ether.
I watch myself, from the ceiling, lap beads of sweat from her throat. I get deeply into tonguing her dewlaps, worrying the loose flaps like a terrier with twin slabs of rawhide. I have no idea what the rest of my body is doing, but my Hooksexup ends feel singed with ecstasy.
We bounce and rock for hours or maybe it's minutes until, in a kind of sudden conflagration, May's eyes go wide. She grabs her throat and rolls to one side, clutching herself, and before I know whether to scream or smile, a stream of vomit spews, Linda Blair-like, out of her mouth. Insanely, the red-green spray hits my eyes like the fountains of paradise. Then May manages to mutter, "I'm sorry . . . Chemo."
And in that instant, reeking and ecstatic, I realize that I've just had sex with a dying woman. And, even scarier, that it was the best I'd ever had . . . She gave me fifty dollars, and I gave her a face to puke in. If I told you it was beautiful, you might not understand.
