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For some reason, when I was eighteen, on the rare occasion I was able to convince a woman to sleep with me, afterwards, as we lay in bed naked, I would become terribly depressed.
I still can't say what exactly it was, and as I got older the feeling left me alone. But at that time, I was very sensitive and had to tread lightly in the arena of sex. Blowjobs left me feeling lonely and vulnerable. Sixty-nines made me feel claustrophobic, like I was being buried alive. Even massages made me anxious, more conscious of my own blood-and-gutness than was to my taste.
The only sex act I found myself comfortable with was the handjob. There was something about it that felt easy and conversational. It was like going for coffee with a friend, but with your dick included in the chat. And I should say that even in the h.j. department, I wasn't exactly laid back. So used to the way I handjobbed myself, it took me a good ten minutes just to acclimatize to another
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person's touch. Once we got going, I needed a lot of encouragement — reassuring talk, oils, balms and constant repositioning. Plus, a decade of self-abuse had rendered my dick pretty much aristocratically indifferent. I had to practically slam it in a doorjamb to get it halfway turgid. So a typical handjob usually took anywhere between twenty to thirty minutes, with me shouting "harder!" and "faster!" like I was whipping a team of snow dogs across the tundra.
Of all the fist fellatio I received during that unfortunate period, the most grueling, soul-debilitating and dehumanizing took place in my parent's basement. It was midnight. I was hanging out with my girlfriend, Amy, drinking beer and listening to the local classic rock station when she told me to lean back on the couch and take off my pants.
Tired, slightly drunk and not especially aroused, I still did as I was told, and as I did so, she took off upstairs to look for paraphernalia.
"There's some ointment in the downstairs bathroom," I said.
"I never want to hear you use that word," she said. "It turns me off."
Amy was the kind of overachiever who prided herself on getting the job done, the type who made birdfeeders, baked complicated pastries and taught herself to play the French horn. I was the kind of guy who used words like "ointment."
I'll never forget how hopeful and sweet she looked trotting down the stairs, her arms loaded with pharmaceuticals, so completely unaware of the handjobathon we were about to embark on. It was like the beginning of that Stephen King novel, The Long Walk, where all the kids show up, well rested and fresh-faced, about to embark on the never-ending jaunt that would eventually kill them.
The start was pretty promising. Despite the three or four beers in me, I became erect easily. She pounded away, looking at me, looking at the ceiling, smiling, sighing. After fifteen minutes, she stopped to massage her wrist.
"You don't have to continue," I said.
"No, I want to," she said.
I guess she was still under the impression that leaving a job unfinished could prove a blemish on her sexual resume. So she carried on, as though getting me off were some kind of logic problem that could be solved through perseverance. She brought
After another spirited half-hour, she introduced her left hand to the equation.
to it all of the over-achieving eagerness she brought to all of her undertakings. It was like doing a thorough job on a bibliography or getting out a grape-juice stain. Nothing a little old-fashioned elbow grease and determination couldn't resolve.
She started up again, her fist pogoing up and down, her fingers doing fancy little French-horny things. I watched, unimpressed. Twenty minutes in, my mind began to wander: Was this what that song from Grease, "Hand Jive," was really about? Is that what we were doing? Hand jive? Can there really exist an orgasm machine like the one from Young Frankenstein? Have my friends just been giving me a good time or am I really that great a dungeon master?
Amy let go and rolled her hand around on her wrist, her mouth wide open in mock/real pain.
"Are you even enjoying this?" she asked.
"Of course," I lied. What exactly is head cheese? Who's next in line for president after Speaker of the House?
After another spirited half-hour, she introduced her left hand to the equation, using it to manhandle my balls. It was like watching one of those science films of a Neanderthal trying to start a fire. Yet somehow I remained, all throughout, as hard as a ketchup bottle.
Two a.m. came and went. I started drifting in and out of consciousness. I'd have these quick two-second dreams where I'm riding a unicycle along a bumpy gravel road. I'd reawaken with a start to find her pounding away, no longer even looking at me, dropping the charade of eye contact and focused solely on my penis. It was as if she were enacting an age-old primordial tale. Like a sexualized version of The Old Man and the Sea, this had become a test of endurance between her and my dick.
"You are a worthy opponent, but come you shall."
The clock on the VCR read three a.m. Aside from a few cigarette breaks and a couple chats about "what the hell was the matter here," they had been at it, my penis and her, for three hours straight. I felt completely alienated from her, from my own penis. From life itself.
Imagining being jacked off by Amy was more titillating than watching the actual thing.
I decided to take a shortcut to the finish line. I closed my eyes and imagined myself in my eleventh grade classroom being masturbated by Mrs. Velardi, our thirtysomething art teacher who wore tank tops and bandanas. Then, in the midst of it all, in walked Amy. I saw her, wearing the same thing she was wearing beside me on the couch, but instead of being flesh and blood, she was imaginary — entirely in my head.
Oddly, closing my eyes and imagining being jacked off by Amy was more titillating then keeping my eyes open and watching the actual thing. It made it more perverted somehow, and thus transported me to the next level.
"Faster," I whispered. "Harder."
The radio was blasting a Doobie Brothers retrospective. I reached over and turned it off in the middle of "Taking It to the Streets." The Doobie Brotherless silence was all I needed, and thirty seconds later I was an out-of-control garden hose.
I remember Amy raising her hands in the air, triumphant, like that freeze frame of Judd Nelson at the end of The Breakfast Club.
The next day, I would wrap my penis in toilet paper to keep it from rubbing against my jeans. It was bruised and battered, but also oddly naked — lonely without a hand wrapped around it, pole-dancing to classic rock 'n' roll. Eventually, of course, it would grow most comfortable in its aloneness, but just then it needed coddling. n°
Jonathan Goldstein's writing has appeared in ReadyMade, The Carolina Quarterly, Land-Grant and The New York Times. His first novel, Lenny Bruce is Dead, was published in America this spring. He was born in Brooklyn and lives in Montreal.
