I have an AOL account.
It's kind of stupid, because except for the email I really don't derive any benefit from AOL. My trusty Internet Explorer gets me everyplace I need to go - my office network, Google, MySpace . . . everywhere.
Still, I have an AOL account.
Which brings me to sex.
First, let me start out by saying that sex is a good thing. I'm for it, and always have been. Indeed, while the sands of time have eroded the youthful ardor of other passions, my advocacy for sex remains as sincere and vigorous today as it was thirty five years ago. In short, I am a lifelong, devoted fan who would do just about anything for it.
Interestingly, my passion for sex predates by several years my status as an actual participant. I think my positive disposition towards sex today owes much to the time I spent as a youthful outsider. Just as familiarity breeds contempt, so abstinence hones desire. In the years that stacked up between the bookends of original concept and successful execution, I honed a lot. As a youth I devoted several hours of each day to honing. I honed and honed, rested, and then honed some more. It is a wonder that I graduated from the eighth grade, so preoccupied with honing was I.
My prolonged status as a virgin was attributable to many factors, not the least of which was an unfortunate chubbiness of build and propensity for acne that plagued me until early adulthood. My main obstacles, however, were not physical, but rather, intellectual. As a youth, I suffered most from a lack of reliable information. Oh sure, by my twelfth year I understood enough of the basic biology to make me paranoid, but this wasn't the information I was looking for . . . not really. I knew how to rut . . . at least, theoretically . . . , but what I wanted to understand was how to love.
My thirst for romantic knowledge had nothing whatsoever to do with tender sensitivity, but rather, was driven by two separate, yet equally important practical considerations.
First, I realized that sex wasn't something one could just ask for (e.g. "Hey, I'm horney! Wanna fuck?"), it was something that had to be earned. All of the available literature suggested that women considered romance an indispensible precursor to sex. For me, an outstanding book learner, the matter was simple – if physical intimacy was a thing earned, then strategically tendered gobs of romance was how one paid the bill. Unfortunately, my starter account at the Bank of Romance was congenitally overdrawn, and I found my way to heaven blocked by the Bank's stingy lending policy. Thus undercapitalized, I came to understand that I could rely on no one but myself to generate the romantic capital necessary to get down a girl's pants. My first step in generating this emotional wealth was to learn as much as I could about the mysteries of romantic attraction.
The second factor motivating my new course of study was pride. It had not escaped my attention that women tended to speak among themselves when men were not present. Further, it was rumored by reliable sources that the subject of these unsupervised discussions was often "men". While I could envision a scenario under which it might be quite pleasant to spoken of by the lucky maid whom I had romanced into bed, I could also see a very real potential for disaster. What if I was really, really bad at sex? The consequences of such a catastrophe were almost beyond my capacity to imagine. At a minimum, I could expect spend the rest of my life learning to ignore the humiliation of a thousand averted eyes and the subtle mummer of derisive feminine laughter whenever I left a room. It went without saying that any future opportunity to get laid would be contingent upon my willingness to relocate to Tibet. No, this could not be. If I was going to have sex, I wanted to be good at it!
As I've said, access to reliable information was limited. Beyond the cursory instruction to be divined in Chapter 5 of "Biology: The Science of Life" Fifth Edition, reference material was frustratingly scarce. Of course, my standard "go-to" source for information about life's adventures was not approachable; I'd die a virgin before I'd ask my mom how to romance a girl, and die a prison inmate should I embrace any romance-related counsel offered by my father.
Wait . . . this last bit about my dad is unfair, and I take it back. My dad was actually a tremendous help, and I'd be remiss in failing to acknowledge his contribution to the Romeo I was to become.
"You gotten laid yet?" he asked me one evening after dinner.
"N-No," I stammered.
"Ah, don't worry about it, son. When I was a kid I thought I'd never get laid. It didn't happen for me until . . . How old are you?" Sixteen, I reminded him. "Yeah, it didn't happen for me until I was twenty."
He lied, God bless him, but I didn't realize it until years later. Dad was a manly-man; an athlete, a charmer and handsome in a Spencer Tracy kind of way. The belief that my Universe's prototypical male had not gotten lucky until he was twenty was hugely comforting to the sixteen year old me. His was a good lie, and I have long since forgiven him for it.
I only wish that he'd waited for mom to leave the dinner table before deciding to share.
Dad was helpful in other ways as well. Notwithstanding his propensity for inappropriate after -dinner anecdotes, he was always the consummate gentleman around my mother. His example, always courtly and polite (albeit, irreverent), became the template after which I modeled my own sense of courtesy and decorum. The capacity to treat a woman courteously, I realized much later, is one of the pillars upon which romance rests, and for his example, I am exceedingly grateful.
I'm even more grateful for the porn.
Dad maintained a small multi-media library hidden in a little brown suitcase behind a pile of moldy trampoline nets in the garage. This library consisted, among other things, of several fascinating magazines collected between 1958 until 1976. "Biology; The Science of Life" would have enjoyed a far more enthusiastic readership had the editors chosen to include at least a few of the images captured as a matter of course between the covers of my Dad's vintage periodicals. The textbook's loss, however, was not to be mine and I absorbed the information like a desiccated sponge.
Far more helpful, however, was dad's small, but impressive collection of 8 mm stag reels. While the porn magazines were of the sort available on wire racks at any local liquor store, the films, at least when they were acquired, quite clearly predated the requisite Supreme Court sanction by several years. They looked illegal, too; each small, red plastic reel stored in its own thin brown cardboard box bearing hand letter titles like "Candy Barr", "the Photog", and "To [sic] Fun-Loving Girls". A lifetime of conditioned obedience to my parents (particularly the Old Man) screamed that I not touch the contraband. Of course, I touched the contraband. Thoroughly. I will spare you the details of plot and character development, and say only that pedagogically speaking, the educational benefit I derived from these flickering black and white images was far more impactful than the frustratingly static pictures in the magazines.
However, despite the resources Dad unwittingly (or perhaps, not so unwittingly) set at my disposal, there were still several gaps in my understanding. I knew, from everyday experience, what girls looked like with their clothes on. I now knew, thanks to the little brown suitcase, not only what girls looked like with their clothes off, but also what they looked like as they performed any number of delightfully depraved acts. What was missing, however, was practical information regarding the means by which "the clothed girl" transitioned into "the naked girl". There was some magic there that the porn either glossed over, or ignored entirely. Had I possessed that little piece of intelligence, I probably could have skipped all the pornography and been just fine. However, as the quest for knowledge is as much about the journey as it is the destination, I do not regret the time I spent with Candy Barr, To [sic] Fun-Loving Girls and assorted centerfolds of the Great Society.
To fill this gap in my knowledge base, I turned to the only source of information left to me . . . my shit-head friends. Of course, there is a skill to extracting information from idiots. One didn't come right out and ask about the most effective methods for seducing our female classmates. Instead, one opened the topic by commenting on Kathy's ass, or Dannette's rack and then waited to see who felt inclined to share personal anecdotes. While I would not be surprised to learn that many of these legend-spinners from my childhood have remained virgins to this day, at the time, almost everyone in my circle had an opinion. What the information lacked in accuracy was more than made up for in volume. Oh, the bullshit that was slung . . . not the least of which, my own.
Oddly, however, from the ragged shards of rumor, half-truth and outright lies assembled during these ad hoc seminars, something remarkably like a plausible truth began to emerge. It became clear, through intellectual trial and error disguised as Cro-Magnon grunts, that there was a process by which one could hope to enjoy the affections of a willing female. The importance of identifying, making contact with, and pursuing the right sort of girl (read, slut) was a topic much discussed, as were the needs for financial resources, planning, date logistics and execution. The correct manner by which one undressed a girl was a subject I found particularly intriguing, as information on this point was almost completely omitted in my other research materials. From this we each, in our own remedial ways, formulated a sort of game plan to be used on the first acceptable (read, any) girl who could be prevailed upon to acknowledge our respective existences.
By the end of my first year of high school, I had achieved my objective of understanding the nuances of romance. I knew what a girl looked like clothed. I knew how to get her to take her clothes off. I knew what to do with her once she was naked. It had been a difficult job, with lots of hard work; but once accomplished, I felt confident that I was adequately prepared. I had only now to wait for the right opportunity to set my education to good use.
And so, I waited.
And waited.
Seasons passed, and I waited.
The oceans of the earth flowed twice down the Rhine, and I waited more.
It wasn't as though I was completely inactive during this period. Indeed not! I dated . . a little. Yet somehow, my precious game plan had brought me little more than a few reluctant pecks on the cheek. Fortunately, my dad's little brown suitcase remained accessible during this period, and I consulted it often for inspiration, insight and . . . well . . . . some preemptory honing. .
Then, half way through the first semester of my senior year, something unusual happened. Ronald Regan had just ousted the hapless Jimmy Carter, Milton Friedman declared that the individual was the wisest steward of his own destiny, and America was electrified by the rediscovered potential of individual self-reliance. And so it happened that one day at lunch that I found myself engaged in a spirited debate with like-minded classmates about the nature of our democracy and the stunning renaissance it was positioned to enjoy.
Or maybe we were talking about homecoming . . . I don't remember for sure.
During this conversation, a certain young lady of my casual acquaintance joined the circle of assembled philosophers. After a brief period, I realized that she was according me an unusual portion of attention. She listened patiently as I spoke, contributed with good humor when I challenged and laughed loudly when I joked. And there was eye contact. . . . lots and lots of eye contact. At the time, I took this as nothing more than my due; however, in retrospect, it occurred to me that her enthusiastic participation exceeded anything that might reasonably be explained by zeal for Regan's victory.
"Hey," she announced after school that day, "I'm horny. Wanna fuck?"
Either she had access to my dad's little brown suitcase, or, what is more likely, she understood intuitively something that I had completely failed to grasp – that with the proper credentials, one actually could just come right out and ask. She, of course, had the proper credentials. She stored them inside her bra.
The young lady lived in a guest house at the back of her father's estate. Access to her room was won through a narrow door facing an alley that ran along the north side of her trailer park. Through the simple expedient of bolting the room's larger retracting door shut and then barricading it behind two rusty refrigerators and a derelict washing machine, the girl had converted the windowless garage at the back of her dad's lot into a livable, albeit, very dark, apartment.
And so it happened that I found myself in a dark room with a willing female. Somehow, through circumstances completely beyond my control, I had been catapulted beyond mundane preliminaries straight to step fifteen of the game plan. No one, I can assure you, was more surprised than I. Notwithstanding my father's innate optimism, I never truly believed that I'd ever make it much further than step five. The cost of my pessimism was that while the first steps of the game plan were exceptionally clear to me, later steps became increasingly vague with respect to tactical details.
Among other errors, the cabal of knuckleheads constituting my core group of friends held it as an article of faith that in the event of imminent sexual congress, it was the male's responsibility to undress the female. The capacity to skillfully strip a lover of her final barriers to modesty was assumed to be the penultimate gauge of efficacy and competence. In our minds, it both literally and figuratively, separated the men from the boys. It was such an ingrained element the standard adolescent fantasy that it never occurred to us that a girl might be inclined to, or, indeed, even capable of, removing her own clothes. Given its presumed importance, much time was spent theorizing about the most effective methods for disrobing a girl. Through discussion, a consensus emerged that the process of taking off a girl's clothes was, but for one notable exception, identical to our own. That exception, of course, was the bra.
It was in surmounting this very obstacle that I felt myself most disadvantaged. Unlike many of my friends, I had no sisters upon whom I could spy, and while I am sure my mother wore bras, I have made it my lifetime goal never, ever to think about them. Even the little brown suitcase let me down – the To [sic] Fun-Loving Girls and The Photog.'s model had each impudently taken it upon themselves to remove their own bras, while Candy Barr, in the simple act of sitting, somehow magically squirted from the top her one-piece bathing suit like toothpaste from a tube. Although visually arresting, the stags were singularly unhelpful in any practical sense.
Barren of experience and unenlightened by available media, I was forced to bring into bed with me the dubious anecdotal insights of my friends. This guidance suggested that performing an expert breast extraction required adherence to three basic rules. In brief, these rules are summarized as follows:
Rule 1 –To move behind the girl in order to relieve her of her bra is bad form. Breast liberation, therefore, may only be done in the context of a frontal embrace. In considering this, it is best to imagine a force field that separates the front of the girl from the back. Until the bra is removed the male must approach the female from the front, and may only reach behind the female through holes in the force field at about the level of the girl's arm pits.
Rule 2 – Using both hands to unfasten a bra is crude and boorish. Placing one hand on the female's lower back for leverage, the skillful lover uses his free hand to first locate, and then unbind with a gentle tug the delicate clasps holding the two ends of the bra in place.
Rule 3 – Under no circumstances can one look over the female's shoulder at the clasps holding the bra together while the prescribed one-handed, frontal bra removal is in process. Although not mandatory, additional virtuosity points are granted to the male who, from the front and with one hand, removes the bra while engaging the female in an impassioned, full tongue kiss.
When the moment of breast extraction arrived, the girl and I were lying next to each other, engaged in an embrace. In other words, my left arm was pinned underneath her such that had I wanted to approach the bra's fastening mechanism from behind, I would have had to roll her like a log down the length of my arm until her back faced me. Beyond being clumsy, there was the very real risk that I might overdo it and roll her off the edge of the narrow mattress. I saw it all very vividly in my mind - her, rolling away from me and then disappearing over the side of the bed - me, reaching out desperately to stop her from falling - her, suspended by her bra six inches above the floor and screaming at me to let her go. What I'm saying is, is that although it would have been far more convenient to remove her bra from behind, my compliance to Rule 1 was guaranteed by cowardice that stood between my objective and the application of common sense. .
Rules 2 and 3, I quickly determined, were ridiculous and I violated both almost immediately. You have to remember that before that afternoon, I had never actually touched a bra, and my failure to engage in hands-on experimentation left me completely ignorant about bra fastener mechanics. When one-handed tugging, pulling, jerking and twisting produced no successful result, I broke protocol and availed myself of aid from the underutilized hand. When this likewise failed, I abandoned virtuosity by interrupting the impassioned kiss to peer over the girls shoulder and get a better look at the situation. The room was dark and the dim outline of white fabric visible half way down her back made me no wiser. Turning on the bedside table lamp helped considerably, but the blurry haze of a congenital astigmatism prevented me from seeing well enough to break the code. It was as I was reaching a second time for the bedside table to retrieve my glasses that the young lady finally reached the limit of her patience and, thank God, took control.
Placing one hand firmly on my chest she shoved me first off of her, then down into the mattress. Once she was satisfied that I could do no more harm, she sat up on her knees, cocked her head slyly to the left and then graced me with a sweet, patient smile. As I watched, fascinated, she slipped her arms through the bra straps, grabbed the base with both hands and simply slid the entire white-laced monstrosity down her body to about her navel. Then she did something truly amazing; she spun the hideous contraption like a wheel around the axel of her torso so that when she finished the back of the bra sat positioned underneath her now-liberated credentials. Then, with an ease that mocked my earlier struggle, she effortlessly unclipped the fasteners and let the bra drop to her thighs.
Wow, I thought, she's a fucking genius!
I was both amazed and humbled by her demonstration. Seriously! Convinced that I had gone and done bagged me the Albert Einstein of pulchritude, I felt in that moment as though I was in the presence of royalty; unfit, unworthy and exceedingly grateful.
Although the rest of the story is very, very short, modesty, good breeding and no small measure of embarrassment prevents me from sharing further details. It was what you might expect . . . only, a little less.
I was to encounter my arch-nemesis, the bra, on several subsequent campaigns, and although the playing field was somewhat leveled over time by experience, I have never once been able to look my enemy in the . . . ah . . . eye . . . I guess . . . and declare myself the better man. The idealized one-handed-bra-removal-through-arm-pit-holes-in-the-force-field move is one that I have never successfully executed, and I have long-since given up trying. I am no quitter, but in this, have allowed myself to be guided by Mr. Miagi's excellent advice to Daniel-san in the "Karate Kid II" - "The best way to counter a blow is to simply not be there when it is delivered." This advice finds practical application in the following personal preference:
When given a choice, I prefer women to be furnished naked.
This is small of me, and I know it. It presumes that my tastes are the only ones that matter, and, of course, this is not the case. Some men (okay, virtually all OTHER men) are genuinely aroused by women in skimpy lingerie. Many women derive satisfaction, self-confidence and, perhaps, even a sense of power by outfitting themselves in sexually provocative underwear. The practice is certainly helpful as an unambiguous means by which availability and willingness can be telegraphed between two willing partners. Indeed, an entire industry has evolved that feeds off of a prevailing consensus that sexy women's underwear is a good thing. While I do not share this view, I am not such as spoil-sport as to insist that the practice be prohibited. I say only that nothing telegraphs availability and willingness more clearly than exposed nipples and a bare ass and that women's lingerie gives me the cold-sweats . . . in a bad way.
Which brings me, of course, to AOL.
One of the benefits of AOL is a "Welcome" screen that rotates through links to daily news, sports, entertainment and human interest articles. Although I don't really need AOL, I enjoy this feature, and will occasionally click on a link that happens to catch my eye. From this, I stay up to date with the wacky capers of Washington and Wall Street, the latest movie hype and . . . yes . . . the love life of Jennifer Aniston and the developmental progress of the Pitt and Cruise children.
Over the weekend I found myself drawn to one particular feature suggested on AOL's rotating Welcome window. "Hot Models Strip For Winter", announced the link. Intrigued, I clicked, and was led to a photo reportage covering the recent Victoria's Secret runway show in New York, at which the company introduced its winter line of lingerie. Against my better judgment, I began to click through the pictures. The first image, that of cadaverous model dressed in a becaped black boustier and matching panties, all enveloped underneath an aurora of white fabricy stuff, was enough to completely reaffirm my aversion to lingerie. Had the model been naked, the picture would have been compelling; however, the silly rig concocted by the R&D boys at VS simply made the poor girl look both ridiculous and unapproachable. To my mind, the complexities of her outfit suggested not provocation, but rather, unimaginable practical complications. The girl might as well have been dressed in a suit of armor. Curious and appalled, I reluctantly continued to the next image, and the next, and the next.
Do I protest too much? Maybe. If I was really so turned off by the pictures, good sense and honesty in aversion would have compelled me to stop at the first sample. Of course, I did not stop, which probably means something. To my credit, I was not oblivious to the inherent contradiction between attitude and action as I clicked from the first picture, to the second, to the third, and on to the fourth.
It was on the fifth image, however, that I reached credulity's end and found that I could go no further.
I pictured myself at home, retired from the day's toil to the refuge of my bed. I read a little, smoke a cigarette, hone a bit, smoke another cigarette and then turn out the light and fall asleep. Sometime in the middle of the night, I hear a strange rustling sound at the end of my bed. Thinking, of course, that it must be Lester licking his testicles, I try at first to ignore the noise. When the sound continues, I grow angry. "Lester," I shout, "for crying out loud, knock it off."
It is at that point that I hear the unmistakable sound of a woman clearing her throat. "Ahem," it demands, "Ahem". In that instant I realize that I am not the only human being in the room. Terrified, I click on my bedside lamp,
jerk my glasses onto my face,
look to the base of my bed and see
this:
Oh, for the love of God!
I mean . . . like . . . I wonder . . . what the . . . I . . . . I . . . . well . . . . what?
Okay, if we are going to continue, you must humor me by engaging in a little mental editing. First, please redact from your imaginings the robe-clad chorus in the background. In its place, if you like, please insert the image of a terrified 160 pound English Mastiff who is trying his best to pretend he is a Chihuahua and hide underneath a reading chair in the corner of the room. Now, eliminate the black guy in the silver suit. This is very important. The black guy needs to leave. He needs to take his microphone and go away. I'm not kidding. I simply cannot proceed with him in the room.
If you have done everything correctly, you should be left with the image of an eighteen foot tall blonde woman dressed up as a snow flake.
Okay, you now have the same information I do. What do you think? Am I excited? Am I aroused? Leaving aside the fact that the situation seems but a precursor to some tabloid-ready home invasion massacre story, I can say without the slightest hesitation that under such circumstances, sex would be the very last thing on my mind.
Remember, I'm a fan of sex.
Remember the honing? Remember that? No, no amount of honing could prepare a man for this.
As surely as I draw breath to write these words, I can assure you that in the moment of beholding this snow-flaked outrage, my only thought would be of the holes beneath the Amazon's arm pits, and the mechanized peril that lies beyond them.
Anyway, I'm thinking about canceling my subscription to AOL.
I probably will.
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