For Some Reason It Never Feels Right
In high school, I was sexually desperate.
I only had one male suitor. A friend, really. Charles. He had a huge head of curly brown hair that looked like some sort of prickly bush that might grow in the desert during the Jurassic period. You could have lost coins or your keys in there. The barber needed to run a metal detector across it before he started cutting. Whenever his hair came up in conversation, which it did often since he was in such unrelenting pain about it, Charles would say, “Wait till everyone else is bald, I’ll have my revenge. I’ll get back at all those fucking assholes.” And the moments he spoke like that, thorny and filled with hopeful spite, were the only times when he was attractive to me in that involuntary, hormonal sort of way.
I was in and out of anorexia by then and slightly comfortable with my nude body. So, we tried to have sex, often. He couldn’t really maintain an erection for longer than a minute, which was fine since he never once made me wet. (Given that that was a difficult thing to accomplish due to my dedication to chronic malnourishment.) The sex was such a joke that when my mother forced me to the gynecologist to get on the pill I asked the doctor if an impotent male could make a female pregnant. My doctor grimaced. He and I had only met once before when I was twelve (in the aftermath of an improbable horse-riding accident that I’ve excluded from my personal history). He said, “If a penis gets anywhere near that vagina, this is for the best.”
As he said it, I noticed he was leaning his penis toward my vagina.
One night Charles came over after my mother had locked herself in her bedroom. My mother and stepfather at the time, it was either the end of David or the beginning of Neil, didn’t care what I did as long as I was around for her birthday and holidays to take pictures. I’d been in my room watching St. Elmo’s Fire on VHS and experimenting with playing with myself, using innovative techniques I discerned from a pristine copy of Our Bodies Ourselves that I’d found in a drawer of an antique armoire that I wasn’t supposed to touch. I’d been sneaking myself a few pages at a time and had finally gotten to the good part. By then it was the last scene of the movie—when two members of the group were hugging and fighting and such—and suddenly I found something I’d been looking for my whole life. In one instant, playing with myself became less play and more work, in the sense that it felt selfish and adult and satisfying. And the effort had put me in a new pleasure bracket far superior to even eating, or, at that point, not eating.
Hence when Charles called as the credits on the movie rolled, I was entirely prepared for intercourse. I told him not to bother showering. I wanted his hair as thick as possible.
After pacing around my room and staring at everything on my walls like he was going to buy something, he sat down on my bed and said he wanted to try out an idea he had. I sat on my hands, wondering if he could smell what I did.
“OK, what?”
He’d brought it up, but still I had to nearly torture the actual disclosure out of him. (Anyone who thinks torture can’t work hasn’t spent much time with adolescent boys.)
“If you meow, it will help,” he finally said, after I threatened to explain menstruation to him again.
I meowed.
He twitched a bit. “I mean during.”
“Really?”
He closed his eyes and moved his chin up and down very slowly.
“How’d you figure that out?”
“Let’s just try.” He must have found some book of his own. Something by James Herriot.
But it worked.
This is what it’s supposed to feel like, I instructed myself, his fullness reaching into places where no man had ever boldly gone before. It’s supposed to be like this all time. It’s supposed to hurt and feel good. But even the hurt should feel good.
“Keep meowing,” he said, when I got too into it. “Please.”
For no reason at all, I decided to hiss. And I hissed like crazy right in his ear. His reaction was quick. He vibrated tensely. Then he came. He came so hard that it overtook him, drawing liquid from every cell in his body. And as he writhed, I clawed his back with my nails and mewed a bit like I was in feline heat. And when he realized I was doing that, it was like he came again. He shook, finishing with slight sputter. A deflating balloon letting out a final peep of air.
We slept in an awkward embrace all night, our drying sap forming a bond that neither of us minded. And the next morning after we dressed, Charles followed me out of my room right past my mother in the kitchen. As we crossed her, she said, “There had better not be any animals in this house,” and took a sip from her coffee.
I paused, desiring a lobotomy or electric shock therapy—if I could find a competent expert willing to perform either. Charles bumped into me, so I kept moving. After we hugged, he bowed to me. It was cute how filled with masculine instincts he was from his first successful sexual experience. But as soon as he turned away towards his Datsun, I was done. I heard my mother’s words replay in my mind and the monsoon of her connotations drowned me. So I cried.
I cried so hard that I went straight to my room for days, only venturing out to search drawers for books, defecate and stock myself up with celery, wheat bread and mustard.
After that, I couldn’t speak to Charles for more than an hour without breaking into a tearful fit. So we gave up on each other—after trying the cat thing only seven or eight more times.
I still think about poor Charles sometimes.
I hope he still has all his hair.
This story is somewhat related to Jeff Hurlow’s Myspace Portrait Project.