R/T/M (7 page)

     The first time it happened by accident and I had five and change left over at the end of the night, but once I had my routine down I was doubling my wages each night.   Not too shabby.   I had it down so smooth that even the idiots I worked with had no idea what was going on.

     I worked with this girl that had a nose ring and long hair with one long braid in it.

     That summer I was pretty pissed off about a lot of petty little things and I worked out a lot.

     I was up to seven hundred push-ups a day and at least as many sit-ups.

     I was a fucking monster.

     The girl and I flirted back and forth until finally one night she asks me if I want to go back to where she lived and watch some movies.   I think and say, “Sure.   Why not?”.   I’m not thinking anything’s going to happen.   I was your “average frustrated chump”.   I mean, think about it.   Look what I had to deal with in high school.   I wouldn’t even know what to do with a good piece of ass.

     So we’re at her house in this living room / den kind of thing that was apart from the main house, but connected by a small enclosed glass corridor.   We decide we’re going to watch ‘Suburbia’.   The punk rock classic, not the lame “quirky comedy” with Giovanni Ribisi in it.   Five minutes in and she’s all over me.   We’re rolling around on the floor and when she gets on top she says the sexiest thing I had heard up till then.   “I would so fuck you if I didn’t have my fucking period right now.”   Not very hot by today’s standard, but at the time it was pretty fucking sexy.   None of my hometown high school girls had any shit-talking skills so anything was a welcome change.   A few days later she invites me over again and she follows through.   We fuck on the furniture and on the floor.   We fuck each other until we’ve got carpet burns on our knees and
elbows and our genitals are red and raw.   We fuck until dawn and her parent’s leave for work.  Then she sneaks me into the house and up to her bedroom.   We fuck a little more, then we fall asleep.   Then when we wake up, we fuck some more.   We kept up that routine for most of the summer.   It was pretty hot.   She had a little cardboard box filled with sex props.   Handcuffs and warming massage lotions and whatnot.   We didn’t get around to using half of that shit we were so eager to get to the sex.

     One time she
handcuffed me.   I didn’t know what the deal was.   It was new for me so I just went with it.   She said, “How does that feel?”.   I said, “Fine.   I guess.   Now what?”.   I think she had a couple ideas but she didn’t think I was ready for them and she was probably right, so she just took the cuffs off.   Every now and then during sex she would turn over onto her stomach and squeeze her legs tight so it was difficult to get into her from behind.   Looking back, she probably wanted me to put it in her ass, but, like I said, I wasn’t exactly a sexual expert so I’ll chalk that up to woulda shoulda coulda.

     At the end of the summer she came over to the house I lived in with m
y mom and step-dad.   They were out at work so we had the place to ourselves.   She told me that this guy, Victor, that she was in love with and that she would do anything for was coming back from the west coast and she was gonna have to break things off with me.   It was probably the only time a girl has ever been straightforward with me about something like that.   I said something like, “Okay.   There’s nothing I can do about it, so, whatever.   Will we still be friends?”   She smiled and kissed me and threw me a goodbye fuck.   It was the only time it was kind of sad and romantic with her for me.   She got dressed and left and I never saw her again.   So much for friendship.    

     In college I didn’t have any problems with women.

     It could have been the college.   It had a popular nursing and educational program so there were a lot of girls there.

     Go ahead write that down.

     I majored in psychology and often I was the only guy in the class.

     Write that down too.

     “Majored in psychology.”

     I developed this system of staring as flirting.

     If I saw a girl I liked I’d just watch her until she looked in my direction and we made eye contact.   Then I’d smile and give her the “chin-up” nod and pretend to be reading or whatever.

     After I did that a few times I’d sidle up to her in line at the dining hall and say something like, “Hey.   I’ve seen you around.   What’s your deal?”

     Either they’d shut me down or they’d let me talk at them.

     Either they had a boyfriend or we made plans to hang out.

     Either they were having it or they weren’t having it.

     I knew that if they weren’t having it, they just weren’t having it, so I’d laugh it off and move on.

     I just played the averages.

     I figured if I flirted with enough girls, one or two was bound to bite.

     It worked.   I don’t know how, but it did.

     I pretended I was unafraid and I guess to a certain extent I was.

     I figured if I talked them up and they gave me the cold shoulder then I’d never have to bother with them again, but if I never talked to them I’d always have this unrelieved frustration.

     I remember that first year, running five girls at once.   It was a scheduling nightmare.

     I’d kick out the girl that slept over the night before and go to class.   Maybe I’d get a call to my beeper and I’d return the call and I’d spread a little afternoon delight.   I’d have plans for dinner in the dining hall with some girl and then we’d go back to my dorm room and we’d fool around, and if she didn’t want to come across, I’d make up some excuse and tell her we should hang out sometime soon and I’d walk her to the door, and when the latch clicked I’d call up another girl and have her over for a few hours.   And maybe she’d stay the night and maybe she wouldn’t.   And maybe a different girl would come tapping on my window at two in the morning, drunk, coming home from the bars, and want to come in, and I’d have to work around her in stage whispers, trying not to wake up the girl that was all naked and curled up in a ball under the blanket in my bed.   Maybe that happened once or twice.   I wasn’t an asshole, I was just trying to have the best time with the most girls I could without hurting anyone’s feelings.   Maybe I was making up for all of that long-term relationship without sex bullshit from high school, but it didn’t feel like I was making up for anything at the time.   Actually it felt pretty fucking awesome and if I could’ve I probably would’ve spent the rest of my life that way.

     But in a community as
small as a college, word gets around, and none of the girls was really interested in being part of a harem.   So I ended up with one or two that I would see steady.   But none of them lasted through the summer breaks, going home to hook up with their hometown sweethearts.

     But then again, each year there were incoming freshmen and graduating seniors so it all balanced out in a comfortable equilibrium.

     My first year steady had a boyfriend who was at a military academy in New Hampshire.

     She wanted to be the only one and I told her I was okay with that, but she had to break things off with her boyfriend.   She said she would when she went up to be his date at a formal dance at the military academy.   She didn’t break up with him.   She didn’t have the heart.   She fucked him and came back, thinking she could just carry on with me.   I kind of respect that.   At least she didn’t lie about it.   She was trying to do the right thing in her own way.   I told her that we could still hang out, but I’d still see other people.

     I started dating a different girl and I fell in love.   At least what I thought was love at the time.   She was beautiful.   Naturally corn-silk blonde with dirty-blonde roots.   Ice blue eyes.   Long legs and round firm D-cup breasts.   I bet you’re thinking I’m making this up but I’m not.   Okay.   She had some crooked teeth.   And she smoked camels, so her breath always smelled like cheap cigarettes.   And she was anorexic.   And she had this voice that was like a breathy Betty Boop which could be really annoying sometimes.   So she wasn’t perfect.   But she wore a leather motorcycle jacket and black jeans.   I wanted her and I acquired her and I told the first girl that I was going to go steady with the second.

     The first girl attempted suicide.   She took a whole bottle of her medication and locked herself in a shower stall with nothing but a razor and she wouldn’t come out.   Her room-mates called me.

     What was I supposed to do?   I went over.

     Let me give you some back story.

     Some more back story.   Just in case I haven’t lost you yet,

     She had some strange medical condition.   She had abnormally low blood pressure.   She’d be standing there and then her eyes would roll up under her eyelashes, which would flutter like a person having a seizure.   Then… poof!    She’d collapse in a heap on the floor.

      It only happened once a month or so, and usually she was around people who knew what the deal was so they’d keep an eye on her and keep people from running over and practicing their CPR on her.

      Once my room-mate and I were walking to the dining hall first thing in the morning and we saw a lump that looked like a garbage bag on the sidewalk in the distance.   When we came up on it, sure enough, it was my girlfriend, passed out cold on the sidewalk in her winter coat and backpack.   We couldn’t just leave her there, so I grabbed her under the armpits, and my room-mate grabbed her ankles and we carried her back to the lobby of the dorm.   We must have been quite a sight and someone must have seen it, because someone called security and a uniformed campus security guy showed up.   The guard really wanted to call the paramedics, but we kept insisting that she does this about once a month.   That if you give her a few minutes she’d come around.   You just had to give her some breathing room.   Plus she told me she got really pissed when someone called an ambulance, because they’d show up and she’d never go with them and sometimes the ambulance tried to charge her a fine since they thought they rushed over there for nothing.

     So the medications raised her blood pressure and kept the blood in her brain and kept her from falling over all the time.   But when she tried to overdose on them, all they did was make her retain a huge amount of water, so she bloated up like a year’s worth of premenstrual water weight at once.   So she was dumped and depressed and bloated like a hippopotamus.   And there was nothing I could do about it.   If she wanted to kill herself, in my opinion, that was her decision to make.    I wasn’t going to kick in the shower stall door and get soaked and maybe accidentally diced up by a razor trying to keep her from deciding her own destiny.

     It was all for naught anyway.   I dated the blonde till the summer then she dropped me after the first night at my first apartment on my own.   My car died and I couldn’t get a job and I was a month behind on rent all summer long.   Women just weren’t an option.   So I decided to do without.

     My summer room-mates were supposed to stick with the apartment through the next school year, but my room-mate’s girlfriend flaked and dropped out.   And my room-mate had a free room at the college because of a scholarship, so he took it.   I understand, but it left me in a tough spot.   I got a one-room apartment in the heart of the city.   There was no heat.   No hot water.   Not bad in the fall, but in the winter it got really damp and cold and I got really sick.   Cold water showers and no heat.   It was usually colder inside than it was outside.   I would sleep with the blanket over my head in the hope that the heat from my breath would stay under the covers and keep me warm.

     All I ate for a semester was a large coffee and a bagel each day, because it was all I could afford.

     I got so sick I had to drop all my classes.   I probably should have been hospitalized.

     I got crash financial aid and managed to get a dorm room for the spring semester.

     It was close.   I thought I had hit bottom.

     I had no idea what the bottom was.

     Since the summer was unkind, I decided not to bother with women.

     Not that I got into guys.

     That whole collegiate experimentation with homosexuality?

     Yeah, I skipped that whole thing.

     That whole not bothering with women thing?   That didn’t last long.

     I was hanging out with some friends from the theater department.

     You want to talk about ambiguous sexuality, let’s talk college theater.

     Everyone at the table except me was gay or bisexual or omnivorous or whatever.

     Later on I had a buddy that worked tech crew for the shows and he got me a couple gigs.

     That shit was great.

     You got paid to hang out with the prettiest, craziest, sexiest girls on campus and all of the male actors were gay.    Being a techie was like being rough trade up in there.

     I fucked around my fair share.

     Anyway, all of the gender-bending theater kids were insisting that everyone was a little bit bi
sexual.

     They had this stupid fucking game where they insisted that you had to pick a celebrity of the same sex to have sex with.