My Sin to Remembrance A twisted short story by Thomas Wayne
"You don't even remember me, do you?"
I started. Slopped my McDonald's coffee all over the Daily Centurion's personal ads column. Busted. In truth I had been staring at the delicate youth with the severe, even military haircut and maroon CIU workout jacket. He looked as out of place on campus as I felt during my afternoon perambulations which more often than not brought me here to idle behind a copy of the free campus newspaper and observe cafe society.
I had always hated the rudeness of the question, compounded now by the impertinence with which it was phrased. I affected an amiable expression and searched random memory. Had it been last night? No, no gaping hole of a blackout there to account for it, no missing time. But Wednesday? Ah, Wednesday. Hours misplaced there, momentarily forgotten but now perhaps not lost forever. My sudden dread warned me I was about to be reminded of something. Some humiliation no doubt, some ignominious alcohol-inspired word or deed of mine remembered by this callow youth now stroking the day-old peach fuzz of his cheek as he regarded me with unthreatened amusement.
"Are you really an 'eschatologist'? That's what you told me. 'As contradistinguished from a scatologist,' you said. Still don't remember? You were kinda wasted. As contradistinguished from shitfaced."
I tried a casual chuckle. "Of course. Hi," I said. "How are you? Mind was on work, I guess."
But the kid wasn't giving up that easily.
"You really don't have a clue who I am, do you? God, I should feel insulted." But playful, ironic, tweaking me for laughs. "Shall I give you a hint?"
I looked around the dining room; we were nearly alone, no mid afternoon crowd. No one within earshot.
"I'm sorry," I said, shaking my head in resigned bewilderment, but not putting the paper aside yet. "Please do. I must be losing it."
"That's what you said the other night, too. 'I must be losing it,' you said."
"That must have been me, then. I've been saying that a lot lately. You have the advantage of me, sir, I confess."
My last remark had been intended to disarm him and cut to the chase. It had no such effect. He had all the glee of a whiz kid showing up an old dinosaur of a prof standing at the overhead projector before a packed lecture hall. Too young to be anything but a student. Not one of our volunteers. Not from the support group. Maybe a campus town bartender. No, I knew all of those on a first-name basis. Without breaking eye contact or waiting for an invitation, he slid next to me in the booth.
"Here's the hint: we were watching your wife on television together. As a matter of fact, that's the first time you told me you must be losing it. Starting to come back to you now, isn't it? God, you're as white as a sheet."
"The Hoop, right? Wednesday, was it?"
"Jock bar at midterm break. Twenty TV's, no waiting. You sang to me."
"I sang to you?" I stared at him in disbelief, but his steady smirk drove my eyes back to the personal column. Someone For Everyone.
The kid opened up, a pretty fair baritone, totally free of self-consciousness. "'In some secluded rendezvous...'" A woman who appeared to be well over seventy, wearing a paper hat and a McDonald's uniform, looked up from the steam table in reverie. A pimply-faced kid dumping the garbage muttered something that sounded like, "Get a room."
I flashed on my drunken self crooning the kid over to my table. Wednesday, definitely.
He moved closer now. I scooted away a discreet nine or ten inches before responding: "Keeping busy?
He lowered his head and regarded me through long lashes, blue eyes blazing. "You kept us both fairly busy the other night, Steve. You don't mind me calling you Steve, do you? Professor Toddmann seems so impersonal somehow, after...well, you know."
"Who the hell are you, man?"
"You a bed 'em and forget 'em kind of guy, Steve? Had yourself a sodomy lobotomy, maybe?" Wagging his head in my face.
"Look, we both must have had a lot to drink..."
"You had a lot to drink, Steve. But not too much, if you know what I mean."
"Coming in here like this and ambushing me, intruding on my personal time and personal space--you have a set of balls on you, kid, I'll say that for you."
"Who'd know that better than you, Steve? I gotta tell you I'm a little bit hacked off by your anger, a tad insulted, you wanna know the truth. Where's all that poet's passion now, all those urgent protestations of forbidden love? It pricks my self-esteem, no pun intended, not to mention shatters my romantic confidence to be so soon forgotten, so cavalierly cast aside on the slush pile of your rejected lovers. I suppose this means you weren't serious about the job offer, either."
Like a cop flashing a badge, my beleaguered memory served up a total recall of our claustrophobic coupling: last stall of the Hoop men's room just before last call. Me feverishly going for it, kneeling, my head bobbing as though for apples over the toilet bowl, he posed in a lazy sprawl spread-eagled across the lowered lid. His fingers had stroked and played with the hairs on the back of my neck, making no particular haste to come, heedless of the fire-drill urgency of the moment.
Playing itself over and over inside my head, mantra-like in rhythm to my every downstroke, my father's voice uttering his ultimate cussword, his invoking of the apotheir of degradation, brought up from the base of his throat like hawking to spit.
Cocksucker. Accent on the second syllable. O.E. cok: a bantam rooster; suk: to draw water from a bog. Impolite Sl. (insult) one who fellates, e.g., another man in a toilet.
I had bided my time after having risked a sidelong glance and spied the impressive broad beam heft of the young man's meat while standing to shoulder to shoulder with him at the tandem urinals in the Hoop men's room, checking out the Hoop men. His serendipitous schlong had obsessed me from that moment until it brought me to my knees on the cold tile, making my obeisance to it, baring the soles of my shoes to mischance.
It was Bec who had taught me the word schlong. It was her word of choice for describing the male genitalia, which she did frequently and unabashedly, liberated as she was. Except that in my particular case, the word she most often resorted to was schmeckie. A baby penis, a pale pink grub worm, a child's plaything that glows but does not grow in the dark. Something to powder and diaper. In a figurative sense she regularly powdered and diapered me: her income in a field I thought disreputable, even quasi-criminal, exceeded mine by a decimal place; it was she who'd made affordable our sumptuous home, the two matching Expeditions in the driveway, my Rolex watch, even the twelve-hundred-dollar suit I'd soiled at the knees Wednesday night. It was Bec on local cable access Wednesday night who brought in the suckers, who paid the money, who paid the bills, who bought the stuff, who supported the husband who lived in the house that Bec built.
Many more drams poured from the reagent bottle of vodka before I broke free of general conversation and told him what was really on my mind. That was the moment I most craved these stolen Wednesday nights--the quiver of fear at having uttered the indecent suggestion, too late to call back now. Something of the same thrill of fear in being pulled over, the revolving red Mars lights flashing in the rearview, watching the uniformed silhouette approach in military stance, then lean in close, his intimidating sidearm hanging just out of my reach.
After I'd propositioned him, the kid regarded me as though studying a dental x-ray, drawing aside the curtain of flesh and surveying all the rottenness my mouth would offer up. Or was that a fist he was making? Was he about to knock my eyeteeth down my throat for drill? And would that have been less of an insult than what ultimately was to follow?
It turned out he was giving me what anthropologists call the "copulatory gaze." Two minds with but a single thought, we found ourselves once more in the men's room that night where I made good on my suggestion. Payback to my wife for neglecting me, her inane call-in show still running on cable while I ran him head. He left first; I followed a sixty-nine count later. I actually sat there watching Rhonda explain the mysteries of scrying to a rapt Bec and mentally counted up to sixty-nine--a rigid Wednesday night ritual--before dismounting the bar stool to join him for our assignation. The counting had been a cautionary thing at first, to exorcise second thoughts and ask oneself if one were serious, but had become through habitual overuse a compulsory interlude to allow anticipation to build.
"Open your mind," Rhonda counseled Bec and Bonne. "Let the imagery flow naturally." Bec seemed unusually stiff-necked in front of the camera, ill at ease as though she knew all about the action going down at the Hoop that night. Or maybe it was Rhonda's relaxed stage presence contrasting with her own. Bec had confided in me--for who else has a woman to confide these things in other than her husband?--that she feared new addition Rhonda posed an All About Eve kind of threat to her hosting hegemony on Ask Your Oracles. But there they were, Bec, Rhonda and Bonne--the three witches. Rhonda with her crystal ball, Bonne of the tarot cards, and Bec. The lapis lazuli Rhonda Rainier had pinned to her blond coiffure was a third eye, making her beehive bouffant of high-piled hillbilly hair look like a turban, especially when she bent to peer into her crystal orb. Bec was fond of telling me how Rhonda always lost that trailer-park twang the moment the red eye was lit. Bitchy witches, they had nary a good word for one another. Rhonda for her part loved to criticize my wife's anatomy, warning her to keep her "big tits"--four syllables in Rhonda's mouth--from knocking Rhonda's crystal ball off the table. Indeed, Bec did have big tits--tits to navigate by. They were what had first attracted me to her in college. Actually, only I had been in college. Still was, in fact. Bec, five years farther advanced along life's pathway than me, had been a graduate school dropout living on her parents' beneficence in a college town when we first began dating. But that's another story.
Bonne Terry--first name pronounced bone--held herself above these petty personality conflicts. A stunning Jamaican woman of impressive mien and indeterminate age, she read the tarot. Bec worked without any props, using only her head to get inside yours. Was I following her lead tonight?
The Hoop was the kind of sports bar where they even had a television suspended over the sinks in the rest rooms. I had opened the john door and seen no one at first. Had he run out the back to humiliate me in a coitus interruptus game of hide-and-seek? Then I heard him clear his throat and saw from under the last stall his one Reebok-clad foot extended like a dancer's. Gently I swung the door open to find him playing with it, shaking it at me, teasing me with its sideshow size, his face high-colored and ruddy as only an athletic blond's can be. Rhonda's voice squawking on and on behind me, I threw my silk tie over my shoulder and went to work, hovering over him, then lighting like a hungry mosquito. His sponginess became firm, taut urgency in my mouth. But how could he hold out for so long? Mocking me, making me work for it, challenging me to make him come. I had drawn the stall door shut behind us-- for propriety's sake, I guess. It didn't go all the way to the top--almost the lower half of a Dutch door. Although I couldn't see above his crossed arms, I could sense him watching my wife's program over my shoulder where the TV monitor peered like a voyeur. I wanted to make him shoot in my mouth while Bec was talking, so when I heard her voice replacing Rhonda's. I redoubled my efforts. Still he maintained.
Bec's voice filled the room for me; I hadn't heard any footsteps. Then someone punched the locked stall door so hard that it shook.
The mean voice of a redneck posing the rhetorical question: "What the hell's going on in there?"
Just then my partner chose to ejaculate a copious, albeit ill-timed, flood of semen. I felt his body stiffen, then relax. He sighed. On the other side of the door only impatient silence.
Did he think either of us owed him an answer? Would I have my glass jaw broken and wired shut, living on pureed foods and milkshakes sucked by means of a straw threaded through the hole where my eyeteeth once had been? Blinding TMJ headaches for life? Bleeding insult to the brain, memory loss, double vision that would render me unemployable, even more in bondage to my wife than I was now? Deviated septum that would mar me with the smashed nose and slurred speech of a street bum? The redneck finally relented, snarled something unintelligible, turned and spat his disgust into the sink. Banging the door on his way out.
All my restless Wednesday night forays had been black bag jobs, until now: never any intruding bystanders factored in to complicate the equation. The whole point of a secret life is that it remain a secret. I had a filthy little secret life going on--my Wednesday night avocation. I had tempted fate for the impure thrill of it; now fate was about to succumb. I savored the rude pun.
Bec's Wednesday night cable show--travel time, preparation, studio airtime, debriefing, cool out time over drinks, social kiss kiss bye bye time, and return trip home--could be relied upon to consume each Wednesday from three PM until after midnight, thereby granting me carte blanche to "explore my limits", as we say in the social psych game. The first and only limit I had undertaken to explore thus far was one that had always held a particular fascination for me. Dare I speak its name? Anonymous man-on-man fellatio. The seat of oratory put to a baser use--exposition, declamation, persuasion, all reduced to one menial and shameful service--the vicious adder tongue slithering forth to greet the serpent's head of virility. Hail fellator well met. Throughout literature and legend I felt the omnipresence of my obsession. Beginning with the Adam and Eve story I saw a phallic allegory: the serpent supplanting the woman. Untidy emotional entanglements I sought to avoid most of all. I had made no more than mental notes of my furtive explorations and had committed nothing to writing. I deceived myself that I was embarking upon a new kind of freeform, groundbreaking participant observation research project, but in the quick of my soul I knew it to be a lie.
I had never seen myself as queer. A sly manipulator of men's genitals, perhaps; a secret service hetero putting one over on my victims. But never queer. Shame over my inadequate equipment barred me from exposing it to a stranger's scrutiny. Especially this evening's stranger, whose ample anatomy and superfluous length would have justified his scorn--another instance of biological determinism. Or perhaps these Wednesday evenings I cared more for my cock than for my mouth.
I stood at the sink, opened the faucet full blast and cupped scalding water in my hands, rinsing my mouth out. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, like the directions on a bottle of mouthwash. In the mirror I caught a glimpse of his expression, bemused by my feverish ablutions, my pathetic sanitary ritual. He stood, making no effort to zip up, hands on hips, still semi-erect, aiming a trajectory at about the level of Bec's face on the television screen.
"Well, I'm sure we've given each other a lot to think about this evening," Bec was saying in her velvety TV voice, over the weird atonal theme music. "New doors are opening up for every one of us. It's up to each one of us to walk through those doors into a new vision and an enlightened future. Be sure to join us again next Wednesday beginning at eight PM right here on Ask Your Oracles."
The kid nudged the glistening hood of his foreskin into parade rest with a lazy roll of his thumb. Was it the collected lint from his shorts I still tasted?
"So tell me, is your wife psychic enough to pick up on what we did?" The kid's eyebrows arched like a model's. I took a sip of my coffee before shaking my head.
"I figured that it was all fake," he said. "Taking advantage of innocent, gullible people. How does she live with her conscience?" He fixed me with a level gaze that unnerved me, and added, "For that matter, how do you?"
"What's your point?"
"Think of all the risk you're exposing her to, what with all the bugs out there these days. Especially the waters where you're snorkeling, Steve. Cesspools of incurable disease. You ever hear of a condom? Dental dam?"
"Keep your voice down."
"You telling me to shut up, Steve? Suppose I tell her about the whole sordid episode?" His broad maleficent grin told me he would do just that if I didn't stop him. I affected a conciliatory tone. "I'm just telling you there's a time and place for everything. I'm sorry, what was your name again?"
"How soon they forget. It's Randy. Name goes with my disposition, so you can remember better next time."
"Who says there's going to be a next time, Randy?" Casual smile while I said it.
"You're the one making reference to time and place, Steve. Sounds to me you're about to ask me for a date. I'll make it easy on you: the answer's yes. I'll make it even easier. The time could be right now. I'm footloose and fancy free until my three o'clock poly sci lecture. The place could be your office at the NDI annex. A fine and private place."
"'But none, I think, do there embrace.'"
"'To His Coy Mistress'. I'm impressed."
"I'm not your coy mistress."
"But you could be, Steve. You could so easily be. You know, I've given considerable thought to that job offer you made me. The answer to that one is yes, too."
It was only after LeGrand died that I began to implode. A perennial college student, I needed the discipline of a lab partner, assignments and a series of deadlines to check my tendencies toward indolence. In fact, it was immediately after LeGrand's funeral that I returned to the office alone at NDI and logged onto the Internet. That's how I can time it to 2:43 PM on a Wednesday when, by means of a seemingly random--and definitely randy--series of hyper links, my sexuality began to change.
I guess I wanted to dissociate myself from the chrysanthemum stink of death, to prove to myself that I was still alive. For whatever reason, looking at women peeing seemed to do it for me at first. Judging from the superabundant supply of full-color photos online, perhaps about half the women in this country have at one time or another posed, panties askew, either squatting or standing facing the camera while they let go their urine streams. I found I loved the squalid indignity of it. The carefree expressions in their faces--it would, after all, be necessary to relax in order for the shot to work--buoyed my spirits. Some had not even cared enough to disrobe, but instead proudly displayed for the camera how they had deliberately wet themselves in dark, demeaning stains. How many years later would the horror of incontinence revisit some of them like a malevolent Peter Pan? Stop, don't think like that. This is for your enjoyment, so act like it.
For several hours I wandered through the online galleries. It had been necessary to subscribe to some--to "become a member". Oh well, I thought, "We are all members of one another." Savoring the irony of that one, too. LeGrand no longer there with whom to share that college professor's eclectic humor. I used the NDI Master Card number. Eventually I printed enough "pics", as they were called, to dangerously deplete the color ink reservoir on our printer. My favorite among them all was a woman of about thirty in a secluded garden. The sun caught her well-scrubbed face, which exuded wholesome good health like those young women you see in 1930's films by Leni Riefenstahl. Blonde, pale and freckled, she wore old-fashioned round-frame glasses but little or no makeup. A zephyr of a breeze tossed and played with the white picture hat she wore. In truth, clothed in a middy blue blouse, from the waist up she looked like a young schoolteacher picnicking in Nazi Germany. Waist down was the reason for the picture: wearing only panties, she squatted like a squaw, her long and bony bare toes splayed in black loam, the dark earth having splattered in flecked rain patterns as high as her ankles. From where a dainty crooked finger had deftly swept aside the crotch of white lace panties, a distinctly rude stream arced forth, curved like a dagger cut from amber, then burst into droplets before raining down to nitrogenize the soil and further sully milady's no doubt already compromised virtue.
She'd really had to go. The thing about hard-core pornography is that there's no faking it. At least not without world-class special effects beyond the means of your garden-variety pissoir shutterbug. And by the way, who had taken the picture? I stared at it, first on the monitor, then the laser print, as though it held all the enigmatic fascination of the Mona Lisa. I placed it in my lap drawer, then took it out again. How much had she been paid? Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred? In cash, or was it drugs? Where does one find such women? Was she a biker's momma, or a young housewife taking a girlfriend's dare, getting back at her husband for working late at the office? The insouciance of her go-ahead-and-watch expression, smiling wide-eyed and casual, straight into the camera, riveted me. How does one broach to his prospective model the subject of posing for such a picture? Ply her with liquor or drugs first, then warm her up with a few innocuous candid shots? Push fluids while engaging in dilatory tactics in a remote location? A cooler of beer, a camera, and Thou?
I knew I could store the pics in my desk at work without fear of discovery. Bec never visited the office, just as I never visited her on the set of Ask Your Oracles. We respected one another's private lives. And then I saw it.
Supported by two brawny California suntanned legs, a heroically-proportioned cock discharged a king's torrent of urine; a lusty firehose making a latrine of the gaping mouth of a woman who didn't believe in dentists. I stared at the electronic pic for many minutes, taking no more notice of the woman's face than if she had been a stranger on a passing bus.
It was the cock that had mesmerized me. Impossibly long and thick, it seemed to be reinforced with a trio of powerful animatronic rods bundled just below the smooth velvety surface which glistened as though oiled with loving and tender care. I found there were chat rooms, and photo exchanges where one could assume an identity and actually speak in real time with the owners of such cocks while one admired pics of the subject under discussion. With breath-catching trepidation and a deep, dirty thrill, I first entered one such chat room around sunset. I tried adopting the identity of a thoroughly amoral woman calling herself "Sue's_gotta_have_it". There were three others who'd beaten me to the punch on that one, so I added "69" to the moniker and got a green light. My password, spelled out in a starline of asterisks like footlights, was "fell_later." Get it? Wouldn't you know it, the first place "Sue's_gotta_have_it" went to chat was the Tool Room. Profligate misuse of the Internet--possibly the single most revolutionary technological marvel of the age--permitting men to gratify their egos by displaying their exposed equipment globally. There were tools galore in the Tool Room. Homeric tools. Tools for Ripley. The proud possessor of the first I downloaded claimed to be an Australian fireman named Chet. As chance would have it, in the time it took Chet to read my salacious fake bio he PM'd me.
"Hi, Sue. Wanna chat?"
Now what? Caught staring, I supposed I'd have to play along and chat for a while with this man, hiding behind my assumed identity. My heart raced. I clicked the box for my reply and typed: "Hi, Chet. You have a beautiful penis." Can't go wrong if you open with a compliment, right? I took a deep breath and clicked "send."
"Thanx." Then a smiley face. No, three of them in a row. For some reason I thought of Bec, Rhonda and Bonne.
I waited. Being new to this, I thought maybe that was all the chat the situation called for. I clicked to close the PM window and was already taking the measure of some other man's tool when Chet pursued me there.
"Hey, where'd ya go?" More smiley faces: six of them this time. God, these men were aggressive! A furtive thought worried me then: what if Chet were a computer wizard whose unrequited horniness would turn to a rage befitting the enormity of his equipment once he discovered the truth of my betrayal, who could penetrate my false identity, perhaps even find out my e-mail address here on campus and expose my pretending to be a slattern admiring his penis! The Daily Centurion could only exalt such a scandal to front-page status. My colleagues would idle over coffee and read of my shame. No, I told myself, the game was still afoot and it was up to me to keep it going.
"Right here, Chet. Enjoying the view." Could Chet tell I was looking at another's tool?
"Thanx again, Sue." Apparently not.
"That's what I'm here for, your enjoyment."
So I enjoyed him for nearly an hour with him none the wiser. I piqued his every fantasy. As a man pretending to be a woman, I had a tactical advantage over him. For the last few minutes of that hour I challenged myself to make him masturbate. I think I succeeded. The PM window was quiet, as though a shade had been pulled down for privacy. At last he returned. "I want to leave my wife and marry you!"
"I'll bet you say that to all the girls" was the best reply I could come up with to that one.
"No, I'm serious. Come to Australia. I'll pay the ticket."
"One way or round trip?" This was getting too extreme for me.
"Around the world."
Epilogue
Unhealthy exercise at the health club
His penis, sleek and wild as a seal emerging from a dip in the reflecting pool at the zoo, faced me in the mirror. Its size challenged and defied me. All rationalization failed: its proportion far exceeded any justification by his merely greater physical stature. I envied him its size, wanted to utterly possess it although--because--I knew it was his.
He toweled off at leisure, in seeming comfort with his nudity in the steamy closeness of the clubby males-only atmosphere. I broke a taboo: no more than furtive sidelong glances allowed in this closed society of men. So many subtle yet inviolable taboos separated the two of us, invisible as the barriers at the Forest Park zoo. I dared break another: a subtle widening of the aperture of my eyelids as I continued to stare, not at the exotic beast itself--a more powerful and robust example than my own, a Medusa's snake of forbidden lust and casual destruction, turning me to stone with desire--but triangulating, fascinated by the chance encounter of its reflection in the mirror. Clean as a whistle, and ready for...what?
So many near-imperceptible cues betray our cupidity. A too-deep sigh, a heaving of the chest, a too-feminine attitude given away by posture, tilt of the head, or carriage of the lips: any one of these, beyond self-control or self-knowledge brought about by proprioception, can reveal our inmost desires as blatantly as rouged cheeks and a tiara.
I knelt and began my obeisance.