She said hi to both of us. “Isn’t it a great party?” she asked me. When she moved, the hem of her dress swirled around the lace bottoms of her panties.
I said it was a great party.
“Did you bring any goodies, Pete?” Pete grinned and held up his Baggie of weed. Her eyes sparkled.
She was standing next to me, her hip pressed casually against mine. I could feel her bare thigh. I began to get as horny as a bull moose.
“Bring it over here,” she said.
We found a relatively unoccupied corner behind one of the stereo speakers, and Dana produced a huge scrolled water pipe from a low bookshelf that was fairly groaning with Hesse, Tolkien, and Reader’s Digest condensed books. The latter belonged to the parents, I assumed. We toked up. The grass was much smoother in the water pipe, and I could hold the smoke better. I began to get very high indeed. My head was filling up with helium. People came and went. Introductions, which I promptly forgot, were made. The thing that I liked best about the intro-ductions was that, every time a stray wandered by, Dana would bounce up to grab him or her. And when she did, I could look straight up her dress to where the Heav-enly Home was sheathed in the gauziest of blue nylon. People changed records. I watched them come and go (some of them undoubtedly talking of Michelangelo, or Ted Kennedy or Kurt Vonnegut).
A woman asked me if I had read Susan Brown-miller’s Women Rapists. I said no. She told me it was very tight. She crossed her fingers in front of her eyes to show me how tight it was and then wandered off. I watched the fluorescent poster on the far wall, which showed a guy in a T-shirt sitting in front of a TV. The guy’s eyeballs were slowly dripping down his cheeks, and there was a big cheese-eating grin on his face. The poster said: SHEEEIT! FRIDAY NIGHT AND I’M STONED AGAIN
I watched Dana cross and uncross her legs. A few filaments of pubic hair, nine shades darker than the bleach job, had strayed out of the lacy leg bands. I don’t think I have ever been that horny. I doubt if I will ever be that horny again. I had an organ which felt large enough and long enough to pole-vault on. I began to wonder if the male sex organ can explode.
She turned to mg and suddenly whispered in my ear. My stomach heated up twenty degrees instantly, as if I had been eating chili. A moment before, she had been talking to Pete and to some joker I remembered being non-introduced to. Then she was whispering in my ear, her breath tickling the dark
channel. “Go on out the back door,” she said. “There.” She pointed.
It was hard to comprehend, so I just followed her finger. Yes, there was the door. The door was real and the door was earnest. It had one hell of a knob on it. I chuckled, convinced that I had just thought a particularly witty thought. She laughed lightly in my ear and said, “You’ve been looking up my dress all night. What does that mean?” And before I could say anything, she kissed my cheek softly and gave me a little shove to get me going.
I looked around for Joe, but I didn’t see him anyplace. Sorry, Joe. I got up and heard both my knees pop. My legs were stiff from sitting in the same position so long. I had an urge to un-tuck my shirt and cover up the huge bulge in my jeans. I had an urge to tiptoe across the room. I had an urge to cackle wildly and announce to the general attendance that Charles Everett Decker earnestly believed that he was about to get screwed; that-to drop a bad pun-Charles Everett Decker was about to rip off his maiden piece.
I didn’t do any of those things.
I went out the back door.
I was so stoned and so horny that I almost fell twenty feet to the tiny white shin-gle of beach that was down below. The back of the cabin overlooked a sudden rocky drop to a postage-stamp inlet. A flight of weather-washed steps led down. I walked carefully, holding on to the railing. My feet felt a thousand miles away. The music sounded distant on this side, blending and almost being covered by the rhythmic sound of the waves.
There was a slip of a moon and a ghost of a breeze. The scene was so frozenly beautiful that for a moment I thought I had walked into a black-and-white picture postcard. The cabin behind and above was only a dim blur. The trees climbed on both sides, pines and spruces that sloped off to naked rock headland-twin spurs of it, which cupped the crescent-shaped beach where the waves licked. Straight ahead was the Atlantic, pinpointed with uncertain nets of light from the moon. I could see the faintest curve of an island far out to the left, and wondered who walked there that night besides the wind. It was a lonesome thought, and it made me shiver a little.
I slipped off my shoes and waited for her.
I don’t know how long it was before she came. I didn’t have any wristwatch and was too stoned to be able to judge in any case. And after a little while, unease began to creep in. Something about the shadow of trees on the wet, packed sand, and the sound of the wind. Maybe the ocean itself, a big thing, a mean mother–humper full of unseen life and all those little pricks of light. Maybe the cold feel of the sand under my bare feet. Maybe none of those things, maybe all of them and more. But by the time she put her hand on my shoulder, I had lost my erection. Wyatt Earp striding into the OK Corral with no sixgun.
She turned me around, stood on tiptoe, kissed me. I could feel the warmth of her thighs, but now it was nothing special to me. “I saw you looking at me,” is what she said. “Are you nice? Can you be nice?”
“I can try,” I told her, feeling a little absurd. I touched her breasts, and she held me close. But my erection was still gone.
“Don’t tell Pete,” she said, taking me by the hand. “He’d kill me. We’ve got a . . . kind of a thing.”
She led me underneath the back steps, where the grass was cool and matted with aromatic pine needles.
The shadows made cold venetian blinds on her body as she slipped out of her dress.
“This is so crazy,” she said, and she sounded excited.
Then we were rolling together and my shirt was off. She was working at the snap on the front of my jeans. But my cock was still on coffee break. She touched me, sliding her hand inside my underpants, and the muscles down there jerked–not in pleasure or in revulsion, but in a kind of terror. Her hand felt like rubber, cold and impersonal and antiseptic.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Come on, come on, come on . . . ”
I tried to think of something sexy, anything sexy. Looking up Darleen Andreis-sen’s skirt in study hall and her knowing it and letting me. Maynard Quinn’s pack of dirty French playing cards. I thought of Sandy Cross in sexy black underwear, and that started to move something around down there . . . and then, of all things to come cruising out of my imagination, I saw my father with his hunting knife, talking about the Cherokee Nose Job.
[“The what?” Corky Herald asked. I explained the Cherokee Nose Job. “Oh,” Corky said. I went on.]
That did it. Everything collapsed into noodledom again. And after that, there was nothing. And nothing.
And nothing. My jeans had joined my shirt. My un-derpants were somewhere down around my ankles.
She was quivering underneath me, I could feel her, like the plucked string of a musical instrument. I reached down and took hold of my penis and shook it as if to ask what was wrong with it. But Mr. Penis wasn’t talking. I let my hand wander around to the warm junction of her thighs. I could feel her pubic hair, a little kinky, shockingly like my own. I slid an exploratory finger into her, thinking: This is the place. This is the place men like my father joke about on hunting trips and in barber shops. Men kill for this.
Force it open. Steal it or bludgeon it. Take it . . . or leave it.
“Where is it?” Dana whispered in a high, breathless voice. “Where is it? Where . . . ?”
So I tried. But it was like that old joke about the guy that tried to jam a marsh-mallow into the piggy bank. Nothing. And all the time I could hear the soft sound of the ocean grounding on the beach, like the soundtrack of a sappy movie.