HAVING ME WRITE about sex was like having Steven Hawking write about tap dancing.
Despite the recent spike in sexual activity thanks to Lisa, I was still hopelessly inexperienced and apparently largely misinformed. One particularly brusque partner informed me that I had the “lovemaking skills of a demented muskrat.” In addition, I had absolutely zero experience with regard to creative writing. This made the other interns—all creative writing majors—bristle with envy.
Despite having no literary experience, the actual writing part didn’t faze me, but I hadn’t quite gotten over how disgusting and undesirable I felt throughout high school and college, and the idea that someone could read about my sexploits and not bring up their lunch seemed terribly far-fetched. My first stab at describing a sexual encounter on the page made me want to wretch, which left me wondering how I could ever sell it to anyone else. I certainly couldn’t have done it without Anna, who was absolutely ready, willing, and able to do anything to help me. Having a hot girlfriend to share these experiences with made them much less scary and enabled me to write without feeling like some sort of disgusting little perv.
Actually doing the first few “experiments” wasn’t really a problem either. It was writing about my bits ’n’ pieces that was scary. I was always aware that recounting a sexual encounter without lashings of self-deprecation, humility, and compassion can result in something that reads like a Penthouse “Forum” letter.
The subject matter for the experiments were to be things that are purported to enhance the sexual experience, be it an activity, like having sex outside, a product or device, such as a cock ring, or a fetish, like bondage or dressing up like a sports team’s mascot. The beauty of me writing it, I was told, was that my relative inexperience would provide a “vanilla” everyman’s perspective that could be accessible to a larger audience.
A large part of my agreeing to write about my sexual adventures for a large audience was that the very idea of it was so incredibly ludicrous. Would my friends commuting to the city or working at the oil refinery even be able to get their heads around the concept? Many of them, I’m quite sure, would question whether I’d had sex at all, let alone being paid to do so. Regardless of who got their pubes first or who went from tenor to baritone the quickest, the true measure of when one becomes a man is his first knickers-off experience with a female. By that token, at age fourteen, I was a boy among men.
What really drove me crazy back then was how nonchalant the popular boys could be about it all.
At fourteen, Joanne Davis had suddenly blossomed into a living goddess. I could barely speak around her, felt I didn’t deserve to be in the same dimension as her. And there’s greasy-haired Mark Wilson, regaling the back row of the biology class with how he absentmindedly fingered her behind the music department, waving his middle finger around as olfactory evidence. I couldn’t get a girl to look at me and Wilson was two knuckles deep in my dream girl before recess.
“Smell Joanne Davis!” he said to anyone who’d listen. He didn’t even curtail his piggish behavior as Joanne glided into biology and took the seat next to mine, yielding an immediate stirring in my loins.
I looked at her apologetically on behalf of fourteen-year-old boys everywhere. With that look, I wanted her to know that should I be given the opportunity to put my hand in her knickers, I would make it ever so special. I’d probably go the whole hog and tell her that I loved her. I smiled gamely at her and to my complete surprise she smiled back. I was so caught up in the moment that I barely noticed Wilson walk around behind me, where he released something both silent and deadly between my dream girl and myself.
“Uurrhh, Stoddard! That fucking reeks!” he shrieked.
A truly awful fart cloud completely enveloped Joanne and me.
“That wasn’t me, it was Wilson!” I blurted out as the true perpetrator sought sanctuary on the other side of the biology lab, still reassigning me the blame.
“Oi, Stoddard’s just dropped his guts!” he announced to the group he’d been defaming Joanne to just thirty seconds earlier.
“I swear it wasn’t me!” I pleaded.
Joanne looked at me with utter contempt.
“You’re fucking disgusting,” she spat and excused herself from the offending area.
Whether it was my pimply face, buckteeth, wispy frame, or the supposed culprit of a noxious fart, I grew to feel more and more disgusting by the minute.
Humiliation in the eyes of girls had somehow become a daily occurrence for me. Every day at school, it became more apparent that I was a permanent member of a dwindling group of boys who girls wanted nothing to do with. By the time I was eighteen and still hadn’t convinced a female to lock lips with me for the briefest moment, I’d grown to accept that I’d be one of the unfortunate creatures that shuffled around Corringham town center smelling of urine and muttering to himself. By age twenty, I was almost looking forward to it.
Yet here I was, a fledgling sex writer, on the platform of the 207th Street A train stop in New York City with my blonde, knockout American live-in girlfriend, who was more than happy to let me fuck her on public transport; my first assignment was to have sex on the subway. My girl’s only conditions were that her face or real name not appear in the column, which I thought was more than fair.
It was almost one in the morning, and as I’d suspected, the platform looked deserted. I’d never had sex in public before. We would be able to commandeer an empty subway car for our purposes. It was the height of a particularly steamy New York summer, when the temperature didn’t seem to dip with the sun at night. Anna was wearing a tight T-shirt, short denim miniskirt with no underwear underneath, and, at my request, a pair of good running sneakers should we need to flee. Getting caught in the throes of passion was not an option for either of us. Her parents would have been unable to withstand the double whammy of shock and shame at their only child’s indiscretions. My precarious visa situation meant being caught with my pants around my ankles could have been good grounds for deportation. Being kicked out of a country that was suddenly granting my every wet dream would have been more than I could take.
Being late at night, there was hardly a soul in the station. As it was after 11:00 p.m., however, the A train was now running a local service and we only had the time it takes for the train to speed from one station to the next, and the risk of onlookers increased with every stop headed downtown.
“You’d better be ready to go once the doors close,” said Anna, shoving a hand into my skivvies.
It wasn’t until then that it occurred to me that I was really in no mood to have sex at that moment, under the harsh fluorescent lights of a chilly, Brooklyn-bound A train. This was the first time I would be engaging in sexual activity under obligation to a third party, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last.
Bing bong.
The doors slid shut and the train lurched forth into the tunnel, before stalling, allowing Anna some extra time to kiss some life into my atypically hesitant penis.
“Come on!” she said and pulled her T-shirt over her implausibly large and perfect twenty-one-year-old’s breasts.
Ladies and Gentlemen: we apologize for the delay, we will be moving momentarily.
The PA system in the car was way too loud and the crackly, Bronx-accented announcement hurt my ears and jangled my nerves, causing Anna to work harder than a hard-bodied college senior should ever have to. As the train slowly crawled forward toward the Dyckman Street stop, Anna spun around, hiked up her skirt, and put a foot up on the seat. The train was still moving at a snail’s pace but that didn’t quell her sense of urgency.
“Fucking put it in!” she screamed at me.
Anna’s vim for the assignment far outstripped my own, which sort of surprised me. I did as I was told as the train started speeding toward the next stop.
I grabbed Anna’s hips for balance as the train violently shook back and forth on the tracks and tried to center my thoughts on my objectives.
Susan had said that we should go as far as we could. Wanting to exceed my employer’s expectations, I was insistent on going to completion. I knew that we only had another few blocks to play with, though it was incredibly difficult to gauge precisely where we were, and so I banged away at my inexplicably willing assistant with everything I could muster. Fortuitously the train slowed to a sudden stop once again. Although I very nearly fell over, the stop bought us a little more time. Anna looked over her shoulder at me.
“Are you nearly done?” she asked.
“Nearly there.”
I was close.
The train sped up and then began to slow as we neared the next station.
“Oh no!” I cried, aware that I needed a few more seconds. Anna then inserted a finger into her bum and said something as raunchy as it was considerate.
“You’d better come in my mouth. I don’t wanna leave a mess.”
Her vocalized civic responsibility was exactly what I needed to bring things to a head, seemingly nanoseconds before the train pulled into Dyckman Street. With a minimum of fuss or mess, Anna pulled her skirt down over her bottom just as a heavyset woman in a Wendy’s uniform stomped aboard.
“Are you okay?” said Anna upon noticing that I was clearly not okay.
“I’m fine,” I said, visibly shell-shocked. “I can’t believe we just did that!”
Anna made the noise that would usually accompany a shrug. She was unflappable to the point of utter disinterest. I felt that at twenty-four, I’d skipped the bit where young people were supposed to have sex partially clothed, outside of the bedroom, high on drugs, and with people they didn’t necessarily know or even like that much. Arbitrary, casual, distasteful sex: screwing for screwing’s sake. After going so long without any at all, I sort of gave it a reverence my contemporaries didn’t. I only fooled around with people I could imagine going on picnics with, people I would look after should they catch the flu. People I—and I shudder to say this—would not fuck, but make love to. I could barely pull myself away from Lisa the night after I met her. I am, or at least I was, old-fashioned in that regard. Writing a column about new sexual experiences would provide me with a novel but valid excuse for catching up on something I felt I shouldn’t have missed—a free pass to engage in the mischief I felt I’d been precluded from having thus far.