After that I knew sex was everything, at least for me, and I set about getting my share. But I had to learn the rules of the game. The very first one I learned was about supply and demand. Vagina owners controlled the supply of sex, and the demand from men is always greater than the supply. The second was about access to the supply.
I went back to school with a different attitude because that’s where the girls were. I stalked them: I watched for the door to open to their bathroom for a quick peek. I watched them bending over to pick something up. One way you might get to look down their blouses, the other you might be able to make out the lines of their panties. In class, sometimes they were restless and they shifted their legs so you could see up their skirts. Cheap thrills, but what else was there to do in school?
My dick drove me. My hormones were running down the road screaming. Ask a girl for a date and she’d look at me like I was a werewolf.
Pornography saved my ass. My right hand became my best friend. I got my high school education looking at dirty books that didn’t lie about sex.
Everybody lied about it. Sometimes I used to think that everybody who wore clothes lied about it. People all wanted to dress the wild thing in fancy clothes. They talked shit like love, romance, wedding, family, commitment, values, and I thought, in and out, in and out, pole and hole, pole and hole. Sex was sex. I didn’t think it needed dressing up.
I mean, I wanted to wallow in it. Maybe sex was my calling, like they say preachers have a calling, because I’ve never felt bad about any dirty thought I had — they were just like other thoughts. Pictures on my own private screen.
I’d mope around the town where we were living or I’d mope around school. Dark nights would find me outside windows, looking for what I’d seen Daddy and the happy whore doing.
I saw things I can’t write down. People are really fucked up when it comes to this activity. Everybody did it a little bit differently. Sometimes I took my binoculars along for a closer inspection of the plumber with his wife, the postman and his girlfriend, the doctor and his daughter.
I knew other guys felt the same way I did, but they didn’t have the balls to admit it. Or a Daddy like mine.
But if it doesn’t come out one way it’ll come out another. I used to go shooting with a kid named Jeffrey. We’d go off to the dump and shoot rats with our .22s. I’d try to get Jeff to talk about girls, but it was hopeless. He was a very quiet, shy kind of guy, just the opposite of me. He was a swimmer, too. Maybe all that time by himself in the water was like sex for him, or maybe he’d got water on the brain.
“Jeffrey,” I’d say to him after he’d shot enough rats, “why don’t we go over to Miranda’s house and see if we can catch her with the shades up? There’s a tree that’s easy to climb, and you can see right into her bedroom. She’s got melons, man.”
But not Jeffrey. He’d go, “You’re a disgusting pervert, Tate. Miranda is on my swim team.”
A few weeks after that trip to the dump, Jeffrey was big news. Instead of shooting rats, he waited after school for his parents to arrive home and ambushed them as they walked through the front door. He used the .22 he shot rats with to put nine .22 LR slugs into his father, then another four into his mother. Then he took off in their car and the cops didn’t find him for two days. But he’d left a note that sounded like his father had given him the same advice Daddy gave me about making people notice me. He said he wanted to go on national television to tell people why he killed them. I just wanted to get laid, but I took the lesson to heart about shooting people and getting famous.
Most of the time I felt like an animal in the zoo. I was in a cage looking out at people who were looking in on me. When I walked down the street I looked at people around me and they just seemed like pod people, or zombies. I wasn’t like them, despite the resemblance. I was something else. I could shoot one of them. Not a girl, but there were lots of pricks out there.
I couldn’t get laid even if I paid. There was an older girl in the trailer park who’d dropped out. She wore tight white shorts even in the winter time, and there was a steady traffic of cars most nights at her house. I watched her especially. I liked her face. Pouty. Big lips, usually wet. Boobs on her like spikes, they were so hard and pointed. I watched her from behind a little fence where I could stretch out on the grass and make myself comfortable for the evening.
LaDonna put on quite a show. She was an exhibitionist. She must have known I was watching her, and she got her kicks showing me her power over men. I was the watcher and she was the watched — a fair deal, I thought.
She had a screen porch she sat out on most nights when it was warm. Sometimes she would turn on a little lamp, and other times the only light came from inside the trailer. Most of the time I could only see her shadow. She had a chair and a cot on the porch, and she sat there like a spider in a web, waiting for the flies to come to her. They were mostly older men and LaDonna still looked young despite her work.
While I watched her with the dirty old men my bone was usually buried in a hole I dug in the ground with my knife. I remember thinking that the wet dirt wrapped around it was probably the closest I’d ever come to the real thing. I didn’t have the nerve to go up and knock on LaDonna’s door.
But night after night that summer when I was fifteen, I went to see LaDonna’s show. An old guy in a rich car would pull up in front of her trailer and kind of sidle up to her door, looking around like hypocrites do to see if anything is watching them. She’d usually open it before he started to knock. Inside it was hard to see much — except clothes were taken off and she’d disappear — like she was kneeling. Or she’d sit on their fat old laps and dance, making shadows move with her. She must have given a lot of hand jobs because she got them in and out so fast.
The night it happened, she’d just finished doing a guy and saying good-bye when she walked over to the screen and pressed those points of hers against it. The tease that pleased — I decided it was now or never. I had to ask.
I stood up but didn’t zip up and walked right towards her following the only part of me that counted. I stopped not far from her. She hadn’t moved.
“How much?” was all I could say. It was not easy even to say that. Her nipples were so big they were like rubber nails.
She laughed.
“What do you want, anyway? You’re gonna trip on that thing.”
What did I want? I wanted it all...! A dozen of my favourite fantasies came to mind. Which one to choose?
I wanted my cherry popped so I told her, “Your pussy.”
She laughed again and stuck her tongue out at me. It was fat.
“You’re not old enough, boy.” She looked down at my pecker. “You just might be big enough, but you’re not old enough. Now go away.” Her eyes got big, like here comes trouble....
Maybe she was saying that because she could see what was happening behind me.
Spotlights. It was the cops.
“You’re a sick boy,” one of them said to me. “Did you know your genitals are exposed?”
They’d caught me at it. Then they took me home and found all my porno magazines, and that was that. I was a pervert. A peeping Tom. Wrong. Bad. Immoral. Sinful. Going to Hell. Disrespectful of women. Dirty. Sick. Irresponsible. One-track-minded. My mind was in the gutter.
I listened to what people said and I thought, in and out, in and out. They couldn’t stop me from thinking that.
Daddy was reassuring when I asked him if I’d done wrong.
“Hell, no. Nothing wrong with fucking except the people who try to fuck you because of it. It’s how we all got here. Any way you look at it, it’s a superior way of spending your time.”