Green Hell : December 2014

An excerpt from book #3. (Or perhaps book #4 – my editor informs me that #3 is getting long enough, as it is). If everything goes as planned, #3 should be in print by St. Paddy’s. The working title: Irish Need Not Apply.

     It isn’t the kind of thing I usually write, but I just can’t see myself doing the same thing over and over again. What's the fucking point? “Palimpsest,” from the Biohazard anthology (which, as it happened, was semi-prophetic in that we predicted a hemorrhagic fever epidemic in the US of fuckin’ A; my story implied that the Federal Gubmin’t had deliberately released it in order to reduce the number of “useless eaters”) was so unrelentingly grim and bleak, I didn’t want to write – or even read – another post-apocalyptic, quasi-sci-fi story for months after I finished it.
   My wife liked “Friar’s Lantern,” my contribution to First Love (see below) – still available, and a steal at $8.50 plus postage; include a topless or nudie photo with your money order, and I’ll even autograph it. Just kidding! Just kidding! I’d have a hell of a time explaining that one to my wife…), under my nom de –uhm, “nom de keyboard,” I suppose – Jefferson Behan, and opined that I should stick to writing stories along the same line: more upbeat, and less drenched in bitter, vitriolic mockery of myself and the rest of humanity (especially the shitheap of pretentious superficiality that is yuppified, post-modern, post-American America – “the Land of the Gated Community and the Home of the Gas-Guzzling SUV”) than my usual offerings. I was inclined to agree with her, and kept the stories in the upcoming volume a bit lighter, except for a revision of “The Homecoming Queen,” which treats with some rather ugly subjects.
I tried to the keep the "nookie" in this one from becoming too graphic, as I don't find any particular challenge in writing porn. I also tried to explore the emotional elements of the story, rather than cranking out a "Dude, I got my rocks off!" piece.
     The following, of course, is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

                                                                        ******

     It was late March, and in Georgia, March, whether coming or going, bears no resemblance to any species of animal, carnivorous or herbivorous: it is more a war between blind, insensate elemental forces. The day was warm – almost uncomfortably so after twelve weeks of winter. Although the air-temperature was in the seventies, we’d had snow less than a month before.
    I locked my bedroom door and double-checked it. Just to be safe, I wedged an aborted woodshop project between the sill and the bottom of the panel. I lowered the needle onto the spinning disc of black vinyl on the turntable, to be rewarded by the opening riff of Quiet Riot’s “Breathless,” while my scuffed Dingo cowboy boots skimmed the floor at acute angles to one another and thudded against the dressing-table and bedpost. As Kevin DuBrow wailed over the urgent, galloping crunch of Carlos Cavazo’s guitar, I shed my denim jacket, spiked wristbands, and plaid button-down, and drew my Black Sabbath T-shirt over my head.
     Afternoon sunlight streamed through the window, gilding her skin, bejeweling her eyes, and burnishing her hair with highlights of auburn.
     My control/ That’s what you take from me…
   She lay supine on my bed -- a life raft amidst whorls and eddies of discarded clothing and unalterable circumstance -- with the sheet drawn to a hand’s breadth below her collarbone, tucked between her arms and ribcage.
    I was stirring and stiffening before I finished unbuckling my belt, and completely at attention by the time I stepped out of my jeans and briefs.
      Damn my soul/But you won’t let me be…
      The tautness of the thin fabric served to reveal and accentuate, rather than conceal and downplay the fullness of her breasts and hips, and the convex, mirror-image curves between them.
      Stop me in my tracks/ There’s no looking back...
    I crossed the room naked, and lay down beside her, one elbow on the mattress, my palm supporting my jaw. The other hand roamed, with casual purpose, over the expanse of linen, and the flesh beneath it. A slanting ray of sunlight transformed her eyes into lamps of jade, and I experienced a peculiar temporal disconnection, as might a man abruptly emerging from a coma. Six months earlier, I’d begun dating a girl who’d recently had her braces removed. Although the metamorphosis had been too gradual to notice, she and the indescribably beautiful woman sharing my bed were one and the same.
     I can’t see…
  We exchanged a kiss, and I marveled briefly at the proficiency and fluency we’d acquired in the expression of affection. It was neither the clumsy, lip-bruising, crash-dummy impact of our first date, nor the unwittingly parodic, triple-X double-helix of tongues to which we’d shortly progressed. It was long and improvisational, shallow and deep by turns: a fantasia of passion, nonetheless possessed of discernible, if fluid, elements of composition, rhythm, and dynamics.
     It’s much too late/ I feel faint…
     She’d shed a few pounds since midwinter. Slender and light-boned as ever, I had little weight to lose. The return of the sun had given her a touch of color, and added highlights to her dark brown hair. It had had the latter effect on me, as well, although heredity – the genetic legacy of Ireland and northern and western Britain – had left me with only two choices of complexion: ash-white or beet-red. Given my slightly delicate features, her pointed chin, our large, glistening eyes (hers green, mine given to shifting from green to grey to blue), her mid-back length hair, and my own, which spared neither my eyes nor my collar; a third party, observing our embrace might have mistaken us for a shojo comic come to life.
     You take my breath away.
     We separated for a few heartbeats, during which I looked directly into her eyes. What I saw – and I hoped that I wasn’t succumbing to self-deception – was a reflection of my own emotions.
     We shared a smile, which quickly metamorphosed from wistful exercises in portraiture to very teenage grins. I brushed her lips with mine again. Then her neck, as my hand, following a carte du pays it had long since memorized, slid beneath the sheet, drifted up her bare thigh, traversed her belly, and found her breast, thumb teasing a change of condition from her nipple. I continued kissing my way downward, buzzing her collarbones (the gold, heart-shaped locket I’d given her for Christmas lay between them), each breast in turn, her stomach; leapfrogging to her legs, just above the knees, then blazing a new path upward to the inverted trapezoid of hair between them.
    When I surfaced some minutes later, her face was flushed, her eyes sparkling in a way I’d learned to recognize, but never to describe precisely. I lay atop her, braced on my toes and palms, as if executing pushups in P.E., and we kissed again. As we did, her hand gently closed upon the appendage to which my thinking often devolved when she and I were together.
     Her expression of feigned surprise, and the exaggerated tone of her “Oh, my! Willy’s certainly on the up-and-up!” left me mildly embarrassed – and even more excited, if it was even possible: Energy and enthusiasm may be squandered upon the young, but flattery never is.
     I kissed her again, and submitted to gravity. As I did, she began to submit to me, her thighs parting a fraction of an inch at a time, until I was directly upon the threshold. I kissed her again – the deepest, most heartfelt kiss I’d ever given her. I spent an inestimable stretch of time looking at her face, the loveliest I’d ever seen, and never lovelier than it was at that moment, and whispered, “I think we’d better stop right here.”
     She smiled, and said, “I think you’re right,” in the same tone. And then her demeanor and aspect changed entirely.
    The vulpine grin was back, her voice bantering and playful.
    “Your turn,” she said, reversing our positions with speed and ease that belied our relative sizes. She sat astride me as if she’d won a wrestling match, her hands kneading my shoulders. The sun disappeared as the curtain of her hair fell over my face.
     She dismounted and rolled onto her side, ear and cheek on my chest, her hand -- seemingly endowed with a mind of its own -- somewhat lower.
    Then her head was on my stomach, and thought, analysis, observation – everything but raw, physical sensation departed.
      She took her time, knowing that this was the last chance we’d have for quite a while.
     Although mental clarity is difficult for a boy of seventeen to achieve, let alone maintain under those circumstances, I marveled once again at the steep acclivity of our learning curves. Despite our having done this dozens of times before, it was a new experience.
     In a euphemistic note she’d slipped into my locker months before, she’d said she enjoyed this particular expression of affection – “diving,” we called it. I hadn’t known whether she was sincere, or catering to the insatiable ego-demon who, even then, amused himself by spitting in the face of my self-conscious social ineptitude. Uncertainty left me atop a narrow, crumbling causeway between maelstroms of vanity and insecurity.
      Fuck that shit in the ear, dude. Don’t be such an ankle-grabbin’, queer-bait fag. Just enjoy it.
      For once, the voice of unreason had it spot-on, fuckin’-A right.
     She was the loveliest, most intelligent girl in the concentration camp we called a “school.” My love for her was as profound and implacable as the Erinyes of black depression, blacker rage, and neon-chromatic levity who lowered their necklines and raised their miniskirts at me a thousand times or more a day: her only real competitors. And she was mine.
      To all appearances, she enjoyed the voluntary, trusting submission on my part, and the temporary power the act conferred upon her, but I didn’t imagine that was the same as enjoying the act itself. It was, however a position I could see, albeit from a different perspective.

    When first I’d initiated this level of exploration, she’d been nervous.
     No -- more than nervous. She’d been taken completely aback.
      She was well into one of her inexplicable and often frustrating crying-jags that evening, and I‘d finally lost my patience with her. Although I experienced them as well (bipolar disorder is a harsh and unpredictable mistress), I isolated myself whenever I spotted the menacing, telltale clouds on my emotional horizon -- as much from pride as from reluctance to inflict myself upon others whilst in that condition. Years later, I realized that experience should have left me more empathetic, but upon a teenager, it often has the opposite effect: immitior quia toleraverat.
     Empathy is as lacking in the young as youth is wasted upon them.
     Her tragic muse inspired an ode of groundless self-deprecation, a truncated, asymmetric chorus of cartoonish teen angst.
     Antistrophe need not apply…
    I was confused and annoyed by the sight of anyone of her beauty and intellectual prowess foundering in a mire of detraction so reflexive and devoid of reflection.
     She claimed to be fat – although the tape measure refuted her with silent but emphatic objectivity. She claimed to be ugly, apparently oblivious to the lowing herd of rivals with which I contended daily. She claimed that no one liked her – although I loved her with a single-minded intensity verging on certifiable madness. I smothered the thought before it drew its first breath, but I wondered, for a fraction of a second, if this wasn’t projection; a cowled and cloaked admission that it was she who liked no one. And if she saw herself in such an unflattering light, how did she see me?
     My thinking and behavior have long been heterodox (sometimes inconveniently so), perhaps even more so then than now. Moreover my teens were an uninterrupted flight of extraordinarily vivid imagination.
     Fortunately, there is no necessary dichotomy between creativity and pragmatism.
     Aleister Crowley had once defined magic as “the science of bringing about change in accordance with the will.” Although I found the assertion reductionist and over-general, I had to concede it a measure of qualified validity. If this is or was the case, then some forms of magic require neither complicated ritual nor exotic paraphernalia.
     I lifted the curse of her melancholy with a counter-enchantment of my own, an operation calling for nothing more elaborate than audacity and prehensile digits. Abracadabra, presto, hocus pocus, and alakazam: in an instant, her jeans were around her ankles, and my head was between her legs.
   “What are you doing?” she gasped.
      To my mind, the question was as obtuse as it was self-answering. I gathered that she’d never seen an X-rated film, or perused an issue of Penthouse’s Forum.
     Instead of plying her with colloquial expressions for the act (too vulgar) or the technical term (too clinical), I answered: “Shocking you.”

  Strangely enough, she was resistant to the final outcome, as if by inducing sensual release, I’d somehow misappropriate her self-control. When I’d finished, I nearly laughed at the sight of her: shuddering, her eyes tightly closed, warring with herself to regulate her breathing. To me -- no longer a child, but not quite a man: and yet completely male -- it seemed ridiculous that she’d resist my efforts to ply her with pure, physical enjoyment. The satisfaction and excitement I derived from the experience were consequently the results of a perceived victory as much as of the sincere desire to please the bewitching creature I loved as deeply and madly as only a seventeen-year-old could.
     We’d spent the next few minutes in what Aristotle described as “falling action,” reconciling ourselves (although they were very different forms of reconciliation, and motivated by entirely different forces) with what we’d done. As I held her, nuzzled her, stroked her hair, she relaxed. Her face was still flushed, but her eyes, when she opened them, were soft, dewy, unfocused, and her smile was one I’d never seen before: drowsy, loose, as if she were slightly stoned. And somehow, she looked older.
     For the first dozen heartbeats, I experienced a rising sense of protective concern (but from whom was I to protect her? Myself? Herself?), coupled with the barest hint of guilt. I wondered if, once again, I’d “gone too fast for her.”
     But then we changed places. The last thing I remembered her saying before she disappeared beneath the sheet was “I can’t believe I’m actually doing this.”
     To my relief, there was no awkward silence as we dressed, no “I have to go. I’ll see you tomorrow” when we’d finished. We were arm-in-arm as I walked her home, her head on my shoulder. The goodnight kisses – just one more; always just one more – and embraces took no less time to complete, and the next morning, nothing had changed between us.

    On that spring afternoon, though, something had changed. She prolonged the act well beyond what was normal for us, and there was a new intensity to her efforts, an intensity to which I enthusiastically responded.
     Despite the unrestrained, elemental sensuality of the episode, it never seemed dirty or pornographic to me, then or afterward. It was as natural an expression of love as any I could think of; perhaps even more natural than most. I could conceive of of no greater declaration of devotion than refusing the offer of what I’d most wanted from the moment we met and it occurred to me that perhaps she was acknowledging the tacit assertion in her own way.
     Finally, and as all good things must, it ended. My hand tapped a gently frantic tattoo on her shoulder, and she pulled away.
   When I was completely spent, she fetched a handful of tissues from the box on the nightstand, and teased me about a matter that had become an inside – if mildly embarrassing, for my part – joke between us.

     The refusal to take her, even more than the gold, heart-shaped locket I’d given her for Christmas was the hypostasis of my feelings for her. But a disconnected shard of me wondered: Was she the true entelechy that drove me, or merely the concrete symbol thereof? The thought was disconcerting, and I tossed a thick, black coverlet over it, as one might conceal a frayed, unattractive piece of furniture when expecting houseguests.

The Results of practice sessions #6-11.

Chibi-style goblin, and a female elf. Still using Sharpies, a rough-textured sketch pad, and a ont-very-detailed (but still useful) instruction book.

Same gear, but one practice session along. Experimented by shading with a colored pencil. Well, a grey pencil, actually, but it was part of a set of colored pencils.

Same setup, a more detailed instruction book. Began playing with facial expressions. Pen-lines are still indecisive. Combined with the rough paper, it made control very difficult.

Different day, same problems. Faces were also too stylized and "cartoony."

Finally getting somewhere. a set of real pens on Bristol paper. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that Bristol paper has two sides: textured and smooth. Compared to the sketch pad, though, even the textured side felt downright silky.

Session #11 -- and measureable progress at last. Good pens on the smooth side of the Bristol paper. I was still suffering from a case of the chickenshits when it came to the hair, but the pen-strokes on the face are much bolder and cleaner. I think I might rustle up some scrap paper and spend an entire session practicing nothing but long, unbroken lines until I can execute them cleanly and confidently.