What Men Really Want---Wanton, Wanting, Wild Womanly...
A View Divergent from the Standard
from 
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What Is It That Men Worship, When They Kneel at the Altar of Woman
PLUNGING HEADFIRST INTO A SYRUPY SOUP OF SEX AND TROUBLE
From the mass media’s mellifluous whispers to the presumptions that issue from pulpit and pundit, the notion seems nearly universal that men express their sexuality with primitive, predatory, and severely circumscribed goals in mind. One gay fellow who was my friend until he died in 1998, “a prima donna queen” of the first rank, put the idea thus when he explained his conception of his sexuality, and that of all other men, including mine he asserted. “I’m just here to get my kitty punched.”
And I have encountered this mentality often enough---”Getting your rocks off;” sex as a process of accumulating bragging rights; women as meat; a predilection for the gang-bang; etc., etc., etc.---though it has never interested me. Quite the contrary, such ideas have left me cold. In the same vein, I could never be a rapist, because I couldn’t get an erection if I were entering by force where I only enjoy going with an invitation---and preferably an insistent invitation full of feminine longing for what there is to gain in that place of gender joined joyously.
And what there is to gain, biologically, is obvious, eh? But the architecture of our desire is much more than the sum of plumbing and procreation. THE INTERCOURSE OF ‘GETTING IT ON’ HAS COME TO DOMINATE OR PENETRATE GIGANTIC PORTIONS OF LANGUAGE, FROM THE HARDEST TO THE EASIEST. So many words and expressions exist for love and sex and gender precisely because it is central in all ways to our existence. This is a topic of both practical and academic interest to the likes of “the Wild Irishman,” and I’ll be sharing all sorts of wild rants, and pointed, poignant imprecations and delights, over the course of the coming period of time.
Tonight, ah tonight! For twenty odd years now---New Years Eve, 1980 is my recollection of when I first articulated this position---I have believed, though many would label the idea merely a conceit, that the most powerful force for good in our corner of the universe is female orgasmic energy. Greedy goon that I am, the more multiplicative are the aspirations of delight the more expansively ecstatic the event leaves me. More to the point, any man capable of worshiping a woman---which is any man not too intimidated or infuriated to express himself this way---will come around to this point of view after examining the issue.
When a man encounters such a worshipful union with a woman, goddess’s gift as fiery and volatile as martyrdom, the possibilities for volatile madness are manifold---hence, “crazy with love,” “out of my head over you,” “my heart dropped at my feet,” and all the lines and plots of song and story from time out of mind that tie wild love to wild upheaval of heart and hearth. Mine is the terrible blessing of meeting this magnificence again and again in my life.
From the perspectives of science, for the most part, all these impassioned outbursts are no more than emotionally subjective effluvia. And who among us would deny the potent contributions of science? Still, living inside this skinbag for this one ambit of flesh, I choose to pry open this old heart---again and again and again until I pass beyond the realm of blood and jism---and try again to engage the muse, the mistress, and the matron of Gaia’s ghost, just as I did with Jina, who in some ways was my one true love and in other ways was one of many---and, I’ll hope some more, please!
******************************************************************************
We were both brave and crazy in 1983, both hungry and hopeful, both willing to wait for fate to demonstrate the inevitability of our bliss. All right, all right, Jina was much more of the “girls just want to have fun” school of thought. Her favorite little ditty came to her via her grandmother; Jina’s attitude, the “just say no” nonsense that was becoming popular when we first kissed notwithstanding, was nothing new. “What you gonna do, In a little canoe, With the moon shining all around?”
She was an actress as well, a High School thespian and best friend of one of Georgia’s future academy award winners. Jina was not brilliant on stage, but she had the energy and potential for brilliance. A better birth or a luckier marriage might have vaulted her lithe raven ripple of lushness to the heights of Helen.
Instead, she found me, as she fled Dick, her gorgeous snake of a husband who felt himself so superior to the rest of creation that he actually attempted to carry on with two mistresses, while trying to keep the firebrand fabulosity of sweet Jina confined to quarters. She took up with one of her drama students, a very pretty East Tennessee High School boy whose longing was big enough to encourage his plunge into the torrid embrace of my dearest lover ever. Thus, even though Dick could have let either of the pregnancies his mistresses aborted go to term---so long as the babies did not end up in his and Jina’s nursery---and still not have deserved exile, he sternly cast Jina out as soon as she admitted deflowering the callow fellow under her didactic charge.
Dick was realizing his mistake at about the exact same moment that I was responding to the “SWF” posting for a roommate---”prefer SWF, but need someone soon!” A misty drizzle had laced my wild locks with diamond beads that night we met. I rode through the November fog on my ten speed, pumping away with my tireless soccer thighs, that filled out my pleated wool slacks with a certain swagger. “I knew right away, ‘I got to have me some of this!’” she laughed later, a chortle as at home dining with Pastor Williams, from the Southern Baptist Mission, as engulfing me, so interpenetrated and hot and wet had we become at that moment of recall that we had melded into one thing.
I was clueless, however, disbelieving that one of such chic ambition and honed hip could possibly have an interest in a man as red as the wool tweed suit I wore the night we met, coming from a Cuban film forum very favorable to the heroic status of Fidel Castro. At the same time, when she invited me to lunch, we traded opportunities to finger lick the guacamole bowl, and in response to some sort of hypothetical inquiry about girls and boys and finding joys, I told her that I found many sorts of women comely. Unbidden, moreover, I continued “I’ll tell you this, too; if ever such a woman asks me out of love to share her love, except for immediate physical danger or gross bodily distress, I would never be able to answer other but yes.”
She ate the lime from her Margarita and held my eyes, waiting to see what I might say next. I just sighed and drank in everything about her, unaware consciously that I was not the only one contemplating matters connubial. ‘My gal Sal’ more or less expected my company at least every other night of the week, and Jina had explained all about Dick, how he had become insanely possessive after tossing her out and was probably capable of any dastardly deed if she once made any move toward another match.
And in just such a state of suspended certainty and unanimated understanding would we have remained, but for a remarkable, once a century climactic oddity. Atlanta underwent an unprecedented cold spell that Winter, such that from the day after Christmas until past MLK’s birthday, the mercury failed to rise above freezing for more than odd and intermittent moments. Ice skating was posssible on several local ponds. People hunkered down and buried themselves in freshly minted parkas.
The frigid snap ended with a dreary bluster of forty five degree sprinkle that, in the event, seemed ideal for a couple hours of soccer, since we had been unable for several weeks to tolerate play for more than thiry minutes at a time. I’ve always had weak respiratory health and strong enthusiasms in all kinds of conditions, so I stripped down to shorts and sodden tank top, billowing steam as we cavorted and careened through the muddy ice of Iverson Park.
I was a case of walking pnemonia by Sunday night, the swift descent of such cases characteristic of my father and me many times over the years. Sally checked in, about coming to visit as usual, but demurred at the sound of my flu, fearful that all of her students would sicken and die and that she would never again find work as a tutor or child care program manager. Jina was just unravelling her scarf while I had this conversation, however, and she immediately threw herself into the role of nurse and nurturer.
“You just sit by the fire”---we had one space heater in our drafty old Grant Park bungalow, guttering out gas and flame adjacent to an impossibly crooked and comfortable settee, where I dutifully lay my blanket wrapped, fever-wracked flesh to wait for whatever glorious gift was pending---”I’ll run get some chicken soup at Kroger!” Just as Jina finished rewrapping her neck, Sally called me back. She KNEW what was coming, in that mysterious way women have. I told her not to be crazy, that we’d hook up after the risk of contamination had passed. When I hung up, Jina grinned, “I won’t be long.”
I knew what was coming too, although not so that I would own it easily. “She can’t want to seduce me,” I thought. “Not tonight! I’m sick.” I told myself. On the other hand, naked as my fever, my erection billowed out the wool coverlet that snaked around me, and Jina had noticeably focused on this visual feast as she prodded me hither and yon in search of somewhere comfortable and warm to billet me.
However long she searched for the ‘Sopa Pollo’ she finally found, I haven’t the foggiest idea, since my fever peaked, and I passed in and out of a hundred and four degree delirium. She played her lacquered nails on the tuft of fur at my throat to waken me to the sight of a Jina I’d never seen before.
Beautiful women are so much more beautiful without make-up, especially in the luster of any fire, whether of combustible or feverish origin. A sweat suit, zipped only to the midpoint between her silken cream breasts and unknotted at the belly so that the waistband sagged toward heaven, showed her fiber and firmament ever so much more provocatively than expensive party dresses or smutty dance clothes. Were I a religious sort, no doubt, I’d have assumed mortality had intervened and my personal accompaniment to my reward had arrived.
As it was, I sucked down a quart of garlicky peppery Latin broth, an entire half gallon of lemonade mixed very watery, and discoverd revival of faith and every human hope. Still, the embraces we exchanged on the settee were in the nature of nursing duty; as a quarter hour passed and midnight tweeted from her cuckoo clock. “We better get to bed,” she offered, and although I am never in psychic shape to be seductive, I was so far beyond the capacity to countenance a congress that night that I stumbled toward my room, as constricted as any Catholic choir boy.
“Where the hell are you headed,” she laughed outright?
As things transpired I headed to her fluffy queen bed, from which she initially absented herself to a couple of quilts and a duvet on a fur rug, spread on the floor below where I lay. We remained thus, our breath so silenced that the space heater from the next room roared like a blast furnace, for maybe a minute or two. Then, as I leaned my intermittently inflamed torso over the edge of her four poster love nest, she was just rising to meet me. Before I could say how silly this arrangement was, we were kissing, the down quilt raised to allow her to enter the superheated warmth that we shared for the next six hours.
I was occasionally delirious and frequently lucid. We wrestled only briefly before she was riding me, as confident as a jockey, rocking to a rhythm older than memory. We drenched each other, her gasps of completion never louder than a gas fed furnace, but her contractions and the waterfall of fluid she shared with my skin as fertile and perfect as the first connection of essences, that has led to this paradoxical age, where fecundity every day meets our febrile lack of gratitude at being the outcome of this river of life.
After she sobbed into my shoulder the first time, burying her cries in my muscles, as her mounting flanks hurled themselves against me like storm tossed waves, she clung to me fiercely as any hungry hound will hang on to a bone. When I pried her loose and inverted her juiciest parts so that I could drink my fill, she lost her shouts in my belly and my crotch, her face as wet with me as I was with her when next we kissed.
I stirred from an interlude of collapse, and her eyes flew open to clasp onto mine. In the candles she had lit while I dozed, two animals shared what could be the final moments of one, capturing the essence of the future of life in their mutual embrace, as honest and real and untrammelled by pretense or will as sunrise or season. I came around, however, my pneumonia not yet deeply enough seated to threaten what we were cooking.
Still sheepish and uncertain---how in the hell had this happened?---I asked gallantly, “Would it be OK if we made love again?”
She hooted, her deepest chuckle, the one that would always set me throbbing, finally the resting place of her mirth. “Oh, PLEASE!!!” was all she said as she took me, no woman ever more juicy or fiery in the engulfing delta which flowed from her as naturally and fiercely and powerfully as the Mississippi entered the warm waters of the Gulf in an April following a harsh Winter.
I cried out when she had me, finally and completely, weeping as I had never done and never again would. The candles burned to nubs, but the fever refused to bank our fires, and as I passed in and out of consciousness we rose together from the melted mire of muscle and come and sickness and healthy lust to fuck again and again and again, until she feared she would kill me.
“I’m serious,” she said as 6:30 came and went and she called her boss to tell him she was playing nurse for the day. “I could kill you if we keep this up!” I was willing to try, but I didn’t insist.
When she brought me Kroger’s chicken soup, a plain and simple quart, “just like granny ordered,” she was her normal, armored Jina again, sensible heels and shapely tweeds to ply advertising and flirtation in Midtown. “I’m going in to work.” I nodded, sensing a shift, wondering exactly how much the fever colored my memory of our night together. “Dick called.” I nodded. “He knows.” Before I could protest, she continued, “Don’t ask me how, or argue, he just knows.”
I giggled. “Sally knows too.” Now she laughed, and the tension melted away to nothing, like the candles from the previous evening.
She sat on the bed, her hand fluttering before coming to rest on my hair, her eyes filling and the thought occurring to me that as much as she unleashed last night, any flow left had to constitute a miracle. “Listen.” I nodded, the attentive little boy before the giving goddess. “We’ve both been very, very bad.”
I nodded again while protesting, “well, maybe not BAD exactly.”
And she laughed and wept. “You know what I mean.” Her hands, warm and strong and as rich somehow as delta silt awaiting seed, enfolded mine. She kissed my fingers and demanded, “We must both promise,” she set my hands down, as chaste as a nun in an infirmary, “we must both resolve, never, never, ever to allow this to happen again.” I stared at her levelly. “I’m serious; Dick would kill you and then torture me.” Her ‘aw, shucks!’ chuckle returned.
“I’m not afraid of him. I’ll follow to heaven or hell to be with you, Jina. But I’ll also let you follow your own heart. This will be our beautiful, feverish, nasty, nutty night. Nobody’ll ever KNOW, whatever they think.” I’m pretty good at these extemporaneous speeches. No shit, now, this is more or less what I said.
She giggled and shook her head. “I knew you’d be a prince, too.” She sighed and looked at me, measuring me. “Well, I’ve got to warn you, and she laughed like the country girl she still is, even in a $10,000 dress at the height of commercial society with a husband other than Dick or me, “I’M TERRIBLE ABOUT STICKING TO MY RESOLUTIONS!!” She turned on her heel, and I knew I’d follow her to both---that the heavenly and the hellish would hale our hearts as long as we saw fit to hold each other.
******************************************************************************
Admittedly, I treasure these memories. They are beautiful to me, because they confirm the life I’ve lived, the life to which I still have committed myself to continue living---giving and taking the deepest sweetness of the masculine and the feminine dance of eternity. But I share them here, as well, because they show---to any man or woman who bares the bloody chambers of a beating heart---what we are to each other.
More particularly, they introduce a love affair that helped me to see how fully truthful was my earlier formulation---that the true love which every man seeks, who has forgiven his mother and found the goddess, is the love of a woman who shares her deepest orgiastic explosions with him, not out of any attempt to gain advantage or position, but because expressing that energy is the essence of every day survival and the will of whatever is most human and most holy in us. Nothing: not fear, not pain, not shame, not any emotion or ideology or analytical incision can derail the flesh in its pursuit of that powerful conjunction. It is to us as fully essential as air or water or food or sleep. To waver on this point is to end it all.
Fluff or fervor, silly or serious, “THAT’S MY STORY AND I’M STICKING TO IT!!”
PLUNGING HEADFIRST INTO A SYRUPY SOUP OF SEX AND TROUBLE
From the mass media’s mellifluous whispers to the presumptions that issue from pulpit and pundit, the notion seems nearly universal that men express their sexuality with primitive, predatory, and severely circumscribed goals in mind. One gay fellow who was my friend until he died in 1998, “a prima donna queen” of the first rank, put the idea thus when he explained his conception of his sexuality, and that of all other men, including mine he asserted. “I’m just here to get my kitty punched.”
And I have encountered this mentality often enough---”Getting your rocks off;” sex as a process of accumulating bragging rights; women as meat; a predilection for the gang-bang; etc., etc., etc.---though it has never interested me. Quite the contrary, such ideas have left me cold. In the same vein, I could never be a rapist, because I couldn’t get an erection if I were entering by force where I only enjoy going with an invitation---and preferably an insistent invitation full of feminine longing for what there is to gain in that place of gender joined joyously.
And what there is to gain, biologically, is obvious, eh? But the architecture of our desire is much more than the sum of plumbing and procreation. THE INTERCOURSE OF ‘GETTING IT ON’ HAS COME TO DOMINATE OR PENETRATE GIGANTIC PORTIONS OF LANGUAGE, FROM THE HARDEST TO THE EASIEST. So many words and expressions exist for love and sex and gender precisely because it is central in all ways to our existence. This is a topic of both practical and academic interest to the likes of “the Wild Irishman,” and I’ll be sharing all sorts of wild rants, and pointed, poignant imprecations and delights, over the course of the coming period of time.
Tonight, ah tonight! For twenty odd years now---New Years Eve, 1980 is my recollection of when I first articulated this position---I have believed, though many would label the idea merely a conceit, that the most powerful force for good in our corner of the universe is female orgasmic energy. Greedy goon that I am, the more multiplicative are the aspirations of delight the more expansively ecstatic the event leaves me. More to the point, any man capable of worshiping a woman---which is any man not too intimidated or infuriated to express himself this way---will come around to this point of view after examining the issue.
When a man encounters such a worshipful union with a woman, goddess’s gift as fiery and volatile as martyrdom, the possibilities for volatile madness are manifold---hence, “crazy with love,” “out of my head over you,” “my heart dropped at my feet,” and all the lines and plots of song and story from time out of mind that tie wild love to wild upheaval of heart and hearth. Mine is the terrible blessing of meeting this magnificence again and again in my life.
From the perspectives of science, for the most part, all these impassioned outbursts are no more than emotionally subjective effluvia. And who among us would deny the potent contributions of science? Still, living inside this skinbag for this one ambit of flesh, I choose to pry open this old heart---again and again and again until I pass beyond the realm of blood and jism---and try again to engage the muse, the mistress, and the matron of Gaia’s ghost, just as I did with Jina, who in some ways was my one true love and in other ways was one of many---and, I’ll hope some more, please!
******************************************************************************
We were both brave and crazy in 1983, both hungry and hopeful, both willing to wait for fate to demonstrate the inevitability of our bliss. All right, all right, Jina was much more of the “girls just want to have fun” school of thought. Her favorite little ditty came to her via her grandmother; Jina’s attitude, the “just say no” nonsense that was becoming popular when we first kissed notwithstanding, was nothing new. “What you gonna do, In a little canoe, With the moon shining all around?”
She was an actress as well, a High School thespian and best friend of one of Georgia’s future academy award winners. Jina was not brilliant on stage, but she had the energy and potential for brilliance. A better birth or a luckier marriage might have vaulted her lithe raven ripple of lushness to the heights of Helen.
Instead, she found me, as she fled Dick, her gorgeous snake of a husband who felt himself so superior to the rest of creation that he actually attempted to carry on with two mistresses, while trying to keep the firebrand fabulosity of sweet Jina confined to quarters. She took up with one of her drama students, a very pretty East Tennessee High School boy whose longing was big enough to encourage his plunge into the torrid embrace of my dearest lover ever. Thus, even though Dick could have let either of the pregnancies his mistresses aborted go to term---so long as the babies did not end up in his and Jina’s nursery---and still not have deserved exile, he sternly cast Jina out as soon as she admitted deflowering the callow fellow under her didactic charge.
Dick was realizing his mistake at about the exact same moment that I was responding to the “SWF” posting for a roommate---”prefer SWF, but need someone soon!” A misty drizzle had laced my wild locks with diamond beads that night we met. I rode through the November fog on my ten speed, pumping away with my tireless soccer thighs, that filled out my pleated wool slacks with a certain swagger. “I knew right away, ‘I got to have me some of this!’” she laughed later, a chortle as at home dining with Pastor Williams, from the Southern Baptist Mission, as engulfing me, so interpenetrated and hot and wet had we become at that moment of recall that we had melded into one thing.
I was clueless, however, disbelieving that one of such chic ambition and honed hip could possibly have an interest in a man as red as the wool tweed suit I wore the night we met, coming from a Cuban film forum very favorable to the heroic status of Fidel Castro. At the same time, when she invited me to lunch, we traded opportunities to finger lick the guacamole bowl, and in response to some sort of hypothetical inquiry about girls and boys and finding joys, I told her that I found many sorts of women comely. Unbidden, moreover, I continued “I’ll tell you this, too; if ever such a woman asks me out of love to share her love, except for immediate physical danger or gross bodily distress, I would never be able to answer other but yes.”
She ate the lime from her Margarita and held my eyes, waiting to see what I might say next. I just sighed and drank in everything about her, unaware consciously that I was not the only one contemplating matters connubial. ‘My gal Sal’ more or less expected my company at least every other night of the week, and Jina had explained all about Dick, how he had become insanely possessive after tossing her out and was probably capable of any dastardly deed if she once made any move toward another match.
And in just such a state of suspended certainty and unanimated understanding would we have remained, but for a remarkable, once a century climactic oddity. Atlanta underwent an unprecedented cold spell that Winter, such that from the day after Christmas until past MLK’s birthday, the mercury failed to rise above freezing for more than odd and intermittent moments. Ice skating was posssible on several local ponds. People hunkered down and buried themselves in freshly minted parkas.
The frigid snap ended with a dreary bluster of forty five degree sprinkle that, in the event, seemed ideal for a couple hours of soccer, since we had been unable for several weeks to tolerate play for more than thiry minutes at a time. I’ve always had weak respiratory health and strong enthusiasms in all kinds of conditions, so I stripped down to shorts and sodden tank top, billowing steam as we cavorted and careened through the muddy ice of Iverson Park.
I was a case of walking pnemonia by Sunday night, the swift descent of such cases characteristic of my father and me many times over the years. Sally checked in, about coming to visit as usual, but demurred at the sound of my flu, fearful that all of her students would sicken and die and that she would never again find work as a tutor or child care program manager. Jina was just unravelling her scarf while I had this conversation, however, and she immediately threw herself into the role of nurse and nurturer.
“You just sit by the fire”---we had one space heater in our drafty old Grant Park bungalow, guttering out gas and flame adjacent to an impossibly crooked and comfortable settee, where I dutifully lay my blanket wrapped, fever-wracked flesh to wait for whatever glorious gift was pending---”I’ll run get some chicken soup at Kroger!” Just as Jina finished rewrapping her neck, Sally called me back. She KNEW what was coming, in that mysterious way women have. I told her not to be crazy, that we’d hook up after the risk of contamination had passed. When I hung up, Jina grinned, “I won’t be long.”
I knew what was coming too, although not so that I would own it easily. “She can’t want to seduce me,” I thought. “Not tonight! I’m sick.” I told myself. On the other hand, naked as my fever, my erection billowed out the wool coverlet that snaked around me, and Jina had noticeably focused on this visual feast as she prodded me hither and yon in search of somewhere comfortable and warm to billet me.
However long she searched for the ‘Sopa Pollo’ she finally found, I haven’t the foggiest idea, since my fever peaked, and I passed in and out of a hundred and four degree delirium. She played her lacquered nails on the tuft of fur at my throat to waken me to the sight of a Jina I’d never seen before.
Beautiful women are so much more beautiful without make-up, especially in the luster of any fire, whether of combustible or feverish origin. A sweat suit, zipped only to the midpoint between her silken cream breasts and unknotted at the belly so that the waistband sagged toward heaven, showed her fiber and firmament ever so much more provocatively than expensive party dresses or smutty dance clothes. Were I a religious sort, no doubt, I’d have assumed mortality had intervened and my personal accompaniment to my reward had arrived.
As it was, I sucked down a quart of garlicky peppery Latin broth, an entire half gallon of lemonade mixed very watery, and discoverd revival of faith and every human hope. Still, the embraces we exchanged on the settee were in the nature of nursing duty; as a quarter hour passed and midnight tweeted from her cuckoo clock. “We better get to bed,” she offered, and although I am never in psychic shape to be seductive, I was so far beyond the capacity to countenance a congress that night that I stumbled toward my room, as constricted as any Catholic choir boy.
“Where the hell are you headed,” she laughed outright?
As things transpired I headed to her fluffy queen bed, from which she initially absented herself to a couple of quilts and a duvet on a fur rug, spread on the floor below where I lay. We remained thus, our breath so silenced that the space heater from the next room roared like a blast furnace, for maybe a minute or two. Then, as I leaned my intermittently inflamed torso over the edge of her four poster love nest, she was just rising to meet me. Before I could say how silly this arrangement was, we were kissing, the down quilt raised to allow her to enter the superheated warmth that we shared for the next six hours.
I was occasionally delirious and frequently lucid. We wrestled only briefly before she was riding me, as confident as a jockey, rocking to a rhythm older than memory. We drenched each other, her gasps of completion never louder than a gas fed furnace, but her contractions and the waterfall of fluid she shared with my skin as fertile and perfect as the first connection of essences, that has led to this paradoxical age, where fecundity every day meets our febrile lack of gratitude at being the outcome of this river of life.
After she sobbed into my shoulder the first time, burying her cries in my muscles, as her mounting flanks hurled themselves against me like storm tossed waves, she clung to me fiercely as any hungry hound will hang on to a bone. When I pried her loose and inverted her juiciest parts so that I could drink my fill, she lost her shouts in my belly and my crotch, her face as wet with me as I was with her when next we kissed.
I stirred from an interlude of collapse, and her eyes flew open to clasp onto mine. In the candles she had lit while I dozed, two animals shared what could be the final moments of one, capturing the essence of the future of life in their mutual embrace, as honest and real and untrammelled by pretense or will as sunrise or season. I came around, however, my pneumonia not yet deeply enough seated to threaten what we were cooking.
Still sheepish and uncertain---how in the hell had this happened?---I asked gallantly, “Would it be OK if we made love again?”
She hooted, her deepest chuckle, the one that would always set me throbbing, finally the resting place of her mirth. “Oh, PLEASE!!!” was all she said as she took me, no woman ever more juicy or fiery in the engulfing delta which flowed from her as naturally and fiercely and powerfully as the Mississippi entered the warm waters of the Gulf in an April following a harsh Winter.
I cried out when she had me, finally and completely, weeping as I had never done and never again would. The candles burned to nubs, but the fever refused to bank our fires, and as I passed in and out of consciousness we rose together from the melted mire of muscle and come and sickness and healthy lust to fuck again and again and again, until she feared she would kill me.
“I’m serious,” she said as 6:30 came and went and she called her boss to tell him she was playing nurse for the day. “I could kill you if we keep this up!” I was willing to try, but I didn’t insist.
When she brought me Kroger’s chicken soup, a plain and simple quart, “just like granny ordered,” she was her normal, armored Jina again, sensible heels and shapely tweeds to ply advertising and flirtation in Midtown. “I’m going in to work.” I nodded, sensing a shift, wondering exactly how much the fever colored my memory of our night together. “Dick called.” I nodded. “He knows.” Before I could protest, she continued, “Don’t ask me how, or argue, he just knows.”
I giggled. “Sally knows too.” Now she laughed, and the tension melted away to nothing, like the candles from the previous evening.
She sat on the bed, her hand fluttering before coming to rest on my hair, her eyes filling and the thought occurring to me that as much as she unleashed last night, any flow left had to constitute a miracle. “Listen.” I nodded, the attentive little boy before the giving goddess. “We’ve both been very, very bad.”
I nodded again while protesting, “well, maybe not BAD exactly.”
And she laughed and wept. “You know what I mean.” Her hands, warm and strong and as rich somehow as delta silt awaiting seed, enfolded mine. She kissed my fingers and demanded, “We must both promise,” she set my hands down, as chaste as a nun in an infirmary, “we must both resolve, never, never, ever to allow this to happen again.” I stared at her levelly. “I’m serious; Dick would kill you and then torture me.” Her ‘aw, shucks!’ chuckle returned.
“I’m not afraid of him. I’ll follow to heaven or hell to be with you, Jina. But I’ll also let you follow your own heart. This will be our beautiful, feverish, nasty, nutty night. Nobody’ll ever KNOW, whatever they think.” I’m pretty good at these extemporaneous speeches. No shit, now, this is more or less what I said.
She giggled and shook her head. “I knew you’d be a prince, too.” She sighed and looked at me, measuring me. “Well, I’ve got to warn you, and she laughed like the country girl she still is, even in a $10,000 dress at the height of commercial society with a husband other than Dick or me, “I’M TERRIBLE ABOUT STICKING TO MY RESOLUTIONS!!” She turned on her heel, and I knew I’d follow her to both---that the heavenly and the hellish would hale our hearts as long as we saw fit to hold each other.
******************************************************************************
Admittedly, I treasure these memories. They are beautiful to me, because they confirm the life I’ve lived, the life to which I still have committed myself to continue living---giving and taking the deepest sweetness of the masculine and the feminine dance of eternity. But I share them here, as well, because they show---to any man or woman who bares the bloody chambers of a beating heart---what we are to each other.
More particularly, they introduce a love affair that helped me to see how fully truthful was my earlier formulation---that the true love which every man seeks, who has forgiven his mother and found the goddess, is the love of a woman who shares her deepest orgiastic explosions with him, not out of any attempt to gain advantage or position, but because expressing that energy is the essence of every day survival and the will of whatever is most human and most holy in us. Nothing: not fear, not pain, not shame, not any emotion or ideology or analytical incision can derail the flesh in its pursuit of that powerful conjunction. It is to us as fully essential as air or water or food or sleep. To waver on this point is to end it all.
Fluff or fervor, silly or serious, “THAT’S MY STORY AND I’M STICKING TO IT!!”
Don't you just love passion? Keep them coming, believe me, you are being read.
