“BECAUSE A PROBLEM REPEATEDLY OCCURRED”

Viewer discretion advised.

“You don’t talk to her, you don’t look at her, you don’t even think about her!”

(Aside: I’m reading D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and I was hating it and I said so on Substack Notes which brought down a measure of fury from some people, including hit playwright, voice of a goddamn generation, and nearest thing to a real literary celebrity Matthew Gasda. I’ve gotten a little further in the book and it’s not so bad any more, I’m finding. It’s opening itself up to me more and I’m seeing things, good things. I’ll stop assaulting poor D.H. and doing him dirty.)

The following contains scenes of an adult nature. Readers be advised.

BECAUSE A PROBLEM REPEATEDLY OCCURRED”

You want to avoid any childish sci-fi detours that go beyond a certain cerebral point. Believing in things, living the mood life as you do, is science fictional enough—fielding delusions, personal bespoke conspiracy theories in single serving packaging for one as it were, is all you are prepared to handle, and then only with a daily dose of anti-sike-otics, which adds another layer of speculative fiction to your life. But the notion of a time machine as an erotic toy, for sale on sex shop shelves next to fleshlights and sex swings and other outlandish fare, is compelling. It touches special nerves at the core of the memoirist’s fevered brainstem: to reclaim lost blushes, lost arousals, lost orgasms with perfect fidelity would be a high literary attainment. You’re put in mind of the erotic diaries of Leo Tolstoy, which he handed off to his new bride Sonya on their wedding day, “so there would be no secrets between them.” His numerous past affairs and dalliances were there on the page for her discovery. It’s been described as a marital blunder for the ages, but you wonder at the blunder. Once you started telling an Egyptian woman in bed during pillow talk about your past sexperiences, thinking it was all very progressive and mature to discuss, and she put her finger to your lips and said, “Let’s make a pact, that when we’re together, it is only us in our bed together.” She didn’t want even the thought of other lovers intruding from the mists of history. You only saw the troubled Egyptian woman a handful of times. You want to write it all down, every ball-joint twisting pivot of her expert head during fellatio, every sigh and stroke, to give to some future woman, who is as much a fantasy as any Frazetta painting lady in loincloth: your next wife. But you’re not Tolstoy, just as you’re not Andre Breton. Particularly with Tony Larry stuck in your eye like the troublesome asterisk-splinter. You cling to the tales of women past as an amulet warding off bisexual developments. For example, you analyze the last sexual partner you’ve had in conscious life (you’ve had many in dreams), the moment you had with the Metalhead. You’ve forgotten her name. Because you mean nothing to her just as you now, pointedly, mean nothing to any other living woman—especially your ex-wife Natasha, or Aubrey Andromeda, your close call with that unique category of psychotically hostile post-divorce girlfriend—just as they now mean nothing to you, freeing you to inscribe the tale in your secret diaries. It’s not a perfect emancipation from the invisible-ink NDAs of past lovers, more like a grey area in which you bend the rules.

     The Metalhead was your final outpost of womanly civilization before entering the vast wasteland of the male loneliness epidemic, cacti and tumbleweeds rolling through your libidinal dead zone. You met online in those blind alleys of OKCupid, or “OKStupid,” where deceptive panels and mirrors are erected to fool lab rats desperate for food pellets and water. Reconstructing the pathway you took through the online dating labyrinth to each other is difficult, as much is hazy about the Metalhead, except her curly hair and her musical tastes and her nerdy reading habits that seemed to communicate a non-threatening partner. You went out on several dates with her in Oylesburg, you saw a movie together the title of which, for waiting to grasp her hand and create a will-o’-the-wisp of intimacy in the theater, you literally cannot remember—it may as well have been two hours of the animated loop of a drug advert, neurochemicals embodied in humanoid wiseacre blobs, spongebob serotonin and adventure time dopamine. She talked about casual sky-diving. You kissed at the end of each date, with cursory tongue. Then a gap of silence, weeks of nothing. Until New Year’s Eve, when she contacted you on Facebook and wanted to know where you were.

     “At home,” you wrote. Lame, no plans.

     “Where’s that? What’s your address?” It was 11:45, a quarter hour till the ball dropped. “I’ll come to you.”

     Things accelerated with the rapid pace of booty call time-compression. You cleaned the house in a blur and hopped in the shower and felt not exactly excited but confused, as this never happened to you. It was a blizzard and she found her way through the snow-squalls with dutiful GPS assistance. Loveseat by the fire, drinks, then to your wide bed (absent your book-drifts, this was a long time ago). She later talked about never ever getting any sleep due to her job which she glazed over, she had life-threatening levels of insomnia, so when she was asleep after sex you wanted to avoid disturbing her. There was a paranoia about each other’s motives, even after you fucked. During the first round, she did everything to alarm you as a first-time visitor to your body, she sucked your balls like a watermelon rind which had never happened before, at least you don’t recall even horrible sex-cynic Aubrey doing that, and you actually didn’t enjoy the sensation. It felt too coarse and unearned in the way that some oral ministrations can feel awkward, informal and deployed too early, a firework shot off while the twilit sky is still yet too bright to make out the pattern, to appreciate the symbolism behind its explosion.

     The Metalhead had a tattoo on her lumbar curve that was not exactly a Taoist yin-yang but some kind of trashy variant of the black-and-white circle. You had been tentative with the first round of sex, fearful of impregnating the Metalhead as you had been with Aubrey Andromeda toward the end of that, and this impacted your potency. But like an important dial on a console in the control room at Chernobyl, touching and rubbing the silky skin of the tattoo with your fingertips raised your radioactive core. She gasped when she felt behind her and found your erection, freed of trepidation by her disclosure that she had an IUD and condoms were no longer necessary. You don’t recall names or jobs or other details, but no time machine is necessary to bring to mind her lubricity. It was not exactly so, but in your recollections, your penis erect was like a shepherd’s crook or segment of inflated bicycle tire, a thick and curved radian-arc. Wait, bicycle tire? More like a tricycle’s wheel, or dirt bike. Surely not a ten-speed? An old style push mower’s wheel? Don’t reinvent the wheel. No matter. What’s of concern is the way you were seeking friendship from the woman who screwed your brains out then bounced for all time away into oblivion. The logic of the one night stand had a lesson that was lost on you. Meaningless sex had an aftermath you did not recognize, and this is more evidence piled up in the courtroom, exhibit Q, that you’re not right in the head. You wanted to find out more about her music and her books; you wanted to learn bands and sci-fi writers and movies; she wanted single serving dick. So what does this imply about your sexuality? Let’s get harsh and punish you with black and white about it. It was not straight enough to hit it from the back staring at that yin-and-yang symbol like you eventually relaxed into doing, the straight thing would have been to join her later in mutual ignorance and abandonment, lack of feeling, leaving her alone, not contacting her to ask pathetically when you could see her again. That would have been the heterosexual move. Remember, wanting a relationship, in this backwards pocket of the universe you currently inhabit, when the pace was set by wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, would be as obliviously gay as RuPaul’s personal shopper at a Whole Foods in West Hollywood. A window of years might have existed for that courtship to be allowed, for that kind of dating behavior, and you had it with Natasha, and with last gasps from Aubrey, but the window has elapsed just like the bell curve’s far end falling away and revealing a landscape of broken single people wandering in circles. The inability to take the woman’s temperature, following her lead into not caring about a future together, “catching feelings” shows you don’t know the game anymore. In perverse contrariness to the expectation, your lack of intuition about this state of affairs was what made you feminine in the world’s eyes. The Metalhead could perhaps sense you holding back in the bedroom, and when you gave in, and got erect enough to really do it, she left and changed the situation, and you pressed further in texts and DMs further. “That was a mistake,” Tony Larry told you later when you recited the whole sad tale to him. “You didn’t pick up that the deception happened.” A Gen-X blindspot you need a gay Millennial to point out to you. And expecting to have a talk with her in the morning about how you should call her—how old are you that you need it made explicit, this breaking off of contact.

     In high school, the girls whispered, called you “the marrying kind” behind their trembling fans, and it got back to you. You sensed then that there was something wrong with this in a young man, but it made persistent waves in your life, the ripples never ended. When it was time to marry, you did. And reproduce, you did. Now you are on the other side when the players of the game are jaded and damaged, so to be the “marrying kind” is, in an unspoken way, a detrimental flaw. The Metalhead understood what you did not.