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From: jordan@u36.com
Subject: STORY: Autobiographical Essay [MF] Jordan Shelbourne
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And this is it; this is the last piece I have lurking about that might
be considered erotica *and* finished, even if it's not where I want it
to be.
It may be useful to you to look up a copy of my "Unwrap Party" first;
it may not. If I've done everything right, you don't need to.
This is in no sense like M1ke Hunt's similarly-titled story.
Do feel free to contact me at jordan@u36.com. This story, unlike the
others, is *not* available at http://www.u36.com/jordan, though it
may someday be.
Jordan
Today's quotation:
"It is not the criminal things which are
hardest to confess, but the ridiculous and
shameful."
[Jean Jacques Rousseau]
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Jordan Shelbourne
[Tedious legal material:
[Copyright by the author, 1998. All rights retained. Please do not
archive without permission; for permission, contact me at
jordan@u36.com.]
I write erotica. I get asked if it's autobiographical. After all, I've
had sex, and the sex in my stories is often like the sex I've had. But
a story is about a single moment that illuminates the character's life
and changes it. Life is not about a single moment. The thing about
life is that it goes on, day after day.
Here's an old story. You've heard it before: boy meets girl, boy gets
girl, boy loses girl. It's even true, sort of.
There was a woman named Elaine. This was a long time ago, but I haven't
forgotten her. We met during an annual show. If the story were
autobiography, I might have written it like this:
I was adrift that year. I'd graduated but nobody was hiring
biologists. Instead, I was a bookstore clerk camping below the
poverty line. I had a place to live: I rented a room from Trudy, a
former prostitute and a political lesbian. Men (she said) were
shit. She was making an exception for me...and for another fellow
who was in the throes of a divorce. Every night Trudy groaned; he
grunted; and I listened. Eventually I joined a campus theater
group full of younger people, because I couldn't listen to that,
alone, night after night.
Except that that makes you think the story will be about Trudy, and it
isn't. It's about Elaine. And me.
fiction.
In the story, I named her Sarah; I think Elaine would have liked to be a
Sarah. Elaine had a scar on her upper lip and the faintest of lisps;
her "s" was a bit mushy. She'd been born with a harelip.) I'm often
attracted to scarred women -- the scars don't have to be physical.
Like, as they say, attracts like.
In the story I named myself Ben, the amputated form of Benjamin.
Neither Ben nor Sarah has any obvious scars. Such is the power of
fiction.
Instead I said:
The wrap party had been going for hours, and Ben sat apart from it.
He had made a vow this year not to get involved with anyone -- not
to have a "show romance" -- and he had kept it; this made him feel
both proud and obscurely sad. So after the speeches had been made
and most of the cast and crew had split up into smaller groups, Ben
headed for the spare bedroom in the basement where the coats were
stored: Another year done.
Before he reached the stairs, someone touched his shoulder; it was
Sarah.
I don't know why Elaine was attracted to me. Perhaps it was because she
thought I was fundamentally a nice guy but that I was *different*.
Others have thought that. Perhaps it was because like attracts like.
I couldn't say that in the story. Sarah had to have a reason. So
I invented a boyfriend who dumped her. In the story, Sarah seduces
Ben on the dance floor.
I was dancing with Elaine and her roommate, Sue. A slow song came
on, and Sue drifted away. Maybe she knew how Elaine felt about
me. I remember the feel of Elaine's sweaty body pressed against
mine, our arms wrapped around each other, mouth-on-mouth,
pelvis-to-pelvis. I remember her small breasts against my chest,
the urgency of my erection. Eventually we moved to the bathroom
where we almost -- but not quite -- consummated the relationship.
When I run into people who were at that party, they still remember the
lineup outside the bathroom. So: Sarah and Ben move to the bathroom
where they almost -- but not quite -- consumate the relationship.
Elaine and I walked through the cold to the apartment she shared.
(Sue would not be back from the party for hours.) We ran through
the apartment, shedding clothes as we ran, to get to her bedroom.
Once there, nearly naked, we lay on the bed kissing, and grinding
our hips together through our underwear. I remember adjusting my
cock to point up, and how my cockhead poked out of my shorts. I
remember her pebbly brown areolas, her nipples (only occasionally
hard), and how her small firm breasts nearly disappeared as she lay
on her back.
I skinned her panties down her legs and kissed my way back up to
her damp crotch. She was, I think, the seventh woman I had slept
with, and by this time I was getting good at oral sex. She had a
long lean body and a tidy round ass; I held the cheeks in my hands
as I ate her. It took a long time before she came but eventually
she pressed her hands down on my head as she pushed her hips up
against my mouth. She made an almost ultrasonic squeak as her body
tensed and then she sagged. I did not stop, and she came again
soon after, and then one more time.
All of this is in the story, but I was free to make up whatever Sarah
was thinking. At this point in the story, Ben moves up her body and
with her consent they make love.
I crawled up Elaine's body and I kissed her. My underpants were
gone by then. I pressed my hips against her so that my hard, heavy
cock was firm against her mons. I slid my cock along the length of
her wet lips, lubricating it, and as I steadied it to enter her,
she touched my hand and said, "No." She gasped as she said it and
perhaps she was as frustrated as I was, but she said, "No. I don't
want any little Elaines running around."
I did not have a condom. She was not on the pill. My cock was so
hard it *ached*.
Perhaps I should not have been able to stop; perhaps most other men
would have gone on. But I had faced possible pregnancy twice before and
did not want a third. (That would be too wordy to explain in the
story.)
Instead of having sex, we talked. I don't remember the exact words.
Perhaps it went something like this:
"I'm sorry," she said.
"I'm sorry too," I said.
And then I tried to think of a way to ask her if she had come,
because I *thought* she'd come but every woman is different. (Two
of my lovers had been quiet, and one had screamed obscenities, and
one had never come but did not fake it.) I couldn't think of a way
that didn't make me sound as insecure as I really felt.
"You know I've only slept with one boy?" she asked me.
"I couldn't tell," I told her.
"When he left me, he said that I was frigid." She sighed. "I was
so scared."
"Did you come?" I asked her.
She nodded, her underlip caught between her teeth.
"Then you're not frigid."
"I guess not," she said, and we kissed some more. I kissed my way
down her sweet sweat-salty body and ate her to another orgasm. And
then I lay beside her.
"Do you like kinky sex?" she asked me.
"I don't know," I said. "Haven't tried much. I guess that means I
don't really need it."
(If you read my stories, there isn't much kinky sex.)
She seemed satisfied with that. "He wanted to tie me up. The
boyfriend."
"I won't ask to, then," I said.
"Okay." She played with my nipples for a while. "Tell me about
your family," she asked me.
I shrugged. "Not much to tell. My mother died, oh, twelve years
ago when I was thirteen. It makes me feel weird to know I've lived
almost as long without her as with her. I don't connect with my
family, really. My sister keeps doing stuff to pretend we're this
Norman Rockwell family. My dad tries but we just don't...connect."
"I understand," she said. "I'm from Montreal. Almost from
Westmount." I nodded; her family had money. She could see me, but
she didn't look at me. She looked at the ceiling, with one hand
pillowing her head and the other touching her pubic hair. "My
father--" She stopped for a while.
This is something pornography never mentions and erotica sometimes does:
the time after orgasm can be a naked, vulnerable time. Maybe that's why
I usually came alone, back then.
"My father," she continued. "He liked to be whipped and
humiliated. He hired a woman to--" She was quiet again for a
while. "He taped it. The sessions. He left them on the tape
player so we could find them. I had some friends over once and one
of them pressed Play and we heard it all." There was another long
pause. "My parents are divorced," she said softly. "I hate him."
I hugged her for a long, long time. Then I told her this true
thing:
"When my mother was in the hospital, dying, my dad visited every
day. I didn't. I didn't want to go to the hospital where I had to
be quiet and where it smelled funny. She'd been in the hospital
before and she'd always come out. I figured. Or I just didn't
care. I don't know any more. When I hate myself I say I didn't
care, and when I don't mind myself I say I thought she'd live. And
when my dad asked me if I wanted to go I said no." I had to stop
because I didn't know if I wanted to tell her why. I squeezed it
out anyway. "Probably because I had a TV show I wanted to watch.
The next week she was dead."
She hugged me that time, and then we kissed some more. She reached
down and found my soft cock. She stroked it gently. Despite my
shame, it started to harden, to lengthen, to grow. "We could get
some condoms tomorrow," she said.
"I'd like that," I said.
I could have put that in the story. Except that we didn't have sex
until two days later and it was good but the mood was somehow different
than it had been, even though we held those secret things about each
other.
No, in the story Sarah and Ben have sex that night. They make love
(although Ben worries they might be having sex and calling it love).
And when they reveal their love to each other, well, the story is
over.
Life isn't like that.
Elaine and I dated for a while -- I bought her the first long-stem roses
she'd ever had, though it cost me half a week's pay -- and when she went
to Toronto for her summer job, she even invited me up for a party once.
But her friends all had money and came from a different world. I
watched her closely while I was there and I could not mistake what she
felt: embarrassment.
I was an embarrassment to her. I did not have the respect of her
friends.
I could have put this in the story. I would have had to dramatize this
about Ben, that he has this quirky pride even though he often goes for
the cheap laugh. I could make up or remember an incident (perhaps about
a joke gone wrong) to show the difference between making them laugh and
being laughed at. And the aftermath:
He kept the stupid smile pasted to his face though he had a sad
sick feeling inside himself, a bright and fevered weakness. He
wanted in that moment to have his secret back, to hide again the
vulnerable parts of himself, but Sarah knew them now and she would
always know them, just as he knew hers.
He turned to Moira and when she finally deigned to speak with
him, he asked, "Do you know Sarah's parents? Her father?"
And of course Moira did. Across the room, he saw Sarah's eyes
widen, huge and white, and he waited for one word from her, one
tiny request -- but she did not say it. She would not beg him in
front of her friends.
He had the words ready, but saying them would not give him his
secret back. It would only expose a new one, that he could be this
petty. So instead he said, "Can you tell me about them? She never
speaks of them." And he had another sip of the wine that was now
flavorless for him.
I could have put all of that in the story -- but it's all sloppy loose
ends, isn't it? And how do I reassure the reader that Ben got married
later, happily, and that Sarah's doing well, too, with somebody else?
It makes the whole story seem unimportant, doesn't it?
Except it was very important. I was there; I know. Light falling on a
field has weight, and so do all the details of our lives. They press us
onward and change our direction. I do not know who I would have been
without Elaine -- but I could not have written that story. And I could
not have written this.
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