Alcock’s Autobiography 1.3
3 May 2011
It was late March, in the single digits, snowy and windy to boot. The motel was cement block. There were fluorescent lights inside and outside. We had the heater on full and still got cold anywhere but directly in front of it.
I can’t remember why I had agreed to go with her to Butte. I think it had to do with something historic, like a century-old bar that was shutting down for good, or maybe it was just a holiday, like St. Patrick’s Day. Our room was as close as you could get to the nearest bar and we still froze in the ten seconds it took to walk to there. Inside was a handful of men drinking beer or whiskey even though it was a weekday and late and the weather was bad.
The bartender was a good-looking forty-year-old and she was adding the right amount of locally-grown comments to keep the mens’ talk easy and the booze flowing. The usual country western songs poured non-stop from the box but the volume was low. Although I was a native speaker of the local working class Montana dialect, soon a familiar queasy feeling began to arise, something like stage fright, due to old fears spawned as a schoolboy, not the least of which was that I didn’t believe any of the shit they were saying.
I’d throw out the occasional line or two just so they wouldn’t notice me. It would have worked if I’d been alone, but they noticed her, the only female customer, and just old enough and young enough to be accessible to everybody in their dreams. So they sized me up, and the more aggressive figured they wouldn’t have any trouble beating the shit out of me if it came to that and they felt free to play with her.
What threw me off is she went for it. She became the center of about six guys’ attention and was whipping around the banter, smart and sassy. There were a couple of old ugly ones (I laugh as I write this, realizing how even they were probably better looking and about twenty years younger than I am today) but the rest were solid working men in their thirties. She was thirty-two or so.
I was becoming uneasy, the old insecurities from boyhood had started to stir. I just assumed I was the shortest (probably wasn’t), and although I didn’t think it clearly then, vaguely assumed I had the smallest dick among ‘em (probably did). Smallest dick with the only woman, and a pretty good-looking one, too. And spirited, easily holding her own with their probing innuendo and off-color jokes.
[[[Here Uncle MT inserted a note to me. In fact, the whole manuscript is peppered with these. In my role as editor, I’d decided to cut them all. But maybe I should leave a few. We’ll see. I’ll keep them within single square brackets so I can remove them quickly with a global delete.]]]
[Dick: You may think it odd at best and probably more likely ridiculous that the theme of the size of your uncle’s dick, aka Alcock’s dick, keeps raising its ugly head. I understand your concern. Keep in mind that the magnitude of its role, especially behind the scenes, is a recent discovery for me, a revelation. I always felt nervous about it, yes, always ashamed, but since the age of fifteen when I started to employ it in the normal way— by fucking every woman I could— I ceased to worry about it vis-a-vis the opposite sex. I did worry about it among my fellow men, however, always painfully aware that I came up short. The whole problem was brought into focus by a recent change in my anatomy in that area, one that makes it virtually impossible to have sex again. This, much more than the size of my dick, got me thinking about the role of sex in my life and of course about the associated women. ‘nough said. I’ll try to write you a more detailed note later. Uncle M]
I suggested to her a couple times in a low-key way that we should head back to our room, because I could feel the momentum building as the crowd got drunk. But she had had such a good time on the ascent that she figured it’d get even better with another drink and, beclouded by alcohol, failed to note and assess the apex, the point were the fun trajectory turns downward. If the truth be told, the apex for both of us occurred with less than four shots of whiskey and before our first hour in the bar was up. We were well into the second hour with one to go before closing when the lanky well-built crew-cut with a short-sleeved shirt and an Asian girl in a rose on his arm, moved onto the just-vacated stool beside her which until then had been occupied by one of the old ugly guys, albeit with good manners.
“It’s okay to hit on your girl?” He said.
