5 May 2011
With L___ things changed. We were still in the infatuation stage, reveling in discovering how our bodies could fit together, in exploring the possibility that this was it— the true love that, like all other common fools, we hoped against hope to find. We were both in the early, optimistic stage, ready, eager to cut each other slack, to forgive sour notes, to see hints at future discord as quirks of a fascinating and essentially lovable personality. This may have been the only time I could have accepted criticism that cut to the core.
By seeing through my disguises and remaining immune to my ruses, her words stuck. As with all real teaching, the student is most important. He must be in a receptive state; it is not a matter of shoveling stuff, nor a matter of enforcement, à la public school. Lessons do not come fully developed, out of a box. Real lessons are not yet lessons, but potential lessons, and they must fall on fertile ground to bear fruit.
L___’s lessons stuck. They would germinate because she first worked the soil, loosening it, exposing the big weeds, and the found soft, fecund places to plant her thoughts in my mind. The soil was dominated by clay slabs of greed, rocks of hatred, and weeds of delusion. Once she showed me where the big rocks were, I could remove them. Aware of the clay, I could loosen and mix it with good sandy soil, releasing its nutrients and trace minerals. Acknowledging the extent of the weeds, I could root them out. And knowing where to find her fledgling plants, I could help them grow.
We were lying in bed. I was telling her the story of the scars on my arm, amused, full of myself. I had mentioned cherry-picked chunks of the Anna affair, showing me in a good light. I had already told her about several other women in my sexual past, including my ex-wife, ignorantly or purposely avoiding any prick-size aspects.
[Dick. Recall that before I began Alcock’s memoir, its relative size was a taboo subject for me. I did secretly bemoan my fate, and fantasize about how great a full-sized member must be, but until the past year or so I never, even jokingly, talked about it out loud. Uncle M.]
In a small, soft, intimate voice as nonthreatening as a voice could be, while rhythmically stroking a particularly sensistive area of my body, she said, “You don’t know anything about women, Peter.”
There was silence for a while.
“I guess not,” I said coolly to hide the alarm from the stab in the gut, assuaged by her hand and her voice. But the seed of truth she planted grew and bore fruit in the ensuing years.
And she followed with another point. Again, bundled in a soft voice, devoid of malice, like a sweet nothing of love, “You don’t make love when you fuck me,” she said.
I almost said, “Well, shit!” and was about to get up from the bed. But I lay there numbed, feeling bad, the flower of my manhood wilting in her hand. There was silence for a while before she began to caress me and mumbling something about “Let me show you what I mean,” she begin a slow, laid-back, dance of seduction which soon awoke a steadily expanding desire to possess each other totally, where two become one.
Finally, having completely restored my self-confidence and made it thoroughly clear she loved me, she said, “You’re too cocky for a little prick.”
After a couple seconds of silence, I chuckled. It was a joke, and I need not dwell on it. I buried it deep, got up and made nihon cha for both of us.
1 note
4 May 2011
From what I could tell in the mirror behind the bottles in front of me (I was in the habit of taking off my glasses when eating or drinking), by ignoring this in-my-face challenge, I had merely elicited a sly smile; he seemed to have taken my silence as a challenge, the last thing I wanted.
Over the next couple drinks he launched into a discussion of the Vietnam War. It had been six or seven years since the war ended but for most of us, it was still a fresh topic, especially as a sounding board for political views, patriotism, morality, dick size… things like that. At this point in the bar night, it was usually prelude to a fight or if you said all the right things, man-love for a new drinking buddy.
He was talking to me through the girl. She would respond with mild anti-war talking points such as what a waste it all was, but because this was coming from a woman and they were indeed mild, it did not violate his world-view of who should think what, and he would flash a glance at me and then argue with her. But confused by more booze, she slipped up once or twice, saying under her breath something about ‘baby killers’ and ‘murderers’, and he thought she was referring to our brave troops. Finally, my silence provoked him to fire a major salvo at me.
“What did you do? You look like a hippie dude. Say you were queer?”
Without hesitation I shot back, “I fought.” emphasizing the initial fricative, and hitting him hard with a double entendre. It was a short-lived victory. He meditated on his glass of whiskey and soda for a while, then drained the last third of it in one gulp. He was trying to decide if I was bluffing because if I really fought in the war, out of respect for my service, he probably didn’t want to beat the shit out of me. But if I was faking it, he certainly did.
For my part I had already realized that the fucker hadn’t actually fought in the war. From his bullshit I had gleaned a few key pieces of information, namely that he was most likely in the merchant marine and that the closest he got to combat was being fired on a few times as his ship made it’s way up the Vung Tai Channel to deliver Corn Flakes and Cheerios to the MSTS docks at Saigon. So he had been lucky enough to escape the draft by working on a freighter at double pay for being in an active war zone.
I was about to covertly suggest once again that we go back to our room and merge while we were still sober enough to find the requisite body parts when he pushed himself away from the bar, empty glass in hand, and started, I thought, to lurch in the direction of the head. But no sooner had he started in that direction than he came to a full stop, directly behind us. I got a blurry glimpse of the arm with the glass reaching out toward the bar. My first thought was he was setting his glass down, my second that he was going to hug her. This was followed instantly by my third thought which turned out to be almost correct. The mother-fucker was going to hug me! But instead of doing that, he gave the glass a sharp crack on the bar and, pulling his arm around me, drew the newly serrated edge of the glass sharply across my left forearm, right below the rolled back cuff of my tie-dyed shirt. The bartender, alerted by the sound of breaking glass, screamed at him, “Kevin what the fuck are you doing!” Followed definitively by “I’m callin’ Larry!”
Kevin backed away, still holding the broken glass.
“They’ll lock you up, you dumb shit!” She yelled.
My instant reaction to being attacked was to rear up off my stool and whirl around ready to kill, like a rattlesnake. As a runt growing up in Montana, I had learned this survival technique along with a curious fact: big guys don’t usually feel an ordinary fight is a life and death situation. I think they see it more like sport. Not so in my case. For me it was always a matter of life and death and I had learned how to convey this message. Maybe it was a hunkering down, an intense narrowing of focus, the adamantine hatred in the look in my eye that projected intent to kill. They might be bigger than me, but by God if there was any chance in hell, I’d kill ‘em. I was precisely at the point of locating my specific target when I realized that “Larry” meant the cops; she was about to call the cops. Not a good idea.
With momentarily frozen Kevin five feet away, I relaxed a second and told her that wouldn’t be necessary, just if she’d please get me some band-aids or gauze and tape, I’d be fine. And maybe some disinfectant?
“I just got Mercurochrome,” she said.
“Well, get me a pint of Everclear then. I’ll pay for it.” I said. “And a clean towel or something. It’s bleeding all over the fucking place.”
By then, several of the other men had eased up to Kevin and were talking him down and gently moving him away from the scene of the crime. My partner was frozen solid, her back pressed hard against the edge of the bar, eyes wide open.
In the end the bartender didn’t call the cops, they sent Kevin home to his wife, we went to our ice cold room, and didn’t make love, although there were a few desultory gestures. And out of the deep compassion in her heart, the bartender said the pint of Everclear was on the house.
The next day, we left early, the place was so cold and depressing. We both had bad hangovers which rode shotgun for us on the drive back to my house in Missoula. Her ex-boyfriend didn’t expect her back until five, so we spent the next five or six hours together, hanging out in the big house. At some point we got in bed and pulled each other close but feeling a little worn out, I didn’t follow my Daoist regimen of not reaching a climax (more on that later). I just came inside her like any other dumb clod.
That was about the last time in my life that I could have given up booze or have relegated it to a minor role before it started to ruin my health big time. That I didn’t do so for another dozen years is one of my top ten regrets.
Now when my arms get burned in the sun and I’m driving with the window down, the three parallel lines stand out on my left forearm, each about two inches long, and I remember that night with Anna in Butte, and the guy named Kevin who put them there. [Dick: Remember, for a man of my age and temperament, the hug would’ve been worse. Uncle M]
Anna would float away within the coming couple months, replaced by L___, the most intelligent woman I met in Missoula who upheld her half of one of the deepest, if short-lived, sexual liaisons I would ever have. And she by Kuniko, an intelligent, sensitive, libidinous, thirty-year old who would end up capturing my heart as well as my loins for the coming eight or nine years. Their stories follow.
END of Chapter 1.
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.
1 May 2011
My name is Peter Alcock, the surname’s suffix the bane of my life. I will not repeat a single one of the jokes I had to endure, especially in my childhood and youth, for even now as I await my seventieth birthday, the memory of them elicit only the barest of perfunctory smiles. It would have been bad enough if the referent had been of a size that the conjured image, a male consisting entirely of that member, may have been thought commiserate with the reality. But it has been my karmic dispensation to have both, the confounded surname and to have been outfitted with a tool of such diminished proportions that standing quite on its own, without the contrast with my surname, it would provoke silent mouth-puckering amusement if not outright giggles and sneers from those to whom I was as-yet nameless, such as in the showering area of a swimming pool or, during my time as a hippie, in the nude hot tub at a late ’60s California Renaissance Fair.
I recall one girlfriend between my first and second wife, overall a good woman, but one whose irrepressible sense of humor forced her to trick me, after our customary wholesome morning three-mile run, to join a group of her ex-boyfriend’s low-life biker friends nude at a hot pool in a murky basement “spa”. More than a decade later, by accident, I happened to discover that she had bet them— my informant thought it was ten dollars each— that they had never seen such a poor excuse for genitalia on a full-grown man, and she’d brought me there to prove it. She invited me out for a fancy dinner with excellent wine, a rarity God knows, on the evening of the same day, thus compounding her crime by using the spoils of the very thing that would have depressed me most to make me the happiest of men. Furthermore, the next morning— it had to wait until morning because she continued to live with her ex-boyfriend who apparently was still experiencing lingering discomfort with the ex part of his title— she came to my house and lavished upon my poor member and me a rather outstanding concoction of love-making before we set off on our run.
I was forty then and testosterone levels were high. Perhaps it was the discrepancy between the physical size of my little soldier (and his ferocious appetite which made him straight as an arrow and hard as a rock—- the sheer stamina of the chap!) that appealed to her, but at times during our brief roll in the hay, I felt she felt I fully lived up to my name, Alcock.
If there is one message, then, right up front, it’s that a small prick does not have to condemn you to a life of deprivation. Would that it had! For mine led me to the nether regions of many a fair girl throughout a fairly wide stretch of the globe with consequences both good and, need I say, terribly bad. Yes, contrariwise, something so seemingly incapable, so apparently ill-suited to the rough and tumble of the big wide world, propelled me fully-charged into a life of depravity and sin or, as the Buddhists prefer to express it, ignorance.
