The night I made her come in the back seat of Chuck Marifolio’s car on the way back from the North Bar I thought, Wow, at last I’ve got it made. We’d been necking more and more insanely, it was March by now, and this night at last I got her panties hooked out of the way and my finger inside and she didn’t repulse the attack at all. In fact, her arms tightened so hard around my neck I could barely breathe. It was a very uncomfortable position, my elbow bent wrong, and in that position I poked my finger around till I found the man in the boat and I tickled his ears until all of a sudden she jerked, one little involuntary jerk, and said, “Uh-aaahh,” in my ear. And when we separated a little while later her eyes shone like tiny white Christmas tree lights.
Oh boy, I thought. Now you owe me one, I thought. I make you come, you make me come. Hot damn.
So we got out of the car and up onto her porch, and nothing was different. I kept trying to figure out some way to phrase it, to mention this debt she now owed me, but everything I thought of sounded too crude, so it wound up with me stopping at that back yard again on the way home.
I stopped there almost every time, I’d been doing it for months now, and as spring came along I began to wonder what sort of flowers would blossom there. But as April and May lumbered by nothing grew in my fertilized ground — isn’t come a fertilizer? — but weeds, which should have told me something, but didn’t.
I know how this should end. We’re into the age of the absurd now, and all characters have to become clowns, with the makeup and the colored lights and all. The way this should end, some night I’m out in that back yard jerking off and all at once a thousand lights go on, the neighbors have alerted the police who’ve been lying in wait for me, and I go prancing and leaping away across the back yards with my cock hanging out like a dog’s tongue and my background filling up with policemen on horses.
Well, that isn’t what happened. What happened was, one night in late May, a Friday night, I called Betsy and broke a date because I was disgusted, saying I couldn’t find anybody with a car to double with, and she said, “You can drive, can’t you, Ed?”
“Sure,” I said. “If I had something to drive.”
“I can borrow my brothers’ truck,” she said. “If you want.”
“Sure,” I said, not wanting to say sure, but trapped into saying sure.
“I’ll meet you at the west gate,” she said, “at eight o’clock.”
“Sure,” I said, and at eight o’clock I was standing by the campus’s west gate, waiting for the object of my lust to drive up in her brothers’ truck, and wondering how come she hadn’t ever borrowed that truck of theirs in the past. The truth, of course, was that she’d decided it was time to get laid, but that idea never entered my head. I didn’t know until much later that occasionally girls want to get laid. I thought that every once in a while they agreed to it, but I didn’t think they ever wanted it.
Anyway, ten minutes late this truck appeared. Ten years old, Dodge, black cab with a former company name smeared off the doors with white paint, rattling wood-slatted sides of the body, no top on the body, it looked like a junk collector’s truck. And there in the cab, shifting gears like a pro, my Betsy.
It turns out her brothers, two of them, Birge and Johnny, drive Christmas trees to New York for a living, and this is their truck. It now being May and no Christmas trees being handy, and Betsy having decided to get laid, we have the use of the truck.
When she made up her mind, she really went whole hog. There were blankets on the floor in back which I’m sure were not usually there, and when I slipped my hand up under her skirt at the movies she wasn’t wearing any panties at all.
But I’m getting ahead of my story. I’m skipping over the part where I don’t know how to drive the truck. I keep stalling it, and not being able to shift the gears, and it turns out Betsy has to drive. Is that a crock?
So all right, we go to a movie. Critic’s Choice, with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball, a comedy about people not getting laid. Fortunately it wasn’t very funny, so up went my hand and panties had she none, and I made her come three times during the movie, and even I began to believe that maybe tonight was the night.
If only, I thought, she’d touch my cock. I was all over her like Sherwin Williams Paints over the globe, and not once had she ever touched any part of me below the waist. Not that I was hot to have her touch my ankle, for instance, but with me having her come all over New York State every weekend it seemed to me only fair that sooner or later she repay the favor.
Which she did, later that night, surprising the hell out of me. She still didn’t touch the cock, not with her hand, but that was okay with me.
But I see my time is up. Another fifteen useless pages down the drain. All I’ve gotten out of it is now I’m horny, remembering those early times with Betsy, and I think it’s time to go out to the kitchen and make up with her. We’ve been fighting too long, and we haven’t screwed for almost two weeks, not since I finished Passion’s Prisoner.
Maybe that’s the problem. As soon as Fred goes to bed I’ll dip my wick in Betsy, and come back here refreshed and calm and at peace with the world and ready to go to work at last. Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving, I’ll be lucky to get a chance to do any work, I wasted yesterday, I haven’t done anything useful today, I better get on the stick.
I should be able to use some of the sex stuff from here tonight. I’ll do a boy-on-the-make book, I can use some of this stuff in the first chapter, where he lays his home-town girl goodbye.
Sex on Wheels I’ll call it.
1
When Dwayne Toppil slipped his hand under Liz’s skirt in the darkness of the movie theater, he couldn’t at first believe it. She wasn’t wearing a thing under the skirt, not a thing!
In the dim light reflecting back from the Technicolor movie showing on the screen, Dwayne saw Liz’s eyes gleaming with mischief, saw the amused grin on her lips. She pulled his head closer, till her lips were by his ear, and then whispered, “A going away present.”
“Mmm,” he said, kissing the throbbing pulse in her neck. “It almost makes me not want to go away.”
“Just so you don’t stay away too long,” she whispered back and rolled her hips slightly, moving herself against his probing fingers.
Dwayne felt a sudden wave of guilt when she said that, knowing that he intended never to return to Smithville, but the passion welling up within him kept the guilt from turning into action. And he knew that was best. It was best he leave Smithville, best he leave Liz, no matter how much they had come to mean to each other since graduation from high school two years ago.
Somehow it seemed incredible now to Dwayne that he could ever have thought of making his life here in Smithville. This wasn’t the place for him. No, and it isn’t the place for me either. I hate Dwayne Toppil and his fantasy fuck Liz and Smithville and everything.
So I got laid, and I saw a movie, it’s tomorrow, and here I am back on the old treadmill again. I saw a book once, in a used bookstore I went to with Pete, called Treadmill to Oblivion, by a radio comedian called Fred Allen. The title was so great, so beautifully great, that I right away bought the book; and discovered that Fred Allen was a great man. He spent his entire life in the wrong place, simply because that’s where circumstance put him, and he always knew it was the wrong place, and he never knew how to get the hell out of there. Treadmill to Oblivion. Right.