I don’t suppose that’s fair, but I don’t give a damn. All I know is, on that first date it had been seven months since I’d gotten laid, I was horny as hell, she was a fairly good-looking girl with all the necessary parts, and in the back seat of Howie’s car I was very bored. Also, at North’s Bar we ordered and drank a pitcher of beer. So on the way back to town I started to kiss her. It was January, we were both encased in tons of coats, it was like a stunt on Truth or Consequences. Finally I put my gloved hand on her knee, which even then struck me as ridiculous, and she let it stay there. She also didn’t object when I poked my tongue in her mouth. She didn’t respond either, but she didn’t object.
I have since then kissed two girls who understood that french kissing is a mutual matter. Betsy just sits there with her mouth open, but both Charlotte and Kay sort of went down on my tongue, which is pleasanter to do than describe.
Anyway. Since my gloved hand had not been repulsed from her knee, and since my tongue had not been repulsed from her mouth, I suddenly decided I was going to get laid. I got very hot and tried to find a way to get my hand inside her coat to her breasts but it was impossible. Also, she didn’t help. Still and all I was convinced that tonight was the night, the drought was over, old Ed was about to get his ashes hauled.
Sure.
Since she didn’t live on campus and everybody else in the world did, naturally she had to be let off first. On the way up to the bar she’d pointed at a closed Esso station and said that was her father’s gas station, but it turned out she didn’t live in the house next to the gas station, she lived in a house in town. Which, as it turned out, was just as well.
She gave Howie the directions, and we finally stopped in front of a totally dark house on a totally dark street. Except for street lights at the corners. I was trying to say there weren’t any lights in the windows of any of the houses. A writer would have worked it out.
Anyway, I said, “I’ll get off here too, Howie.”
“Oh, that’s all right, Ed,” Betsy said.
“No,” I said, doing the gallant number. “You’re my date, I’ll see you to your door.”
Howie, looking at me in the rearview mirror, said, “Should I wait?”
“Naw, you go on,” I said.
Howie’s date, a girl named Dora, sort of grinned at me from the front seat. “Have a good time,” she said. Did you ever notice how the other guy’s girl always thinks you’re hot stuff, how she’s always looking at you like you-devil-you? Never your own date, always the other guy’s date. I have no idea why that should be true.
Anyway, we got out of the car. There was snow all over the place and the air was freezing. Happily, there was no wind. We walked up the cleared slate path to her front porch and up the stoop and over the porch to the front door and then she said, “I had a lovely time, Ed. Thank you.”
“I’m glad,” I said, and kissed her again. You know, with the coats and all. And standing up, so I couldn’t even put a gloved hand on her knee. But I stuck my tongue in her mouth again, not so much because I was getting anything special out of it as that I hoped it would inflame her. Since then I have learned that Betsy considers one tongue in her mouth enough, that she gets nothing from the arrival of my tongue in there except a faint gagging feeling, and all in all she would prefer sex to be like a dueclass="underline" held at ten paces.
That January night in 1963, however, I was still ignorant of these fine points of my wife-to-be. All I knew was, I wanted to fuck her. Desperately.
So when we broke that kiss, she said, “Good night, Ed.”
I gave her a sort of panicky grin and said, “So soon?”
“It’s awful cold,” she said.
Which I thought gave me the opening I needed to get to the opening I needed. Visions of sofas dancing in my head, I said, “Then why don’t we go inside for a while?”
“Oh, we couldn’t,” she said.
“Why not?” I said.
“My father’s a very light sleeper,” she said. “He’d be awful mad if he woke up and found us.”
Which I interpreted as I saw fit, my interpretation being that this was a very sexy girl and I was going to make her but not tonight. I would have to borrow a car or something, or at the worst wait till spring. We would screw, but not in her house.
All right. If we weren’t going to fuck I didn’t want to stand around talking to her. I had a long walk ahead of me, through town and two miles down the old Montreal road to the campus, and I was cold and horny and anxious to get started. So I kissed her once more, to keep her from thinking I was hurrying away, and then I hurried away.
I felt the lover’s nuts starting when I’d walked about two blocks. I hadn’t had them for months, and they really hurt. My whole groin was starting to ache, and that was going to be a bitch for walking, so what I did was, I went into somebody’s back yard and leaned against the side of their garage — white clapboard — and jerked off. It was a painful come, but afterwards I felt better, with only a slight general ache between my legs. Then I walked on back to the campus.
I got there around two-thirty, and Rod was working on a short story. He and I were roommates, we roomed together all but our freshman year. As of then, he hadn’t sold any short stories yet, but he wrote them all the time, sent them out to the magazines, got the rejection slips when they came back, sent them out again. He had a chart showing the titles of all his stories and which magazines had been sent which manuscripts. Finally, just before the end of our junior year, he sold a story to some magazine I never heard of, some Playboy imitator. He got a hundred twenty-five dollars, and very drunk.
But at the time of which I speak, to get literary for a minute, he was still an unpublished writer, and I never took him really seriously. I mean, writers aren’t people that you know. The people you know work at Montgomery Ward or drive an oil truck or have a good position with the state, right? The people you know aren’t movie stars and they aren’t deep sea divers and they aren’t pilots for TWA and they aren’t writers. Right? So I didn’t take Rod very seriously, and neither did anybody else. He wrote these short stories all the time and I thought they were crap and nobody bought them.
It’s hard to remember my attitude toward him then, to tell the truth. My attitude now is so different. Now I envy him, I think he’s this fantastic guy and there isn’t any part of my life that he doesn’t have better. He’s my friend, I like him very much, even though we’re the same age I think of him as a big brother, and at the same time I hate him.
Do I? If I hate Rod, I swear to God I didn’t know it until just now. And if I hate him, it’s stupid. It isn’t his fault I don’t have it made as good as him. He spent all his life practically, trying and trying and trying, always pushing in the same direction, always wanting to be a writer and trying to be a writer and kind of demanding to be a writer. Always writing.