1 threw the phone book on the ground and randomly opened it up.1 was in the middle of the Ts: Richard Tnapsack, 141 Boyle; Susan Tnapsack, 616 Beech; Heather Tnapsack, 112 Smith. Smith and Heather had a familiar ring. I dialed. This is Heather Tnapsack. I'm not home right now, but I'd really like to talk to you. Please leave your message after the beep. The voice was enthusiastic, but overly firm. She sounded like an older woman who was afraid of not being heard. Just as I was about to put down my receiver, some one picked up on the other end.
"Hold on a minute. Lemme just turn off this machine. I can't never figure out where the switch is. Oh there. Hi."
The voice was definitely that of an older woman. The firmness had a shrill quality. It was her way of counterbalancing the tremors. But 1 didn't trust myself anymore. A person who was having a passionate affair with someone he wasn't sure even existed couldn't afford to leave any stone unturned. 1 was walking on thin ice, but I had to take a chance.
"I wanna shove my big hard rod up your soft hot honey pot."
"Oh baby, you're really turning me on. I'm sticking my finger in my pussy. Oooh, it's so hot. You wanna come over and eat me?"
"Will you let me shove my dick up your ass?"
"Oh yeah, turn me over on my stomach."
"Like a little doggy"
She barked. "Are you going to put a little leash around my neck and a muzzle around my mouth?"
"No, then you wouldn't be able to suck my cock."
1 could tell 1 had dialed the wrong number. She was too old and hysterical sounding. My woman was more calm and collected when it came to talking dirty. This was like one of those experiments in chemistry where you add two chemicals together to see if a reaction will happen. If there had been a silence after 1 had started with the I zvanna shove my big hard rod then 1 might have given Heather Tnapsack the benefit of the doubt. 1'd known she wasn't the one, but I'd continued until her voice started to quiver, and I knew Heather Tnapsack was in all likelihood talking to me from a wheel chair or walker with a nurse's aide standing by her side. I realize there are no laws against liaisons with the elderly, but there is the law of nature. And when you're hard up enough to resort to talking about the doggy position with someone over 85, you're likely to get into trouble.
I politely told Heather Tnapsack I had the wrong number. I thanked her for her time. She was a little upset at first. She called me a "cracker asshole" and demanded we talk about it. She said she felt we were really getting along and wanted to know why 1 was pulling away. She even suggested we see the couples counselor she and her husband went to before he died. When 1 once again rejected her advances, she said, "You have a problem with intimacy," and slammed the phone down. She must have *69ed me because a minute later she called back screaming, "YOU CAN'T RUN AWAY FROM 1T," and slammed the phone down again. I prayed she hadn't written my number down because once she received another incoming call, she'd lose the *69 capability on my number forever. She would then share my predicament-being raped and inseminated with a passion she was helpless to reciprocate. She couldn't find me, just as I couldn't find the fuck of my life. Was it Thoreau who said, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"?
It had long been my theory that earthquakes and volcanoes were subterranean manifestations of repressed sexuality. Moreover, most wars wouldn't have occurred if the natural expression of sexual desire hadn't been curtailed. Wars were then paraphilias or perversions, expressions of the desire for connection and security that had gone awry. Adversaries on the battlefield were lovers reaching out to each other, albeit in a somewhat angry and frustrated way. All of mankind-in fact all matter-inevitably seeks unification, and it is the disruption of this drive that causes all the misery in the universe. Isn't the Trojan War, a battle over a woman, the paradigm of such misplaced love? So 1 felt particularly guilty in exciting Heather Tnapsack and then pushing her away when I deduced how old she was. It may have been one drop in the bucket, but I was contributing to the strife that was gradually destroying not only the earth, but the universe.
However, worse than my remorse about Heather was my growing realization of the difficulty of the task at hand-locating my lover. If this were World War II and 1 were a member of the Gestapo, 1 could have ordered everyone in the city out of their houses on pain of being put before a firing squad. But even then 1 might not have recognized her. 1 only had one fact that didn't as yet qualify as a memory, since it was more concept than image. I was looking for a tomboyish woman, a woman who actually looked like a boy, whose hidden secret was that she fucked like a fiend. If for instance 1 had had the knowledge 1 would later have access to-that she was involved in the field of early childhood education as a part-time teacher in a Montessori school-my task would have been considerably easier. I would have had a hint, a clue, but unfortunately such information was not available to me at the time.
Vampires sucked blood; my lover had sucked not only my dick, but my soul. The life was seeping out of me. The more 1 looked at the columns of names in the phone book and the more 1 faced the reality of the Sisyphean task before me, the more 1 realized that without the pussy I craved, 1 no longer wanted to live. 1 was a dead man without her cunt. 1 felt a little like Jesus with his stigmata crying out, "My God why halt thou forsaken me?" After all, it was kind of up to her. She was the one who inevitably sought me out, and now, at a crisis point in our relationship, she was nowhere to be found. Furthermore, any remaining residues of our first purely animal attraction, which had pushed me in her direction, were deserting me, leaving me in a morass of mind that was little help in locating what was fast becoming a totally anonymous body. Admittedly it was only a crisis for me, as far as I knew. I didn't have any idea what her feelings were, anymore than I had an idea or memory of where she lived. I'd never said more than ten words to her at a time. On the other hand, I had to believe she was facing some of the same feelings I was. Her passion was equally powerful, and time had to be affecting her in some way. Unrequited passion, like unrequited love, only builds in intensity. That which has been lost always leaves more latitude for the imagination than the knowable. It's easy to idealize what you no longer possess. I was like a refugee who dreams of returning to the verdant fields he once plowed. 1 had to believe that since she was human she must have shared some of these same emotions.
Days passed. Bill could see how upset 1 was. Out of respect, he stopped glaring at the bulge in my pants. He produced one memorable meal after another. Romantic disappointments had previously resulted in a loss of appetite for me. It had happened with her during that meatloaf dinner when I first realized I was powerless to make our relationship more than it was-as it has happened all through my life when the girl I wanted didn't reciprocate my feelings. But now I became ravenously hungry. I gobbled up everything Bill cooked, cleaning off the last drops of gravy in our gravy boat with Bill's wonderful parsley-covered garlic bread. Then after dinner I'd sneak out and start all over again. One night I wandered downtown to the bus terminal where I'd first met Bill and landed in the local KEC, where I purchased the 24-piece family bucket of spicy. Another night, I indulged myself on ribs at Outback Steak House; on yet another, I gratified my desire for Big Macs by eating four in a row following the bass en croute dinner Bill had already served. My body was changing before my eyes. The simple thought of sex with her still produced a hard-on, but now a roll of fat was hanging on top of it. In fact, my hard-on looked like a beam on which my stomach rested for support. One night I took off my clothes and stared at myself in the full-length mirror in my closet. I'm fair of complexion-my skin was baby white as it had always been, but along with the creases of fat, I noticed that my body had become considerably more hirsute. The whiteness of my skin accentuated the tangled forest of graying hairs that covered my solar plexus. If she looked at me, if I became part of her life and she paid attention to the man she was fucking, if she got up in the morning and faced me sitting on the toilet with my roll of fat hanging over my thighs as I squeezed out the remains of my food bash the night before to an accompaniment of sputtering flatulence, would she continue to want me? Maybe I was better off not creating a real relationship in which my existence was so roundly acknowledged. I'd looked inside of myself and found a desire for a real relationship, but when I took a good look at the outside of myself, I was full of doubt. I didn't like what I saw