Sexual desire, love and its mate, betrayal, haunted me before my ninth birthday. Freud coveted his mother and feared his father, leading to repressed homicidal rage and castration anxiety, and his maternal longing perplexed me. My mother, all adults in fact appeared to belong to different species before my sensual awakening and they had the amorous allure of, say, a Cabbage Patch Doll. Killing my father with a gun fashioned from a Tinkertoy had its obvious limitations. However, I had devised a plan to kidnap Barbie Benton, Hefner's love if I recall, but a Playmate for certain, whose ethereal beauty had legend suggested transformed a slab of petrified rock into a tumescent human object that stalked her.
My sensual yearning during Freud’s erotically quiescent years, or latency period from five to eleven, had made me into a sexual Sisyphus; a child pushing the boulder of his avarice toward an unknown summit of my obsessive sensual demand. In the third grade, my cupidity prodded me to kiss L’s cheek and my intense longing purchased the gift of many ecstatic hours in which I played grab the warm, tingly thing with L. and her beautiful friend, A in a precocious ménage a' trois.
I had developed into an excellent hopscotch player, while adroit at masculine sports, driven by my androgen inspired erotic ache and the demand to get as close to the intoxicating scent of pre-adolescent girls as feasible.
Then during a fateful summer along came Marge. Maligned by its dreadful brevity and premature decease, my love for eight-year-old Marge was as poignant as any affection since our first kiss. My dearest Marge and I stood on a verdant slope, skirting Crystal Lake- the Jungian fount of the feminine archetypes-which elevated and made the loss of our innocence due to the sharp blade of our longing and its temporal brevity most piquant.
We were on a seesaw giggling that night after dinner when after we dismounted; I wrenched her to my gagging heart, imparting a pale lavender bruise on her beige shoulders then with unbearable tenderness my salacious lips found hers. Marge’s eyes quavered beneath the shades of her closed lids and our strange yearning became forever encrypted in our hearts and loins. It stunned us, we were vertiginous, and that kiss amplified my thirst for Marge whose name and soul inhabited every cranny in my mind. This fantastic specter loitered in the attic of my soul from the instant our eyes unveiled our shame and I could not evict any thought of Marge with any other idea. Why the taste of her mouth and her scent conjured images of the glutinous coils of flypaper, dangling from our bunk’s rafters with their litter of imprisoned flies, has remained an enigma to this day.
In my reticent exploration of her lips virtue and grace vanished and it bore the cryptic foreshadow of a more intense erotic avarice to unfold in a matter of days. The single edgy probe of my tongue against the tip of hers yielded to a more intense and furtive promise of a most wicked delight. The intoxicant of our agitated respiration coalesced with the images refracted on the mirrors of our pupils as we cosigned the pact we sealed with the insignia of a most faint yet persistent osculation, but the infant of our love died of known causes in its crib.
Our screen reminiscences, our puerile attachment merged with the omnipresent bouquet of freshly mowed grass, the stench of gasoline, of stagnant thistle, of dead crabs and the carcass of a large-mouth bass wedged in the lake’s muddy shore in a fetid olfactory orgy. The omniscient lawnmower encircled the lake, clattering in the distance and circling us while drawing closer in its perpetual grooming of the campus grounds. Its driver bore a resemblance to a burnt reptile, and this ghoul was never without the cigarette glued to the hinge of his lower lip. He sat at the wheel of this clacking black contraption, similar to a stove chimney, whose second purpose was to suffuse the ether with an acrid plume of pesticide a carcinogenic cloud that subsumed the entire campus to extinguish airborne pests and perhaps even a few campers. Whatever concoction it discharged it was so acrid it scratching lungs and evoked conjunctivitis. The jangling and mewling of his fumigator was the metal personification of a baying wolf baying. Even in the middle of the night, it clanked through nocturnal darkness only found in the woods and mountains far from city lights, anthracite darkness, while it spewed its vile nimbus of insecticide into the bunks to continue to burn the sensitive tissue of our eyes, and our lungs.
My love for Marge sealed with the sweet bequest of our kiss surrendered to a more urgent and sweeter obsession for a woman that Saturday night. The entire camp had squeezed into the social hall redolent of pine, perspiration, and pesticide for a variety show. A moist breeze filtered through the screened windows or the heat and stagnant air might have claimed lives. Several comic skits led to the primordial epiphany of my brilliant salacious life. The crossed-eyed beams klieg lights’ undressed the drama counselor who’d managed to entangle her body in the curtains. She spun, this way and that, a bottle, and her quandary educed tics of laughter from the mob until she was undraped in a spin that disoriented her.
The tattered patched cloak parted, revealing a line of older women, they had to be fourteen or fifteen, performing a kick dance. Their shrink-wrapped, sweat-dappled T-shirts were a second skin. Their breasts, their curves, their puzzling ovals and scanty shorts pressed into the dampened knolls defining their sex all those feminine curves and secondary sex characteristic I’d seen for eights years but went had gone unobserved until then had transfigured me forever. Those sirens launched their legs and the buried archetypal images rose from the recesses of my mind into reality into consciousness. What had been black, white, and blurred was now in living Technicolor™.
A mosquito circled– the vector of Eros–descended and its proboscis scribbled the epic of my own desire into the flesh of my neck. Crimson droplets clung to the wheal on my pristine flesh and claimed my psychic virginity as she—the woman in the center—kicked her sneaker-ed foot into the crisscrossed lights. This mature woman, in a millisecond, had become the locus of the Platonic feminine ideal of perfection. My erotic odyssey begun with Marge was accelerated by each thrust of her legs, and I was helpless the child of my desire. The affection Marge had instigated formed a tear I noted on my cheek for I’d betrayed Marge in the intense desire my ignorance had miss-perceived.
My eyes, my depraved yearning, my initials became branded into the flesh of the woman before me, and in an instant aborted the place where Marge had reigned. My thirst, my divine lunacy was a worn pinball machine whose steel ball activated vicious lights, hideous radiance; wild squeals and it tilted no matter what I tried. I had seen thousands of women before and though I had a keen eye for the grotesqueries due to overindulgence, disease, and senescence. My absolute initiation into manhood allowed me to see beyond my former blind spot as she danced a mere ten yards from where love and sweat had left me frozen.
My heart, in a its congenital vertical position, was a fist slamming out a steady rhythm; its knuckles cracked my ribs, and terror transformed my tongue into a bloated slug and a reminder of my swollen epiglottis and my many wars just to breathe. Ensnared in the light’s lone pearl colored eye her form stenciled against the oft sewn and patched drapes, her body with its veiled and overt ovals, curvilinear legs, arable breasts, and the rippling parabola of her deep and baffling hips riveted this captive. Her effort raised shadowed islands on the flimsy weave of her T-shirt, and my throat closed like a crushed can. My veins suffused with roiling blood and a white-hot needle of blood filled the cavernous pocket of my wayward fleece-collared cock. Her twitching, oh, dear God, her taut and striated muscles rippled beneath her flesh was torturous as was the rhythmic propulsion of her legs left me lust-addled and all non-sensual idioms were evicted from the crypt of my consciousness.
Swirling colored spotlights merged on my retina inducing a precipitous bout of double vision as the girls’ linked by their arms and now chained with their neighbors their legs rose even higher. My love’s legs exploded through the dense shade toward my transfixed eyes, skewed by my rapture, they lingered in defiance of gravity taunting me, and then they receded from my visual clasp and my extended arm. The mosquitoes, flies, and gnats sustained their blood banquet, drawing sustenance from my throat, as she completed her possession of my mind with her tawny legs, whose preposterous length I explored down to the folded lips of the socks choking her slender ankles while each leg perpetuated in making my heart soar toward the cobwebbed rafters.
Turning from the stage, I sought Marge who I’d lost in the shadows, amid the meandering light beams and silhouettes of campers in my uncanny state of disorientation. I needed relief from my transgression, ablution from my guilt, and my loss of innocence. Searching, half-crazed, I scanned for Marge to emerge, to quell my callous mutiny. Marge had stooped, I learned, to attend an insubordinate shoelace, and she resurfaced in her need to exonerate me for my betrayal by her prosaic act. My madness and stupefaction escalated, causing me to push my mates aside for fear that my spiny erection would surrender its furtive commentary, and I ran outside to anoint the sacrament of my Eros, but hardened by what I needed to commemorate, desire punished and prevented me from consecration by urination. Blood stretched the shameless caverns of my penis exacting a severe urethral itch whose divine sensation I could not expunge by for another two years.
Inside, I caught a glimpse of a young girl impersonating Brenda Lee singing All Alone Am I. My love was the last dancer to file down the steps in the shadows at stage right, my left, and her descent into the embrace of her progenitor’s corpulent arms. Her mother tousled her hair, and I watched them exit through the side door.
Oh, lithe, Marge, whose soft flesh remained vibrant on my fingertips, and whose androgynous form enabled my transition into the thorny thicket of Erotic love and my endless contemplation of this mature woman.
My camp-mates detested girls, and they chided me for having a real girlfriend while they played with their gas propelled model planes. I suffered more from their innate hostility than the bed wetter, who befouled the nocturnal air, but their jealousy was translucent and my adoration of the feminine form and intellect has remained constant, and I’ve been in too many fights to protect those I loved, and some I barely knew, to mention.
My dancing goddess was not a pretty woman. Close-up her angular features suggested a cubist portrait, but from my pine bench, in the frayed and oft spliced film of my reminiscence, her harsh makeup had a paradoxical softening of her face, giving her a sensuous rather than angular appearance. I had tried, without success, to get close to my dancing queen whose image kicked my mind like stones amid the rising dust. Curious as it seemed then my ardor was satisfied by seeing her from a distance like living snapshots I glued in a photo album tucked in my mind, and I settled into the role of a prepubescent voyeur with equanimity.
A few hours before the convoy of chartered buses carried us home; I’d been skimming flat rocks off the skin of Crystal Lake. I had tossed the slab of slate when I looked up and saw her strolling with her father. They stopped and he opened his Cadillac’s rear door. Then her porcine sire signaled for two waiters to place her large trunk and valises into the car. She wore a sailor hat and carried a teddy bear. Her father tipped the boys, her buck-toothed mother grinned, straightened her floppy hat, smacked her lips—a chimpanzee adjusting her lipstick--and they drove slowly down the dusty road passed me. My love sat in the back of the car. Her face somewhat obscured by her tennis racket and the teddy bear she clutched. She didn’t look my way, although I somehow thought she would, and I was worthy of but an ephemeral glance into her amygdaloidal eyes but it was then more than enough.
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