Mary’s attitude towards her lovers was not, as the therapist at Sunnyvale Detention Center had once told her, similar to that of the author(s) of the Iliad. She was not in the least enslaved to some numerical goal, the achievement of which would free her into a life of chastity, repentant or otherwise. She did, however, enjoy the cumulative pressure of those names, those acts without names, the mysterious and tangible medallions evoked by each separate entry. Her promiscuity was the vast unseen inland in the dark continent of herself, its motives and its ways unknown and unexplored, for she hugged the coastline just offshore, like a 16th century Portuguese navigator, mapping the margins and letting others guess at the exquisite, rain forest-wide interior.
Mary was lying upon her cot listening to a tape of Pergolesi, enjoying the sensation of Cecilia’s warm fur against the bare soles of her feet.
Anything like a complete compendium was an impossibility. The many moments of anonymous intimacy, the nasty tricks played on one’s memory by wine and heroin, gin and speed, lager and acid. These, if ever recorded, would be housed at the back of the volume, appendices moth-eaten with empty brackets and ellipses, question marks and exclamation points, a bootlegger’s delight.
These one-offs had blurred over time, the compliments and criticisms which Mary took away from the encounters marked only by the narrow straits of most guys’ vocabularies. The odd detail might resurface in memory from time to time but like the collapsing hole at the end of an old-timey cartoon, the focus was specific, the context and surrounding landscape now nothing but expanding black.
Who had been the first? Anna Diederix, of course, though that had been purely technical. The summer of her ninth year, the same year in which her parents’ marriage ripped slowly apart she had been warehoused with a more-than-upscale childless couple who were friends of theirs, and acceptable to both warring parties. Anna was the Dutch governess the couple had hired for the occasion, their childlessness being neither a source of sorrow nor an unfulfilled dream but rather, the simple recognition that they didn’t understand children and would be at a loss what to do with them, and any expectation that Mary was to benefit from their company was worth a moment’s silent mirth and little else. On a warm summer night Anna had come to her room and with brisk Lowland efficiency had deflowered her with a letter-opener. Mary had, of course, told no one. A week later Anna was fired, caught sneaking out the back door with a sleeve’s worth of heritage cutlery. Mary still found herself picking letter-openers up from people’s desks to see if she could feel the Proustian onrush of remembered trauma. She no longer could.
When she returned home to find her father absent (no hope of return and don’t cry it’s all for the best) Mary told herself she would fall in love with her cousin Robin and he with her, and so the two made confused and meandering inroads into each other’s ignorance. Who taught who to French kiss would be an interesting question but it was more a matter of daring each other to do something gross and then liking it and in the liking of it the awareness of the absolute necessity of utter utter secrecy. Humid gropings and carpet-burn frottings and once or twice, a hot cry from Robin, and when she put her hand to the front of his Cub Scout shorts she felt a dampness, and if she pushed just a little, like dimpling palm into dough, she could elicit a second cry and he grabbed her wrist so as to hold her hand in place, gasping and laughing at the same time, which always made her gasp and laugh along with him.
Their secret, yes, but a skill, however uncertainly and erratically applied, which soon made its way into swimming pool games with the neighborhood boys. Still innocent, still within the confines of Eden.
And then the music came, and kissed her deep, all the way down to her soul and beyond, and she was no longer just the pretty, the shy, the strange girl with the beautiful sloppy mother and then the brittle aunt once mommy went haywire and gone.
Guys, like bees upon a blossom.
Lester Bogert, lead singer of the Golden Horde, cock-rock king, who broke her heart, turned her over to his main girl for healing, whose friends, after five hours downstairs that night, set her firmly on a path with no map other than: be alive in the now.
Despite the best of intentions on both his and Mary’s parts, Lester only had her the once. But there were no regrets, and Mary quickly learned that while there might be much to say in favor of returning lovers, the dark, sudden pleasure of the anonymous one-off was not a taste to be outgrown or talked out of. The repeaters were tagged as those who wanted body only or those who wanted a lightly-sketched soul to accompany the body. For Mary, the freedom of the slut was the freedom not to care, the knowledge that true appreciation was a sparsely-populated province. Exclusivity was a lie, and she knew that she was a name on a numbered list, often at the top, sometimes near the middle, never at the bottom. And anyway, she didn’t stick around, and once she’d gone, there was no repossession. Tiger, or doll, she aimed for the unforgettable, and they always remembered her, with or without her name.
And who came next?
Take a deep breath please.
Jack Blackpool, who reeked of motor oil and industrial grade soap, who fell upon her each time like a hungry swarm, elbows and knees to pinion her in place, while he rode, steady, strepitoso and jubilant, with neither finesse nor variation.
Dodo Tyler, booking agent and Ivy League dropout, who taught her, with illustrative props, the meaning, both musically and sexually, of ‘vamp till ready’.
Ricky Riddle, lazy as a lord, fond of dressing her to suit some shadowy scenario, preferring her in nothing but vest, rubber boots, and top hat, and who insisted that she learn to perform fellatio with her hands tied behind her back.
Sean Halifax, who sandwiched her in her first threeway, (the face of the third party not seen till he groaned, shot, and emerged from behind her for a formal introduction), who honed her natural skill at chewing gum and walking at the same time, providing her with the reputation of one both persuadable to, and adept at group action, of which, once the leering word was out, there was never a dearth.
Kelly Blaster, percussionist at every street fair in town, self-styled Druid, who fucked her in the moss, in the mud, in the weeds, in the reeds, on the daylight summit of Stratford Hill, up against a cherry tree at Haynes Point, in a bone-rattling thunderstorm on the beach at Kitty Hawk, their teeth chattering as the temperature dropped, who promised her an orgy at Stonehenge, someday, somehow, at which point the world would end, or begin, she was never sure which.
Francis Piggott, whose affection for chairs and rope she indulged, who never ceased asking for a harder! harder! version of whatever she was doing, who coaxed her one session to straddle and urinate on his lap and who chided her for being narrow-minded when she giggled with nerves while doing so.
Sandy Blazes, who laid her on a marble slab within sight of the Memorial to the Unknown Soldier at the end of a snowy day, who made her come so unexpectedly (out of the blue!) that she bit his lip in passionate surprise, blood-drops speckling the snow beside her head in a pattern like the Indonesian archipelago.
Oedi Reeves, who shoved a glycerine dambuster down her throat, let it take effect, stripped her, and took close-up photos of her snatch and clit, and who masturbated noiselessly and copiously over her face while she swam in a blue stream of gentle paralysis, double vision strobing to triple and back again, watching, unfazed, Oedi’s bifurcated cock morph to a spouting trident.
Lucky Page, a red-bearded, doe-eyed hippie, whose opinions and poses irritated her beyond endurance, but for who she willingly opened her legs, unable, like the queues of girls before and after, to resist the experience of feeling a thirteen-inch penis pulsing like a dimwit eel inside her.
Johnny Chrysostom, who spoke often of God (a personal friend, she gathered), his voice a perpetual whisper, who met her in the gift shop of the Freer Museum and who she made love to as much out of boredom as pity, casual courtesy, growing force of habit, who insisted on showing up uninvited at a gig, where his self-regard was rudely shaken by the discovery that she was not his and his alone and who, in his resolution to save her from the grip of slutdom, blackened her eyes, strangled her till she could feel the blood roiling over her eyelids and who whispered ‘I love you / let’s make a baby’ moments before she passed out, who accosted her with flowers, chocolates, and an admittedly adorable teddy bear in the parking lot of the clinic where she’d been treated for concussion and who was only convinced to back off when her bandmates arrived and closed in on him with a bridge-tosser 22 and a tire iron, but who got in the last word by shouting after them that they’d burn in hell forever and ever and ever amen.
Raccoon-eyed Mary found herself even more popular, for reasons she was afraid to imagine. She cradled her guitar like a dying lover and resolved that she would live like a nun for at least ……… three weeks, which was when she met Pete Johnson, who slid her on top, who took the time to show her how to stop/start mid-fuck, and how to prolong and how to delay, and other tricks which fattened the inventory of her fourteen-year old’s technique, to the future shock of some and the future delight of many, not that it made an ounce of difference to the primitives who continued to catch her magpie’s eye.
Corydon Beck, the Azure Kittens’ fantastic guitarist (so much better than her, although she knew she was closing the fluid distance, gig by gig), who gave her her first fix, showing her how to use a warm tea bag to take down the swelling after skelting the horsehead needle under her tongue, who was morbid and happy at the same time, wanting her to be forever naked and expressing the hope that he might die in her skinny arms, who showed her kundalini positions five through eleven, including the unemployment lotus which could be held for hours, who tied her off with a belt and gave her the dregs, needle’s tip black with his blood, less for her so that at least one of them might hear if someone should come crashing through the paranoid door, beneath whom she fell asleep in the middle of sex, waking hours later to find him still inside her, lips turning visibly blue till she pinched him into consciousness, roll-eyed whaaat! slowly subsiding as he passed his hands over her cool body and began to move both of them towards an orgasm which felt as final and loudly melodramatic as onscreen death, and who, to absolutely no one’s surprise but Mary’s, overdosed one night in the gazebo in his parents’ backyard, leaving a half-written suicide poem on the inside cover of the latest issue of Creem magazine.
Shylock Beck, Corydon’s twin, who confessed to Mary at the funeral home, the afternoon of his brother’s burial, that Corydon’s talented, bratty shadow was one he was secretly glad to be shed of, who started to cry, which made her, copycat, kneejerk, start to cry as well and who, seeking common comfort and finding no protest, pulled her into the director’s unlocked office where, in a tear-stained frenzy of lifted skirt and pants around ankles, they fucked with an up against the wall violence which indicated their lives depended on it.
Arno Hedstrom, sixty-something owner and principal projectionist at the X-rated Kino in Richmond, who gave her a job as inventory-girl, who paid her in dollars, hash, and lessons, who howled, and growled, and arched his back like an Olympian the day she got it right, handing her a tissue for her chin and cheeks, while she rolled on the cum-glazed carpet in stoned and carefree bliss, who grinned and promised her a promotion to number three girl, not realizing that she’d completed her seminar and would not be returning as girl number anything to the smoke-shrouded alcove above the theater and its tatty plastic seats, from which arose the occasional groan, the telltale cough following each trenchcoat splatter.
Keith Hemmings, poet-in-residence at some women’s college she’d never heard of, who took her home with him after a night of drunken flirting at a slum-show party, who called her Queen Isabella for reasons unknown, who couldn’t keep his doctoral paws off her ass, rhyming her little curves with his stout tense phallus, praising the smallness of those alabaster globes, the downy cleft and hidden silken clutch he was so eager to explore, his tongue tripping with couplets, his fingers dripping with vaseline.
Leslie Caine, who said she kissed like a professional, who claimed to see in her a rarest quality but who, when erect and panting, settled for, insisted on, the usual, who lectured her in the chilly aftermath on her lack of class, her unladylike familiarity with four-letter words even as she bent nude and annoyed at his kitchen sink, combing sperm out of her hair.
Tony Mansions, who introduced her to another sort of threeway, with a fellow minor named Belinda, who razored lines on the glass table in his expensive hotel room, bidding them inhale to their young hearts’ delight, who commanded them to suck his cock in turns, fucked them each for a perfunctory minute, pulled out without coming, who asked, almost shyly, tears in the corners of his itch-yellow, drug-seared eyes, if they would be perfect angels and, arming them with strap-on dildos, veined and textured and gasp-inducingly large in their gleaming sheen of lubricant, lay himself back upon the sofa and begged them to punish him, and who, when vigorously doubleplugged (Mary in his mouth, Belinda deep in his ass) scored his own nipples with mandarin fingernails, his writhings and moanings at such extremes of anguish and pleasure that Mary felt herself somewhat nearer to love with each teenaged thrust of her feline pelvis.
Tony M., who took her with him when they dropped Belinda at the Greyhound station on M Street, three-hundred dollars paper-clipped to her g-string should she wish to run right away again, once-arrived back home in her holy-rolling Tennessee paradise, and who returned with Mary to the now fresh-linened hotel room, where he fed her brandy and cheesecake and made languid, efficient love to her, a long display of such mainstream and methodical fucking that she wondered whether the grand Guignol of that morning’s threeway were a coke-and-dexedrine invention of her own, but no, turning her head on the pillow as he plowed her from behind, she could see the peeking strap of the dildo, its curl like the upturn of an elastic smile.
Angel Bantam, who taught her how to box, how to use a switchblade to maximal persuasion, how to break into a car, how to boost a wallet without detection, how to smile when it hurt, and hit where it hurt, who went down on her in the choirloft while his cousin sang Mass below, who was the first of that admittedly tiny number of men who regarded the eating of pussy as something more than two licks and done, who was a hair-puller when climaxing and turned her (in time, in patient tongue-on-pearl time) into one as well, who promised to send her a postcard from his adventures in the South Pacific and who disappeared forever somewhere near Borneo.
The Pergolesi tape hummed to its lowing end. Mary stretched, unbuttoned the top buttons of her jeans, wriggled her toes against Cecilia’s arching back. She turned on her side, flipped the tape out, selected another, drained off the last of the rum from her souvenir cup (‘Seis Banderas Sobre Maria’) and rolled over onto her stomach, sliding her hand into her panties. Just a touch, just a touch to fall asleep to.